lickhaven

Why did they have to send him here, of all places, Roswald asked his unresponsive self.

Togo. It didn’t sound like a country, more a comic strip. He didn’t know the language, even what the language was called, and the colonial fall-back was French, which he’d never really managed. What could he represent to them here as a U.S. bureaucrat?

And this damned, rickety railroad station!

Another visitor on the platform, a white woman, her back to him, holding a cigarette like a forgotten twig in stiff fingers, stumping purposefully, kicking up spurts of dust.

It couldn’t be. She snapped to a stop, a dog at the end of its chain, swayed, rammed the cigarette into her mouth, took it out, tilted her head back and blew smoke straight up in the air. Her arms dropped to her sides, she raised on her toes, shaking her head with what looked like anger but must have been something else because she spun ecstatically, arms out, then another intense, mechanical puff.

Roswald tried to steel himself against her presence. Another illusion,had to be. If he could move away or close his eyes… but his senses could not distrust him enough to be saved. He slunk up behind her.

“Rylla.”

For the firs time since he’d known her she received her name without flinching. She spun again, gracefully, radiating the ravening alertness that made her seem larger than her body. When she saw him, her jaw dropped. “Isa!” and she threw her arms around him. “What in the world are you doing here?“

“I’ve been sent here. But you – how is it possible? You wouldn’t be here. No one’s here.”

“I’ve been all over everywhere, and every time I feel I’m getting closer to something, but after two weeks here I was sure this couldn’t be it. They have no idea what to do with a woman traveling alone. I told them I was a Buddhist monk on retreat. Do Buddhist monks go on retreat? I spent ten minutes describing how I dyed my robe in saffron. You see, you have to strip the crocus stamens just after the dew is off – they’re so serious, they believed every bit of it. I don’t think I could recognize a crocus. No, it’s the portulaca that always get me confused. They look like something else, but I can’t remember what. I shouldn’t be jabbering, I’m just so happy to see you.”

Roswald was beyond happiness. “I did finally get your letter, from Brazil, but it was too late to answer. Well, obviously.”

“I was sure you wouldn’t. I think I said that. Before. I never think the post is going to work. Why shouldn’t letters fall out of bags and get stuck behind the backs of things? I wasn’t at all sure you’d want to answer. I suppose I’m worried about why I’m here. I must be here for a reason. Why do we wait inside ourselves for whatever it is to work its will on us, sex or god or the time of day, when the real world is outside. Why aren’t we out in it?

“I would like to make love with you, you know. I always loved making love with you. Something comes out then, something in you that I don’t, didn’t see other times. You ought to look for it. What a horrid thing to say, like I’m you mommy or your confessor. No one should by anyone’s confessor. That’s why I’ve never wanted to be analyzed. That’s what friends are for, not analysts… Did I tell you that I look on you as a friend? There’s so much you never tell anyone, even a friend, and the first thing you don’t tell them, I don’t tell them, is – you’re my friend. Well I think that’s true. God, I’m saying the most terrible things to you. I can’t seem to shake it. Really, there wasn’t any good reason to be hiding out there, in the jungle. Is that why I was there? So I couldn’t hide and wouldn’t want to hide from myself? Oh Isa, that might be it. Just after saying that I’m not searching for myself.

“I didn’t? Say that? Well I meant to. I said it to somebody. About everybody saying you must be searching for yourself. I mean me. That I must be searching for me. But they’re wrong. But I’m finding myself. So which part is incidental? The search for me or the search for that external something I can link up to or be part of or identify as something I’ve lost? Good god, this is all so mystical, and there isn’t anything, not a single thing mystical about this afternoon. It’s clear and sunny and beautifully empty, not empty like in Buddhism, just empty. Mysticism needs murk and ominous warning noises. Don’t you think?

“Goodness gracious!… goodness… what do you suppose goodness is all about? Is it good to do what I do where I want to do it? That’s what I wanted to find out, since I was there, but it certainly isn’t why I came. There. The jungle. Now they call it rain forest. I like jungle better. I read a lot of Kipling when I was little. He made the jungle – though it was an Indian jungle, in India – sound admirable. I find admirable things in the most unlikely places.

“Oh. That’s one way of defining myself – I find things that other people don’t find. I know I’m searching. When I wrote you that letter I was trying to deny it, searching, because it sounds too… easy. To be searching. It’s just a jolly good excuse for going around and never finishing anything, of making a vagabond of your mind. Well, I am searching and I might as well admit it. I was there because something special wanted me there, or that I wanted something special. Maybe I’m a ceramic bowl waiting to be filled and that was a secret filling station. Perhaps now I’m full of jungle water. You’d think I’d know it.

“I’m getting into nonsense. Does that ever happen to you, you start to say something very serious but it gets turned around in your head so that when it comes out it isn’t true any more? Or it’s so far short of what you wanted to say that you might as well not bother? Do you ever start feeling that you’re incredible? I do, all the time. It’s not that I think I’m wonderful, I get amazed at what it is to be a living human being. Silly.

“Suppose we do make love. It isn’t the past, I wouldn’t want it to be, do you? The past? Good. But if it’s the present, whose present is it? I don’t want it to be all yours, and it’s starting out that way. I wouldn’t want it to be all mine. Either. Too much of my past has been a personal present that didn’t want to let go of me. Ugh. So. If… I can have this moment because it’s my moment with a friend and the physical business is a complete part of it… Yes, let’s make love or we’ll never know, and the worst it can be is terrible, then we’ll know. And of course it could be very good.”

Roswald felt stranded on a celestial omnibus without destination or possibility of transfer. It wasn’t a wholly unpleasant sensation – nothing with Rylla could be – but disorienting, overwhelming. She had made it her present, pinning him to the wall for examination. Holding, turning, stripping him.

They were sitting in his room, in a state of pre-something-unstated.

“Isa, in the Amazon, I wonder, was I really in the center of the continent?”

“I don’t know that much about South America. I don’t think it has a center.”

“I went all around in a sort of semi-circle before I ended up where I did, so I thought maybe it was the center.”

“Didn’t you say you landed in Rio and cut straight in? That wouldn’t be a semi-circle.”

“I went along the coast first. It felt like a semi-circle. Going along a coast always feels like a semi-circle, doesn’t it? Especially when it’s that long. As soon as I got to Rio the first thing I did was try to find how to get to Quicolo, and I’d never even heard of Quicolo before. Do you have psychic things happen to you? Premonitions of death or feelings that you’re going to meet someone coming around the bend? I don’t. I didn’t. Then all of a sudden, back before, with this boy Michael I started to feel I was going to end up in the Amazon. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I thought it must be a way I had of looking at things. But when I got there, I was almost sure it wasn’t. A little beckoning finger instead. Well, I don’t believe in that either. Do you think it means anything?”

“Search me.”

“All right.”

She pulled down his shorts, looked at him with a steady brilliance, then burst into a laugh that cascaded a full octave, spraying a mist of mirth through the room. Her giggles landed on Roswald’s shoulders and trickled down his back, washing away the remains of a humorless day.

Roswald wanted the passion from when he had first torn into her with a ravenousness of mind and body that would have been obscene if not returned. His physical explosion tonight had been a throwback. Rylla’s lovemaking had more of a lilt to it, not restrained, but smoother along the edges. The compartments inside her were breaking down. Her mind had always been even in its parts, but the parts not mutually accessible. Now she slowed the wheels enough to see their turning. It could be argued that they had something better tonight, a growing tolerance for each other’s reticence – but he would not be the one to argue it.