The Wild (21 page)

Her response to Danlo's bewilderment was strange. As he watched her carefully slide a black sliver of death into the finger-gun's chamber, her face fell lovely and ruthless in intense concentration at the task at hand. When she had finished, she pulled the black spikhaxo glove over her fingers, looked up at Danlo and said, almost jubilantly. 'I've always loved your faithfulness to ahimsa, you know, but I've never quite been able to share it. If a tiger hunts me, should I be afraid of killing him? I've always dreaded being afraid. I've always dreaded killing anything, but there's always killing, isn't there? Oh, dear Danlo – sometimes it seems that life is nothing but killing and death.'

In the fire of her dark brown eyes and the beautifully controlled passion of her voice, it almost seemed that she sought the chance to slay a tiger, to experience deeply the extreme peril of life. In a way, this was consistent with her purpose as both courtesan and woman. As long as she could remember, she had sought to live more deeply, more truly, and thus to awaken herself to a new way of being. Unfortunately, her inborn temperament and love of life often worked against this goal. Tamara loved all the things of life, and she could never get enough of it, whether it be sex or food, music, drugs, wine, or dance, or conversation, maithuna, rock collecting or intellectual gourmandizing. So keenly did she love the tastes, colours, sounds, and textures of the world that when she was younger, she had often found herself moving from one pleasure to another with all the restlessness and energy of a bee flitting among a field of wildflowers. It was her natural tendency to abandon any activity precisely at the moment when she began to feel tired or bored. Her meditation masters, appreciating her almost bodily hunger for excitement and ecstasy, had warned her that she possessed something of a 'monkey mind', a talent for leaping agilely from one branch of experience to another – but never holding any one experience very tightly or very long. They meant this as no insult, but rather an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of her wonderful vitality. Their criticisms, however, had devastated Tamara. From the very beginning of her novitiate as a courtesan, when she was a shy and nervous girl only twelve years old, she had vowed to overcome the flightiness of her mind. She found within herself immense desires for love and ever more life, and yet she found as well an immense will to control those very desires. All through her novice years and even into her time as a voluptuary, with a ferocious discipline that impressed the elder sisters of her Society, she cultivated for herself a new mind, a 'dolphin mind' as she called it, a way of diving deeply beneath the waves of her life's experience in order to drink in the essence of whatever task or pleasure engaged her. Whether dancing or washing dishes or memorizing the formulae for the methyl-tryptamine series of poisons, she learned the art of concentration, the ecstasy of details. She learned to pay attention to things. And most of all, she learned to enter into any new experience with all her natural verve and zest coupled with a marvellously intense awareness of the world. And so it shouldn't have surprised Danlo to see her strap the spikhaxo onto her lovely hand and step out beneath the full moon onto the beach, but nevertheless he was surprised. The logic of Tamara's life demanded that she experience everything possible as deeply as possible – but human beings are nowise consistent, and their lives are patchwork robes sewn together from various incongruities, whimsies and passions. And compassion. The real Tamara, Danlo thought, the blessed woman whom he remembered so well, would fight like a fury to save her own life. She would fight a tiger – fight all the demons of hell – to protect those she loved. In truth, she could kill, would kill, at need, but she would never seek out fighting or killing for its own sake merely to know what it was like to kill. The real Tamara, he felt certain, in this one instance would hold illogic and compassion closely to herself as tightly as she had grasped his body at their first mating.

