supplicium post mortem

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead, it seemed. Her stomach clenched, a passing fancy, and she stretched her arm across to see that he was still breathing. His chest did, in fact, move. He wasn’t to die yet, though when he did, he would look the same as that twilight on their bed.

The Pervy Hour had past. He lay naked, the duvet twisted at his feet. She still wore a shirt. The room cold now, she pulled the covers over them, as much against the air as against her own eyes. What had seemed a part of them now felt incongruous, like Adam and Eve felt towards each other after eating the knowledge.

Was it part of their fallen inheritance that she should always feel naked after? She had no Puritan admonition against making love with her husband, but always, after – either quickly or some time later – a self-consciousness would come over her, turning their acts into something faintly repellent. Before the arrival of the observing mind, the relentless panopticon, she could love him with her body, as she had promised at the altar; but, that Eden always fled, like a fawn, before the cold gaze of reason.

He jerked awake with a sharp intake of breath and turned to her, resting his head on her chest, curling a knee across her, his arm encircling her as if to keep her from rising, then or ever. Life had been long, so long for both of them, before they finally found each other.

“You were late,” he would tease, “as usual.”

They had been together before, in the distant past. “Last time,” he said, “I think I was the girl.” Or was the last time when they had both been boys? It was hard to remember precisely. Once, visiting the chapel of his Public School, she had been possessed of an eerie familiarity, as if she were recalling long ago, before her childhood, as if the memory resided just behind her eyeballs, if only she could see it there.

Later, once he actually was dead, she would discover that Anglican belief did not include reincarnation as such. “What do you make of it, then?” she would ask her theologian curate. “We both thought we remembered the same thing.”

The theologian would touch his index fingers to his lips and look at the ceiling, silent for a spell. “I think,” he would reply, “that it was a kind of spiritual gift, a blanket of Grace, perhaps.”

The blanket of Grace was large enough to cover the two of them that twilight, to extend the unspeaking respite. Holding him and being held by him was like being able finally to breathe, like stepping down into fresh, thick air after a lifetime at altitude. They exchanged no words, but the way he held her fingers said more than conversation. They were thinking the same thoughts, the same thought, as it sometimes seemed they would dream the same dream, not separately in their own heads, but tandem, one mind.

Twilight gave way to evening. Soon the dog would need dinner. Soon the phone would ring, and the traffic would resume outside the window. Soon they would resume ordinary living, side by side. For this moment, though, his arm still around her, his heart still pumping against her side, his cheek warm on her chest, duvet covering them, for this moment they lingered, ignorant of everything except each other. She breathed, sinking against him, no words, no self-regarding. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind.

Come read the other folks writing this week:

• Rafi – yay!
• Tom - yay!