Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

She said, Awful. I danced every dance with a chemistry professor.

He remembered how the audience tittered.

Have you ever danced with a chemistry professor? the dumb-cluck girlfriend asked. The audience laughed. Ohhhwww, my feet! she groaned.

The audience howled with laughter.

Except one. He sat there, his face burning, and finished the movie with the same kind of stunned depression he felt now, a feeling of dislocation and paralysis, devoured for a moment by this other pattern that made himself and everything he believed in worthless and comic.

He didn’t remember what he did after that. Maybe just got on the streetcar and went home.

That could have been the night Lila was on the streetcar… That smile. That’s what he remembered most. There it was. Lila on the streetcar. Lila and the lilacs in spring. The little suppressed smile. The little half-hidden contempt. And the sadness that nothing he could do or say could ever make her smile at him in any other way.

He remembered once there was a huge cottonwood tree in the night and he stood alone under it and listened and its leaves rattled slightly in the night breeze. It had been a warm night and there was a smell of lilacs in the breeze.

These patterns of his mind slowly vanished into sleep.

After an unknown time some new patterns returned in the form of shimmering water. The shimmering was above him. He lay at the bottom of the ocean shoal on a bank of sand. The water was faintly bluish but so clear he could see little hills and ripples in the surface of the sand as clearly as if no water were there.

Growing from the bottom were dark green blades of eel-grass that rippled in the current of the water like eels struggling to get free of the sand. He could feel the same currents against his own body. They were pleasant gentle currents and he felt serene. His lungs had stopped their struggle long ago and everything was quiet now. He felt like he belonged here. He had always belonged here.

Above the tips of the grass in the faint blue water were hundreds of milky pink and white jellyfish floating through the water. They seemed to drift at first but then as he watched closely he saw they propelled themselves by pulsing in-and-out, in-and-out, as if they had some mysterious goal. The littlest ones were so thin and transparent he saw them mainly by refraction of the shimmering water above them as they passed between him and a dark shape suspended on the surface. The dark shape was like that of a boat which from the bottom of the ocean seemed more like a spaceship suspended in the sky. It belonged to another world that he had come from. Now that he was no longer attached to it he felt better.

One of the peculiar milky-white creatures swam toward him and nudged against his body, first on his arm and then on his side, alarming him a little. Was the creature being friendly? Was it hungry for something? He tried to get up and move away from it but found he couldn’t. He had lost all power of motion. The creature nudged and stroked and nudged and stroked until he gradually felt himself being released from a dream.

It was dark now and he felt the nudging again. It was a hand. He didn’t move. The hand moved up and down his arm, carefully and deliberately, then began to make further and further adventures across his body. By the time the hand had reached far enough to arrive at its destination, its destination was rigid and waiting. The dream-like feeling of helplessness and motionlessness persisted and he lay silently as he had lain at the bottom of the ocean, letting this happen to him, as if he were watching it from afar, a kind of spectator to some ancient ritual he was not supposed to see or understand.

The hand continued to stroke and caress and gently grasp and then, slowly in the darkness the body of Lila rose above him, and slid itself over him, kneeled and lowered itself gently and slowly down until it enveloped what it had come for… Then it tightened. Then, slowly, it lifted and paused. Then it eased and descended. Then it lifted and tightened — and released and descended again. Then again. And again. Each time a little less slow. Each time a little more coaxing. Each time a little more demanding of what it was there to receive.

Surges of excitement in his body grew with each demand. They became stronger and stronger until his hands rose up and seized her hips and his own body began to move with hers in each rise and fall. His thoughts were swamped by this ocean current of feeling and the huge jellyfish-like body hovering over him pulsing in and out, in and out, expanding and contracting on and on. He could feel huge waves of emotion that were not directed by anything. He could feel the explosion almost coming…

Then ALMOST coming…

Then… her body was suddenly tense and rigidly hard around him and she gave a crying-out sound and his whole self let go into her and his mind leapt out to some place beyond anywhere… When it returned he could feel the vulval pressure slowly releasing and the flesh of her hips became soft again.

She was still for a long time.

Then a tear fell on his cheek. It surprised him.

I do that for someone I like very much, her voice whispered. It seemed to come from some place other than the body that was above him; from someone who perhaps had also been an onlooker at all of this.

Then Lila lay back beside him, stretched the full length of her body against him and wrapped her arms around him as if to possess him forever.

They lay there together for a long time. Her arms held him but his mind began to drift free in an ebb tide of thought nothing could hold.

After a time he heard a steady breathing which told him she was asleep.

Sometimes between sleep and waking there’s a zone where the mind gets a glimpse of old active subconscious worlds. He’d just passed through that zone and for a moment had seen something he would forget if he went back to sleep. But he’d forget it if he became any more awake too.

This was the first time he’d been passive like this. Before it had been his idea, his aggression, his carnal desires. Now this passivity seemed to open something up.

What he seemed to have seen was that maybe he hadn’t had anything to do with it at all. He tried to hang on to it, half awake, half asleep.

A light shone again in the port. Maybe a car headlight from shore. Lila turned under the covers and brought her arm up over her face so that her hand opened upward toward him. Then she lay quietly.

He put his own hand up next to it. They were the same. The pattern that had caused her to come in and do this had also made these two hands alike. They were like leaves of trees, with no more knowledge than leaves have of why their cells produced them or made them so alike.

That was it, maybe. That was the thing, the other thing that was doing this that was not Lila and not himself.

The car headlight vanished and then, in the fading mental image of her hand, he thought he had seen something else. On her forearm near the wrist had been long scars, one of them slightly diagonal to the others. He wondered if it was something she had done herself.

He turned and put the tip of his forefinger against the wrist. The scars were there, all right, but they were smooth. It must have been long ago. It could have been a car accident or some other trauma, of course, but something told him it wasn’t. It seemed like more evidence of some past internal war with the thing that had brought her here tonight — some enormous battle between the intelligence of her mind and the intelligence of her cells.

If that’s what it was, the cells had won. Probably they had bled enough to throw off infection, then swelled to slow down the bleeding, clotted, and then slowly, with the special intelligence of their own that had nothing to do with Lila’s mind, they remembered how they had been before she had cut them apart and they carefully joined themselves back together again. They had a mind and will of their own. The mental Lila had tried to die but the cellular Lila had wanted to live.