One morning in late summer, I woke up feeling sick. I’d had a series of dreams which seemed extremely clear and direct in their message: an elevator was going down and down, down, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth, deep into total darkness; a plane was falling from the sky and hundreds of people screamed as they face certain death and the sky was still bright blue above them.
I got up from the bed and looked in the mirror half asleep, barely able to see myself, and I tried to cheer myself up by making funny faces.
‘All running forward necessarily involves some kind of loss, some moment of sadness,’ I thought, ‘We did so much together but now it's time to say goodbye to her, it’s time to let her go.’
***
At work, when I first arrived around 9am, my energy rose ever so slowly. (I had been working as an administrative assistant for six months at that point and the novelty of it all was starting to wear off. Now I knew what went on behind all those windows in all those tall buildings in downtown San Francisco, and it was much less than I had imagined.)
That morning, I started out feeling very tired, drained of all motivation. I checked the voice mails (“Please confirm receipt #1105. Call us at your earliest convenience,” or “I will be there late today, cover for me please…” or “I still haven’t received my payment. Could you please check on it for me?”)and I distributed the physical mail (Star salesman Perez likes his mail kept intact while star salesman Johnson likes her mail opened and sorted using large clips and Account Manager Chang wants all junk mail to be thrown out but be careful not to throw out anything important.) and I sorted the multiple invoices that had come in for me to take care of (invoices that often had many months past due and multiple late fees.)
I went through everything as carefully as I could manage but I had no desire to be there; it was as if the colors were draining from the entire place and we were all slowly turning into an old black and white movie in slow motion. There was a thick black shadow hanging over me as I went up and down the elevator, as I greeted people that I worked with on both floors and those other people I didn’t work with but that were always around.
As the morning progressed, as 9 became 10 and later 10:30, and as I opened the packages that the UPS man had brought in and I briefly visited the little storage room in the basement to replenish the office supplies and as I brought the boxes of pencils and printer ribbon and paper and pens up to the main office supply cabinet, I felt slightly better, not quite so frozen stiff, not quite so sad. There was a hint of light in the distance. Just enough to keep me moving.
***
Around 11am, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror once again. This time, I was able to see myself more distinctly- the white dress shirt, the black slacks, the dark red and brown tie that my friend had given me, the hair pulled back into a tight pony tail.
‘What if I make one good small decision today? Just one. That’s all I need to do. Focus on that one small decision. If I manage to do that, then maybe I can manage another one. And then another, and then another. If I keep it up, I will eventually move far, slowly but surely, I will find myself in a better place.’
***
Around noon, I went for a walk. I had an hour for lunch but I often stretched that hour into 90 minutes. (Nobody was officially checking on me. The advantage of having so many bosses was that none of them was really consistently checking up on me. ‘If he’s not at his desk, maybe he’s downstairs. If he’s not downstairs, maybe he is in the storage room. If he’s not anywhere, maybe another manager sent him on an errand.’)
Without rushing at all, stopping at bookstores, record stores, even at magazine stands, stopping to watch street musicians or random street preachers, I walked all the way to the edge of the bay, about ten blocks away from my building. (While I worked there, it really did feel as if the building was mine and to walk into the brightly lit lobby felt like home and the stacks of invoices in my cubicle felt like the warmth of my bed after walking through very cold weather.)
***
I found her sitting on the pier by herself, facing toward the north side, sitting on one of those little old concrete benches that hardly anyone ever used.
She looked absolutely beautiful to me, radiant in a way that seemed painful. Long black hair, smooth white skin with one small tattoo on the left forearm, a short red dress that showed off her shapely legs halfway up her thighs, stylish dark brown heels, a thin golden watch around her wrist.
She sat there alone, staring at the water, looking very sad. I felt that she had been crying recently (even though her face showed no sign of tears.)
I sat down next to her and said hello in a quiet voice, leaving about a foot of space between us.
‘There is ultimately no reward for the good things that we do.
So, there should be no punishment for the bad.’ I thought to myself.
***
When I first saw her from a distance, I felt a kind of longing, a clear invitation marked with an unknown rhythm, something present yet invisible. ‘Come to me,’ it said. ‘I'll take care of you. You’ll take care of me. Let me be your place of rest and I will give you peace.’
