Paul O’Cathain
Copyright 2012 Paul O’Cathain
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A Kiss in the Season of the Flowering of the Tuberoses
A Kiss Sweet with the Sugar of Early Cherries
Kiss of the Fragrance of the Dust of Moonlight
Nixie’s Kiss
He was making a mistake. The realization was like lead in his stomach. He was already dressed in his tuxedo, he was at the church, beneath the crucifix that held a suffering Jesus, his eyes turned upward toward his salvation. But the statue did not look at Ross: He was alone. He had waited too long, and now he would have to make this decision alone and quickly.
In a matter of minutes, Constance would be here with her father and Nixie. It was not too late to back out, even though it would be embarrassing. It would be something to discuss as a joke with his friends, who were even now seated in the church. He could hear Bill now.
“Hey, Ross, at least you didn’t wait until the last minute, like when the preacher said ‘Do you take this woman to be your lawful wife,’ you didn’t say, ‘uh, Connie we need to talk.’”
There would be laughter and quickened voices and then maybe a few of them would say the obvious: I never liked Constance anyway, you did the right thing. I would have told her a long time ago, hit the bricks. That was a close one, bro.
And it was true that Constance was not likeable. She was controlling, unyielding, she had little sense of humor. And she did not trust or like Ross’s friends, which made it doubly difficult. She wanted control over Ross, and the irresponsibility of his friends made her force her smile and grit her teeth. It was true, they were irresponsible, they were now in their early 30’s but were still waiting for their big break, still full of dreams of internet riches, book deals, careers on Wall Street. And doing very little to make these dreams a reality, mostly talking about deals that were in the works, deals that would be discussed with great fervor, and then, after a year, would be discussed as: “Hey, whatever happened to that deal you were so revved up about?”
It was true, Constance had ample reason to mistrust his irresponsible friends. But that was the point: They were his friends, and if he had taken a different path, went to work every day and silently listened to their stories of Wyoming and the Grand Tetons, sudden trips to Aruba, the latest unbelievably hot female companion, a wine tasting trip to Bordeaux, then he still wished them well, wished them joy, silently loved and accepted them. They were his friends, and he cared for them.
Constance did not: She loved Nixie, the only child of her short and strife-filled marriage. She loved Ross, he did not doubt that. But she also loved shopping trips and a lifestyle of excess and she did not hesitate to assert her entitlement to these things. She had a job, it was true, but it was not a job that supported such a pretentious lifestyle, and she had forcefully and repeatedly demanded it from her first husband and he had eventually rebelled and told her to hit the bricks.
Her first husband, what was he, the second? Not yet. All he had to do was tell the preacher: “You know what, I’m sorry to say this, but I’ve changed my mind. Do me a favor, tell everyone, but I simply can’t do it. It would be a mistake. You understand.” And then he would be gone. He would not be the second husband, he would be the one who got away, and he would discuss his narrow escape for years afterwards, maybe go on a trip to Wyoming with his friends, and he would ask “Whatever happened to that internet deal,” and they would change the subject and ask him “Whatever happened with you and Constance, anyway? I always kind of liked her and thought she would be good for you,” and he would change the subject. It didn’t work out, the deal or the marriage, that was all. These things happened. Just didn’t work out. Nobody could disagree with the obvious.
And what about Nixie? Would she agree? She was not his child, but he had promised her that he would adopt her if her father agreed, and there was no reason to think he would not. Daniel wanted nothing more to do with his former family, and if Ross would take over responsibility for support, great. Daniel did not really want to be part of Nixie’s life anyway. The visitation agreement was never fully utilized and there was never any question of Nixie staying over for another night, or going on vacation with Daniel’s new family.
And the simple truth was, he loved the girl and wanted her to be part of his life. He was more than a potential step-father to her. His pulse slowed to a steady pace of joy when he sat with her to do her fourth grade homework. Making smores for her made him feel like he had value, like he was part of a great cycle of something that revolved around life itself.
But it was Constance who would be his wife, and the leaden feeling grew heavier as he finally faced the obvious: Constance might have the necessary skills to be a society wife but she did not have the necessary skills to be his wife. She would not be able to sustain a real marriage based on honest communication, shared values and restraint. She saw him as someone with potential, the potential to work hard, give her the things she wanted, take care of her and Nixie, but she did not see him as someone who had dreams, who wanted to go with his friends, go to Aruba, go to Wyoming, go to taste wine in Bordeaux, go go go, to be someone more than he was constrained to be. And he realized that he needed to be with a woman who recognized that part of him, someone who would say “It’s okay, we can afford it, let’s go to Bordeaux this July.”
But there would be the mortgage and the payments on the new furniture, and the braces and this year would not look good, probably next year. It simply would not work out, and someone had to state the obvious. And because no one else would, she would grit her teeth and say it. Then she would make herself feel better with a trip to Nordstroms.
You can’t wait any longer. It’s not going to work, you know it, and you know you’d be making a mistake going through with this. Tell her, tell the preacher, get out of here. He went outside.
It was a bright, September Minnesota day, and the sudden sunlight made his head spin and his pulse quicken. A light wind was coming from Canada, hinting of the last days of summer but also hinting of the snow to come. Things were mixed, snow and summer, flight and standing one’s ground, but the light buffeting of the wind seemed to make the difference. The world seemed to be spinning quicker and quicker, throwing him in some kind of centrifugal state of preparation for flight, sending him off to Canada or Wyoming or Aruba or anywhere but here.
