"Yes," and she fell silent.
This was really impossible. I didn't think she was completely an ally—in fact I thought she was lying—but I felt an underlying sympathy from her, and a sense of conspiracy with her, that grew more powerful the longer we were together. The problem was, what did that feeling mean? Without the ability to converse freely, I was stymied in my attempts to learn more; pushed this way and that in the cross-currents of her behavior, I could only wonder what she was thinking. And what our listeners made of this mostly silent day in the sun.
So we paddled out onto the Tidal Basin and talked from time to time about the scene around us. I loved the feel of being on water—the gentle rocking over other boats' wakes, the wet stale smell. "Are the cherry trees blossoming still?"
"Oh, yes. Not quite at the peak, but just past. It's beautiful. Here"—she leaned out—"here's one about to drown." She put it in my hand. I sniffed at it. "Do they smell?"
"No, not much," I said. "The prettier people say flowers are, the less scent they seem to have. Did you ever notice that?"
"I guess. I like the scent of roses."
"It's faint, though. These blossoms must be very beautiful—they smell hardly at all."
"En masse they are lovely. I wish you could see them."
I shrugged. "And I wish you could touch their petals, or feel us bouncing about as I do. I have enough sense data to keep entertained."
"Yes… I suppose you do." She left her hand covering mine. "I suppose we're out quite a ways," I said. So that we couldn't be seen well from the shore, I meant.
"From the dock, anyway. We're actually almost across the basin."
I moved my hand from under hers and held her shoulder. Deep hollow behind her collarbone. This contact, this conversation of touch… it was most expressive hand to hand, and so I took her hand again, and our fingers made random entanglements, explorations. Children shouting, then laughing in boats to our left, voices charged with excitement. How to speak in this language of touch?
Well, we all know that. Fingertips, brushing lines of the palm; ruffling the fine hair at the back of the wrist; fingers pressing each other back: these are sentences, certainly. And it is a difficult language to lie in. That catlike, sensuous stretch, under my stroking fingertips…
"We've got a clear run ahead of us," she said after a time, voice charged with humming overtones.
"Stoke the furnaces," I cried. "Damn the torpedoes!" And with a gurgling clug-clug-clug-clug we paddle-wheeled over the basin into the fresh wet wind, sun on our faces, laughing at the release from tension (bassoon and baritone), crying out, "Mark Twain!" or "Snag dead ahead!" in jocular tones, entwined hands crushing the other as we pedaled harder and harder… "Down the Potomac!" "Across the sea!" "Through the gates of Hercules!" "On to the Golden Fleece!" Spray cold on the breeze—
She stopped pedaling, and we swerved left.
"We're almost back," she said quietly.
We let the boat drift in, without a word.
My bugs told me that my office had been broken into, by two, possibly three, people, only one of whom spoke—a man, in an undertone: "Try the file cabinet." The cabinet drawers were rolled out (familiar clicking of the runners over the ball bearings), and the desk drawers too, and then there was the sound of paper shuffling, of things being knocked about.
I also got an interesting phone conversation over Jeremy's phone. The call was incoming; Jeremy said, "Yes?" and a male voice—the same one Jeremy had called earlier—said, "She says he's unwilling to go into any detail."
"That doesn't surprise me," Jeremy said. "But I'm sure he's got—"
"Yes, I know. Go ahead and try what we discussed."
The break-in, I supposed.
"Okay." Click.
No doubt it never even occurred to them that I might turn the tables on them, or act against them in any way, or even figure out that something was strange. It made me furious.
At the same time I was frightened. You feel the lines of force, living in Washington, D.C.; feel the struggle for power among the shadowy groups surrounding the official government; read of the unsolved murders, of shadowy people whose jobs are not made clear… As a blind person, one feels apart from the nebulous world of intrigue and hidden force, on the edge by reason of disability. ("No one harms a blind man.") Now I knew I was part of it, pulled in and on my own. It was frightening.
One night I was immersed in Harry Partch's Cloud Chamber Music, floating in those big glassy notes, when my doorbell rang. I picked up the phone. "Hello?"
"It's Mary Unser. May I come up?"
"Sure." I pushed the button and walked onto the landing.
