LOSING PLUM BLOSSOM

In the crevice of the hospital corridor where Clarissa had stalked him, she just had time to pluck her mascara box from her white summer bag and refresh her eye shadow before he emerged from the men’s washroom. She had waited for this moment all day and in the night, while she lay awake into the long hours dreaming the dreams of her age, lost in the Indiana summer while the Oriental mosquitoes buzzed the taut skin of her long white legs, she had seen his face again and again as he now emerged, white coat flaying with the speed of his departure from what had obviously been a most unnecessary and unpleasant function, a waste of his valuable time. His hair spun into a Cox comb on the top of his head and his broad shoulders carrying the hurried curve of his all too slender legs seemed to as if they were hurled by a huge bird perched on the back of his neck and clean shaven chin. She crouched in the Formica hospital chair, waiting room to the clinics where he appeared at the appointed hour on the days she had memorized, and in the instant that he passed by her she did not expect him to honor her with even the most cursory glance, but today to her amazement he actually looked at her. Taken aback she gasped visibly, which audible sound brought a sneer of contempt from his chiseled features, his mouth curling almost in a snarl until he conspicuously almost snapped his head in the opposite direction, towards the wall, in his onward march to the secret small doors at the end of the corridors near the escalator, entrance to the monastic secrecy of the operation retreats where he would spend most of the rest of the day. Clarissa sighed audibly and not knowing whether she should cry or shout for joy, she selected the most logical compromise known to the Indiana debutante and removed her mascara box and rouge from her bag again to inspect her face and see if any damage that had occurred could still be repaired. Actually she was not entirely displeased by what she saw, especially as it was all now seen as it had been mirrored in his eyes. For that brief moment of ecstasy she had been young and beautiful again, the lines stripped of their deathly etchings, the sagging eyes lifted to the half-moon of the Oriental night, their color reflecting the green light of that sky so far from the blue hues of her childhood and youth, the low arched mouth smiling and gay, mouthing pleasantries in the far away ball room of the town hall decked in flowers and lanterns, the scene of her coming out party of so long ago. That was even before she had met Roger.

Roger. Even the name had an unreality to it that she could not place. His lean pink face, pale blond hair and ethereal blue eyes, always in the same uniform, white starched with the medals pinned to the chest, epaulets sown onto the shoulders, black shoes shined to an eerie sheen, that was all that was left of him, that and the tears. It was strange that she could not remember clearly anything before that time, not specifically, not times and places at any rate. Her, she remembered that, but not much else. The telegram. There had been the telegram from the President. Shot down in Vietnam, his country was grateful, the President was grateful. A lifetime of tranquility and happiness crowned by the President’s gratitude. Like a floating cloud the twenty years of marriage existed only in some secret place in her mind. She pushed the image aside, like a great cloud it had blurred her vision and distracted her from the task at hand. Ahmed. Or at least that’s what she called him. She knew Ahmed wasn’t a Chinese name but an Arab name and that his Chinese name was something like “An Men”, which she had discovered, after considerable investigation, meant something like “People’s Great Peace”. Chinese always gave themselves such names, exaggerating their humble existences with such pompous self-importance. Or maybe they gave themselves these kinds of names, as the men at the American Officer’s Club used to joke, so many years ago, just to confuse the foreigners. But in Ahmed’s case, she was sure, it different. He was guaranteed to take her mind off Roger at any case. That wasn’t a Chinese name, and Ahmed was Chinese or at least Taiwanese. That wasn’t a Chinese name, and Ahmed was Chinese or at least Taiwanese. Ahmed was an Arabian name, the name of an Arabian prince, to be exact, the dashing black prince on a white courser, lean, cruel, unable to speak, unwilling to speak because speech was unnecessary. She pushed the image aside, like a great cloud it had blurred her vision and what she called him. She knew that wasn’t his name.

Looks were speech, love was speech, and his warm embrace was speech. In his canvas tent, he would lie with her, undress her, caress her, close his mouth to hers, his hands would press her, the very thought made her gasp. Of course she knew Ahmed was not his real name, he did not live in a tent or ride a horse-or did he? It seemed unimportant to her.

Their early courtship in Indiana, honeymoon in Hawaii, his enlistment right out of college, the long years of intermittent waiting while he was stationed in Japan and then Korea, and his final posting in Taiwan, in the days when the U.S still recognized the Ching Kai Chek government and had the huge base military here. Then the assignments from Taiwan to Vietnam, only the top were picked for the missions from here, Roger of course being a “Blue Angel” he volunteered for the secret mission, missions that had only recently been revealed in the American press as having taken place illegally, without the consent of congress, over Cambodian territory, where U.S. forces had been forbidden by Congressional decree to be. She realized after the press reports that Roger must have indeed been shot down over Cambodia. Was it possible that he was still alive? One of the MIAs? It was a thought she could not contemplate. If he were still alive, did he remember her? Did he even know who he still was, locked in a Cambodian jungle jail now for over fifteen years? It was a problem that she sometimes discussed with her dear- perhaps her best friend – Father Mulroney, the man most responsible, she supposed, for her continuing to stay in Taiwan, even long after the military had left here, the Officers Club sold to the Chinese, Father Mulroney and Arthur. The tears had nearly drowned her, she remembered that, but not much else. The telegram. There had been the telegram from the President. Shot down in Vietnam, his country was grateful, the President was grateful.

