He lived on the outskirts of the village below the observatory. During the week he worked odd jobs in the village, delivering groceries for his mother’s store and building doors with his carpenter father. On the foothill trails that he had walked all his life, his path crossed Kara’s one dusk; the trees were sheathed by the glistening silver webs of the iceflies, which emerged from their cold white cocoons every year when the winter melted. The young man had been thinking about a wedding some years before that had taken place beneath these same trees, not far from this particular trail. It was a harsh, wincing memory. He’d been the wedding’s best man, a particularly bad best man, ignorant of the rituals of best men, of obligatory dances with the bride and toasts to the happy couple. No one had told him about being a best man; and in the oblivious anguish of his own love for one of the bridesmaids, a girl he would never see again after that wedding, he’d taken her down this same foothill trail as the wedding party awaited his presence in growing confusion and fury. His dereliction of duties as best man became for him, years later, the evidence in his life of his own destructive innocence. He never cared much for weddings after that. Years later, when he had left the village after his disastrous affair with Kara, in a white seaside city far away on the morning of his own wedding, the only thing about his pending marriage for which he felt some relief was that at least he wouldn’t have to worry about his transgressions as a best man, being merely the groom instead.
Between Amanda, the bridesmaid with whom he’d walked on the foothill trail, and Kara whom he met on the same trail eight years later, there was Synthia. Beautiful and shattered, cruel and totalitarian, Synthia was the woman that divided his romanticism in two because, of all those he loved, she was least worthy of it. Prostrate in her adoration of an iron fist, and for the way it might piece her together according to its own design after smashing her to bits, Synthia despised the young man for the way there was no iron in his fist, no iron in his heart. Rather his heart was soft for her: she couldn’t tolerate it. Rather his hands were gentle on her body: she held them in contempt for how they were respectful of her, for the way they refused to violate the most fragile of orifices, refused to draw with exquisite brutality the starting line of his pleasure at the line where hers never began. That he was the only man who ever gave her an orgasm was something she only hated him for all the more; it was something that only made him all the weaker in her eyes. Synthia was the beginning of the end of his idealism about love, though that idealism would be another fifteen years in dying. She was the end of the division in him between love and sex, and of his naïve conviction that the two — the protests of philosophers notwithstanding — didn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. It was the end of his idealistic supposition that freedom wasn’t the price of love, and that slavery wasn’t ever the choice of those who had the freedom to choose.
Amanda, the girl he had loved on the foothill trail not far from the wedding party, was the last he loved chastely, and the last who wasn’t beautiful. He would have a lot of time, living out his later years as an old man inside the rim of a volcano, to consider why something as corrupt as beauty so held him in its grip. He’d have enough time to consider that perhaps, in his blindness, neither Synthia nor Kara was ever as beautiful as he thought. His blindness was too profound even to know he couldn’t see, until in the dim light of the lamp by which he read at night he found himself holding the pages only inches from his face. It was just like history to teach him what love couldn’t. He went and got some glasses. He couldn’t stand for Kara to see him wearing them, as he crashed into the chamber of the observatory that last night and found her naked below the sliver of night wedged in the observatory dome, the fine hair of her arms on end and the nipples of her breasts erect in the cold. He crept up behind her and before she could protest enveloped her in the warmth of his arms and lit her womb with the fire of his cock up inside her and it wasn’t until afterward that she sent him away, not because she hadn’t surrendered willingly to the way he fucked her but because, no longer able to resist seeing her, he had pulled from his coat pocket afterward his new glasses and put them on.
She looked at him. She grabbed him with fistfuls of his black hair and, staring at his face on the floor of the observatory, recoiled. With his blue eyes grown huge by the magnification of the glasses, there came back to her the memory of two eyes in a bottle dug up from beneath the sands of a dream, and all the heartbreak of that dream which she’d lived her waking life to avoid. She sent him away that night without explanation or comprehension. She was left more naked to the night than she’d ever intended, whispering “Etcher, Etcher” as she’d heard an old woman whisper a strange name in a dream’s doorway on the other side of a dream’s river.
And a little more of me died. I was twenty-eight. There were moments in the months that followed when I didn’t care if I lived or not, too dead to take an active part in ending my life, too alive not to let the days roar past me until the very sound of them had passed as well, and only in the subsequent quiet could I identify the stirring far inside me as something resembling survival. Some might have said I was weak. I never felt weak. I never felt weak that I could have loved so much. I never felt weak that I could give myself over to love, or throw everything away for it. I never felt small that love could be so much bigger than I. It was later, when others might have said I was strong, that I felt weak, later when no love was as big as I that I felt small. Later when, for the ten years that passed after Kara, there was no possibility of a love like that again in my life, and nothing left to me but to write my books in pursuit of more commonplace glory. To tell the story of everyone else’s dreams but mine: Kara’s dream and Lauren’s dream and Wade’s, glib dreams of buried cities and haunted jungles and flooded streets, the erotic fevers that change everyone strong enough to change but me; until finally I changed too. And only when the ten years had passed after Kara, only when I’d given myself passively to my marriage in the conviction that I had metamorphosed from the dead childhood of love’s idealism to the dead adulthood of loss’ resignation, only when from the dead wisdom of such an adulthood I had come to believe in nothing but the palpable reality that could be drunk from the hinge of a woman’s legs, was I surprised by love again. She was black and white. She was quiet and wild, her voice watery and melancholy, her smile sweet and hushed. She was the most beautiful woman I ever knew and for as long as it would last I was a force of nature. And if I had never really known her in order to write about her here, then I would have dreamed her, on and on into my nights with no sight of her ever to break the spell and cast another in its place. Maybe that would have been better. But she wasn’t a dream. And until there’s another dream, and until there’s another spell, this is my last book.