The Wild (26 page)

As the sun ripened the sky into a full and glorious blue, they stood in the ocean shallows holding this strange conversation. The waves were rising higher and higher against Danlo's sodden kamelaika. He shifted his weight from right to left, trying to keep his blood flowing to his cold, throbbing feet. He listened carefully to what Tamara was telling him. She seemed to have come to a similar understanding about herself as had he. She thought it was only natural that she had forgotten her quickening in the amritsar tank and her strange birth. The imprinting of her memories, she told him, must have driven these two periods from her conscious recall, much as in infant amnesia where a child's experiences and natural growth causes her to forget the early years of her life. She used this word 'natural' with sadness and great poignancy. It was as if in deducing that she was the child of the Entity's hand, she regarded herself as something other than a natural human being. At the same time, she still couldn't help seeing herself as Tamara Ten Ashtoreth, and this confusion of identities was clearly causing her much pain.

'Love hurts most of all, you know,' she said. The way love inevitably wakes everything up and causes us to burn for ever more love.'

'That is something that Tamara might have said.'

'I know.'

Danlo listened to the seagull chicks crying from their many nests out on Cathedral Rock. He said, 'This must be hard for you. To be ... and yet not to be. To not know who you really are.'

'But I know who I am,' she said. 'Do you?'

Danlo watched her as she splashed water over herself from her head to her thighs. Her whole body sparkled with this icy salt water.

'You are not Tamara,' he said at last. He winced in pain at the inevitable speaking of this truth. 'You are not she.'

'Am I not?'

'You are not just Tamara. You have some of her memories but...'

'Yes?'

'You are something other,' he said. 'Something more.'

'I know – but what?'

'It is hard to put a name to what you really are. You are the Entity's child, yes? Her ... starchild.'

'I'm a woman, Danlo.' She rubbed her wet hands over her breasts and belly, then down over her hips. 'A woman who loves you.'

'Yes,' he said. He could hardly hear himself speak above the thunder of the sea. 'A part of you is a woman – I can see that you are. But another part is only my memory of another woman named Tamara. Which is the part that loves, then?'

'Does it really matter?'

'Yes, it matters,' he said softly. 'I do not want to be loved by the part of you that is only the ghost of my own memory.'

'Because you think it's unseemly to love yourself ?'

'No,' Danlo said with a sad smile. 'Because it is not real. Your memory of the first time we touched eyes ... this blessed moment of love never really happened to you. And therefore, for us, it never really was.'

Tamara was quiet for a moment, and then she said, 'If I could, I would cark the cells of my body so that I was really she. I'd cark myself – I'd replace all the atoms that compose my heart and brain with new ones. But I don't think there's any power in the universe that could do such a thing.'

'No,' Danlo said. 'But even if that were possible, it would not matter. My memories are still ... my memories.'

'And yet when Tamara's memories of you were destroyed, you proposed to replace them with your own.'

The cold from the water worked its way up Danlo's legs, and he began to shiver as he nodded his head. 'Yes, this is true. And in my life, I have done only one other thing as wrong.'

'What did you do?'

'You do not remember?'

'No.'

'I ... wished a man dead. I saw him dying, in my hands.'

'You speak as if by such wishing you had actually murdered him.'

'I almost did. In a way, this man is dead because of me. Just as Tamara would have been dead inside if she had imprinted my memories.'

'Oh, Danlo.'

'Truly – to cark one's own memories into another's mind is almost worse than murder.'

Tamara stepped through the foamy white waves closer to him. She took his hand and pressed it lightly over her heart. Surprisingly, even though she was dripping icy water, her skin was warmer than his.

'Am I so dead inside?' she asked.

'Most of what you remember about your life is unreal.'

'Do you think I can't distinguish the real from what is not?'

'Can you?'

'Oh, I really think I can. I think I've discovered something about the nature of memory.'

'Yes?'