Roger. The President was grateful. A lifetime of tranquility and happiness crowned by the President’s gratitude. The tears had nearly drowned her – she remembered that. Their early courtship in Indiana, honeymoon in Hawaii, enlistment right out of college, the long years of intermittent waiting while the was stationed in Japan and then Korea, and his final posting in Taiwan, in the days when the U.S. still recognized the Chiang Kai Cheek government and had the huge military base here. Rushing down the hospital corridor, Ahmed realized that he had only five minutes to eat the first protein he had since eight in the morning before he could complete his one last operation of the day. After the operation just finished Ahmed for the first time in a long time began to feel the effects of working nearly 20 hours every day for as many weeks as he could remember. This last operation had been particularly difficult, but a real challenge – a complicated combination of femur transplant into a small boy with leukemia in second stage of remission. It had called on his skills as an orthopedic surgeon, plastic surgeon and oncologist or cancer specialist. His most recent acquisition of skills in the latter field had allowed him to complete his fourth chief residency in the last decade, building on the expertise he had developed in endocrinology and which was especially succulent to him as it had allowed him to complete that particular residency in the beloved homeland of Japan. He had been back in Taiwan now only for six months, but the memories of the two additional golden years in Japan, granted him by the Gods lived with him as a constant presence. He had been granted the inestimable honor of completing his residency as a research fellow at the Tokyo Imperial University, sacred ground of his paternal blood, second to none in the world academically and made even more estimable by the fact that it bore the name and imprint of the holy Emperor himself. In addition the grounds of the University were a mere two hour subway ride from his father’s home and only another half an hour by car to what was him perhaps the holiest place in the world – Plum Blossom’s ancestral home. Plum Blossom. He dare not think of her. She was lost to him permanently in this reincarnation. The inferior Chinese blood of his mother’s genes had made her unobtainable. He did not deserve her either he knew, and he had devoted his life to attempting to compensate for that which was inferior in him, in his blood, his bones, genes, hormones, the inferior protoplasm of a weak and malformed race. Endless study and accumulation of medical knowledge was his pact with his miserable karma. Only by incessant self – improvement and the personal suffering it entailed could he hope to even face with some modicum of dignity that part of himself that was pure and immutable – his Japanese “ yang” or male side. Suffering and self – sacrifice would enable him to purge the inferior Chinese or distaff female side of himself. Pure male, pure Japanese he could hope to face Plum Blossom in the next life if not in this, and it the next life she would accept and forgive him all. His capacities for accumulation of knowledge to a degree that astounded even the most learned professors and surgeons in his fields had enabled him to make the necessary calculations as well. How many years he had to live and exactly what he would do with each day allotted to him; how much he had targeted to learn each day, each week, month and year until the inevitable – and much longed for – end. The sum total of what he had accumulated at the end of this blessedly finite time span would stand him in good stead when he confronted the Buddha face to face as the next revolution of the wheel of reincarnation was to be spun – not haphazardly this time though, the work he done in this lifetime would have seen to that. Even the Buddha himself would not argue with him on that score.

In the next turn of the reincarnation wheel he would have earned himself a position on the wheel’s turn that would put him on a level equal to that of Plum Blossom.

He had treasured those two years in Japan, granted him in his adulthood, penitence paid with such enthusiasm in all of his incessant efforts to master each branch of his beloved medicine and each technique of each branch, no matter how detailed or difficult, for his miserable birthright. These two years were the life renewal of his early years of childhood and youth in Japan when he lived in his father’s home, brought to Japan to study and to master the sacred language which he had title to if only in part. Plum Blossom, his third cousin had lived in the adjoining villa on the outskirts of a Tokyo that was being rebuilt in gigantic leaps by the superior race, rebuilt to mock and then to hold rightful sway over the evil “gaijin” [foreigner] who had deluded themselves into believing that they had subjugated the Japanese race and brought the Emperor to his knees. On his occasional days off from work he would take the subway and then a taxi to the grounds of Plum Blossom’s childhood home. She no longer lived there of course. She had been married now for almost ten years and was already the mother of two children. Her husband was Suichi Matsu, once a neighbor, never a friend. Ahmed tried to block out the image of the hated Suichi in his mind lest it pollute the picture he always kept of Plum Blossom, he imagined through all the networks of frontal and lower brain lobes, and which predicated all actions which would take him forward towards the higher notch on the wheel of reincarnation. Whenever he had a few leisure minutes, he would use them to recall her picture, and polish the dust, as it were that surrounded the aura of her beauty. Such dust was Suichi. How important it was to have visited her ancestral home so recently, to savoir in recollection the memories of Plum Blossom performing the tea ceremony as a young girl on the lawn by the side of the pebble-bottomed pool laced with lotus leaves and lilies. How beautiful she had been as a child! The seed of an even greater beauty to spring from her incipient flowery root in mature womanhood. Another such speck of dust that had recently appeared as a blotch on the perfect picture of Plum Blossom, black hair tied back in the traditional bun, eyes like cherry blossom drops, skin as white as the snow on the peak of Mount Fuji, dressed in the mottled kimono of the Meji Restoration era style, tied in a red sash, was this hideous old “geijin” woman who seemed to follow him everywhere. He had operated on her for a broken arm several months ago and for his pains, she plagued him incessantly, paging him at the hospital at odd hours with complaints of pain, complaints that emanated from the feeble constitution of her race, compounded by the indiscretion of her sex. As if that weren’t enough, with the clumsiness characteristic of her race, she had gone and broken her leg while taking a bath some weeks ago. He had refused to operate on her again, instead handing her over to his chief orthopedic resident, Wei-Chun, also his protégé, and live in lover.

Even though Wei Chun was entirely of Chinese extraction, he was not a blot on the perfect mirror of Plum Blossom which Ahmed kept always in his mind. This was because Wei Chun provided the important function of physical release for Ahmed, a release he knew he needed to keep healthy enough to perform his exacting work and fulfill his ultimate destiny of re-purified reincarnation. From his exact biological calculations Ahmed knew that so much sperm being produced in the male testicles needed to be ejaculated lest the individual feel extreme discomfort and all normal systemic functions become disturbed to the point of general malfunction. While manual masturbation by the individual himself could to some extent forestall the ill effects of sperm production without ejaculation, the interaction that was part of sexual activity had a beneficial effect at least double if not triple that of individual auto-masturbation. Ahmed gave Wei Chun his instructions in the same way that he had trained him to surgically operate on the bone and muscle system of the orthopedic system and he obeyed with the same alacrity and gratitude he had shown as Ahmed’s most promising student. As far as Ahmed was concerned, intercourse with a female would be an unthinkable violation of his pact with the spirit of Plum Blossom who was wedded to him, if not in this world, in the next. While Ahmed was not a virgin, some sexual experiences with females having proved unavoidable due to his father’s, Hiro Matsui’s, insistence on taking him to geisha houses during his youth and on his return visits to Japan, sexual intercourse always made Ahmed feel ashamed after the act was performed. It was the conscious knowledge of his disloyalty to Plum Blossom that so affected him and so he would never willingly seek out a female partner, a prostitute, or even one of the massage girls in the local Taiwanese “barber shops” which were so popular in the city and which specialized in manual masturbation of the customer. His sexual experiences with Wei Chun, on the other hand, were entirely clinical, more like a surgical procedure than a sexual act, they performed the necessary biological restorative function to the system and were quickly and cleanly forgotten.

