AH

by Erik Jan Harmens
Short Story

 

Marvelling at … something so obvious … the idea that the world continues to revolve around the sun … that the moon keeps revolving around the earth … that who knows what other celestial bodies continue to revolve around other celestial bodies … and that we seem to withdraw from it all in here … I wonder how it will all continue to happen when we are no longer part of it … while I also think that everything will end when I die … because I perceive the world from my point of view … and there is no world without me … it is as if everything stops in here … where ‘everything’ means ‘time’ … as there is no time … and there is only time … In that void … that wonderful vacuum … two bodies lie on a bed, doing everything but staying still – moving, pressing, folding into each other … and one of them is mine … if it weren’t, I could be watching instead – playing the omniscient narrator … or a hidden voyeur … peering through a crack in the wardrobe … or a visible voyeur … an enthusiast … sitting in a chair with his trousers down around his knees … But that’s not the case – I’m inside it. She and I are the centre of the universe, or maybe this is the universe. There’s nothing beyond it, nothing that matters. Maybe to the rest of the world, but not to us. There is no time. And there is only time … When we first met … in, what do you call it? … a ‘repurposed’ building … a vacant ‘office band’ wrapped around a residential tower like a scarf … a space where people once worked from nine to five entering data into a system … every working day … data they felt no connection with … that were just there … supplied on handwritten forms … forms that were piled up in plastic crates … such-and-such a number for every ‘data entry clerk’ per day … In the corridor of that building … now called a ‘creative hub’ … she came walking down from one end … and me from the other … for some reason, we moved forwards without stopping … like runaway trains … until we could do nothing but collide … which we did … not at great speed, but we touched … and we both recoiled … like magnets of the same polarity … and then there was silence … in the same way that you don’t hear anything for a moment after a crash … I apologised … ‘Sorry, sorry …’ and so did she … ‘Sorry, are you OK?’… only then did we glance at each other … because earlier, the other person was no more than a blur … a faceless shadow in the space … but when we looked at each other … when we looked closely … nervously at first … but then in every enticing detail … we were seized by a kind of hunger … that needed to be satisfied immediately … me looking at her … and her not looking away … and just as you rewind time like a cassette tape when things go wrong … I fast-forwarded it … I foresaw what would happen later … namely, what is happening right now … in here … in this void … in this wonderful vacuum … foreseeing how our bodies would become one … without any light in between them … And the amazing thing is that when she entered this room … ten or maybe twenty (or forty) minutes ago (no time; only time) … it felt as if this had all happened before … when in reality it was about to begin … the advantage of this was that all I needed to do was to follow the script … which meant that, after I closed the door behind her, I forcefully pressed her against that same door … because that is exactly how I visualised it … then she opened her mouth … and stuck out her tongue like a moray eel emerging from the coral … and I did the same … two moray eels … after we took our clothes off as if we were on fire … and discovered that our bodies had already prepared them-selves … for what we had not yet figured out in our minds … I hear her ‘yeah … yeah …’ but in my mind, I turn it into something else – ‘ah …’. Not an encouragement, just an exclamation of delight. I move and she says ‘ah …’. I move again, and again she says ‘ah …’, but as soon as she says ‘yeah …’, ‘yeah, harder …’ or even ‘yeah, push, push …!’ I feel like I need to do better … that what I’m doing isn’t good enough … and if it’s not good enough, I want to erase it … I wish I hadn’t started it in the first place … I’m imperfect … I feel small … so if that little bit is substandard … sweep me up … like the sand that dislodges when you tap your shoes together after a day at the beach … sweep me up … When her ‘yeah’ grows louder, threatening to drown out my ‘ah …’, I press my hand to her mouth. She snorts – a sound that excites me more than it should … ‘gnfff …’ she breathes ever more heavily … needs to make an ever-increasing effort … until it turns into a growl … her breathing stalls … briefly but long enough for me to be relieved when it starts up again … and to be amazed … amazed that when the moment of relinquishing my final resistance to coming still seems far off … and it feels as if I can keep moving up and down endlessly … up and down … like a nodding donkey in an oil field … the moment of coming is suddenly close – like a car that wasn’t there a second ago, now looming in the rear-view mirror … until I come, again and again, spilling more of myself than she can take in … and it comes flowing back … unlike time … which never flows back … time passes and doesn’t come back … memories do … they stay … sometimes … and if they don’t … they aren’t memories.

Published in Extra Extra No 24

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