Contours of Darkness (39 page)

'Our brains are too big for our bodies,' he said. 'We are evolutionary freaks. The civilisation you talk about destroying isn't some abstract monster out there; it exists inside us, it is us. What's the point of running here and there, travelling, forming organisations, getting involved in political struggles, when you can't climb the walls inside your own soul?' He looked into her eyes and his voice dropped to a low calm tone. 'We live here,' he said, 'and if we can't cope with our problems in our home, what chance do you think there is anywhere else?'

A subtle shift took place in her psyche. Beneath his incantation of hopelessness she thought she detected a plea for help. 'Do you want me to stay with you?' she asked.

He reached over and took her hand. 'I'm a man and you're a woman' he said. 'From the structure of our anatomies and the fact that we can reproduce ourselves by joining together, you would think that nature had designed us to live together. But every other single bit of evidence points in the opposite direction. For all we have in common we might as well come from different solar systems.' He paused. 'No, I don't want you to stay,' he said. 'I want to be left alone. And maybe we can see each other when we want to fuck, the way we did when we first met.'

She shook her head. 'It's impossible to go back to that,' she said. 'You know that. There's no point in pretending.'

'Well, then,' he said, 'one last time.'

He pulled her towards him and she did not hold back. His arms folded around her and she pressed her body into his, her breasts and thighs warm against his skin. Like so many lovers who find the sweetest fruit at the very brink of the precipice, they had come to the edge of dissolution in order to taste the exquisite sensations of fucking at the edge of separation. Through everything they felt ran a single thread of awareness: this is the final moment for this, this is the final moment for this. Each touch, each kiss, each sigh, was to be the last. And, although given the truth that there is no certainty in life, such is the case whenever people make love, it is the consciousness of the reality of evanescence which suffuses all feeling with unbearable poignancy. His erection rose once more, but without the stridency and urgency that marked his previous tumescence. She opened to him easily, lifting one leg to facilitate his penetration between her thighs. Gently, they entered one another, lying side by side, his cock nestled in her cunt, her heart in his hands, their minds interlocked. They barely moved, letting yearning take the place of striving. For her it was a single sustained orgasm, a continual swelling and discharge. She held his face in her fingers and kissed him again and again, each contact of her lips a seal of love lost. He held her buttocks and pulled her to him with unfailing strength. From their mouths came an almost inaudible murmuring that swept through the room like the sounds of an underground stream.

The music from the radio entered the space left by their cessation of talk. The haunting voice of Mick Jagger filled the air, the sound of a man who had been picked by destiny to play a role that is the envy of millions, but which remains a performance, like any other, that only masks the anguish of the spirit sustaining it. The mournful tones of Keith Richard's guitar insinuated themselves into the rhythm of Aaron and Cynthia's fucking, and the knowing words of the song impressed themselves into their brains.

'Childhood living/ Is easy to do/ The things you wanted/ I bought them for you/ Graceless lady/ You know who I am/ You know I can't let you/ Slide through my hands/ Wild horses/ Couldn't drag me away/ Wild wild horses/ Couldn't drag me away. . ..'

As he melted into Cynthia, the power of the music to cast a spell amplified the meaning of the lyrics. He envied the implied strength and wisdom of the man who wrote it, describing as he did the sorrow that binds men and women together, and the ability to sustain the sadness in order to maintain contact with his mate.

'I watched you suffer/ a dull aching pain/ Now you decided/ to show me the same/ No sweeping exit/ or offstage lines/ Could make me feel bitter/ or treat you unkind/ Wild horses/ couldn't drag me away/ Wild wild horses/ couldn't drag me away. . . .'

The tempo changed and the music broke into a lilting phrase, guitar and drums suffusing the piece with a moment of relief. Aaron thought of the time when he had felt such strong ties to Cynthia that he could have said the words of the refrain with total honesty. He wondered whether the trenchant observations of the song were merely an emotional binge, and how its composers would resolve the tension between the descriptions of pain and the courageous declaration of the final lines.

