Bodies in Motion

It was one of those rare and magical times for me when I had felt the lift-off, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, that had signaled the beginning of an out-of-body experience. This experience had been a long time coming, and I grew exhilarated at the prospect of spotting my real Abby again, even if just to see her in a very terrible parallel world.

I arose, my head skimming the ceiling. It finally melted through it, and I reached heights that staggered me even in this state. Positioned high above the parish line in my nightshirt, floating in the cold air with a layer of room-temperature buffer around me, I could see the nighttime Jefferson Parish on my right and the glittering New Orleans to my left. I went higher and higher until I could follow the curves of the Mississippi which cradled them both. The only thing sifting this high up to me from down there was faint atonal music, like the tuning of a symphony orchestra. It wasn’t the actual sound waves, but the essence of the music that easily reached me, the soulful identifications from the beings in this city who blew into horns, dragged hair across strings, percussed, or interdigitated with ivory. Making pure harmonic and melodic sense in each of their pockets of attention, here they blended into a sublime celestial arrhythmia that made even greater sense, and I was walking on clouds.

I closed my eyelids so that I could focus through them—real seeing. Lenses of flesh that willed a different focus, existentially. I once again saw all of the parallel layers spread out in the different directions, so far down the line that they seemed to blend into a continuum. And now I once again felt the ill wind from the direction into which my Abby had gone. And as unbelievable as it seemed to me, I went even higher. I looked for her, but I was now so high that I could not resolve any of the individual layers. They seemed as blended together as the way they feel to us in our blind, quotidian lives.

Ultimately, straight down into my own layer, I saw a tiny something rising my way. What--or who--could it possibly be. I had assumed I had take flight solo. I focused with all of my strength and saw that the tiny something was becoming larger and larger, until I could see that it was a someone, someone who was getting clearer and clearer.

Whoever it was got closer and I became more fearful. Already palpitating remarkably, now my heart began to pound away at what I felt to be a dangerous intensity when it had dawned on me this might be my Abby. It was, I thought—it had to be. Who else? She got closer, floating up so gracefully.

I was so high that she still had quite some distance before she would reach me. I saw her grimace as she passed through that stratified layer which was the ill wind. Thankfully, I saw the complacency return as she arose ever so high above it.

At last. To be with her agian! We held an eerily aerial embrace.

Now truly happy with one another, we looked through the ill wind at our sleeping bodies—so peaceful, resting in the flesh. We watched lovingly as parents would steal a glimpse of their slumbering children. I saw her body give a little shudder in the bed below us, obviously catching herself in her sleep. I returned my attention to her, up here, and noticed we now were holing each other at arms' length.

This is when she surprised me by grabbing my hand and yanking me hard to her. Contact while in an out-of-body experience was unsettling, almost an invasion. Force, however, was cataclysmic.

We slammed together, and she tore sexually at me. It was an invasion, but I gave in. We went at each other hard, encompassing each other, conquering each other. My quintessence was swimming, overwhelmed by the torrent of physical, energy not confined by physical shells, exertion not spent via balanced caloric conversions. It was maddeningly precipitous, limbs flailing, secretions sublimating directly into aether. She kissed me hard, this contact making our mouths one organ in spasm, almost in seizure. The other parts of our bodies also became furiously matted together.

It got rougher.

It became uncaring and frightening. We were raping each other! Her kiss was no kiss. It didn’t taste right. This was a stranger. Something had replaced her with that shudder I had witnessed. That had been no sleeping body having had a mere muscle spasm; that was her leaving an uglier parallel world’s replica for me—all during her own out-of-body experience, an outing she had been lulled into by whatever vacuum I had produced while bouncing around above the ill wind.

I was off the number line with an imaginary number doing unimaginable things to me. The assault became more ferocious, and now her flailing limbs were striking me. To my shock, we were hovering right in the jet stream of the ill wind. The more vehemently we attacked each other, the wilder the wind blew us—or could it have been the other way around? Might we have been the very source of the ill wind?

My God! I wanted to kill her, and this was her apparent sentiment, too.

I flailed back valiantly, but also with a determined purpose of rising above the ill wind. No way. She kicked me in my out-of-body ribs and she struck me in my out-of-body nose, drops of my out-of-body blood falling, falling, to the bed below. I was losing.

Suddenly my hair got pulled and the puller was not letting go. As it would turn out, the puller was indeed not her but someone else! This pull became stronger, inspiring whatever resistance I had left while being beaten all about my out-of-body by this new anti-Abby. But my resistance was to no avail.

Unexpectedly, a final jerk of a hand bolted me out of the ill wind. I saw the Abby I had been fighting all of this time fall all of the way back down and land hard into her (whose?) sleeping body. I pivoted around to identify my new champion.

My Abby, as welcome as any angel, embraced me with her floating warm body, soothing my injuries and my hopelessness and my life. Stunned, I held her at arms' length, again, to gaze at her. She tugged me back toward her, reeling me in. We coupled again, and that was a good feeling, a family feeling. And I felt physically protected by her.

“I'm here for you,” she said to me lovingly. “Sleep, my love, your search is over.” Then, as if her mission were complete, she pulled away, my longing face the only protest. As if the attraction of two bodies were what constituted gravity, her distancing herself from me began pulling me back down, vaporizing the buoyancy I had felt which had hung me up so high. I descended ever so slowly, ever so impervious to the ill wind I passed through on the way back down. I slipped back into my body and went on to sleep like a baby—like our baby.