'All the memories that were imprinted inside me,' she began. 'The time in my mother's kitchen when I first wanted her to die, and the first time I saw you in the sunroom of Bardo's house and wanted to love you until you died – all these things I remember as clearly as I can remember the shape of Cathedral Rock when I shut my eyes. I can remember all these unreal things about my life, even though I suppose I know they never really happened to me – at least to the cells of this body. I have all these beautiful memories, but I can't relive them. That is the difference, you know. I found that out in the house. During the ceremony, the second ceremony, when I had finally fallen into recurrence, when I felt myself being born again – I knew that the real memories are those that can be relived, and the imprinted ones cannot.'

Danlo pressed his hand into the warmth between her breasts and said, 'This is true. The remembrancers have known this for a long time. This is why they forbid their students even the simplest of imprintings.'

'You know this and yet you still offered to imprint someone with your memories?'

'I ... had fallen into love. I cannot tell you how much I loved her.'

'Oh, I think I know.'

'Yes – you have my memories,' he said.

'I have something,' she agreed. 'Memory is so strange, isn't it? I can see all these wonderful memories inside me, and yet there is a distance to them. I know they are memories. I'm not really seeing them, in the moment as I see you now.'

'The way most people remember is not really remembering,' Danlo said. 'Remembrancing is different, truly. Especially recurrence.'

'For one's life to recur in a flash – how is this possible?'

'I do not know. But the remembrancers say that matter is really just memory frozen in time. In recurrence, time melts away and we go back to ourselves. And then there is a flowing of our lives again.'

She smiled at this and asked, 'And what else do your remembrancers say?'

'They say this: that difference between simple remembering and reliving one's life is the difference between seeing a foto of an electrical storm and feeling a bolt of lightning sear one's hand.'

Now Tamara was no longer smiling. She took Danlo's hand in her own, turned it palm upward to the sun and ran her finger over the lines and callouses. Finally she said, 'I've felt the lightning, too, you know. There was my birth, and before that, the days in the tank. And here in this house all these days we've had together. The flowers and the fire and the love. Do you think I can't remember how your hands burned over me the first time we lay together? Isn't this real?'

'Yes, it is real,' he admitted.

'Then at least I will have this part of my life to live and relive again.' She shut her eyes, and continued, 'As I am reliving it now. All these moments, all this life, all this passion – it's all so real isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'And it always will be?'

'Yes, only—'

'And then there is the other thing,' she said quickly, interrupting him. She opened her eyes and looked at him grimacing against the icy, wet touch of the sea. 'The strangest thing of all.'

Seeing that he was now shivering, she took his hand and led him out of the water. They walked up the beach for a while in the direction of Danlo's lightship where it lay almost buried in the sand. Although the wind was up and Danlo remained quite cold, the modest exercise restored the life to his numb legs. When he paused to talk to Tamara on the dunes some fifty feet away from his ship, his legs ached and burned, but he no longer worried that they would freeze and he would have to cut them off.

'What is this strange thing?' he asked.

Tamara stood tall and perfect in the light streaming down from the sun. Her body was now completely dry, and her skin had taken on the lovely white lustre of a pearl. Her face was turned toward the ocean as if she was listening to the whales sing their high, haunting songs out along the blue horizon. Or perhaps she was listening to the wind. She seemed to take strength and meaning from the deep sounds of the world all around her, for her eyes grew brighter and she held her head almost preternaturally still. Perhaps, Danlo thought, she was attuned to whispers and vibrations that only she could hear. Her whole being seemed to be trembling as if she was waiting for some great thing to happen. As she stood utterly naked on the windswept dunes watching and waiting and listening to herself, there was something wild and utterly ruthless about her. And there was something vast and splendid, too. Beholding the dazzling beauty of this rare thing, for a moment Danlo felt himself falling as if he had stepped off the world out into the whirlpool of lights that spin through the universe.

'My dreams,' she said. 'Where do my strange dreams come from?'

'I have wondered about your dreams, too.'

'When I sleep and I relive this strange other life of bloody red moons and gleaming knives, where do these memories come from?'

