by Lisa Alther
‘That one’s kind of catchy.’
‘Yes, but 10,000 billion billion years is a lot to ask one author to cover.’
Ira came marching home as scheduled. It seemed that at least a couple of centuries had passed — due no doubt to the enormous amount of sensory material I had absorbed through my reticular formation in his absence.
The afternoon of his return, he checked the kitchen calendar and informed me with a gleam in his eye, ‘Tonight’s the night, Ginny! If we don’t get a son tonight, we never will! I’ve been storing my sperm for weeks!’
‘Neat.’
After Wendy was in bed and the supper dishes were done and Walter Cronkite had spread his messages of good cheer, Ira took my hand and led me up the stairs. I felt like Marie Antoinette en route to the guillotine. A new personality had had life breathed into it by Hawk. It was as yet frail and tentative and would be smothered under the least adverse pressure. I didn’t see how I could possibly give birth to this new personality for Hawk, and to a baby son for Ira at the same time. The moment for a choice had arrived, I knew, as I douched with baking soda solution.
I walked resolutely into our bedroom. Ira was lurking under the sheets. I started taking my underwear out of my drawers. I loaded it under my arms and walked out. I had decided: My heart was in the cellar.
“What are you doing?’’ Ira called.
‘I’m moving to the guest room.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Moving to the guest room.’
‘Where?
‘The guest room.’
‘The guest room?’
‘The guest room.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Right now.’
‘Then I’ll come in the guest room with you.’
‘That won’t be necessary,’ I replied coolly.
‘It will be if we’re going to have a son,’ he said grinning lecherously.
‘But we’re not.’
‘Not what?’
‘Not going to have a son.’
He stared at me, stricken. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t want any more babies.’ I blurted out.
‘“Don’t want any more babies,”’ he repeated slowly to himself.
‘Ira,’ I said, turning to him sadly, ‘let’s not beat a dead horse.’
My days once again became structured. Now, however, I was working around three people’s schedules — Ira’s, Wendy’s, and Hawk’s. I was getting up and feeding Ira and tending Wendy in the morning while Hawk worked on his novel. I stir-fried vegetables in a wok for Hawk’s lunch, hiding the wok just as Ira appeared in the doorway for his Campbell’s tomato-rice soup. After Ira had left, I’d feed Wendy and put her down for her nap. Then I’d race to the basement for my exercises, which now included mud pie staring, the semen retention posture, and various breathing exercises. We intoned “Om” 108 times daily. We listened with our right ears for the Inner Sounds, which were to take the form of humming bees or tiny chinging bells or an ocean roar or a flute, according to our degree of spiritual evolution. I heard only my heart, masquerading as a bass drum; that put me at the bottom of the heap, evolutionarily speaking. We visualized floods of colors bathing different parts of our bodies. We contracted our anal sphincters while envisioning a current of serpent fire wafting up our spinal channels to the crowns of our heads. We shut off one nostril and inhaled and exhaled through the other in various intricate patterns understood only by Hawk. We forced air against our cheeks until they bulged. We imagined the life force flowing into our lungs with every breath. We placed clasped hands over the transformation centers of our solar plexi and pictured brilliant spiraling tongues of flame being fanned to incandescence by our breath. We drew our abdominal walls back and forth spasmodically, causing our breath to take the form of staccato gasps. We placed our right palms, middle and index fingers outstretched, over our hearts and repeated ‘om’ and ‘hum’ forty-two times in alternation with our heartbeats, while visualizing our hearts as arched black caverns dimly illuminated with a throbbing red glow.
It beat the hell out of housework.
‘I just don’t understand you, Ginny,’ Ira would complain at night when he came home to find wet shirts mildewing in the washing machine. ‘If you’re not going to be my wife, if you’re not going to cook my meals and clean my house, if you’re not going to share my bed and raise my children — what are you going to do?’
I’d smile serenely as I shoved TV dinners into the crusted oven. It was quite simple really: I was going to ascend into heaven. On my back.
