11:11 | by Elton Shanaj

 

Earlier that night, the first night they spent together having met often over meals, Sophia spoke of a new dream she’d had: “We walked along beautiful trees, as he led me through tall pines and flowers stemming from knotted roots. I felt strongly that he was me, this person – my own self as a male – and not for one moment did I doubt it, given we never spoke for some reason; for some reason that wasn’t yet clear to me, I feared this him/me.”

 “Above, on a gray hill, a white wolf kept post,” she halted as Uro’s glance slithered around the kneecaps of her long legs. Yet, she preferred to illustrate her doubts: eyes squinting while the complicit eyelids fluttered with disbelief. He was sure that in her gaze she was asking, ‘This body, this embarrassment, arbitrarily given to me, this thing you like?’ and quickly averted his eyes away from her and ahead of them.

Her gaze lingered near by, over her bed, seeming that if she pressed on with her dream, it would fade away. “Strangely I,” she continued, “I became aware that I was dreaming as we arrived at the end of the trail where a precipice reached down toward the abyss, covered in malachite, moss and then lime. Blinding metal railing shone forth and subsequently I wasn’t aware any longer that I was dreaming.

“I took my eyes off of him, when suddenly he arched his back and threw himself up in the air and over the railing. Right before and while jumping he looked into my eyes for the first time and I was reminded, again, of being simultaneously here and there as there took off into the abyss. My heart leaped forth for fear of losing him, especially because his eyes seemed to express such deep sympathy, such deep understanding. This last recognition was terrifying: my own eyes looking back at myself without a deprecating smile but humble modesty, trying to relay a message, which I’m left to figure out. Or not figure out.”

She licked her lips with a light tongue seeming to question her commitment to the narrative and then perched there the back of her fingers. Slowly, she turned them around caressing the flesh of the upper lip’s crest, while also pressing beneath her teeth an orphaned bottom lip.

While wet and slightly swollen under her fingers’ stamp, her lips reflected back the city’s evening lights, which entered from the windows, undisturbed.

Uro observed her face; her doubtful look betraying her firm chin. From the moment they had met, a sense of knowing her or her situation had suggested the presence of feelings shared. As he listened, it occurred to him that the theatrics of the lips implied a tacit request: she sought someone whose inclination would show her genuine penance, someone apart from this man who possessed her eyes, who may have impinged into the most intimate space, without grace.

“I knew I’d not find him. I quickly understood that he was very much alive in some form, maybe united with the trees. Only if, I thought, I could put my hands on a spot of dirt and know that it was there he fell, and once more find the knowing, modest look I had recognized!  I searched in vain for something that would bring his message to me and instead found the white wolf eating what seemed like a small little pile.

“I stopped, and he raised his head and showed me his mouth, stained brown all across, a kind of semi-hardened mud crackling against his white bristle fur. And then, the smell that had overtaken the forest scent broke with the sulfuric pungency of fresh excrement. I smelled this in my sleep.”

Propped up against the pillow, she allowed her head to lean sideways, appearing tired and pensive, yet content. Uro had easily sunk into the wild arrangement in composition, the extravagant bouquets of surrealist symbolism she’d so effortlessly narrated. Besides, the tenderness in her languid voice and in her gestures invited him to see beyond her dreams and perhaps unveil a deeper awareness.

Before their relationship proceeded any further, he hoped to find in her an eager listener. He thought her reaction important insofar as he could ascertain through it some qualities he had long suspected were corrupt in his visions of penance. That’s what he called them, even though to everyone else they were memories of the past. To the people he trusted most they were fears of the future. He knew that he trusted Sophia, on that there was no doubt.

Beginning with his first relationship, with Kana, the strongest visions and the precursor reality within which he learned how to live were established, “The same way a laughter surfaces: encouraging well-being while secretly ignoring its own echo,” he qualified while rubbing his forefingers together, as if rolling stubborn tobacco flakes into an organic, unavoidably imperfect cigarette. Sophia smiled.