After much contemplation and discussion – and the delicate probing of the extreme facility with which Tamara recalled her past – Danlo decided that there must be something wrong with her memory after all. It was not that her memory was not good. In a way, it was much too good. At times, her memory of the moments they had shared was as clear and pure as glacier water, and it was this very purity of memory that disturbed him. For Tamara, unlike himself, had never possessed anything like a perfect memory, and even if she had, her clear recollection of their first meeting or their last all-night dance session bore none of the depth nor murkiness nor hidden currents of real memory. When he looked into her quick, dark eyes, he saw a vast distance between the things she remembered and her most intimate feelings for those things. She seemed to have all the memories that she should have had, but they somehow failed to connect her with her deepest self or with the most vital and beautiful moments of her life. It was almost as if she wore her memory too lightly, as if it were nothing more than a glittering golden robe that she might remove at any time and replace with something more pleasing. But real memory, Danlo thought, was more like naked skin inextricably fused with the body, or rather, it was all deeper tissues and bone and nerves connecting every part of one's bodymind. He decided, then, that the Entity had healed her poorly, or at least incompletely. Perhaps it was part of his test that he discover this. Perhaps this strange goddess was testing the depths of his perception and compassion. But test or no, he must find a way to restore Tamara so that she was truly herself again. He had known this since the moment that he first learned her memories had been destroyed. Somehow he must help heal her – and if this was no part of the Entity's test of him, then it must be his test of himself, of his faith, of his prowess, of his ability to love unconditionally and completely despite the flawed nature of Tamara's soul.

One night, as they were sitting by a driftwood fire down on the beach not far from Danlo's lightship, as Tamara stared into the dancing flames and held his hand beneath the thick red blanket that covered them, Danlo looked at her and asked, 'Would you ... like to practice some of the remembrancing attitudes with me?'

Instantly, her hand tightened in his, the same convulsive squeezing of her finger muscles that would have triggered the spikhaxo glove to fire a dart if she hadn't taken it off before sitting with him. She turned to him in puzzlement. 'It's been a long time, hasn't it? But why would you want to remembrance now?'

In the light of the fire, her eyes were dark liquid pools full of doubt and hurt. He thought that he should be careful of what he said. He thought that he should remind her of why she had once taken an interest in the remembrancer's art. Perhaps he should speak of the courtesans' dream of waking up the cells of the human body, of awakening the whole bodymind so that a new kind of human being might be born. In this way, he might ease her into the attitudes of gestalt and imaging and so trick her into remembrancing herself. And thus into healing herself. As he looked into her soft, trusting eyes, he saw that he easily might have accomplished this little deceit. But he could not bring himself to lie to her. His was the guile of guilelessness, and so after a long time of looking at her, he finally said, 'Because it would be a way ... toward the union that we've always talked about.'

'One soul,' she said. 'One soul in two separate bodies.'

'Do you remember the night we first breathed each other's soul?'

She nodded her head and smiled. Once, on a brilliant night of snow and starlight after they had promised to marry each other, he had held his mouth over her nose and lips, breathing out while she breathed in. And then she had held her mouth over his. In this way, which was the way of Danlo's brothers and sisters among the Alaloi tribes, their spirits had passed into each other and interfused to become one. 'I remember,' she said. 'But why should we seek backward in remembrance for this union?'

'Because we were ... so close.'

Tamara squeezed his hand more tightly. 'I've never been as happy as I am now.'

'I think you would remain here forever, if you could.'

'In our house,' she said. 'With you, here, forever – I'd love that.'

'Then you would never return to Neverness?'

'No, never,' she said.

'Have you forgotten your calling, then? Once a time, you wanted to wake people up, their cells, their ... souls. You wanted to wake up the whole universe.'

At this, she laughed beautifully and looked down toward the ocean shimmering in the moonlight. She breathed in long breaths of salt air and listened to the pounding waves for a moment before saying, 'That was before I came here. There's something about this Earth just as it is – it's already awakened, don't you see? And while I'm here, by the forest, by the water, I feel as awake as I've ever been, perhaps as I ever could be. I don't care about the rest of the universe, Danlo. How should I care?'