But this gaijin woman, hobbling on her crutches, accosting him at every turn, with her pallid white skin like dust, resembling one of the ghosts of the “Kabuki” theatre,

Menacing, horrific and to be avoided at all costs, she was not only ugly, but also insolent. If it had not been for his absolute commitment to self-sacrifice through acquisition of medical knowledge and the care and salvation of the sick and the infirm, he would have had her bodily thrown out of the hospital. As luck would have it, the old gaijin lady’s leg was not healing well, and Wei Chun suspected a severe case of osteoporosis, brittleness of the bone brought about by the trauma of the fracture. Without begrudging Wei Chun on the brilliance of his diagnosis, Ahmed had congratulated Wei Chun and was forced to accede to prescribed treatment procedure of an extended, if not unlimited, course of physical therapy with heat treatment, short wave therapy and spinal traction, the latter being necessitated by the damage to the spinal nerve in the diffuse line of the primal fracture extending into the lower vertebrae. What this meant of course was that the old woman would be in the hospital almost daily. Due to the unfortunate combination of his moral scruples and his avid aversion to her, he would have no choice but to see her on the same regular basis. He could do nothing but try to avoid her and do his best to ignore her, a difficult enough task given her seeming determination to harass him and disturb him in his daily routine. Indeed it was difficult for him to understand the source of her malevolent purpose. Indeed at times he wondered if she were some kind of sign that the fates were perturbed with him, and that she had been sent to warn him that in the great wheel of reincarnation there had been a snag of some sort. Had Suichi already made his own pact with the Great Buddha for the next notch of the revolution where he would once again possess Plum Blossom and Ahmed would again be left out in the cold? What kind of pact could that truncated boar have made with the Great Buddha to have gained such an advantage again? After all, Suichi was merely a middle manager in the company set up by Ahmed’s father’s own company at the onset of Japan’s new and glorious restoration. He contributed nothing to the salvation of souls – nothing except absolute obedience of course.

The thought made Ahmed shudder.

After all, what did the Great Buddha demand above and beyond absolute obedience? For that matter, what did the sacred Emperor, temple of the Great Buddha in this reincarnation, demand above and beyond absolute obedience? Had Ahmed somehow missed the point? Was not absolute obedience a virtue beyond even the curing of the sick, prevention of death and salvation of souls?

It was a question that Ahmed did not care to dwell on. After all, he was a doctor, not a philosopher or a priest. He knew what his objective was and he was determined to fulfill it to the best of his ability, to the very core of his marrow, to the center of his heart. It was a testimony to the ability of this old “gaijin” woman to disturb the center of his tranquility and certainty of his life’s purpose that he could even contemplate such disturbing questions and in this way interfere with his professional performance. It might be quite possible that she could even drive him mad if he allowed her to continue to interfere with his set routine in this way.

For Clarissa, with Ahmed gone, the day was for all intents and purposes, over. It was time for her to go home, a short trip by taxi to her apartment in “Tien Mu”, the Americanized section of upper Taipei. The translation of “Tien Mu, “was “Mother of God,” an irony, Clarissa noted to herself, unusually grandiose even for the Chinese. Her apartment was on a fourth floor walkup in one of the more modern apartment buildings on a tree lined crescent; the floors were parked and wooden fans hung from the ceiling, an anachronism of design as most of the apartments had room installed air conditioners and electric fans could be purchased at almost every corner store. Her furniture was Chinese antique, one of Roger’s hobbies being collection of such furniture when it was still cheap during the days of the American military presence in Taiwan. The furniture and a cabinet of silverware and Lemoge china, legacy of her dowry were among the few relics she had kept from the three room modern bungalow she and Roger had lived in on the American compound before he was killed.

Almost in a daze from her brief but emotional encounter with Ahmed she set out to prepare herself her usual frugal dinner. Breaded fish sticks and frozen peas bought from one of the few stores hat stocked American food only in the “Tien Mu” district, boiled in hot water on her portable gas burner in an otherwise bare and mostly neglected kitchen, were eaten sparingly, the leftovers from the meager meal carefully stored in her near empty refrigerator for morning breakfast. Clarissa had no television and rarely listened to the radio. Sometimes she read the magazines or books lent from the library of the local Church, but tonight, more enervated even than usual, she decided proceed with her usual routine of a brief wash in cold water and retiring to her rather luxurious queen sized bed where, due to the heat, she wrapped herself in a single sheet and let her mind wander as it might for hours before she would drift off to sleep, dreaming of Ahmed and waiting for another chance to see him the next day. Indiana was like that, but she realized it only in retrospect, as her mind began its usual cinematic meandering. The days had drifted by there too, week passing into months, months into years with no visible change. Life had been set as by some predetermined routine, the origins of which aroused no curiosity among anyone and whose plan was fulfilled without question by everyone and certainly without complaint. During the hot summer Taipei nights she would try to remember what she could of Roger and her early life in Indiana, but she began to realize that the first thirty five years or so of her life had had no order and no time plan, contrary to what she had always assumed. She’d known Roger since junior high school. Although they were both Catholics, they attended the same public junior and senior high schools in Bloomington. Clarissa’s father was head of a small ball bearings factory and Roger’s father was an engineer who Bloomington country office of public works. Roger’s mother was a kindergarten teacher, while Clarissa’s mother, whom the neighbor’s all said had “airs” had never worked and looked down on Roger’s family for the reason that Roger’s working mother evidenced the relative poverty and inferior class of Roger’s family. While she lay in bed at nights in the sweltering heat she tried to remember the faces of Roger’s parents but could not. She could not remember their schoolmates, not their faces, nor their names. Even her own mother’s face was a blur. In her mind only her father’s face was clearly delineated; he was always laughing, holding his arms out to her and laughing or taking her out on the swing in the large back yard of their white frame house and rocking her back on forth, “my little angel’, he would lilt as the swing flew up in the sky and down again and she was hysterical with childish laughter, her giggles filling the flat blue Midwestern sky on those happy weekend afternoons so long ago, yet always with her, they would still cause her to smile to herself.

