Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake

by Robert Silverberg

He found her by accident, the way it usually happens, after he had more or less given up searching. For years he had been sending out impulses like messages in bottles, random waves of telepathic energy, Hello, hello, hello, one forlorn SOS after another from the desert isle of the soul on which he was a castaway. Occasionally messages came back, but all they amounted to was lunacy, strident nonsense, static, spiritual noise, gabble up and down the mind band. There were, he knew, a good many like him out there—a boy in Topeka, an old woman in Buenos Aires, another one in Fort Lauderdale, someone of indeterminate sex in Manitoba, and plenty of others, each alone, each lonely. He fell into short-lived contact with them, because they were, after all, people of his special kind. But they tended to be cranky, warped, weird, often simply crazy, all of them deformed by their bizarre gift, and they could not give him what he wanted, which was communion, harmony, the marriage of true minds. Then one Thursday afternoon when he was absentmindedly broadcasting his identity wave, not in any way purposefully trolling the seas of perception but only humming, so to speak, he felt a sudden startling click, as of perfectly machined parts locking into place. Out of the grayness in his mind an unmistakably warm, eager image blossomed, a dazzling giant yellow flower unfolding on the limb of a gnarled spiny cactus, and the image translated itself instantly into Hi there. Where’ve you been all my life?

He hesitated to send an answering signal, because he knew that he had found what he was looking for and he was aware how much of a threat that was to the fabric of the life he had constructed for himself. He was thirty-seven years old, stable, settled. He had a wife who tried her best to be wonderful for him, never knowing quite what it was that she lacked but seeking to compensate for it anyway, and two small pleasing children who had not inherited his abnormality, and a comfortable house in the hills east of San Francisco, and a comfortable job as an analyst for one of the big brokerage houses. It was not the life he had imagined in his old romantic fantasies, but it was not a bad life, either, and it was his life, familiar and in its way rewarding; and he knew he was about to rip an irreparable hole in it. So he hesitated. And then he transmitted an image as vivid as the one he had received: a solitary white gull soaring in enormous sweeps over the broad blue breast of the Pacific.

The reply came at once: the same gull, joined by a second one that swooped out of a cloudless sky and flew tirelessly at its side. He knew that if he responded to that, there could be no turning back, but that was all right. With uncharacteristic recklessness he switched to the verbal mode.

—Okay. Who are you?

—Laurel Hammett. I’m in Phoenix. I read you clearly. This is better than telephone.

—Cheaper, too. Chris Maitland. San Francisco.

—That’s far enough away, I guess.

He didn’t understand, then, what she meant by that. But he let the point pass.

—You’re the first one I’ve found who sends images, Laurel.

—I found one once, eight years ago, in Boston. But he was crazy. Most of us are crazy, Chris.

—I’m not crazy.

—Oh, I know! Oh, God, I know!

So that was the beginning. He got very little work done that afternoon. He was supposed to be preparing a report on oil royalty trusts, and after fifteen minutes of zinging interchanges with her he actually did beg off; she broke contact with a dazzling series of visuals, many of them cryptic, snowflakes and geometrical diagrams and fields of blazing red poppies. Depletion percentages and windfall-profits tax recapture were impossible to deal with while those brilliant pictures burned in his mind. Although he had promised not to reach toward her again until tomorrow—judicious self-denial, she observed, is the fuel of love—he finally did send out a flicker of abashed energy, and drew from her a mingling of irritation and delight. For five minutes they told each other it was best to go slow, to let it develop gradually, and again they vowed to keep mental silence until the next day. But when he was crossing the Bay Bridge a couple of hours later, heading for home, she tickled him suddenly with a quick flash of her presence and gave him a wondrous view of the Arizona sunset, harsh chocolate-brown hills under a purple-and-gold sky. That evening he felt shamefully and transparently adulterous, as if he had come home flushed and rumpled, with lipstick on his shirt. He pretended to be edgy and wearied by some fictitious episode of office politics, and helped himself to two drinks before dinner, and was more than usually curious about the details of his wife’s day, the little suburban crises, the small challenges, the tiny triumphs. Jan was playful, amiable, almost kittenish. That told him she had not seen through him to the betrayal within, however blatant it seemed to him. She was no actress; there was nothing devious about her.