He had felt a contingent pain, equal to a warning, at the first sight of Kana, unable to resist turning his head toward the click-clack of scented thumps on the carpeted university library. His training as student worker scheduled under Kana’s supervision, herself a junior student worker, was not what he had expected. Her perfume, he swiftly had noticed, was sweeter where the last vestige of her cleavage ended, considerably high above the v-shaped black blouse. While instructing him how to file books in alphabetical order she’d also seen it as pertinent to demonstrate the electrical currency with which the underside of her arms, elbows, thighs and the side of her breasts could manage in acrobatic synchrony scaling his newfound infatuation.

His amazement the following months had grown at how Kana had wore black with such effrontery; her attire wherever she went had consisted only of short mini-skirts or low-cut cotton blouses.  A finely spread face-powder would hide the few coarse pockmarks anchored on both cheeks, while the black eyeliner she had used with precise accuracy had struck-through uprising sorrow.

It had later been his opinion that to find the crusty paint necessary she must have known that her suffering showed and it then became obvious that she regarded her ability to persuade and hide her pain beyond all doubts and as such, without make-up, she felt naked. Not many other girls (she was not yet a woman, as Uro was not yet a man) would wear any separate collars around their necks, but for Kana the collar was a signature, there always rested a black sail of feelings over the white flesh.

Was it true that had he had the time to escape in the beginning, escape indulging his hand on a perky nipple barely shielded under a summer t-shirt while she pretended sleep, her smarting hand that gratuitously had included in its strike his cheek, upper lip and eye, his profuse apologies for the inappropriate act of trespassing the latest limits of friendship, the strange embrace that had followed as they both simulated intercourse, then nothing would have happened, and he would have never been a witness to the self mutilation of her hands, the right inflicting deep scratches on the left and the favor being returned alternatively upon the masochistic commands of hindered sobs?

Sophia remained quiet and said nothing. Perhaps she hadn’t heard him or perhaps she was still buried deep within her own dream. They lay in bed, close enough to kiss, but did not. She inhaled the conditioned air with eager briskness and slowly exhaled an aging thought, a long sigh, which he imagined to be swathed in pain. He followed Sophia’s movement as she took off her coiled cobra earrings from each earlobe and was suddenly struck by a swelling surge of empathy.

“Sophia, I don’t know if you’d … I don’t know if this is appropriate, completely appropriate to continue telling you considering we have seen each other for not that long…”

“I don’t want to know, now, I mean…” she interrupted and nervously got up and treaded to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. The sight of the shut door was enough to send his will dangling at half mast. He had wishfully assumed that his visions would be clear in meaning and discernible overall. To show that seven years had passed not for nothing, but were a time of reflection, or a collection of sensitivities, in short, a maturing self, his self, had emerged.  He thought he understood the message left behind by the ‘modest look’ in the male that was her, imbued as it were still alive in the top-soil of her dream.

Perhaps, the ambivalent presence of an absurd romanticism in Uro’s outlook, which he recognized, pointed to a more serious problem: the reinterpretation of the past exhorted the birth of a surreal world, of needs surreal.

“I know... I know about your childhood, about what happened.”

She coughs out a question, “What…?”

“It’s better if I talk to you, in person, not over the phone.”

“No,” she commands, as her voice climbs into the receiver like sound vines in pursuit of light. “Tell me what you know!”

You hesitate; you hope she’ll understand and can’t wait any further. The burden of knowing has been hanging around your neck for three days, “I’ve checked your email.” As you say it, your courage is frozen on the spot by her frightening yelp. “Don’t be angry. Please come upstairs and we’ll discuss it! Please!” you plead.

She drops her receiver and the line goes dead. The novel silence in your dormitory room is intimidating. Facing Kana and justifying your act of stealing her password seems now a task well over your prior confidence, already shaken by three days of agony over reading the appalling correspondence between him and her. What toll must the moral dilemmas, abuse and coercion have taken on her psyche? What have you done? The phone rings again, pulsating once, and then no more. A minute passes and another ring and then no more. What torture. You call back but her line is busy. As you put down the receiver, the phone rings. You wait and pick it up on the second pulse and can hear heavy breathing pleading for words. She doesn’t speak. The line goes dead again.