The car drove up: Her father had rented a limousine for the day. Ross wondered if they would give him the deposit back, or whether he would drive the car around all day to get his money’s worth. He’d probably try to do both, put a couple hundred miles on the car and then return it, try to get his money back with a pathetic story about his daughter being left at the altar by her no-good boyfriend.
Sanford got out, and the back doors swung open and Nixie got out one side and Constance got out the other. Constance looked beautiful, it was true, the gown was a little overstated for a second marriage, but it was completely lovely. You could not say that Constance lacked good taste. She knew exactly where she and her father were going and they quickly stepped toward the vestibule.
Nixie did not know these things, and she looked around everywhere, ignoring her mother’s curt command to come on. She saw Ross standing at the side of the church and her face seemed to become illuminated from an inner light, and she was running toward him, she was going going going to where her heart was, and she ran up to him in her white flower girl dress with the satin roses, carrying a basket of rose petals which spilled petals onto the ground as she ran, and she ran up the six steps to him and reached up and kissed him on the cheek.
Her blue eyes looked at him with pure happiness. “Can I call you Dad now?’” she asked.
The spinning of the world slowed, took on a stately pace and then stopped altogether. He caught his breath and said one true thing: “Yes, Nixie. You can call me Dad now.”
She smiled and went back to be with her mother. And he turned and reentered the church, making the sign of the cross, looking upward at the crucifix on the wall. With a slow realization, he saw that the statue of Jesus had eyes turned upward. They looked toward a place that was greater than his suffering, toward a place that held the only redemption to be, the only redemption to which man could ever aspire, a redemption that came from the simple and single act of loving the abandoned and unloved. Here, in this place, Ross would do the same. He stood at the door, adjusted his tie, and stepped into the church.
A Kiss in the Season of the Flowering of the Tuberoses
Matty went outside early, before dawn. She walked into the garden, through the rose-trellis gate, past the sundial, to the white garden.
It encompassed a space of four feet, with white flowers and blossoms, gardenias, coreopsis, moon flowers. In the center were the tuberoses, tall green stalks with blossoms not yet emerged, but already pressing against the green sheath.
Matty wore a watch but rarely looked at it. She paid attention to the passage of time by what was happening in the garden. Early summer would begin with the blossoming of the tuberose, late summer by the dahlias, bee balm and canna lilies. She was only in her early thirties, but had begun the habit of older women whose clothes and shoes reflected the season in the garden, and had prepared her sun hats and sleeveless dresses to wear when the season changed to summer.
It would be a few more days, only—it was still late Spring. She distracted herself by thinking of the carol she had sung in choir back in Middle School, 20 years ago: “Tempus adest floridu”—Spring has unwrapped her flowers. Early summer would come soon enough, when the tuberose unfolded itself, releasing its sweet fragrance into the white garden and the night air. As others might watch for Memorial Day or the opening of the community pool, she watched the tuberose to mark the start of summer.
This year she watched the budding flower with an all-consuming dread. She feared the coming of this summer with every fiber in her being and would have given her life to stop its arrival. Her eyes fixed on the plant, she was unable to look away, she fixated on every green striation and leaf. She tried to calm herself, tried to think of the coolness of the summer nights, the blossoming of the white garden. She would not go back into the house with this dread encompassing her. She would not frighten her daughter that way.
Instead, she would wait for night to fall and then she would bring Maryam out to smell the flowers, as she had every year since her birth, four years ago. She did not care what they had said, the medical authorities, she would still carry her daughter out in the night air, to sit in the fragrance of the white flowers and wait for the tuberose and share their moments and lives together. Even if Maryam was sleeping she would lift the small bundle and carry her into the night to the white garden, where the fragrance owned the night, and she would hold the child against her, or hold her on her lap, and she would allow the little one to awaken and tell her what was in her heart, her hopes and her fears, what boys at preschool she liked, what clothes she wished her mother to buy, what she wished for more than anything. Maryam did not know what had been said about her by the doctors and nurses, and Matty would not tell her, ever. She would bring her into the garden and they would share their plans and dreams. Maryam loved the tuberose, loved the white garden.
She went back into the house. The California sunshine had not burned off the haze, and the traffic for the race track in Arcadia had not yet clogged the roads. The day had not yet begun. Maryam was sleeping, and she went back to the kitchen, not waking her.
It was another hour before the child came into the kitchen, wearing a white nightgown with the pattern of small flowers.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, sweetheart, what is it?”
“Don’t I have to go to preschool?”
“No, honey. Not today.”
“I want to go.”
“Not today, honey. You have to stay with me today.”
“I saw the big kids waiting for the bus.”
“I have to take you to the doctor today.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Why not, honey? Everybody there is nice to you.”
“They hurt me.”
“Just a little bit.”
“A lot.”
“Sweetie, they have to take a little blood today, that’s all.”
She started to cry.
“What is it?”
“I don’t want that other thing.”
She answered slowly. “We’re not going to do that again, honey. We already tried that.”
“Okay.”
“Can I have a hug?”
“Okay, Mommy.” The child climbed on her lap and put her little arms around her. They held each other, breathing into each other. She held her hand over the bruise on the child’s arm where they had taken blood. She hated to see bruises on the child. It made her frantic, made her breathe in panic. She could not look at them.
