lickhaven

[a continuation from two episodes past]

Dear Isa,

This is where I got to. It’s a tiny place on the Amazon River, not a place really, because it wouldn’t exist if we didn’t hack it out of the jungle every day. You wouldn’t believe how fast things grow here. They know – the trees and vines and such – that this is their land and they have the power. They throw all their vegetative serfs at us and let us lop off their heads. Some day we will stop the lopping and the trees will pull the whole place to bits and pieces. Why not?

I’m not with Swengdon’s group any more, too much the same thing along the way as at Manchester – pour viruses into flasks, slosh them around, dump them. We were measuring different things in different places, but it was the same thing we were doing. That wasn’t what I was looking for. Then or now. I can’t say – yet – what I am looking for, but I’m getting quicker at seeing which directions are wrong.

I feel that I have to go through something before I can settle down. Do you think I’ll settle down? Also, I got involved with Swengdon. Well, you’d know that. It happened before we left, and it got worse, got moreso. He’s a fine man, may be a really wonderful man. I think he is. He believes in what he’s doing. Perhaps too much, it eats into him all the time. You can’t help admiring him even when it becomes frightening.

The coffee is wonderful here. It’s a silly way to identify a country, by their coffee, but at least it’s true. I seem to spend a great deal of time drinking it at any rate. Most of the last four or five months I’ve just been traveling. Around. I lived with an Indian tribe for almost six weeks. Indigenous is the right term now, like rain forest instead of jungle. I don’t think they ever did know what to make of me. Women have a very particular place in their culture and I didn’t act like a woman so far as they were concerned. They took it fairly well from that angle – I mean they didn’t try to kill me or even send me to Coventry.

Sometimes they waggled their hands in a peculiar way, their equivalent of shrugging their shoulders. They use poison darts to hunt game. It’s amazing to watch. They stand still – completely still – for hours, holding the dart gun, ready to blow on it, then something comes by, a monkey or a bird, they just give one big puff and hit it, every time. What I don’t understand is why when they’ve poisoned the animal, eating it doesn’t poison them? They boil everything, that helps, I suppose. But when I asked them, they just waggled their hands at me.

I should get more out of situations like this than I do. I’m enjoying myself, of course – every day is some new amazing thing, a bird or a crocodile or an idea I’ve never had because there was no place like this to make me have it. I get discouraged because I ought to be learning something I’m missing. The worst is that I feel like I’m on the right road but in the wrong place. Do you think that’s a good sign? Some things don’t change though. I still can’t sit anywhere for very long – you remember that, you said so.

I heard about a program in Africa, and I might get into it – one of the men from Swengdon’s is going there. He told me before I left the group. You don’t know him. Why would you? It will probably be the same all over again. But it might not.

I wonder what Africa is like? What do they drink there that’s hot, do they have coffee?

I honestly miss you Isa, which is hard for me to say. I like to cut things off and remember them instead. I suppose I think nothing can hurt me that way, which means everything hurts more that I would want it to. I felt that way at Manchester and I’ll probably feel that way in Africa. If I go. I want to see everything!

You can write to me here for the next month or so. After that, before Africa, if,  I’ll probably go down to Rio for awhile and you can write care of Poste Restante, if they have it there. I don’t know what will happen after that. Africa? I hope.

Love, Rylla

P.S. A huge snake just went by past the window. Not an anaconda, that big, I’ve seen one or two, but it was just wandering along being its snake self. What a place! To have a yard outside, a garden almost, with ten foot snakes that belong there! Snakes always seem to know where they’re going. How does one get to be a snake?

###

Rylla was walking the room, puffing a cigarette with quiet determination but without the respiratory assault she once had. Roswald should get up, but unfamiliar parts of himself had stiffened. Someone had injected cement into the hunker muscles of his thighs, and an area between his shoulder blades had rusted solid. Maybe if he rolled over first…. The floor mat rolled with him, then started to pull away like a body-length bandaid. He made the sound of a pig with its tail under duress and flopped back, bent fetally.

Rylla, called back from her mental wanderings, tried to make sense of his whimpers and feeble hand signals, then pried him slowly, painfully loose. He sat up, one side red, cross-hatched, fine grit particles pushed deep into crevices. She bathed him carefully, head to foot, like a baby, and bundled him to bed where, from bodily perversity, he could not sleep.

