Waking, cottonmouthed—Matilda’s mind stretched like a blanket over all memories. She tried to rise from bed but the covers were too heavy to move.

What’s the rush?

Who wants to wake up anyway?

Rhetorical questions. She smiled and buried herself deeper in the sheets.

In her dream, a risqué dream if you will, all the men she ever knew were naked, and one by one, sat on her sofa.

There was Saul, dark, muscular and oblivious to his nakedness, reading the magazine she’d left on the coffee table—a girlie magazine picked up from a grocery store checkout line.

“I thought you didn’t like these kind of magazines...”

Saul’s voice drifted through the silence of the room. She raised her head and looked in his direction. Maybe if she said nothing about his nakedness it wouldn’t be awkward.

“The fashion tips are good.”

Her responding voice didn’t seem like it belonged to her. From a distance, it was muffled and filtered.
Saul’s voice was like a blunt object. A weapon.

“You never followed mainstream fashion.”

“Sometimes the articles interest me.”

Her voice crossed the room and returned, like an acoustic boomerang.
Saul laughed.

“You know how to perform a blow job without reading a clumsily-written article.”

She should blush—it was required. She hoped she was blushing. Maybe she was too old to blush. Instead, she continued a conversation with a naked man sitting with legs crossed one on top of the other. She made a mental note. A naked man should not sit crossed-legged…under any imaginable circumstance.

“What are you doing here? Did we…”

Her sentence was terminated by Saul’s laughter.

“We’re all here, Matilda. Larry, Matt and that weird Dutch man with a name no one gets right. And, of course, young Juan you married for a day in Vegas. I am not sure who else is in the kitchen but they’ll show up on the couch sooner or later.”

What was this? Erotic redemption? Post-coital purgatory? Maybe the last night’s Vindaloo was the culprit. Everybody knows spicy food triggers hallucinations and other out of the body experiences.

She must be dreaming, yet the naked man seemed real.

Saul selected a cigar from a wooden box on the coffee table. The smell of cigars triggered an olfactory reverie.

And, she was thirsty.

“Could I have a glass of water? “

After her question left her lips, she regretted it. If Saul was willing to fetch her water, he’d have to get up.

“Never mind, I am not so thirsty,” she added quickly.

She did not want to see him standing erect.

“What do you want? Why are you here? Am I dying?”

She wanted to add ‘why are you naked’ but was afraid of a vulgar answer. She remembered Saul’s visceral directness.

“We’re here because it’s your birthday. You’re not dying, but we’re leaving your memory. We had our part, but now we’re moving on. Larry, for example, found a nice Italian girl on the Internet. He’s moving in with her.”

Oh, God. Larry. I remember him and his Camaro with flames painted on the sides.

She tasted a hint of vomit but hid her revulsion.

“Also, Matt’s here. Older, but never married.”

Matt, she recalled, was an exquisite lover. Ten years her junior, he always made her laugh. She woke every morning with a smile on her face as if she slept with a stone in her mouth.

Vrjen. Why does no one remember his name?

She met him in Amsterdam and spent a night in his hotel bed. After too much Scotch, she was left with no money, no passport, and a bellyful of anger. Her luggage, cello and wallet were stolen. The hangover lingered.

“What about you, Saul? What have you been up to? “

“Me? What do you want to hear? That I never forgot you? I did, though I still see myself back in that time moving through life as if from one prison to another.”

“What was to come really came—we were poisoned by our own distress,” Matilda whispered.

Saul’s raspy voice continued.

“Dust settled on the past, but not because I held vindictive feelings for you—dust anointed everything around us.”

Saul spoke while Matilda hid her head under the covers.

“We lived in quiet desperation…trying too hard to find places of comfort and happiness.”

Under the sheets, she nodded.

“Your problem? You looked for an impossible notion of love; something you read about or thought should be delivered by destiny.”

These were Saul’s last words.

She closed her eyes hoping for the dream to change direction, but the cigar box rested on the coffee table next to the girlie magazine. This dream and all these thoughts were like songs of dying swans.
Her memories were finally organized.

Nobody ended a big love in a benevolent way.