“Okay, take your pills now.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You have to.”
“After.”
“Okay. You can watch TV for a while. Then take them. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Guess what?”
“What?”
She kept her voice steady. “The Mexican Tuberoses are going to bloom. That means that summer’s here.”
The child looked at her. “When are they going to bloom?”
“Tonight, maybe.”
“I have to go now.”
She went off to watch TV on her little legs. Matty smiled. Kids forgot things. She made breakfast for herself and Maryam, and called her to the table.
“Mom?”
“Sweetie.”
“When are you going to let Daddy come home?”
“Honey. I didn’t ask Daddy to leave. He just—”
“Yes, you did. I heard you.”
“Honey, that was just adults talking. He had to go on a trip.”
“I want my Dad.”
“I’ll talk to him. Maybe he can take you to the zoo.”
“You said I’m not allowed to go to the zoo. I’ll get sick.”
“I think—okay, he can take you out to eat.”
“Okay, Mommy.”
The child looked forlorn. Matty did not care. Mike wasn’t coming back. Maryam was her child and she’d take care of her. By herself. Mike wasn’t coming back.
They had an uneventful morning, then in early afternoon got in the car for the trip to the UCLA medical center.
“Mom,” she asked, looking out the window as they went through Pasadena.
“Yes, hon?”
“What’s AML?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Somewhere. What is it?”
“I’m not sure, Maryam. It sounds like the name of a toy or something.”
“It’s not a toy.”
“I don’t know, honey. Where did you hear it?”
“Just somewhere.”
“Did one of the nurses say it?”
“Nobody said it. I don’t want you to get mad.”
“Mommy isn’t mad.”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not, honey. Let Mommy concentrate on driving now, okay? Cause traffic’s bad.”
A car swerved into her lane and Matty swallowed her anger and concentrated on the freeway. She was able to pull into the parking garage in Westwood in less than an hour.
She put Maryam in a seat and went to the reception desk. The nurse was new, not someone she recognized.
“I’m Mattina Thorens. My daughter has an appointment with Dr. Herr.”
The nurse pulled up the chart on the computer. “Okay, have a seat, he’ll be with you shortly.”
“I have to say something. I want to talk to your supervisor.”
“Okay.” She looked surprised, but called the supervisor over.
“Can I help you?”
“My daughter is receiving treatment for AML, okay? I’m not happy about it but that’s the way it is. I’m trying to protect her for the little bit of time she has left. And one of your nurses has been talking about it in front of her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She asked me what AML was a half hour ago. I never mentioned that diagnosis to her and neither did her father. If she heard it anywhere she heard it here.”
“I understand. I’ll instruct the nurses not to discuss it. But it’s very doubtful that they would talk about it to her—”
“Listen to me. She heard it somewhere, okay? And she didn’t hear it from me. I’m trying to protect her. Please do me the courtesy of listening to me and respecting my wishes and behaving in a professional manner around a 4-year-old child. Is that too much to ask, or do I have to take it up with—”
“All right, Ms. Thorens. I’ll tell my staff.”
“Thank you.”
She turned and walked over to Maryam, who was reading a child’s magazine on her seat.
“You okay, sweetie?”
“I’m okay.”
They waited. The nurse called her to the desk, and walked her and Maryam back to an examination room. The nurse took blood, and Dr. Herr pushed open the door.
“Hi, Maryam.”
“Hi, Dr. Herr.”
“Hi, Mattie.”
“Hi, Nathan.”
“How’s she doing?”
“She’s doing fine.”
“Do you want to step outside for a minute?”
“Sure.” She turned to her daughter. “Dr. Herr wants to talk to me about gardening, honey. We’ll just be a minute.”
Her daughter looked frightened, and Matty didn’t want to leave her, but she had no choice. Nathan talked about their mutual interest, gardening, as they went out the door.
“Things should be in full bloom at your place by now,” he said.
“The arum and japonica are about done. The tuberoses are ready to blossom.”
“I love tuberose. Polianthes and jasmine are my favorite fragrance plants.”
“The polianthes are the best. My white garden is wonderful.”
They went down the hallway a bit. “The nursing supervisor told me what you said. I apologize. She assures me it won’t happen again.”
“Thank you, it’s just—”
“You don’t have to explain. You don’t want her to know. I understand. How’s she doing?”
“She’s really, really sick.”
“It won’t be much longer. And that’s a blessing.”
“I don’t want her to suffer.”
“You have the pain meds.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. She can stay at home for now. But things could deteriorate very quickly.”
“I know.”
They drove back to San Marino in silence. Matty tried to talk to her daughter, but could not summon enough spirit to keep a conversation going, and they drove mostly in silence.
Michael called and talked to her before bedtime. Matty had a glass of wine to help her get to sleep, and then went to bed.
She got up early, around 4. She didn’t keep a clock by the bed. She didn’t know why, but she could look out the window and see the stars over the mountains, and she was attuned to the pulse of the garden, and that was all she needed to know of time.
She went out to the garden. Perhaps the first blooms of the tuberose would have pushed through the green stalk to release their fragrance into the night air. It would mark another day gone, but she had to know. Perhaps despite all it would bring her some peace, and she could bring Maryam out to share it before the day began.
