0312. Awake
HERE IS WHAT YOU have told me, and what I have pieced together from the well of memories we share:
Once upon a time you fell in love with a woman who was beautiful and clever and irresistible and full of life.
And as it sometimes happens, you were too old for her, or she was too young, or something had gone wrong somewhere in the cosmic fabric of the universe and the pieces came together misaligned.
Because even though you were one soul in two bodies, you were a married man with a child, already resigned to the life that you’d chosen because you thought you’d done everything right.
Until you met her.
She was so young she almost radiated with it.
More than youth—she was so mature for her age, so worldly, so wonderfully certain of who and what she was—there was a sort of undeniableness, a mercuriality, a throbbing sense of life.
You saw her and you understood that everything would be different now.
You thought of her constantly, unrelentingly, in the shower, at your desk, while you chugged away at fucking your wife, a dreary chore that comingled with your other obligations, the family who bled you dry, the life you’d chosen from a place of duty, the passion you thought you’d already traded away.
Then you saw her and you watched a pathway light itself from within, an alternate future, an eternal, lasting joy.
And you tried to fight it, you did! You held her youth in your head like some important detail from school, something that would be on the final exam, at the heavenly gates, some piece of information that gradually began to haunt you, the absurdity of your social circles, the dowdy wives and lecherous husbands who didn’t understand what you felt, which was the utter transcendence of love.
You knew the truth about love, which was that it was divine, it was sacramental, it was powerful enough to change everything.
You began to look at your body and the ways gravity had taken its toll and realize that if, indeed, she loved you in return—and she did!
she whispered it so sweetly in your ear while she curled in your lap, darling little thing, all too thrilled to call you master—then this was the only acceptable form of love, because your wife was rigid with transaction.
She cooked and cleaned and raised your children and such was the calculation of marriage, the things she did despite a low-burning revulsion for you, because in return you footed the bills, made her the envy of her friends and peers.
Not like her, the love of your life, who asked nothing from you. Only your eyes. Only your time.
But yes, your body was older, in fact your body was getting old.
And she was so young, so glittering with promise, her breasts so full and tawny, you could hardly be in the same room with her without imagining them like scoops of ice cream.
The supple pearls of her nipples, the way you would roll them on your tongue, and she’d let you stay there for hours, licking and sucking, satiating yourself.
You were her master, and she belonged only to you.
Yours was a certain kind of happiness that had been kept from you before, that only existed when you were with her, as if it had been only recently invented.
All your life you had been waiting for her.
It almost seemed cruel how many times you’d gotten it wrong.
Because yes, you had your secrets, your sins from before you met this love of your life.
You had what I have, which is a voice inside you that occasionally takes control.
You’re not a perfect man; you’ve had some indiscretions.
The first few were dalliances, then nuisances.
Paying people off to keep this one or that one’s condition quiet before you realized just how simple it all could be.
Just a one-time procedure, really; illegal at the time, but not for a man of your means.
A friend of a friend introduces you to Hodel, a young man then, just building his practice and so eager for a patron, and from there everything goes much more smoothly.
Mutually beneficial ease, until the time that it suddenly goes wrong.
When Hodel asks what you want done with the body, you’re surprised by your reaction.
Surprised that when you look down, you feel no grief or disgust, realizing instead just how exquisite this beauty can be.
Even later, after the purpose of the ritual changes, you never fail to honor it—the way their eyes are so fixed and tranquil.
Those exotic, seductive shapes of them as they kneel before you, glinting up at you like some eternal, ancient rune.
But that first time, you cast aside finesse, focusing only on necessity.
You take the lipstick from her purse and paint a tawdry smile, the extra care of a wanton woman to suggest she was meeting a date late at night.
You take her wallet and her jewelry and you stage it as a robbery just off Hollywood Boulevard—the kind of story everyone already knows, a familiar cautionary ending while the Santa Anas blow.
At first, waiting for the ax to fall, panic threatens to overtake you.
But the police never come—of course not, they’d never dare make those kinds of accusations, certainly not at you—and so the tedium continues.
It all passes so easily, so distant from the relevance of your circles, as if she never existed at all.
It was only meant to happen once. But then, everything’s so much worse with the heat. The reawakening of raw desire burns inside you with new intensity, a growing appetite for the hunt.
Eventually, you only call Hodel once there is already a body to dispose of.
Though it never begins with pain! It begins with what you used to think was love (before you met the love of your life and rewrote the definition).
It begins with earnestness, desire to talk with her all night, to lay your hands on the silk of her skin.
But it always goes wrong, because they always want something.
They start to make demands. They want more money, more time, more benevolence.
They never seem to realize how tiresome this is, the ultimatums, the constant arguments and tears.
The love of your life would never accuse you like this, as if you are a monster. Someone who truly loved you would never inconvenience you by threatening to tell your wife.
Each time, as you perform what you begin to think of as the ritual, the thing inside you finds a moment of calm, as if it has finally managed some semblance of peace. You find that something in your mind seems to clear, and suddenly you feel … enlivened. Alive.
No, not just alive! You feel breathless, invincible—young.
Before that first year of bodies, you were briefly hospitalized for stress.
A faulty ticker, said the doctor (not Hodel, Hodel is not a cardiologist) with the air of having made an unremarkable joke.
But after, when a lover threatens to strike you—strike you!
You, her master, whom she supposedly loves!
—with a butcher knife and, well, things go awry—when her thick black hair is spread across the floor of the greenhouse while she mewls inaudibly for help—you realize it must have all happened like this for a reason.
That all of this, somehow, is meant to be.
There’s something almost sacred about it, like she’s laid herself upon an altar, a form of begging your forgiveness.
As if to say, I have loved you badly through my own corruption, but now I leave you with a gift.
The knife glitters beside her throat, and the answer is pleasingly obvious.
Divine intervention that you cannot ignore.
Your heart improves. Three bodies later, you begin to feel a change in your joints, as if a new buoyancy has found them. Hodel warns you that it can’t go on like this forever even with your many friends in the LAPD, so you cut him in just to shut him up.
And then you meet the love of your life.
Her name is Emmanuelle.
She’s exotic, like the others, which is why you notice her to begin with.
She calls to you with those siren eyes, that supple body that is all but a summoning, a reckoning in the making.
The first time you call her your precious lotus flower, she laughs and says she’s from Cincinnati.
This injures you, though you try not to show it.
You tell her: No, my darling, you are from heaven.
Oh, she says, wide-eyed. (She is not like those other women, flicking ash from their cigarettes.
It’s so unladylike, the smoking. Better to keep their bodies healthy and pure.)
But Emmanuelle, she understands you! She is obsessed with it, that same lifestyle you crave, the cleansing of her body to preserve her clarity of soul.
She makes some changes here and there to your diet; she introduces you to sea moss gel and spirulina, she brews you oriental teas, she loves you dotingly (not like the others who claim to love you but only make demands).
You promise her that in exchange for her devotion, you’ll take care of everything, of her, forever, though you never bother to change your will.
You’re already doing everything you can to ensure mortality doesn’t cheat you of this love.
Where does it come from, the thing that becomes the ritual?
It takes shape over time, a meticulous series of sacrifices, acceptance of the lifeblood offered to you by your unworthy lovers, their bodies contributing each time to the eternity you deserve.
By then you are wealthy beyond means, wealthy enough to live countless lifetimes of splendor, and you feel no shame in it, no guilt, because why would all this be yours if the universe did not want you, specifically, to be happy?
With each offering the voice inside you grows stronger, as if your soul is regenerating itself.