The voice went on, grainy, crackling, faintly wailing, energetically despondent, launching into the final stanza. 'I know I've dreamed you/ a sin and a lie/ I have my freedom/ but I don't have much time/ Faith has been broken/ tears must be cried/ Let's do some living/ after we die/ Wild horses/ we'll ride them someday.' The verse ended in a brief flurry and the last line sang out once more. 'We'll ride them someday.'

Aaron buried his head in Cynthia's throat. This is what he had always been unable to do, to follow the line of his negativity to its inner conclusion, and then still find the confidence to rescue a vision of triumph from its clutches. He pictured himself holding a team of pawing eager steeds with one hand while his other arm held Cynthia tightly by the shoulders. He realised that he would never live up to his own expectations of what a man should be.

Cynthia moaned and a series of ripples rolled up and down her body. Her pelvis twitched a score of times, each movement distinct and conscious. Her cunt swarmed over Aaron's cock and the breath was forced from her lungs. With tears beginning to form in his eyes, he relaxed the last bit of tension in his loins, and let her take him to orgasm by the power of her own climax. They came together, as softly as falling snow.

Neither of them moved for a long time afterwards. They shared the same thought: they would probably never do that again. The next time either of them fucked, it would be with someone else, and while, in the future, this moment would be lost in the mists of forgetfulness, the very fact that they would not remember added to its heartbreaking sweetness. The dark deepened around the houses in Berkeley as a hundred thousand people slept or made love or played the many games people play while waiting for the dawn. And the disc jockey played
Sister Morphine,
as he continued to sculpt the mood of the night with selections from
Sticky Fingers
, the
Fleurs du Mai
of rock.

'Can we stay up all night?' Cynthia said at last. 'I don't want to go to sleep knowing that I'll be leaving in the morning.'

'You're going tomorrow,' Aaron said.

There's no point in postponing it. If I'm going to go at all.'

He was about to say something which might have deflected the direction of their flow when an announcer's voice, sententious and crisp, broke into the room. This is the three o'clock news,' he said. Two alleged members of the notorious Weatherbureau were apprehended this afternoon in a suburb of Tucson, Arizona. The van they were driving contained a large shipment of dynamite which authorities say had been smuggled in across the Mexican border.'

Cynthia flicked her eyes towards the radio. The voice annoyed her, but as it continued, an unaccountable fit of fear seized her. She gripped Aaron's arm, as though bracing herself.

'One of the men drew a gun and fought a brief battle with police and was killed on the spot. The other man, Conrad Wilson of Berkeley, surrendered without a struggle.'

'Conrad,' said Cynthia. A cold chill ran down her spine, causing her fingers to shake. Aaron felt as though the bottom had been ripped from his bowels and he tightened his sphincter instinctively. The voice went on, like an alien intelligence announcing an invasion of the planet.

'Interviewed after the capture of the two supposed revolutionaries, one Federal Agent said, "We've been watching Gerard Mohr for several months now, hoping he would make a move like this. We have no information on his accomplice, but we have tracers out and should know more by tomorrow." '

Aaron felt as though someone had hit him across the back of the neck with a rubber truncheon. Cynthia's face began to twitch. They held onto one another like two children in a pitching boat on a stormy sea. Each sentence struck with the sharpness of a gavel on hard polished wood.

'Conrad Wilson,' the voice said, 'was charged with transporting contraband material across a national border, illegal possession of explosives, possession of illegal drugs, and crossing a state line with intent to incite a riot. The arresting officer said that the charges, plus others that would be added when he was formally arraigned, could carry a penalty of up to thirty years/

Aaron listened as the words rolled into his ears. The picture of Conrad, smiling, gentle, stoned, sitting in his fairyland living room, was horribly superimposed with images of guns, billyclubs, fists, iron bars.

'On the international scene,' the announcer began to say. Aaron leapt up and snapped the radio off. He stood there for a few seconds, shaking.

