Teehanu (Excerpt), Nick Holdstock
Skye and David made their baby close to the Pacific. The gulls hovered like watching angels, the waves were like a touchdown roar, and although he had not spoken, she answered, “Not yet.”
They had begun four hours ago, in the dark, in the womb of the dunes. The two of them had sat cross-legged, she visualising her ovum, he encouraging his sperm. After a while she opened her eyes and said, “David, I love you.” He told her he felt the same, and then they closed their eyes again, and then they were making love without touching at all. They did this for another hour, and only then did they start to kiss, because, as they had both agreed, Creation was a sacred process that should not be rushed.
When she said, “I love you,” for the sixty-eighth time, he began to push more slowly, to almost pull out of her, and she was now beyond orgasm, she was in some other place, a high plateau with sparking light where there was no need for breath and the chakras were open 24-7 like the Korean shop near the pier. Her eyes were closed, and they were open, and there were wise Tibetan yaks which saw the light that lived in her while David moved his sensitive penis in and out. It was a place without a name, because it had no need for one, but if it had, its name would be Teehanu. A land where women run with the wolves, where women are the wolves, and the pulse, when it arrived, was the true meaning of sudden. She heard, she felt things start to hum, the atoms dancing as they charged, as every grain of sand, every blade of grass, as every water-turn of wave was fully expectant. And as she told people later, “I didn’t need to tell David. He knew, because I knew, and we were the same person, like brother and sister, y’know?”
David began thrusting harder, and Skye raised her tired legs higher, and then the sun rose out of the sea like a great and significant egg. It cracked its red light on them and they stared in each other’s eyes— her blue eyes looked viridian, his green eyes seemed topaz —and with a simultaneous sigh, they came. Then the heralds called from her namesake; the waves pounded a victory song.
They lay together, him in her, and it felt like the natural state, the way things ought to be. A jogger passed, and paused, still running, the soles of his trainers printing the sand till he saw Skye’s arm twitch. Then he moved off down the beach while David’s sperm swam on. They struggled like tiny salmon, and, as on any great journey, friends were made, and friends were lost, and whenever David sees footage of tadpoles he recalls that story about the race where people keep walking or else they got shot, a story which is by Richard Bachman, who is actually Stephen King, and he read this and other stories in the summer before Skye and he met, when he was trying to buy weed but couldn’t ever seem to score, and finally he just sat in the park with a load of books because maybe then, when he’d stopped looking, the weed would fucking come to him. And so he sat and read while trying to look like the kind of guy who wanted to buy drugs. Sometimes this group of rich girls came and sat in the park and did some kind of exercise that involved them bringing their feet up to their thighs while standing with their hands out and trying not to fall and then, after they’d done this for twenty minutes, a blonde girl with long, tanned legs and breasts like fists would clap her hands and they’d sit in a circle and hold hands and make noises that weren’t proper words and the first few times he totally cracked up because it wasn’t the Sixties.
And when Skye and David got dressed they didn’t feel the same. It was like they’d never worn pants or shirts, as if their actions had restored them to some original condition, to a state before cities or cars when the only burdens people carried were firewood and water. They walked the long line of the beach, surf frothing at their heels, Life beginning inside her. When they got home they drank mineral water and fell quickly asleep.
When Skye woke it was dark again and she could not remember her dream. She lay next to David and wondered if those hours on the beach had ever happened at all. But there was sand in her hair, salt in her pores, that feeling of starting again. She knew she was still herself, but now, maybe more so. Now all the worries were gone. All the unworthy suspicion. They would walk their path together, first as two, then as three, but always, they would be one.
She got up and opened the window and the night came in. The hiss and click of the sprinklers. The scent of Cereus, Queen of the Night, as she flowered and bloomed.
She swung one of her legs out the window and then straddled the sill. The wet lawns shone in the light and she saw no one except for Jesús on his nightly round. She wished there was no need for fences, barriers, locks or walls, for armed and highly trained personnel to perpetually circle their compound like Tibetan monks at prayer. She did not want these things. She wanted to be close to people. But there was the problem of Hate. The world was full of people who had never met their true selves, who never breathed from their diaphragms or thought about White Light. And this had nothing to do with money— some of the most enlightened people were also incredibly poor.
Skye stroked the skin of her foot and then a breeze did the same. The air was warm and with a new scent, something like marjoram, or sage, and she looked at David, who loved her so much, and then she turned and saw Jesús stop to light a cigarette. It pulsed and glowed in the dark and she thought, no, she felt, the satisfaction he must feel from making people safe. He was a guardian, a true protector, and when that one-eyed man who lived under the pier followed her home, scaled the fence, knocked on her door and burst in, screaming, Jesús was immediately there, and although violence was never good (and could only beget more violence), Jesús really had no choice. If he hadn’t broken the man’s arms, then his jaw, then his nose, the one-eyed man would have done the same to her.
After the paramedics left, she sat on her blood-spattered sofa and cried and Jesús put his arm round her and what they did together afterwards had nothing to do with cheating. They had shared a terrible thing, an awful thing, and if they did it in the shower, on the floor, it was only to restore the balance by sharing something of beauty.Jesús walked out of sight. Skye got into bed. She spooned up to David, who turned and put his arm around her, and that was how she fell asleep, and that was how she woke next morning, with him, with Life inside her, with the walls painted in sun, with the chorus of birds outside, feeling utterly free of want, completely at peace with things, and this Moment stretched for nine months, because she was in it, she was of it, and although David did not believe in Moments, he held crystals above her stomach, ran hundreds of herbal baths, walked twenty blocks for goji berries when he was hungover. He held her hand while she chanted and breathed in a room with orange walls and sometimes there weren’t enough mats so he had to sit on the floor which made his ass really numb. David got used to the look in her eyes, that dreamy, unfocused gaze, as if she was looking through a hole in a fence reserved only for Mothers. Sometimes he came home and found her saying “I love you” to her belly while shining a torch on it.