The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  While Wendy played, Hawk lectured me by the pool on nostrils — which, it turned out, were not nostrils at all to the cognescenti but were rather extensions of astral ducts that conveyed cosmic energy to the body.

  ‘You breathe moon breath for twenty-four minutes through the left nostril; then you switch and breathe sun breath through the right nostril for twenty-four minutes.’

  ‘No,’ I said, scandalized not to understand the workings of my own nose. “Even with my adenoids out?’

  ‘Only when you’re breathing through the right nostril should you undertake actions requiring physical exertion and emotional commitment. And only when you’re breathing through the left should you begin calm steady activities.’

  ‘That sort of limits you, doesn’t it?’ I could just picture myself waiting around all morning for my breathing to switch to my right nostril so that I could start vacuuming.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, because you can change back and forth at will once you develop the skill. For the commencement of the Maithuna, for instance, we both have to be breathing through our right nostrils.’

  I shot him an ironical look. I could see us lying there all night trying to synchronize our nostrils and forever being out of phase, like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind, each wanting the other only when the other had decided to leave.

  ‘Ginny,’ Hawk said sharply, ‘I think your attitude toward this whole thing sucks, frankly. I’ve been putting up with it, thinking that you’d outgrow your juvenile need to ridicule unfamiliar concepts. But if you can’t cultivate some reverence, we might as well call the whole thing off.’

  ‘Please don’t, Hawk. I’ll work on my attitude, really I will, Hawk.’

  “All right. But if I have to mention this again, that’s it.’

  Looking at me sternly, he lay on his side and showed me how to switch from one nostril to the other, with his thumb under his ear and his fingers on his forehead. Then he demonstrated another method, massaging his big toe on the opposite side from the nostril he wanted to activate. I practiced these until I had discovered that they really did work; then I sat pondering the unfathomed mysteries of my neglected flesh.

  That afternoon while Wendy was napping and Hawk was meditating, I went to the cellar to retrieve Hawk’s breakfast tray. On his cot were some stacks of paper. Unable to restrain myself, I poked through them. They were sections of his historical science fiction novel. Glancing nervously toward the doorway, I read a dozen pages, in which a Vermont farmer and his wife by accident shot down a ski jump one night on a snow machine. As they sprawled unconscious on the slope, the Management Outpost in charge of the Milky Way galaxy zeroed in on them in response to vibrations from the crash. Interpreting the curious pattern of ski trails as fumbling Earthling requests for divine assistance, the Management Representative, with uncharacteristic benevolence, materialized an Earth-style executive suite at the Outpost and whisked the Vermonters into it. As they stood in their snowsuits dripping and blinking, he tried to recall the formula for transforming himself from a blinding patch of light into a form discernible to limited Earthling sense organs. Finally he managed to materialize in a quilted skimobile suit, discovering to his chagrin that he had given himself a long tail by mistake. He decided to leave the tail and hope that his guests, and especially the Home Office, wouldn’t notice.

  ‘Interesting place, Earth,’ the Rep said charitably, actually regarding it as the most hideous hell hole in the entire universe. Then he described his stint there as a Trainee several millennia ago, just as Earth was coming down with its disease. He had been an Aymara Indian stonecutter near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The force field of a passing comet had conflicted with that of Earth, resulting in continuous lightning for days, which set off forest fires all across the globe and drove wild beasts down into the towns. Earth’s axis had shifted and its rotation had slowed and its crust had heaved and buckled in great booming earthquakes. Volcanoes had spewed; tidal waves had uprooted huge trees and tossed boulders as though they were pebbles. Then Earth’s poles had switched, and the Rep was no longer able to communicate telepathically with the other Trainees or with Management. This altered force field also jammed his materialization mechanism, and he was trapped in his Earthling body.