He rustled uncomfortably on the clean white sheets. “I can’t sleep.”

“Oh.”

“You aren’t very sympathetic.”

“Snort.”

“Don’t snort at me.”

“You’re the only one here, who else can I snort at?”

“What I mean –”

“Isa. Do you suppose part of me was in the jungle all along?”

“How, what do you mean?”

“That… some essential piece of me broke off, I don’t know when, maybe when I was born, and ended up in the Amazon? Or there was a mix-up and parts got switched. With somebody else?”

“A warehousing error?”

“I’m not being funny. I’m trying to see what being there meant, means. Suppose the missing piece is slipping back in.”

“Spiritual osmosis…. hmmm, I have to say, on careful reflection, that that sounds nuts.”

“Remember the first time we met, I was telling you about that business of molecules fitting into people’s noses? I don’t think my idea sounds any more ridiculous than that, and I found afterwards that he, that Swengdon was probably right. I’m not saying I’m right this time, but does anyone know anything about why people happen the way they do, why I can make an equal guess. Too.”

“But there’s more known about molecules than how they fit into noses.”

No answer, and she went back to pacing and prodding the furniture. Why was he needling her? She took dismantling accepted theories as a challenge, looking for equally plausible alternative ways of accounting for facts. Yet so far she hadn’t dabbled in mystical hokum. 

“All right,” he said, “what else?”

“What what else?”

“There’s more to your idea. I wasn’t trying to blow you off. Where does this take you – how does it fit, with what?”

“It just fits with me, that’s all. Of course it’s silly. I have silly ideas. I like silly ideas, they’ve given me beautiful sunsets, let me see the clouds break up in Nepal after the monsoons with mountains bigger than God reappearing like pieces of forever that somebody’s forgotten. 

“You see? They even make me sound poetic, and you know I’m not poetic. What I’m beginning to see is that I’m collecting myself. There’s a myth about that somewhere. Osiris, the Egyptian god or whatever he was got chopped up by somebody and scattered over Egypt and he had to go looking for himself under rocks.”

Roswald, drifting into the warmth of listening to her, a moist, cradling warmth, was whacked fully awake… what he had been thinking about earlier, lost pieces, Roswald bits scattered across the landscape. Not so bad to be fragmented… good enough for Rylla and very old gods.

She drifted on. “I thought I was searching for something outside, a corner, an… angle I guess I mean. All the forces of the world as lines and planes, all coming together, but I couldn’t see the corner where they met. But what if the corner’s inside me? I certainly wouldn’t see it then, would I? If I’m looking outside? People corners and thing corners, how would that work? We probably can’t see unless the lines extend far enough. If you come along too early, too soon, there’s nothing to look at but a hodgepodge. On all those projects I must have thought I was following the forces. Then I’d get into… fucking somebody and I wouldn’t be able to see them, the forces. I’d get so angry at myself.

”Sex is its own force, has to lead somewhere too, but the people I… slept with, they weren’t following anything, and I wouldn’t find that out until too late. I’d lose track of them, the lines of force, then I’d march off and try to find them again. I couldn’t like myself while I was doing it. But… what if everybody is their own corner? I mean, forces come from different directions, from all over, they could all meet in someone, in everyone…. Shit, that doesn’t work, it wouldn’t matter who was who was where, everywhere would be the same. I should have only one silly idea at a time.”

Roswald had fallen back asleep. Rylla felt an urge to tuck him in, kiss his brow. No. She didn’t really want to kiss his brow. She wanted to kiss the brow of someone – something? – she had not met.

She stretched both arms and touched the air. She ran her fingers along the walls. They were only walls. Isa was only Isa, the bed he lay on was only the bed. There was nothing wonderful in any of it, yet her fingers and her body knew they were only an inch away from a different touching.

Then the fire of certainty left her, seeped out through the almost-touching fingers, gone off to play. Possibly it would end up as someone else’s certainty. For the unconcerned world, it should be just as good.

She lay down beside him, staring at the ceiling. It was white. She blew out the dribbling candle and, once her eyes adjusted, the ceiling turned silver-gray from moonlight. She wondered why things could be the same and different, changed yet still the same.