The transformation of their marriage that had taken place that afternoon saddened him, and yet not deeply, because it was an inevitable one. He and Jan were not really of the same species. He had loved her as well and honestly as was possible for him, but what he had really wanted was someone of his kind, with whom he could join mind and soul as well as body, and it was only because he had not been able to find her that he had settled for Jan. And now he had found her. Where that would lead, and what it meant for Jan and him, he had no idea yet. Possibly he would be able to go on sharing with her the part of his life that they were able to share, while secretly he got from the other woman those things that Jan had never been able to give him: possibly. When they went to bed he turned to her with abrupt passionate ferocity, as he had not for a long time, but even so he could not help wondering what Laurel was doing now, in her bed a thousand miles to the east, and with whom.

During the morning commute Laurel came to him with stunning images of desert landscapes, eroded geological strata, mysterious dark mesas, distant flame-colored sandstone walls. He sent her Pacific surf, cypresses bending to the wind, tidepools swarming with anemones and red starfish. Then, timidly, he sent her a kiss, and had one from her in return, and then, as he was crossing the toll plaza of the bridge, she shifted to words.

—What do you do?

—Securities analyst. I read reports and make forecasts.

—Sounds terribly dull. Is it?

—If it is, I don’t let myself notice. It’s okay work. What about you?

—I’m a potter. I’m a very good one. You’d like my stuff.

—Where can I see it?

—There’s a gallery in Santa Fe. And one in Tucson. And of course Phoenix. But you mustn’t come to Phoenix.

—Are you married?

There was a pause.

—Yes. But that isn’t why you mustn’t come here.

—I’m married, too.

—I thought you were. You feel like a married sort of man.

—Oh? I do?

—That isn’t an insult. You have a very stable vibe, do you know what I mean?

—I think so. Do you have children?

—No. Do you?

—Two. Little girls. How long have you been married, Laurel?

—Six years.

—Nine.

—We must be about the same age.

—I’m thirty-seven.

—I’m thirty-four.

—Close enough. Do you want to know my sign?

—Not really.

She laughed and sent him a complex, awesome image: the entire wheel of the Zodiac, which flowered into the shape of the Aztec calendar stone, which became the glowing rose window of a Gothic cathedral. An undercurrent of warmth and love and amusement rode with it. Then she was gone, leaving him on the bridge in a silence so sharp it rang like iron.

He did not reach toward her, but drove on into the city in a mellow haze, wondering what she looked like. Her mental “voice” sounded to him like that of a tall, clear-eyed, straight-backed woman with long, brown hair, but he knew better than to put much faith in that; he had played the same game with people’s telephone voices and he had always been wrong. For all he knew, Laurel was squat and greasy. He doubted that; he saw no way that she could be ugly. But why, then, was she so determined not to have him come to Phoenix? Perhaps she was an invalid; perhaps she was painfully shy; perhaps she feared the intrusion of any sort of reality into their long-distance romance.

At lunchtime he tuned himself to her wavelength and sent her an image of the first page of the report he had written last week on Exxon. She replied with a glimpse of a tall olive-hued porcelain jar, of a form both elegant and sturdy at once. Her work in exchange for his: he liked that. It meant they had the same sense of humor. Everything was going to be perfect.

A week later he went out to Salt Lake City for a couple of days to do some field research on a mining company headquartered there. He took an early-morning flight, had lunch with three earnest young Mormon executives overflowing with joy at the bounty of God as manifested by the mineral wealth of the Overthrust Belt in Wyoming, spent the afternoon leafing through geologists’ survey sheets, and had dinner alone at his hotel. Afterward he put in his obligatory call to Jan, worked up his notes of the day’s conferences, and watched TV for an hour, hoping it would make him drowsy. Maitland didn’t mind these business trips, but he slept badly when he slept alone, and any sort of time-zone change, even a trifling one like this, disrupted his internal clock. He was still wide awake when he got into bed about eleven.

He thought of Laurel. He felt very near to her, out here in this spacious mountain-ringed city with the wide bland streets. Probably Salt Lake City was not significantly closer to Phoenix than San Francisco was, but he regarded Utah and Arizona both as the true Wild West, while his own suburban and manicured part of California, paradoxically, did not seem western to him at all. Somewhere due south of here, just on the far side of all these cliffs and canyons, was the unknown woman he loved.

As though on cue, she was in his mind:

—Lonely?

—You bet.