Tt can't be,' Cynthia said.

'It is, all right,' he replied.

She sobbed once, her hands covering her mouth. 'Thirty years,' she whispered, the awareness of that length of time pressing heavily on her brain. It was longer than she had yet lived during her entire lifetime. She could not grasp it.

'And they'll come here next,' Aaron said.

'Here?' she repeated.

'You heard him,' he said.'
Tracers
they call it. They'll investigate where he lived, who he saw. And they'll come here.'

Cynthia swallowed, trying to keep her mounting nausea down. 'What can we tell them?' she said. She was still at the point where acceptance of the reality required a coating of hysteria to scale it down to manageable dimensions.

Aaron balled his hands into fists. 'What do you think?' he said. 'We'll cringe and we'll lie. They'll ask questions and we'll pretend we don't know what they're talking about. "No sir," we'll say, "we thought he was a student. No, sir, we didn't realise he was a radical. No sir, we had no idea he sold drugs. Me, sir? I'm a school teacher. Yes sir, very respectable. Of course, sir, I'll be very careful who I associate with in the future. You see, sir, he was a neighbour, and we were just being friendly. No crime there. Very good, sir. Thank you, sir." SHIT!' he exploded.

Cynthia stared straight ahead of her, not seeing anything. At the very moment she was losing one man in her life, the other was ripped away, to be thrown in prison for more years than she could imagine. She could hear the steel doors closing behind her, could sense the suffocating closeness of the prison cell. The picture burned in her mind and she wondered whether she would ever be without it again. It seemed at that moment that so long as Conrad was in jail, she could never again feel free. His capture was her own.

'But they'll file dossiers on us anyway,' Aaron went on. 'And we'll be implicated.' He began to pace the floor.

Cynthia stirred from her trance, Aaron's words mingled with her thoughts. The realisation that it might be decades before Conrad would make love to a woman again had begun to sear her mind. In the face of that, Aaron's worry seemed inane. 'Good,' she said, 'I want to be implicated.'

He smiled grimly at her. 'Tell that to the FBI when they come.' He tossed his head back. 'This isn't a matter of the emotions,' he said. 'This is people who are ready to kill. In their eyes Conrad is a madman who must be destroyed. And if we are involved, they will put the same judgment on us.' He ran his fingers over his hair. 'I don't advise playing games with the situation.'

'But how can it be?' she said. 'Conrad is the last person in the world who would get involved in anything violent.'

'We don't know anything about him,' Aaron told her. 'He told me he once killed a man. He was a revolutionary. Those visits he paid us were only one of his masks.'

Cynthia gazed up at Aaron and looked at him a long time. 'You talk about him as though he were dead,' she said. 'He was your friend, and you seem to have written him off all at once. Don't you care about helping him?'

He took almost a full minute to answer, letting all the changes course through him before his response came forth of its own accord. The woman in front of him, the man in jail, himself a willing prisoner of despair, all the myriad confusion of his lifetime, came together in a single moment. The choice of who he was and where he stood hinged entirely on the answer he gave.

'No,' he said.

Cynthia remained expressionless.

'Of course, sentimentally, I want to. But in practical effective terms, there is nothing I can do. He took his chances to live as a free man, and I respect him for that. I used to envy him. But he was caught, and now he pays for his beliefs. I am a coward, and I remain at liberty to walk around. That's my jail sentence: I get to live with myself, knowing what a failure I am. That's the way life is. I don't want to make a romantic political affair out of it. The people who arrested him are no different from me. It's hard for me to admit that, but it's true. I do nothing to fight them, so I am on their side by default. How can I help Conrad? I'm one of the people who put him in prison. I'll feel bad about it for a long time, but I see no point in taking any road that will put me behind bars too.'

Cynthia stood up. An iron composure gripped her features. She wanted to repress her feelings until she could be by herself. She turned towards the kitchen, to go to the back yard.