13
Besides being merciful to me for allowing me to end my day without pressing any issues about the rally, Ava was still personable, even though I didn’t deserve it—even though I unilaterally turned off because I chose to escape any explanations—any reliving—of the incidents at the Dome. I didn’t want to worry her about Chaz on the prowl, either.
I found my tattered shirt in the garbage container in the kitchen. Looking at it I rubbed my bruised chest again, which was blossoming black and yellow. I respected Ava for not even wondering out loud how something like that could have happened to my shirt. She saw it and didn’t even want to imagine.
Actually, she was always very good to me. Very patient, too. Even during some very grumpy times that were to come. I’d cook the meals and homemake, while she worked a do-nothing librarian job for a few dollars.
“It’s just temporary,” she had said, “until I can find a better world. And no, I don’t usually read anything. It’s hard enough just stomaching some of the titles.” Nevertheless, she would regularly regale me with stories from the front counter, laugh-out-loud funny had they not been about pathologic fetishes or animal “husbandry.”
The schmuck she had been married to in this layer had had no life insurance, so we had to get by on her minimum wage. The house was paid for, which made it possible. She got around mainly by her suburban bicycling, ever watchful for killer taxis and PincerLock neighbors. All of this time she had still spurned the use of her car, now a late model Piranha, but I would fire it up every few days anyway, just to keep its battery at the ready should the need ever arise or our courage ever become foolhardy. Nevertheless, I often dreamt of the time we’d have to resort to taking off in it, but I couldn’t say whether the dream was a nightmare or not.
The bicycle, however, was just fine for her, helping her get from home to her job and back, interspersed with small-time grocery hauls. The library where she worked wasn’t much of one; it wasn’t anything I expected. I went there once to surprise her, even though I knew she wouldn’t like the idea. The whole set up took away any enjoyment a library could give. A person could only have access to the card files and then could request a book by giving the number to Ava behind the counter. No browsing through aisles, no paging through magazines. The only chair one could curl up in, to read a little bit of a book, was at home. I knew Ava did some browsing herself, as she was the only one who could; I knew she was learning about this layer, for she often came home depressed. And that was just from reading the titles.
Constantly I warned her about Chaz, to keep her vigilance up always. After she finally heard about my Superdome experience that evening, she was sure to heed my admonitions. In fact, she came home the next day with some Radio Shack wireless burglar alarm system we spent the afternoon installing.
The library was on Bonnabel Boulevard, which wasn’t very far away from her neighborhood—maybe a couple of miles at most. But she had to cross Veterans Boulevard at some point, and since this was a main thoroughfare, I hated to have her exposed like that with Chaz on the trail. Luckily, Dr. Landrum or Chaz didn’t even know her last name, so the only hope lay in spotting her. Or me.
My admiration for Ava, the working woman, was especially strong as she had been a self-unemployed housewife prior to her husband’s death. She had never seemed disquieted by the transition. We seldom strayed outside together, so there was plenty of time for indoor conversation, philosophic as well as mundane, silly, and nostalgic. One evening when I was feeling particularly pent in, I talked her into going with me to one of my favorite places in City Park. We had been engaged in one of the philosophical variations of indoor conversation when a particularly troubling episode of Lifestyles of the Glib and Self-indulgent started on the T.V.
“Come on,” I beseeched her, “we’ve got to get out of her. I’ve got to get out of her. Come with me.” She was all for it, getting the chance to get out with me for a change, instead of alone.
We both rode bikes out to the park, I borrowing the late Ralph Ebe’s ten-speed. Ava rode her thick-tired girl’s bike and kept up with me easily, biking as she did every day. It took us only about twenty minutes before we reached Marconi on the west side of the park.
“Where is this place?” she asked me. I beckoned her to follow me. We darted down this lane and that path, twisted our way around and behind a levee that protected the park from the I-610 which cut right through it, and then we arrived at my spot.