Hawk was in high spirits. He had finished his first volume on the creation of the universe. The farmer and his wife had returned to Vermont as prophets for the Management Rep. In payment, the Rep had materialized for them a brand-new Sno Cat with leopard skin seats, to replace the one they’d busted up on the ski jump.
Hawk had also come to a decision on the structure for the remaining nine volumes. It would be a comedy with the Big Bang ending.
Hawk was also delighted at the way our training sessions were going. He felt that my attitude toward the Maithuna was finally assuming the appropriate reverence, now that I was becoming accustomed to the paradoxical concept of using lust to transcend itself. The Maithuna had to be performed on the fifth day after the cessation of my menstrual period, so that Hawk had been charting my periods as carefully as Ira had in his pursuit of a son. Hawk had announced that the Maithuna would take place in two more days, following one further exercise.
This exercise occurred while Ira was at his volunteer fire department meeting. I descended to the runaway slave room all atremble in anticipation of the Maithuna. Hawk was sitting on the floor in the lotus position with his tongue protruding from his lips, drawing in a breath with a loud hiss. I knew better than to interrupt him when he was soliciting prana, so I sat quietly on the cot and surveyed the room to discover what spiritual treat was in store for me tonight. On the television tray sat a lighted white candle. Next to it was a mirror, lifted from the upstairs bathroom. Otherwise the room was dark. In front of the tray sat the camp stool.
Hawk motioned for me to sit on the stool facing the mirror. ‘Now!’ he said briskly, combing his beard with his fingers. ‘Pick some one part of your anatomy to focus on — your chin or your nose, say. Not your eyes.’
I rejected my pert little ski jump of a nose, although I had always regarded it with affection, because it was too close to my eyes and I kept glancing into them. I settled on my lips instead.
‘After we do the standard 7:1:7 breathing,’ Hawk said, ‘I want you to concentrate on the chosen feature without blinking and with your eyes half-closed. Try not to think at all. And remember: no blinking. And when your eyes start to unfocus, allow them to. Don’t refocus.’
We breathed rhythmically for a while.
Then Hawk said softly, ‘All right. Begin now.’
I was relaxed from the breathing, and I regarded my lips with detachment, trying not to enumerate the various ways in which those two curious flaps had gotten me in trouble in the past.
As I stared, inhibiting my impulse to blink, I could feel my eyes shifting out of focus, as Hawk had said they would. I didn’t fight it. I allowed them to unfocus, as I continued to stare at the mid-point of my upper lip without blinking.
I found my other features, on the periphery of my vision, becoming blurred and unidentifiable. As I watched, they seemed to alter subtly. Gradually, my face took on the appearance of someone else’s — no one I knew. Before I could examine the topic of whose it might be, it had again shifted slightly; and it continued shifting in a slow, steady kaleidoscope of human physiognomy. I was somewhat alarmed: I didn’t care for some of the faces mine was mutating into. Some seemed kind and warm, others hard and malevolent.
As this germ of alarm began to sprout, clouds of fog began rolling in from the sides of the mirror. Soon, the features reflected there, whomever they belonged to, were almost entirely obscured. The only indication that an image was prese
nt was a faint glow outlining the head. I was dissolving in creeping clouds of mist!
I panicked at the prospect of imminent annihilation. I opened my eyes wide and blinked them several times, as Hawk had instructed me not to. The fog and the glow vanished instantly -and there I was, staring at myself in a mirror. I was breathing fast with fear.
“What’s wrong?’ Hawk asked innocently.
‘I was vanishing!’
‘Good.’
‘Good? It was awful. I was being annihilated.’
‘Relax. You were supposed to vanish. That was the whole point of the exercise.’
‘Very cute!’
