John Haskell - American Purgatorio

But I didn’t cross to the other side. She’s there, I thought, on one side and I’m on the other side. And yes, I could have gone over and joined her except for the membrane. The thing about the sexual membrane is, once you’re on one side, the other side seems very far away.

We sat like that for what seemed like a long time, and although I was looking into her eyes and she was looking into mine, what our eyes were saying were different things. I didn’t know about my eyes, but her eyes were saying, “You almost made it. Almost, but not quite.”

Feather, still looking into my eyes, raised a finger and tapped me on my chest, gently pressing her finger into my breastbone. I felt the sensation passing through my skin and through my breastbone, and I didn’t think I’d asked any question but, as if answering a question, she took my hand and led me along a path in the pine trees to a Volkswagen van parked on a dirt road in the middle of a clearing. Fletcher was already in the van, the door open, eating rice from a bowl, using chopsticks. The whole back of the van was a platform with a foam pad and sheets, and when Feather and Fletcher began taking off their clothes, I assumed that they would want to be together when whatever was going to happen started happening. Which was fine with me. And when it did start to happen — first some light touching of feet, then rubbing of feet and ankles and lower legs — I was ready to go. As I started to squeeze past Feather she took my hand and placed it on Fletcher’s foot. She grabbed his other foot herself and together we began rubbing. I imitated her massaging style, using my fingers and the knuckles of my fingers to dig as deeply as I could into the emotion-filled muscles and fascia of the ball of his foot. I could hear raindrops hitting the roof of the van when Fletcher sat up, took me by my shoulders, and positioned me so that I found myself straddling Feather, who was lying on her stomach. My hands were kneading her large gluteus muscle, and Fletcher was behind me, rubbing my back through my shirt. I still had my clothes on, unlike Feather, who turned over, so that I was now massaging her neck and her legs and everything between.

The whole interweaving dance had a mind of its own, and it continued until, at a certain point, Fletcher was massaging my back, and Feather was massaging Fletcher’s back, and the only person not massaging was me, flat on my stomach, face tilted to one side, eyes closed, feeling the skin of my neck and back and buttocks exposed to the air. I could feel my belt being unbuckled and I knew that hands were touching me but I couldn’t tell whose hands they were. And when I heard the metal doors of the van swing open I couldn’t tell who left or who came until I heard Fletcher’s voice asking me to turn over. And when I did I could see that Feather was gone. I could see that I was aroused, and I could feel it, but I was too relaxed or too lost in experience to do anything but notice.

One aspect of the sexual membrane is that once you’re on the sexual side, you don’t really care what happens next. In a sense I’d gone to a movie, and I was watching the movie, and at some point — I didn’t know when — the movie became a different movie, and by the end of the movie I was enjoying whatever movie I was watching, and had forgotten a switch had occurred.

And as Fletcher continued massaging, the distinction between sexual organ and other organs — skin, say, or brain — disappeared, and in the middle of that disappearance I experienced something. I wouldn’t call it cataclysmic, because it was effortless and sudden, and while I and my body were experiencing all the physiological things that happened in the aftermath of that, Fletcher unrolled some toilet paper. Even wiping my stomach was a kind of massage, and it wasn’t absolutely clear if clean-shaven Fletcher, his hair tied out of his face, was being sexual. There was no sign of that. It was only clear that he was attempting to be kind, and for me, at the receiving end, there wasn’t any difference between attempting to be kind and being kind itself.

Of course when it was all over I went back to the other side of the membrane, the nonsexual side. Fletcher became no longer a pair of practiced hands dancing the dance of pleasure; now he was a stringy-haired hippie manqué, and while I still liked him, as a human being, I didn’t want to be with him. So I decided to take a walk.

There was a trail that led up from the van into the hills and I walked on that trail up the hill until I came to a wooden ladder over what might have been an electric fence. I stepped over that, walked out into a field, and in the middle of this field I came to the proverbial two roads diverging. Actually they were two trails diverging, an unused fire road and a smaller trail worn into the hillside grass.

Normally it wouldn’t have been a question. I would have just picked a trail and kept walking. But I’d been thinking about desire and the twin poles that comprised desire: want and need. There was moment-to-moment craving on the one hand, and on the other, something that led to long-term satisfaction and fulfillment. Like everyone else, I believed I wanted satisfaction and fulfillment, so I stood at this junction, looking at the two roads, one less traveled than the other, and I knew it wasn’t just the two roads, it was the meaning of the two roads. I somehow imagined that my choice would determine, not only where I went, but by virtue of that choice, what my world would be. It wasn’t that one road was Anne and one road was Feather; both roads were going in the same direction. It was merely a question of knowing what it was I needed, and based on that, where I needed to go.

When Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, he didn’t say how long the road would be, or which road it was, and so I stood, not transfixed, but not moving forward, looking at these two brown roads.

I’d read in a book one time that a way to break through a barrier is to talk to yourself, in a mirror, on LSD. I had no mirror, but I stood in this meadow, a green grassy meadow. Clouds were obscuring the moon but there was light enough to see, and there was one big tree sitting in the middle of this meadow and I went up to this tree and started talking. Not talking. I knew the tree couldn’t talk, but I tried to imagine, if it did, how would the tree communicate? I tried to talk with the tree. I stood in front of the tree, sending signals, sending vibrations, trying to receive something, or hear something, to have the tree, not tell me what to do, but show me, so that I might know. And because it was spring some seeds were falling, and one seed came down like a whirligig and landed on my head. I brushed it off. That wasn’t what I wanted. I was trying to communicate. I was trying to communicate with this tree.

Although the tree was probably sending me loads of signals or vibrations, nothing was getting through. There was a skin between the tree and me, a membrane separating us, and my strategy was to tear at the fabric of the membrane. I knew the membrane was a mental construct, and that all I had to do was step through that mental construct. I knew my decision about the two trails was not about the trails, but about how I walked on whatever trail I took.

And maybe I would have acted on this knowledge, except I was distracted by the rain that was starting to fall. Also by the thunder and the lightning strikes that were moving their way across the eastern horizon. I didn’t think about the danger of standing on a hillside in an electrical storm. I thought about the lightning, and the different kinds of thunder. Chief Joseph was named after a kind of thunder, and I thought about cracking thunder and brittle thunder and howling thunder and vibrating thunder — and also the rolling thunder that I imagined had been rolling for a very long time across the great midwestern plain to get to me. By counting the seconds between the flash and the thunder, and dividing that by some number, I might have estimated the lightning’s distance. But instead, I stood there, a light rain falling against my face, waiting for the next burst of light, and then waiting for the sound of the light. I stayed on the slope as the rain stopped and the thunder moved away. I waited to see, when the clouds parted, if I could see any sign of the waning moon.