How he remembered of dark rooms and sleepless dreams with poetic clarity, but the shame of it was that Kana’s face drowned in the skeletal streaks of her mascara, caked-on, sealing the exodus of all tears and he only remembered the sleepless rooms and dark dreams with poetic flair. What shame!

Mascara she learned how to wear on her fifteenth birthday. When her eyes - Uro imagined as vivid, those of a brooding child - predatorily set on the future image beyond the mirror, acknowledged the shadow. Of the man, the brother-in-law, the father figure. Broaching his caring hand between her bare shoulders, late at night, when her sister was away, when her naked skin was only a night-robe layer near. Did she resist, push away the cold hand that fed her hopes? Did her innocence take refuge under the ancestral shell of self-preservation? In consequence, she must have accepted the aftermath as an already written account from the hands of poets he gave her to read, the ancients who knew.

The sister never found out. A secretive love was born between him and her, the forty year old and the fifteen year old. Is love the word? Maybe for the young, maybe while the back-stepping retreat to the cavernous heart of the shameful is still underway, love is the right word. He continued to flatter her, buying her more books, needless to say envisioning himself in control, his own Humbert. Kana sought confirmation and occasionally reproached her sister for neglecting the husband, him, who kept himself at a distance which she mourned by means of the apocalyptic fantasy of a teen urged to age beyond her years.

He couldn’t afford to keep her as close as she would have desired in the years following up to her high-school graduation and under the goodwill premise of the benevolent family man he managed to send her to college, first year paid, in a different continent. There was even the promise that he would soon enough meet with her, maybe join her too. Had she grown up and forgiven this man, the brother-in-law, the father figure?

“Why did you do it? You had no… You had no right. Why?”

“Please come over, everything is alright,” you plead. Once more: the dial-tone. The sounds of despair, sounds so fresh they’re echoing in numerous attempts to make themselves understood, urge you to turn the lights off, to wait. For what?

The phone rings, “I’m downstairs, let me in!”

With haste you turn the lights on and rush to meet her. She wears a dark grey coat with the collar up and all buttons done, resembling at worst a military coat and at best a mediocre black garment. You attempt an embrace which is ditched with forthright vehemence as mascara smears on your left cheek. Following behind her in the corridor you can’t help but notice the speed with which each firm step wants to leave you behind, forget that it was you following.

She enters the room and looks around as if for the first time, but only moves her neck about; she knows where everything is, the twin bed lined up against the cream wall, the kitchen table with one shaky chair and the four utensils resting in the bowl, all clean. Her strength seems to give under her knees as they shake right before she climbs on the bed, stretching her coat at the hips and collar as she curls alone facing away.

“Why did you do it?” her voice finds you once it bounces off the wall. Standing in the middle of the room you can’t hide, although you wish it was possible. As you’re still formulating an acceptable, sensitive (considering the situation) answer to why you went behind her back and read what you had, it is impossible not to believe yourself: ultimately it was because of good-will. You just want to help, understand the source of symptoms she had tacitly insinuated through bulimia (you had pretended not to notice), top-of-hand chronic sores from scratches which could only be justified as prude self-punishment for so long.

You tell her about your intentions wishing to turn the tide on the subsequent consequences your actions have taken. Even though you have no heart to bring up his name or the calm of judgment to discuss with her the damage she fends off unacknowledged, a general even if pedantic desire to defend your actions is damning. Consoling her, maybe offering your arms despite the expected dismissal of your sympathy, should be the brave thing to do. You sit near and touch her back with your fingertips. As expected she writhes and objects but then gives her hand. You’re glad to communicate in this way, earn her trust again and eagerly take her hand, cusped in a fist, inside both of yours. It is cold and stiff and you rub it and draw your mouth close and exhale warm breaths.