But there would be no tuberoses this year. The stems had been slashed in half two feet from the ground, the blossoms had been torn from the plant and trodden underfoot. She could not believe that this had happened. What joy could someone take from this? She sat down, heavily, on the garden bench. What kind of person would steal into her yard and destroy her flowers? What pleasure could they take in that? She would not tell Maryam, who so much loved sharing the fragrant night air with her, loved the tuberoses. She would not tell her, ever. She would make some excuse, any excuse, and go into the flower district in L.A. and buy as many cut flowers as she could carry in her two arms and take them home and put them in vases and tell her daughter that she had decided that cut flowers were best this year.
Her heart was beating frantically, and her breath was ragged in her throat. She felt ringed by terror, as if the city itself had threatened her and her child, as if strangers and darkness had slapped her and Maryam, had maliciously decided to destroy something that was precious to them. The fact that Maryam was sick only added to her bitterness. But she would not show any fear or anger to her daughter. She would go back inside as if everything were fine, and make an excuse not to take her daughter to the well-loved garden. She brought her breathing under control, and quietly went back into the house.
She saw the knife in the sink, still encrusted with drying vegetation, bits of green and white where the spikes of blossom had been slashed. She gripped the sink. There were only two persons in the house, she and her daughter, and Maryam had no reason to attack the plants. Maryam loved the evenings together in the white garden. Matty must have done it herself. She knew she was losing it, she couldn’t take it, she was only so strong. And they had told her that stress would make her forget what she had done, something about cortisol and the brain. But she had to get it together. She had to get a grip. She would not destroy anything else. She would focus.
They had breakfast and Maryam went to watch television. Matty brought her juice and her medicines.
“Mommy?”
“Yes, sweetie.”
“What’s polian-things?”
“Polianthes? Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s just the Latin word for tuberose. Where did you hear it, honey?”
Her heart was beating so hard it hurt her.
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
”Excuse me, sweetie. I have to call someone.”
She went into her bedroom and called the medical center. Ten minutes later Dr. Herr called her back. She tried to speak calmly, but began to cry softly into the phone.
“Dr. Herr. I think that maybe I was wrong about Maryam hearing something from the nurses. I think that she heard you and me talking in the hallway.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t think she could hear us.”
“It’s just that—last year—we were talking in the hallway. I was pretty upset. And you were trying to be kind. You took the time to ask me about my garden. And I finally asked you how long she had. And you said the summer. And I said when in the summer, when the dahlias and bergamot bloom at the end of summer, or when the tuberoses bloomed, and you said that when the tuberoses bloomed, that would probably be all the time she had. And I think she heard us. And they were ready to bloom last night. And she went outside and she cut them down.”
Dr. Herr said something in response, but she was crying so hard she could not hear him. She hung up the phone, trying to be quiet, not to alarm Maryam.
But the child must have been listening, must have heard her, must have understood. She came into the room and crawled onto the bed and into her arms, and kissed her, and Maryam said “It’s all right, Mommy, you don’t have to cry.” So that was it. Matty had not protected Maryam, the child had tried to protect her, had understood her dread of what the flowering meant, and had destroyed the flowers to protect her, not from her own fear, but to give her mother a few more days of waiting and denial and a kind of peace, before the reality became clear. Matty had not sheltered her, she had carelessly told her of her fate, and had spent her time in concentrating on the passage of time, in the way she had always understood it.
“Honey,” said Matty. “Were you trying to help Mommy when you cut down the flowers?”
The child did not answer the question. Her reply came from a deep space of loss, abandonment and fear: “I want my Mommy!”
Matty felt that her soul had been cloven in half. She had concentrated on protecting her daughter, but had excluded her from her own life at school, with her father, and most of all from Matty herself, so that Matty could selfishly deal with her loss the only way she could, with rage and denial and despair, lashing out in anger and going out at dawn alone to watch the passage of time in sick dread, instead of spending each moment with her child, watching her face, understanding her, sharing her fear, being aware of her. She had left the child alone in her room, isolated and abandoned her to deal with her fears alone. She felt deeply sickened with herself. If her soul could have cried out it would have.
Maryam had told her in the only way she could: She needed her now. There was no more time for pretense that she would be fine, that there were boys in preschool who dreamed of her, that there would be endless summers of tuberoses and gardenias and jasmine and secrets and hopes and dreams. There were no more tuberoses, but the season of the flowering of the tuberoses had come, and with it the need for bravery and acceptance, not denial and rage, and she needed her mother now of all the times in her life.
Matty hated the tuberoses, hated the coming of summer, hated herself. And this hatred was a form of selfishness that she now recognized in herself: She hated that she was selfish, hated the flaw in herself that had led her to abandon her child, that had forced the child to be mother to her, with her tantrums and rages and fear. She blinked at the enormity of it. She looked out the window. The day had come and the stars were no longer visible over the hills. The stars and the tuberoses were gone and she no longer knew how to measure time, and this was just, because her measure of time had been wrong from the beginning: The true measure of time was only in a child’s eyes, in the growth of a child’s knowledge and awareness in the world. There was no more time. There was only now. It was time to live in the present, as an adult, understanding her child, dealing with her terrible knowledge, giving her comfort from the deepest wellspring of love that she possessed. A wave of profound humility washed over her, humbling her to the depths of her soul. She turned back to her child.
