Tanner’s Virgin

Chapter 15

I sat cross-legged on the ground. I was wearing a white loincloth and holding, in both hands, a yellow flower. I did not know the name of the flower. I knew that names were but an illusion, and that what one must seek to know is not the name of the flower but the essence of the flower, the flowerness of the flower, and through it the flowerness of oneself and the selfness of the universe. And I poured the selfness of myself into the flowerness of the flower, and time opened and flowed like wine, and I was the flower and the flower was I.

The Manishtana sat cross-legged beside me. I handed him the flower. He looked deep into its center and said nothing for a long time. He returned the flower to me. I looked at it some more.

“You meditate,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It is beauty, the flower, and you meditate upon it in the peace of the ashram, and you sense the beauty, and it becomes a part of you as you in turn become a part of it. And there are three parts to the beauty. There is the beauty that exists and is perceived, and there is the beauty that exists but is not perceived, and there is the beauty that is perceived but does not exist.”

I studied the flower.

“You meditate, and your mind recovers.”

“It does.”

“You regain health.”

“I am much better. I have stopped vomiting.”

“That is good.”

“I can concentrate again. And I no longer break out in cold sweats all the time.”

“But you do not sleep,” said the Manishtana.

“No.”

“So you have not yet healed yourself.”

“I do not think that is to be healed.”

“Man is to sleep. There is the night that is for sleep and the day that is for wakefulness, and there is no time between the two, just as the Holinesses in their infinite wisdom give us no state between wakefulness and sleep, or between yin and yang, or man and woman, or good and evil. It is the principle of dualism.”

“It is my special difficulty,” I said. “I was wounded long ago in a forgotten war. The powers of light took the art of sleep from me, and they alone can return it.”

“The perfect man sleeps of night,” said the Manishtana.

“Nobody’s perfect,” I said.

I found Phaedra sitting in the garden beside the waterfall. She was smelling a flower. She had her eyes closed, and she was curled up in the fetal posture clutching the flower in both hands. She had her nose in it and she seemed to be trying to inhale it.

“Good day,” I said.

“I am a flower, Evan. And the flower is a girl named Phaedra.”

“The beauty is the flower and the beauty is the girl.”

“You, too, are beautiful.”

“We are all flowers who would be as flowers.”

“I love you, Evan.”

“I love you, Phaedra.”

“I am better now.”

“And I, too.”

“We both talk funny. We talk like the Manishtana. We speak strangely, and converse of flowers, and the beautiness of things, and the wonderfulness and flowerness of our holy souls.”

“We do.”

“But we are well again.” She sat up, crossed one leg over the other. “Evan, I know what happened in that other country. I was with men, many men every day, day after day. I know this, but I cannot recall it.”

“This is your good fortune.”

“Evan, I know that I enjoyed it, that it was a sickness with me, and that I was so sick and so dominated by the yang of all, that you were sick at the touch of me. I know this, but I remember it not.”

“There are those parts of the lifeness of life which we must know but not remember, and there are those parts of the lifeness of life which we must remember but need not know.”

“The Manishtana told me that yesterday. Or something like it. There are times when I think that it does not matter what the Manishtana says, but only that it sounds well to one’s ears.”

“It is so with all of human speech. What one says is of less matter than the vibrations of the sounds one utters.”

“Evan, I am at peace again.”

I kissed her. Her mouth was honey and spice and cider and flowers and the songs of small birds and the purring of kittens and the petals of a rose. Her sighing was the wind in the trees and rain on a snug roof and flames on a hearth. Her skin was velvet and wool and cotton and satin and bedsheets and blankets and fur. Her flesh was food and water. Her body was my body and my body was her body, and thunder rolled in the hills and bolts of lightning skipped like rams.

“Ah,” she said.

Her body was my body and my body was her body, yin and yang, darkness and light, east and west. Hare krishna Hare krishna. Hare rama Hare rama. The twain shall meet.

Om.

“Never before,” said Phaedra Harrow.

A bead of sweat trickled down her golden breast. I flicked at it with my tongue. She purred. I flicked at other nonexistent beads of sweat. She giggled and purred some more.

“Never before,” she said again. “I thought I was all better a few minutes ago, and it turns out I didn’t even know what all better was. Do you know what I mean?”

“Do I ever.”

“I don’t even have to talk like the Manishtana anymore. That was sort of fun, but I can see where it might get to be a hangup. I mean, flowers are very nice.”

“Flowers are wonderful.”

“But you could get kind of dragged with doing nothing but grooving on flowers all day.”

“True.”