—I’ve been thinking of you all day. Poor Chris: sitting around with those businessmen, talking all that depletion gibberish.

—I’m a businessman, too.

—You’re different, love. You’re a businessman outside and a freak inside.

—Don’t say that.

—It’s what we are, Chris. Face it. Flukes, anomalies, sports, changelings—

—Please stop, Laurel. Please.

—I’m sorry.

A silence. He thought she was gone, taking flight at his rebuke. But then:

—Are you very lonely?

—Very. Dull empty city, dull empty bed.

—You’re in it.

—But you aren’t.

—Is that what you want? Right now?

—I wish we could, Laurel.

—Let’s try this.

He felt a sudden astounding intensifying of her mental signal, as if she had leaped the hundreds of miles and lay curled against him here. There was a sense of physical proximity, of warmth, even the light perfume of her skin, and into his mind swept an image so acutely clear that it eclipsed for him the drab realities of his room: the shore of a tropical ocean, fine pink sand, gentle pale-green water, a dense line of heavy-crowned palms.

—Go on, Chris. Into the water.

He waded into the calm wavelets until the delicate sandy bottom was far below his dangling feet and he floated effortlessly in an all-encompassing warmth, in an amniotic bath of placid soothing fluid. Placid but not motionless, for he felt, as he drifted, tiny convulsive quivers about him, an electric oceanic caress, pulsations of the water against his bare skin, intimate, tender, searching. He began to tingle. As he moved farther out from shore, so far now that the land was gone and the world was all warm water to the horizon, the pressure of those rhythmic pulsations became more forceful, deeply pleasurable: the ocean was a giant hand lightly squeezing him. He trembled and made soft sighing sounds that grew steadily more vehement, and closed his eyes, and let ecstasy overwhelm him in the ocean’s benignly insistent grip. Then he grunted and his heart thumped and his body went rigid and then lax, and moments later he sat up, blinking, astonished, eerily tranquil.

—I didn’t think anything like that was possible.

—For us anything’s possible. Even sex across seven hundred miles. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I guess it did, didn’t it? Did you like it?

—Do you need an answer, Laurel?

—I feel so happy.

—How did you do it? What was the trick?

—No trick. Just the usual trick, Chris, a little more intense than usual. And a lot of love. I hated the idea that you were all alone, horny, unable to sleep.

—It was absolutely marvelous.

—And now we’re lovers. Even though we’ve never met.

—No. Not altogether lovers, not yet. Let me try to do it to you, Laurel. It’s only fair.

—Later, okay? Not now.

—I want to.

—It takes a lot of energy. You ought to get some sleep, and I can wait. Just lie there and glow and don’t worry about me. You can try it with me another time.

—An hour? Two hours?

—Whenever you want. But not now. Rest, now. Enjoy. Good night, love.

—Good night, Laurel.

He was alone. He lay staring up into the darkness, stunned. He had been unfaithful to Jan three times before, not bad for nine years, and always the same innocuous pattern: a business trip far from home, a couple of solitary nights, then an official dinner with some woman executive, too many drinks, the usual half-serious banter turning serious, a blurry one-night stand, remorse in the morning, and never any follow-up. Meaningless, fragmentary stuff. But this—this long-distance event with a woman he had never even seen—this seemed infinitely more explosive. For he had the power and Jan did not and Laurel did; and Jan’s mind was closed to his and his to hers, and they could only stagger around blindly trying to find one another, while he and Laurel could unite at will in a communion whose richness was unknown to ordinary humans. He wondered if he could go on living with Jan at all now. He felt no less love for her than before, and powerful ties of affection and sharing held him to her; but yet—even so—

In guilt and confusion Maitland drifted off into sleep. It was still dark when he woke—3:13 a.m., said the clock on the dresser—and he felt different guilt, different confusion, for it was of Laurel now that he thought. He had taken pleasure from her and then he had collapsed into postorgasmic stupor. Never mind that she had told him to do just that. He felt, and always had, a peculiarly puritanical obligation to give pleasure for pleasure, and unpaid debts were troublesome to him. Taking a deep breath, he sent strands of consciousness through the night toward the south, over the fire-hued mountains of central Utah, over the silent splendor of the Grand Canyon, down past the palm trees into torrid Phoenix, and touched Laurel’s warm sleepy mind.

—Hnhh.

—It’s me. I want to, now.

