I've seen this episode before.  This is the one where our hero, rather our point of view character, throws himself into something he doesn't really want, helpless against the waves of desire that drag him away from shore; spin, twist, and mangle him; punch him in the solar plexus; and then slap him back on the beach, spitting up blood and water.

Perhaps one day, he will see the waves before he casts himself in, before he pulls the thick red cords around himself and tips backward over the gunwale.  But not this time. This time, it is too late.  He is already in the water, and the jaws of the riptide have already clamped around him and begun to twist.  But he has flickered out of the trance quicker than before.  He can see hear the song of desire, and he can feel the slick, grey hands pulling at his limbs, but the cloud of numb surrender has blinked open obliquely, like a frog's eye, and he can see.  He can't stop it, but maybe he can write it down before he forgets.  Maybe words can break it and he can stop himself next time.

Here's what happened.

He broke the seal on the lid of the jar marked "But what if you don't have to be alone?", because surely such a suggestion is not too absurd.  In fact the opposite theory, the idea that he is better off in solitude, is too dreary to be entertained at length.  What kind of a world would that be?  Where there actually isn't much hope of finding a partner, and he had better find another way to spend his time? That's absurd, isn't it?

So he twisted it open, and the divot in the center of the lid popped up so that it couldn't be believably resealed, and he sniffed the contents.  They were pretty nondescript, a typical Korean guy of seemingly similar age, who advertised himself as versatile, though that had so far always proven an unreliable monniker.  He returned the serve, and the usual volley began, largely the sort of soft lobs one gives an opponent who needs bolstering.

Normally after a bit of this, once he is confident that the other party can hold his own, he would step up the energy in his responses, turn on the charm and the eagerness, draw him into a real volley to see what he could do.  But this time he didn't. The other fellow was just barely on this side of irresistible, and there was something in his answers that smelled like hope and potential and lemon rind.  So our character hesistated, and in the moment where the blanket of desire normally washed over him, he instead let it think that it had.

He managed to keep this ruse up for two weeks, fooling the sirens into thinking he was ensorcelled, but keeping his ears and his spirit plugged.  When the time came for them to meet, he was still firmly in control of his faculties.  Even while they were hiking up that narrow alley back to his place, he was clear and sharp.  The fellow wasn't barely on this side of irresistible like his pictures, he was well on this side.  And he had the sort of lisp that isn't an effeminate affectation, not the alveolar type, but the sort of sideways,Carol Channing lisp that is a real speech impediment.  So there was no way he was going to tip over this time.  Those harpies had no grasp on him.  He had won.

But the sex was amazing.

And so began the twisting and the rolling and the sudden punch to the gut that had been the end of the cycle every time before.  He thought he had the waves at his command, that when he stretched his rod over them they would part, but it was no different.  Desire, expectation, longing, one after the other, the broken washing machine of dating and sex.  Exactly two weeks from agitate to rinse.  And that's where he is now, writing this down before he gets spilled back out onto the sharply pebbled beach.  It's not over yet, but our character's version of things has already proven itself to be way out of gear.  Perhaps he will continue to roll around in the waves for a while, because, as was mentioned, very good sex.  But dare we hope that this time he does it with his eyes open?

Ethan didn't doubt that Norah loved him, exactly.  He was a fair judge of character, and could see in her eyes, and kisses, and silent movements, a love that would be very difficult to fake.  He also knew well that she was not a person who would bother to fake any of those things anyway. But she didn't love him the way he loved her.  Of this he was equally sure. 

Ethan loved Norah in a way that had become inextricable from his very body.  It wasn't just that he loved her, but that he loved nothing but her.  To stop loving her would be possible only through the reordering of his entire spirit.  The way Norah loved was just as real, and one could even say just as strong.  But her love worked like an intricate and complex program, one that had taken Ethan as input and produced love as the result of a series of calculations.

Ethan was reassured by this on one level.  Norah had not fallen in love with him as the result of fate, or passion,or  being struck with a magic arrow .  She had chosen him, and it is a marvelous feeling to be chosen.  On another level, Ethan was terrified by this truth.  If she had chosen him, it was theoretically possible that she could unchoose him.  Whether she ever used it or not, Norah's love had an off switch.  The program that had selected Ethan could someday be deleted.  Ethan's love could not be deleted.  It was his operating system, and the removal of it would cause a complete system crash.

~

To her credit, Norah also knew this about herself, and didn't like it.  She didn't like the fact that she had never been in love, not with Ethan, and not before him.  She had loved, fiercely, passionately, even foolishly, but that was not the same as being in.  She was very careful not to let this become an advantage.  A lesser human, upon recognizing that she or he was in a position of power over another, would use that fact to win arguments, to stack up little victories, or otherwise to secure territory.  Norah saw chances to do this all the time, and never once took the opportunity.  She was terrified of becoming one of those women who plays with hearts like figurines, and who is interested in getting what she wants out of a relationship.  Norah wanted nothing out of her relationships.  The relationship itself was what she wanted. 

