Imagine

Imagine a middle-aged ex-cop, paunchy, balding. He wears a Bob Marley muscle shirt and hides his receding hair-line under a South Park ball-cap. Imagine that his first words to me were, “I’ve been following you...I mean, your writing.” And that a few months later, he said, “I don’t believe in all that New Age crap, but I’ve been going into these trances.” Imagine that aging, chunky, entranced and terrified became my standard for male beauty. Imagine impossible love is possible, if only for a lightning flash, if only for time’s eternal loop through the interstices of the stars. Imagine a portal is, in fact, many---open doors and windows, alcoves and badger dens, parted lips and any heart that sighs open, or shouts, or unfolds as datura does. Imagine that a woman and man meet. She aches just like a woman. He is married, not so much to his wife, as to his wild legend of himself, to safety, to smoke. The connection is clearly impossible. And still, they gaze into each other. Within a breath, they know. It is love. It is impossible. Their diamond minds have been moving toward each other forever. She is lightning,. He is sand. He is lightning. She is sand. Alchemy annihilates them. What will be left behind will be glass. It will hold moonlight. It will reflect sun. It will send a signal to those in the distance.

Monkey and I are no longer gaze to gaze---though he is not married to his wife; and my ache fades steadily, the bruise no longer the cobalt of thunderheads. Slivers of glass lie on the playa, on sand that was once mountains. The shards contain moonlight, reflect. sun. Here is the signal: We were joined, in his words, at the level of DNA. Snow had contained his cabin and mine since he had arrived. We were together, without binding vows, without the illusion of “till death do us part”. We understood the bone and marrow partnership was forever, beyond the corporeal, beyond the death that raced toward us. We were in his cabin. Fire burned in the rickety woodstove. We were suspended on the blade between the eleventh and twelfth months. Breath and our touch carried us toward the shortest day. We believed we had forever. He had brought a television into the cabin. I have lived without that cold light for decades. On that night, we watched a Japanese anime, Spirited Away. He was both lost and newly found in his smoke. I went through the electron portal, into a story that seemed my own: a terrified little girl, breaking, orphaned by hard magic, befriended by a young wizard, only to lose him, then find him eternally.

There was a River Spirit ---and a kind monster working in the depths of an enchanted bath-house; there was the knowledge that paper cuts can kill---and that What chooses us may never let us go.

My beloved pointed at the screen, “There,” he said, “there. That is how it is when I am in the trances. See the layers. The ordinary---the cookpot, the spice jars, the andirons; then the Other, the fire in the stove, the reflections, the shadows.” I had longed to be with him as he tranced, had promised him I would tether him with a touch, so he could travel, so he could go and go and go. “Pause the movie,” I said. He is a man and, of course, held the remote. He did. We stood facing each other. We said something, I don’t remember. We touched fingers, made the lattice we knew was the template for our partnership; two fingers touching, coming apart, touching. We wove the armature of what we believed to be our clan, three fingers touching, then four. I stepped back and looked into his vapor eyes. There was a long moment. And then, he laughed, the sound a shudder of fear and delight. His eyes rolled back and I saw him begin to slump. I knew to turn my back to him, to drape his arms over my shoulders. I held him upright for half an hour, then eased us to the floor. We lay next to each other, my hand lightly on his wrist. A tether. My soul the earth-sunk root that held us safe.

He was gone for four hours. When he came back, he was filled with knowledge, much of it for his scarred heart, some a continuation of the lessons his earlier trances had contained. “It is real,” he whispered. “You saw It. It is real, isn’t It.”

“Oh yes,” I said, “more real than anything we know.” Two months later, a week before the last time I saw him, he said, “You should write our story.”

Here is Our story. Here is Our signal for those of Us who have been waiting, those who are distant, and those near-by---a transmisson as impossible as light pierceing the mind from stars long dead. Here is what an entranced Monkey was told: There are loving Beings at levels beyond our earth knowledge. They watch. They give. They want us to know that something is coming...a cataclysm. Our species has the power to forestall the event. When we love, when we bear witness to truth---be it beautiful, be it ugly---we nourish Them. We nourish ourselves. Love loops through the interstices of the galaxies. It cannot be stopped.