3

A Bon vivant is hard to detest, or so I find out when Ava calls me back. Enough is enough is her tone; getting down to the bottom of this is her attitude.

“Fact,” she reports to me, “you’re a summa cum laude. Fact: you have never heard of the holocaust or Nagasaki. Fact: you’re moved to tears over forty years later, and I can’t explain that unless your sliding is for real. For you, anyway. Of course I don’t buy it, but let’s talk.”

“Tell me what a cannibal is, first,” I request.

“When I come over. Bye.”

I don’t wait long.

Her Chevrolet drives up a few minutes later. Even from six floors up, I recognize her squeaky brakes from our “platonic” date. (Her car used to be a Ford when her brakes were full and her nose was bumpless. Fewer bumps with Fords, I think to myself—could there be a marketing premise here I could cash in on?) After an uncomfortable, fidgety period of time, what used to be a doorbell now sounds as a raspy buzzer. Upon opening the door, I get a Hello Ralph peck on the cheek. She firmly takes my hand and silently leads me into my own apartment. She maintains her hush which convinces me that she will choose her first words very carefully. Now we’re sitting in the den of my apartment, and I’m a little embarrassed because it is a little less tastefully done since my last slide.

“Pretty tacky,” her first words say of my plastic lamp shade covers.

“They weren’t here last layer,” I tell her in my defense.

Ava smiles with pity, her sympathetic eyes tenderly regarding me.

“I’m going to speak with you assuming all of this is true. Of course it’s not,” she adds to dash my hopeful glint, “but it will help me appreciate who you are, how you think. I’m attracted to you—”

She is! To me!

“—and I find you interesting, and...”

“You were downright in love with me last time.”

“Last layer.”

“Right. I think you were, anyway,” I qualify.

“Right,” she shoots back, her eyebrows cocked in investigative position, her eyes now in rivet. “So what happened?” she asks.

“I couldn’t have you—I mean her, and at a crucial moment I slid, hoping to put the icing on the cake, affection-wise.”

“And?” she asks.

“Things went the other way; you’re now just a friend with a bump on your nose.”

“Was she a stupid girl, Ralph?” she asks, rubbing her nose as if controlled unknowingly by a post-hypnotic suggestion.

“I don’t know what you mean.” And I do not. Stupid to reject my affection? If so, am I brash to take her question as announcement that she is smarter, that she will be mine?

“I mean did she buy all of this crap about layers and sliding?” she continues, planting me firmly on square one once again.

“I don’t think she is stupid,” I answer. I stare into her eyes. “She is you.”

“Oh, yes, me,” she echoes. “But the girl who you wanted to be affectionate with was stupid—I mean believing you and all,” she is careful to point out again for the sake of emphasis. I suspect that this is beginning to sound a lot like teasing.

“Actually,” I tell her, with every intention of creating whatever jealousy she might be capable of, “she was lovely. A lot like you...except for the bump, of course.”

“That bump again,” she says fretfully. “Was she better without it?” She poses the question, although sarcastically, as if she expected an answer. I pause and brace myself. “For your information,” she insists, “I’ve had this bump all of my life. It’s just a gentle rise of the bone—a fashionable prominence—and not dromedary, for goodness sake. You keep talking like it defines my whole essence. Forget the fricking bump! O.K.?” I can’t tell if she is angry or just being cute. But she stops and calms herself, making me respect her indignation. I just wait.

“You know,” she continues, “I could have feelings for you, perhaps, but this way of life you swear is true is just too big of a road block. I just can’t have any type of progressing relationship with a crazy person.”

“What’s my only chance?” I ask.

“Denial versus proof. And if you deny it all now, I’ve got to wonder why you put on this elaborate act anyway. Wait,” she says, stopping to realize a conclusion, “the fact that you did put on this elaborate act is too troubling to accept, and you’re out. So I guess it’s proof, buddy boy, which I’ve got to figure is pretty much impossible.”

“And you don’t believe me anyway.”

