I sprang from the bed in search of my pants. I found my wallet undisturbed. I rummaged around the room and calmed myself down. Nothing was missing.
It would be many years before I made any sense of my bizarre encounter.
I enjoyed the remainder of my holiday more than I had previously anticipated, as I eagerly explored myriad new worlds of taste, smell, sound, beauty, and sex. I returned home only briefly. University was a few days away.
My parents immediately noticed a change in me. I was more alert. My eyes were brighter, and I smiled much more easily. My parents deluged me with questions about my trip.
Ordinarily, I would have fled from such a barrage of attention. But I knew they were only happy to see me, and that they would miss me once I was gone to university. Also, I was very grateful for their gift to me, that vacation that I couldn’t have known how much I needed. Of course, I would answer their questions. But I also knew that I could not be entirely candid.
They asked about the bottle I had brought back as a souvenir. I answered coyly that it was to remind me of someone special. They did not press the issue, not wanting to embarrass either me or themselves. Their thoughts were transparent. They were imagining some exotic girl, nice but not too nice, who had deflowered their shy son. The reality would have shocked them, as, in fact, would the extent of my sexual escapades. So I gave them a nice, polished version of my travels: enough details for them to know that their idea had been a success. But I was also vague enough to let them to understand—by omission—how much of one it had been.
Yes, I had kept the bottle. It was not quite empty. There were some dregs, some few lingering drops. I was both tempted and scared to sample the liquid again. I did not know what to make of its effects—if indeed it had been responsible for my vivid hallucinations—and I was loath to waste what little there was left. I thought of diluting the remains in water. Drinking the results only occasionally, slowly learning to understand the visions it bestowed upon me. It was too soon. I put the bottle away, intending to leave the decision to a later time when I would have the leisure to think properly.
The few days between the return from my voyage and my departure for university went by with alarming rapidity. Did it occur to me at the time to visit Lost Pages? I can’t remember—but, even if it had, I would not have been able to find the time to go. And how could I have known what to look for?
To facilitate my preparations, my mother had already packed most of my personal effects. My clothes were neatly folded into old suitcases. My books had already been stored in boxes, ready to be shipped to my dormitory.
In this new life, my time and mind were now occupied with my studies and the string of tedious jobs I had decided to take in order to afford an apartment that would secure me the privacy dormitory life failed to provide. I was discreet and avoided permanent entanglements. I attracted—and was attracted to—those who yearned for an intimacy that would not shatter their daily lives or their other, more public, attachments. Mostly men, but also occasionally women.
I rarely returned home to my parents. They saw me for some, though not all, of the customary holidays and requisite family events. Those visits were short and never included enough time to visit my old haunts. It was as though my previous identity had been supplanted by a new one that recognized no continuity with the past. Everything I had experienced before university—more precisely, before that fateful summer trip—might as well have happened to someone else.
Eventually, teaching assignments supplemented the scholarships I earned, and the two sources of income allowed me to quit migrating between minimum-wage jobs to support myself.
One night a young woman—a mischievous student whom I had met the previous semester while teaching an undergraduate survey class—noticed the bottle on a shelf among other knickknacks nestled between piles of books.
On the floor of my living room, we were naked, the sweat of sex clinging to our cooling bodies. We were laughing at everything and nothing until the laughter escalated into a wrestling match. I had her pinned down between my legs, mercilessly digging my fingers into her ticklish belly, but, in a surprise manoeuvre, she managed to squirm and jump away from me.
She ended up on the far side of the room, staring at the bottle. She called me over to her. “Look at how the light catches.” She pointed with one hand and squeezed my buttocks with the other. “It’s beautiful.”
At the bottom of the bottle, where light hit the amber liquid, miniature rainbows danced. If I tried to concentrate on any particular aspect of this tiny spectacle, it hid from my sight. I had to absorb the phenomenon in its entirety, or not at all.
Why had I never noticed this? Had this effect been going on unnoticed all these years?