Like clapping, you can only do it with two hands—the old Zen Conundrum. Without two hands, there’s no clapping. No stars, galaxies, or clapping hands. Whether you’re a super cluster or a tiny proton, a yin or a yang, everyone is hooked into everyone else.

These thoughts settled in her mind. She walked to the kitchen with a clear mind and contented smile.
 
* * * * *
 
Saul was right—Matilda was uncompelled by trends. For three years in her very moist days when innocence, like cotton candy, insulated her from the scorn of the world, she lived as his clay, learning new shapes every morning, morphing perpetually in what could be seen, in retrospect, as a blind race toward childhood’s climax.

With memories awakened, she sat at the kitchen table and tried to make sense of her dream.
It’s funny how life ties and unties loose ends.

“You’ll always go for the dysfunctional man—this will bring shame and unhappiness on us all,” her father said.

His old words lived harshly in the quiet space between wounded honor and Matilda’s newfound climactic bliss. Because of Saul, Matilda grew up quickly. Her views on life, men, love, and sex were forever sealed—far from the missionary’s border.

Worldly spin learned from the master. Saul had none of the pedestrian, boyish charm of other schoolboys. Instead, he had complete control; sculpting her any way he desired. She never resisted. Her first lover, powerful, confident, old and savage. Macabre in the way the world saw him; she followed him like a sailor follows the North Star.

Now, she could not help smiling while pouring coffee in her mug. Even in her dreams, Saul was the dominant one. Her history with men guided by his will…he conducted a symphony of memories. He directed the cast of characters and arranged their subconscious stage positions.

“Lousy bastard.” She mumbled but still smiled.

Eventually, she wrote herself in and out of love many times over—fulfilling her father’s crude prophecy. She disobeyed abstract rules linked to her virginity. To her parents’ horror, she married twice and walked out of life’s cul-de-sacs in ill-conceived divorces.

All this time Saul was a constant in her thoughts. Like an absurd, surreal master of ceremonies, he fed her desires and fancies—showing up in her dreams every time a new lover threatened her emotional well-being. Ultimately, every man after Saul seemed no more than a prepubescent, sexually deprived victim the ogre masterfully carved in her soul.

She looked through the window—searching for a safe place to land her memories. When she met Saul, his advanced age was an issue—and made him the target of an angry world. Nobody understood how such a young girl could be content in the shadow of such a powerful and seasoned man.

“Why is she destroying her youth?” her father asked her mother.

“Why can’t she go out with a nice Jewish boy?’ her mother asked her father.

Matilda was her parents’ only child. The youngest in her art class; she had no knowledge or experience when it came to men, sex, and love. As a blank canvas for Saul, she greedily absorbed the pleasures of the world but had no clear awareness of her place in it.

“You need to go back and learn how to be a child,” Saul said while leaning over her shivering, pale body.

Every second lived in her mind…the edge of his bed, her wrinkled shirt on the floor, her pale body radiating in the dark, his eyes like beacons, green and clear, glued to the pink buttons of her breasts.
She twisted and gasped at his touch.

“I am not a child.”

After so many years, her reply still echoed as an acoustic memory kept hidden in the secret chambers of her quirky mind.

Saul’s passing through her made it hard to feel like a child again. A deal had to be struck between her and society. Her senses and awareness had to evolve. In time, as the years passed, the echo of Saul’s influence tyrannized every waking moment.

“Who’s the ogre that screwed you up?” Matt asked years later when he touched the chill in her heart.

Between Matt’s question and the next sip of coffee, Matilda reviewed random moments from her past. A forceful wind lifted dark curtains.

The eternal hourglass of existence flipped over and over.
She along with it.


*

Love is a game…a fun game of catch-me-if-you-can. Once playing starts, you must take turns at getting caught. It is a basic principle; if you want to be loved, you have to let yourself caught. She never let Michael win so he never loved her. Larry thought he won, but didn’t, so he didn’t matter.
 
She was a tough child who wore either white socks or nothing.
 
Her emotions had the intensity of a raging fire. Air, with all due respect, vibrated with her beating heart. She was sure she’d go to hell but something made her think she could change before it was too late. In hell, your desires are never satisfied. That’s what they say.
 