  The ensuing decades were a grim struggle for physical survival. Rain, evaporated from the seas by the heat of the fires and volcanoes, fell endlessly, and everything rotted and mildewed. Crops couldn’t grow. Daylight was a perpetual twilight due to volcanic dust. Scavenging hordes of starving Earthlings plundered the countryside. The Rep hid his family in a cave and they lived like savages, while friends and relatives died all around them from epidemics and malnutrition and demoralization. Those who survived were those who were able to develop ferocity and greed and cunning — the opposite of the qualities valued in pre-catastrophe society. Their chests expanded like those of asthma victims from the strain of having to breathe more air to absorb the same amount of oxygen. New babies were stunted and sickly.

  The Rep retained no memory of his original mission. Management sent a Supervisor to Earth to report on which Trainees could be rehabilitated and which would have to be abandoned.

  The Rep, responding to the timbre of the Supervisor’s voice as he stood at the cave mouth asking for shelter, fell to the floor among gnawed bones, clutching his bloodied stone ax, and wept. Management was eventually able to rewire his scrambled neural networks and recontact him. And when he died, he was given his current desk job on the frontiers, which he regarded as a steppingstone to more important posts closer to the Home Office.

  ‘“So you see, I know what it’s like to be an Earthling, incarcerated on your burnt-out cinder of a planet with no way out that you can see,” the Rep said sympathetically, smoothing the distinguished full head of gray hair he’d indulged in during this materialization. “I know you loot and murder with positive pleasure. But your moral retardation isn’t really your fault. It was just one of those unfortunate accidents that go on somewhere in the universe all the time. But it does provide the more promising Earthlings like yourselves with the opportunity to understand the full horror of being cut off from Management.”

  ‘“Jesum Crow, where the hang am I?” muttered the farmer, blinking.

  ‘The Rep looked at him with dismay. He hadn’t succeeded in making his guests feel at home, in spite of the executive suite. What had he overlooked? He definitely needed to brush up on his knowledge of rural American folkways. He’d ask his Assistant for a report right away. But his guests weren’t exactly Mr. and Mrs. Sociability. Sighing, he hung up an X-ray and showed them Earth — a black pinprick afloat in a dark gray patch, surrounded by trillions of blindingly bright patches and pinpricks. He explained to the uncomprehending couple that the gray area was quarantined in hopes of containing the infection. Management was administering radiation and antibodies in hopes of effecting a cure; otherwise, the area would have to be plowed under and reseeded.’

  The Rep then ushered the bemused Vermonters into the lab where new planets were being created. In micro-climate cages plants and animals and insects to suit the unique physical conditions of each prospective planet were being materialized. One planet with high gravity, for instance, was stocked with short squat creatures. Once the general pattern was established, the different species had to be balanced in terms of reproduction and predation. The Rep described the difficulties he had getting technicians even to look at Earth, since the way Earthlings were hogging Earth’s Life Force Allotment (LFA) from the other species was so aesthetically appalling.

  ‘“And, of course, our scientists have their personal tastes to consider in designing their planets — colors, shapes. It’s rather a game.” He sighed plaintively. “I always did want to be in on the creative side of the business…”’

  ‘I couldn’t help but glance at your book just now,’ I confessed to Hawk when I returned to the pool. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I found it very entertaining.’

  ‘It
’s not intended to entertain. It’s intended to develop in readers the mental set that will allow them to regard my “fiction” as a possibility.’

  ‘I see. You mean you really think that’s what’s happening?’ I was beginning to suspect that I might have erred in my selection of an instructor in transcendence.

  ‘I didn’t say that! I just don’t want you regarding it strictly as entertainment.’ He tugged irritably at the jingle bell hanging from his ear lobe.

  The next day we cleansed the astral ducts that led from my etheric double, whatever that might have been, into my ‘gross physical organism.’

  ‘You respire approximately 21,666 times a day,’ Hawk informed me. ‘Most of these breaths are a rapid shallow panting that fills about one-sixth of your lungs and serves only to keep your physical body functioning at a level of minimal competence. You must learn to breathe in such a way as to send a potent charge of prana to your root chakra, to arouse your dormant kundalini and fan its spark into an all-consuming flame. Which will leap up your spinal channel toward the crown of your head and unite with the mahakundali of shiva in residence there, polarizing each of your cells.’

