Bruce Wagner - I Met Someone

He understood that by advising Dusty it was time to explore, he was being hypocritical… because just like she, Jeremy wasn’t feelin’ it. He took the arrival of his son as an evolutionary marker — emblem of the commutation of a life sentence of perversion and promiscuity, a symbol of escape from the prison of bodies and enslavement of flesh. The age-old question watered his musings like a soft rain: What does it all mean? The cock goes here, the mouth there, the proprietary heart and obsessive thoughts follow with the predictability of blind donkeys descending into the recesses of a spectacular, spectacularly meaningless canyon. In his twenties, he was in love with a hermaphrodite (they called them “intersex” now) who had a vagina with a swarthy nub of cock dangling above it like a boutonniere. How perfect that shemale was for him, how he loved that being! What a cruel, lusciously asinine farce was the game of love, desire, and need! With no escape other than the false exit of celibacy… and what was celibacy but a smug entr’acte in a dead-end, compulsory burlesque?

Summoning Devi again, he could smell that meadow of spring flowers that seemed to live on her nape (inexplicably on one side only). Their time of domesticity, measured in months, was surreal. He never said a word about her to friends or colleagues, which only served to heighten the phantasmal aspect. When he came home at the end of a workday there she was, sometimes barefoot, always pregnant, in the kitchen, cooking, like the beatific, soon-to-be-slain wife in a film noir. She’d been curiously dispassionate in telling him she had found her guru dead on the bathroom floor of the beach house, as if all was prefigured. After that last lunch with MacKlatchie, Jeremy Googled Killer, Longtime Fugitive, Dead in Malibu , but there was nothing… though he had found a rather obscure article which may or may not have been the spur that goaded Frank to return to Minnesota for his second-attempt helping of “just desserts.” The homicides occurred in the winter of ’83… Yet even after Devi told him Sir had died—“gone ahead” was how she put it — Jeremy never brought it up. He doubted if she knew her teacher had murdered his family but decided it unlikely, as Franklin would have shielded the woman he had loved from the beginning against a thing so unsavory; Jeremy didn’t feel it was his place to disabuse her. Another caveat of MacKlatchie’s might have been that such knowledge on Devi’s part may not only have challenged the “energetically incontestable” beliefs he had so carefully imposed and inspired but made her criminally complicit in harboring him. In the same vein, there had been a few moments, before and after MacKlatchie’s passing, when Jeremy pondered reaching out to the police to report what he knew.

But he let that go.

As sleep overtook, he drifted back to the Buddhist dinner party, recalling Michael Imperioli’s story. The actor said that after the retreat in Ukiah, he never saw his friend again, yet got postcards, in which the man wrote that he was on his way to a place called Summerland to meet his dead wife. The strange thing was, Devi had more or less said the same thing — she and her beloved teacher were on their way to that very place, when destiny had interrupted, in the form of “Jerome” himself. The article in the small-town Minnesota paper that Jeremy found online, The Summerland Sentinel , recounted the notorious unsolved murders of Margot and “Little Jim” MacKlatchie more than three decades before, in the hamlet of the same name.

What did it all mean?

The soft rain fell…

When Devi summarily announced — again, with odd dispassion — that it was her turn to “go on ahead,” she said it was by dint of finding “my Sir, who waits for me.” By then the lightness had gone out of her, and the light from her eyes too, replaced by something indescribably different. She was no longer his, nor was she Wyatt’s.

On the morning that she left, she told one last story in the “old” style.

“After my Bella died, my guru said we must go. That he had heard the bells and they beckoned us to take to the road — to the ‘Highway of Holiness,’ he said, that would deliver us to freedom. To Silence . I gathered what few possession I had (I threw everything away when Bella went ahead) and spent my last hours in Chicago with pounding heart, blushing like a bride. My Sir bought me a beautiful suit at Marshall Field and told me to have my hair and nails done because ‘one must begin such a great adventure with understated elegance and easy formality.’ So I did. And as I was rushing to meet him at the train station, I bumped into a boy I knew from middle school. We’d gone to college together too, and while we didn’t see each other much because of our schedule of classes, I knew he had always been in love with me. He was shy and held back, but I knew. When he saw me he was shocked at how I looked because I was usually so plain! I never cared about makeup or how I did my hair or what I wore. When he saw it was me , it made him crazy. I’ll never forget the look on his face. ‘Cathy!’ he said — I wasn’t Devi yet, I was still Cathy to the world, and to that world I suppose shall always be—‘Cathy, my God, I didn’t recognize you!’ We chatted, though he could see I was anxious, and in a hurry. And finally — finally! — he asked me out. I was polite, but said that I was on my way to the station and was going away on a long journey. His face got sad and he said, ‘Did you meet someone?’ I just looked down at my shoes. How could I tell him the truth of who — of what —I had met? How does one say one ‘met’ Silence? I could scarcely say it to myself . And how paltry the question was, how human , yet how poignant, how beautiful! So I stammered yes , kissed his cheek, and ran off.”

Jeremy remembered her final kiss to him , and the one she bestowed on their son.

Then, those last words:

“I’ll see Bella soon — and my precious Sir… his wife and son —and my… why, I’ll see Mother and Father —and Tristen too! Then you, Jerome, and then Wyatt —

“And all whom I ever loved.”

—

The flirty, dark-clouded skies snubbed the storm, and the birthday party was a marvel. Nature was in an uproar — as if thrilled to have been invited, she changed costumes like a teenager who couldn’t make up its mind. (Her room was a glorious mess.) Thankfully, she had decided not to bother the event with any petulant, hormonal displays, at least none that a light umbrella couldn’t handle.

Cell phones were confiscated on entry, the unpopular chore carried out with panache by an affable stable mucker, size Extra Large, who’d dopily squeezed himself (and been well squozen by others) into the chrysalis of a grungy old Quiksilver wetsuit, festively adorned in leaves, twigs, Post-its, and glitter. The donkey ears that his smaller, even more puckish counterpart would soon attach to a snoring Bottom were taped to his battered cycling helmet like a HELLO sticker at a jackass convention. In regard to the banning of electronic devices, the invitees already knew it to be a policy of the manor. When she first took up residency, Dusty threw a housewarming whereby she welcomed the new neighbors with a heartfelt speech expressing her hopes that one day she might be deemed a worthy addition to their community. She also spoke of her partner’s “accident” and its effect on their lives, before congenially segueing to enlighten her guests as to the obscene bounty placed upon post-trauma images/videos of Aurora (there had been none as yet) “should they become available.” Such an eventuality, she said, was doubtless an intrusion she wished to postpone for as long as she could. The actress took great care not to tar the villagers with that brush, making sure they understood that even friendly group shots, taken by the innocents now gathered, and photobombed , as they say, by the sometimes scampish Aurora (the guests tittered but warmly understood where Dusty was going with this), had the potential to be hacked by professionals with all the stealth, speed, and brutality of wolves slaughtering sheep. Their embarrassed but resolute hostess couldn’t apologize enough, as she felt the whole business to be unneighborly , but really had no need, because the good and honorable Brutonnières, won over by her sensitivity, humility, and earnestness, not to mention the touching heroism of her predicament, heartfully assured those wishes would be respected. And besides, their sons’ and daughters’ smartphone umbilicuses were ones they looked forward to cutting, be it only for a few hours. The prospect made them right jolly.