If anything, she worked harder at the relationship than Ethan.  She yielded in countless little ways to his whims, far more than one might say was her share.  She worked harder than she needed to to make him happy, partly out of a sense of fair play, but partly because it made her feel human.  She knew that she could win any argument with a cold glance, simply letting her hand hover over the off switch for a moment.  For that reason she always yielded.  To win that way would introduce an element of threat into the foundation of the relationship, and it would cease to be love.  It would be blackmail.

For Norah, Ethan was a good man, who loved her deeply, and who also happened to be attractive, interesting, and kind.  And so she loved him.  For Ethan, Norah was a cold and terrifying magic that he had no choice but to love.

He had heard stories before about The Falling Gate, and about what lay beyond it.  Even though there was no rule that compelled people to go through it, and in spite of the fact that plenty had come back wounded, scarred, with pieces of themselves missing--or even worse, with nothing at all--most of the people in his village had at least faced the first doors. 


There was something about The Gate that called people, that encouraged them to take the chance, whispering to them that they might get lucky.  "People would rather risk everything than live with uncertainty," his father had once said, and it seemed wise at the time.  He remembered listening to his father talk about what he saw beyond The Gate, the various tests he faced, and how he chose.  About the room with the enormous hourglass, and about how his father simply waited for it to run out.  He had heard other people talk about the hourglass as well, though.  And at least one person, the Copyist, did not wait, but kept walking.


At any rate, he knew that it was time. Time to go through The Gate and see for himself.  So many of the stories he had heard were about the gate, people comparing what they saw, how they had chosen, what they came back with.  There were even arguments about what was the best path, whether to open the leaden box if you found it, whether if you happened to meet the grinning demon it was best to fight, to run, to hide. 


Once, glowing and fuzzy after a night at the tavern, he had dropped a few coppers in the Beggar's cup.  She cracked a flaky smile and asked if he wanted to know something.   He wasn't sure that he did, seeing as she smelt like dead skin, but she must have taken his hesitation for assent.  "I hhembraced the grinning demon!" She intimated, followed by a chuckle that soon turned into a racking cough.  He thought that was a pretty novel approach, whether she actually did such a thing or not.


All of which is to indicate that he was as well prepared for the moment as could be expected.  Perhaps more than average, for he did enjoy stories.  He had turned all the different versions together in his mind, boiling them, reducing them, interpreting where appropriate and filling in blanks where some were hesitant to offer details.  When he reached a certain age, he began to want more than stories however, and this was the day that he decided to go for himself. 

So the thoughts in my last post have been rattling around in my head for a month now.  They really felt like they needed to go into verse, but I couldn't find the right meter.  Today my ex got married.  Evidently that loosened something up.

They say that life is like a path,

 

We travel with a friend.

But now and then the path will fork

And seem to bring an end.

For reasons unbeknownst to us

Perhaps our friend will say

You take this path, and as for me

I’ll go another way.

 

Why is it then, so often, that

A parting of the ways

Does not feel like a parting but

The turning of a page?

Perhaps life is not like a path,

But rather like a book

That, even though we’ve read it once,

Demands another look.

 

The characters in chapter one

Do not go anywhere.

We flip back in our memory,

And find them waiting there.

So even now is Romeo

Ascending up a wall,

And Catherine and Pip have not

Gone anywhere at all.

 

So though we two no longer walk

Together side by side,

The fact that you are with me still

Can never be denied.

As Dante still loves Beatrice

And Petrarch too his Laurel,

I adore you still, and always will,

And that dear, is the moral.

 

Yours ever,

Roderick de Codpiece

Order of the Knight Companion

It's a bit simple, but it's exactly what I was trying to say.

It's rather common to hear people speak of like as if it were a path.  It's a tempting metaphor really.  Rocky, narrow, dark, winding and sometimes overgrown with trees, our lives indeed seems that way sometimes.  And sometimes we meet somebody on the path who walks with us for a while.  And sometimes we come to a crossroads, and say to that person, "I shall go this way," and they say to us, "I shall go this other way," and before we know it we've said goodbye.  Sometimes our paths recross, but sometimes they don't and the parting of ways was simply a parting.

There are others, perhaps of a more fatalstic mindset, who think of life as a stream, down which we are carried along until we are lost in the ocean.  Perhaps this is also true, and we never really do more than wave at one another as we pass. 

