The Versifiers
Becky was maundering to the far end of her forties in tip-top mental and physical health.
She had kept the sonsie constitution of her youth, which manifested itself as if on the cusp of its full potential, one she carried like a sylph with both elegance and provocativeness. She sprinkles her waking hours with a hybrid strain of weed, the catholicon for her restless mind that shields it with indifference from vain nuisance and frees it for on-end musing. Her habitual 3-month health check which had been made playful, almost anticipated, by a physician who jocosely flirted at the entry point of mischief, would give her the periodic reassurance that the whimsical, moderate infliction of prime quality cocaine on her bloodstream was turning out to be all blessing and no curse — ‘those minute, desultory heart spasms are just a benign signal of a heart going at it’ — for that matter a perfectly well-functioning heart, the blood texture and the skin vigor of a 30-year-old still, and the mental sharpness of a brain amused by the conscious alteration of its chemistry but not a slave to it. Oh and the mushrooms. Twice a year, on the longest day of summer and Sylvester, Becky will indulge in 5 grams of magic mushrooms. She still uses that good old name to refer to her bi-yearly cavalier who so graciously and tenaciously carries her on a mind-expanding introspection down to the cavernous waters of herself and all the way up to the invigorating levity of her shallowest reefs, a four-stage journey she has come to domesticate, as far as one can, into yielding the most favorable outcomes one desires from a Psilocybin trip.
As she prepares for the most improbable of dates, placidly laying in her bathtub while her right hand meanders dreamily, paced by an instinctive, slow glide over the area between the right side of her waist and her inner thigh, a magnet to the warm iron fingers that unconsciously find their way to its innermost corners, she cannot help but contemplate the prospects of her night excursion about to unfold. Nonchalantly she lifts her leg up, knee bent and exposed, her foot leans on the extremity of the bathtub to stretch the protruding toes, crimson toenails sparkle like morning-kissed cherries. In the languor of that emollient stretch she is about to succumb to the eventuality of the most desired upshot and allow it to conquer her mind.
Becky Becky Becky, look at you, she muttered with her eyes. A flâneuse waltzing through the autumn of her life, at one with her body and a percipient mind still able to listen unreservedly and interpret what it espies with razor-sharp candor. That is the thought, an introspective ode to her Rebecca days, that interrupted her projection of the night ahead in a puckish attempt to delay it. Very fuckable, too. She whispered with a frisky grin before reverting back to her inner voice. Worthy of torrid fornication, she corrected herself, a scold without the guilt, as she slid her foot back into the warmth of the tub’s belly.
There used to be a time when Becky listened more closely to her mind than to her gut feel. The cerebral quest for a rare occurrence, a shooting star of a night that engages the soul so intensely that the body eventually caves in to the seducer of its mind. And while memorable fucks had been plenty, she could only single out one outstanding intellectual rodeo, her first night out with James.
The exhilarating back and forth of two wits at work to seduce one another, quips moulded with gins and tonic, mutual epiphanies heightened by intermittent Columbian snow inhaled off the brow of a toilet paper dispenser, her Dr. Martens unobtrusively grazes his calf under the table, his eyes shiver without detaching from hers, their voices raised to overtake the music, lowered to a whisper into the ear, reduced to null as they glance at others fail at the same game. The game of letting go completely, absorbed to the core and irreversibly by an entrancing nemesis.
Yet with time, statistics, though the produce of intellect, had brought her back closer to the husky voice of her most basic instincts, binding her tightly to the tenet that substandard intellectual resonance could be compensated for with untamed intercourse, but that substandard intercourse could not be counterpoised by eloquence. And so right then in the tub, she still had a penchant for the projection of uninhibited sex over wishful intellectual repartees, the kind that would get her to the animal state that life denies her most of the time, most days, the only right kind to send off the year burning with King James the last.
