Entangled

"I've a fav piece of moving music. Say, a piece from Brahms like this one. Or depending on my ranging mood of the moment, maybe a piece from jazz pianist, Bill Evans. Maybe something darker hue, more contemporary, Billie Eilish."

"I imagine I assign the piece to a poet, a novelist, a photographer, a YouTube blogger, a filmmaker, a dancer, a painter, an architect, a surfer. I tell each of them to live that music for a day, however they may perceive that music, invest their soul in it, then create something. At the end of which I'll have a poem, a novel, a photograph, a Youtube video, a film, a dance, a painting, a building, a surf ride. Different, but somehow, of the same fibre thread essence."

"That's what music means to me. Well, at least, something like that, if this makes any sense at all."

"Just so you know, I've no musical training. All connoisseur."

***

"Isn't this rich? Are we not a pair?"

"Yes. A universe without us will be thoroughly mundane."

Chuckle

"Are you spooked by what has happened?"

"I can't say. I think one thing. And yet, not quite. I don't have the words for it. Dissonance..."

"I kind of understand..."

"Do you have any particular... errr... inclination?"

"Power and yet femininity in a woman."

***

Ocean at their back, they walk back to the cottage.

An old oak tree spreads out its branches as if to protect the cottage. The place is oddly hushed. The building almost appears to be holding its breath.

***

The drawing room. It is very differently nuanced from the rest of the property.

The decor and furniture are classic. The herringbone lay of the oak floorboards gleam to a high polish. The big room is frighteningly free of decoration. No pictures on the walls except one. An unfinished painting. A still life abandoned by the painter. Why is it even hung up? At a certain angle though, the painting appears finished. No clocks. No vases. No sideboards. No books. Fixtures spaced unnaturally apart. The floor rug is indiscernibly patterned. A stillness fills the space. It is a stillness so profound he has to adjust his hearing to it. He hears the high, unfamiliar, strangled cry of a bird outside. But he cannot see the bird itself.

She slumps a bit and exhales. Her breath, laboured.

She whimpers, "I'm here".

She is in a corporate power suit. The epitome of the fragile seeming woman with a spine of steel.

She begins unbuttoning her outer suit jacket as if it is mercifully the end of a brutal day at the office. He stops her.

"I will tell you how I want it."

***

He turns toward her. His hand rises to her forehead to brush back an imaginary strand of trailing hair. Pulls her chin in ever so slightly. Gazes at her face, as if he is admiring a privately held Monet.

She begins to say something.

"Please. I need complete silence."

He takes her all in as if there is five more minutes of air in the room. What she really resembles is an art gallery. A peculiar kind where patrons with peculiar curiosities might steal away to be awed by peculiar items on display.

He is not disappointed. He wonders at the grace of the full jutting bosom. Porcelain skin stretched smooth and taut like filled sails over her chest. He has seen them before. But, they look new. They don't look like they belong to a fifty-five year old woman. They have an inviting weight that has defied the years. Defied gravity, rejecting traditional representations of reality. Thin, blue veins, barely visible, travel to her nipples.

He much prefers white to tan. Breasts that are white from being covered are way sexier. They are private, secret. They make the admirer feel privileged. And that is what he is feeling now.

He looks into her eyes. Waits for an expression to cross her face. He expects an icy glare. How dare he violate her this way. Ascertaining her like meat chattel.

He sees none of that. He can't read her expression. What is she thinking? But, all he gets is the heat coming off her body. And now, is that a strange, wild light in her eyes?

He is a bit more sure now. If this is not sexual desire, then, what's flowing in his veins is tomato juice.

He stares at her. Her bosom, then, southerly. Hearth and home. He doesn't know where to start. It bespeaks a certain pathos. Like the mule who, placed between two identical buckets of fodder, dies of starvation trying to decide which to eat first.

He can make out clearly his own figure reflected deep inside her eyes. Like he is peering down a mine shaft seeing himself down there. It looks to him like his own soul being sucked into the other side of a mirror. He loves that vision, and at the same time it frightens him.

But, James kind of, perversely, relishes this starvation of the senses. Deprivation feeds its own hunger. The biggest human sex organ is the brain.

