Chapter Twenty-One: Complacencies in the Peignoir
Veronica was relieved that the storm would prevent her from going to Les Jardeen. She was tired and felt like going to bed. More and more that was all she felt like doing.
Paregane was supposed to be non-addictive, without side effects. That was what they had promised and while at first she didn’t believe them, in fact didn’t care, over time she was amazed to find that it was apparently true.
Apparently true. Because it didn’t really take long for her to discover that a second dose in the afternoon put things right, if she didn’t have anything to do. Afternoon jaunts in the garden were brief pick me ups, 2-3 hour naps spent walking in the mountains or sitting under an oak tree. She watched the squirrels gather nuts and listened to the birds sing. She found a part of the garden that was poised on the edge of autumn, leaves about to turn, fields full of golden seed. Everyone was busy bringing in the harvest, bees drunk on abundant nectar. Sometimes in the distance she caught a glimpse of a house behind towering trees. Among those trees there was no warm sun and the mortar of walls crumbled into sand. A roof, walls, a parapet would just emerge from the shadows. It intrigued her a little, but not enough to draw her away from her gold and russet world, clad in a mantel of dying sunlight, burnished, bronzed, sweet with honey and a twinge of melancholy, little violet shadows edging the luminous leaves. Day after day she visited her autumnal world. It was a place she had all to herself. It became a guilty pleasure, as when she had discovered that masturbation could be a serious pastime, that summer on the ranch, and she spent hours on her back in her room in a self induced daze of orgasms.
Once the arrangements had been made there was little for her to do. The weather was getting worse and more unpredictable by the day so she couldn’t go for bike rides in the park. The stale, ridiculous ‘garden’ air of the gym was unbearable and she lost her attention span for books. There were just so many hours she could spend doing nothing at all, shopping and cleaning and thinking.
Soon she was taking that second pill every day and after that she added a third. As soon as Felix was out the door she went back to bed with Paregane. She found she could go to the garden by merely sitting or lying down with her eyes closed. She wasn’t asleep at all and it was just as real. The world around her had frayed and faded. Her senses, once so acute, perceived more of the garden than her home or town. Only Felix remained vibrant. In his presence she felt the allure of his odor, like exudatious bark gums. His body was like the plums that hung heavy above the riverbank. His eyes were like the shadows of the oaks, obliterations of light, crystalline. They were transmigratory spirits married in eternity, wandering the physical world in search of a key and door, a way out of the cave their barbaric devolution into bodily existence required for a habitus.
More and more she felt their exile had to come to an end. For some reason he was resisting the return. He seemed so wedded to ordinary things still. Celebration, food, movies, walks. She had the power to pull him out of it and then, like chemicals, they reacted, pulsing and streaming in the sky and raining down to earth together. Paregane three times a day and there was nothing left but the garden.
People crammed up against rough-hewn walls, drinking wine and shouting, upset her. Then they changed forms, became dragonflies in the mouths of emerald frogs squatting by a pool of water. Sammael rode in on a giant camel and when he got down she saw that his back terminated in a long, scaly tail. It switched back and forth as he walked. Crowds in paradise filled the air with an alien sweat and she shrank from the press of their naked bodies, ran through the woods. Was panic bleeding into the garden? She had no idea. Everyone looked insane now, there was no difference. Only at her oak tree could she be safe and she stuck by it as much as possible.
Sammael stretched his short pink legs out and lay back beside her. They didn’t say much, never did. She looked at the rusty fur on his toes and the huge cock like a hank of rope draped over his thighs. Just as he was leaving he said, “They’re here for the wrong reasons. It’s too bad.” She never felt regret in the garden, never felt nostalgia or loss. In the garden matter was always pregnant and it seemed to her most of the time everything was poised to take off. Yet, her favorite place was a place on the verge of death.
She was strong in a weak world of watery images, a single, flame- like presence. Flying, or swimming, or fucking Felix, it was all the solitary flame. He filled her up, she gasped as he came in her heart, her belly, her guts pitched and her eyes glazed over. She would never be satisfied, never be disappointed either, so long as she could penetrate his ears with her voice, her eyes breaking down the scales and piercing through the iris into the ganglia of nerves, driving down his gullet, up and out of his fingertips, her nipples hard beneath their touch.
It wasn’t easy to get up. She didn’t want champagne. She didn’t want the future or the past. She wanted to lie there. She wanted to be a vibration rippling out through space into eternity. She tried to get up and dress but instead, reached out to the night table and put a pill on her tongue. He could wake her when he returned. In no time at all she was back home in the garden, wandering down to the lake. Sammael was seated by the shore, clasping his knees in his arms.
“If it weren’t for my body back home, I’d stay here for ever,” she said.
Without turning around to look at her he said, “Do you really think that husk lying back there in your room is more real than I am? Do you think it means anything at all? Everyone comes here looking for god but I can tell you, if there is one in all the universe I’ve never found it.”
She climbed the granite outcrop and launched herself out into the air, soaring across the aching, cloudless sky, goose bumps rising on her flesh. Down below a bear and its cub caught salmon. She rode higher, harder, faster than ever before. The sun grew warm on her back and the world below got small. She circled high overhead, alone and free on the pulsing thermals. As she plunged down straight for the lake she felt something strange, almost painful. Her back twitched and her legs shriveled. Feathers pierced her shoulders and her arms, as if bursting into flame, became blue wings. Down she shot into the water. It bubbled up around her, raced past her eyes. She speared a fish through its center with her beak and rose up out of the lake and into the air, heavy at first, beating hard to be air borne and then popping up. She could taste the blood of the fish in her mouth and at the same time felt something strike through her heart, as if she were dangling half alive off of a spear being lofted into the sky. She dropped the fish onto the rocks below where she was smashed apart, flooded with a dying, narcotic warmth, blood oozing up and colors fading to white. She pecked at the raw, mangled flesh and swallowed it hungrily. Then, exultant, she fled upwards and into the light of the sun, swooping out over the wide water to join her brethren on the far shore of the lake.