Was she scared?
 
Yes, maybe. She cut her life against the grain.
 
Nowadays, on a shelf in her living room, she kept a gray box filled with letters and old photos. Never sentimental—she fought hard against the emotion. But, every so often, she’d open the box; its contents were like Seurat paintings with a multitude of seemingly random dots coming together as faces, words, and memories. They stirred a unique feeling in her belly, like an itch that could not be scratched.
 
Her blue eyes matched up pieces of the big puzzle—fitting faces to words and the reverse. In turn, she turned a postcard or photo in her hands and read the few lines on the back. Some she barely  remembered—some she knew by heart.
 
“Friday evening. Friday. Wait for me.”
 
The postcard had a mountain landscape on the front and his scrawled signature on the back. Matilda was sixteen when she pushed her body into the dance of gestures—delicate and haphazard. The arc of her weird life formed a parabola. She came back to everything left behind. Sixteen and enslaved by Saul’s detailed complexity. Saul, a dark, Machiavellian man with glowing, controlling green eyes.
 
Twenty years prior, in a wooden cabin surrounded by woods and mountains, an innkeeper shouted something about a storm. Matilda did not care. She stared at the woods with intense persistence—trying to match the green mountains of the postcard’s image with the twilight view displayed in front of her as real life. When she held the postcard and quickly looked toward the sun setting behind the mountains, she could almost hold the image in place. But an errant rock or incongruous slope—unmatched in the postcard—interfered with her task.
 
A voice came from behind.
 
“Close one eye, then switch to the other—you can get it.”
 
A heavy hand fell on her shoulders. Behind her was Saul—in murky shadows and looking rough as if after a long hike. He seemed preoccupied and in a hurry, but his gestures were soft and his voice velvety.
 
“Come on...come in, a storm is coming.”
 
Her nostrils caught the ionic smell of electricity. She wanted to stay and watch. She responded with unwanted indecision.
 
“I like the rain and wind…I like the feel of danger.”
 
Inside, with unnecessary loudness, the innkeeper closed the shutters. Increasingly insistent, the wind whined.
 
Her voice was as quiet as a whisper.
 
“It will be a wonderful storm.”
 
Thunder. Angry, untamed clouds broke above the cabin. The shutters strained at their hinges.
 
Thunder burst between them and attacked shelves bearing an army of lined-up bottles—they clanked like an absurd percussive concerto. The roof rattled as if attacked by drunken carpenters. With the next thunderclap, the deafening storm rushed in—fast and furious.

Afterward, she watched him sit at the base of a tree and smoke a cigarette. Beyond the trees, the moon and stars sprouted. It was late, terribly late. She sat next to him with her knees raised to her chin.
 
He smiled.
 
“What causes the stars to appear and disappear?”
 
She answered with a laugh.
 
“It’s the job of a naughty girl…to light them with a magic wand as penance for past mistakes.”
 
White socks loosely rode her thin ankles and emphasized the contours of her faultless legs. The image led to thought, thought to excitement, and excitement to the sin of unhindered desire. With an artist’s skill, he kindled warmth in her belly.
 
Desire.
 
Intense emotions vibrated and flowed between their bodies.
 
* * * * *
 
Life’s tragic events clear the spirit. Later on, that’s what she was told. Her memories were like trains. Some screamed by quickly, others were heavy with travelers. Some were routed to forgotten side rails…fenced in and neglected. Driverless, with broken windows—rusty and desolate. She could not scrap them. They were vestiges of her life. We would be nothing without remembered people and events.
 
Some trains started a long journey but ended up abandoned.
 
She reviewed images recorded long ago and felt things, perhaps imagined, as frightfully real hallucinations. She took comfort in false security—that dead history was safe and could not
touch her.
 
During her mental wandering she grasped at who she might be…flesh and bones, soul and spirit or perhaps just a random thought in God’s feverish mind.
 
Now, her life was a gray box filled with old letters, postcards and photographs.
 
Long ago, in a storm’s aftermath, Saul sat at the base of a tree and gazed at white socks embracing her tanned ankles.
 
What do you think causes the stars appear and disappear?