She came up the stairs alone. "Sorry to bother you at home," she buzzed, out of breath. Such a voice. "I looked up your address in the phone book. I'm not supposed…"
She stood before me, touched my right arm. I lifted my hand and held her elbow. "Yes?"
Nervous, resonant laugh. "I'm not supposed to be here."
Then you'll soon be in trouble, I wanted to say. But surely she knew my apartment would be bugged? Surely she was supposed to be here? She was trembling violently, enough so that I put up my other hand and held her by the shoulders. "Are you all right?"
"Yes. No." Falling oboe tones, laugh that was not a laugh… She seemed frightened, very frightened. I thought, if she is acting she is very good.
"Come on in," I said, and led her inside. I went to the stereo and turned down the Partch—then reconsidered, and turned it back up. "Have a seat—the couch is nice." I was nervous myself. "Would you like something to drink?" Quite suddenly it all seemed unreal, a dream, one of my fantasies. Phantasmagoric cloud chamber ringing to things, how did I know what was real?
"No. Or yes." She laughed again, that laugh that was not a laugh.
"I've got some beer." I went to the refrigerator, got a couple of bottles, opened them.
"So what's going on?" I said as I sat down beside her. As she spoke I drank from my beer, and she stopped from time to time to take long swallows.
"Well, I feel that the more I understand what you're saying about the transfer of energies between n-dimensional manifolds, the better I understand what… happened to me." But now there was a different sound to her voice—an overtone was gone, it was less resonant, less nasal.
I said, "I don't know what I can tell you. It's not something I can talk about, or even write down. What I can express, I have, you know. In papers." This a bit louder, for the benefit of our audience. (If there was one.)
"Well…" and her hand, under mine, began to tremble again.
We sat there for a very long time, and all during that time we conversed through those two hands, saying things I can scarcely recall now, because we have no language for that sort of thing. But they were important things nevertheless, and after a while I said, "Here. Come with me. I'm on the top floor, so I have a sort of porch on the roof. Finish your beer. It's a pleasant night out, you'll feel better outside." I led her through the kitchen to the pantry, where the door to the backstairs was. "Go on up." I went back to the stereo and put on Jarrett's Köln Concert, loud enough so we'd be able to hear it. Then I went up the stairs onto the roof, and crunched over the tarred gravel.
This was one of my favorite places. The sides of the building came up to the chest around the edge of the roof, and on two sides large willows draped their branches over it, making it a sort of haven. I had set a big old wreck of a couch out there, and on certain nights when the wind was up and the air was cool, I would lie back on it with a bumpy Braille planisphere in my hands, listening to Scholz's Starcharts and feeling that with those projections I knew what it was to see the night sky.
"This is nice," she said.
"Isn't it?" I pulled the plastic sheet from the couch, and we sat.
"Carlos?"
"Yes?"
"I—I—" that double-reed squeak.
I put an arm around her. "Please," I said, suddenly upset myself. "Not now. Not now. Just relax. Please." And she
turned into me, her head rested on my shoulder; she trembled. I dug my fingers into her hair and slowly pulled them through the tangles. Shoulder length, no more. I cupped her ears, stroked her neck. She calmed.
Time passed, and I only caressed. No other thought, no other perception. How long this went on I couldn't say—perhaps a half-hour? Perhaps longer. She made a sort of purring kazoo sound, and I leaned forward and kissed her. Jarrett's voice, crying out briefly over a fluid run of piano notes. She pulled me to her; her breath caught, rushed out of her. The kiss became intense, tongues dancing together in a whole intercourse of their own, which I felt all through me in that chakra way, neck, spine, belly, groin, nothing but kiss. And without the slightest bit of either intention or resistance, I fell into it.