The smell is of antiseptic and the hand’s surface glistens where cream has been applied to heal the scratches. She whines when rubbing her hand your fingers brush against her wrist. Not only that, but your fingertips feel moist and upon turning her hand around you discover that several surface incisions run from one end to the other. Quickly you pull-up her coat sleeve to see that there are over twenty irritated cuts bleeding collectively and the blood has been soaked by the sleeve. You hold her by the shoulders and force the other arm’s sleeve up and see more cuts. Momentarily falling in shock you let go and she runs to the bathroom locking the door behind her. As you try to get a grip on the situation, running a gamut of questions ‘What have I done?’ ‘Is this my fault?’ ‘Is she going to die?’ while the sounds of dry heaving are followed by flushing water, you realize how fatal it is to hope. A total lack of respect for the irrational has brought you to your knees with one blow. It has shown you how vulnerable your aspirations are, if that’s what they are.

You knock on the door asking her to come out and when sounds cease anxiety builds in. “I’m calling 911. Please, come out. Are you well?” is what you mutter. Barely able to orient yourself in your own room, you grab the phone and clumsily push 9 when she has left the bathroom and takes the receiver and puts it down. You look at her seeing an image as it washes without getting wet and dry your eyes with humiliating effort. Her sad face has stopped crying you can see; her hair is tangled where wet spots appear at random and she begins to unbutton her coat.

“I’m sorry!” you say and would like to believe that it is being said with passion, checking your tone and saying it again, hearing instead a beggar plead for more than sympathy, then saying it again in what you believe is a terminal tone of voice, of humility, but it’s too late for that.

“Here I am. I am yours! You own this now. What you wanted,” she says in a sick steady voice as the gray coat opens over her pale breasts and pubic hair, you see for the first time, over her bare shoulders and then it drops to the floor. Nothing has seemed so unerotic, frightening in its multitude of implications before, yet so powerfully striking, a gesture which says without needing words that your hands are now tainted.

“No, no… Please, no, that is…” and there are no words that will take back, clarify whatever it was that you wanted. You stumble for words and fret for the sheet covering your bed, which you use to cover her, indirectly also offering an embrace. But she pulls the sheet down with psychotic anger leaving you to embrace her naked body in terror, “Hold me!” she says through her teeth, “It’s all yours now. You wanted this. Take it!” continues a cold voice, otherworldly, “Do you not like it? Do you not find me attractive?”

But all you can do is shake your head indiscriminately, without purpose. “Yes, you’re attractive. No, put this on. I don’t own you.” It is, now, too late to withdraw your candidacy, you are in her eyes a willing accomplice, the new owner of her nakedness, her secret, although you think otherwise. Your vague wish was to free her of the oppression your gender had instated, unmark the body’s shame from her psyche, but instead you have succeeded in doubling the shame.

Next, you pick up the bread knife and overcome by her desperation use it on your wrist, imitating her wounds. “I don’t own you. I don’t want to hurt you,” you seem to say and say as much with the knife in your right hand as its obliging teeth dig in the unwilling flesh of your left wrist, parting the blue veins until minuscule spurts insignificant in size burst without glory. “Look, look,” you want to say and show her the most basic of human relations, empathy; prove you’ve taken her to heart, without pity. “Your pain is my pain,” you say and you don’t know how far pathos will take you and cringe with fear as she observes your act for no more than ten seconds, seeming amused more than anything. You see her throatskin purge down a terse smile and with her body now covered she slides and lies down on the bed, her face toward you but her eyes somewhere else and shortly they’re closed and seem peaceful. You stop. Quite angry you refuse to understand how she can sleep. But, she sleeps, clearly unimpressed by your disingenuous act, your gesture. You promise you’ll never tell anyone. She can go back again to forgetting and you hope too, as well.

Uro had eventually arrived to question his reasons for joining Kana’s dark abyss as he had done, as no more than an ignorant being who assumes the other’s ignorance before assessing his own resilience, but only after a sense of shame for all that had followed echoed into some organ (maybe the heart) without much of his consent.  He was sure that in a way what he had recognized on Kana’s body had the quality of an incense smudge-stick alight – the smudge-stick used in the ritualistic blessing of new beginnings – as the smoke of shame had drawn him near. Blessed be the shame of a new soul!