“That’s right. So I sit here, unbelieving, ready to leave forever, either because you’re crazy, or twisted and conniving, but with my open mind.”

“I suppose that’s about as open as your mind will be,” I surmise.

“That’s right again,” she says, with her arms on the armrests of the unlovely chair, her right foot tapping.

“I guess the pressure’s on,” I say, stalling in my inability to work any convincing magic.

(Now I know there’s the potential for a relationship here; there have to be some common threads among the layers. She liked me a whole lot when she was Ana. And I still like her here, because, after all, I don’t change. In fact, I know I even love her—I think. So this is all-or-none time. I could slide, hoping she would be madly in love with me as Eva, Alana, or whatever her name would be then, but I doubt it. And even if she would, I might not, depending on her, love the new Miss Right in return. And considering the direction my sliding has been in, we’d probably hate each other and I’d be stuck in a world with three nuked Japanese cities each with a half-life identical to Strontium-90, several American civil wars, or who knows what else. At least here, small pox is still eradicated.

So sliding is out. That means charm. All-or-none charm. I have to have her want to accept my situation, and not dispel it before I have a chance to convince her.)

“Well?” she asks.

Silently I rise, as if my number had been called. I fix my eyes on her and lean forward to show my intention of walking over to her, testing the water. She stares back, keenly interested in how I might resolve the unresolvable. I begin toward her and she still is motionless, neither inviting nor recoiling. When I’m close enough, as if this had been my plan all along, I lean over and kiss her on her lips. No one is more surprised by my actions than me. And then I consider her own actions. It is an unrejected kiss.

Some challenge.

Her coyness was an elaborate act of her own, and I, the summa cum laude, fell for it. My all-or-none gamble went my way: having risked the oblivion of none, I celebrate the joy of all. And for the first time in my slippery life I share my body with someone I love.

We are led by a path of least resistance into my multicolored bedroom. It waits very naturally for us. We fall onto the bed as one, entangled in a squirming mass of fumbling limbs that reflexly work together to disrobe the two separated people we used to be. It’s hot and heavy and everything I thought it would be with her.

And then it happens.

I’m so enthralled that I spontaneously slide several times; but she doesn’t appear to alter. I am complimented to say that she herself is so enthralled she never notices the several physical shivers that punctuate our lovemaking, changing my world who knows how and frankly, who cares, since she seems to remain with me, unchanged throughout. A constant?

Impossible. Just seems so. I catch myself. I’m new to actual love-sex, and I falter: I’m sliding to have sex with many different women—God! Why am I doing this? Selfish bastard! I hate myself—she feels so incredible. They feel so incredible? Still she seems so unalterably consistent in her movements with me. But I’m sure the reality is that I’m experiencing them all—Anas, Avas, Evas, the rest—as I travel. I’m sure. I hate me for doing this, but isn’t that the real me? Isn’t that what I would have wanted before tonight? I take. Guilt creeps in.

In this strange, new role of lovemaking instead of mere sexmaking, I know that I am cheating my true feelings—turning it back into just sex. We both breathe heavily with our efforts. Drops of my perspiration fall on her. Her eyes are closed tightly from her pleasures. She doesn’t appear to change as I slide. And wouldn’t that be incredible!

Why not! I want her, not them. I love her. She’s given herself to me, given her love to me—it’s a personal, intimate gift from a single individual. I want her here, not left behind. Why did I slide? I can’t believe it! I hate myself, I love her. Why can’t she stay the same! I push and push, both physically within her passionate vise and metaphysically along the layers—with her attached. It’s a ridiculous fantasy so I can suppress my feelings of wickedness over the sliding I did to heighten the sensation of my male pleasure in this romp. I push more. I imagine that as I slide I catapult her along with me—the same Ava with the same me, in the same sex, into the different worlds. But that doesn’t help because there’s a different guilt.