***

Chapter 9

Day 4

Evening. The cliff edge.

A moist sea breeze is blowing in slow and easy from the south. A sea scent mingled with a hint of rain.

"A lot has happened in the last three days. I hope I've not deharmonised your universe too much."

"I don't know. I guess I'll know only later."

"Our last night. I'll be leaving noon tomorrow."

She is pensive. Sunset is like survival. It exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, it must first be seen. But, only just.

He is silent.

"Let's make it memorable. Do you have any particular inclination?"

"Remember we discussed music yesterday. How I would assign a musical piece to an artist, have the artist live the music, and create something from it?"

"Yes"

"Let's listen to Ravel until dark. Then, we go indoors."

James plays Ravel's Bolero on his cellphone.

They feel the rising symphonic buildup. Beginning meekly with a lone sweet flute. More and more instruments entering the fray. Always the same melody. Only increasingly richer, louder. A rising musical tide. More festive. Grander. Until the full complement of the orchestra roars.

***

She picks up the chair, sets it with its back a foot from the bay window.

Darkness and warmth in the room. There is a soft reverence to it all. Though a light mood touch of boudoir.

Bolero plays in the background. Barely audible. Or maybe there is no music playing, just the persistent audio memory of it in their ears.

She commands lightly, "Come and sit."

He sits. She faces him.

She is the professor bringing enlightenment to a promising young student.

What was that Oscar Wilde said? "Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power."

Ravel's Bolero with real feeling. He is her music slave. Warm, intimate, filled with the joy of performance. He feels like he is in a warm little room.

The feeling is overcoming, pushing all other thoughts of his aside. Only this matters. Nothing else does. Like nothing he has known before.

He feels a sense of vertigo. There in the darkness, time turned on its head. Moments overlap. Memories crumble. Then it is over. He opens his eyes. Everything falls back into place. Before his eyes is a woman. Nothing more.

"Are you all right?" she asks worriedly.

"I'm alright."

He grits his teeth. A delirious hunger in his heart. He thinks. Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse.

Bringing her mouth close to his ear, she whispers into his ear, barely above the rising musical tide, and the sounds from the crash of the surf beyond the cliff.

She turns her head away. Her voice low. Not meant for him. She mutters something to herself, like she is talking to her other self. Her voice like it is somebody else's coming from another room.

She sits up a little. Straightens her back. Moves back and forth with just her lower torso.

For all her exterior cool, he feels her tropical heat all down his front. A chill down his back from the ocean wind through the window.

She turns her head. Her breath all over his face. Heavy breathing. Her arousal rising to his nose. She is panting loud and quick. She feels little fires everywhere.

Suddenly, she heaves, squeezes her arms tight around his head. Grinds into him. Groans. Moves her mouth on his. Not a kiss. A scream. From her mouth into his throat, to muffle the noise. Holds her lips on his as she rides.

The magic passing through. All of it in the mysterious dark void they never see, cannot see, only feel. Sweet seconds of ecstasy. He makes a noise. The kind of noise that should not be made. But, it's OK, nobody is listening. There is no better kind of exhaustion. His most intense ever. White so white, so everywhere, it is like Christmas in June.

Like a dazed survivor of an accident, he hardly knows who he is, or where, or what he is doing here.

She feels she has emerged from a dark tunnel and found herself in the middle of a Rio carnival. She feels a ridiculous happiness. She wants to be a singer in the park. A violinist in the piazza. A dancer in the rain. A surfer philosopher. Roll in the grass with her dog. Run down the hill screaming. Pirouette till she falls over. Then, writhe a floor dance till her dress is rag. She wants to ride a blue bicycle around a quaint Brittany clifftop village.

She gets off.

"You've a bruise at the back of your thigh."

"All your fault. You brute!"

They enter the common dark that is the night.

***

Chapter 10

Day 5

James' eyes flicker open. One can be roused by sound, movement or light. To wake up by light is a special rare treat. To be seized by the day. But, James is not so sure about this on this morning. He gives a quiet shake of his head.

A ray of sunlight divides Isabella's naked body into two halves.

