The Lighthouse

He stopped. He let go of her and stood still, his prick buried inside her.

"Fuck me, Julia. Be my whore. Show me how you love it. Show me what you want."

At first she didn't know what to do, or she was embarrassed, or both. But he felt so good inside her and her need to please him was so strong that she found a way to move, pushing back against him. She lowered herself to her forearms, spread her knees and ground her hips at him, stirring him around in her, burning with desire. She pushed back, and then she began to bend at the waist, rolling her ass against him, making him slip in and out and touch her all over, and as she heard him groan she realized she could do this. She could use him as well as he could use her, and she could slide herself all around his invading pole using her stomach muscles and her back to give him what they both wanted.

"Oh Christ!" he moaned. "Oh, you hot bitch!"

She should have been offended, but instead she swelled with pride, clamped her teeth into her lip to keep from smiling and fucked him like the lowest whore, squeezing his cock and flexing her ass and driving herself mad with her own obscene behavior.

Yes, he was right, he was right. There was something so honest here and so pure, so deeply gratifying in a way that went straight to her feminine soul, the pure pleasure of animal instinct, of acting without thinking and feeling without judging. It was freedom, and with that freedom came the sheer eroticism of what she was doing, taking her lover's body into hers and milking him for his fluids, for his biological essence. She let her pussy tell her what to do and followed its lead, and in return she felt at last the bliss she'd been seeking, mindless, endless, the sheer sensation of life.

"Oh God, Julia! Oh fuck! Oh my God you're going to make me come! Fuck me, baby! Fuck me, you gorgeous cunt!"

She squealed with excitement, her face burning with shame and victory, and on impulse she reached back beneath her legs to feel his balls tighten and pull up into his body as he throbbed again inside her and ejaculated yet again. A bliss as deep and dark as the ocean rose up and covered her with goose bumps, surrounded her and drew her down, claiming her as its own.

*****

They were lovers now, and Julia glowed with health and a kind of vitality she'd never known in her life. Every day her long legs took her skipping down the stairs and across the lawn, into the car and away to town and Patrick, and try as she might, she just couldn't stir up any guilt regarding Seth. She didn't know whether he knew or not, but if he did, he didn't seem inclined to mention it, and his indifference only served to justify what she was doing. Seth was content to work on his menus and housekeeping schedules and advertising campaigns, and Julia went into town and fucked Patrick with a slutty enthusiasm that was the closest thing she'd ever felt to absolute freedom.

She was cautious and circumspect, but no one seemed to care. The factory manager came to know her and would say good morning when he saw her, and the town had more important things on its mind than gossip. They were free to walk around the docks or picnic by the sea or visit the woods, and Julia even started painting again.

But it was the sex, the late mornings or early afternoons in bed that did it. The windows of his living room had no shades and faced the sea, and the light poured in like sweet honey. On overcast days or days when the storms came, the racing clouds cast shadows and bars of light that swept over their bodies as they lay tangled in the sheets, their long, deep kissing a contrast to the animal-like urgency with which he thrust his hips, working his cock inside her and bringing them both to a boil. At such times Julia was able to let herself go, to let the prison of her personality slip away and emerge into a world where she was the wind whistling through the blue corridors of the sky or the green shoots pushing through the earth and exploding into obscene and glorious bloom. She felt the scend of the sea on her body and the crashing foam of the waves on her flesh, and she would often put her hand over her womb when she felt her lover come, as if she could feel the live writhing of his semen inside her like fish in the sea.

Sex with him was mindless, guiltless, and so intimate that she found herself fantasizing constantly about ways to take him deeper and more fully, to fuse with him in ecstasy. The feel of his body moving inside hers, whether in her pussy or her mouth or her ass, between her breasts or beneath her chin and in her hair, was like communion—religious and deeply fulfilling in a way she could never understand but only experience, and she experienced with a part of herself that had been neglected for far too long.

The one cloud on the horizon was the transitoriness of life, the impermanence, and one day when she went to the bathroom in his flat she stopped and opened his medicine chest and looked inside. She knew that a crisis had almost killed him, but they'd never talked about it. Now, when she opened that cabinet she saw the grim rows of medicine with their frantic, hurried labels—emergency medicines with the instructions for use printed in loud capitals, names she didn't recognize on plastic bottles that seemed suddenly ominous and threatening.

She came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway. "Patrick? That time you were so sick? You never told me about it. What it was, I mean."

They'd already made love twice that day, and he was lying in bed, relaxed and unconcerned. "It was a kind of stroke. They called it a cerebral event. I always liked that. It makes it sound like a party."

"Patrick, don't joke." She was naked, wearing one his tee-shirts like a dress. She felt suddenly cold. "But you're so young."

"They run in my family, unfortunately," he said. "A natural propensity. Blood clots." He looked at her and smiled. "But don't look so grim. I take medicine now, so I'm good. And I learned more in those three days than I ever have in all the rest of my life. I saw it all, Julia. All this stuff I'm always telling you about. I saw it then, and it's all true."

She went to the bed and lay down next to him, on top of him, pressing herself close and kissing his chest, inhaling him. He put his arm around her and held her, and not for the first time she wished she could somehow dissolve into his body. Just the other day he'd been telling her about a kind of algae that reproduced by fusing cells, by injecting the contents of one cell into another and mixing themselves up and then separating like lovers going back to their own beds, only now with their very protoplasm all scrambled up and conjoined. She wanted something like that.

"Tell me," she said.