How could I know? I had found it simpler to ignore my memento. I suppose I passively cherished its presence, but I had yet to pursue—or even to contemplate pursuing—my investigation of its contents. A council of unacknowledged, intertwined fears sat at the heart of my negligence: that my life of pleasure would be shattered by the revelations awaiting at the conclusion of a successful investigation; that there were no answers to be found; that the liquid would turn out to be nothing more than wine or some other mundane beverage; that I had those many years ago lost my grip on sanity and been besieged by delusions; that my great moment of epiphany rested on an instance of madness; that the foundations of my personality were too fragile to withstand close scrutiny. However, these personal insights were still in my future, some time later than that evening, when I stood in my living room, my naked body pressed against my lover’s soft back, as we both stared at the contents of my precious bottle.
The dregs appeared somewhat more substantial than I remembered. Hadn’t there been but a few drops? There was now a pool at the bottom of the bottle.
“Tell me the story,” demanded my lover, tucking a stray strand of her blond hair behind one ear.
“What do you mean?” Unsuccessfully, I attempted to resume our tickling match.
“Stop it! There must be a story! What are you hiding? Tell me. Tell me!”
I had never revealed the story behind this bottle. Except for my parents upon my return from my fateful voyage, no-one had thought to ask.
I had never told anyone.
Suddenly, I felt the tremendous weight of this secret. In her curious, smiling face, I sensed the potential for release and relief. To finally relate the events that had changed my life.
I must have been silent for longer than I realized. She was gently stroking my chest. I noticed her looking at me, worried.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes?” she whispered back at me.
I led her into the bedroom, and, then, I told her.
I told her everything. My whole life. She listened to my ramblings, paid attention to every word. She never grew impatient—or at least was sensitive enough to my needs not to show it if she did. Somewhere in this great mess of a narrative, the bottle’s story came out. I omitted no detail, no matter how utterly embarrassing or unbelievably fantastic.
Why did I trust her so when I had never allowed myself to open up to anyone in this fashion before? Because I needed to. I do not mean to undermine or diminish the depth of her empathy or her curious intelligence, and certainly not the quality of her companionship. No doubt all of these aspects of her combined to trigger my realization of this great need, this great chasm, in my life. My need may not have necessarily been to share with her, but without her I would not have been able to acknowledge—much less satisfy—it.
I can’t remember how or when, but my confession segued into sex. There is no clear dividing line in my memory between the two. It was all communion—I thought I understood that word more deeply than ever before. I lost myself in my lover and became one with her.
I also can’t remember when sex turned into sleep. One moment I was intoxicated by my lover’s smells, our smells, the pungency of our bodily secretions . . . the next I was waking up, languorously serene, to see her eyes scrutinizing my face.
I took her hand and kissed it. “I—”
“Don’t say . . . don’t say anything. Shh.” She placed her fingers over my mouth. Her eyes avoided mine. “Don’t.”
We had been hugging in silence for a short while when she said, “We should get going. We both have busy days today.” I grabbed her wrist and looked at her watch. She knew that my next class was to start in fifty minutes. I prided myself on my punctuality. I would not make my seventy-five students wait.
I was irritated that she knew my schedule. I wondered—silently—about her own affairs. What did I know of her? I became ashamed of myself, ashamed at my selfishness, my egocentrism. Did I ever inquire into her daily grind? Did I ever show any interest in the details that made up her life? I hid that lack of interest under a veneer of sophistication, under the idea that we met not to encumber each other with the boring minutiae of our quotidian routines but to escape into an oasis of sexual delight. But wasn’t all that a petty excuse to forgive myself for the lack of interest I exhibited in my friends and lovers? I was such a peacock. I was embarrassed; I now saw myself as a clumsy, transparent, ridiculous jester. As someone whose relationships didn’t matter, didn’t mean anything. As someone who didn’t matter, neither to myself nor to anyone else.
I fled to the bathroom, using the time as a convenient excuse. Any notion of communion had been shattered. I heard her walk around the apartment, heard the clinking of a belt buckle as she was getting dressed.
“Gotta rush! See you soon!” she shouted from two rooms away. In my agitated, self-engrossed state, I failed to fully register the uncomfortable and distant timbre of her tone. I heard the door open and close.
I turned my mind away from introspection and, instead, toward the busy day ahead of me. I washed and dressed in a precise hurry and managed to step into my classroom a few seconds early.