I remember a college friend once asked me, hesitantly, if I didn't have trouble with my love life. "Isn't it hard to tell when they… want to?" I had laughed. The whole process, I had wanted to say, was amazingly easy. The blinds' dependence on touch puts them in an advance position, so to speak: Using hands to see faces, being led by the hand (being dependent), one has already crossed what Russ calls the border between the world of not-sex and the world of sex; once over that border (with an other feeling protective)…
My hands explored her body, discovering it then and there for the first time—as intensely exciting a moment as there is, in the whole process. I suppose I expect narrow-cheeked people to be narrow hipped (it's mostly true, you'll find), but it wasn't so, in this case—her hips flared in those feminine curves that one can only hold, without ever getting used to (without ever [the otherness of the other] quite believing). On their own my fingers slipped under clothes, between buttons, as adroit as little mice, clever, lusty little creatures, unbuttoning blouse, reaching behind to undo bra with a twist. She shrugged out of them both and I felt the softness of her breasts while she tugged at my belt. I shifted, rolled, put my ear to her hard sternum, kissing the inside of one breast as it pressed against my face, feeling that quick heartbeat speak to me… She moved me back, got me unzipped, we paused for a speedy moment and got the rest of our clothes off, fumbling at our own and each other's until they were clear. Then it was flesh to flesh, skin to skin, in a single haptic space jumping with energy, with the insistent yes of caresses, mouth to mouth, four hands full, body to body, with breasts and erect penis crushed, as it were, between two pulsing walls of muscle.
The skin is the ultimate voice.
So we made love. As we did (my feet jabbing the end of the couch, which was quite broad enough, but a little too short) I arched up and let in the breeze between us (cool on our sweat), leaned down and sucked on first one nipple and then the other—
(thus becoming helpless in a sense, a needy infant, utterly dependent [because for the blind from birth, mother love is even more crucial than for the rest of us; the blind depend on their mothers for almost everything, for the sense of object permanence, for the education that makes the distinction between self and world, for the beginning of language, and also for the establishment of a private language that compensates for the lack of sight {if your mother doesn't know that a sweeping hand means "I want"} and bridges the way to the common tongue—without all that, which only a mother can give, the blind infant is lost; without mother love beyond mother love, the blind child will very likely go mad] so that to suck on a lover's nipple brings back that primal world of trust and need, I am sure of it)
—I was sure of it even then, as I made love to this strange other Mary Unser, a woman as unknown to me as any I had ever spoken with. At least until now. Now with each plunge into her (cylinder capped by cone, sliding through cylinder into rough sphere, neuron to neuron, millions of them fusing across, so that I could not tell where I stopped and she began) I learned more about her, the shape of her, her rhythms, her whole nerve-reality, spoken to me in movement and touch (spread hands holding my back, flanks, bottom) and in those broken bassoon tones that were like someone humming, briefly, involuntarily. "Ah," I said happily at all this sensation, all this new knowledge, feeling all my skin and all my nerves swirl up like a gust of wind into my spine, the back of my balls, to pitch into her all my self—
When we were done (oboe squeaks) I slid down, bending my knees so my feet stuck up in the air. I wiggled my toes in the breeze. Faint traffic noises played a sort of city music to accompany the piano in the apartment. From the airshaft came the sound of a chorus of pigeons, sounding like monkeys with their jaws wired shut, trying to chatter. Mary's skin was damp and I licked it, loving the salt. Patch of darkness in my blur of vision, darkness bundling in it… She rolled onto her side and my hands played over her. Her biceps made a smooth, hard bulge. There were several moles on her back, like little raisins half buried in her skin. I pushed them down, fingered the knobs of her spine. The muscles of her back put her spine in a deep trough of flesh.
I remembered a day my blind science class was taken to a museum, where we were allowed to feel a skeleton. All those hard bones, in just the right places; it made perfect sense, it was exactly as if felt under skin, really—there were no big surprises. But I remember being so upset by the experience of feeling the skeleton that I had to go outside and sit down on the museum steps. I don't know to this day exactly why I was so shaken, but I suppose (all those hard things left behind) it was something like this: it was frightening to know how real we were!
Now I tugged at her, gently. "Who are you, then?"
"Not now." And as I started to speak again she put a finger to my mouth (scent of us): "A friend." Buzzing nasal whisper, like a tuning fork, like a voice I was beginning (and this scared me, for I knew I did not know her) to love: "A friend…."
At a certain point in geometrical thinking, vision becomes only an obstruction. Those used to visualizing theorems (as in Euclidean geometry) reach a point, in the n-dimensional manifolds or elsewhere, where the concepts simply can't be visualized; and the attempt to do so only leads to confusion and misunderstanding. Beyond that point an interior geometry, a haptic geometry, guided by a kinetic esthetics, is probably the best sensory analogy we have; and so I have my advantage.