Her relationship with Roger had happened neither by accident nor design. The few Catholics in the public schools of Bloomington were united by a bond predetermined by their religious affiliation, by family alliance, by lack of other alternatives. In the junior high school hops the Catholics dated each other, and by the time of senior high school when everyone was collecting their own “steadies”, it was inevitable that Roger and Clarissa should exchange rings and declare to their classmates their all-American intention of that age and time to date no one but the holder of their class ring. Kissing which was mandatory led to petting and by the age of sixteen Clarissa had lost her virginity to Roger in the back seat of his father’s old Chevrolet while watching a horror movie at the local drive in. It was not that she had not enjoyed the experience, but it seemed little more to her than the winning goal in the local girl’s field hockey team to which she belonged. For Roger the experience had been a bit more exhilarating and from that time onward and after each of their subsequent weekend forays he was planning the day of their wedding. There was the fear of pregnancy of course on her part, but it had never happened, not before their wedding and not after. They never attempted to find out which one of them was at fault. It didn’t seem to matter much to either of them, and within two years when they were both in college, concentration on their studies induced them to find out methods of birth control so they could both graduate with the least inconvenience and this in spite of the fact that birth control was against their religion and neither of them ever confessed their sin to the priest in college chapel. Their lives were, in short, she realized now, uneventful. Emptiness was the ruling principle of all that they had lived through. There was no question of endurance or suffering or misery. She had only known these feelings since Roger’s death and they had intensified to the point of being unbearable since meeting Ahmed and falling in love with him. Roger’s death had totally disoriented her, not so much perhaps she realized because she was so much in love with him – love had always been assumed by her to be part and parcel of their whole relationship from childhood, culminated by the first act in the back seat of the old Chevrolet and immutably solidified by the fifteen years of marriage. The disorientation was rather caused by the fact that for the first time in her life she had to ask questions of herself and found that there were no answers.

After Roger’s death Father Mulroney had attempted to convince her that she was going through a crisis of religious faith. He had provided her with books on passion of Christ and had introduced her to the writings of the Japanese Catholic, Endo, “The Life of Christ” and “The Silence. “Instead of providing with the answers to her, she was looking for these books only raised more questions in her mind. Despite Father Mulroney’s best ministrations, her questions seemed to swirl into an incessant vortex of self-doubt and ultimately skepticism. Was Roger walking now with Jesus Christ in heaven or had he been stolen from her by some dark force that cared neither for Roger’s soul nor her own peace of mind? Even worse was the thought that Roger’s death had been nothing more than a casual accident, that his body was crushed by physical forces and that he had simply ceased to exist, both in this world and in the next, the very existence of which seemed to her to be highly questionable at vest. These were terrible, heretical thoughts that Father Mulroney had tried his best to assuage, and indeed it had seemed to become one of the central tasks of his life and his vocation to put these thoughts to rest for Clarissa by whatever means at his disposal. Father Jack Mulroney had befriended Clarissa and Roger during the early days of Vietnam when Jack had been stationed in Taiwan; a young priest from Chicago, Jack had been ambivalent about the war from the outset and his while his chapel sermons conformed to the US governmental and army policies, in private to his friends, such as Clarissa and Roger Carlton, he was more candid. He had deplored the loss of life in Vietnam, and being a devoutly sincere and pious young priest, he was as equally appalled by the loss of Vietnamese as American lives. In the Carlton home in the early days of the war Jack Mulroney had led many private meditation and prayer sessions in which he implored God and Jesus Christ to save the precious young lives of American servicemen and fliers and Vietnamese civilians and to lead the two countries to a way of mutual understanding and tolerance. Jesus Christ walked among all peoples, he would tell the eager young couple, his breath of love and friendship filled the spirit of every race and would lead mankind to harmonious cooperation and brotherly love. He prayed for the spirit of Christ to guide the American President and his cabinet and generals in finding a peaceful solution to what seemed already in those days an unstoppable bloodletting on both sides. Clarissa had prayed in those days with an open and sincere heart; she knew now that her prayers were hypocrisy because she had no concept of what bloodletting meant until she had lost Roger to it. After Roger’s a death, Jack’s faith never appeared to waver.

Jack Mulroney was a neurasthenic fellow, lean with white blond hair and pale green eyes. His father was Irish, but his mother was Polish and he had a conspicuous aquiline nose. Father Mulroney’s struggle for the soul of Clarissa had taken its toll on his own quavering faith, and the kind of doubts that had emerged in what seemed even to him as an increasingly torturous Jesuitical logical over the years had had the obverse effect on Clarissa from what Jack would have wished. While Jack’s Mission was far removed from the cataclysmic changes taking place in the Church in the U.S. and Europe, the isolated Mission was freer perhaps than Missions in the west to experiment with the new ideas that were conveyed by Missile or word of mouth than Missions under the critical purview of Western parishioners. Many factions in the Church had advocated greater awareness of human sexuality and sensuality short of marriage if not sexual intercourse in order to invigorate what many believed were a dying religion. Jack’s early seminary training had left him unprepared for this change of perspective coming from the highest echelons in the Church, but his near obsessive concern for Clarissa had infused these policies with innuendoes for him that disturbed routines of a lifetime and caused him to reevaluate principles and tenets that he had up to now considered absolute articles of faith. In short, Jack was afraid that he had fallen in love with Clarissa, and with this frightening realization he prayed continuously for a means of reconciling his own awakened feelings of sensual love, the new and often quite shocking re-orientation of the new Church and the basic tenets of Catholicism which for him were the foundation of his life’s work and his own personal identity.