“Oh, Ralph, this is wonderful,” she said as she stood on one leg, balancing on her bicycle. The place was called Popp’s fountain. It was a Romanesque arrangement of concentric rows of columns around a circular pool. Wood straddled across the circular path of the columns in a connect-the-dots fashion to give it a Stonehenge-like feeling. This had been the first time I had seen it after numerous layers, and the fountain wasn’t working. Some of the columns had damage, too, from the elements and vandals. But the unruly vines that grew along the structure more than made up for the disrepair, creating a verdant oasis. Ava and I sat on the rim of the pool. It was a particularly mild evening in late November, but we wore wind-breakers and that had turned out to be a good idea. It was dusk and, even though we wouldn’t be able to stay there for very long, we still enjoyed the rewarding setting. The philosophical flavor of our conversation was what had inspired me to woo her to this place. She was both smart and a good listener. She readily continued in the spirit of the discussion.
I described to her my honest impression of my life—of life itself—with the sliding, out-of-body experiences, and the like. We both knew that there were at least two progressions, one good and one bad, and that we were on the bad cruise. After listening, she explained her version of things.
“Your scheme of things is very simplistic compared to mine,” she said. “Whereas you look at the whole sliding affair as linearly traversing one spot to another, replacing the exister du jour with yourself, a true exister, my whole take on it is more circumspective.”
“Circumspective? Am I not circumspective enough?”
“You’re linear. You’re on a number line, heading in one particular direction on it. You’re so one-dimensional.”
“Ouch.”
“No, you know what I mean. All of these layered me’s or you’s, simultaneously existing, make up the whole being, the whole existence. True existers are only the occasional pin-point beings of the whole, beings with some organic capability of awareness of perspective.”
“Perspective. Hmm. Don’t you have to rise above it all to have a perspective? Doesn’t portend well for a number line and being one-dimensional, does it?” I smiled, feigning hurt, but she knew she was convincing me.
“Perspective is the key,” she emphasized. “Remember before when I told you I thought that we were travelling in this worse direction because we had originally made some selfish slides way back when,” referring to our hatted cafe conversation right after our push through the magnet.
“Yes,” I answered.
“We’re only going this way because we have pushed ourselves. The magnet helped, certainly, but we set up the direction. We made these ancient selfish slides, only to see the effects of our selfishness on an innocent world—the real victim. And the more we did it, the worse the world would be, with our perspective of the difference which our selfishness had caused around us.”
“And true existers who would slide for good, wholesome reasons would get sent into ‘the nice’ direction?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “They would see the world better for their goodness”; she smiled, adding, “for their wholesomeness.” I considered her points. “Like Mother Teresa,” she added, on a roll.
“Who?” I asked her.
“Mother Teresa. The nun in India. Come on, you know.”
“No, really. She wasn’t in my Survey.”
“This nun that lived for the poor. Did everything her whole life for the poor. She was this really good person.”
“I guess where I’ve come from there were a lot of people like that.” I laughed sarcastically. “I guess not so many anymore.”
“Well, take her, anyway,” Ava continued. “If she’s a true exister, and if she would slide around, I’d bet she’d be one to go the other way. Doing good and seeing better and better places.”
“It sure sounds a lot to me like good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell,” I deduced. “Hardly an original concept.” She flipped out both palms in conclusion to having made her point. “Well, Ava, I guess that’s a way to look at it,” I agreed. “I wonder if this Mother Teresa would get to such wonderful places by all of her slidin’ good deeds that the poor would eventually not be poor. She’d be out of a job.”
“That wouldn’t matter,” she said. “All of these worlds co-exist as total existence; that all of these Avas, and Johns, and Mothers Teresa, for that matter, co-exist in the prismatic worlds that add up to not just true existing, but total existing. Deja vu is nothing more than a spill-over of awareness from one version of someone to another version of that someone.” She stopped to consider where her own words were taking her. “There is a very small piece of your own Abby that killed herself when the Abby here did herself in.”
“There’s a thought,” I said uncomfortably.
“Sorry,” she offered.
“I’ll give you the reason I have real trouble with that,” I argued. “If it were true what you say, then it really doesn’t matter at all what you and I, even as true existers, do. It all gets averaged out in this total existence you talk about.”
“It does matter,” she said to me. “Goodness is its own reward. The total existence does not average out to zero. It can be better with better things in it. The sum of the parts can have a vector force of improvement. And the whole is greater than the mere addition of the parts; that difference, that vector force for improvement, being the soul.”
Soul! Somewhere there had to be a soul. Not a static boxed-in entity on my naïve number line, but a dynamic, timeless identity of the total self.