‘For Christ’s sake, where’s your scientific detachment?’ Hawk drawled. “Why do you have to turn everything into some sort of cosmic melodrama? The explanation is very simple, and I’m sure you could think of it yourself if you weren’t so insistently agog. Your eyes function on movement, change. Normally, when you’re looking at something, your eyes are in constant motion, taking in the object in quick little glances at component parts. When you inhibit this foveal shift, by staring steadily without blinking, you can produce a kind of temporary blindness. The point is, all our senses are instruments for detecting change. They function through registering movement — your eardrum vibrates with sound waves, and you hear; a stimulus moves across your skin, and you feel. But tonight you reduced your input of visual movement to a minimum and were able to shut down one of your senses very briefly. Now, what if you were in a situation in which there were no change at all, in which all your senses shut down — would you yourself cease to exist?’
I looked at him blankly, blinking, still shaken from my confrontation with annihilation.
‘Did you cease to exist when you intentionally shut down just one of your senses?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Hawk sighed. I was apparently missing yet another vital point. ‘What if you were in a realm of existence where there was no matter, and therefore no change? Your sense organs wouldn’t function, true, but you wouldn’t need them to function either, would you, since their raison d’etre is to assure physical survival by detecting and warning of change.’
I frowned.
He cast his eyes to the ceiling with disgust.
‘All right Let’s try a different approach. Time is measured by movement of objects through space, by change of position, right? By the movement of the earth on its axis; once around is called a day. By the movement of the earth around its sun, once around being called a year. By the vibration of a tuning fork, or a quartz crystal. By the rotations of cesium 133; 9,192,631,770 cycles of the frequency involved in the transition between two energy levels is called a second. By the movement of a pair of hands around a clock face. By the movement of a shadow on a sundial. Fifteen degrees of longitude on a globe equals one hour. Wendy asks you, “How long is an hour, Mommy?” And you reply, “As long as it takes to get from here to St. Johnsbury and back.” In other words, as someone once said, time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space. Time is nothing more than a succession of objects in space. Likewise, movement through space, distance, is measured by time. Someone says, “How far is it to Montreal from here?” And you say, “Two hours.” The ancient Persians had as a basic unit of measurement the parasang, which was the amount of level ground covered in one hour by a man on foot. And interstellar distances are stated in terms of light-years — the distance light travels in one year. But it is possible, likely even, that there are forces moving faster than the speed of light; we just wouldn’t be able to detect them with our sensory equipment in its current form.’
‘I know all that,’ I said smugly. ‘I took physics, too, you know.’
‘Maybe you already know it, but have you used it to draw any conclusions relevant to your own existence?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’ll state my point in so many words. You can say you already know that, too, but I don’t think you do. The day I shut you in here in the dark you experienced the way time speeds up when sensory stimuli are reduced. Well, here is my final question before the Maithuna, which will occur tomorrow night.’
My heart leapt, my breathing quickened. I almost didn’t hear his final question, which was: ‘Just because we can’t conceive of an existence apart from time and space doesn’t prove that such existence is impossible. What happens to time when all sensory input is cut out?’
I couldn’t see the point. Not caring, I raced upstairs somehow to get through the long hours until time for the act for which I’d been training for four weeks.
Ira went off the next night to a special session of the Cemetery Commission. I kissed him guiltily as he left. Wendy was already in bed.
I took a bath, as I had been instructed, in order to allow free flow of my bio-electric current. I anointed myself with Chanel No. 5, which Ira had given me for Christmas. Then I put on my rose negligee and tied a green silk scarf around my neck, Dale Evans style. I had asked Hawk if I should insert my diaphragm, it being a possible fertile day. He had said not, since its presence would interfere with my bio-electric current. Anyway, he assured me, since he now had complete control over ejaculation, there was no need for it. Our union wouldn’t involve a standard orgasm; therefore, pregnancy wasn’t a possibility.
I glided out to the Bliss family cemetery. Hawk was already there, in a brown terry cloth robe belonging to Ira. He was setting up the ultraviolet mosquito lamp from the terrace. The ultraviolet wave lengths were supposed to stimulate my muladhara region, whatever that might mean.