“Mommy’s right here, honey. And I’m very sorry about everything. And I want you to call your Dad and ask him to please come home. Then I want you to get ready for school.”
The tiny hands clutched her and she looked deep in her eyes. “No, Mommy, not today. I have to be with you today.”
“Why, honey?”
“Because I’m scared.”
“You don’t have to be scared, Maryam. Mommy will take care of you. And Mommy will be with you. Mommy loves you.”
The little hands clutched her so tight, as if holding onto life itself, and she sought faith in her mother’s eyes, and she finally found it, and she relaxed her grip, and she still held her eyes locked onto her mother’s eyes, as if she would hold them forever, and she spoke.
“Okay, Mommy. Okay.”
Kissing Distance
He sat himself in a free seat of the downtown C train and opened his mail: A few bills, and then glanced at the flood of materials from the sex industry. It was too funny, really. Here he was, basically celibate and sexless in his 23rd year, spending all of his spare moments working on his multinomial lattice problems, and he had found his way onto all of the sex-related mailing lists.
He knew why: It was the publication he had made in the Journal of Derivative Science—Optimal Kissing Distance of Multinomial Lattices under Time-to-Expiry Constraints. The kissing-distance business had thrown everyone except for a few mathematicians, cosmologists and financial engineers. He knew, and they knew, that kissing number was simply the number of times a sphere kissed its neighbor, touched it in n-dimensional space, and the kissing distance was the space between them. He had an obsessive need to feel that the world was knowable and to discover the laws that controlled behavior of elements in the world. The kissing distance problem was simply useful in interpreting how things worked in the world.
It was a problem that was well known to financial engineers and mathematicians, and was a development of the old cannonball problem. If you were a sea captain, and attacked by pirates, you needed to know how many cannonballs you had. And cannonballs were arrayed in a stack, the ball in the center kissing the ones around it. So, how many balls were in the stack? The captain needed to know, and quickly. Thus a mathematical subdiscipline was born, one that found its way onto Wall Street, where the financial engineers needed to know how many financial options kissed their neighbors. So he found work on Wall Street, helping the financial engineers decide how many options were busy kissing—occupying tangential n-dimensional space around a financial instrument—at any given time.
It was too funny. He had no sex life, he only had the life of the pure scientist, yet here he was, with more sex literature on his lap than the dedicated sex workers who were, even now, straggling home to Brooklyn on the C train. He glance around the train: Mostly filled with workers on their way to the financial district, wearing suits and running shoes, some regular people going to work or going home after the night shift, and a few obvious sex-trade workers. None of them had any sex-related materials on their laps, or even any material at all. A few readers on the train were reading the Post or Times, the Wall Street workers were reading the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times, but mostly, everyone looked everywhere but in the eyes of their neighbors. A few who were standing looked at the materials on his lap.
What did they assume? That this 23-year-old, inexperienced and mild-looking guy was some sort of sexual adventurer? May be a sex-trade worker himself, who had a copy of the Mathematical Derivatives Bulletin in the pile of smut mags as a kind of cover? Was he heading home to Brooklyn after fevered nights of wrinkling the sheets of some Sutton Place heiress? Was he possessed of sexual secrets that came from nights of performing the acts of the Kama Sutra and Tantric Yoga, secrets that he had learned in Thailand, Taipei and Singapore and Sutton Square? Hmm, maybe, maybe not. They would probably watch him to see where he got off the train. If Wall Street station, then the results would be anomalous. If he kept going to Brooklyn, then it all made sense. Sex boy.
He glanced at the mathematical journal: The usual stuff, lots of integrals. Bored him. He glanced through the sex stuff. Again, mostly boring, material from commercial sex sites, but a few interesting items. The train filled up, all the seats were filled, and people were hanging off the overhead and upright poles. As they progressed toward the Wall Street station, the train became packed more and more tightly, until people were touching against each other. He recognized the mathematical description of the situation: As more passengers arrived, the packing density of the train compartment increased, and the kissing distance decreased, until neighbor was touching neighbor. Packed tightly together, the passengers kissed each other as the train jostled them, as they moved about the train, or as they remained stationary, clustered around the upright poles. That is, if the dour and grim expressions of the passengers could be described as kissing; constrained proximity was more like it.
But kissing distance was the mathematical term for touching, and it was his manner to use the mathematical term whenever possible. He constantly described the world in mathematical terms. It was a weakness of his—or perhaps a strength, he did not know, but that was his way. People thought of mathematics as something abstruse, and perhaps it was. But for him it was a language to describe the world, a truer language than English, or French or Latin or Sanskrit. Each of these verbal languages was full of flights of fancy. Everything was like something else. It was true enough that life was full of these homologies, but it was an inaccurate way to describe the movement of things in the world.
Mathematics seemed to be exempt from this conceit, and because of this it was an altogether truer language. At least he had thought so until he had taken a few classes in the Physics of Cosmology at NYU, and then he came away with a disturbing intimation that mathematics was simply another language that was also filled with comparisons. There was even a mathematical term for it, mirror homologies. Everything was like something else—and different in ways that could not be explained with mathematics or any other language. He did not dwell on this; it upset his understanding of the universe, of cause and effect, of man’s place in a well-ordered cosmos, that was, he suspected, not very well ordered at all.