“You mean,” I asked, “a vector force of improvement by us?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Ava,” I said to her with an expression not unlike ridicule, “if we true existers are the difference, then we are mere specks among thousands, millions of layers of me’s shimmying in each’s layer doing what that layer expects. Being mean if that’s the layer. Being magnanimous, if that’s the layer. The difference we’d make to this total existence would be like that couple of degrees warmer than absolute zero that’s left over in the universe from the Big Bang.”
“Ralph, sometimes you depress me.” She stood up and by pulling at my hand motioned for me to stand.
“Ava, we are the reality,” I said, resisting her tug. “Don’t be depressed by all of this that is not truly existing.”
“Ralph,” she said half-jokingly, “I’m so depressed I’m ready to call it a night. Let’s go.”
“C’mon,” I offered, rising with her lead. We mounted our bicycles again and rode off. Upon arriving back at her house, she told me she was turning in. I told her I’d join her, meaning nothing more than intending to fall asleep with her. That was by now well established.
And yet another day came to a close while we waited for a magnetic push.
“Laying here with you,” she said to me in bed after we had finished all of our retiring procedures, “reminds me a lot of when I used to lie in bed with my Ralph—before he had died.”
“Ava,” I said, beginning with a tone of remorse.
“No, please don’t feel bad. I’m just talking.”
“O.K.,” I said, relaxing again.
“Anyway,” she continued, “he used to have this saying. After sex, he used to say, ‘I get to have sex with the most beautiful girl in the whole world.’ Or when he sneaked a feel of me in some public place, he used to whisper, ‘I get to fondle the most beautiful girl in the whole world.’ Even when he was just lying next to me in bed, he used to say, ‘I get to sleep with the most beautiful girl in the whole world.’ I mean it was his favorite compliment—he used to say it all of the time. And of course, I never got tired of hearing it.”
“Of course,” I agreed.
“But what I used to say back each time,” she continued, “was, ‘I bet you say that in all your worlds.’“
“Good come-back.”
“I guess. And he would laugh each time, no matter how many times we’d go through our little routine.” Ava paused a moment to readjust the pillow under her head, which naturally dislodged the perfectly positioned pillow under my own, and then she continued. “But I guess it was also a way for me to say that all of the me’s were the same, because we all made up the same whole person. That it really didn’t matter who he was intimate with, as long as it was with a me, of course...”
“Of course,” I said again.
And now she laughed, and being a part of this humor made me feel like I was spying on their intimacy through a keyhole. It had been four months since our Oedipal rendezvous, and “getting lucky” with her was the furthest thing in my mind since.
This is why, all of a sudden, off guard, she surprised me.
It was one of those rare and magical times for me when I had felt the lift-off, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, that had signaled the beginning of an out-of-body experience. This experience had been a long time coming, and I grew exhilarated at the prospect of spotting my real Abby again, even if just to see her in a very terrible world.
I arose, my head skimming the ceiling. It finally melted through it, and I reached heights that staggered me even in this state. Positioned high above the parish line in my underwear and nightshirt, floating in the cold air with a layer of room-temperature buffer around me, I could see the nighttime Jefferson Parish on my right and the glittering New Orleans to my left. I went higher and higher until I could follow the curves of the Mississippi which cradled them both. The only thing sifting this high up to me from down there was faint atonal music, like the tuning of a symphony orchestra. It wasn’t the actual sound waves, but the essence of the music that easily reached me, the soulful identifications from the beings in this city that blew into horns, dragged hair across strings, or interdigitated with ivory. Making pure harmonic and melodic sense in each of their pockets of attention, here they blended into a sublime celestial arrhythmia that made even greater sense.
I closed my eyelids so that I could focus through them—real seeing. I once again saw all of the layers spread out in the different directions, so far down the line that they seemed to blend into a continuum. And now I once again felt the ill wind from the direction into which my Abby had gone. And as unbelievable as it seemed to me, I went even higher. I looked for her, but I was now so high that I could not resolve any of the individual layers.
Ultimately, straight down into my own layer, I saw a tiny something rising my way. I focused with all of my strength and saw that the tiny something was becoming larger and larger, until I could see that it was a someone, someone who was getting clearer and clearer. For one frightening instant I thought it might be Chaz. She was possessed, I swear, and she would chase me even into my out-of-body experiences.
