Underworld

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'It means all the interesting things in my life happened young.'

'If you fuck me, it'll be a hate fuck. This what you want? This what you mean by aggressive?'

'No. But what do you want? You're in my room half undressed.'

'Maybe this is what Barry wants.'

'To put you in bed with a man who hates you?'

'We're here to stretch ourselves.'

'This is for him then.'

'Maybe.'

'Carry out a command.'

'No, share a fantasy, carry out a fantasy.'

'What does Barry do for you?'

'None of yer business, bud,' and she says this in a rural barroom twang.

I didn't want to understand her too quickly. It was possible she wasn't here for sex at all but only back matter, the kind of supplementary material that fills out an experience. We would talk a fuck but not do it and she would go back happy to her swapmeet. I looked at the bruise on her thigh. It was depressing to think she might be an agent of her husband's will, here to do the thing and run it back for him, and old Barry a sometime screenwriter, probably, who makes his money over the phone, selling real estate to retirees. When I leaned forward to kiss her, she turned away with an expert shrug, minimal, impersonal, that managed to place me on the outer brow of the perceivable.

'Maybe you're not completely wrong about me, Donna. Maybe I have a theory about the damage people do when they bring certain things into the open.'

'Go on. We're always interested in constructive criticism.'

'But I don't think you want to hear this. Too personal.'

'Oh but I do.'

'I'll probably make a fool of myself.'

'Oh make a fool. I want you to.'

She took off her watch and dropped it on the bed beside her. I felt an urge to fuck her now and risk the malaise of bleak bargain sex that might drift into the room from the boat show of the swingers. Because I didn't know how dumb I'd sound, how schoolboy earnest, or what exactly I'd be giving up with this digression into personal history.

'Go on. We want to be enlightened,' she said.

I moved into a kiss and she did not lean away this time but returned a certain tepid sip, a hint of distances we'd yet to cross.

'A long time ago, years ago, I read a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. Written by an anonymous mystic, I'm not sure, fourteenth century maybe, whenever the Black Death was-he was writing in the days of the Black Death. A priest gave me this book. This was the priestly part of my life. He pressed this book upon me. And I've forgotten most of this book over the years. But I know that it made me think of God as a force that withholds himself from us because this is the root of his power. I remember one sentence.'

'Neat title.'

'I remember the title and I remember one sentence.'

I stopped here, letting the words take shape and sequence, my hand around Donna's ankle, and I sensed a certain receptiveness, a thing I needed to beat back the incongruity. What the hell, I thought. Take a chance.

'The sentence appears near the beginning of the book and it made me feel I was being addressed directly by the writer, whoever he was, a poet maybe, a poet-priest, I like to imagine. Tause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.' See, that was me, sort of incisively singled out, living in a state of pause and stocktaking, twenty years old and stupider than my fellows and desperate to find a place for myself. And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God's enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability. Maybe we can know God through love or prayer or through visions or through LSD but we can't know him through the intellect. The Cloud tells us this. And so I learned to respect the power of secrets. We approach God through his unmadeness. We are made, created. God is unmade. How can we attempt to know such a being? We don't know him. We don't affirm him. Instead we cherish his negation. We wretched weaklings, you see. And we try to develop a naked intent that fixes us to the idea of God. The Cloud recommends that we develop this intent around a single word. Even better, a single word of a single syllable. This was very appealing to me. I became preoccupied with this search for the one word, the one syllable. It was romantic. The mystery of God was romantic. With this word I would eliminate distraction and edge closer to God's unknowable self.'

'What kind of word?'

'I searched. I thought about it. I took it seriously. I was young.'

'Love would be a word. But not for you. Too namby-pamby,' she said.

'Help would be a word. But even for a weakling, this was a little pitiful. And I thought the problem is the language, I need to change languages, find a word that is pure word, without a lifetime of connotation and shading. And I thought of the Italian word for help because this is what my father used to say when we annoyed him, my brother and I, he'd clasp his hands and wag them and roll his eyes toward heaven and he'd say, Aiuto. The way his own father or grandfather probably did. A word to penetrate the darkness. Aiuto.'

'Too many syllables.'

'Too many syllables and too comical. Because he did it basically to make us laugh, distract us with laughter. Maybe my father knew twenty words of Italian, I don't know, he was born here, or maybe he spoke the language fairly well, I don't really know. But he did this word. This word was a three-act play the way he did it, drawing it out, croaking like a poisoned duke. Ay-oo-tow And we laughed because on some level he was making fun of the old country and the old mannerisms. A great and profound word but I couldn't use it.'

Oddly now she reached down and took my hand and moved it up along the inside of her thigh and placed it sort of cuppingly snug in her crotch, adjusting her posture to get completely comfy, like a child at story time.

'Where's your father now?'

'Dead.'

'Where's your brother?'

'I don't know.'

She waited for me to continue.

'But I knew I was right to abandon English. And finally I came upon a phrase that seemed alive with naked intent. Alive with something I knew and felt from my own experience. A beautiful spontaneous prayer. Five syllables but so what. Three words and five syllables but I knew I'd found the phrase. It came from another mystic, a Spaniard, John of the Cross, and for that one winter this phrase was my naked edge, my edging into darkness, into the secret of God. And I repeated it, repeated it, repeated it. To Jo y nada.'

'Todo y nada.'

'Yes. And what does it make you think of? What does it refer to, in your own life? What does it describe?'

'Sex,' she said at once. 'The best sex. Todo y nada.'

'Yes, exactly.'

'So what are you saying?'

'I'm not saying sex is our divinity. Please. Only that sex is the one secret we have that approximates an exalted state and that we share, two people share wordlessly more or less and equally more or less, and this makes it powerful and mysterious and worth sheltering.'

'Don't take it into the open, you're saying. But this is because you're still the same romantic person, probably, you were at twenty. Sex is not so secret anymore. The secret is out. You know what sex means to most people?'

She put her hand down over mine and shifted her pelvis slightly, working into my palm.