And then, an anomalous moment: Kristen got on the train. He had met her at a party some two years ago, and had become instantly infatuated with her. They had talked that night, talked incessantly, and at the end of the evening he had kissed her. In the days and weeks that followed, he had texted her and called her and facebooked her and twittered her until even he had been ashamed of his obsessive behavior, and she had not responded, even once. He had eventually stopped, accepting the obvious, that she had some other priority in her life, or some commitment that excluded him, or was simply not interested in him.
Still, there had been something between them that night, and he could not, could not, relinquish it. They had talked for hours, and she had become increasingly animated and intimate, touching him repeatedly, telling him things that she had probably never told anyone. He did the same. Perhaps she had been influenced by the alcohol that night, perhaps she had gotten carried away, perhaps something else. But it had been real. It had been a moment in which some dimension of hers had blazed forth, blazed forth and engaged him and basically, aligned him toward her, forever.
He had had a few girlfriends before that night, but this had been a moment—that you read about, in which great loves are born, loves that will change the world around them. He had moved so effortlessly into her world, a world of intimacy and secrets and longing, that he could not find his way back out. He was still with her, in some way that he could not understand.
He had to know, and he would ask her, now. He got up and lessened the kissing distance between them by making his way through the now-crowded train car. As he did, the kissing distance increased with his train mates—he touched numerous of them on the way to the front of the car. The expressions of the neighbors was mostly passive, mostly acceptant, although some showed signs of irritation. They did not acknowledge his presence, except in the form of withdrawal, even though they were close enough to kiss him physically.
He was standing in front of Kristen. She looked up.
“Hi, I don’t know if you remember me. I’m Jeremy. We met at a party two years ago.”
She seemed to shrink. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember you.”
“Look, you obviously have a reason for not responding to my calls. I just want to know what it is.”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m not going to bother you or pester you. I just need to know.”
She looked around—for an escape route, witnesses, eavesdroppers, who knows? And then she spoke, more to herself than to him, but she finally looked up at him, with a disturbed glance that immediately went back to her lap.
“Look, Jeremy. I can’t. I can’t tell you why. But I simply can’t. I’m sorry for that night, for letting you think that there was some Act II. But I can’t.”
“Is that all?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you any more.”
The train pulled into the next station, and she hurriedly got up and exited the train. He was left watching an empty seat, which was soon occupied by another body. He turned away.
So. He did not know and he would not know. Why? Why could she not tell him? He looked around the subway car, filled with distant, empty eyes. Did he think there were secrets here, beside the secret that she carried and would not tell? He did. There were dimensions there, all around him, hidden dimensions within the kissing distance, and an isolated loneliness that kept the dimensions eternally separate, even though he was close enough to reach out and touch a dozen of his fellow commuters. Did anyone tell what they knew, what they kept hidden, suddenly stand up and say “This is why?” No. They all kept their silence within the dimension of remembrance, or loneliness, or longing, kept it there and never spoke of it.
How to explain these dimensions? It disturbed him, violated his view of the world that these dimensions did not exist in the cosmology that Einstein had advanced, the cosmology that they all lived by. It was a kissing space defined by length, width, height and time. It then occurrred to him, perhaps as a flight of fancy, perhaps as an accurate way of describing the world: There was another way of describing the world, the Calibri-Yau conjecture. It was a cosmological concept that considered the universe to be filled with hidden dimensions and unseen existence, only connected by tunnels, which would appear and disappear, seemingly at random. Perhaps physics had a way of explicating the situation he was in, and perhaps not. But he had an obsessive need to know why and there was no why. The only logical answer was that the world was composed of laws that he would never understand, of layers and dimensions that were only hinted at, of a deep-seated complexity that would never, never be understood.
He was close enough to kiss a half dozen strangers, and of course, he would not. He would not be kissed in return, and a random action on his part would accomplish nothing. He would not enter their hidden dimensions through some intrusive act within this larger, surface dimension. The man is the work clothes, the Wall Street analyst, the sex worker headed home to her kids—their minds and purposes were deeply hidden within this layer of hidden desire and remembrance, and if they were all 20 feet beneath Manhattan, moving at 20 kph, at a predefined latitude, longitude and altitude, moving toward 3rd street, or Wall Street, or Flatbush avenue, then they were each within some hidden place with dimensions that he could not begin to understand.
Kristen’s kissing distance from him had been defined by an Einstein variable, time: Her kissing distance had been two years. But it was also located in a place of remembrance that was constantly before him, of repeated and constant time. He continued to think of her, constantly, from a perspective of wondering and lost love. It was not simply two years, it was both two years and the moment that he was in. Some indefinable pathway connected the two.
Her own kissing distance from him had also been two years, but there would remain an undefined dimension, of obligation or trust or guilt. He did not know and would never know. There would be no tunnel or passageway to this hidden dimension that he could traverse. That he had traversed to her space at all, had been a result of a singular and anomalous occurrence, one that had left him with no explanation, but one that had taken him to a place that enclosed a dimension of endless wonderment. He felt like he was falling, eternally falling down a tunnel toward the dimensionless place that he would never reach.