***
After a few awkward exchanges, I managed to get past her initial suspicions; I asked her a couple of wide open questions and she was noticeably relieved when she saw that I was actually listening to her answers.
We talked for a long while, both of us staring at the shiny blue water of the bay, at the little sailing boats, at the ferry, at the larger ships in the distance, at the bridge.
After some time had passed and it seemed that we should be saying goodbye by now, we talked some more and then even more. By that time, it was long past my lunch hour, even past the 90 minute imaginary line I would set for myself. I was long past caring.
As I sat there next to her, I felt that I was giving her a kind of gift, an elusive chance to talk to someone, to say all the things she had to say which she hadn’t been able to say so far but she needed someone to listen, anyone. I just happened to be anyone this afternoon.
She told me many things over the course of several hours, sometimes she told me the same anecdote or observation more than once. She said she had been feeling so weak and helpless for so long, for years and years, and she had refused to acknowledge the reality of what was happening to her.
“I don’t even know if I remember how to feel differently. You know what I mean?”
During the last week, she had been betrayed by her manager and she had lost her job.
“The truth is I feel specially betrayed by Rose, this girl who was supposedly my best friend. We went out together. We told each other everything. We helped each other when we were too drunk after a night out. We covered for each other when we were late for work. And then, after years of trust, she told my manager all about my unreported absences, about the bloated expense reports -which we both did but I took the blame for all of it-, about the unauthorized use of company accounts for little treats here and there; just petty shit like that, shit we had shared, shit we had done together and had a laugh afterwards; she told my manager, and he fired me that same day, without a second thought. After three years of steady work, of loyalty, of small and big sacrifices, of Christmas gifts and team building exercises, I was fired all within a few minutes…”
She felt betrayed by everyone else at her office as well. ‘We are a family here. We look out for each other…’ but nobody stood up for her when it came down to doing something, saying something. Nobody even seemed to care, they just kept on doing their work, head down, one girl gave her a hug, another girl wished her good luck in her job search, an older man shook his head and said ‘that’s the breaks, kid…”
Now, after all the goodbyes were over and all the options had been exhausted, she was really all alone, helpless, weak.
“On top of it all, I feel that I left everything half way done.
There was so much left to do. There were so many projects I was in the middle of completing, so many problems I was in the middle of fixing, and I had clear ideas on how to fix them…”
She shook her head backwards and half smiled at me.
“But I have to stop worrying about it. It’s not my job anymore, it’s literally none of my business. They don’t want me there. They don’t need me. I’m already a fading memory…”
‘I will protect you,’ I thought, ‘Calm down. Right now, this very minute, you are safe. Completely safe.’
I felt that it was my place to simply listen to her, to listen without adding superfluous comments or unnecessary questions, without suggesting easy solutions, and that’s what I did. For several hours.
***
Around 4pm, she turned around towards me decisively and smiled brightly. It was the first time she had truly smiled since I first sat down next to her.
“I feel very comfortable with you. I feel that you are here for a reason…”
‘You're exhausted,’ I thought, ‘Come lie down with me. You don't have to explain why you feel the way you do. The why doesn’t matter. You don’t have to explain anything…’
***
Often when I think back on certain special moments, certain specific crossroads in my life, I feel that the basis for everything that really happens, everything that I really make happen, is a freely flowing movement, a kind of improvised dance.
Sometimes I manage to move in this way, and this unusual movement radiates in such a way that the space itself changes, it changes in unpredictable ways, shocking, even frightening. When I manage to understand this, in those ephemeral moments when I can accept that this is real, that it works, that everything is in fact located within these tiny movements themselves, in the specific actions that I take, seemingly superfluous details, subtleties that can never be traced or repeated, shapes beyond any apparent content, tiny adornments which can seem either crucial or pointless; once I can understand this, then everything else can be derived from that; and everything else means very little because there’s hardly anything left once I can see the subtleties.
There is no reward for dancing. There is no punishment for failing to dance.
***
Around 5pm, she rested her head on my shoulder, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if we had been together for years and we were used to tender intimacies like these.