Ziad Rahbani’s orchestra makes its entrance into the candlelit bathroom. Ouverture 83. A mischievous upright key in perfect tandem with an orotund bass chord that turns lull to lust. A hot, buoyant wave crashes on her body from the gut down to the farthest inch of her as the melody infiltrates her heart without permission, precipitating an involuntary shiver of mellow ecstasy. Music had been there all along but it is the onset of this track that made her aware of it again, taking it in as if for the first time. On one suspended brass note, the flash of a muffled, profound techno loop hijacks the soft melancholy right before it gets to settle in completely, with it the stroboscopic visual bursts of James and her entwined on an underground dance floor from their twenties, one body spirited away by the pounding bass line, a serotonin fountain gushing with not one thought of depletion.
That dawn they reached Mount Climax together at sea altitude, a profane tango with eyes locked heavenwards, dignified by the distant antiphony of Sunday bells tolling in acuquiecense to an Imam’s solemn chant carried on the wind. They lazed in each other’s hotness, their labored breaths colliding in one another’s mouths, arms joined, strapped around one another’s backs like adamantine ropes of stout flesh, their hands clasped at one another’s waists like toddlers clutch at their favorite toy.
‘You make my heart syncopate’ he had murmured in the depth of her ear, guards gone and incapable of jest or masculinity. In that moment of absolute height, a testament and the undisputed benchmark for inspired sex, if not love and the making of it, it was humanly impossible to envisage it would be their last.
While he lay sleeping and she lay gazing at the gentle curve of his ear, with her mind’s eye she pondered the apotheosis that was their story, its multiple culminations and its non-existing lows. Uncontrollably a pang of fatalism interrupts her retrospection, bereft of reason as if conceived in a forlorn part of her heart, her eyes smarted, still fastened on his face but looking through it. For the length of a scene cradled by morning birdsong, she abandoned the first person and witnessed herself in the third, seated at the bedside as she transposed the fatalist thought to a piece of paper that had idly waited on the nightstand like an accessory to murder. She could even track the movement of her hand and observe the ink substantiate the kill:
Fuck love, I retire, with rapture only
And if this rupture does not break us,
Nothing else ever will.
In the same way an unbridled fever leaves the body, unexpectedly and completely, she had evanesced from his world with the thrust of a silent, dagger verse, survivable only if honored.
A quiver of the body turns the tub water lukewarm, too incisive for the engrossed mind to ignore, drags it back to here and now. Steaming hot water flows in once more. With a subtle motion of the leg she propagates the warmness that was accumulating at the surface, a second run, sends her mind wandering again, this time with a more aggravated spirit. She gives in to the full pull of memory all the way down to inception.
A soft-lit Thursday, a whispering mediterranean breeze laced with a faint smell of mollusks, the street-access stairs to the American University of Beirut. Becky, nestled in a sun ray slicing the flight of steps diagonally, devouring the last pages of Kawabata’s Dandelions, by then inside Kawabata’s mind, her belongings spread around her akin to an arbitrary fort she had unconsciously assembled, basked like the only constant in the compulsive tumult of extras, comers and goers.
‘Am I allowed into your manor?’ his first words to her, what felt like his first words ever. In that split second he even wondered if he had thought them or said them out loud, either way to no avail. Her body language acknowledges his presence, wittingly her mind does not dignify it.
Tickled but undeterred he sits on the periphery of her world, lays his eyes on what formed her fence. An umber satchel, an ambulant microcosm of home, which he assumes contained an idiosyncratic amalgam of ordinary things from which he could try and map out her mind and her life. Abutting it on each side, her coat lumped into a textile ball and a five-book pile with what looked like a diary, crowning the stack. With a precise gesture he picks it up, obverts it to scan the cover and spots the handwritten acronym, BL, in the lower corner. He inspects the spine as if studying a rare first edition, opens it randomly and meticulously allows a slow shuffle before he halts on a page where his eye settle on a single entry marooned at the top:
From hardship’s womb I snatch a moment
With one shake rid it of despair
‘Would you like a chamomile with that?’ Becky interrupted, her open book in her left palm, her right-hand thumb and index finger delicately clinging to the top right edge of its last page, suspended there indefinitely, her stare does not waver, her heart rate takes an upward slope. Kawabata who?
