In a world of miracles, cannot everything happen...?
In the nudie camp we had invited the non-nudies – I remember I was sitting on a table with not too many others, joking about the weird stuff that happened in the world.
Then other groups of people came and started sitting themselves around the same elongated picnic table – a woman sat at my side – I looked at her it seems at the same time that another of the fellows already sitting down stared (perhaps too intently) at her – so she went into a rage of sorts, ejaculating in high dudgeon: “What! What’s the matter! Something wrong? Why the bloody pernickety stares?” – all this glaring at me. I replied, with an apologetic smile: “Just a roving eye; sorry.”
Then it started getting too crowded, the wine flowing, the sandwiches jumping along the table; I felt trapped, so I got up and searched with the eyes a route of escape – the best way was to get on top of the table among the food and the drinks and the bouquets and the hands, and run for it to the nearest corner in order to leap then to the floor, free; only that when I got up, my underwear (the only item of clothing I wore) got caught on a sliver of the bench and as soon as I got over the table I had to hold and hide my balls (my shorts torn and hanging down to the middle of my thigh) – so I said, laughing, especially to the lady at my side, a non-nudie mighty interested now: “Just a wandering eye, indeed,” but everybody was already making fun of me, so that I ran to the end of the table and leaped to safety.
I went to the meadow to look at the sky with the others. The seals (so you’d swear they were – same shape, same sheen, same impression of ponderousness,) the seals in the air were still talking among themselves. The sky was a spotless deep blue, the “seals” all black, with fins that looked like rudimentary hands. It was utterly amazing. How do they do it? How do they manage to... And they look so intelligent, stoichiologically surmising and all... Balancing their words, or thoughts... What..., what kind of uplifted animals or celestial beings are those...? Mighty puzzled, we were asking all kinds of questions. They had appeared in the sky a couple of days ago. That was the main reason we had invited the non-nudies of the neighboring camp up to our domain. To discuss and comment about the wonderful apparition of the shiny magical beasts conversing by themselves up there, and aloft. Such miraculous situations. But now lo...! At last the “seals” seemed to have arrived to an understanding of sorts... No more weighty conferences atop our wondering heads... They had started drifting away, only that now there were millions of them drifting in the same direction – opposite the sun that had started its slow descent... The seals were “flying” (without wings) higher and higher and faster away; only that now, come from all the corners of the firmament, there were many, many of them, and their shapes were not identical to those we had come to know; some of their shapes were a bit comical even, almost cartoonish, grotesque... And yet, the whole, how imposing, daunting, stirring... The wife of another fellow was at my side, we embraced while we looked up... She was a beautiful woman, bronzed, strong, with short hair... And now we embraced still tighter... The sky was changing into astonishing shapes... The forms the sky was conceiving were now mainly like enormous, heaven-encompassing peacock’s tails, with chiefly brown and white rhomboids, but also rhomboids in other iridescent tonalities... In a world of so many miracles, why should anything, at the end of the day, be impossible...? I remember commenting – and she holding me tighter.
Unfortunately a superannuated plane appeared now very low, licking the trees, its motor making the sick noise of giving up its ghost... We were afraid the plane – all black, and heavy, all of metal often rusted at the seams – might fall upon us. But it fell a bit off the camp. We saw immediately a thick plume of dark smoke. We rushed, she and me, only that we were by now a bit far off. And then we saw two naked young women get out of the plane, no too much the worse for wear, a few scratches and bruises and stains of grease and coal – they were wobbly, but who knows from what, if from fear, or shame, or too much of an intoxicating substance brewing inside them... There was nobody else inside the wreck. The women were both very embarrassed; nobody bothered them much. There was no fuel left in the plane; it didn’t really burn, but it looked like a pile of junk.
We walked, the other’s wife and I, deep into the fields; we sat down among the rows of recently planted oats; we kissed; we decided that we were part of the miracle – the seals in the sky, the odd images sketched in the firmament by the conjunction of the elements, the planes that fell, all those signs of life and of mystery hidden and manifest – who knows what’s really (really!) true. Everything might be possible – the return of our selves – the return of we as we really are under these disguises of flesh... “We might see ourselves again in a world undreamed,” we concurred. Nothing has been discovered as yet. So many possibilities ahead...
And then she got up. She went, so marvelous, a goddess into the sunset.
At length I got up and went into the opposite direction. I found on a lame chair a pair of trunks that I got into. I walked past the camp. I gathered a few bottles of orange juice that were unopened; my intention was to carry them to the fringes, I didn’t want that they should spoil, go to waste. Only that, lost in thoughts, by and by I had walked into the wrong camp. There were some steep steps in front of me, a stairs difficult to climb. Also I saw that there was a mechanical ladder working not far from the stairs. Loaded with the dozen bottles of orange juice, I started climbing the stairs. A fellow was atop them, dressed all in yellow, in a sort of military uniform, with a pumped up cap like those worn by generals. He started shouting. Actually he was congratulating me. “Magnificent work, citizen compatriot!”
Then he was talking (shouting) to somebody behind him. “Behold, soldiers, a pure clean fellow, a legal local citizen, a man of our kind, climbing the stairs!”
Now I saw that behind him he had a company assembled – about twenty young fellows all dressed martially, in yellow, all of them I noticed holding in their right hand, not a rifle or another weapon, but a bottle of milk (milk, I assumed, for the liquid inside it was all pure white, as the liquid inside my bottles was pure orange.)
I had stumbled into a camp for blossoming right-wingers – a camp that I knew to be not too far from ours (about thirty miles, I reckoned – that must have been the large stretch along which I had gotten stranded.)
The commanding nut was haranguing his troops: “Then they will say that only the dirty bastards, the tainted immigrants employ the stairs – that we real McCoys are too degenerate to climb stairs, that we consider it beneath our station... No way! Here you have a hero! Not only a properly hued person, build like a demigod, and loaded to the gills to boot, but also a man of quality: observe how fine his hands, behold the classical shape of his nose... He looks to me like a rare product of the heavens... And he climbs the stairs like an immigrant...! He doesn’t take the easy mechanical way. He takes the hard bitter heroic way! We are able to be strong and earthy too, my dear purebred clean-blooded fledglings! Not only them are able to endure; we can too!”
They were looming huger and huger, a gigantic yellow egg about to burst. I was in the middle of the stairs and the general, after effetely glancing and smirking my way, gave an order: “Let’s meet the hero halfway!”
The yellow boys came to me as an avalanche. I feared for the bottles. I put them down one by one. And now I had to be embraced by each of the boys. The general, from the upper rung was paternally smiling; very straight, and proud. Now he gave another clashing order. “Climb to the bottom and up! Let’s show the hero that we also can!”
The yellow blob went down and up in an exhalation. A quaint demonstration at once of bearable stamina and acceptable coordination. Then they stood behind their “general,” in correct formation. The boss told them to be at ease, and they started drinking eagerly from their bottles – I noticed that their bottles carried now my orange juice. I peered down at my bottles – they had been all violated, they were almost empty, or filled with murky milk. I left them there. Silently I retraced my steps..., headed back to our nudie camp...
The night fell while I was still lost in the fields. The stars were so strange. The sky was a complete snake with many eyes, many refulgent eyes – What am I but a possibility, I said, trudging along, bombed.
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