Sophia came out of the bathroom having washed her face and completed the hygienic necessities before going to bed. She saw Uro pinned on the edge of the bed appearing terse and said in earnest, “Whatever you have to say, I doubt you can be true,” her voice filling the quiet room, “out of an inability we all have… you know… truth is elusive. And, besides, I’d rather not be compared to anyone from your past.”

Brought back, or otherwise caught unawares by her statement, universally true, Uro felt the urge to at least hold his ground on the particulars, even though he believed his intentions were beyond comparing the two together. Yet, those elements unique to one’s existence but which repeat in every setting, the same smiles, same cries, same fears, which feed the need to be loved by those who cannot love us and to love those who cannot be loved, could be easily taken as comparable. “You’re probably right. My goal, I don’t know, my point was that by telling you my past I’d make you aware, warn you, because I’m not entirely clear what danger I present. I should leave that up to you, I suppose. You’re right,” he conceded, thinking that in the end he’s only responsible for his actions. Eventually, he thought, the only particulars that should matter to him are maybe his own, the ones that delineate his island against the desolate blue.

Had Sophia too forgiven the man who possessed her eyes? And in the silence of reflection found the gift of distance? He hoped so, even though if there were any signs to read in order to confirm this wish, he was at a loss of finding them. What worried her? He was ready to admit guilt, consider himself an accomplice to male aggression.  And he acted with conviction even before acknowledging where his loyalty lay. As a male, his needs were foremost practical; his were the same needs the male gender exhibits while in a collective erection to the summit of dominance.  

 She drew near his lips and let him taste the cleanness of her tongue. “You’re the last danger that should ever frighten me,” she whispered. Whatever benevolent impression he had parted seemed satisfying. He was glad to be kissing. After all, the expectations of this night had long been labored on by both and he caressed her face and shoulders listening with anticipation. What sounds would excite him? He opened his eyes and saw that hers were partially closed. She looked carried away, as if drunk or high. He closed his again and allowed an electric silhouette of pink or ruby tint spark-up inside his eyelids in her image and kissed her rather passionately. Short euphonious sighs broke off her chest at the right moment, or what seemed to him the right moment, and he guided his hands on her breasts, feeling them, cautiously.

When he opened his eyes again making sure that he wasn’t going at it alone, he was surprised by her guarded face, welcoming nevertheless. He wasn’t the only one concerned for what may wait, or at least that smile which gradually seemed to siphon through a sour thought said as much. She may share with me, he thought, her bare being and I should be ready, fully ready to accept it.

She pulled back, briefly in silence before chuckling, “We’re going to fuck?!” He opened his eyes, deliberately taking his time, as if he had gotten used to the darkness inside his eyelids while they’d kissed and discretely wiped his lips with the back of his fingers.

“I…I’m sorry, you can’t see my body. Sorry.” She withdrew and turned off the only light, an ambient yellow light in a corner, as the luminous city crept back into the room. For a while her silhouette was grey and shifting. She was everywoman and it seemed that in the process she had grown a new shadow. He thought about her body, maybe more than he would have had it not been brought up. He liked her long legs which she didn’t seem to mind showing in shorts. There was no shame in her legs; they exuded health, of strong stock carrying-on her tall frame properly.

He extended his hands out with the intent to ease her darkness and when he found her she dropped to her knees and she kissed them. Her kindness seemed exaggerated, but he was ready to accept her how she was along with her expressed embarrassment. He said what he thought was appropriate, an inclusive appreciation, “Everything about you is attractive, and there is nothing wrong with you. I like your looks.”

But she must have not believed him, “I’m damaged goods,” she said in a tone of voice that could also be paired with ‘I’m not here.’ “You’ve heard the expression, I’m sure. I’m not comfortable with who I am. You understand.”