‘Is that sentence you?’ he asked, twisting his wrist outwardly and extending his arm to place the notebook at a distance that prompts her to read.
‘I’m afraid it is’ she muttered, scanning the unfinished prose.
‘May I?’ he retorts almost immediately as he pulls a fountain pen out of his pocket and shows it for permission.
‘You might as well.’
Pluckily elevating his right foot over the coat ball in an exaggerated motion, he crosses over her wall and into her orbit, the commotion of the outside world recedes as he seats himself non-invasively to her left, now able to discern that indelible smell of lilies in her hair while she observes him in imperceptible wonder of his subtle banter, she could hear her cynicism thaw, her reservedness betrayed by the twinkle in her gape.
He looks into the depth of her eyes as if to remember them forever, scrutinizes the quasi-blank page, glimpses her amused expression and with a lecherous smirk rests his gaze forward, eying no particular thing for what felt like a minute but was in fact a dozen seconds. He then attacks the page with poised enthusiasm to write what he had deemed the only utterance worthy of completing Becky’s orphan prose, words that seeped uninterruptedly out of her eyes and into his ink in a moment that would have been impossible to predict.
‘I’m James, by the way.’
‘Becky.’
‘I’m in, Becky L. I’m in.’
Like the searing water of a bath promises the world, then that same tepid water starts yanking it away, so did those enmeshed, arcane sequences of her memory play with her. Now wrapped in a crisp velvety towel, her ring finger slithering pensively across her lips, the towel drops to the ground as she stands up, skin warm, heart racing, the night still ahead.
Just then her memory goes full circle, consummates that reminiscence one last time but perhaps the most vivid before the present is given another chance. Now she is no longer able to summon up his face, the full glare of her memory fixates the back of his head, resuscitates the crepuscular tricks the sun had played on the wave in his hair, his posture graceful and engaged, a step below her but with her nonetheless, taking in that slice of sunshine on their first and last Thursday. With her diary agape, posed on his right knee and his elbow right-angled like a true leftie he wrote in free flow with not a single doubt to impede his mind’s stride, more likely his heart’s. She waits, silently, eyes wide shut to fully take in the poignant randomness of the scene and the disappearing sun. Beatitude.
Sobered up by the ethereal silence of a vinyl winding down, she leers at herself in the mirror, head cocked to one side as her fingers cajole the nape of her neck. Underwear or no underwear?
On her dressing table, lined up like a loyal brigade, a small pastel pouch of cannabis, two snap-cap vials, one of fulgent white Columbian and the other of an ivory magic powder, to be used potentially, interchangeably and in incremental moderation up to the coveted extreme. Or perhaps none of it will leave her resurrected umber satchel, now an ocher shade of brown and faded at the flaps, if hope does materialize for a night where the world as it comes is enough, naturally accentuated in recompense for the renouncement of a chemical ascent to turpitude.
Her warm skin prickles, goosebumps forming, as she starts to consciously take in the fathomless randomness of her imminent retrouvailles, and in her palm sits Kawabata’s Dandelions, ajar with her thumb at the last page she had never ended up reading. From there she retrieves a folded, ragged-edge notepaper faintly yellowed by time that she unfurls with silk fingers, on it she notices a pale coffee stain the drop of which she does not remember and the mixed breed prose that she had since internalized like a latent affirmation more than twenty years ago, the sunburst from that day she can now feel on her bare chest. Her handwriting then his:
From hardship’s womb I snatch a moment
With one shake rid it of despair
A moment of joy, relative joy
From the scent of a thousand lilies, always there
But made perceivable by the wind.
Lain at the bottom like a prophetic postscript, cast away for gravity from the completed verse, James’s prelapsarian vow:
One day I’ll find you again.