Top in light. Everything is the colour it usually is, only brighter.

Bottom, a colourless shadow.

***

"Goodbye, James."

She sounds autumnal. She seems to have something on her mind besides the artistically straggling strand of black hair over her forehead.

Isabella leaves. Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporates, leaving only memory. Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

***

He thinks of Haruki Murakami. At pivotal moments, the man duly appears before his mind.

The Japanese are fond of sakura, cherry blossoms. The trees are famously fleeting. They bloom for two or three days. And then, gone. Other flowers like plum blossoms for instance last considerably longer. Why go to such great lengths to cultivate something so fragile?

He recalls the Buddhist concept of mujo, or impermanence. It may hold clues. Life is ephemeral. Everything he knows and loves will one day cease to exist. Himself included. Most cultures fear this fact. A few tolerate it. The Japanese celebrate it. The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty. We pay more attention to branches about to blossom or a garden strewn with faded flowers rather than blossoms in full bloom.

The sakura is lovely, not despite its short life span, but because of it. Beauty lies in its own vanishing.

Maybe appreciating life's small, fleeting pleasures demands a loose grip. Hold too tightly and they break. Pay attention to things, but not grasp them, manipulate them, try to figure them out. This does not come naturally to most people, most of all, himself. Grip is too tight. Always questing to figure things out, unearthing hidden meanings that may or may not exist. Maybe this is the irrepressible Anglo analytical nature? As for impermanence, it terrifies most people.

***

The scent of the wind has changed. The blow, a little different. You can tell a lot just by the tiniest change in the air.

The surf gentle. Just a rippling sheet of tiny waves drawing in toward shore. Perfect peaceful periodicity.

Sitting on the cliff edge, he replays the past four days in his head. That's all he does, all day. He never tires of it.

What he has been through seems so vast, with so many facets. Vast but real. Very real. Which is why the experience persists in towering before him, like a monument lit up at night.

He inspects the events from every possible angle. He is more affected by them, now that he is alone without distraction. The impact is not petty. After a while some of the dissonance goes away, some surface only later.

The main thing is to recover his equilibrium. But, he feels he has to go back there to close the circle.

Here's the thing. If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.

He remembers that when he was little, he had this science book. There was a what-if section on what would happen to the world if there was no friction. The answer was everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution. This is his mood.

What he has experienced, is it worthy writing material for a novel? What would Haruki Murakami do if he were him at this moment? Can a chef without appetite cook great cuisine? For a novelist, if he really wants to create something consequential, he needs to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What he wants to do is go down there. But still stay sane.

He pours what remains of his beer into his glass and sips it, as though he finds the effort of drinking to be truly thirsty work. He has never drunk a beer so slowly before.

He is dead bored. Nothing to do. Nothing he can do. Nothing he wants to do. Maybe he should go to the barber in the village for a haircut. But, just how many times can one go to the barber? Never mind, just go. He goes hoping that there'll be a long queue. But, you know how things conspire to mess you. Nobody there. He is served immediately. Sigh.

Dinner at the village pub. Everyone is there. The mayor to the grocer's daughter. He finishes up with the murderously black and concentrated thick-brewed coffee. The coffee is the blandest ever. He adds three spoonfuls of sugar and creamer, stirs well, and drinks the shit like a connoisseur. The sludge roasts his insides. He needs this.

He goes to an underground bar called DUG to work off the coffee. His head throbs, almost like a heart.

Alf, the post office clerk is in action on the dance floor with the baker's daughter. His feet seldom move beyond a shuffle, but his hands are always busy. A sort of slow-mo body search, while enjoying her bakery warmth. Curiously, the girl never seems to mind. The music changes. It appears like Alf prefers music that is not too fast. Must be an early onset of arthritis on the lad. Sometimes the world is just cruel that way.

James walks back to the cottage. He sees the vicar emerging furtively from the motel with the church organist. God is in the details.

He scarcely talked to the cat that day.

Sometimes, it's like that.

