We danced all night. Sam had tapes of Native American dances and chants to play on a portable cassette player, but we danced to everything—Uncle Laf’s Zigeuner music, Hungarian rhapsodies, and Jersey’s favorite wild Celtic songs that were feverishly danced, so she used to tell Sam and me, at every Irish wedding and every wake—fast and slow, exciting and magical, powerful and mysterious.
We danced barefoot around the fire, then outside in the dark meadow atop the mountain that smelled of the first cornflowers of early summer. Sometimes we touched one another, held hands or danced in each other’s arms, but often we danced alone, a different and fascinating experience.
As I danced on and on, it seemed that I truly felt my own body for the first time—not only more centered and balanced within itself, though that was true too, but also completely connected in some mysterious fashion with the earth and sky. I felt parts of me dying, falling away in pieces, spinning out into the universe and turning into stars in the vast midnight space, a space spangled with galaxies that seemed to go on forever.
We danced into the morning, until the coals of our fire had flickered out, then we danced out into the wildflower meadow once more, to see the first grey light of dawn bleeding red into the morning sky. And still we kept on dancing.…
It was only after all this time that something strange began to happen—something frightening. And the moment it did, I stopped dancing on the spot. The music was still playing on our cassette, as Sam whirled round and saw me standing there, barefoot in the wild-flowers. He came over to me.
“Why have you stopped?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I’m not dizzy or anything, it’s just …” I couldn’t say.
“Then dance with me,” he said.
Bending down to switch off the music, Sam took me in his arms there in the meadow and we moved slowly in a circle, almost floating. Sam held me lightly, just enough for support. His rugged face with straight nose and cleft chin, his lashes shadowing strong cheekbones, seemed as he leaned toward me like those of a strong protecting spirit. Then he pressed his lips to my hair.
“I learned something from Pandora’s manuscripts,” he said. “In an early version of a medieval alchemical text—the Goethe, the Magic Circle of Solomon the Magus—it says angels don’t make love like human beings. They don’t have bodies.”
“How do they do it?” I asked him.
“They have a much better way,” Sam said. “They mix themselves together, and actually become one for a very brief time, where before there were two. But angels, of course, have no substance. They’re made of moonbeams and stardust.”
“Do you think we’re angels?” I suggested, leaning back in his arms with a smile. Sam kissed me.
“I think we should mingle our Stardust, angel,” he said. Then he drew me down by the hand onto the grass, to lie on top of him among the wildflowers. “I want you to do whatever you feel like—or nothing at all,” he said with a smile. “I’m completely at your service. My body is your instrument.”
“Can it play El Amor Brujo?” I asked him, laughing.
“It can play whatever selection the virtuoso wishes to ripple out upon it,” he assured me. “What will it be?”
“All at once, I feel like I’m way above timberline,” I told him seriously.
“We’ve been there before, and we survived,” Sam said softly, taking my fingers and brushing them over his lips. “We entered the light once together, Ariel. Just after our totems found us—do you remember?”
I nodded slowly. Yes, I remembered.
When the cougar and two bears had vanished from that predawn mountaintop, we’d sat for a very long time, Sam and I—maybe hours—just touching each other’s fingertips, side by side, not moving. As darkness had faded to dawn, though, I had the uneasy feeling of something changing in my body, something shifting like restlessly sifting sands. Then all at once I’d found myself moving away from earth itself, floating through the air high up into space. I felt completely separate from my body, yet I still had form and shape—like a teardrop filled with helium, suspended in the night sky.
I had a moment of panic, that I might fall or that I might actually be dead and leaving the earth forever! But then I suddenly realized I wasn’t alone up here. There was someone beside me: Sam. It was almost as if he were speaking to me from inside my own mind, though if I looked, I could actually see both our bodies sitting side by side, down there on the earth below!
“Don’t look down, Ariel,” Sam had whispered in my mind. “Look up ahead. Let’s enter the light together.…”
Oddly enough, we’d never spoken of it afterwards, not once. And odder still, it had never seemed to me that it was all only a dream. If anything, it was more vivid than reality, just as our three-dimensional, Technicolor world is so much more solid than a two-dimensional black-and-white photo pasted on cardboard. This was many exponential dimensions greater and deeper. But if I’d had to really pin it down in specific words, I would never have known where to begin.
We had entered the light together as children, Sam and I. Now we were about to do so once again. This time, I knew, it was going to be very, very different from the last. We two were about to be transformed into one, on a spring morning among the wildflowers.
And this time, I was no longer afraid.
As I lay in Sam’s arms hours later, instead of feeling drained I felt exhilarated, as if my veins were suddenly filled with something light and bubbly and effervescent.
“How exactly would you describe that?” I asked him as
