Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, book 1)

that, in the event of retirement, they should undo everything be had labored to build up. Having no illusions, he nevertheless gave his utmost to all who made demands upon him.

He was a unique being, O'Rourke. He disturbed me profoundly sometimes. I don't think I've ever known any one before or since who made me feel quite so transparent as he did. Nor do I ever remember any one who so abstemiously withheld giving advice or criticism. He was the only man I've ever known who made me realize what it means to be tolerant, what it means to respect the other person's liberty. It's curious, now that I reflect on it, how deeply he symbolized the Law. Not the petty spirit of law which man uses for his own ends, but the inscrutable cosmic law which never ceases to work, which is implacable and just, and thus ultimately the most merciful.

As I lay in bed wide awake, I would, after an evening such as this one, often ask myself what O'Rourke would do it he were in my boots. In endeavoring to make the transposition it had occurred to me more than once that I knew nothing about O'Rourke's private life. Absolutely nothing. Not that he was evasive—I couldn't say that. It was just a blank. Somehow the subject never came up.

I don't know why I thought so, but I had the feeling that in some period long past he had suffered a great deception. A frustrated love, perhaps.

Whatever it was, he had not been soured by it. He had foundered and then recovered. But his life had been irreparably altered. Putting all the little pieces together, putting on one side the man I knew, and on the other side the man whom I caught glimpses of now and then (when he was in a reminiscent mood), comparing them one with the other, it was impossible to deny that they were two quite different beings. All those rugged, sterling qualities which O'Rourke possessed were like protective devices, worn not outwardly but inwardly. From the world he had little or nothing to fear. He was in it and of it, totally. But against the decrees of Fate he was powerless.

It was strange, I thought to myself as I closed my eyes, that the man I should owe so much to must remain forever a sealed book. I could only learn from his behavior and example.

A wave of tenderness swept over me. I understood O'Rourke in a bigger way than I had before. I understood everything more clearly. I understood for the first time what it really means to be «delicate».

13

There are days when the return to life is painful and distressing. One leaves the realm of sleep against one's will. Nothing has happened, except an awareness that the deeper and truer reality belongs to the world of the unconscious.

Thus one morning I opened my eyes involuntarily, struggling frantically to fall back into that condition of bliss in which dream had wrapped me. So chagrined was I to find myself awake that I was on the point of tears. I closed my eyes and tried to sink back again into the world from which I had been so cruelly ejected. It was useless. I tried every device I had ever heard of but I could no more accomplish the trick than one can stop a bullet in flight and restore it to the empty chamber of a revolver.