With Roger’s death, Clarissa was faced with the horrific realization that she had depended of Roger not merely for love, security and a sense of belonging, but also for basic physical gratification that she had always taken for granted and had accepted as one of the basic benefits of the married state, even though she still held in her mind the traditional American woman’s view that only men, not women, sought physical gratification and that it was entirely perverse to think of marriage as a socially acceptable vehicle of obtaining sexual release. Actually, Clarissa’s sexual relationship with Roger had been entirely mundane. The major satisfying aspect of the sexual relationship was that it had commenced at such an early age that neither had been able to acquire the inhibitions towards sexual intercourse that normally occurred with those who married or who first experience sexual relations at a later age. In other words, their sexual relationship had been neither erotic, nor passionate; it simply existed as part and parcel of the same dullness of which all the other components of their lives were composed. Clarissa had cooked dinner; they had both enjoyed it. Roger mowed the lawn; he brought home the paycheck. Clarissa cleaned the house and swept out the kitchen. They both watched television and went to church on Sundays. In the evenings before they went to sleep they had sexual relations. When Roger died, Clarissa began to realize, not without a certain amount of horror, that almost all aspects of her life were the same with Roger as without him, except for the physical relief that she had always taken for granted a part of life. Once she began to recognize the function that Roger had served, she began as well to question the nature of her love for him as well. Had she loved him just because he satisfied certain physical needs, or had she loved him as a person? Lying in her bed, the sheet resting on her naked form, she could not even remember what he was like as a person. It was only with the greatest of difficulty that she could recall his face, and she was not at all sure that if she saw him on the street in Tien Mu that night, if perhaps he had come back from the prison camp in Cambodia, and even if he had been restored to the perfect physical condition in which she knew he left her, that she would even recognize him. And if Roger was not a person, indeed had never been a person, what then was she, had she been?

It was when these thoughts began to cascade in her mind and seemed to overwhelm her very sanity that the picture of Ahmed would reappear in her mind. She could not for the life of her understand what Ahmed’s existence had to do with Roger having ever been a person or her now being a person. For one thing, Roger would have detested Ahmed and would have refused to either speak to him or of him. Of that she was sure. Roger did not consort with the natives. It was not army policy, and Indiana’s, not white Indiana’s, to consort with coloreds, especially and in particular, not foreign coloreds. Orientals of “slant eyes” were even more particularly frowned on, given the fact that Americans had been at war with the “slants” of Vietnam. Before that there had been the war with Japan. Both her father and Roger’s had been in that and had plenty to say about the cruelty and bizarre behavior of this devilishly dangerous “yellow peril” of another era. Roger had lost his life to them. Of course Ahmed was not a Vietnamese, he was not even a Communist, but he was a native, a colored, an Oriental. From Roger’s perspective he was a non-person. He did not exist. But did Roger exist either? Had he ever existed?

Ahmed’s face appeared to her again. The burning black eyes, decisive cast of feature, cruel and angry as they were, evinced a purpose to which she could only clumsily hope to appreciate. He detested her, she was sure of that. But somehow that made no difference. When she first met him when her arm was broken so many months ago and he had attended her and set it, he had not detested her then and that was always what she remembered, no matter how he changed his attitude towards her, lost interest in her and come to feel only contempt towards her. When she first appeared in his clinic, crying and in acute pain, he had come to her with love and warmth on his face. He had put his arms around her shoulders and begged her to stop crying. When he had applied the anesthetic, he had first held her hand and explained to her, patiently and lovingly, what the effects would be and how she would rapidly recover. She could still feel the warmth of his hands on hers and in a fever of turmoil became sexually aroused again, putting her fingers on her own narrow opening between her legs, feeling the heat that surged through her slender frame until she was engulfed, imagining it was Ahmed touching and caressing her, imagining him undressed before her, naked, raw, primitive, in a fury of sexual torpor, his body a primal feast of the unholy love which to her was the sole satisfaction her body craved even to the point where the spiritual part of herself seemed to vanish to a point where it no longer existed and no longer mattered. While such auto-masturbation never satisfied Clarissa, it produced an entirely different effect on her from the kind of “normal” sexual relationship she had had with her husband. Roger had satisfied a physical craving, simply, openly and without much ado. His love making neither aroused her nor enticed her; certainly it did not intoxicate her. Yet the very thought of Ahmed was enough to center her heart and all of her feelings in the core of her sexuality. Yet there was no reason for any of this, she knew. She had tried to discuss her problem with Father Mulroney many times. Talking about her unrequited love and inexplicable admiration for Ahmed was something that Father Mulroney would discuss with her in an accepting way, try to rationalize it and integrate it with his acquired sense of tolerance and love of all peoples, men and women of all races. Father Mulroney, or Jack as she had been tending to call him more and more in recent years, was a strong believer in inter-racial relationships and had himself presided over the marriages of many whites and Orientals. Jack had tried to explain to her that she admired Ahmed because of his devotion to medicine, his vocation of healing the sick and attempts, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to prevent death. St. Luke had been a doctor, as Jack pointed out, and it was no doubt his acute skills of observation and love of mankind that came with the professional practice of medicine that made him one of the Lord’s most faithful disciples. Jack himself had once thought of being a doctor, he confided to Clarissa, on one of the near weekly meetings, they had come to have and to take for granted as part of a their close relationship.