  ‘Pardon me?’ Once again, I was wandering blindly in a sphere with its own jargon, every bit as specialized as Joe Bob’s football terminology or Miss Head’s pronouncements on Descartes. I had some vocabulary work to do, if my relationship with Hawk was to flourish. But did I want it to flourish? I was no longer so sure, after my encounter with his book. Was he insane, or was he a prophet without honor in his own country?

  ‘You will understand,’ he replied, waving my questions away like so many gnats.

  We sat by the pool with our legs crossed and emptied our minds of trivia. I was trying to decide whether concern over the possibility of Wendy’s falling into the pool constituted a triviality in the realm in which we were dealing. Then we emptied our lungs by drawing in our abdomens. We inhaled seven times, paused, and exhaled seven times. This we repeated ad nauseam, mentally intoning ‘om.’ I waited for my kundalini to leap into flames, but nothing happened.

  ‘Nothing happened.’

  ‘Would you know if something happened, if something did happen?’ he asked, gazing at me with an irritating serenity. ‘In your current crude state, the subtle ranges of impact aren’t available to you. You’re expecting immediate and dramatic results, but it doesn’t work that way. That was how I approached drugs in Montreal — for on-the-spot enlightenment. You’re so fucking goal-oriented. If you have sex, you want an instant orgasm.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I protested, injured by his mistaken estimate of my character. How many Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights had I spent pleading with Ira not to force me to have an orgasm? ‘Maybe you’re just projecting your personality quirks onto me.’

  ‘I do not project. I have subdued my personal desires to such an extent that I no longer have desires. If one is empty of desire, one has no need to project it onto other people.’

  ‘How do you know when you’re empty of desire?’ I asked, genuinely perplexed.

  ‘You know,’ he promised me, crossing his eyes and closing them, and rotating his stomach muscles like twiddling his thumbs.

  He stood up and assumed the semen retention posture, motioning for me to copy him. I did so, confused, since I had no semen to retain. Wendy wandered over, her wet diaper drooping, and tried to imitate us, sticking one chubby leg behind her and reaching intently for her big toe with her nose. She tumbled over and hit her head on the concrete and began howling. Hawk looked up at her angrily, while I cradled her and rubbed her bump. His expression said clearly: You must make the break with these distracting worldly ties. I turned my back on him.

  During Wendy’s nap, Hawk led me to a spot in the back yard near the Bliss family graveyard. He thrust four sticks into the ground to form a square. On them he placed a stiff straw place mat from my kitchen table. Then he scooped up some topsoil and carefully picked out all the clods and sticks and stones. He placed a mound of this sifted topsoil on the mat. Using a smooth stone, he leveled off the mound into a plate-sized disk.

  We sat on the grass a couple of yards away and stared at this mud pie through half-opened eyes. Hawk said we were trying to summon up within ourselves its spiritual image. He mumbled lover’s endearments to it like, ‘Vast Expansive One, Fruit Nurturer, Concealer of Subterranean Secrets.’ And I contemplated the phrase ‘dust to dust’ as he had instructed. I was trying to decide through how many human and animal and plant bodies the material in the mud pie had been recycled since its creation.

  Eventually Hawk and I began opening and closing our eyes, like camera shutters, trying to imprint its spiritual image on our retinas. Finally, Hawk grabbed my arm. At last, I thought, as he dragged me across the lawn toward the pool. This is it!

  He pushed me down by the pool and threw himself down beside me and closed his eyes. ‘Do you see it?’ he demanded urgently.

  I closed my eyes expectantly. But I saw the usual uninspired black. In desperation I searched the black for even the faintest flicker of illumination. I saw nothing. Should I lie? Would Hawk be likely to perform ritual coition with a devotional dunce?

  ‘See what?’ I asked noncommittally.

  ‘The luminous disk, purified from all its gross material imperfections.’

  ‘Uh…’

  Just then Wendy, bless her heart, tottered through the gate, saving me from having to reveal to Hawk that he’d chosen a spiritual pygmy as his celestial sex partner.

