This is how she comes to discover that the letters feel different. She’s afraid to tell Saul, uncertain what he’d think to learn that L thickens her skin, that F makes her feel liquid, that Q fills her head with beautiful glass beads until she can only hear them clicking together. Not all the sensations are pleasant. E tenses her muscles as if they are bracing for an attack. K coats her joints in sandpaper.
Saul can tell when a letter has come. Eliza’s face goes from a state of relaxation to intense concentration, as if she is trying to hear a very soft sound.
“Do you have a letter?” he asks loud enough to enter her thoughts without shattering them.
Eliza nods, eyes still closed.
“Good. Now, without deliberately thinking about it, I want you to open yourself up to all the words that contain that letter. Let the words flow through you, like you’re a hollowed-out log being carried by a current.”
This has become Eliza’s favorite part. It took awhile to make her father’s instructions work. At first she was too conscious of trying to pull words from her memory: apple, acorn, around, arrest. The key is to take baby-making to its natural conclusion. Filled with a letter, she imagines growing with it. Pieces of the letter break apart or fuse together to form her eyes, her nose, her hands and feet. The letter bends and flexes, and suddenly a stream of words is passing through her, coming so quickly she barely feels each word before it is replaced by another.
Accommodatarantulassoramblastand.
A whispering noise, like the rustle of silk. Words she feels in her fingertips as she sees behind her closed eyes. Beneath the words she hears are ones she doesn’t quite catch, words to which she has not been properly introduced but which hover, expectant, on the periphery of consciousness.
Next time,
she promises, remembering that for every baby there are countless neverborns.
Through it all, Saul watches. Elly’s eyes dance back and forth behind her closed lids. Her fingers flutter and twitch. Inside Saul, dreams once destined to be neverborns begin to grow.
At first Aaron chants with the stereo on to mask the sound of his voice, but he soon decides that mixing the words of God’s name with those of the Eagles is too large a dilution. Which is what gives Aaron the idea of the closet. He likes the darkness of the closet, the softness of his shirts against his face, cushioning and protecting him. He chants into flannel, he chants into cotton. The holy sound of God’s name is absorbed by the cloth as soon as it leaves his mouth. He likes to think that by soaking up the sound, his shirts become holy too, the same way that placing food before Kṛṣṇa turns it into
prasadam,
infused with God’s spirit. The word “Kṛṣṇa” still sounds alien. Aaron ups his chanting to three rounds daily in order to make Kṛṣṇa more at home on his tongue. He begins carrying his
japa
beads to school inside his left pocket. He chants to himself when class drags, when there is a mandatory assembly, when he is stuck in the lunch line. The chant becomes a looping refrain in his head.
When the scent of the
japa
beads first sticks to his fingertips, he is startled. It is a strong smell, a combination of spice and perfume that belies the paleness of the wood. Aaron discovers himself smelling his fingers at odd times, not having consciously brought his hand to his nose. The scent marks him, reminds him that the most powerful symbols of belonging are invisible. He feels a gratitude toward the
japa
beads that initially embarrasses him, a feeling of kinship that seems inappropriate toward a simple object. But when Aaron next visits the temple (another movie with Charlie, who Saul is pleased to know is becoming a close friend) and sees the devotees praying before the Krsna deity, the idea of praying before a statue doesn’t seem nearly as strange.
The first time Aaron chants sixteen rounds is a Saturday. He only intends to chant eight, tying his record for the most he’s ever chanted, but instead of feeling twitchy and restless by the middle of the eighth round, he feels like a long-distance runner getting a second wind. He is barely aware of the shirts in his face or the stale air of the closet. His fingers count out the beads of their own accord, unconnected to conscious thought, which has taken a back seat to the sounds streaming from his mouth. He feels his voice resonating in his chest and belly. The feeling takes up everything. It erases time, wipes away his awareness of his moving lips and fingers. His mind empties of his boredom with school and his mounting anxiety over his covert visits to the
ISKCON
temple. He is only the sound of God’s name coming from his mouth, too caught up to even notice that he sounds like Chali now, his words fast but precise, the chant’s end and beginning blending together into a seamless, rolling whole. He doesn’t realize until he has stopped that his fingers have set aside sixteen beads, signifying the completion of a full chanting cycle. He looks at his watch. Two and a half hours have passed. The warm air of the closet surrounds him like an embrace.