Rather than meeting in the church Jack and Clarissa would find an opportunity to make a regular outing out of their meetings, going to the National Palace Museum to view the ancient Chinese treasures or spending the day in the Yang Ming National Park to view the cherry blossoms during the spring season or to enjoy the seasonal weather of summer and fall among the hot springs and ranging Oriental mountain landscape. Since Clarissa had broken her leg, they had had to limit their meetings to dinners in the few Western restaurants of Taipei with their superb French cuisine or sample the Taiwanese seafood restaurants by river in Tam Sui [Water Talk], easily accessible by taxi. Often at weekends they would spend the day at the American Club and return to Clarissa’s apartment where they would have an aperitif to top off a day’s conversation, increasingly concerned with Clarissa’s mounting obsession with Ahmed.

Yet Clarissa’s attempts to discuss her sexual obsession with Jack seemed to have the opposite effect from what she intended. She received less and less sympathy from Jack for what became increasingly the major passion of her life. As Jack’s routine efforts at prayer, meditation, confession and absolution had visibly less effect on Clarissa’s own feelings and the central topic of conversation on her part, Jack instinctively felt less inclined to go through the motions of what was obviously an exercise in futility. He began another tack, spending countless hours in the University libraries attached to the Catholic missions researching abnormal psychology and he used considerable effort in locating such psychological counselors who might exist in this remote Asian outpost of a Catholic persuasion, or at least such counselors who were not outright anti-Catholic. Jack had come up with the inescapable conclusion that the character, Ahmed, Clarissa was describing, exhibited all the symptoms of psychopath and might prove to be extremely dangerous to her should she actually be able to carry the relationship any further. Whereas previously Jack had set out to inundate Clarissa with every sort of theological treatise in an attempt to win back her faith and persuade her to forget her obsession on the basis of moral principle and Catholic belief, he now set out to inundate Clarissa with all possible written treatises on abnormal psychology. In depth studies of psychopathology, borderline schizophrenia and sado-masochistic behavior were presented to Clarissa week after week. As she lay in bed dreaming of Ahmed, she would leaf through these learned and often frightening texts, filled with case studies and analyses, only to close the pages with his face searing her brain, his eyes boring through the marrow between her eyes, penetrating to the crevice between her legs, and twirling herself in a vortex of ecstasy at the very memory of a look he had given her, however in contempt and detestation, she would slip the learned tombs to the pillow beside her and losing consciousness in the passion that seemed no longer hers alone, she would fall asleep without having completed whatever essay or chapter she had started out on with the best of intentions. On closer reflection she realized that whether or not Ahmed was a psychopathological individual or not seemed as relevant to the problem at hand as whether or not he had type A or type B blood.

Even if it could be definitively proven that Ahmed was a clear cut psychopath and or a schizophrenic, with or without extreme sado-masochistic tendencies, it would make no difference in the way she felt about him or in the way he made her feel about herself. Indeed the more he was denigrated the more acute her sense of self had become; the more aware she was of herself as distinct person with focused needs, desires and objectives. It was as if all her life she had lived on a flat two dimensional plane with flat two dimensional people, in square houses, on flat parcels of land, with graphically visible shapes that could be copied in pastel crayons an where people spoke to each other in words that were entirely transferable from one individual to another without such transference making any difference to the particular characters involved. Since meeting Ahmed she seemed to have been suddenly transported into a three-dimensional where the language she spoke, the movements she made and feelings that emanated from her spun over the two dimensional paper world in which her feet were planted, but not her head, so that everything she spoke and felt was no longer either comprehensible nor relevant to the world she had come from and still lived in, lived in but was no longer entirely a part of. Such a realization had, if anything, amazingly enough, heightened her awareness of her native two-dimensional world, and indeed heightened her appreciation of it. What she had always taken for granted as the absolutes of human life, social and religious, became a curiosity, aesthetic creations even, as exquisite and artificial as the fine jade vases created by the Chinese artisans of the eighth century or the Ming lacquer boxes with infinitesimal designs of houses, trees, landscapes and people, so intricate and detailed that they could not help but mirror reality yet so miniscule that the very attempt to view them and comprehend their wholeness was an intense effort entirely at odds with the mundane reality they purported to portray.

Her change of attitude came slowly to her, naturally and not deliberately. While she had for the many months since she met Ahmed resented Jack’s more and more conspicuous attempts to turn her against him, especially as her confession of her sexual passion towards Ahmed, became harder to suppress, or one might say perhaps, easier to express, lately she had begun to appreciate or even savour his evident discomfort. Not that she enjoyed watching his discomfort or forcing him to constantly retest his faith vis-à-vis her intransigence, but more that she was able to empathize with his inability to understand or comprehend the transcendence into the third dimensional world she had achieved and which she had come to believe had no relationship with her Catholic faith, but really was incidental to it. Of course she was entirely unable to communicate these thoughts to Jack for fear of losing his friendship and his companionship, the latter which had become increasingly important to her as her aesthetic awareness of the shared two dimensional world became more acute.

For his part Jack became more and more distressed by the change in attitude he had noted in Clarissa. It seemed that she had determined, for some reason of psychic trauma associated with Roger’s death, or for some reason of plain devilish entanglement, to ignore all the rules of logic and all the precepts of the faith on which their lives and civilization were built and on whose foundations their souls were to be saved. Clarissa’s nonchalance regarding Ahmed’s obvious psychological diseases were a cause of great concern for him on several levels. From the perspective of the parish priest, Jack felt that Clarissa was abandoning the love of good for an obsession with evil. From the perspective of the clinical psychologist – and he consulted at great length with the psychologists he knew on this score – he feared for Clarissa’s sanity. From one point of view she would seem to have entered into a severe depression. From another, more gloomy prognostic perspective, she might herself be near a total schizophrenic breakdown, the causes of which were rooted in her or early childhood and which disease was being triggered by her age menopause, the traumatic loss of Roger, and the series of accidents which had caused her various bone fractures and brought about her osteoporosis.

