A story of one soul during two lives

I stumble inside to discover to my surprise and chagrin that it’s well after one p.m. Noon had come and gone without me even taking note of the shifting angle of sunlight and shadows. I must pay attention! I may have less than a hundred of those left. For that matter, it might have been the last one.

To Hell with notes. If the stream is meant to feed the river, there will be no stemming the tide when it rises. Just footnote it in my mental filing cabinet under: Heaven and Hell are states of mind. I’ll know what that means.

I strip and step into the shower, noting with distaste a thin layer of flab pervading my fleshbag. Soft living. My metabolism had gotten too accustomed to periodic lapses in the food stream to maintain the litheness of youth. I’m not designed for prosperity. Oh well. I’ll die fat and happy.

Actually, it’s a relief not to have to carry these bones, these abused lungs, these worn eyes, this thinning hair into the ordeal of senior citizenship. I hate the way old people smell. I hate bingo and shuffleboard and slot machines and voting Republican and wrinkling and shrinking and not being able to get it up or walk to the store under my own power.

I never have to wear adult diapers, wrestle with the demons of constipation, endure the contempt of a younger and more vibrant generation prancing about, rubbing in my face what a used-up has-been I am.

As I lather my hairy legs, I reflect on the good fortune contained in my death sentence. I’ve never really been happy here, never felt at home in the penis-wearing club. Oh, I could relate well enough to the fascination with the permutations of the female of the species. But the mysteries of football and fighting, baseball and beer, wrestling and war, have always eluded me. I fail to see the attraction. I’ve never understood the old saws about sneaking away from the wife to play poker with the guys; why would you leave a perfectly good woman alone in bed so you can lose your paycheck to a bunch of smelly, cigar-munching lushes?

Directed metempsychosis! Suddenly I understand what Llewellyn’s up to. We’re going to pick my next life! A lesbian. I want to be a lesbian. Be a girl and be with a girl. How could it get any better than that? The question is, have I earned it?

Only one thing bothers me: the waste. Three decades of growth and development as writer and human being, nearly half a billion words read, over a million painstakingly produced. Indifferent as I am to residing in this body, it’s where I keep my memories. It pains me to have to quit just when I’m starting to get the hang of it.

I shut off the water and step shivering onto the bathmat. The high life may not be good for my figure, but at least I now have regular access to indoor plumbing. The garage where I composed Desert Trance was comfy enough by my current standards of the time, but I was driven quite thoroughly to distraction by the necessity, imposed by the cokehead inhabitants of the main house, of begging showers along a circuit of friend’s pads where I was gradually but steadily wearing out my welcome, at least in the bathrooms.

I had even tried to effect payment of the water bill-in arrears in the amount of about $450-by means of sympathetic invocation, since I was unable to manage it mundanely. It was, in fact, the first failure in my magical career, and I had written it off to the base and selfish nature of the spell. Success appeared most frequently linked with altruistic or general motives. I had been warned about this, naturally, but I was so heady with my recent triumphs both literary and psychic that I felt the Goddess would back me up no matter what I did. I learned to my mortification that She has little patience with bullshit. She’s heard it all before.

How long has it been since I’ve communed with my altar? Long enough for a formidable layer of dust to encrust my crystals and glyphs. I doubt I’ve been at it five minutes since I bought this house. No wonder I’ve felt so spiritually bankrupt, my writing well dried to cracks. I had abandoned everything I believed in, without even noticing it, as soon as those beliefs had brought me everything I thought I wanted.

How peculiar. What the fuck was on my mind?

Oh, yes. Her. She contributed approximately one in four of the items on the midnight cloth with stars and moons duplicated fractally across the surface. She bought my Goddess Tarot deck, as I’d bought her a Faerie Wicca set. Molly and magic are so hopelessly linked in my memory I even now wince to think about it. I loved her more than air. Now she’s just a face that appears in my dreams, sometimes declaring her just-discovered devotion to me; more frequently twisted in orgasm beneath his thumping torso, her hair splayed out on a copy of Desert Trance she’s using for a pillow. Kissing him. I wake from such visions bathed in cold sweat and existential dread.

How stupid. The terminal two years of my life, largely numb to the victory of publishing my first novel to wild acclamation and sales figures, because I was pining for a fickle twenty-one year old stripper who once compared men to ice cream. What a waste, she said by illustration, to go into 31 Flavors and order Rocky Road every time for the rest of your life. Just because you like Rocky Road, love it even, has nothing to with how you feel about Orange Ripple. You don’t owe it to eat Rocky Road when you’re in the mood to eat something else. Someone else will crave Rocky Road that day.

I could find fault with neither the logic or the metaphor, except of course Rocky Road does have feelings about it, she’s his favorite customer, the only one that really matters, and besides, Orange Ripple is supposed to be his friend.