—All right. Yes.

The image she had chosen was a warm sea, the great mother, the all-encompassing womb. He, reaching unhesitatingly for a male equivalent, sent her a vision of himself coming forth on a hot dry summer day into a quiet landscape of grassy hills round as tawny breasts. Cradled in his arms he held the gleaming porcelain jar that she had showed him last week, and he bent, tipping it, pouring forth from it an enormous snake, long and powerful but not in any way frightening, that flowed like a dark rivulet across the land, seeking her, finding, gliding up across her thighs, her belly. Too obvious? Too coarsely phallic? He wavered for a moment, but only a moment, for he heard her moan and whimper, and she reached with her mind for the serpent as it seemed he was withdrawing it; he drove back his qualms and gave her all the energy at his command, seizing the initiative as he sensed her complete surrender. Her signal shivered and lost focus. Her breathing grew ragged and hoarse, and then into his mind came a quick surprising sound, a strange low growling, that terminated in a swift sharp gasp.

—Oh, love. Oh. Oh. Thank you.

—It wasn’t scary?

—Scare me like that as often as you want, Chris.

He smiled across the darkness of the miles. All was well. A fair exchange: symbol for symbol, metaphor for metaphor, delight for delight.

—Sleep well, Laurel.

—You too, love. Mmm.

This time Jan knew that something had happened while he was away. He saw it on her face, which meant that she saw it on his; but she voiced no suspicions, and when they made love the first night of his return it was as good as ever. Was it possible, he wondered, to be bigamous like this, to take part with Laurel in a literally superhuman oneness while remaining Jan’s devoted husband and companion? He would, at any rate, try. Laurel had shared his soul as no one ever had and Jan never could, but yet she was a phantom, faceless, remote, scarcely real; and Jan, cut off from him as most humans are from all others, nevertheless was his wife, his partner, his bedmate, the mother of his children. He would try.

So he brought the office gossip home to her as always and went out with her twice a week to the restaurants they loved and sat beside her at night watching cassettes of operas and movies and Shakespeare, and on weekends they did their weekend things, boating on the bay and tennis and picnics in the park and dinner with their friends, and everything was fine. Everything was very fine. And yet he managed to do the other thing, too, as often as he could: snake and ocean, ocean and snake. Just as he had successfully hidden from Jan the enigmatic secret mechanism within his mind that he did not dare reveal to anyone not of his sort, so, too, now did he hide the second marriage, rich and strange; that that mechanism had brought him.

His lovemaking with Laurel had to be furtive, of course, a thing of stolen moments. She could hardly draw him into that warm voluptuous ocean while he lay beside Jan. But there were the business trips—he was careful not to increase their frequency, which would have been suspicious, but she came to him every night while he was away—and there was the occasional Saturday afternoon when he lay drowsing in the sun of the garden and found that whispering transparent surf beckoning to him, and once she enlivened a lunchtime for him on a working day. He roused the snake within his soul as often as he dared and nearly always she accepted it, though there were times when she told him no, not now, the moment was wrong. They had elaborate signals to indicate a clear coast. And for the ordinary conversation of the day there were no limits; they popped into each other’s consciousness a thousand times a day, quick flickering interchanges, a joke, a bit of news, a job triumphantly accomplished, an image of beauty too potent to withhold. Crossing the bridge, entering his office, reaching for the telephone, unfolding a napkin—suddenly, there she was, often for the briefest flare of contact, a tag touch and gone. He loved that. He loved her. It was a marriage.

He snooped in Mountain Bell directories at the library and found her telephone number, which he hardly needed, and her address, which at least confirmed that she really did exist in tangible actual Phoenix. He manufactured a trip to Albuquerque to appraise the earnings prospects of a small electronics company and slipped off up the freeway to Santa Fe to visit the gallery that showed her pottery: eight or ten superb pieces, sleek, wondrously skilled. He bought one of the smaller ones. “You don’t have any information about the artist, do you?” he asked the proprietor, trying to be casual, heart pounding, hoping to be shown a photograph. The proprietor thought there might be a press release in the files, and rummaged for it. “She lives down Phoenix way,” she said. “Comes up here once or twice a year with her new work. I think it’s museum quality, don’t you?” But she could not find the press release. When Laurel flashed into his mind that night back in Albuquerque, he did not tell her he owned one of her vases or that he had been researching her. But he wondered desperately what she looked like. He played with the idea of visiting Phoenix and somehow getting to meet her without telling her who he was. So long as he kept his mind sheathed she would never know, he thought. But it seemed sneaky and treacherous; and it might he dangerous, too. She had told him often enough not to come to her city.

In the fourth month of their relationship he could no longer control his curiosity. She sent him a view of her studio. amazingly neat, the clay, the wheels, the kiln, the little bowls of pigment and glaze all fastidiously in their proper places.

—You left one thing out, Laurel.

—What’s that?

—The potter herself. You didn’t show me her.

—Oh, Chris.

—What’s the matter? Aren’t you ever curious about what I look like? We’ve been all over each other’s minds and bodies for months, and I still don’t have any idea what you look like. That’s absurd.

—It’s so much more abstract and pure this way.

—Wonderful. Abstract love! Save that for Swinburne. I want to see you.

—I have to confess. I want to see you, too.

—Here, then. Now.

He sent her, before she could demur, a mental snapshot of his face, trying not to retouch and enhance it. The nose a trifle too long, the cleft chin absurdly Hollywood, the dark hair thinning a bit at the part line. Not a perfect face, but good enough, pleasant, honest, nothing to apologize for, he thought. It brought silence.

—Well? Am I remotely what you expected?

—Exactly, Chris. Steady-looking, strong, decent—no surprise at all. I like your face. I’m very pleased.

—Your turn.

—You’ll promise not to be disappointed?

—Stop being silly.

—All right.

She flared in his mind, not just her face but all of her, long-legged, broad-shouldered, a woman of physical presence and strength, with straightforward open features, wide-set brown eyes, a good smile, blunt nose, conspicuous cheekbones. She was not far from the woman he had imagined, and one aspect, the dark thick straight hair falling past her shoulders, was amazingly as he had thought.

—You’re beautiful.

—No, not really. But I’m okay.

—Are you an Indian?

—I must have sent you a good picture, then. I’m half. My mother was Navaho.

—You learned your pottery from her?

—No, dopy. Navahos make rugs. Pueblos make pottery. I learned mine in New York, Greenwich Village. I studied with Hideki Shinoda.

—Doesn’t sound Pueblo.

—Isn’t. Little Japanese man with marvelous hands.

—I’m glad we did this, Laurel.

—So am I.

But seeing her in the eye of his mind, while gratifying one curiosity, had only intensified another. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to hold her.

Snake. Ocean. They were practiced lovers now, a year of constant mental communion behind them. The novelty was gone, but not the excitement. Again and again he carried the porcelain bowl out to the sun-baked hills and poured the serpent into the grass and sent it gliding toward her eager body. Again and again she surrounded him with buoyant warm sea. Their skill at pleasuring one another struck them both as extraordinary. Of course, they soon began varying the imageries of delight, so that no monotony would taint their embraces. She came to him as a starfish, thousands of tiny suction-cup feet and a startling devouring mouth, and at another time as a moist voluptuous mass of warm smooth white clay, and as a whirlpool, and as a great coy lighthearted amoeba; and he manifested himself to her as a flash flood roaring down a red-rock canyon, and as a glistening vine coiling through a tropic night, and as a spaceship plunging in eternal free-fall between worlds. All of these were effective, for they needed only to touch one another with their minds to bring pleasure; and each new access of ingenuity brought an abstract pleasure of its own. But even so they tended often to revert to the original modes, snake and ocean, ocean and snake, the way one might return to a familiar and modest hotel where one spent a joyous weekend at the beginning of an affair, and somehow it was always best that way. They liked to tell each other that the kind of lovemaking they had invented and of which they were perhaps the sole practitioners in the history of humanity was infinitely superior to the old-fashioned type, which was so blatant, so obvious, so coarse, so messy. Even so, even as he said things like that, he knew he was lying. He wanted her skin against his skin, her breath on his breath.