They do not talk about what happens at night. Because their days are the same, it is almost possible for Saul to convince himself that their nights also remain unchanged, that he has somehow imagined it all.
Ten times now she has followed him to bed. Six of those ten he has said no. Two of those six, her masturbating in front of him has changed his mind. His few unswayed refusals have led to awakening to himself hard in her mouth, in her hand, or between her legs. When he manages to pull away in time, he is kept awake by the fear that he will be awoken later to the same thing. He tries to condition himself to wake upon being touched but can’t, his wife weaving herself too deftly into his dreams. A few times he hasn’t woken up until the middle of orgasm, the unwanted pleasure filling him with a sense of shame he hasn’t felt since the first wet dreams of his adolescence. He has never felt so divided, wonders if Miriam has secretly intended a crash course in mind/body separation.
It shames him that he cannot bring himself to talk to her because the possibility she may stop is worse than that of her continuing. He cannot remember the last time he felt that distinctive, delicious groin ache from too much sex. He imagines trying to describe his dilemma.
That’s a problem?
he would be told.
You should feel lucky she wants it at all.
He tells himself this imaginary voice is right. He tries to assuage his discomfort by inventing a medical explanation based upon his own off-brand of science. Perhaps Miriam’s new proclivity marks the onset of menopause. Perhaps, he rationalizes, there is a final surge of sexual energy before that part of her body shuts down; all the more reason to enjoy it while he can. But he has stopped sleeping well. He dreams of hands clutching at him and not letting go.
One dream starts so realistically Saul is uncertain whether he is asleep or awake. Miriam is on top. Perspiration dots her upper lip. She is oblivious to the fact that he is lying completely still. As he observes his lower body’s mindless response to his wife’s ministrations, Saul is filled with resentment. He decides that enough is enough. In a stern voice he tells Miriam to stop. Miriam pauses briefly and, without removing her hands, looks down at Saul and shrugs. She starts pulling at his penis. Her grip is firm but not too hard. Just as Saul wonders what she is trying to do, his penis suddenly tears away as easily and painlessly as a piece of clay. There is no blood. When Saul next looks at his body, a swath of perfectly smooth skin spans the space between his legs, delicate and overripe like a healing burn. Miriam rolls off him, completely focused on her new prize. Rather than horror, Saul feels relief.
There are four rules to follow: No gambling. No intoxicating substances. No illicit sex. No eating meat. At first Aaron thinks that not eating meat will be hard. When, on Chali’s suggestion, he pictures a burger as part of a cow, a drumstick as a chicken’s leg, he realizes that he has never before granted meat a former life. As soon as meat becomes something more than a plastic-wrapped lump on a Styrofoam tray, the idea of avoiding it becomes much easier.
Aaron’s first test comes at dinner the day after he vows to begin following Kṛṣṇa’s precepts. Saul has made barbecued chicken, one of Aaron’s favorites, cooking it on the grill mere feet away from the mysterious light spot on the patio whose origins only Aaron knows. At the table, Aaron heaps his plate with macaroni. He can barely look at the barbecued chicken parts which, at his glance, mentally assemble themselves into the blackened corpse of a bird.
“I’m a vegetarian now,” he says to a surprised Saul when he refuses a drumstick and a breast, his former favorite parts.
Eliza looks up mid-wing and notices Aaron’s plate of pasta for the first time. By so obviously enjoying her dinner in the face of his abstention, she has surely enacted another betrayal. She puts her wing down and takes more macaroni, hoping to demonstrate solidarity, but Aaron isn’t paying attention. Elly tries to take bites of chicken only when her brother isn’t looking. That being most of the time, her chicken wing disappears at a rapid pace, with her reaching across the table for more to avoid drawing Aaron’s attention with the verbal request. As Eliza bites into her second wing, she knows that a good sister would have at least refrained from taking seconds.
Aaron is too focused on Saul to notice. He is less concerned with his proclamation than the questions sure to follow, senses that once again he will need to lie.