So. Kristen was in some undefined space, and he was in a space that only he inhabited, containing a dimension of constant remembrance, of wonderment and continued longing, and eternal falling toward an unknown destination. The train slowed, approached Wall Street, and he stepped to the doorway, clutching his sex materials and mathematical journals. He would cross the plaza and ascend to the 40th floor, and there he would consider the lattice space in which derivative financial instruments kissed, and he would not further consider, nor would he ever fail to consider, the space in which he would not be kissed. This strange space was defined by a time space of two years, but was also a constant, unvarying space: A space of wonderment at the dimension of loneliness that had suddenly opened within his life, two years ago and now and forever. This space remained open: It would not ever be closed. He went to his office and went to the window and looked at the harbor, and knew that he would be falling, eternally, toward a place of loneliness in which he already existed.
The sea was breathing. The fog rolled in like the exhaled breath of the Pacific, and then withdrew as it touched wave-whitened rocks. He could not see far within the fog and had to guess at the shapes around him. To his right would be rocks rising up some 20 feet, to be topped with balsam pines, sage and currant bushes. To the west, to his left, there would be tidal pools, a white tracery of waves, ocean rocks and ocean. The beach itself would only be some 20 feet wide, but he could only see a half dozen feet in each direction. He must have been walking erratically in the fog, because he would alternatively find himself, at the tidal pools to the west, or at the rocks to the east. He was used to walking this stretch of beach during the day; now, at night, everything looked strange and unfamiliar. He knew he was heading north, but if he turned and went back, he could not even sure if he would be able to get back to the cabin where Lauren was sleeping. In the fog and darkness he might walk right past the wooden steps and keep going in the fog, walking until he was out of Oregon altogether and found himself in Northern California.
That was unlikely; his ability to fix his location had been well established and well practiced during his military career, and he would find the steps well enough. And tonight he needed to think. So, he walked on, up the shore, the wet sand crunching beneath his feet, until he came to a deeper pocket of fog, an exhalation of the sea’s breath that is closed his vision to the space of a few feet, perhaps less. He could see only mist. He breathed it in. It was fragrant with sea smells: salt, seaweed and tidal pools. He continued on, barely able to see his feet and the sand beneath him. His path took him behind the shelter of a rock, half-embedded in the ocean, half on the land, and the breath of the sea drew out, toward the ocean channel, toward the rocks where the sea lions slept, and toward the deep water of ocean swells, the silent passage of sharks, and the thrum of passing ships.
As the sea’s breath drew back, in the place of the sea smells there came the fragrance of pine, mountain sage and currant. He understood: The land was breathing into the sea, as the sea was breathing into the land.
It was a bittersweet realization: He had spent the last months of his life, the only months that ultimately mattered—breathing in Lauren’s breath, and breathing his own breath into her. And during that time little had changed but time itself, as the months rolled past. Despite the fact that he loved her, he had not been able to change anything—her situation, his situation, the desperate loss and loneliness and isolation that encompassed them both.
He coughed. It could have been caused by the fog, and it could have been fatigue resulting from the scar tissue in his right lung. He had been shot in Afghanistan, and had spent the year in convalescence in Oregon. The attack had been, perhaps, expectable. He had had long experience in Afghanistan as a military officer, then an intelligence officer and finally as a government contractor, but he realized that his understanding of the motivations and desires of the Pakhtuns and Tajiks had been the understanding of an outsider, and was insufficient to deal with a sudden crisis. To really understand the Afghanis, to understand the intricate web of legends, cultural beliefs and superstitions that influenced them on a daily basis, one would need to be born there.
This was irrelevant to the Americans, who were struggling with a logistic problem of massive scale: The unimpeded passage of diesel and jet propulsion fuel to the machinery of war. Gasoline was the lifeblood of the American excursion in Afghanistan, but the safe transport of gasoline was firmly in the control of the warlords. Tanker trucks of gasoline would proceed up the KG highway, their safety assured by the warlords, in return for a payment that would be many times less than the value of the cargo and trucks, but that still represented a king’s ransom in that impoverished country. His job had been to secure the safety of the cargo by negotiating the payment between the Americans and the security companies.
The only opposition to the prevailing agreement had not been the Taliban; numerous local strongmen coveted the riches that America had vested upon the reigning security company, and their resentment was made known with violence. Sometimes the violence would be resisted and gunfire would ring out in the Khost, and a press release would identify the dead as Taliban assailants. Other times the violence would result in a bribe quickly paid to assure no further hostilities, and the dead would be buried and forgotten.
Such was the state of affairs in the summer of 2009. It became more complex, infinitely more complex, when local strongmen discovered the hoard of gold hidden in recently uncovered, ancient ruins. The ruins were on contested land, land which had been variously in the control of different clans over the course of the last several hundred years. The land had been largely ceded to one of the Tajik clans until the discovery of the ruins; then, one of the Pakhtuns clans, the one that held the security contract for the gasoline, asserted control and moved in with an armed force.
Cherchez la femme: It had not been the ruins themselves that had inspired the conflict, so much as it had been the discovery of treasure, fabulous treasure that represented hundreds of years of undocumented Afghani past, that represented the route of the Alexandrine and Chinese traders, and that formed an obsession that still had the power to drive men mad, despite the passage of centuries. Among the treasures, which were discussed in bated breath up and down the Khost highway, was the golden mask of a woman.