“I feel that I am taking up a lot of your time,” she said, “you probably have things to do today. Don’t you need to get back to work?”
It was my turn to smile as I looked at the clouds drifting slowly over Alcatraz.
“My plans are whatever happens, happens. You cannot spoil that. Nobody can.”
***
On our way to the hotel, I told her what my grandmother used to say to me:
“One has to decide what one does, and one has to decide if it will be done well. These are all decisions that you make. And nobody can make them for you.”
She nodded and asked to hear it from my lips one more time. So I repeated it, a bit slower this time:
“One has to decide what one does and one has to decide if it will be done well. These are all decisions that one makes. Nobody can make them for you…”
***
From the room up on the 15th floor, the view was impressive. We could see the northern part San Francisco, a bit of Chinatown, North Beach, the Marin headlands, the blue water of the bay still sparkling with the last of the day’s sunlight, the bay bridge, Treasure Island, the Oakland hills, even the Sierra Nevada mountains in the far distance. And all of it was shining with the warmth of this moment we were sharing, this moment of carelessness, of impulsivity.
“Not too long ago, this view would have been impossible.”
She nodded, leaning against my shoulder, both of us sitting on the king bed facing the window, her leg pressing up against mine, her hand on my thigh.
“The thing is, I know exactly what it is that stops me from enjoying it all… as much as I wish to enjoy it, as much as I want to be here and enjoy it without any hesitations. I want to be accepted. I want to be liked by these other people. So many people. This gnaws at me; it bothers me day and night. I want people to accept me, to like me, to admire me. My boss, my friend Rose, the man that delivers the water every day and takes five minutes to chat about the weather, the girl at the coffee shop who takes my name and says thank you… I want them all to like me. And I don’t know if they do. Now, at least this very moment and only this moment, I wish simply to be here. I don’t need to worry about them, about all those eyes looking at me out there, calculating, judging, measuring. I want to be here with you, and watch the world from a distance…”
And the world was out there allowing itself to be watched while we basked in the quiet silence of a first kiss, the tantalizing melody of a touch, a hint of deep desire in the final seconds of an exhaled breath.
***
When I showed her the two pills, she blushed and smiled with a deep shyness and then she nodded enthusiastically.
“If you had told me, we would end up here together doing what we are doing; if you had told me all this, the first moment you sat down next to me, I wouldn’t have believed it. I probably would have asked you to leave, in fact, I know I would have asked you to leave. But we simply don’t know what God decides, what God has decided is in store for us, or how he decides it. I don’t know where you came from, what was going through your mind earlier today before we met, how you happened to talk to me when you did, how you came to be here with me. And now we are here in this beautiful quiet place above everything. Above everything. In the middle of the city and yet away from all the noise, away from all prying eyes…”
I ran my fingers through her hair, feeling the black softness weaving through my fingers, and I spoke in a very soft, calm voice.
“You don’t have to convince me of anything… We are here and that’s all that matters. Just do this for me… drop the mask, the mask, relax the muscles of your face and drop the mask. This… mask… Just do what I’m doing…”
I focused intensely on relaxing my own face, one tiny muscle at a time, and I slowly shifted into an altered space, a new place full of light and warmth and tenderness.
It took a while to manage that shift, and it took even longer for her to do it with me, for her to fully join me. We sat naked on the bed in front of each other for what seemed like hours, staring into each other’s eyes, searching for a deep level of understanding that would have seemed impossibly just a few hours ago.
I repeated the same instructions several times.
“Drop…the…mask…this…mask…come to me… I'll take care… of you… you’ll take care of me… let me be your place of rest… and I will give you peace… we will find a kind of peace… together… tonight… right now…’
Eventually, she relaxed her face slowly, ever so slowly, and as she did, she entered into this glowing altered space with me, and as she did it obvious on her face that she was now with me and I was with her and, for a moment, this was a kind of knowledge that stood far beyond questions…”
By that time, the sunlight was definitely fading and the view outside the large window was even more beautiful; a shining landscape of moving and static lights amid vast spaces of sheer darkness, purple and black and bright red and yellow and all of it in perpetual movement, life in a myriad shapes too subtle to grasp or determine, life as truth dancing, as dancing truth.
