“And do you know what Buddha told me through his teachings? That I had created my own hell. I was selling my body and turning a deaf ear to criminal activities. I was guilty. Me. I hadn’t done what they said. But karma does not distinguish like a court of law. I deserved what I got. Maybe I deserved worse. That’s why I’ve written this book...”
“What’s wrong, Benny?” Mona asked me on our walk back home.
I was guilty. The words echoed in my mind like the lyrics to a song that you halfway remember for the first time in many years.
“Nothing, Moan.”
“That’s not my name.”
“Benny’s not my name. At least I don’t introduce you to people as ‘Moan Valeria.’ ”
“Is that what’s wrong with you?”
“Have you fucked Harvard Yard yet?” I asked her.
“What?” She was laughing.
She stopped but I kept moving, so she grabbed my sleeve to make me pause.
“What?” she asked again. “Am I hearing right? Ben Arna Dibbuk is jealous?”
“What of it? You drag me out there and make me sit through all that egotistical nonsense while every chance you get you’re putting your hands on him, looking at him, fawning over him with all those questions about when he was a cop, when he got shot...”
I could see in Mona’s eyes a tinge of fear. This was odd because the laughter was there too.
I realized that I must have been getting loud or intense or something.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said softly, attempting to placate me.
I wanted to say more but my breath was confused. I couldn’t inhale deeply or exhale enough. It’s like the air was stuck in there and I didn’t know how to move it around.
My breathing was proof of the rage she feared. Maybe I was angry, but I didn’t know why. I hadn’t thought about Mona flirting with Harvard Rollins. I just said that because I was tired of her calling me Benny. I certainly hadn’t felt jealous. I was guilty kept reverberating in my mind.
“Are you okay, Ben?”
“We’re gonna do it tonight,” I said with absolute certainty.
“Do what?” she asked, but she knew exactly what I meant.
“Fuck you in your ass.”
The shadow contained a mountain, that much I was sure of. But knowledge without visual corroboration is like a star on a cloudy night: You know it’s there but you don’t know where — not exactly. In the dream the deep shade was a flat plane against my senses. I would take a tentative step forward and then stop, afraid of falling over some precipice (hadn’t I used that word the day before?).
Echoes came to me in staccato, irregular intervals. Sharp rocky crags cut my face and arms, thighs and buttocks (I was naked). The fear of falling made me anticipate the crunching of my skull bones on some rocky floor.
But still I pushed along, listening to the garbled, disjointed echoes for some guidance.
“Ben,” she said from behind the flat plane of darkness.
“Star?”
“Do you remember that pipe? The mud on your chest? Do you see me?”
And then I was at my desk at work. I took a deep breath. I must have sighed in my sleep. Work again. My tiny office stacked high with oversize computer printouts in red plastic folders with the program names written on the sides of the reams the way I used to write my name at Louis Pasteur Junior High School in L.A. in the early seventies. HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, ALGEBRA, I wrote on the neatly bound and cut pages of my textbooks. Sometimes I never opened those books, but I labeled them, I knew what they were.
It was then that I noticed the tiny ant wandering purposefully over the coffee-stained printout of DB101SUBROUMSTR, the main program for Our Bank’s nightly check-balancing routine.
The ant inspected the coffee stain, sprawled like a series of veins across the printed page, but it moved on to a crumb of Starbucks coffee cake. The crumb was much larger than the ant but still the ant lifted it and staggered away toward the edge of the desk.
I was amazed at the ant’s might and purpose and relieved that I was no longer under the shadow of that beckoning, unseen mountain. So I watched the tiny creature instead of finding the bug in 101... MSTR.
As the ant went over the edge, I noticed that there were lines of the small creatures moving all over my office, thousands upon thousands of them. They roved the printouts and metal &g cabinets. They were on the window swarming over a slice of Mona’s birthday cake that I had put there and forgotten to eat.
Mona cried out then as she did before, when I penetrated her rectum.
“What’s my name?” I whispered into her ear.
“Benny,” she cried. “BennyBennyBennyBenny...”
The rage between us was sex right then. The birthdays forgotten again. The party and Harvard Yard and Star... Star.
Ants covered the whole floor when I looked back. My vision became clearer the longer I watched. After a while it was as if I was watching them under a magnifying glass. Their faces were quite human and every one of them wore a top hat cut at a rakish tilt. They each had a piece of birthday cake in their mouth and were moving in communal rhythm as if they were singing. I concentrated on trying to hear them. Then suddenly one of the little revelers burst into flame.
I looked around the office &om one ant to another and every insect I gazed upon caught fire and danced a wild ballet of pain.
“Stop! Stop!” a minuscule voice shouted.
I noted then a small ant (the one I first saw on my desk, I was sure) had climbed up onto the magnifying glass that I now realized I was holding. Somehow the lens also amplified its petite voice.
“Your eyes!” the ant shouted. “They’re burning my friends. Stop looking at them.”
I wanted to do what the ant told me; I intended to stop, but a fascination with fire kept me looking from one ant to another, killing them with my eyes. Then I noticed that the program printouts and their red plastic files had begun to burn. I ran from my office, but it was too late. Fire was everywhere.
“There’s no escape,” the First Ant said. “You can run and burn or cook where you stand. All those years working and gathering gone up in flames, gone up in flames.”
I awoke with a start. Mona was rolled up into a ball as far on her side of the bed as she could manage. The open bottle of Vaseline sat on her night table — mute witness to our grinding carnal abandon.
I took a shower and then went to the kitchen. It was 3:27 when I got there. I wasn’t tired, and even if I had been, I doubt that I would have gone back into the inferno of my dreams.
“What do you think it means?” Dr. Shriver might have asked in our weekly session.
I would have made up something and he’d shake his head ever so slightly. And then it would be over: the dream, its possible meanings, our session, another day — a tidy little system of lies like a cheap dime novel from the old days.
I read a lot when I was a teenager. My mother is a reader. My father, before he died, prided himself on reading a book every week. But I had given up that habit somewhere along the way; I lost interest in the narrative line. Everything in a novel leads somewhere. There’s a plot and a story and characters that make discoveries. None of that is pleasing to me. That’s not the way life works. Life, I thought then, was infinitely tedious or depraved. I wrote down hexadecimal computer code, day in and day out. Mona flitted from one silly magazine to another. There was no plot, no resolution, revelation, character development — or even any change other than the fact that we got older.
I think my parents might have been upset that I no longer read, but I hadn’t seen either one of them for many years, even before my father passed on. I would have gone to his funeral but the old banking system, the one I maintained, crashed two nights before the funeral and I had to work seventy-two hours straight in order to set it right.