Danlo looked down the beach where his lightship gleamed darkly beneath the stars. During the time since his planetfall, the wind had driven sheets of sand up against the diamond hull, half-burying it in a new dune that built a little higher every day. And every day, upon awakening at first light, he promised himself he would dig his ship free in preparation for the moment when the Entity permitted him to continue on his journey. But he always found other things with which to occupy himself, whether it be cooking elaborate meals with Tamara in her kitchen, or dancing with her in the meditation room, or joining on the floor of the fireroom to work their way through the many hundreds of positions of the sexual yogas. Sometimes his lack of mindfulness and his fading sense of duty alarmed him. Sometimes, on those bittersweet nights when Tamara fed him bloodfruit and tea and cried out in a strange voice during their love play, he forgot about his mission to the Vild, even forgot that the dying Vild stars were part of a greater universe whose boundaries were measureless to man.

'Sometimes,' he said, 'on this world, after I wake up in the morning and listen to the ocean ... it is as if I am still sleeping. Sometimes I look at you, breathing, lying so peacefully next to me, and you seem so far away. And then I feel so strange. So ... alone. I wonder if I could ever truly understand you.'

'I just want you to be happy – is that so hard to understand?'

'But I am ... almost happy.'

'And sometimes when we're together, you're almost sad, too.'

'Yes.'

'Is that why you want to practice remembrancing together?'

'There was a moment.' he said. 'The moment when we first saw each other. That is where everything began. Your eyes, the light, the love, in that moment – it was as brilliant as the sun. Do you remember? I would recapture that moment, if I could.'

Beneath their wool blanket, in front of the smoky fire, Tamara turned to face him. She looked at him for a moment and then she said, simply, 'I've always loved you. I always will.'

'Tamara, love is—'

'Love is like the sun,' she said quickly. 'Like the sun, at first – it's all fire and brilliance.'

Danlo looked up into the blue-black sky a moment before asking, 'And then?'

'The sun that burns too brilliantly does not burn long. It explodes, you know. Or it consumes itself and dies.'

'No, no,' he said softly, 'love can never—'

'A love that lasts is more like the sunset,' she said. 'Even as the brilliance fades, the colours deepen.'

'But there must be a way to keep the brilliance,' he said. 'If you look deeply enough, inside the deepness, there is always fire, always light.'

'Oh, Danlo, Danlo – if only that were true.'

'It is true,' he said. 'Shall I show you?'

'You would take me into one of the remembrancing attitudes?'

He nodded his head as he looked at her face all warm and lovely in the light of the fire. 'I would take us into recurrence – we could relive the moment that we first saw each other.'

'Isn't it enough that we remember this moment?'

'But ... to see each other, as we were. To be ourselves again, as we truly are – this is everything, yes? If we relive our first moment together, then we can begin truly to live again, to love again, all the moments of our lives.'

'I'd love that, but...'

'Yes?'

'I'm afraid.'

Yes, he thought as he caressed her fingers, she was afraid, he could see the dread (or awe) of some terrible thing flickering like fire across her face. He thought he understood the nature of her fear. Once before, out of a vain desire to preserve her memories, she had lost him – and lost as well everything most sacred to her. He thought he understood her secret, then. She, this beautiful woman who sat before him with love pouring out of her eyes like water, had an immense gift for love. But her attachment and identification with this primeval emotion was so great that she was always afraid of losing it. This was the secret of her soul, that despite the ecstasies and little affirmations of her life, it would all be meaningless without love.

'But there is nothing to fear,' he said at last. 'Truly, in remembrance, nothing is lost.'

'Then why do I dread it so?'

'I ... do not know,' he said. He turned to gaze at the fire, and in the flash of the leaping flames a startling thought came to him: She is afraid because she is not quite herself yet. Because there is always fear inside fear.

'I dread it,' she repeated. 'And yet I think I long for remembrance, too. And that's so strange. Because if I already remember everything about us, what more is there to know?'

'But there is always more to memory,' he said. 'There are always memories inside memories.'

She considered this for a while, and Danlo thought that she might be afraid of where her memories would lead her. She was afraid of something that he could not quite see, perhaps something dark and disturbing out of her past that was invisible to her as well.

'I used to love the remembrancing ceremonies, didn't I?' she said.

'Yes, you did.'

'Do you think we could make a ceremony together, by ourselves?'