***
We made love in an endless blurry sequence of flesh caressing flesh caressing thought caressing sound caressing music and thought and flesh yet again.
Late at night, we ordered room service in hesitant voices that had forgotten how to speak, had even forgotten what we liked to eat and what we didn’t so we ordered way too many things and the man that brought it to us couldn’t help but giggle when he saw us; and then we satiated our long delayed hunger on the small circular table that was the only available surface in the room, dressed only in towels and sweat and smiles.
Then we laid down in each other’s arms again and she told me a story.
“It’s something that I’ve never been able to share with anyone. Anybody else would think I’m crazy, but I feel that I can tell you and it will be ok. This happened when I had just graduated from high school; just a couple of months after graduation, I couldn’t make up my mind whether to go to college or not; I was a bit aimless then and I was looking to find my place in the world, a place where I could fit in. I had left home and I was living with some friends in a little run-down apartment by Hollywood, the kind of place where the hot water rarely works and the mail is constantly getting lost and, when you do get it, it has already been opened. I had been invited to a kind of spiritual group, the kind of thing that now would be called a cult, but back then I had no concept of what that was. A friend of a friend, she told me about this place during a party at our apartment and she gave me a little card with the contact information. I don’t know exactly why I kept it but I did; and I don’t know why I called the number on the card, but I did; and I was invited to come to a meeting. I went to a small office space downtown and I was greeted by man in his twenties, dressed all in black. I was nervous and curious and more than a little paranoid… who are these people really? I don’t even know this girl that well at all, and who knows how well she knows who these people are or what they are really about. You know? There were about thirteen or fifteen of us sitting in a circle. After some small talk and a very brief introduction by the young man that first let me in, another man came in and introduced himself- he was a bit older, also dressed all in black, a bit overweight, a well-trimmed beard, a thin moustache, a warm welcoming smile. He took us through a kind of guided meditation, using a very slow deep voice that somehow both relaxed me and also gave me the chills. I closed my eyes and tried to follow his instructions as carefully as I could manage. At first, after about 10 minutes of breathing and visualizing, I was ready to say that it wouldn’t work, that this didn’t work on me and maybe I should leave. I wasn’t feeling anything particularly different or special, I was just the same as I always am, you know? I was starting to regret having come to this. But then things started to change, very subtle at first and then not so subtle… a rush of a kind of electricity came up through me, from my toes to the top of my head, I shivered without feeling any cold, I almost burst out laughing, it was something that seemed both somewhat familiar and yet strangely new. I began to perceive everything around me differently; the room, the little noises outside the window, the presence of these strangers around me, the man’s voice. I couldn’t stand the curiosity, so I half opened my eyes to see how everyone else was doing, to see if I noticed a change in them… and then something happened, something very weird, something that I can only describe as an illusion; I would like to think it was an illusion because what else could it be, right? Like a brilliant act of stage magic, something done with lights and mirrors and smoke, except there was no smoke and no special lights and no mirrors that I could see… I saw something impossible - something that I could only describe as supernatural but I hesitate to use that word or even think it. It’s hard to talk about it even now. Afterwards, I was left with only a vague memory, very vague because I am convinced I saw much more than I remember, and I forgot a lot just moments after it all happened. I remember seeing a strange shining being, a vaguely humanoid figure bathed in light standing right in the middle of the circle, big eyes open, focused, alive with consciousness yet not exactly human, something very strange. It was slowly moving clockwise in the center of the circle, looking at each of us, staring into each of us, one at a time. I don’t know where it came from. I never heard anyone else walk into the room. I don’t know if I just imagined it or if it was some kind of projection from behind a curtain. Who knows what kind of tricks these people can pull right? But in that moment, I knew, I just knew, it had come to be there with me. Or rather, I had come to this place so I could have the experience of seeing it, of being in its presence. After the meeting ended, the older man who had guided the meditation noticed that I was very shaken. He approached me just before I walked away and whispered in my ear.
‘If I had told you what you were about to face, you wouldn’t have believed me. If your friend had told you about it during the party, you wouldn’t have come… It is sometimes necessary to lie, in order to reveal the truth.’