I put an arm around her and drew her close. Her mouth opened for my kiss. We held each other for a moment.

“Evan? Just now. It was really something.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

“I know. I sort of want to. But I don’t know the words.”

“Forget it. There aren’t any.”

“In Afghanistan. That whorehouse. It never happened.”

“I know.”

“I was never there. My body was there but my soul left my body. It was off somewhere, frozen in ice.”

“It’s not frozen now.”

“Oh, no. Oh, that feels good.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You do love me, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“How nice. Oh, that feels wonderful!”

“Ah.”

“Three steps to enlightenment,” said the Manishtana. “Three branches of the trinity. Three parts of time, past and present and future. Yesterday and today and tomorrow.”

“Ah.”

“Three precepts of the sanctity of the ashram. Piety and Poverty and Chastity.”

“We are pious,” I said.

“This is true.”

“And pover – And poor.”

“Yes. You gave over all of your gold to the ashram upon arriving. Yes, it is so.”

“Uh, the other thing. Well.”

“Yes,” said the Manishtana. His eyes seemed for a moment to twinkle in his wrinkled little head, but it was hard to be certain. He plucked a flower, inhaled it with his eyes. “Yes,” he said.

“Two out of three,” I said, “isn’t all that bad an average.”

“Many of the supplicants at the ashram violate the precept of chastity,” he said.

“Well, exactly my point. Uh-”

“But not so often.”

“Well-”

“Rarely in the daytime.”

“Oh.”

“Never in the flower beds.”

“Uh.”

The Manishtana plucked another flower. “When you came here,” he said to me, “you could not blank your mind, you could not relax your hold upon the inner workings of yourself, you could not find peace, you could not relate to the unity, the oneness of self, the selfness of one.”

“True.”

“And now?”

“Now I no longer have this problem, Manishtana.”

“And you can meditate?”

“Yes.”

“And you cling to the mantra which I have given unto you?”

“I do.”

“Ah,” said the Manishtana. “And you, Phaedra. When you came first to the ashram, you were not yourself. Your mind had gone from your body, and in your body was a demon, and the demon drove you. And before the demon, before there was ever a demon within you, then there was ice and coldness, and even in the days before the demon you were not yourself. It is so?”

“It is so,” Phaedra said.

“And now the demon has departed, you have thought him away and felt him away and meditated beyond the powers of demonness and deviltry, and yet the ice is also gone, and you are yourself. It is so?”

“It is.”

“Then it is time. You may go now.”

“To meditate?”

He shook his head. “To America.”

“But we don’t have any money,” Phaedra said, “and we don’t know anyone around here, and all we have are these dumb clothes, and we have to leave the ashram. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

“We’re going to make love,” I said.

“But after that.”

“You heard the man. We’re going home.”

“How?”

“We shall find a way. Rejoice in the nowness of now. You are no longer a virgin and no longer a nymphomaniac. Instead you have retained the more desirable aspects of each facet of the youness of you. The thouness of thou.”

“The essence of ess.”

“The royal highness of royal high.”

“The finesse of fi.”

“Let’s make love right over there. Right in the middle of all those fucking flowers.”

“He’ll throw us out.”

“He already threw us out.”

“Oh. Let’s, then.”

In the private jet of that famous recording group, the Cock-A-Roatches, Lloyd Jenkins took a deep drag on a brown cigarette, inhaled deeply, and spent a few moments smelling a flower that wasn’t, as far as I could tell, there.

“What I say,” he said, “is if you can’t ball a bird when you’ve a mind to, what’s the point in meditating?”

“A point.”

“So when we saw the two of you, you know, and then that holy man went at you like that, why I thought to myself, here he is, driving them out of the Garden of Eden when they’ve just got the knack of enjoying Paradise. And I thought of all the birds in Liverpool, you know, and we’ve flowershops enough there, and not all those ruddy biting flies. The Mahawhatsit-”

“Manishtana.”

“Eh. He told us, he did, that the flies are part of the oneness of one and the threeness of three, and that the man of spirit makes himself think the ruddy flies aren’t there. It’s a good idea, I’d say, but I’d have to be smoking day and night before I could ignore it when I’ve a fly up my bleeding nose.”

“I love your records,” Phaedra said.

He looked longingly at her. “Ah, girl,” he said. To me he said, “She’s yours, is she?”

“She’s mine.”

“Ah, you’re a fine bloke. We’ll stop in New York, but only long enough to kiss the ground hello. Our birds are in Liverpool, y’know. Flowers are fine, but birds are better. Birds are worlds better than flowers.”

“Amen,” I said.