Dagger Key and Other Stories

An hour, two hours, or twenty minutes later, you’re not sure, your sense of time has been wrecked, and you’re not sure about anything, especially your decision to drink the tea. You’ve passed through a period of sweats, intense physical discomfort, and major stomach pain, and now, though your head’s not in a bad place, it’s not a particularly good place, either. It seems you’re sitting beside a fire, included in a circle of old half-naked men, who’re talking in booming voices, in a language you don’t understand, and you’re terribly confused—you get that they’re discussing you, that by being there you’re making a kind of expiation, but you’re confused by the flickering firelight, by noises in the vegetation beyond the light, by an inner unsteadiness. Furthering your confusion, this hallucination winks on and off, and, when it’s off, you have a distorted view of the room, of yourself lying sweaty and disheveled on the sofa, tossing and turning. There’s this relationship stuff about your mom, too. Scenes revisited from the past. Arguments, emotional confrontations, and the like, replayed at lightning speed, a fast-forward mind movie. Your dad’s in some scenes, but he’s a peripheral figure. It’s all about your mom, really, and you’re overwhelmed with sadness on realizing that these conflicts remain unresolved. And then you re-experience your first childhood memory. You’re two or three, you still have blond hair, and you’re playing on a hooked rug, the sunlight falling around you, and you’re seeing yourself from a height, from your mom’s perspective, through her eyes, her mind, and you feel love, the powerful bond between mother and child that can never be entirely broken…Suddenly you’ve left pain and confusion behind. You’re in a small boat passing along a green river, bordered by low jungle. This is no ordinary river, you understand, but the river of time. A metaphor made visible by drugs and Tantric sex, a stand-in for the literal functioning of time, which—for reasons doubtless plain to Steven Hawking, but unclear to you—cannot be grasped by the human mind. Though it’s a metaphor, it’s an unusually accurate one. Its currents and eddies are representative of actual structures within the timestream and now, somehow, you’ve become separated from it…or not separate, exactly, but able to control your movements within its medium. How you know all this, you’re not certain, but you suspect the old men of having imparted this knowledge. You sense them close by, but they’re no longer participants in your life, merely observers. You find that you can switch off the hallucination at will, but the house is too cluttered for your tastes, too modern in its complexity, so you go with the flow of the green, green river, content to lie back, thinking long riverine thoughts, letting its serene currents carry you nowhere and everywhere the same…

And that’s when Abi comes back into your world.

At first you assume she’s a creature of hallucination, a river goddess, a spirit made flesh. She’s painted her body with elaborate green designs, vines framing her face and spiraling round her breasts, columning her arms and legs, most profuse about her sex, as if it’s her center or is central to the issue at hand. She is, without question, the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen, the manifestation of a fabulous unearthly tropic. In a daze, you allow her to lead you into the bathroom, where she bathes you meticulously, using aromatic oils afterward to polish you, drying your erection with her hair, never speaking a word, and neither do you speak, not wanting to break the erotic spell she’s weaving with her hands and tongue and breath. Her eyes, adorned with kohl, resemble caverns with green fires in their depths. You both smell of flowers. As she leads you from the bathroom, you notice that her back and buttocks also bear designs. Someone must have assisted her, they must have come to the house while you were going through your changes on the sofa. That doesn’t trouble you. Nothing does. You’re atop a chemical peak, too high above the world for trouble to reach.