'It is possible,' he said, 'that the Entity has imprinted you with sleeping memories.'

She shook her head at this remembrancing terminology and said, 'Sleeping memories?'

'A mountain of memories, yes? Most of these memories would remain unconscious, but through your dreams a few of them would rise up into your mind. As the peak of an iceberg rises above the sea.'

'But if these are only imprinted memories, then how is it possible that I've relived them?'

'I ... do not know.'

'I think these are more than just imprinted memories, Danlo. I think my dreams are more than dreams.'

'What, then?'

She flashed him a deep, wild look and continued, 'The red moons, of course, are of Qallar. Before the Entity grew into a goddess, when she was still human, she was born on Qallar. She was a warrior-poet, you know. The only female warrior-poet there has ever been.'

Danlo turned to stare at his ship gleaming in the sun. After a while he looked back at her and asked, 'Then you believe that the Entity has imprinted you with her own memories?'

'It is more than that.'

He thought of her lone walks along the beach at night and he remembered how she had strapped the murderous spikhaxo glove onto her hand in the event she chanced upon a tiger.

'Her soul,' Danlo finally said. 'Do you believe that She ... has made you with a similar soul as She?'

'It is more than that.'

'Tell me, please.'

'I can hear Her thoughts, you know. I can see Her dreams.' She was quiet while the wind whispered over the ocean, and then she looked at him and said, 'I can feel Her pain.'

'Telepathy?'

'No, it is something more.'

'Are you sure? You wouldn't be the first human being whom the Entity has spoken to in this way.'

'But She does not really speak to me.'

'In truth? Then where do Her words come from when you hear them inside of you?'

'How can I really know? Where does the wind come from? Where does it go?'

'But your consciousness, itself—'

'You can't understand such things by such simple analysis, you know.' She stared at him long and deeply. 'You wonder where my consciousness comes from. Does it come from the atoms of my brain? Or from the planet on which we stand? Or does it come from the moon-brains of the Entity? Impossible questions, I think. You really might do better to wonder where your own beautiful consciousness comes from.'

'Perhaps, but I—'

'These thoughts,' she said, 'are coming into my mind as my lips begin to move. These words are coming into my mouth. I am speaking, Danlo; She does not speak to me.'

He thought about this for a moment, and then persisted, 'But it would be only natural if She did, yes? She made you of the elements of this earth – in a way, you are a child of Her body.'

As he said this, she continued staring at him, and he thought it disturbing the way her eyes were as dark as the empty spaces between the stars. And yet, strangely, they were also full of light.

'I am not Her child, Danlo.'

'What are you, then?'

'Just what you have said I am: something other. And something more.'

'Tamara, you—'

'That is not my name,' she said. Her voice grew cold and deep as the sea. 'That is not who I really am.'

'Are you not? Who are you, then ... truly?'

Whether by chance or design, she stood with her back to the sun so that the light framed her head and hair like a fiery golden halo. It was hard for Danlo to look at her. She stood perfectly still, looking at him for a long time. And then she said, 'I am She.'

Danlo shook his head and used his hand to shield his eyes against the burning sunlight. 'No, no,' he said softly.

'I am the one you know as the Solid State Entity.'

'That... is hard to believe.'

'You know who I really am. You have known it for some time.'

Danlo looked at her dark and bottomless eyes blazing at the centre of her brilliant face. At last he said, 'Yes, this is true – in some way I have known this since the moment I first saw you. But it is still hard to believe.'

'She and I are one. There is nothing in me that is not a part of Her; there is no part of Her that is unknown to me.'

'But... how is that possible?'

'How is it not possible? How is it possible that human beings wander the worlds of their births their entire lives and never know a single moment of connection with a mind greater than their own?'

'I do not know.'

She stepped closer to him, and again she took his hands in hers. 'I've said that I am the Entity, and so I am. And I've said that I'm not Her child, nor am I the woman you know as Tamara. But this is not entirely true. What I should have said is that I am not only Her child. I am not only Tamara Ten Ashtoreth.'