She was no longer so coy about her life outside their relationship. Maitland knew now that her husband was an artist from Chicago, not very successful, a little envious of her career. She showed him some of his work, unremarkable abstract-expressionist stuff. Maitland was jealous of the fact that this man—Tim, his name was—shared her bed and enjoyed her proximity, but he realized that he had no jealousy of the marriage itself. It was all right that she was married. Maitland had no wish to live with her. He wanted to go on living with Jan, to play tennis with her and go to restaurants with her and even to make love with her; what he wanted from Laurel was just what he was getting from her, that cool amused intelligent voice in his mind, and now and then the strange ecstasy that her playful spirit was able to kindle in his loins across such great distances. That much was true. Yet also he wanted to be her lover in the old blatant obvious coarse messy way, at least once, once at least. Because he knew it was a perilous subject, he stayed away from it as long as he could, but at last it broke into the open one night in Seattle, late, after the snake had returned to its jar and the lapping waves had retreated and he lay sweaty and alone in his hotel-room bed.

—When are we finally going to meet?

—Please, Chris.

—I think it’s time to discuss it. You told me a couple of times, early on, that I must never come to Phoenix. Okay. But couldn’t we get together somewhere else? Tucson, San Diego, the Grand Canyon?

—It isn’t the place that matters.

—What is it, then?

—Being close. Being too close.

—I don’t understand. We’re so close already!

—I mean physically close, Not emotionally, not even sexually. I just mean that if we came within close range of each other we’d do bad things to each other.

—That’s crazy, Laurel.

—Have you ever been close to another telepath? As close as ten feet, say?

—I don’t think so.

—You’d know it if you had. When you and I talk, long distance, it’s just talking on the phone, right, plus pictures? We tell each other only what we it to tell each other, and nothing else gets through. It’s not like that close up.

—Oh?

—There’s a kind of radiation, an aura. We broadcast all sorts of stuff automatically. All that foul stinking nasty cesspool stuff that’s at the bottom of everybody’s mind, the crazy prehistoric garbage that’s in us. It comes swarming out like a shriek.

—How do you know that?

—I’ve experienced it.

—Oh. Boston, years ago?

—Yes. Yes. I told you, I did this once before.

—But he was crazy, you said.

—In a way. But the craziness isn’t what brought the other stuff up. I felt it another time, too, and she wasn’t crazy. Its unavoidable.

—I want to see you.

—Don’t you think I want to see you, too, Chris? You think I think snake and ocean’s really good enough? But we can’t risk it. Suppose we met, and the garbage got out, and we hated each other ever afterward?

—We could control it.

—Maybe. Maybe not.

—Or else we could make allowances for it. Bring ourselves to understand that this stuff, whatever it is that you say is there, is normal, just the gunk of the mind, nothing personal, nothing that we ought to take seriously.

—I’m scared. Let’s not try.

He let the issue drop. When it came up again, four months later, it was Laurel who revived it. She had been thinking about his idea of controlling the sinister emanation, throttling it back, shielding one another. Possibly it could be done. The temptation to meet him in the flesh, she said, was overwhelming. Perhaps they could get together and suppress all telepathic contact, meet just like ordinary humans having a little illicit rendezvous, keep their minds rigidly walled off, and that way at last consummate the intimacy that had joined their to souls for a year and a half.

—I’d love to, Laurel.

—But promise me this. Swear it to me. When we do get together, if we can’t hold back the bad stuff, if we feel it coming out, that we go away from each other instantly. That we don’t negotiate, we don’t try to work it out, we don’t look for angles—we just split, fast, if either of us says we have to. Swear?

—I swear.

He flew to Denver and spent a fidgety hour and a half having cocktails in the lounge at the Brown Palace. Her flight from Phoenix was supposed to have landed only half an hour after his, and he wondered if she had backed out at the last minute. He got up to call the airport when he saw her come in, unmistakably her, taller than he expected, a big handsome woman in black jeans and a sheepskin wrap. There were flecks of melting snow in her hair.

He sensed an aura.

It wasn’t loathsome, it wasn’t hideous, but it was there, a kind of dull whining grinding thing as of improperly oiled machinery in use three blocks away. Even as he detected it, he felt it diminish until it was barely perceptible. He struggled to rein in whatever output he might be giving off himself.

She saw him and came straight toward him, smiling nervously, cheeks rigid, eyes worried.

“Chris.”

He took her hand in his. “You’re cold, Laurel.”

“It’s snowing. That’s why I’m late. I haven’t seen snow in years.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“No. Yes. Yes, please. Scotch on the rocks.”

“Are you picking up anything bad?”

“No,” she said. “Not really. There was just a little twinge, when I walked in—a kind of squeak in my mind.”

“I felt it, too. But then it faded.”