Hawk had fashioned a low table with a board and bricks. It was covered with a white linen cloth. On it sat two candles, a platter with some food, a bottle of Southern Comfort and two liqueur glasses, a pitcher of water and two Welch’s grape jelly glasses. Next to the table was stretched Hawk’s sleeping bag.
And behind the sleeping bag hovered the gaunt hollow-eyed angels carved by Father Bliss on his children’s tombstones. Next to these tombstones was Father Bliss’s own stone, carved by him in advance, featuring a skeleton holding a scythe in one hand and an hourglass whose sand had run out in the other. At the top of the slate stone were two trees, one of which lay fallen on the ground. They symbolized the two huge black locusts that now towered over the stone house in the front yard; one had been planted by Father Bliss and the other by his wife, when they had moved into their new house right after their wedding.
The hill on which the cemetery sat dropped off into the valley where the Pots o’ Gold vacation homes were pushing up through the soil like sprouting seeds. A ground mist was swirling in around them. The June sun had just dipped behind the far hills.
I was feeling uneasy. ‘Does it really have to be out here? Couldn’t we do it in the cellar?’
‘The symbolism of the site is very important.’
‘Uh, Hawk,’ I asked, considering the topic for the first time, ‘what exactly is going to happen?’
He shrugged. ‘How should I know? I’ve never done this before. I was trying to suggest aspects of what I think might happen with some of the exercises.’
I began trembling with an emotion that could only be diagnosed as acute fear. ‘Is it possible,’ I whispered, ‘that we could really screw ourselves up? Isn’t this just as artificial a means for altering states of consciousness as LSD?’
He glared at me. ‘So you’re chickening out, Ginny? I just wish you’d told me before I wasted four weeks training you.’
‘I’m not chickening out. I was just curious.’
‘Look,’ he said, running his hand through his beard, ‘this is an ancient technique. The Ratnasara says, “He who realizes the truth of the body can then come to know the truth of the universe.” We’ve been giving all this attention to our bodies, not as an end in itself, but in order to use them as instruments for the attainment of moksha — liberation.’
I looked at him doubtfully, stretching my neck to loosen the uncomfortably tight ritual scarf. That may have been what Hawk had been
doing, but I reflected that my motives were considerably less lofty. It occurred to me that I might have to be punished for my sacrilege by the guardian of moksha.
‘People have been doing this for centuries,’ Hawk added.
‘But not me.’
‘Please don’t back out now. I’ve been preparing for tonight for over a year. It’s all that’s kept me going, Ginny. It’s really my last chance. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to live with yourself once you’re aware of the hideous things you, and most of your fellow humans, are capable of? I have to find a more hospitable dimension or I’m done for.’
Put that way, his face contorted with agony, how could I refuse? I nodded my go-ahead.
Hawk lit the candles. We sat in the lotus position in front of the low table and did 7:1:7 breathing for twelve cycles. Then we held our breath and concentrated on our muladhara centers, between the anus and the genitals, which we stimulated by contracting our anal sphincters and visualizing ourselves uniting, in our respective roles as cosmic consciousness and cosmic energy.
After we had repeated this a dozen times, Hawk tapped the bottle of Southern Comfort with his finger and said, ‘That.’ Then he waved his hand around it as though he were a magician trying to make it disappear and intoned, ‘Hung.’ He joined his thumb and ring fingers and gestured toward the bottle saying, ‘Namah.’
My only hope was that Hawk knew more about what was going on than I did.
Unscrewing the cap of the Southern Comfort, Hawk brought the bottle to his face and closed off his right nostril and inhaled. Then he closed his left nostril and exhaled. Filling the liqueur glasses, he handed me one, and we tossed down the sweet burning liquid in one swallow. He refilled our glasses. We each took a piece of bologna from the china platter and repeated together, ‘Shiva, Shakti. I purify my lustful flesh.’ Then we ate the bologna, which signified animal life and bodily development, washing it down with Southern Comfort
Hawk refilled our glasses. We took a chunk of Chicken of the Sea tuna, which represented generative powers and aquatic life forms, intoned Om six times, and ate it, again washing it down with Southern Comfort