“Shshshh…Come here.” His hands clasped the cavity between her armpits and he easily channeled the feeling toward sexual excitement. She gently resisted and staying there unbuttoned his pants and tried to pull them off. He opposed her efforts by not lifting his weight.

She looked up at him. “Do you not want me to put my mouth on you?”

Slightly embarrassed, he carried her on the bed.

“Anything wrong?”

“No, not at all, I want you up here, next to me.” He could see her face; he could see the skin on her forehead shrink with curious pleasure. They both spread under the sheets and she kissed his chest as he, in turn, caressed her, running his fingers through her hair.

Their excitement grew as they both removed each other’s underwear, even though she kept on her shirt. The moment was finally theirs, having shed off the spectacles of Uro’s visions and the admonitions of her dream, all toward one goal, the short lasting but ebullient chance of sexual climax. Combined physical effort caused enough heat that Sophia finally decided to take off her shirt and this allowed their sweat to mix over their timorous bodies, suspended palms firmly digging into each other. He found the raw gratification of rudimentary grunts exciting, her sounds synchronized with his thrusts. Soon, a silent trembling born from below her abdomen escalated everywhere, unwinding her body from his in a flash. His climax came right after, when the vessels of his penis, caught in the present, trembled with pleasure; whiteness washed over between his eyes and eyelids and then a muscle numbness spread like a warm touch below the skin.

They embraced under the newfound pretense of sexual intimacy, which seemed absolute and self-justifying as their sweat began to dry off.  

The air was filled with their scent, encouragingly sour.

“Can I hold your penis?”

Uro nodded with some uncertainty.

She lay on her side supporting herself on one elbow, her breasts resting on each other over his chest. Her hand crawled on his stomach and lifted his penis as she observed herself. When her grip was conclusive she turned towards him for a brief moment and slowly brought her eyes back where her hand was, gentle with its possession. He found the request strange but satisfying, an after-bonding for which all he needed was to be available; if this made her comfortable with her nakedness, then so be it. As she kept her eyes on her hand, he kept his on her profile, outlined against the window’s incoming light. He tried to discern some emotion from the dark side of her face, hardly seeing and rather imagining a pervasive calmness.

Time weighed in moments passed like that, his penis under her care, fixed between her fingers and palm. She chuckled in forced irreverence, “I’ve never held one in my hand, to look at. It’s strange. Soft. You’d think no harm could ever be caused by this limp mass,” and shook her head.

Her dream of the man who possessed her eyes, naturally lent itself into Uro’s thoughts after her spoken words. Was this how one made peace and offered forgiveness? The limp mass lay limp, shrinking under all the scrutiny. He wanted to say that it was shrinking out of shame, but was that true? Peace and forgiveness, shame and penance, those were things of the mind, not the body. He thought about the body: the body didn’t know.

“If I tell you, you’ll probably not like me. Why would you?”

“Not if you tell lies.”

Sophia laughed, “My parents don’t want to know, so I’ve stopped telling them. Only my shrink, but that’s as if to say, only the walls. You know, this, holding this, your penis like this has softened me more than the times I’ve been under hypnosis and have thought, believed to be squeezing a particular penis in anger, punishing it.”

“If you feel the need to tell, I would listen.” He looked at her, “I can’t dislike you now.”

“Maybe you would… maybe you would. Our little town, where I grew up before going to college, had these two or three rich families that practically owned the sheriff, the court, everything. I went to college far from there and worked my ass off at a fast food, which over time made my disease worse, this degenerative muscle tissue problem I have – it’s under control now – but back then the pain would seize me like clamps extending from head to toe and wherever I was I had to lie down, fall in the fetal position and wait 40 minutes, one hour, or more sometimes until it passed. While I was in shock, like that, the only senses I had were my eyes and my ears. My voice would go away, my skin buzzed and sizzled on the surface and inside I was numb, but I could hear and I could see, which did me no good, so I would close my eyes and pretend to be sleeping. One of the sons from one of the rich families befriended me, he was way older and still in college but I didn’t mind, I didn’t have many friends anyway. Just like that we got together and I moved in with him and could quit my job.

