John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

I didn’t remember. Bits of dream may linger, but who can recall the date of the night?

“You should have been punished, Baby. You were violent and cruel.”

Ah, is it surprising, is it any surprise at all, what happened once Ul ‘Lyu broke my grim orbit? After the preposterous roar which shattered the air when her world rammed mine, the birdbath dropping into the compost heap, then I rushed off to find any distraction. And there I found, not just distraction, but my whole life and death put to question:

“On your world,” she had asked, that first time, “what’s the principle for recycling souls?”

Ul ‘Lyu, we never stopped asking. Soon I never wanted to stop asking. I felt how it was to ride beneath you. I saw how even the limits of my smoky hall could seem aired out by new possibilities. I heard you say violent and cruel , but in a voice as nimble as the carnival colors that glimmered always beneath the pale jelly of your soul. In a voice that conveyed only the most neutral meanings of the word, cruel . So I fell in love with Ul ‘Lyu.

If she’d wanted to fly dead-on into the next star due to explode, I couldn’t have said no. But she enlarged the circle of our flights together only slowly. She handled me with care, keeping within the borders of my world. Still for all our talk, for all her wicked grins and for all my many hints at my own feelings, we never told each other outright that we were in love. We traveled and gabbed, no more. And then one time, touring the periphery of my depot, we passed again the point of contact, where the two eternities were jammed together. There, ah there, I saw how Ul ‘Lyu’s place was going eventually to get free of my own. It would roll around the edge.

So Ul ‘Lyu and I paused, hanging above the point of collision. Together we observed how the lip of her heaven advanced against the rough edge of my hell. We came to see the certain precise amount advanced, always, over a certain regular period. We came to see, in other words, the grinding sameness of Time itself. Before I knew what I was doing I’d lifted my face away from that terrible watch-works and started begging Ul ‘Lyu to get me out of here, get me out of here.

“What, Baby?”

Her face loosened itself and rolled down towards mine.

“Ul ‘Lyu, I love you!” And so I’d said it. “I want to leave my life ! The same waiting and nothing matters, the same waiting for the same, same world — I hate it, Ul ‘Lyu! I want to live in your world forever!”

“Oh.”

She became thoughtful. The hum inside her increased. I felt the hard places, the iron places, emerging from within again. But I said nothing. I’ve learned how to wait. Besides, the more Ul ‘Lyu considered, the more the suction holding me in place evaporated, and it took all my energy to grip the solid edges of what she became. Soon I lost the strength to keep my head up. I thought: I’ve told her, but she’s never told me. Again I saw below me that pitiless turn and turn.

But then — between one slipping handhold and the next — the suction returned. Ul ‘Lyu’s body rippled against the hairs on my arm again. I lifted my face and found hers, smiling.

“Okay,” she said.

Ul ‘Lyu turned and plunged into her atmosphere. Beneath, I dangled without a care in any world. I even swung back and forth in order to experience more completely the freedom, the trippy looseness — and in order to set my love caterwauling, once more, as my wrists turned. Meanwhile gradually the dust of the collision dispersed. First shimmering then stark, I saw Ul’Lyu’s world.

It was not gelatinous, like her. Just the opposite. The ground beneath our flight turned out to be a badlands of sheetrock, with canyons and buttes absolutely razor-edged. Fierce magnificence; I will never forget it. Unlike my murmuring indoor death, this one was crystal, exposed to the weather, silent. The single feature against the ivory strictness of those rises and falls was a repeated series of stiff lines, chiseled into the rock. I never learned their purpose, those lines. But we would cross them at regular intervals, since they ran everywhere, even up the sides of the tallest butte. Going past these markings, always at the genial pace of a tourist, Ul ‘Lyu and I resembled a hawk carrying a rabbit as it flew across a row of telephone wires, the bird slowed by its heavy prey.

When my arms grew tired, she preferred to rest on top of a butte. Her flying ability, so far as I could tell, never suffered wear and tear, though she would occasionally plump herself onto the rock next to me. Then, the usual gabbing. And my usual lame steering clear of the one question I wanted most to ask. Through all our early talks and flights, also, the grinding borders of our two worlds continued to sound, distantly. But we went a long time, over whole continents of her lined place, before we ran into others like Ul ‘Lyu. Yes, they were very few, these round creatures. Even during my most lonesome waiting, my own way of life had not seemed so unpopulated.

“I suppose,” I said once, as she lowered me towards a butte-top, “loneliness could be part of your principle. Your principle for living and dying.”

“Baby, I just don’t know.”

Her face was directly above mine. She smiled and the colors within her glimmered and blinked, making me feel as if somewhere within my chest hung a sloppy lower class of beast that I myself was carrying.

“After all, Baby,” she went on, “it could be that in my world something like myself was split into two people. Ooo, or ten people”

I had to look away. My God, her merciless speculations. My knees buckled as soon as my feet hit the white slate.

“Baby, when I was alive, I could have been schoolteachers and dogs and….”

But at last we did meet up with others of her kind.

There, what a spectacle. In a wanton symphony of talk, Ul ‘Lyu and her countrymen bobbed on the air, catching riffs of excitement off each other until I cried out that my arms were killing me. I was set down, gently, but thereafter the conversation riffed on, rattled on, astonished me on and on. Never mind that, when they rested against the tough ivory landscape, Ul ‘Lyu and her fellow-talker looked as ordinary as two scoops of ice cream stuck on a kitchen counter. Nor did it matter that some had female faces and some — yes, at first it cut me deep to see — had male faces. Together they improvised as if the physical universe was no more than a choice of walls and rougher surfaces they might bounce off without end. They began, say, with how my arms must have felt when I’d said they were killing me. Then the two impossible creatures were just gone . From sodomy to bananas, from the Arabian look of a certain cathedral to the way the mind goes black under the pressure of a thumbscrew. Talk, talk, talk. I would put in what I could. I’d try to be good company. But always, soon, I’d be left behind, literally a hanger-on.

And so I began to think long thoughts. Because what could you count on, with these people? “Good company” in the usual sense meant nothing here. Nor did “love” itself. The others in this world, yes, shared Ul ‘Lyu’s puzzling familiarity with the details I recalled from my own universe. Sodomy, yes, and bananas. But their connections left me dizzy. More than once, they left me disgusted. Therefore what could I rely on, what could I trust, in such bewildering party chit-chat? Hanging beneath their talk, I began to wonder what I was worth.

Now, these bad moments always had an end. After the worst and most stupefying conversation, after I hung drained and positive I’d made the wrong choice, then with a particular extra beauty in her voice Ul ‘Lyu would thank her friend and, always, lift me away. With us would rise my nincompoop of a heart. Oh Ul ‘Lyu, you may not have known your principle, but I knew mine. We flew; we flew. Timeless freefall. The bee and the rose set loose together. Flying again, I could ask: