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Godbody

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Dan Currier

IT MAY BE THAT after all this time, and after all that has happened, I do not remember that first time as it really was. Perhaps I remember it as it should have been; we do that sometimes, all of us. Whatever I've added, if I've added anything, was the right touch; the memory is perfect:

Midmorning, late spring in the Catskills, and the mist burning away, but still there an underwater-green with the rich new greenness of the spring-struck trees radiating through it. A broken old stone fence, green-grey, and at the corner of the two roads, he sat naked. He alone in all that green universe was red, was reds; fine hair down to his earlobes copper-orange, slab-sided cheeks picking a ripe-peach-red out of the bars of sun, gold-red on the down of his chest and lower belly. He was sitting absolutely boneless, comfortably round-shouldered, and with his chin gone to bed on his collarbones.

And—maybe this is the part I've added, but it remembers like a real memory, and I'd like to think it happened that way—around his head flew a circle of white moths, turned pale, pale apple-green in that light and amazing against that hair. I stopped the car. I don't think it was because he was naked.

Because I couldn't help myself, I called to him, "Hey!"

He raised his head, swiftly but not startled, and opened his eyes; then, as part of a flowing sequence without stopping anywhere, he placed his hands on the stones and lifted himself and vaulted down, landing lightly and already walking. Walking, his body moved forward as if on tracks, not bobbing up and down the way most of the rest of us do. If his shoulders had been the least bit wider they would have been too wide; if his body were by a finger's breadth flatter it would have been too flat. He made no attempt to cover his nakedness and he wasn't displaying it, either; it just didn't matter to him. The moths whisked away in the wood as he stepped out in the road.

Then: his eyes. Think back now; in all the talk, in everything you have read or heard about Godbody, has anyone ever used a color-word for Godbody's eyes? Someone with hair that color is called a redhead, but redheads don't have red hair; it's orange or russet or brown-gold, and you just can't say that this man had red eyes and be right. Cinnamon, maybe, but that's too brown. Sherry is too yellow, ruby is too red. His eyes were a rich color, that's all you can say, and warm. He bent to put his elbows on the edge of the open window of the car and looked in at me and smiled. "Hi."

What do you say? I didn't know. I tried this: "What you doing, man?"

He took it as a straight question and gave me what was for him a straight answer. "Bein' a bird."

"What?"

Now you have to believe me: what came next was said with no effort to make impressions, or to startle. It was only the truth—his truth. "Was a bird for about an hour," he said. "Tell you something about birds. People go around all the time sayin', 'Am I a man? Am I a woman, a real woman?' Lookin' at what they've done, wonderin' if that's what a man would do. Now, birds: they just birds. The one thing they never do is say, 'Am I a bird?'"

I laughed. I'm afraid it was a silly little bleat of a laugh, but what do you say? Now I tried this: "What's your name?"

"Godbody."

"My name's Currier."

He just hung there on the window for the longest time without speaking. I kept looking at him because in some peculiar way I was afraid not to. I began to feel that I had to move, so I moved my feet; to turn my head would have broken something, and that would have been pretty bad. You don't know what I mean. Neither did I at the time; neither do I now.

At last he touched me. He put his right hand very firmly just where my neck meets my shoulder. He had to slide his hand part way under my sports shirt to do it. My reaction was violent but motionless: does that say anything? The contact evoked a wild desire to do something, and a jaw-bunched, tooth-gritting effort not to. They canceled out, and it cost. Then he took his hand away.

"Why did you do that?"

In that straight-answer way of his, he said, "'Currier' don't say anything. I wanted to find out who you are."

Again (annoying myself) I produced that stupid bleat. "Who am I, then?"

He straightened up and smiled. "I'll be seeing you again," he said, and turned and sprang across the ditch and up onto the old wall. He waved once and dropped down out of sight into the dim green of the wood.

I sat there for some time like a stopped clock; nothing seemed to be happening inside at all. Perhaps the whole thing was soaking in, slowly. Then I found myself looking at the corner of the wall where I had first seen him, with a momentary feeling of disbelief. I actually craned my head out of the car window to see if he had left any footprints. Then there were his words, especially the last ones; the little emphasis he put on one word changed a rubber-stamp phrase like "I'll be seeing you again" into a message.

Then there was that hand on my shoulder. I sat there trying to resist the temptation to reach up there and touch the place, for I could feel that electric contact just as if the hand were still there. I was trying to resist, I found, because to do so might wipe it away. I should have known better. It is there to this day. And this resistance brought to mind that other, the thing I wanted so desperately to do when he touched me. All I knew then was that it cost, it cost terribly not to do the thing I wanted to do, but I didn't know what it was. I know now.

In short—I was very upset. I started the car and turned it around. I had things to do, people to see, but all I wanted then was home, and Liza. Driving back down the twisting dirt road to the highway, and then through town, I looked more or less as usual to people I passed, I suppose; I have a vague recollection of waving to one and smiling at another; but somehow I knew that there was in me an irreversible change, and all I could do, over and over again, was to ask myself the special question I used to guide me in my calling, and by which I judged all my decisions: "I am ordained a man of God; what has this to do with how I am behaving?" There was no answer, no matter how often or how intensely I asked; home and Liza, Liza and home were all that could matter.

The rest I remember less clearly, but more real; I mean, it doesn't have the crystal perfection in my mind that gives my first glimpse of Godbody that dreamlike quality. I pulled into the drive and all the way to the garage doors, so I could go in the back, and went in through the kitchen. There was a flash of annoyance when I heard a man's voice—only because of the pressure of wanting to be with Liza alone. It was Wellen—"Hobo" Wellen they called him, because his name was Hobart, and certainly not because of anything else about him. Hobo was one of those people who look tailored even in store-bought jeans, whose teeth are straighter than they ought to be and whose hair always seems to be blown exactly into place by any passing wind. People like that always make me feel too big and clumsy and put-together wrong, and somehow seem to have easy answers to things which puzzle me all the time.

"Hi, Rev," he said with that bright smile of his. "Just dropped by to tell you a funny, and found you gone and a damsel in distress."

"Oh darling, I'm glad you're back." Liza was pink and happy-looking. The drapes were down from the north windows and lying over the trestle table. "I just washed the windows and Hobo was trying to help me put the drapes back up."

"Well, thanks, Hobo," I said.

"It was nothing," Hobo said. "It really was nothing—I couldn't do it. I'll leave it to you—you can go down on your knees and still reach up there."

One thing I had learned about Hobo Wellen—never that I can recall, not once, did he speak to me without at least one reference to my size. He always made me feel that I had done something ridiculous to grow to six-four and that I should have known better. I said, "I appreciate it anyway, Hobo."

"I'll give you the funny," Hobo said, "and then I got to cut out." This was one of Hobo's pastimes; I can't say I enjoyed it but it apparently did him some good, and it was harmless, although sometimes his 'funnies' weren't funny, and sometimes I wished he wouldn't tell them in front of Liza. When you're a minister you go along with things, though. They say of some pastors and priests, "He'll take a drink, tell a yarn along with the rest of us," and this is supposed to make them better at their jobs. I don't do either one, but I find myself listening all the same, even at times like this, when I wanted desperately to be doing something else. This time the funny was about an airplane and the captain's voice announcing that three of the engines had failed and the plane would crash. Instant panic, and then someone cried out "Somebody do something religious!" whereupon a gentleman in the front of the plane rose to his feet, whipped off his hat and came down the aisle collecting money. Liza smiled and I grinned like an ape and clapped him on the shoulder and he left. That was the other thing about his 'funnies'—they always took a sidewise swipe at the church.

As soon as he was gone I felt Liza's touch on my arm and realized I had been staring at the door through which Hobo Wellen had left. The touch told me it had been a long frozen moment; and what had been going through my mind during it, I just do not know. A growing, mounting pressure of some kind, yes, but a pressure of what? Desire, love, wonder, and was that anger? Why anger? And fear with many faces, not the least of them the certainty that nothing would ever be the same again, that I stood on the borders of a new country with a long journey to make. This part of the fear was not so much the sure knowledge that there was danger ahead, though I knew there was, for I knew that there was discovery and excitement and enrichment too; it was the fear of change, which is a very special thing and perhaps not fear at all, for life is change, isn't it? And why fear life?

"Dan!"

At last I looked at her; I took her elbows and looked down into her face, her dear face. Liza is one of those women who is the envy and despair of all the other women her age; she always had, always would look younger than she was and younger than all of them. It wasn't only the small, slender, firm body and the smooth skin and clear eyes; it was the way she carried herself, the way, when she moved or spoke, she released energy rather than stoking it up and eking it out like the rest of us. She kept her masses of blue-fired black hair rolled and folded up into a gleaming dark helmet and her eyes were not green, as they seemed to be, but an illuminated blue full of so many flecks of gold that they seemed to be green.

"Dan—what is it?"

What moves a man to do the things he does? Sometimes he knows before he does them, sometimes he knows at the time; but what of the times when he acts not knowing why, not understanding even afterward? She was frightened, and instead of trying to comfort her, or trying to understand or explain, I watched my own two hands living a life of their own, rising to snatch the big pins out of the sides and back of her hair so that it tumbled down about her shoulders and back.

"Dan!"

Why didn't I comfort her, why didn't I look for one single word to still the birth of terror in that face? Did I like it? Dan Currier, who, when he bumbled into hurting someone even a little, was almost obsessed with efforts at instant consolation? Or was it the certainty that whatever was going to happen would make up a thousand times over for any distress on the way?