“I’m fighting to keep it damped down. I want this to work.”

“So do I. We mustn’t use the power at all today.”

“We don’t need to. The old snake can have the day off. Are you scared?”

“A little.”

“Me, too.” She gulped her drink. “Oh, Chris.”

“Is it hard work, keeping the power damped down?”

“Yes. It really is.”

“For me, too. But we have to.”

“Yes,” she said. “Do you have a room yet?”

He nodded.

“Let’s go upstairs, then.”

Like any unfaithful husband having his first rendezvous with a new lover he walked stiffly and somberly through the lobby, convinced that everyone was staring at them. That was ridiculous, he knew. They were more truly married, in their way, than anybody else in Denver. But yet—but yet—

They were silent in the elevator. As they approached their floor the aura of her burst forth again, briefly, a fast sour vibration in his bones, and then it was gone altogether, shut off as though by a switch. He worked at holding his down, too. She smiled at him. He winked. “To the left,” he said. They went into the room. Heavy snowflakes splashed against the window; the wide bed was turned down. She was trembling. “Come on,” he said. “I love you. You know that. Everything’s all right.”

They kissed and undressed. Her body was lean, athletic, with small high breasts, a flat belly, a dark appendectomy scar. He drew her toward the bed. It seemed strange, almost perverse, to be doing things in this antiquated fleshly way, no snake, no ocean, no meeting of minds. He was afraid for a moment that in the excitement of their coupling they would lose control of their mental barriers and let their inner selves come flooding out, fierce, intense, a contact too powerful to handle at such short range. But there was no loss of control. He kept the power locked behind the walls of his skull; she did the same; there were only the tiniest leakages of current. But there was no excitement, either, in their lovemaking.

He ran his hands over her breasts and trapped her nipples between his fingers, and gently parted her thighs with his knee, and pressed himself against her as though he had not been with a woman in a year, but the excitement seemed to be all in his head, not in his nerve endings. Even when she ran her lips down his chest and belly and teased him for a moment and then took him fiercely and suddenly in her mouth, it was the idea that they were finally doing this, rather than what they were actually doing, that resonated with him. They sighed a little and moaned a little and finally he slipped into her, admiring the tightness of her and the rhythms of her hips and all that, but nevertheless it was as though this had happened between them a thousand times before: he moved, she moved, they did all the standard things and traveled along to the standard result. Not enough was real between them, that was the trouble. He knew her better than he had ever known anyone, and yet in some ways he knew her not at all, and that was what had spoiled things. That, and holding so much in check. He wished he could look into her mind now. But that was forbidden, and probably unwise, too; he guessed that she was annoyed with him for having insisted on this foolish and foredoomed meeting, that she held him responsible for having spoiled things between them, and he did not want to see those thoughts in her mind.

When it was over they whispered to each other and stroked each other and gave each other little nibbling kisses, and he pretended it had been marvelous, but his real impulse was to pull away and light a cigarette and stare out the window at the snow, and he wasn’t even a smoker. It was simply the way he felt. It bad been only a mechanical thing, only a hotel-room screw, not remotely anything like snake and ocean: a joining of flesh of the sort that a pair of rabbits might have accomplished, or a pair of apes, without content, without fire, without joy. He and she knew an ever so much better way of doing it.

He took care to hide his disappointment.

“I’m so glad I came here, Chris,” she said, smiling, kissing him, taking care to hide her disappointment, too, he guessed. He knew that if he entered her mind he would find it bleak and ashen. But of course he could not do that. “I wish I could stay the night,” she said. “My plane’s at nine. We could have dinner downstairs, though.”

“Is it a terrible strain, keeping the power back?”

“It isn’t easy.”

“No. It isn’t.”

“I’m so glad we did this, Chris.”

“Are you?”

“Yes. Yes. Of course.”

They had an early dinner. The snow had stopped by the time he saw her to her cab. So: you fly up to Denver for a couple of hours of lust and steak, you fly back home, and that’s that. He had a brandy is the lounge and went to his room. For a long while he lay staring at the ceiling, sure that she would come to him with the ocean, and make amends for the unsatisfactory thing they had done that afternoon. She did not. He wondered if he ought to send her the snake as she dozed on her plane, and did not want to. He felt timid about any sort of contact with her now. It had all been a terrible mistake, he knew. Not because of that emanation from the dirty depths of the psyche that she had so feared, but only because it had been so anticlimactic, so meaningless. He waited for a sending from her, some bright little flash out of Arizona. She must surely be home now. Nothing came. He went on waiting, not daring to reach toward her, and finally he fell asleep.