She laid back on the bed and took a deep breath. I leaned over her and kissed her gently on the lips. My lack of shock was all she needed as a response, her tongue against my tongue as all I needed as approval.
***
We barely slept all night. We talked, we kissed, we made love, we stared out the window, then we talked some more.
In the early morning we made love again in the twilight of the sunrise and then we stared at the bay as the light brought it back to the kind of daily life we recognized; the city was all around us and it was starting to wake up.
***
“We shouldn’t be here together. This night was not in your script and it was not in mine. And yet, there is no punishment for what we have done. We are simply here. Together. Nothing else needs to happen. Nothing else is required.”
She kissed my chest slowly, methodically, lovingly.
“I feel that this is a kind of true happiness. In this moment, this particular unique moment, we have no ambitions, no hidden wishes, no concept of the future, no ultimate goal. I needed this. I really did. I have worked like a horse for too long. I’ve had to act as if I was filled with deep ambition because that is what you have to be in order to be respected out there.
But it has all been an act. I know it right now. I may forget it later. I’m sure I will.”
‘You came to me,’ I thought. Yesterday. Today. Here. Now. ‘I took care of you. You took care of me. I made sure you were safe. You showed me endless love in a night that ends much too swiftly.’
Between soft kisses, she continued:
“I wish I could live like this all the time. Faraway from people, faraway from backstabbing friends, from jealous coworkers, even from those people that I just encounter on the street, random people that just cross my path, people who I don’t even talk to… I want to be away from all of them. Away from the daily work, from the daily struggles, away from life. For now I feel that don’t need them and yet I still love them. I am not bitter, I am not angry, I am not sad. I feel full of love right now.”
And she kissed my chest and I reached over and kissed her lips and she kissed me back.
***
She rested her chin in the middle of my chest, her face so close to mine, so overwhelming in its beauty that it was painful for me to look into her eyes but I did it anyway.
“It’s like you,” she said, “I don’t need you. And yet I love you. I really do love you now. Right now. I love to be here with you. I love and I am here with you. I love to feel so open with you. I love and I am so open with you. We are here together, so far away from daily life, and I feel no further ambition. I want nothing else…”
‘You were exhausted,’ I thought, ‘and you came to lie down here with me. Together we have created a world, a world that can only last for one night.’
“I don’t want to work like a horse anymore,” she said, “I honestly have no ambition left in me. This is true happiness. What I feel now. Lying here with you.”
***
Standing up, getting dressed, I spoke up for the first time that morning.
“You don't have to explain anything to me. There will be no punishment for being here, for being here together. There will also be no reward. We haven’t done anything wrong or right. We just did what we did.”
A couple of tears flowed from my eyes but I was smiling as I said it.
“If I had told you that it would all be over so soon,” she said, “that as happy as we were, we would soon face a sad farewell, maybe you wouldn’t have come with me, maybe we would have said goodbye at the pier…”
***
It was 12pm the next day and we stood outside the hotel. We were holding hands but already an unspoken distance was growing between us.
“We may say things now,” she said, “things that don’t quite make sense. Things that sound real but are just illusions, like that thing I saw so long ago. A strange illusion that can never be repeated, that I can hardly speak about. All these things, these things unreasonable and irrational, all of them will definitely not make any sense later, when I try to remember them. When I try to look back and make sense of my memories. But when we first got together, when we first hugged, when we first walked together from the pier to the hotel, when we first began to shine… there was something so beautiful between us, so perfect. It was so quick, so overwhelming, so untouchable. It can never be repeated, but nobody can ever touch it, nobody can ever change that spark, nobody can ever understand what happened between us…”
All running forward necessarily involves some loss. We were together for an afternoon, for a night, for a morning of twilight love and sunshine desire. Now it was time to say goodbye.
***
Around 1pm, I made my way to the BART station. It was Saturday and the trains were running late.
As I waited for my train to come, I tried to remember everything we had both said to each other. I tried to write down as much as possible in the little notebook I always carried. I even tried to remember the thoughts that went through my head as we stared into each other’s eyes, thoughts that were there with us but I never said out loud.
Most of it I had already forgotten.