“He was quiet most of the time and drank quite a lot. I still, I don’t know, have these left over sounds, these shadows, a red dirty lampshade which I remember fell over and didn’t break, and fell next to my head as I was down on the carpet, waiting for the seizure to pass. I don’t remember if the lamp fell before he pulled down my pants or after – maybe I struggled and pushed it down – but that light, you know, was so bright I couldn’t see anything and it made me think for a while that I had imagined it, that nothing had happened. He would adjust my clothes enough so that they were on like before and once the pain was over it would leave my whole body aching, every inch of it felt cut open.

“I was terrified to confront him after the first time, I recall, that happened. I wished it wasn’t true, maybe he’d just been holding me. The thing was that during that time my seizures were more frequent than when I was working, almost twice a week. I’m not sure how often he did this to me. I was on the floor again, and this time I remember hearing him behind me, and I remember loud moaning and I opened my eyes in terror. I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t move. What is he doing? This can’t happen. That’s all I thought.”

Uro put both arms around her and they felt heavy. Here is a person, violated, betrayed, he thought. Blood thumped his ears. Sophia let go of his penis and turned around with her shoulders measuring against his chest and they were cold.

“When I could move again, I went up to him and asked point blank, ‘Are you having sex with me when I’m sick, lying down there, in pain, you asshole, animal?’ I threw an empty bottle or something like that and I left that night and drove home. But, what do you know, they wouldn’t believe me. ‘No,’ they kept saying, ‘he wouldn’t do such a thing. Besides, you want to stay with him. They’re a wealthy family,’ or they said, ‘they can pay for your cures.’ I couldn’t sue him, no one cared to know that I was a victim, or that he may do this to other women, or that he had made me sicker.

“The worst part is that I never got an apology. He wouldn’t acknowledge it and never said ‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t know why that would change anything, I would still feel like shit, like I feel now, I guess. It’s… what do they say, I’d be moving on, I guess. But it’s a damn shame I have to live with it.”

Uro said nothing. He wanted to say that he was sorry, but retrieved his impulse. What would sorry mean from him? What did he know? She continued to sob and it was obvious that retelling had made her tired, altered her demeanor.

“Do you still like me now?” and she really seemed to care what the answer was. She stopped and held her sobs.

“Of course, I’m, I wish there was something I could do, ease your pain.” Another thought, he kept to himself, warned in vague terms that he liked Sophia more or less because she was one of the hurt. It was beyond his understanding how he found them or they found him, the moment when eyes met and something in him or in them or both shared in private, without his knowledge, that he was the chosen one. Yet, his memories of Kana questioned this version. Something sinister, larger than Uro, but of him nonetheless, had imposed this journey, which he tried to understand, as best as he could through the visions, the visions of penance.

“That’s good,” she said, her syllables spread unevenly, like creaking doors opening to sleep. He wanted to follow her. He felt tired, yet the bright light from the red dirty lampshade shone between his eyes and eyelids with blinding vengeance.  A sigh welled up in his chest pushing against his teeth as they knit together like a dam, ready to hold back the darkness he’d breathed in. She lay quiet under his arms, her regular breathing made more regular by her sleep. He lifted the sheet covering both of them to look at her. A beautiful back aligned on her spine sunk on the mattress below them, muscle and flesh were held together under her skin, reborn. How could anyone…? His sigh brushed her back and she shivered and slid away and curled into herself. He let the sheet down, incapable of embracing her again, at least not yet and slept.

He woke up in a daze. When he woke up, his neck was stiff and his whole body ached. Where am I crossed his mind and a glimpse at the window confirmed that night hadn’t still turned to the grey ash of dawn. First, he looked to his side and noticed that Sophia had moved further away, near the edge, shrouded from head to toe with the sheet they had shared. He, on the other hand, lay naked.