Whoever it was got closer and I became more fearful. But no, I was relieved to see, it wasn’t Chaz. Already palpitating remarkably, now my heart began to pound away at what I felt to be a dangerous intensity when it had dawned on me this might be my Abby. It was, I thought—it had to be. She got closer, floating up so gracefully.
I was so high that she still had quite some distance before she would reach me. I saw her grimace as she passed through that stratified layer which was the ill wind. Thankfully, I saw the complacency return as she arose ever so high above it.
But this was not my Abby.
It was Ava! When I saw who it was and who it wasn’t, my despair—that deflation of the human spirit—caused me to plummet at a breath-taking speed. I saw Ava’s hurt expression over the face I made as I whizzed past her with my obvious disappointment. She herself must have felt a negative reaction to what she had sensed in me, for she plummeted also.
Miraculously, we slowed our fall to a stop, bobbing still above the ill wind, protected by an altitude of some substantial difference. Realizing my cruelty, I now made a face to her that was more than any apology could mean, and her face she made to me was more than forgiveness could mean.
Now truly happy with one another, we looked through the ill wind at our sleeping bodies—so peaceful, resting in the flesh. We watched lovingly as parents would steal a glimpse of their slumbering children. I saw her body give a little shudder in the bed below us, obviously catching itself in its sleep.
This is when she surprised me by grabbing my hand and yanking me hard to her. Contact while in an out-of-body experience was unsettling, almost an invasion.
We slammed together, and she tore sexually at me. It was an invasion, but I gave in. We went at each other hard, encompassing each other, conquering each other. My quintessence was swimming, overwhelmed by the torrent of physical, energy not confined by physical shells, exertion not spent via balanced caloric conversions. It was maddeningly precipitous, limbs flailing, secretions sublimating directly into aether. She kissed me hard, this contact making our mouths one organ in spasm, almost in seizure. The other parts of our bodies also became furiously matted together.
It got rougher.
It became uncaring and frightening. We were raping each other! Her kiss was no kiss. Like Chaz at the stadium, it didn’t taste right. This was not Ava, this was a stranger. That had been no sleeping body having had a mere muscle spasm; that had been Ava sliding, leaving this ugly world’s replica for me—all during her own out-of-body experience, an outing she had been lulled into by whatever vacuum I had produced while bouncing around above the ill wind.
I was off the number line with an imaginary number doing unimaginable things to me. The rape became more ferocious in its assault, and now the flailing limbs were striking me. To my shock, we were hovering right in the jet stream of the ill wind. The more vehemently we attacked each other, the wilder the wind blew us—or could it have been the other way around?
My God! I wanted to kill her, and this was her apparent sentiment, also.
I flailed back valiantly, but also with a determined purpose of rising above the ill wind. No way. She kicked me in my out-of-body ribs and she struck me in my out-of-body nose, drops of my out-of-body blood falling, falling, to the bed below. I was losing.
Suddenly my hair got pulled and the puller was not letting go. As it would turn out, the puller was not Ava but yet someone else! This pull became stronger, inspiring whatever resistance I had left while being beaten all about my out-of-body by this new anti-Ava. But my resistance was to no avail.
Unexpectedly, a final jerk of a hand bolted me out of the ill wind. I saw the Ava I had fought fall all of the way back down and land hard into her sleeping body. I pivoted around to identify my champion.
My Abby, as welcome as any angel, embraced me with her floating warm pregnant body, soothing my injuries and my hopelessness and my life. Stunned, I held her at arm’s length and gazed at her. She was older than she had been when we had been separated by the magnet, but she was younger than Ava. She tugged me back toward her, reeling me in. We coupled again, and I could feel our child moving under her skin that she pressed into mine. That was a good feeling, a family feeling. And I felt physically protected by her as our child must have.
“We’re both here for you,” she said to me lovingly. “Sleep, my love, your search is over.” Then, as if her mission were complete, she pulled away, my longing face the only protest. As if the attraction of two bodies were what constituted gravity, her distancing herself from me vaporized the buoyancy I felt which had hung me up so high. I descended ever so slowly, ever so impervious to the ill wind I passed through on the way back down. I slipped back into my body and went on to sleep like a baby—like Abby’s baby.