  That night after Wendy was in bed, I hunted out our Christmas tree lights in the attic, at Hawk’s request. We fixed up two strings, one all red and the other all blue. With an elaborate series of extension cords, we managed to hang the red one around Hawk’s basement room. Then we both sat in the lotus position on his cot. He was wearing my twenty-one jewel Lady Bulova. He instructed me to concentrate on the topic of the passage of time, with my eyes open, and to notify him when I thought that half an hour had gone by.

  It seemed a simple enough assignment. I slouched over in my lotus position and braced myself to count to sixty thirty times. This time I would not fail Hawk.

  After counting to thirty ten times, I became bored and decided to drop it. I let my thoughts wander randomly.

  Finally, deciding that half an hour had to be up, I signaled to Hawk. He glanced at my watch and made a notation on a piece of paper. Then he took down the red lights and strung up the blue ones, and I repeated the tedious exercise.

  Then the blue light came down, and the red ones went back up. And then vice versa. I was finding the whole thing pretty dumb. There had to be easier ways to find extramarital sex.

  After the fourth round, Hawk said, ‘All right. That’s enough.’

  I sighed with relief.

  ‘Under the red lights you called twenty-four and a half minutes and twenty-seven minutes half an hour,’ he informed me. ‘And under the blue lights you called thirty-two and thirty-three minutes half an hour.’

  Oh dear, I had flunked again. I couldn’t even judge time accurately. What hope did I have of ascending into heaven? I looked at him and shrugged apologetically. I had tried.

  ‘If this doesn’t suggest any conclusions,’ he said testily, combing his fingers through his matted beard, ‘then I’m afraid I can’t help you.’

  I skulked upstairs to my lonely king-sized bed.

  The next morning, after breathing exercises, the verya stambhanasana, and mud pie contemplation, Hawk said wearily, ‘I was hoping that this wouldn’t be necessary, but I’m afraid it is. Can you send the baby out for the day?’

  Off Wendy went to Angela’s, and back I raced with Ira’s siren whooping to insert my diaphragm.

  I found Hawk waiting for me on the cot. A glass and a pitcher of water sat on the tray. I cleared my throat alluringly in the doorway.

  Hawk looked up, his bell jingling in his ear lobe. He gestured to me to lie on the cot beside him. Demurely, I did so. He looked down at me. I closed my eyes
, waiting to be kissed.

  He got up and started rifling his pack.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I whispered. ‘I have my diaphragm in.’

  ‘Pardon me?’ he said, extracting a small plastic vial from the pack. He poured liquid from it into the glass and filled the glass with water and handed it to me.

  I drank in little uninterested sips. ‘What it it?’ I asked, hoping it was an exotic aphrodisiac from the French section of Montreal.

  ‘LSD-25.’

  ‘LSD?’ I shrieked, sloshing the liquid onto the cot.

  ‘Just relax and finish drinking it.’

  ‘But I don’t want LSD.’

  ‘Do you or don’t you want to participate in the Maithuna?’ he inquired coolly.

  ‘Yes, of course. But I don’t see what LSD has to do with screwing.’

  His face behind his shaggy beard flushed bright red. ‘Goddam it! How many times do I have to tell you that it’s not screwing? It has nothing whatsoever to do with the filthy disgusting bumping and grinding you’re accustomed to!’

  ‘How do yow know what I’m accustomed to?’ I shot back, furious at allowing myself to be drugged and sold into white slavery so trustingly.

  ‘I don’t know, and I’m not remotely interested. What I’ve invited you to undertake with me has no relation to your past seizures of lust, whatever form they’ve taken. I am trying to teach you to think of yourself as other than a physical body to be “satisfied.” You are the eternal feminine principle. I am the eternal masculine principle. As we mate, we will balance opposing forces and requite our longing for wholeness.’

  In a fit of fury at his pomposity, I tossed down the rest of the liquid. Where did blue balls fit into all this, if orgasm wasn’t our goal? Had I sacrificed my virginity to a myth?

  ‘And besides, the fact that you are unable to entertain the notion that there might be some connection between LSD and what you so repulsively refer to as “screwing” is exactly why we’re having to go through all this tedious preparation. I’ve been ready for the Maithuna for weeks. I certainly don’t need this. I’m doing it for you. So that you can experience transcendence, too.’