With some effort he stood on his elbows, first one and then the other, weighing the urgency of going to the bathroom. Fragments from a dream flashed in sequence. He recalled to have stood on the banks of the river of Forgetting, he somehow had accepted it was called that, and followed its flow. The river snaked over a brown valley and entered the mouth of a mountain, leading to a cave.

He decided he had to go to the bathroom after all. Careful not to wake Sophia, he crawled out of bed. The thought about wearing something had him linger but he quickly realized the unnecessary effort that would require, considering it would come off on the toilet anyway. His sphincter muscles contracted and finally were released when he sat down.

In the cave he had to strike a match to overcome the stark darkness and under the flickering light saw a back sitting at the edge of the river. It stood there, gray hair clung together in a bun and some waved free above the collar bone. The light flickered against the cave wall on one side, and on the other it did not care to return. At first, he looked around with some anxiety, not knowing the identity of the figure and wondered why the river of Forgetting was silent. And then, he proceeded to discern the figure’s profile: a manly nose with a protruding ridge extended a few hairs below the bushy eyebrows, thin lip lost into a sunken cheek, and the arms slightly trembling. The skin was old and folded, especially under the shoulder blades and over the kidneys, but that did not deter the straight posture from keeping erect.

The arms collected water from the river and slowly poured it over the body. Steam rose in bouts indicating that the water was hot or that the body was hot and the skin gradually turned transparent, a kind of pinkish blue or a bluish pink. Layers of skin seemed to disappear bringing to the surface long winding veins and clean flesh. Then the hands pulled out from the front several fistfuls of entrails and set about cleaning with great care. An ancestral voice chanted in a lonely procession and the hands cleaned. The palms rubbed together and sometimes the knuckles were turned on the palms and the chanting grew lauder.

What sins and shame dwell in here/In the pit of my stomach/The coiled true religion.

The figure was no longer on the edge of the river, but in fact, water had advanced and covered the entrails that remained unclean. The hands worked faster while the ancestral voice chanted.

What sins and shame dwell in here/In the pit of my stomach/The coiled true religion.

What sins and shame dwell in here/In the pit of my stomach/The coiled true religion.

What sins and shame dwell in here/In the pit of my stomach/The coiled true religion.

The water reached his feet. Sitting on the toilet he wasn’t too sure what happened next. He thought he’d woken up without leaving the cave, but another version suggested that a white wolf had appeared. The inference was too obvious, so he thought harder if the white wolf had really appeared and if so, what had happened. Maybe the manifestation of the white wolf was an after thought, a reconstruction; the need to make sense from his visions, which had gathered much weight.

There was no longer a need to sit. Uro got up and while reaching for the toilet paper, observed the singularity of what he had produced. He got down on his knees. Uro’s porous expulsion floated unbroken and proportionate. He concluded he had understood nothing. Sophia knew there was no apology to be had. That the humiliation endured at the core of her being was irreversible.

His cowardly nature was the reason why he had understood Kana so poorly, so inappropriately. While conceiving his visions which would, when finished, reveal the unknown he could embrace, a mousy voice rose from his words, touting his sacrifice. But in truth, he had performed his part as an observer and nothing else. He had unjustly resented Kana’s disdainful eyes on him when he used the bread knife as a gesture of loyalty. Loyalty to whom? She needed nothing less than her dignity, nothing less than her trust, returned. And for as long as none of these immeasurable necessities would ever be rendered to her, shame knew no boundaries.

He held his weight with one hand on the toilet rim and felt with heightened curiosity the coolness of the water. With all of his fingers he fished out what once had belonged to him. Even though the water felt cold, the unbroken lump of shit still retained some heat, taken from his body. An urge swelled up inside his chest, momentous in effect but he dismissed it quickly as the persuasion of a cowardly self. His eyes saw the pores expand: sizable air pockets ridding the surface as the hand advanced toward his mouth and with no effort at all he stretched his mouth wide enough. The partially squashed lump crushed into itself grazing his teeth and sat salient on his tongue for an eternal moment he could afford to borrow or lend, and swallowed.