How dare I enjoy fantasizing about displacing someone from the world where she belongs? But isn’t it commendable that I get a bigger thrill from the idea of remaining with this same girl I love instead of having sex with many different women, like I’m actually doing? Greedy son of a bitch!

I fantasize, hope, and need to have her still with me, but I know it’s just a wish. I can’t undo what I did, and sliding is a violation of the monogamous devotion that love now explains so well to me. As we cling to each other so ferociously, interdigitating everywhere, we tense up, our bodies rigid but drifting around on each other because of the cool perspiration that is a film between us. We glide on this frictionless film like there’s no gravity, except for the mutual attraction two bodies have in space. And then there’s that final quiver. She opens her eyes to me at this moment. I struggle to keep the one-woman illusion going, but it’s a stretch. And then my concentration dissolves. I’m out of control and I slip. Selfish bastard!

The different colors burst in my bedroom at our sexual peak, the technicolor of our affections stated in a polychromatic experience that night. All of the primary colors in the room have faded to clashing pastels, then coordinated composites in this celebration. Ultimately that night—our eyes closed—and all—faded to black.

The next morning, as I lay in bed beside her, I studied her. She didn’t seem any different. Same blond hair, same smooth skin. Her nose had the same gentle rise of the bone—that same “fashionable prominence.” I rolled onto my back, staring at the ceiling, and I wondered what the rest of her would be like when she woke up. The morning light made the windows glow, and like the first rays upon an irregular horizon, dawn cast a jigsaw puzzle interplay of light and shadow on new defects in the ceiling paint. What was once a gaily colored and trimmed bedroom was now gray with an old and bad paint job. It seemed my sliding had continued in the same direction. I checked her out again.

I became very frightened. I lay still, supine, naked and vulnerable; and then I trembled.

I found some relief in that Ava hadn’t seemed to change in any noticeable way, unless she were to turn out to be a real ignoramus when she awoke. My cavalier sliding that enhanced my intimacy may have taken a considerable toll on my life as I didn’t know what world I was in, or whether Ava (her name?) could even read. Or speak English.

Changing my world who knows how and, frankly, who cares…

Now I cared. I continued to lay still in my progressing terror, afraid to look at the clock which I hoped still had twelve numbers.

She, this person next to me, slept so beautifully, her breaths calming my fears with the feminine lift of her chest. This very motion seemed so maternal that I could feel so very safe even in a deteriorated world. But once again I regarded the ceiling; once again I lapsed into a vague daydream of doom.

After a while I could sense this person was awake and staring at me. I kept my head still but moved my eyes hard to the side to look at her unchanged green irises. I didn’t know who I was going to meet here. Perhaps someone unchanged. Certainly this was a different person. Certainly, as always, I was the constant and I slid alone. I’ve always slid alone. The fantasy of bringing her along with me, however, was a bewitching conflict that tugged for my attention even as this person stared back at me.

“You grind your teeth a lot in your sleep,” she finally said when I resumed my ceiling watch. She placed her hand on my face, petting and stroking my cheek.

Not only English, I thought, but grammatically correct at that, so thank you, God.

“That’s my TM joint that makes me grind,” I responded. “My bite’s supposed to be off or something like that. A dentist said I should worry about it when I start getting headaches.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I can make at least ten different sound effects by grinding my teeth,” I added. She made no comment. She seemed truly unchanged. The room, on the other hand, was a mess. How come, I wondered, if I didn’t change—if I didn’t become a slob, then why did the surroundings cared for by me change as if a slob lived here? Just who was I that I replaced? Ah, the mysteries of life as I know it.

Ava kissed me hard and got out of bed. Yes, I could love her here. An Ava walked out of a worse bedroom than an Ava had been taken to the night before, and then I heard her freshening up in the bathroom. She wasn’t appalled by the pigsty, probably—certainly—because this was the new Ava, unshocked by a typical room in a worse world. Could I still wish she were unchanged in spite of her non-plussed affect? Could I still fantasize this without feeling stupid? I considered the comfort of stupidity.

I continued to lie quietly, dreading what my Survey of History might describe, this reference companion probably still retrievable from the trash can. Ava had been out of the room several minutes before I heard her pop on the television in the den. Soon I could know my whereabouts, so I strained to listen to this electronic blabbermouth that couldn’t keep a secret. From my bedroom, though, the sound of the TV wasn’t much more than background noise, so I gave up trying to catch any intelligible clues. I dressed from the selection of quite ordinary and actually unfashionable clothes in my closet. When Ava came back into my bedroom, the TV was off again, this window to a new world slammed shut.

“Hi,” I greeted her hopefully, but her face was pale. To my shock, she had been shocked.

“There is a charity for abused children,” she said feebly. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. And there was a murder in Gentilly last night.” She faced me, arms outstretched, helpless. I almost expected stigmata as she stood, motionless, feeling the pain that was out there, dying because of the sins in this world.

So I had taken her with me! I did this. I was no longer alone—and just in time, for I felt we had traveled to a place where I didn’t want to be alone.

“Well,” I said attempting comfort, but in fear myself, “a city this size—you’ve got to expect that occasionally.” I privately remembered a layer a long time ago where taking of life was considered senseless and very rare, most of the killing confined to the occasional outburst of a war. I had hoped that I had not gotten to a layer where murder happened any more than rarely—or even occasionally. I said it to convince myself as much as her: In a city this size, you’ve got to expect that sort of thing.

“There has been at least one killing a day since the new year and this is June!” she exclaimed, suddenly animated. She had never been summa cum anything, but she was by no means slow to catch on, her only noticeable deterioration since I had met her being the unmentionable on her nose. Her apparent and surprising non-deteriorated mental prowess further reinforced the new reality, which was the old her.

No “What’s-this-world-coming-to?” line. She looked at me and firmly, too. “What world have I come to?” she asked instead.

Honestly, I didn’t even know what world I had come to. I was pretty much shocked myself. Imagine! Murders daily. Child abuse! In all fairness to her, though, I was used to surprise, to rolling with the punches, even though the punches were getting harder. Of course, when I thought back on the different worlds I’ve been through, I now knew that I must have been a fool not to notice the worsening of things that was happening in my life before I ever noticed uglier walls for bus schedules.

I rapidly experienced a most unpleasant realization:

The plights of my family had been just that, I had thought. Life had stayed pretty much the same for me in my family, in spite of my countless slides through childhood, high school, and college. The changes, as I’ve explained before, were seemingly random. My parents and I had good times, but there were bad times, too. I had just figured every family has its share of bad times.

I had watched my father’s drinking get worse as I slid my way through life. First there was the happy socialite that he was, never afraid to use camaraderie as an excuse to enjoy a little drink with the fellas at College Inn. Then there was the guy who needed a drink after work. After that, as I slid here and there, there was the alcoholic who never left Parkway Tavern. Finally, there was the guy who killed himself on a repeat DWI excursion, having wedged his car firmly into one of the ancient oaks on St. Charles Avenue.

I also had watched, now it seemed, my mother’s happy way of life turn cynical. And not just because of my father’s drinking. She developed one bad habit after another.

For example, I remember one time I slid at a high school football game just to have my school win. The rules didn’t seem to change all that much, but the score certainly did. The Blue Jays soundly trounced the Cavaliers that night. We partied hard after that victory, and I especially enjoyed myself, having left the losers back a few slides earlier. The priests were not invited to share the beer with us on the lakefront levee that evening, and the clandestine celebration went on to become a new tradition at our school. When I returned home later that night, I saw that my Mom was still waiting up for me.

We lived uptown on Nashville Avenue. This was a town-within-a-town two-way street that was flanked heavily with old New Orleans mossy oaks. It was the type of street that urged you to open up the windows to hear the night, but of course the insects made this impossible, jailing everyone in air conditioned seclusion. In our house our air conditioner was not a very efficient deodorizer, for upon entering through a back door to the laundry room I immediately smelled the cigarette smoke that at first made me think we had company. Imagine my surprise when I saw my own mother puffing away.

“Since when did you start smoking?” I asked her.

“Oh, I’ve always enjoyed an occasional cigarette. You’ve just never noticed,” she replied.

Sounded reasonable to me.

Then, as the Jays excelled toward the state football championship, she became a smoking fiend—even puffing between bites at supper.

And then she developed her cancer by the time I was a college sophomore. She had half of her lungs whacked out at Hotel Dieu Hospital as her introduction to the pain she’d experience the rest of her life, however long that might have turned out to be. And she wasn’t a very good sport about it.

Of course, she rode with my Dad in the car that night.

My siblings didn’t exist, thanks to me: it was my choice to have none. Once, when I was in grade school, my mother asked me if I’d like to have a little brother or sister to share my parents with, to share good times, to share myself. “Hell, no,” was my obvious answer.

Even though I gyrated in solo providence, waiting for all things to come to me, I still had to do living; so I kept shifting around, jockeying for the luck, never having noticed till this very uneasy moment that I may have forged new worlds only to see those who loved me suffer more.

And so as a college student, oblivious—as well as an orphaned only child, I began enacting my wily plans of sliding for dollars and for perfect receptive bodies. The sinking feeling I had now, I realized, was that the worlds had begun to worsen for me a long time ago, before stupid me had realized it. They had begun to worsen by presenting to me new, subtly changed versions of the people I had loved the most, but whose plights I had noticed the least as being the wake of my own cruise through selfish fortuity. This unwelcome perception slugged me like an invited slap in the face, and so I thought of Ana on the beach. And that made me think of the slap in the face to Ava here which was the pain of displacement—a pillaging violation of her existential stability. So I now grieved for both of them, for there had been two assaults: on Ava, displaced unchanged into a changed world; and on Ana, subtly altered because of my careless careening through layers, my affection for her now extended to Ava, which was, of course, my deprivation of the original I had seen that day on the beach. In what important ways, I wondered, had she changed?

But then again, you either love someone or you don’t. At least that’s the way I figured it. If you fall in love with someone and they change, do you then not love them? If they grow, do you then not love them? Isn’t love all or none? Isn’t that what “for better and for worse” means?

So I may have really blown it, changing the first girl I had fallen in love with. But wasn’t I really in love with all of the girls that are her? This rationalization may have mitigated my regrets of misconduct regarding her, but it would do nothing for her feelings. And it would do nothing to restore the childhood I most certainly should have had, raised by the parents I should have had.

As I faced one who was lucky enough, perhaps, not to be the progressively inferior one she had apparently replaced here, but also who was unlucky enough to not be where she belonged, I was caught off balance. Used to rolling with the punches? Hell, I felt my Mom and Dad slug me from places where he had never drank and she had never smoked.

And being off balance, I found it difficult to be sensitive to Ava’s disruption here. I would have had to exponentially compound my own feelings of the current culture shock of murders and child abuse and the like to appreciate her feeling of derailment. She was, after all, on her maiden voyage.

As hard as I tried for her, I continued to be insensitive to these feelings of derailment. And just when I thought I could overcome my sudden grief over my family and deal with her, I realized that Ava had slid! Had slid, had derailed, with me! Synchronously, unchanged, and incarcerated in the same berth as mine.

For the doubting Thomas, it seemed she had her proof.

“Let’s sit and talk,” I urged her, feeling I could explain everything; feeling I could confide my guilt for hooking her, feeling I could seek her comfort for the guilt I had regarding my parents.

“I really don’t think so!” she shouted. She was furious. Her voice wavered with uncertainty. “You give me the creeps. I’m leaving, going home where I’ll discover that there’s been a fluky five or six months of crime, and I just hadn’t noticed.”

She stormed out of my life once again, refusing to accept the certainty. The front door slammed so hard that the doorjamb cracked. I didn’t pursue her. She would eventually be back for rescue, even though I could offer none except in companionship. She wouldn’t have to worry about coming back to me if I were the last man on Earth; she’d have to come back because I might be the best man on this Earth. The world had deteriorated further, and I knew I was going to hate this world even more than the last one I was in. And I would wait for her in a terrible place rather than hope for someone different in a better one. I felt the feelings I had for her. I know that sounds redundant, but these feelings were swimming around me and through me. They blessed me here.

How many times had I slid? I asked myself. Tens? Hundreds? How had I taken Ava with me? Or had she independently slid? Does anyone in love slide spontaneously with the physiologic exertion known as sexual intercourse? Does being in love allow one to relax and assume to the degree that that impasse deep in the brain, the one that keeps the reptile down, far exceeds its duties, like my proverbial turbo-charged fat man jumping up and down? In this way, further suppressing the selfishness that lies there, does love, the opposite of selfishness, better us by inserting that increase in distance from that primitive selfish area? And does adding to that the physiologic exertion of orgasm, like the sneeze in my accidental slides (my slips), cause lovers in love to slide? Was that what it took for Homo quisque to slide, what I’ve always asexually done effortlessly? No, that couldn’t have been right. I mean I’ve never heard of lovers confused by calling each other different names. (Well, actually, I have heard of that, with the most angry of reactions--take it from me.)

No! This talent must have been up to now uniquely mine. Now I had a resentful companion. How had she hooked on? Was it safe to let her out of my sight? What if she began sliding without me? I’ll be left behind with her ghost, and the real Ava—her true existence—will be careening onward to whatever God-forbidden realms there are down the line.

I spent the next twenty-four hours holed up alone in my apartment, surveying my Survey of History and listening to TV. Actually, history hadn’t changed that much. Armstrong and not Grisolm had stepped upon the moon in 1969, behind schedule due to some fire in an early Apollo training disaster. John Kennedy had been assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald and not Sirhan Sirhan. And there had been a few other assassinations. Lincoln, for instance, had been done in by a John Wilkes Boothe and not by spinal meningitis. The people of Switzerland speak German, Italian, and French instead of Suisse. Surprisingly, those are the only big changes I could spot in my Survey in such a limited amount of time.

What really blew me away were the commonplace changes I heard on TV. The amount of crime was astounding. Murder, rape, and beatings abounded. Cruelty to animals was here. Guns were legal here in the United States of America (not “of North America”). Drugs, well...drugs; that was self-explanatory.

I’ve done this before: dozed here and there, getting up only to read my Survey. At one point I made cereal and poured milk with a carton that had a child’s picture on it and which described his disappearance and vital statistics. I suppose it was the best picture a wax carton could depict. He was a frail child, gentle-looking in his eyes. I stared into his picture, trying to construct his tragedy in my mind. I didn’t think things could get this bad. I didn’t think cruelty had continued into the twentieth century here. I fantasized being his daddy on the joyous day he would be returned unharmed. There were no complicating subplots with wives or siblings. It was a simple fantasy: I’m up late reading on the Thank God day he came back. I hear some noise in the kitchen, and I know he has gone there for a middle-of-the-night glass of water. I walk in and hold him hard. “I’m glad you’re back,” my fantasy has me telling him in an embrace that just won’t quit.

The nice thing about a terrible world is that it feels so good when it stops hurting.

Environmental destructploitation (a word here?) had continued into modern times. World War II, formerly a struggle of national forces, included a holocaust in this layer worse than the one I had read about a few days earlier when Ava had been coy. Can you believe that? A worse holocaust. The genocide involved, well...forget it.

Now I knew what a cannibal was. Now I knew what anti-personnel bombs were. Now I learned about gulags, goon squads, and drug gangs. Now I’ve been introduced to Stalins, Amins, and Custers. When Ava gets a load of this, I thought...

If all of this sounds familiar, or not at all unusual, then be ashamed, for this is obviously where you are, where you feel comfortable.