***

Chapter 11

Dream

He reaches over and pulls open the bedside bible drawer. He'll do some bedtime reading. He lifts the King James to look beneath. Too dark. He lifts it higher. It is heavier than it looks. It still gives him a shudder. He remembers that time when he was six, messing around the bookshelf, when it dropped on his littlest toe. Was that an early onset of The Problem of Evil as arranged by the omniprescient One? A wee evil.

There it is, "Praise The Night" by Ben Dover. He curls up to read.

But, he soon loses interest.

***

He fluffs up, then pats down the pillow. Just the way he likes it. A white expanse, silken soft yet firm. He goes to sleep with the feel of those soft thighs in his head. Most delightful.

When you fall asleep, where do you go?

***

The further from the midrange of things you go, the less relative qualities matter.

Take music. Wavelengths. Pass a certain point and you can hardly tell which of two adjacent notes is higher in pitch, until finally you not only can't distinguish them, you can't hear them at all.

***

The women are in bed, as naked as the day they were born, snuggled up close on either side of him.

Their breasts and thighs pressed against him, their bodies smooth and warm. He can feel this clearly.

Silently, greedily, they grope his body with their fingers and probe with their tongues. He is naked too.

This is not something he is hoping for. Not a scenario he wants to imagine. It isn't something that should be happening. But that image, against his will, grows more vivid. The feelings more graphic, more real.

Their fingers are gentle, slender, and delicate. Four hands, twenty fingers. Like some smooth, sightless creatures born in darkness, they wander over every inch of his body, arousing him. He feels his heart stir, intensely, in a way he has never before experienced, as if he had been living for a long time in a house only to discover a secret room he had never known about.

Like a drum, his heart trembles, pounding an audible beat. His arms and legs are numb. He can't lift a finger.

The women entwine themselves lithely around him. Breasts full and soft. Yet, nipples hard as tiny round pebbles. Their pubic hair, wet as rainforest. Their breath mingled with his, becoming one, like currents from far away, secretly overlapping at the dark bottom of the sea.

These insistent caresses continue.

She straddles him.

Who is that? It doesn't matter, does it?

He finds his way with no resistance, as if swallowed up into an airless vacuum.

She takes a moment, gathering her breath, then begins slowly rotating her torso, like she is drawing a complex diagram in the air, all the while twisting her hips. Her long, straight black hair swings above him, sharply, like a whip.

Their movements are bold, out of character with their everyday demeanour. The entire time, both treat this as a completely natural turn of events, nothing they have to think over. They never hesitate.

The two of them caress him together. But he has entered only one. Which? Why that one?

He wonders in the midst of his deep confusion. Why does it have to be one? They are supposed to be completely equal. They are supposed to be one being. Beyond that, he cannot think.

Her movements grow faster. More pronounced. His body is rising and falling like a boat on the waves. There is commotion, as if tens of thousands of birds have taken to the air at once. And before he knows it, he is there.

The time elapsed is short. Too short, he thinks, way too short. But, maybe he has lost any sense of time. At any rate, the urge is unstoppable, and like a huge wave crashing over him, this urge engulfs him without warning. Now, though, he isn't inside the first woman, whomever she is, but in the other woman. How is that?

***

He has a dream. He thinks it's a dream. Either that or some act akin to dreaming. What, one may ask, is an act akin to dreaming? He doesn't know either. But it seems it does exist. Like so many other things he has no name for, existing in that limbo beyond the fringes of consciousness. But, say, just call it a dream, plain and simple. The expression is closest to something real for him.

The darkness of the room is only a bit different in hue from the darkness of his eyes shut. A dense darkness. A darkness without reprieve. No mental adjustment can make it less absolute. It is impenetrable. Imagine black painted over black painted over black.

There is nothing worse than waking up in total darkness. It's like having to go back and live life all over again.

He feels as if his head is stuffed with balled-up old newspapers. Sleep, when it came again, was brief and shallow.

***

Epilogue

Mother and son climb down to the beach. They swim the obligatory three hundred feet to the island. Touch the rock at almost the same instant. Execute a dolphin racing turn flip. Swim back.

They chill on the beach. It sets his mind at ease to know that there is someone like his mum in the world. Everything rhymes even though it doesn't. It makes him feel a bit of all right.