Finally Jack decided to take the bull by the horns. If he could not convince Clarissa of her errors and the dangerous course she was racing into headlong by either articles of theology or reasons of science, he would be able to convince her, he believed, by the facts themselves, as if in a court of law. He decided to utilize his access to the considerable espionage network of the Catholic brothers to get the real facts about Ahmed and confront Clarissa with them, with no attempt to sweeten the bitter truth. After many weeks of sending out his inquiries and demanding action on the part of his colleagues of the cloth, Jack was able to learn that the brilliant young doctor in whom even the greatest physicians and surgeons held in awe and whose name was known in professional circles for his extraordinary achievements as far afield as the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union, was the illegitimate son of a Japanese war criminal, prosecuted by the McArthur command after the war, imprisoned and released only on condition that he continue to provide important industrial secrets to the U.S. government on an on-going basis. He was also able to obtain the critical facts of Ahmed’s depraved personal life. A known homosexual, Ahmed was infamous for seducing his younger male student doctors and was known to be now living openly with his chief orthopedic resident in what amounted to a homosexual marriage. In addition, there was wide spread suspicion among the informants whom the brothers were able to get to talk freely about Ahmed that his homosexual proclivities exhibited clear sadistic traits and he was suspected of whipping and otherwise torturing, even mutilating, his politically more vulnerable male lovers.

When Clarissa was confronted with these facts, she cried uncontrollably. For a time it seemed that the world she had now entered, the third-dimensional world which separated her from the empty, mundane existence that seemed in many ways tantamount to death, would be irrevocably stolen from her. The images presented to her by Jack of Ahmed in sexual copulation with the young resident who, unlike Ahmed, cared for her so lovingly, inundated her mind and seemed to snuff all consciousness from her. The night after being confronted with the facts weeks she lay in bed weeping incessantly, talking to herself and muttering unintelligible oaths of hatred, jealousy, envy and fury. She had seen Ahmed to be entirely celibate, seen him as so devoted to his work that he could brook no interference with his concentration. It was thus that she had rationalized his sudden turning against her after he had set her arm and in particular after she broke her leg and was mandated to undergo the endless routine of physical therapy for the osteoporosis and spondylosis. In her mind she never believed that he had a woman. She believed that he would have loved her and her alone had his time and professional commitments permitted. After an entirely sleepless night it dawned on her that Jack’s horrifying revelations had done no more than confirm her original beliefs. He had no woman in his life. The vacuum in his heart would be filled by her love. His men lovers, if such existed, were no more than a means of physical relief, much like her own auto-masturbation. But in fact after the suffering caused by the awful revelations subsided under this panacea of self-consolation, Clarissa realized that she did not really believe shat Jack had told her, or that this information was not in some way self-serving on his part. For reasons that amounted to courtesy on her part, Clarissa knew that Jack’s interest in her was, after all, not entirely of a pastoral nature. She savored this thought with some satisfaction. She had noticed his longing looks, brushed off his effusive patina of concern only to keep the relationship on a stable course that would best serve her own interests. Lately he had come to touch her arm for no reason, brush his leg against hers and offered to hold her hand when she had lapsed into a particularly morose mood brought on by her self-effacing confessions of Ahmed’s outright rejections. By reason of the fact that Jack was tied to the two-dimensional world to which she now only partly belonged, he had misinterpreted the humiliation Ahmed had caused her as a devastating wound to her soul and her person; he had feared for her sanity and her very life, she realized. But what Jack had not understood was that these psychic and spiritual punishments which Ahmed inflicted on her were more akin to Christ’s Stations of the Cross than visible wounds that existed in this world and had their effects here. On the contrary, these humiliations were the means by which the mundaneness and shallowness of this two-dimensional world could be transcended; they were her spiritual joy and passion, sexual though they might be in their practical effect, the effect beyond the mere sensual was inexpressible in the words of this world.

Having entirely misunderstood the experiential nature of her humiliation by Ahmed, Jack had resorted to the two-dimensional world for the tools of restoration – persuasion, force, hoped for seduction and finally intimidation, she told herself bitterly. Where Jack had begun to stray from his own vocation, limited as it might be in its perspective due to the very nature of its two-dimensional habitat, was where he had sensed in her experience-hardly defined by the conventional sense of humiliation or unrequited love – a true transcendence that may have simulated the experience of Christ that modern Catholics were so desperately at a loss to recover. Such types of profound and existential thoughts were hardly part of Clarissa’s basic makeup, but the intense distress brought about by Jack’s revelations about Ahmed had forced her to think more deeply about what she had previously only felt. Having calmed down considerably after such reflection, Clarissa mused that if it were turn that Ahmed was indeed half Japanese and illegitimate at that with a father who was a convicted war criminal, far from making her loathe Ahmed, it would make her love him all the more. It would help her to understand more specifically the suffering she saw in his eyes; the intense desire to compensate for his father’s sins, against him, his Chinese mother and all the victims laid waste by the orders he had given. What better way to repair the cruelties of war than by the mercies of medicine!

Confronting Clarissa with the indisputable facts about Ahmed’s life history and the depraved way of life he lived was Jack’s last hope in turning Clarissa away from the doomed course she was bent on following. His anguish was inexpressible. He wrestled with himself daily and his morning and evening prayers and meditations took on a new passion which more than often brought him to tears. He had known Clarissa and Roger since they came to Taiwan, and he had considered Roger one of his closest friends outside of the pastoral brotherhood. Roger had been a good man, true to his wife, his corps, his country, he had represented everything a good soldier and a good American could be. When Roger went missing, presumed dead in Vietnam, Jack had taken it as a personal matter to assist Clarissa to come to terms with Roger’s death within the tenets of the faith. On this tack, however, the relationship had broadened in a way that he could never have anticipated. He found himself more and more closely drawn to Clarissa, first out of pastoral duty and sense of responsibility to the Roger he now believed was safe in Christ’s arms, and then slowly for needs he began to realize were as much his as hers. She was a delightful companion and a promising student, both of theology, art and literature. Jack himself, like many Jesuits in overseas missions, had several doctoral degrees in various fields, the priesthood having freed him to devote his life not only to pastoral work and promotion of the church among the heathen, but also to a lifetime of study. With her bachelor’s degree from the State University in Indiana, Clarissa had the rudiments of an educated mind. Her natural gifts were considerable. She had rare gifts of real insight and a talent for logic that could make any learned Jesuit blush. What she lacked was breadth of knowledge and habitual intellectual discipline, and over the years, and Jack had taken her under his wing, she had begun to develop both of these necessary adjuncts to the truly educated mind.

