The Messenger

It was the summer of 1970, Gina was twenty-one, I was twenty-four, and those first few days in Amsterdam sent us into a love-heat.

Holed up in a tiny room overlooking the Stadhouderskade canal, we went at it like scorpions and monkeys until the world went opaque. All that remained was the frantic yelping and clawing, the pressing of flesh and twisting torsos, the suctioning, mind-bending spins into the inner and outer reaches, and the star-burst penetrations that give way to the draining emptiness that swallows you up and lets you hide from yourself. We were a half-blind pair of reptiles thought extinct for a million years trying to resurrect the whole species in the steamy swamp of our bed. It was a glorious and delicious fever; then the fever passed and I fell into dreaming.

I saw myself standing on a high cliff overlooking the Caribbean Sea, transfixed by the vast indigo wetness. The sky was soaked in a gray mist and, behind me, the crumbling walls of an ancient city rose up against a jungle alive with the screams of invisible monkeys. The trees stood like exhausted lovers yearning for the sun’s first kiss, and the macaws listened for God in the immeasurable moment when night becomes day and the past becomes the promise of tomorrow. The air was sweet; it kissed the treetops and moved the leaves like shadows over a sky dipped in dreams. In that dreamy sweetness, I heard an indescribably beautiful voice call to me like a lover in the moonlight, slowly, deliberately, as if time had stopped and the delicate peal of star-chimes signaled the beginning of a new life.

“I’m going to tell you something that will make sleep impossible, something that will set a fire burning in your soul and make the oceans evaporate.

“Do you know that God is this fire? Do you know that God is the first thought you had before you imagined you were something separate and apart from everything else?

“God is the Source of Light, the Ground of Life, the Essence of the Self-Aware Mind.”

As the awe inducing voice trailed off into space, I felt myself shudder. Instantaneously a shooting star streaked across the sky, and in its blazing incandescence I saw a reflection of Gina. Then, as the trailing star-spark disappeared, a crackling sizzle fired away like a cache of neurons in some infinitesimal convolution of my brain. There was a flip-flop of Space and Time, and I was no longer standing above the Caribbean Sea, but back in Amsterdam, holding Gina tightly as we soared upward on the warm wind, higher and higher, losing our way and ourselves, until we were bound together like twin stars burning brightly in the heavens.

In that all-consuming light, I saw the faces and spirits of humankind intertwined in celestial Oneness. Yet in the midst of our love, I was taken with the thought that we were participating in a forbidden and secret ceremony. Gina was the Earth and I was the Sun, and the fire that consumed us had both the power to save and to destroy.

In the flickering candlelight, Gina had become a vision of soft, warm luminescence. I knelt down before her, and it seemed to me that I had never seen such perfection. I drew up and over her, again and again, breaking through the barriers of our earthly form and consciousness. We had become one body and one soul. Our love had penetrated every pore of our existence; this was not a love for a day or a year but an unconditional love for all time.

I felt Gina’s kiss sweep over me like a caress of silk, and with that kiss came a sweet urgent anticipation, which demanded release. We were still of this world, but at the same time, infused with an ecstatic energy that brought us back and forth through the rush of time, back and forth until the instant of surrender when the urgency of our love gave way to the stillness of exhaustion and emptiness.