But in my experience, our experience in this life is more like a book.  The people we meet in chapter one may well die by the time the last page is turned, or may in fact to turn out not to have been important to the story at all.  But unlike a path or a stream, a book is not over when you reach the end.  The characters never leave.  They stay exactly in place, and no matter how many times you finish Romeo and Juliet, he is still at this very moment climbing that wall, and she is still as we speak testifying to the moon.  Penelope still unweaves her tapestry every night, and that ragtag group of travelers never does reach Canterbury.  We never really say goodbye to Pip, or Catherine, or Sancho.  And even if we wanted to, we couldn't say goodbye to those we've loved, laughed and cried with in our lives.  Once we've lived something, we can't unlive it, no more than we can unwrite something. 

Which is a comfort in a way.  Or at least, it should be.

As a certain young man found himself, quite without meaning to, exploring a hallway that may or may not have been allegorical, he became aware of a scuttling from behind the wall to his right.  "That's curious," he thought to himself, and having decided that it was curious, concluded that the hallway he found himself in must also belong to him in some way, perhaps a seldom used corridor in his own home, which he also at that moment realized, he occupied alone.

He examined the wall, partly to determine the source of the unexpected noise, but also to determine the nature of the wall itself.  He decided that it was made of that old sort of lathboard and plaster that is common in older American houses, rather than of drywall, and that it therefore seemed quite unlikely to have any gaps underneath that a mouse could be running around in.  It then occurred to him that this sort of wall usually had wainscotting along the bottom, and just so, he noticed that there was indeed wainscotting.  It was the color of mahogany, but the certain young man well knew that mahogany is seldom used in wainscotting, and that it was rather more likely pine stained a darker color, a fact that was easily confirmed by how easily he was able to make a crease in its surface with his thumbnail.

He held his palm flat against the surface of the wall, which he now decided was papered with a dark green and gilt pattern above the wainscotting, to see if the sound would reoccur.  As he expected, it did, and he could feel a slight scritching underneath the paper at the apparent source.  The young man, in addition to being quite certain, was also what is commonly called a "picker", which is to say that he enjoyed pulling up at the edges of things to reveal the surface underneath.  His mother often chastened him for this habit, as it prevented scabs from healing properly, and was hard on the various laminate surfaces in the house where he grew up.  He wiped the surface of his hand along the wallpaper, with a scraping noise that made him realize just how quiet it had been in the corridor.  He found the texture satisfying, observing the grain of the paper.  He wondered, perhaps aloud, why he hadn't noticed the roughness before, and decided that the lighting in the hallway must be poor.  Indeed, he noticed the wall sconces held candles in them, which also accounted for the warmth of which he was now aware.

The pads of his palm encountered what seemed to be the edge of the paper, and he quite automatically began to pull at it with the nails of his thumb and forefinger.  Stubborn at first, the paper soon tore away from the wall underneath in a great swath that the young man found shiveringly satisying.  With a grin, he pulled up the rest of that section, took two steps back to look at the underlying surface, and jumped slightly as the scuttling sound that he had momentarily forgotten, engrossed as he was in the defacing of the wall, reoccurred.  Not content to remove the wallpaper, which now lay cast aside in a crumple on the parquety, be began to explore the edges of the laths which had been revealed, crusted up and smoothed over with grey plaster.  As it was very likely his house that he was in, he saw no harm in pulling up one of the looser laths, which happened to be at eye level, and blowing away the dust of the dry plaster.

Behind the lath, in the aforementioned dim light of the hallway, he saw what appeared to be a pair of eyes.

His first urge was to press close to the revealed gap between the boards and peer in, but if they were eyes, they were rather close to the gap, and a mixture of timidity and good manners kept him from getting to close to what may have been another's face.  Again, he heard and/or felt the scritching coming from beneath the wall.  Encouraged by this sign, he responded by running his nails along the wall, far enough beneath the revealed gap so as not to be taken as aggressive.  He was answered from the other side by the same sound, also considerately well below eye level.  He knocked twice on the lathing, and a bit of plaster fell away.  Two knocks came in response.  Still conscious of his manners, the young man tried to indicate by his posture that he meant well, raising his shoulders in a gesture of uncertainty that was not entirely conscious.  I n this posture, he pulled away the next lower board , and confirmed that is was indeed a pair of eyes underneath.  Suddenly less concerned with avoiding offense to the owner of the eyes than with completing his removal of the laths, he pulled away a section of the wall broad enough to reveal that the eyes belonged to a slender male face, set four inches or so back from the surface of the wall.  The young man knocked on the plaster again, this time with a syncopated dum dadadum.  He was answered with the same rhythm.