Jan said nothing to him about the Denver trip. He was moody and strange, but she let him be. When the silence out of Phoenix continued into the next day and the next he grew even more grim, and skulked about wrapped in black isolation. Gradually it occurred to him that he was not going to hear from Laurel again, that they had broken something in that hotel room in Denver and that it was irreparable, and, oddly, the knowledge of that gave him some ease: if he did not expect to hear from her, he did not have to lament her silence. A week, two, three, and nothing. So it was over. That hollow little grunting hour had ruined it.

Somehow he picked up the rhythms of his life: work, home, wife, kids, friends, tennis, dinner. He did an extensive analysis of southwestern electric utilities that brought him a commendation from on high, and he felt only a mild twinge of anguish while doing his discussion of the prospects for Arizona Public Service as reflected in the municipal growth of the city of Phoenix. He missed the little tickle in his mind immensely, but he was encapsulating it, containing it, and after a fashion he was healing.

One day a month and a half later he found himself idly scanning the mindnoise band again, as he had not done for a long while, just to see who else was out there. He picked up the loony babble out of Fort Lauderdale and the epicene static from Manitoba, and then he encountered someone new, a bright dear signal as intense as Laurel’s, and for a dazzled instant a sudden fantasy of a new relationship blossomed in him, but then he heard the nonsense syllables, the slow, firm, strong-willed stream of gibberish. There were no replacements for Laurel.

In Chicago, where he had been sent to do a survey of natural-gas companies, he began talking to a youngish woman at the Art Institute, and by easy stages some chatter about Monet and Sisley turned into a dinner invitation and a night in his hotel room. That was all right. Certainly it was simpler and easier and less depressing than Denver. But it was a bore, it was empty and foolish, and he regretted it deeply by breakfast time, even while he was taking down her number and promising to call the next time he was in the Midwest. Maitland saw the post-Laurel pattern of his life closing about him now: the Christmas bonus, the trip to Hawaii with Jan, braces for the kids, the new house five years from now, the occasional quickie romance in far-off hotel rooms. That was all right. That was the original bargain he had made, long ago, entering adult life: not much ecstasy, not much grief.

On the long flight home that day he thought without rancor or distress about his year and a half with Laurel, and told himself that the important thing was not that it had ended but that it had happened at all. He felt peaceful and accepting, and was almost tempted to reach out toward Laurel and thank her for her love, and wish her well. But he was afraid—afraid that if he touched her mind in any way she would pull away, timid, fearful of contact in the wake of that inexplicably sundering day in Denver. She was close by now, he knew, for the captain had just told them that they were passing over the Grand Canyon. Maitland did not lean to the window, as everyone else was doing, to look down. He sat back, eyes closed, tired, calm.

And felt warmth, heard the lapping of surf, saw in the center of his mind the vast ocean in which Laurel had so many times engulfed him. Really? Was it happening? He let himself slide into it. A little flustered, he hid himself behind a facade of newspapers, the Tribune, the Wall Street Journal. His face grew flushed. His breathing became rougher. Ah. Ah. It was happening, yes, she had reached to him, she had made the gesture at last. Tears of gratitude and relief came to him, and he let her sweep him off to a sharp and pounding fulfillment five miles above Arizona.

—Hello, Chris.

—Laurel.

—Did you mind? I felt you near me, and I couldn’t hold back any more. I know you don’t want to hear from me, but—

—What gave you that idea?

—I thought—it seemed to me—

—No. I thought you were the one who wanted to break it up.

—I? I missed you so much, Chris. But I was sure you’d pull away.

—So was I, about you.

—Silly.

—Laurel. Laurel. I’m so glad you took the chance, then.

—So am I.

—Let me have the snake, Chris.

—Yes. Yes.

He stepped out into the tawny sun-baked hills with the heavy porcelain jar and tipped it, and let the snake glide toward her. It was all right after all. They had made mistakes, but they were the mistakes of too much love, and they had survived them. It was going to be all right: snake and ocean, ocean and snake, now and always.

Content

Snake and Ocean, Ocean and Snake
by Robert Silverberg