higher consciousness. There wouldn’t be time anyway, and it wouldn’t be efficient. We only get the effects. That shot to the heart appears to occur simultaneously with the perception of threat: even as the visual or auditory cortex is sorting and resolving into awareness what fell upon eye or ear, those potent droplets are falling.
My heart had made its first terrifying cold pop even before I started to turn and rise from my chair and raise my hands, ready to defend myself, or even to attack. I would guess that modern humans, with no natural predators but themselves and with all their toys and mental constructs and cosy rooms, are relatively easy to creep up on. Squirrels and thrushes can only look down on us and smile.
What I saw coming toward me rapidly across the room, with arms outstretched like a cartoon sleepwalker, was Clarissa, and who knows by what complex intervention of higher centers I was able to convert plausibly my motions of primitive terror into a tenderly given and received embrace and to feel, as her arms locked round my neck, a pang of love that was in truth inseparable from relief.
“Oh Joe,” she said, “I’ve missed you all day, and I love you, and I’ve had such a terrible evening with Luke. And oh God, I love you.”
And oh God, I loved her. However much I thought about Clarissa, in memory or in anticipation, experiencing her again—the feel and sound of her, the precise quality of love that ran between us, the very animal presence—always brought, along with the familiarity, a jolt of surprise. Perhaps such amnesia is functional—those who could not wrench their hearts and minds from their loved ones were doomed to fail in life’s struggles and left no genetic footprints. We stood in the center of my study, Clarissa and I, on the yellow diamond at the middle of the Bokhara rug, kissing and embracing, and I heard through and between kisses the first fragments of her brother’s folly. Luke was leaving his kindly, beautiful wife and bonny twin daughters and Queen Anne house in Islington to live with an actress he had met three months before. Here was amnesia on a grander scale. He was considering, he had said over the seared scallops, quitting his job and writing a play, a monologue in fact, a one-woman show, which stood a chance of being put on in a room over a hairdresser’s in Kensal Green.
“Before we go to Paradise,” I began, and Clarissa finished, “By way of Kensal Green.”
“Reckless courage,” I said. “He must be living inside a hard-on.”
“Courage to shite!” She drew her breath sharply and shot me a beam of angry green. “An actress! He’s living inside a cliché!”
For a second I had become her brother. In recognition of that shedrew me close again and kissed me. “Joe. I’ve wanted you all day. After yesterday, and last night …”
Still hanging on to each other, we walked from study to bedroom. While Clarissa continued to tell me more tales from the ruined household and I described the piece I had written, we made preparations for our night journey into sex and sleep. I had already traveled some distance that evening from the time I had come in and had wanted only to talk to Clarissa about Parry. Work had settled on me a veil of abstracted contentment, and her arrival home, for all the sad story, had restored me completely. I felt frightened of nothing. Would it have been right, then, as we lay down face to face as we had the night before, to intrude on our happiness with an account of Parry’s phone call? Given what we had witnessed the day before, could I have destroyed our tenderness with fretful suspicions of being followed? The lights were dimmed; soon they would be out. John Logan’s ghost was still in the room, but it no longer threatened us. Parry was for tomorrow. All urgency had gone. With closed eyes I traced in double darkness Clarissa’s beautiful lips. She bit down on my knuckle, playfully hard. There are times when fatigue is the
My heart had made its first terrifying cold pop even before I started to turn and rise from my chair and raise my hands, ready to defend myself, or even to attack. I would guess that modern humans, with no natural predators but themselves and with all their toys and mental constructs and cosy rooms, are relatively easy to creep up on. Squirrels and thrushes can only look down on us and smile.
What I saw coming toward me rapidly across the room, with arms outstretched like a cartoon sleepwalker, was Clarissa, and who knows by what complex intervention of higher centers I was able to convert plausibly my motions of primitive terror into a tenderly given and received embrace and to feel, as her arms locked round my neck, a pang of love that was in truth inseparable from relief.
“Oh Joe,” she said, “I’ve missed you all day, and I love you, and I’ve had such a terrible evening with Luke. And oh God, I love you.”
And oh God, I loved her. However much I thought about Clarissa, in memory or in anticipation, experiencing her again—the feel and sound of her, the precise quality of love that ran between us, the very animal presence—always brought, along with the familiarity, a jolt of surprise. Perhaps such amnesia is functional—those who could not wrench their hearts and minds from their loved ones were doomed to fail in life’s struggles and left no genetic footprints. We stood in the center of my study, Clarissa and I, on the yellow diamond at the middle of the Bokhara rug, kissing and embracing, and I heard through and between kisses the first fragments of her brother’s folly. Luke was leaving his kindly, beautiful wife and bonny twin daughters and Queen Anne house in Islington to live with an actress he had met three months before. Here was amnesia on a grander scale. He was considering, he had said over the seared scallops, quitting his job and writing a play, a monologue in fact, a one-woman show, which stood a chance of being put on in a room over a hairdresser’s in Kensal Green.
“Before we go to Paradise,” I began, and Clarissa finished, “By way of Kensal Green.”
“Reckless courage,” I said. “He must be living inside a hard-on.”
“Courage to shite!” She drew her breath sharply and shot me a beam of angry green. “An actress! He’s living inside a cliché!”
For a second I had become her brother. In recognition of that shedrew me close again and kissed me. “Joe. I’ve wanted you all day. After yesterday, and last night …”
Still hanging on to each other, we walked from study to bedroom. While Clarissa continued to tell me more tales from the ruined household and I described the piece I had written, we made preparations for our night journey into sex and sleep. I had already traveled some distance that evening from the time I had come in and had wanted only to talk to Clarissa about Parry. Work had settled on me a veil of abstracted contentment, and her arrival home, for all the sad story, had restored me completely. I felt frightened of nothing. Would it have been right, then, as we lay down face to face as we had the night before, to intrude on our happiness with an account of Parry’s phone call? Given what we had witnessed the day before, could I have destroyed our tenderness with fretful suspicions of being followed? The lights were dimmed; soon they would be out. John Logan’s ghost was still in the room, but it no longer threatened us. Parry was for tomorrow. All urgency had gone. With closed eyes I traced in double darkness Clarissa’s beautiful lips. She bit down on my knuckle, playfully hard. There are times when fatigue is the
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