"It just happened," he said. "Eight years ago. I was working on the docks, and I just keeled over. Miguel called 911 and they took me to the hospital and I was out for a couple of days, or they said I was out. But I remember. I remember the feelings, the thoughts if you can call them that. I was nowhere and everywhere, nothing and everything. I was the rocks, the clouds, the fish in the sea and the sea itself. All those mystical things you read about in books, I experienced all of it, and I saw it was all true. I saw it and felt it and it was just as real as I am to you right now—even more. We're nothing, Julia, and we're everything."

She hardly heard his words. "And it could happen again?"

He was silent, and she could hear his heart beating, a precious sound, suddenly frightening.

"It could," he said. "And someday it probably will, if we don't fuck to death first. We all have to go some time. But I'm not afraid of it anymore. That little event showed me so much, that little brain twitch, that I started wondering what other truths are in there that we only realize at the moment we let go. Our egos, our ideas of who and what we are—that's the prison, Julia. If and when I go, I'll still be here as the rain and the wind and everything out there, all that mushy stuff. The pilchards too, and the boats that catch them. That's what I realized and I've never forgotten it, and I wouldn't trade that knowledge for all the health in the world."

She sat up and looked at him. "You're scaring me, Patrick."

He smiled at her. "It's not for a while yet, Julia. And meanwhile there are certain advantages to being trapped in a body, aren't there? But look at us, spending all our time trying fucking and sucking and trying to fuse and crawl into each other's bodies. Wouldn't it be lovely to just be everything at once? Ultimate sex, as intimate as it can possibly get. That's what it was like."

"But you'd had a stroke. You were hallucinating."

"No," he said as he rolled her over onto her back. "No, darling. I'm convinced. This is the hallucination. This is the illusion. In reality, we're all of us everything. Everything that's out there. We're all in heaven right now, every one of us. We just don't know it."

*****

Then came the high blue skies of summer, and with them, the tourists. The little pilchard boats were scrubbed down and repainted and became party fishing boats. The town and the lighthouse buzzed with guests and diners, and both Seth and Julia had their hands full.

Seth must have known by now, and he probably even knew who, but he still refused to confront her. They were making money and being written up in magazines for the quality of their inn and their eco-consciousness, and he was very pleased. At night the parking lot was filled with big shiny SUV's from the city and in the morning there were the maids and maintenance staff to supervise and Julia found it harder to get away.

It was easiest on the rainy days, the days when the clouds covered the sun and the guests stayed in their cottages, and so it was on a cloudy Wednesday when she was already looking forward to running into town to surprise Patrick that Seth came by as she was having her coffee and said, "Julia—there was a call for you, just now about your friend, Malone. He's in St Joseph's hospital at Bangor. I guess he collapsed and they just found him last night."

Julia sat with her cup poised at her lips, looking from the surface of the black liquid to the steely gray of the sea. She felt cold all at once, as if a squall passed over her as the rain passes over the sea, a coldness like no other, as if the heavens had been removed and all the darkness of space had poured down on her.

"I've got to go. Oh Seth, oh my God. I've got to go."

He nodded. "I understand."

She looked at him, this man she no longer loved, and she loved him anew. She picked up her note and her bag and ran from the room.

He caught up with her in the parking lot, "Don't forget your coat, for Christ sake! It's raining, Julia! Take your phone. Call me when you get there, if you need anything."

"It's a stroke again. I know it. Oh Seth, he's so young."

His face was grim. "Call me, Julia. Just call me."

The road ran along the coast and then hooked inland, and all the way was the gray spattering of early summer rain. It was no one's fault, she knew, and there was nothing to be done, but still, halfway there she had to pull over and sit by the edge of the quiet road and weep. The fragility of the body, the horror of these miniscule processes that kept us alive and made our worlds what they were.

She lifted her eyes to the trees and saw and saw horror, indifference, the strangeness of the world and its silent mystery—the branches entwined as ever, the leaves in bloom. How could this be? The very air should be rent with the news. The trees should be on fire with his sickness, the sky red with terror. A gust of wind came from nowhere and rocked the car, and Julia knew in her bones he was gone.

She got there too late. She rushed to the desk, to emergency, to the nurses station, begging and wheedling, almost hysterical, and finally found what room he'd been in on the fourth floor, but when she got there, it was empty—the beds made, the linoleum spotless and shiny. Not a wrinkle, not a scrap of paper or used tissue.

He was gone, the doctor said. Standing under the fluorescent lights, his face looked blue, his tie was perfect. They'd brought him in last night and the doctors thought he'd stabilized. They sent him up to a room, but then it happened again, Massive stroke. There was nothing that could be done. He was dead by the time they got him back down into emergency. Some Latin name for the disease, words he'd never said to her. The family had been there, had already claimed the body and transported it to a funeral home. Yes, there'd been family—a sister, a niece and nephew, an ex-wife who still cared, no children. There'd been no note, no last words, no goodbyes. There hadn't been time.

There hadn't been time. There hadn't been time.

Julia walked down the stairs, afraid to take the elevator and be boxed in. She recalled what he'd said about what he'd learned from his last stroke, about what he'd tried to teach her. She stood in the lobby as if waiting for someone, looking out at the gray skies, turning his words over in her head. It seemed so unright that there was no sign of him, that a person could just disappear from the face of the earth like that, without so much as a hole in the clouds or a wisp of something on the wind. What was this world that it let things go so easily? She stood there waiting, and waiting.

It began to rain. Big rain—purposeful—and she watched it through the revolving door and smiled despite herself. She smiled, and then, when the rain was at its most fierce and falling with steely determination, she pushed through the door and walked out into it. She took off her coat and hung it over her arm, stood in front of the hospital with her face to the sky and her mouth open as the rain splashed over her throat and chest and soaked her to the skin. Stood there and let him wet her completely, let him pour himself all over her and over the earth, the woods, the sea and everything that was in it.