The Freediver

He falls back down on me. I whimper into his ear in a mewing kittenspeak.

He begins moving faster, picking up pace. My breathing labours to keep up. We are getting close. Somewhere, a piano is playing a rising bohemian rhapsody, arcing to a howl.

We groan. My legs still around his waist, squeezing. He must feel my muscles clamping him. Squeezing it. But, it appears like he is not about to give in to it. He is too hard, too strong to surrender. Not just yet. He pushes. I feel he has reached the end of my insides. I groan loudly for the first time, in what must be a little stab of pain. A little pain cleans out the mind. A little clarity dulls the pain. But, fleeting. Back and forth, in a spacetime of our own.

I intone, "Keep going. Push up on me and sweat. Don't stop until the angels sing."

I feel an energy pulsing through my body in waves. It is a little alarming. But, also amazing. It is frighteningly powerful now. Humming from the base of my spine. My torso feels like it wants to twist and flail, so I let it. But, it is not twisting and flailing. The pounding energy keeps pitching through my body. A sort of thrumming in the ears. It is so mighty now. I cannot deal with it anymore. It is true, only a body can truly know another body.

I moan and wail and squeal in cycles of agony and ecstasy. The sound of a line of pigs being slaughtered.

I yell Seb's name. Or, was it Seth? Have I developed a lisp this late in life? Did I hear him whimper mmm...?

He is spewing warmth, a well-earned joy. I emerge from a dark tunnel and find myself in the middle of a Rio carnival.

It was brutal labour, but worthwhile unto itself. He strangles his long groan down into a brief, low grunt. I wail into the new dawn air.

I feel a wonderful lightness in my body. A ridiculous happiness. I feel unaccountably free. I want to be a singer in the park, a violinist in the piazza, a dancer in the rain. Pirouette till I fall over. Then, writhe a floor dance till my dress turns rag. These emotions, they flow from nowhere. And everywhere.

How do we find the right words to describe the big occasions? I won't even try.

We climb down some, locked in our own experience. There is a clarity that comes with a sudden absence of desire. Is he my lover or my vice?

Pensively, with a tinge of sadness, "This will be our only time."

***

A singularity...

In the Natural Sciences, it describes systems where a small change may have an enormous impact.

In Physics, a point where all known laws are indistinguishable, and space and time are no longer interrelated realities. They both merge indistinguishably and stop having any independent meaning.

By Einstein, a situation where all matter is forced to be compressed to a teeny weeny point.

In Math, a point at which a function soars into infinity.

In Tech, an instant in the future when technology is insanely too far gone, and irreversible.

***

Maybe he finds my body to be restorative. He is flourishing again. He strokes my thigh. My slit is caked shut by my now dried excitement.

"Soph?"

His enquiry is without content. As pure as a freestanding question mark.

"We can't."

"Just this twice?"

I imagine music wafting in the night air. A single violin in the shadows playing one long note of longing.

My hand rises to my forehead to brush back an imaginary strand of trailing hair.

"We go freediving in our private pool."

I feel a giddy flush of anticipation. I have tried my best within the limits of being myself. The world happens to you. You don't happen to the world. There is nothing much you can do.

We dive, hitting the water clean and true.

That seamless thing happens. In its unreality, we begin making music together, without discussion or rehearsal. I know the music. He knows the words.

***

Chapter 16

Betrayal

The morning dawned beautifully. Yet again. The sunlight is everywhere. Everything is the colour it usually is, only brighter.

I look in the mirror. I do not comb my sleep-tangled hair. Leave it wild is how we should live every now and again. I look at the mirror one last time. Yes, it is me. I will be leaving here the day after tomorrow.

I tremble. I need my espresso fix. Where is Seb? Not in the garden. The outhouse?

His bedroom is empty. No cellphone charger. No backpack. No nothing. Not a crease on the bedsheet. Cleaned out. So too the washroom. Not even a wash basin male stain. Ditto, other room. Kind of surreal. Have I imagined a Seb from my Seth?

I rush back to my bedroom. My wad of cash, my necklace, an heirloom, my passport. Far gone.

A snakelike power ascends my spine and blows a hole in my head.

The fuckin' bastard! I feel utterly foolish. A worldly savvy corporate executive, snooked by the oozing charm of a kid. I'm seething. At myself. What a silly old woman I am. And for fuck's sake, why my passport? Is he a master forger too? Hasn't he perverted who I am enough? At least, I can still move around the EU.

***

I am beside myself. Oh, the sting! I have an early night. I seek refuge in sleep. I hope it will be kind to me.

***

He is on a pedestal, installed at some kind of town square. A piazza. A surge of people of many hues swirling, milling around the place, ascertaining this and that.

He is motionless. Immobile. But, appears sentient. Odd.

Like David. Michelangelo's David. That of Florence, Italy. Regally proud and yet vulnerably naked.

It is all rather Kafkaesque.

A lady in a breezy pastel summer dress drifts off the swarm of humanity, and stands alone before him. She studies him for a time. Parses his every contour. Her eyes trace his muscles and sinews, once over, and then again.

She reaches out to hold him, as if taking his measure. She is pedantic about the task. Gently, she cradles his sac like a treasured artifact. She studies his testicles with scholarly intent, as if trying to pick a favourite. He is of marble. And yet, she senses warmth.

She peeks up coyly, tilting her sunhat a little to take him in. The dusting of freckles at her cleavage thins out. He can see her face now.

"Mum!" he cries in silence.

***

I go to the village. The café has yet to open. I direct my feet from the sunny side of the street to walk in the shade.

A McDonald's. It'll do.

"A Happy Meal for you?"

"Coffee. No sugar."

I gulp the murderously black and concentrated thick-brewed coffee. The sludge roasts my insides. I need this.

***

Epilogue

My cellphone chimes. I stir. I rub my eyes redder. Pain. I have a wound that is larger than my body. I feel like I am the only survivor of a nuclear winter. I am a kickass corporate road warrior. I am a cockroach. But, I don't feel like one.

An unlisted number. A message.

"I will give myself up to you at fountain in front of village police station. Cabeção, 160km NE Lisbon. Friday."

***

He is at the fountain, back turned to me. Silently, I stride up to him. I take him down ingloriously by his bollocks. I am a kickass corporate warrior again. As he crumbles, he gazes up at his assailant, astounded, "Mum!"

Seb appears from nowhere. In an instant, he crumbles to the ground too.

"I see you know each other."

The End