Aaron’s declaration reminds Saul of the short-lived vegetarianism of his college days. His alternative lifestyle lasted as long as it took to realize that the horrific farts produced by his bean diet seriously compromised his sex appeal.
“Very admirable,” Saul says. “What, may I ask, inspired this decision?”
When Aaron gets nervous he bites his lower lip. “Well, Charlie’s a vegetarian, and after talking to him about it, I decided it just made sense.” He wishes he could describe the delicious meals he’s had at the temple, the intensity of the flavors making a convincing case for the food being suffused with Kṛṣṇa’s spirit.
“This Charlie fellow sounds pretty interesting. I’d like to meet him sometime.”
Aaron wonders what his father would make of Chali, can’t help but think he’d like him. “Well, Charlie doesn’t have a car and he lives kind of far away, but maybe someday you will.”
“What do his parents do?”
Chali has never talked about his parents or anything, for that matter, not related to temple life. Everything else is
maya,
Aaron reminds himself, irrelevant. With a chuckle, he realizes that this conversation is irrelevant, even Saul is irrelevant. If he joined the temple, he could put his entire life behind him like a shirt he has outgrown.
“They’re vegetarians too,” Aaron says, his thoughts having made him bold. “They’ve invited me to dinner to see what vegetarian food is like. They said I could eat with them whenever I want.”
“How nice,” Miriam says, wondering what their house looks like.
Eliza is amazed that neither parent seems able to detect Aaron’s lie. It’s so obvious. He would chew his lip the same way during Monopoly when attempting an unfair deal, for example trying to convince her to trade Park Place for St. James because orange is so much uglier than blue.
Eliza gives Aaron a questioning look. He glares at her. She turns to the chicken bones on her plate, which she has stripped clean, and keeps quiet.
After the sticky failure of his initial meditation attempts, Aaron decides he will only allow himself to masturbate once a week and then only on a day when he has no meditation plans. He quickly discovers he likes being made to wait. He looks forward to Tuesdays with an enthusiasm only matched by Monday’s exquisite proximity to the special day. With Monday’s arrival, Aaron finds his entire body sensitized. Brushing against soft fabric or feeling nubby carpet on his bare feet sends chills across his body. The difficulty comes in hiding the spontaneous hard-ons that plague him through Monday afternoon. Once in the middle of math, his anticipation is so intense that the tight stretch of underwear against his sudden erection is enough to set him off. He doesn’t even realize he hasn’t been paying attention to the equations on the board until his body begins to shudder gently and he feels wet between his legs. He quickly turns the episode into a coughing fit, asking to be excused for a drink of water. In a locked bathroom stall he removes his underwear and buries it in his backpack, desperately hoping that the novelty of walking around without won’t set him off again. The next morning, at the appointed hour, he struggles over whether yesterday’s surprise counts as the week’s masturbatory allotment and decides it does not since he didn’t actually touch himself to make it happen.
So that weeks into his vegetarianism, when Aaron shyly asks Chali what illicit sex means, he feels a certain thrill when Chali explains that sex doesn’t require two people to be illicit. This, Aaron realizes, will be his greatest challenge, the true test of his devotion. He has been chanting sixteen rounds every day except Tuesdays, but even that one day a week has been distancing him from God. Aaron privately vows to devote himself entirely to Kṛṣṇa.
The first few weeks, it is difficult to unlearn the feeling of Mondays or the excitement of waking up on Tuesday mornings before the alarm, his body still anticipating his forsworn habit. Aaron becomes a devotee of showers of extreme hotness or coldness, the shock of the water helping to make undistracted chanting a possibility. He refers to his new sense of discipline in veiled terms to Chali, who heartily congratulates him on having overcome
maya
’s strongest pull.
Though Aaron still feels conspicuous in his
karmi
clothes and unshaven head, he is no longer a stranger at the temple. Devotees are split between whites and Indian families, the whites mostly guys in their twenties like Chali, with the occasional woman or middle-aged man. Though Aaron is younger than most of the white people, there are several Indian children. There is a girl close to his age, the daughter of a guru. Sundays, she presents skits illustrating Kṛṣṇa’s teachings, her faith electrifying her words and compelling even the freeloaders who have only come for the food to pay attention.