But in the real world, in the geometries of the heart, do I ever have any comparable advantage? Are there things we feel that can never be seen?
The central problem for everyone concerned with the relationship between geometry and the real world is the question of how one moves from the incommunicable impressions of the sensory world (vague fields of force, of danger), to the generally agreed-upon abstractions of the math (the explanation). Or, as Edmund Husserl puts it in The Origin of Geometry (and on this particular morning George was enunciating this passage for me with the utmost awkwardness): "How does geometrical ideality (just like that of all the sciences) proceed from its primary intrapersonal origin, where it is a structure within the conscious space of the first inventor's soul, to its ideal objectivity?"
At this point Jeremy knocked at my door: four quick raps. "Come in, Jeremy," I said, my pulse quickening.
He opened the door and looked in. "I have a pot of coffee just ready to go," he said. "Come on down and have some."
So I joined him in his office, which smelled wonderfully of strong French roast. I sat in one of the plush armchairs that circled Jeremy's desk, accepted a small glazed cup, sipped from it. Jeremy moved about the room restlessly as he chattered about one minor matter after another, obviously avoiding the topic of Mary and all that she represented. The coffee sent a warm flush through me—even the flesh of my feet buzzed with heat, though in the blast of air-conditioned air from the ceiling vent I didn't start to sweat. At first it was a comfortable, even pleasant sensation. The bitter, murky taste of the coffee washed over my palate, through the roof of my mouth into my sinuses, from there up behind my eyes, through my brain, all the way down my throat, into my lungs: I breathed coffee, my blood singing with warmth.
… I had been talking about something. Jeremy's voice came from directly above and before me, and it had a cra
ckly, tinny quality to it, as if made by an old carbon microphone: "And what would happen if the Q energy from this manifold were directed through these vectored dimensions into the macrodimensional manifold?"
Happily I babbled, "Well, provide each point P of an n-dimensional differentiable manifold M with the analogue of a tangent plane, an n-dimensional vector space Tp(M), called the tangent space at P. Now we can define a path in manifold M as a differentiable mapping of an open interval of R into M. And along this path we can fit the whole of the forces defining K the submanifold of M, a lot of energy to be sure," and I was writing it down, when the somatic effect of the drug caught up with the mental effect, and I recognized what was happening. ("Entirely too many new designer drugs these days…") Jeremy's breathing snagged as he looked up to see what had stopped me; meanwhile, I struggled with a slight wave of nausea, caused more by the realization that I had been drugged than by the chemicals themselves, which had very little "noise." What had I told him? And why, for God's sake, did it matter so much?
"Sorry," I muttered through the roar of the ventilator. "Bit of a headache."
"Sorry to hear that," Jeremy said, in a voice exactly like George's. "You look a little pale."
"Yes," I said, trying to conceal my anger. (Later, listening to the tape of the conversation, I thought I only sounded confused.) (And I hadn't said much about my work, either—mostly definitions.) "Sorry to run out on you, but it really is bothering me."
I stood, and for a moment I panicked; the location of the room's door—the most fundamental point of orientation, remembered without effort in every circumstance—wouldn't come to me. I was damned if I would ask Jeremy Blasingame about such a thing, or stumble about in front of him. I consciously fought to remember: desk faces door, chair faces desk, door therefore behind you…
"Let me walk you to your office," Jeremy said, taking me by the arm. "Listen, maybe I can give you a lift home?"
"That's all right," I said, shrugging him off. I found the door by accident, it seemed, and left him. Down to my office, wondering if I would get the right door. My blood was hot Turkish coffee. My head spun. The key worked, so I had found the right door. Locked in, I went to my couch and lay down. I was as dizzy there as standing, but found I couldn't move again. I spun in place helplessly. I had read that the designer drugs used for such purposes had almost no somatic effect, but perhaps this was true only for subjects less sensitive to their kinetic reality—otherwise, why was I reacting so? Fear. Or Jeremy had put something beyond the truth drug in me. A warning? Against? Suddenly I was aware of the tight boundaries of my comprehension, beyond it the wide manifold of action I did not understand—and the latter threatened to completely flood the former, so that there would be left nothing at all that I understood about this matter. Such a prospect terrified me.