That day was interminable. Illusions had been destroyed, and I was in no shape to deal with the wreckage. I yearned to see her, yet dreaded the prospect. I needed and feared her. Was it brave to stay alone? Was it cowardly to not call her, or anyone? Alone, I could hide from eyes that could penetrate my thin carapace. With a lover, I could lose myself in erotic fulfillment. No matter what I did, I was hiding.
That evening, I was too restless to read or work. I couldn’t find any comfort in music; the familiarity of my record collection irritated me, and the radio was intolerably banal. I ate incessantly, stuffing food—raw vegetables, crackers, baking chocolate . . . whatever I could find—into my mouth continuously, as if the slightest respite would allow some unnameable threat to invade my innards.
It was only nine o’clock when I decided to go to bed. Beforehand, remembering the previous night, I felt compelled to walk to the shelf where rested the memento from my coming-of-age voyage. I stared at the pool of liquid at the bottom of the bottle, dazzled by its luminous effervescence and haunted by ambiguous memories. I tipped the bottle and let the spectacle of liquid and light cascade up and down the sides of the glass. I uncorked the bottle, brought it to my nose, and smelled its contents. I was no longer the inexperienced, ignorant youth who had first encountered the liquid years ago. Nevertheless, I still could not identify the fragrance that escaped from the open bottle.
I closed my eyes and savoured the exotic aroma. My lips caressed the mouth of the bottle as I recalled—with both wonder and unease—how I had come to possess it. The dampness on the glass ridge shocked me. I clamped down on the memories and emotions the taste evoked as firmly as I recorked the bottle. I licked the trace of liquid from my lips.
And I suddenly felt awake and vigorous. And aroused. So aroused, it pushed everything else from my mind. So aroused, it hurt. I decided to take a shower, planning to masturbate while enjoying the hot steam.
As I entered the bathroom, I saw him in the mirror. His beautiful face. The subtle, mesmerizing colours running through his hair.
But he was wearing my clothes, was standing where I stood.
I had turned into a doppelganger of the mysterious lover who had left only that bottle behind—exactly as he’d looked all those years ago, when he’d kissed me.
I collapsed, tears storming out of me. Then my head exploded, and the bathroom vanished around me, to be replaced by—
I am a boy looking at myself everywhere in the world. I am everyBODY in the world. I gorge on my own flesh, my arm stuffed down my throat. HE is nowhere. I am dancing. There are many of me. I am a boy. I am a girl. I am a man. I am a woman. I am dancing. With each whirl I take off a piece of clothing. The boys, the girls, the men, the women—I, I, I, and I take off my clothes. I and I and I and I have sex. I MAN
insert my penis in an anus
BOY
in a mouth
GIRL
in a vagina
WOMAN
. I
WOMAN
rub my vulva on the stomachs of myself
BOYGIRLMAN
lying on the ground. I laugh and cry. I am reading a book. Every page is a mirror. I see myself but I do not look like me. I am handsome. I am beautiful. I am charming. I am elegant. I am strong. I am vulnerable. I am everywhere and it is me. It is my body. I am not me. I am a boy. I look down
MY HEAD TURNS AND SPINS
and there is a boy licking my anus but it is not him. It is not me. He looks up at me. Smiling and laughing, laughing and crying. He kisses me. I taste semen in his mouth. I take off my penis and offer it to him. I run. There are many people. None of them are me. None of them are him. They all laugh but they do not cry. I shout: WHO ARE YOU? WHY ARE YOU NOT HIM? Still they do not cry. Where is he? The sound of beating wings. I can see myself
IT IS NOT THE BODY OF A BOY
running, my cloven hooves hitting the pavement, the amber blood coursing through the thick veins bulging from my hairless naked body, the lack of genitals at my crotch, the huge mouth with thick amber lips and big white teeth gaping from my belly, my full breasts covered with thick amber veins bumping against my chest. My head is spinning out of control. I am not him. On the one side, below the ring of eyes crowning my head, a penis and scrotum protrude from my face, flapping around. On the other side, a wet vulva opens deep down inside my throat. I cannot cry. No tears will come. I am not a boy. I hear the furious din of beating wings. I do not see him. The black shapes come and smother me
THE BODY THAT IS NOT A BOY
. There is no sound. Swirling rainbows of
GREENBLUEBROWN
erupt from the darkness. There are bodies everywhere. Of every shape. I recognize no body.