Forgetting his manners, now desperate to complete his removal of the wall between him and his new acquaintance, he pulled away the lathing and plaster all the way to the wainscotting, releasing a cloud of mummified dust and splinters, and cupped his hands over the edge of molding, pulling it away with a jerk and the creak of finishing nails.  He felt a rush of satisfaction as a wide section of the wainscotting tipped forward into the hallway intact.  It was just as though a big scab had come away from his own skin, and not one of those surface scabs either--one that went down into the meat a little bit.  He brushed the crumbled bits of wall off his arms and examined what stood before him.

It did not seem to be a person, as he had first thought.  Rather it was a portrait, one he remembered or decided that he painted himself many years ago, of a young man with a deep gaze and a slender face, wearing a cap with the letter A embroidered on the front.  He was wondering what the A stood for, and also why he had painted it, when another knock came from behind the wall.  He nearly fell over, having forgotten all about the noise and lost in examination of the painting.  He approached the wall again, his heart rate now quite elevated, and his skin suddenly cold.  He touched the painting near the shoulder, appreciating the smooth texture of the surface, which was not canvas, but something smoother.  He was quite proud of his work, and stood looking at it for a few minutes.  How nicely he had captured the shadow of the fellow's arm, whoever he was, and the lines of his neck muscle.  It was a shame that it was only an image.  Whatever or whoever lay behind it couldn't possibly be so perfect, and may in fact just be the dyspeptic pumbling.  He decided to leave the image alone, perfect, intact, but as he rubbed his hand across the clean surface, his hand brushed what seemed to be an edge.

And that is what it's like to meet a new person.

When in doubt, write a story.

This is a story of Jerna.  I begin this way, in part because living among the Kre for so long makes it seem like a story is incomplete without the proper framwork.  I suppose if I was still living on Earth I would have started with some piece of intruiging exposition, a catchy snip of dialogue, a character detail that would later prove revealing, something like that.

"Camron inhaled sharply as he took his first breath of the new air,  having somehow been chosen to be the first off the ship."  That would have been a good beginning, I suppose.

But the Kre always begin their stories by indicating to the reader what sort of story it will be.  A story of Aak, for example, will be about friendship, since Aak is the name of the moon that represents as much to them.  Goreh is a nearby planet that represents philosophy, Tser is the name they give to their sun, and it represents reproduction, and so on. 

Jerna, however, is the name of a startlingly bright, orangey red star that never quite sets, and is even visible to the naked eye on clear days.  To the Kre, it represents that which is far away, unknown, and so any story that is purely speculative, anything they have no way of seeing firsthand (pardon the innapropriateness of the expression), begins with the phrase "This is a story of Jerna".  As you will, I hope, never come to the planet of the Kre, which we somewhat amusingly christened "Vesta" on our landing, this story seems to fit into that genre.

It seems so strange to use the word "genre".  I believe I haven't used that word in thirty years.  I'm surprised I remember it.

Which I guess is how long it would take me to get a response to this transmission.  Fifteen years there.  Fifteen years back.  I don't believe I'll hold my breath.

Ha!  Which is exactly what I did when, as I walked down those corrugated metal steps for the first time, out of the stale interior of the transport, into an atmosphere that all of our research had said was breathable, and which all of our instruments had confirmed.  Instinct, I guess, to seize up a bit, to forget certain basic functions like breathing when faced with something like my first steps on a foreign planet.  We could see a little bit out of the thick glass of the portholes that the soil was a greenish-blue, sort of the color of modeling clay, and that it didn't seem terribly windy out, things like that.  There were moderate sized hills, and here and there little grayish mounds that could have been shrubs or stones.  We spent at least an hour trying to piece together eveything we could from the instruments, and the evidence of our own eyes, but when speculation could take us no further it was time for one of us to venture out. 

I don't even remember how it ended up being me that took those first steps, but it was.  Twenty-four years old, or thirty-nine, depending on how you look at it, and the first human ever to walk on this planet.  I felt like I should have had a protective suit or something, or at least a mask, but the truth was that we didn't bring anything like that with us.  If the planet turned out to be unlivable, we were all completely fucked, so the general policy was not to waste cargo space on that sort of thing.  It wasn't like we were heading back, and it certainly wasn't like we were going to be sending for help.

I really can't compare those first moments on "Vesta", as we hadn't yet decided to call it, to anything on Earth.  It all felt so bright, and the feel of natural light on my face and arms was like an electric current running across my skin.  The fact that the ground gave a little under my feet was startling, and almost made me lose my balance, but all of this is probably just due to the fact that the interior of the transport was dim to conserve energy, and the thick bulkheads were completely unforgiving.  For all I remember, this new planet may have actually been very much like Earth. 

At any rate, after seeing that I didn't explode or suffocate, and that no giant worms appeared from beneath to swallow me up, nothing like that, the rest of the passengers followed me out.