The rumors were various: That this was the gold mask of immortality worn by Cleopatra, taken by her Pashto bodyguard after her death. That it was the protective mask worn by the Witch of Khost, whose evil eye would curse and wither; that it was the mask designed to hide the face of a woman whose breathless beauty threatened to cause war between the Pakhtuns and the Tajiks. Whatever the truth, there were persistent, repeated rumors of koda—witchcraft.
He paid attention only as much as the rumors were a pretext for armed conflict. The Afghanis would fight over land, over clan pride, over riches delivered by a foreigner, and over many other things , so they would certainly fight over a witch’s gold. And so—he had to know. Would the lust for the buried treasure become gunshots, skirmishes and warfare? Or could it be made to fade away like Hindu Kush snows in April?
He made arrangements to see the dig site, which was now guarded by two warring camps, each of which refused to allow the other to take complete control. He assumed that any conflict could be avoided by paying bribes, but he was wrong, and the moment he walked across the threshold of compound and into the room holding the treasures he understood why.
And old man unwrapped the cloth that had held the treasure. There, on purple cloth, was a collection of several dozen artifacts, most of them golden. It appeared from their jumbled-together state that they had been hastily buried. Perhaps a convoy of traders had been attacked by robbers and had hidden the hoard before a battle that they would not survive. In addition to the mask, there were painted statues of goddesses, golden figurines, royal seals, coins and talismans. He was not an art historian, but the collection did not seem to be from the same time period nor from the same region. Some looked Bactrian and some looked Persian. Others he had no clue about. But the mask itself was obviously the most important artifact, and it looked like nothing he had ever seen, anywhere. It was a life mask that obviously was taken from a living woman’s face. It had been fashioned with great care out of layers of gold foil. It was achingly beautiful. And it had been wrapped in a separate, purple cloth and hidden beneath layers of silk.
Why? By whose hands? Who was she? He picked up the mask, taking it carefully from the cloth. It was far heavier than he expected. And the moment that he took the mask into his hands he knew that his carefully established plan to assure his survival in this treacherous terrain was no longer operable. Something beyond desire came over him. It was a strange, covetous lust. The mask seemed to belong where it now lay: In his hands and only in his hands.
The mask was almost a living thing. It was not a simple, featureless mask with eye slits like he had seen in museums throughout Asia Minor. It was the golden shape of a face, a face of great beauty. It was that of a young woman, with mid-Eastern features. The eyes were closed, and the lips were slightly parted, as if she had just paused her breathing. The features were gentle, knowing, understanding, almost loving. It was almost as if he had finally discovered, in the strangest and most unexpected of place, in a shape that he would never have anticipated, a love that would transfix him forever. It was as if she had been waiting in this form, for him to discover her. As if she were about to open her eyes upon him. As if she already knew him. And the golden mask had awakened a desire that he had held back all his life.
He held it and wondered. It had obviously been made by a magician or priest, not a simple craftsman. The purpose of the mask had been to transcend the power of death and the daily toll of life—and it had worked. The beauty was eternal. Many sheets of gold foil had been pressed upon the living face of a beautiful woman. She must have looked on—on what? some great mystery, some great love or desire—before she closed her eyes and let the magician overlay her face with precious oils and then, layer upon layer of gold foil. There were mysteries there, mysteries that would take years and constant, unwavering gaze to understand.
He needed to understand more. He wanted the mask. He wanted to take it away from all of them, even if he had to steal it or take it at gunpoint. It was his.
He dared not say this aloud; he barely breathed the words to himself, even though his breath trembled with desire at the thought of owning the mask. He had been brought in as a neutral party, to try to do what he did best, to broker a deal. But he knew that no honest deal was going to be forthcoming, and that even if it had, he would do the most illogical, absurd and crazed thing that anyone could consider: He wanted to steal the mask. He stared at it, completely under its spell.
He knew he was not the only one who coveted the mask. When he looked up, he saw that the eyes of the tribesmen were crazed, twitching, their pupils wide and black with an obsessive desire. The mask may have represented wealth, or cultural history, or a beauty beyond their comprehension, or some strange force of witchcraft and desire, but he knew that their lust for it was irrational, uncontrollable, and in every way like his own. He wanted the mask, they wanted the mask and there was no difference in their crazed desires. There would be no deal. There would only be the appearance of deals, to be used as bargaining ploys to get at the mask. And he knew he would use every stratagem, every trick that he knew, to be the person who walked away with the mask in the end.
He tried to stop himself. He told himself that it was merely an objet d’art; he had seen thousands of such objects, real and fake, in his years in Afghanistan, as a military officer, then an intelligence officer, then as a private contractor. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of treasure sites in Afghanistan, and many of them held treasures from the ancient world. But he knew that nowhere would there be found treasures that were equal to this one. The other site may have held objets d’art; but he held in his hands held a force, a power of some unknown dimension. It was no wonder that they spoke of koda.
They. An irrational spasm of jealousy rose through him. This mask had come to his hands and now—others wanted it for themselves? No. They would not have it. He would not allow it.
The moment of passion passed, and he realized that had held it long enough, too long. He put down the mask so that others would not wonder. As it left his hands he felt its strange power drain from him. He forced himself to look away, and the power seemed to dissipate further. A gust of wind swirled through the drafty room, touching his hands, reflexively making them close. He had the strange feeling that the wind had filled his hands in the same way that the mask had, and that he had been trying to grasp the wind itself. He felt like he was falling, somehow. He staggered.