What remained, however, was the avira of the dream: in that I lingered voluptuously. Some deep purpose had been fulfilled, but before I had been given time to read the significance of it the slate had been sponged and I was thrust out, out into a world whose one solution for everything is death. There were only a few tangible shreds left in my hand and, as with those crumbs which the poor are supposed to gather from the tables of the rich, I clung to them greedily. But the crumbs dropped from the table of sleep are like the meagre facts in a crime whose solution must ever remain a mystery. Those dripping images which, in the act of awakening, one spirits across the threshold like a mystic smuggler, have a way of undergoing the most heart-rending transformations on the hither side. They melt like ice cream on a sultry day in August. And yet, as they merge toward the inchoate magma which is the very stuff of the soul, some blurred knot of remembrance keeps alive—forever, it would seem— the dim and velvety outline of a palpable, sentient continuum wherein they move and have, not their being, but reality. Reality! That which embraces, sustains and exalts life. It is in this stream that one craves to return and remain forever immersed. What remained then of that inextinguishable world from which I awakened one morning full of tender wounds that had been so skillfully staunched in the night? The face of the one I had loved and lost! Una Gifford. Not the Una I had known, but a Una whom years of pain and separation had magnified into a frightening loveliness. Her face had become like a heavy flower caught in darkness; it seemed transfixed by its own suffused glow. All those memories of her which I had jealously preserved and which had been lightly tamped down, like fine tobacco under the finger of a pipe smoker, had suddenly brought about a spontaneously combustible beautification. The pallor of her skin was heightened by the marble glow which the smouldering embers of memory awakened. The head turned slowly on the almost indistinguishable stem. The lips were parted in thirst; they were extraordinarily vivid and vulnerable. It seemed like the detached head of a dreamer seeking with eyes sealed to receive the hungry lips of one summoned from some remote place. And, like the convolvolutions of exotic plants which writhe and lash in the night, our lips with endless searching finally met, closed and sealed the wound which until then had bled unceasingly. It was a kiss that drowned the memory of every pain; it staunched and healed the wound. An endless time it lasted, a forgotten period, as between two unremembered dreams. And then, as though the folds of night had gently come between us, we were apart and gazing at each other, penetrating the flowing veils of darkness with a single hypnotic stare. Just as previously the wet lips had been glued together—like fluffy, fragile petals tossed by a storm—so now the eyes were joined, welded by the electric current of long withheld recognition. In neither instance did there seem to be the least operation of the mental faculties: all was mindless and unwilled. It was like the union of two magnets, of their dull gray termini; the ever searching parts had at last come together. In this still, charged coalescence another sensation gradually made itself known: the sound of our ancient voice. A single voice which spoke and answered simultaneously: a two-pronged note which sounded at first like interrogation but which always died away like the pleasurable lapping of a wave. It was difficult to realize at first that this monologue was really the marriage of two distinct voices; it was like the play of two fountains sending and receiving from the same source and with the same gush.

Then everything was suddenly interrupted, a shift as of wet sand slipping from the upper bank, a deep dark substance suddenly scooped out, leaving a thin deceptive crust of gleaming white on which the unwary foot would tread and crash to doom.

An interim of little deaths, all painless, as though the senses were so many organ stops and a hand, invisible and beneficient, had absent-mindedly choked off the air.

Now she is reading aloud—familiar passages from a book which I must have read. She is lying on her stomach, her elbows bent, her head cupped in the two palms. It is the profile of her face which she gives me and the white opacity of the flesh is gloved and fragrant. The lips are like bruised geraniums, two perfectly hinged petals that open and close. The words are melodiously disguised; they issue from a sound box made of duveteen.

It is only when I recognize that they are my own words, words that were never put on paper but written in the head, that I notice she is not reading to me but to a young man lying beside her. He lies on his back and looks up into her face with the attentiveness of a devotee. There are just the two of them, and the world has no existence for them. It is not a matter of space which separates me from them but a world chasm. There is no longer any possibility of communication; they float in space on a lotus leaf. We are cut off. I try desperately to send a message across the void, to let her know at least that the enchanting words are from the embryonic book of my life. But she is out of bounds. The reading continues and her ecstasy mounts. I am lost and forgotten.

Then, for just a flash, she turns her full face towards me, the eyes revealing no sign of recognition. The eyes are turned inward, as though in deep meditation. The fullness of the face is gone; the contours of the skull become pronounced. She is still beautiful, but it is no longer the allure of star and flesh; it is the phantasmal beauty of the smothered soul emerging with crest and dye from the prism of death. A fleeting cloud of remembrance passes over the empty map of her sharp features. She who was alive, incarnate, a tormented flower in the crevice of memory, now vanishes like smoke from the empire of sleep. Whether she had died in sleep, perchance in dream, or whether I myself had died and found her on the other side, asleep and dreaming, I could not tell. For an interminable instant of time our paths had crossed, the union had been consummated, the wound of the past had been healed. Incarnate or discarnate, we were now wheeling off into space, each to his own orbit, each accompanied by his own music. Time, with its endless trail of pain, sorrow and separation, had folded up; we were again in the timeless blue, distant one from another, but no longer separated. We were wheeling like the constellations, wheeling in the obedient meadows of the stars. There was nothing but the soundless chime of starry beams, the bright collisions of floating feathers churning with scintillating brilliance in the fiery sound track of the angelic realms.

I knew then that I had found bliss, and that bliss is the world, or state of the world, where creation reigns. I