She was trying to say something: "Dan, I don't know what you're thinking. If you think I was, if you think he—let me go. Let me go!" or some such. I kissed her, I corked up her words and her breath with my mouth. Her eyes, so huge and close, were big enough for me and a dozen like me to tumble into and drown; I tumbled, I drowned. When I released her she was crying; I'd seen her cry many times before but never like this, except maybe that once on the roller-coaster and the other time when I was in the accident and the radio said I had been killed and they were mistaken and I walked in the door without a scratch. I said, "Come."

She went with me willingly, bewildered, until she found herself at the foot of the stairs, and then she held back—not much at all, but even that little made something explode inside me. I picked her up like a doll and sprang up the stairs two at a time and crossed the upstairs hall as if my feet, somehow, weren't touching the floor; but we were at the top of an arc, having been thrown by some huge force. The bed was a blaze of gold from the tops of the two wide windows and a floodlight of sun; there was nothing on it but the bottom sheet, and I dropped her, or threw her down. She bounced, she screamed; I took her wrist and hauled her up sitting and broke the two top buttons off the soft denim jacket, then got hold of the hem and snapped it off over her head. She wore nothing under it, which was a vast surprise to me; I hadn't known, one way or the other—how could I? I punched her shoulder with the heel of my hand and down she went on her back; I snapped her waistband as if it had been a single thread and snatched her skirt off. Her sandals had disappeared somewhere along the way, and she lay naked in that glory of light. I had seen her naked before, of course, but I had never let myself look at her, really look, and as I got out of my clothes—it seemed to take forever, but it couldn't have been long, for I tore my shirt and ripped the zipper in my trousers halfway down; one of my socks, I found later, was still in its shoe!—I held her pinned down to the bed in the circle of my vision with her eyes tied to mine in the center of it. I was breathing deeply but not rapidly at all—strange, that—while her breath came and went like a pulse, making and losing shadows between her ribs and the superb taut hollows at the sides of her belly. And as I held her so, where she lay with her arms crossed over her breasts and her hips half- turned, one knee drawn up to conceal herself, something from me—a demand which was not anger, but still was like a fury—reached out invisible hands and pulled those arms down and away from her breasts, dropped the small strong hands curled to the sheet, rolled back the hips, straightened that leg. The sunlight (you take pictures in your mind at certain moments) slanted down through the hair on the mound between her legs and tinted the skin under it, making the clear cream-color radiate up—a wonder. It was all a wonder, even in the violence and speed of the act itself, frozen forever in the mind, ready to be retrieved forever after, spellbinding, breathtaking.

Then I was on her, and it was all new: never before in the light, never before in haste, never before with the eyes and without cover, never before this smooth opening-up for me, this unimpeded charge and plunge, for always with Liza and me there was this long patient nudge and press and slow yielding; if I moved too fast it was dry and hurt her. Her gateway was completely wet and wanton ... wanting, which was a glory too, because nothing, nothing, nothing on earth could have prevented my deep and total lunge into her at that moment. Then another new thing: she cried out.

She cried out ... what was usual with us? We loved each other, Liza and I, and she never denied me. Who had told me that I must deny us both as much as I could, and that when it became a pressure we must do what must be done quickly and in the dark, and, though we embraced and were happy with it, never discuss it before or afterward? And during it ... not a sound. Once—I recall it particularly because it was the first time—after we had been married a month, Liza gasped and held her breath, and it was as if both her small hands were magically inside her, grasping my organ and squeezing it rhythmically. When it subsided she let out the breath with a long hiss, while her heart thumped my chest like something frantic, imprisoned. As for me, I demanded of myself a control that would make me silent as I climaxed; if I caught myself breathing faster I would instead breathe deeper until it was over. That, usually, was three or four minutes—sometimes a lot longer if I was tired or worried—and it was at those times when again I might experience that extraordinary breath-held tightening grip inside her, like her little hands; even then she controlled that gasp. But now—she cried out.

She cried out, and here was Dan Currier, professional (obsessional) consoler: a cry was to be heeded, the affliction of pain was to be stopped and existing pain consoled. This is everything I was and everything I meant to be. But now, at my first great delving lunge, miraculously made swift and easy, she cried out, and I withdrew almost all the way and lunged again so deep and so hard that it bruised my pubic bone against hers, and again she cried out, louder. Of course there was pain, that shattering drive of flesh into flesh and bone against bone, and my great weight on her and my big arms locked around her so that the cry was forced out as shockingly as it was driven out by whatever was moving her. How, then, she could take in enough air to do what she did I can not explain, but she cried out again and again, each cry like a plucked string, sharply appearing and fading, four, five ... seven of them, diminishing. And with each cry, that incredible gripping inside, but harder, stronger than I had ever known it, so much so that I could realize, now, that I had not felt those earlier ones, but merely sensed them.

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Excerpted from Godbody by Theodore Sturgeon. Copyright © 1986 The Estate of Theodore Sturgeon. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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