However somewhere along the way, Jack now realized, something had backfired. Rather than following the lines of Aristotelian logic which led directly to Jesuitical frame of reference so important to proper Catholic thought, Clarissa had deviated. Worse than, he felt he had permitted her to do so. He had permitted her to do so, he feared, because his attachment to her had trespassed the bounds of pastor/parishioner, even of teacher/student. He would not dare to admit to himself that he was in love with her. The very thought of such a mortal sin, even within the bounds of reformed Catholicism, was anathema to him. He had taken this vows at sixteen in a wild passion of faith and with a determination of unbreakable commitment. The Church was his bride; he wore her ring. He could never imagine committing adultery. But his feelings had left him in turmoil, and logic could no longer always control either his feelings or his impulses, although his behavior still remained under tight control, only of course with the assistance of constant prayer, prayer that was more a pleading with God and Christ that the conversational meditation he had become habituated to over the years. At times he felt like an ancient Hebrew, begging God to help him, down on his knees, wailing and crying for assistance, guidance, action from the great exterior force which controlled all beings, all sentient life, and all inanimate objects.

While he could not admit to himself that he might be jealous of Clarissa’s hopeless love for the heathen doctor, the anger and envy which he felt within himself called for truly supernatural assistance to assuage. At times, when he tried to reason out his relationship with Clarissa he tried to imagine what it was he had in mind for her for the rest of her life. Did he want her to really forget Roger and try to find another husband? He knew too that this thought horrified him as well. Deep in his heart, he knew he merely wanted to maintain the status quo. He and Clarissa would reminisce about Roger indefinitely until the end of their days. They would pray for his soul together, and in the meantime they would continue, perhaps even expand, their growing warm and close relationship with the gratifying mutual companionship it had offered them both. They would continue to study and learn together, with Clarissa always in the role of eager and challenging student, Jack in the role of engaged, stimulating and stimulated teacher. They would share books, ideas, even travel together to see the great cultural sights of the world. When their end came they would still be together, like brother and sister, father and mother, Christ and Madonna. They would be transported to heaven together, having committed no cardinal or venal sin and Jack would hand Clarissa over to Roger with clean hands and a clean conscience. Angels would sing over them in a heavenly rapture for all eternity. Always the three of them would be together in bliss and spiritual purity in the arms of Christ.

Yet with Clarissa’s stubborn obsession with the heathen doctor – and for Jack in spite of his cultivated racial tolerance the world “heathen” was always emphatically part of the term as it came to his mind- his dreams for their life together down the road to eternal bliss had come to a disappointing halt. He had examined again and again the curriculum be had set for her over these past ten years, looking scrupulously for a lacunae or a lapse in the books he had had her read or the instructions he had given her. Although he could not discern any flaw on the surface, he knew from the end result that somewhere, somehow he must have been at fault, and this added to his sense of contrition and the pain that he felt, a pain that was most acute during his own confession and his agonizing routine of prayers and meditation – a ritual that was slowly becoming too painful almost to hear.

After Jack’s most recent disclosures to Clarissa about Ahmed’s background and way of life, Clarissa’s initial reaction being anger and pain, her feelings quickly turned to bitterness towards Jack. Clarissa herself realized that her bitterness was a form of a defensive reaction – a means of blocking the pain that emanated from the images of a man who was little short of a God to her, engaged in sinful and unnatural acts, enjoying the luxurious sensuality of his body with a young man, instead of with her. If she turned this pain of anger and jealousy to bitterness towards Jack, the vividness of the images could be diffused until she had had a chance to transmute them in her mind back to the central focus of aesthetic beauty and physical sensuality which had become the core of her relationship, however it was largely imaginary, with Ahmed.

For this reason Clarissa began to imagine that it was not Ahmed who was homosexual, but Jack. She had visited Jack in the guest waiting rooms of his Spartan monastic quarters on North Central Road in downtown Taipei and in her fevered imagination as lay in bed agonizing on how to reconcile her love and desire for Ahmed with her jealousy of his young paramour – also her doctor – and her anger and bitterness towards Jack for revealing this so-called factual information to her, she imagined Jack, in his quarters, engaged in this same unnatural act with a young seminarian and attributing the entire scenario to Ahmed and his resident. It was a comforting thought for Clarissa and assisted her in making the transition towards the reformed – and indeed more compassionate – image of Ahmed that would be so necessary to allow her to maintain a kind of equilibrium in the third dimensional world which she had entered and which she would not, under any circumstances, leave.

Indeed the consequences of Jack’s disclosures to Clarissa, told with such factual objectivity, with no attempt to disguise or soften the awful blow for Clarissa, had in effect resulted in her subsequent estrangement from him. Their near nightly regular routine of mutual phone calls and at least twice weekly outings abruptly diminished to a once a week phone call and an outing perhaps once or twice a month at most. Jack did little to resist Clarissa’s sudden coolness towards him. He had realized that she was possessed of a near demonic intention that his spiritual and religious capacities were inadequate to deal with. The methods of science and the reality of fact had had the oversea effect form which he intended, so that as frustration gave way to consternation and consternation to passive withdrawal, he did in fact find another source of consolation, much as Clarissa had imagined or perhaps wished upon him.

In the Jesuitical missions abroad, young seminarians were regularly sent from many countries to study and learn from the experienced missionaries familiar with foreign countries and their customs and languages. Some months previously a young German, Brother Ludwig, a graduate student in linguistics form the University of Munich had been sent to Jack’s mission to begin his training as a China missionary and he was assigned to Jack as a student. Ludwig was tall and blond and had the smell of a young man who had given himself up to the service of Christ with little attention to his own personal attire or cultivation, a habit of demeanor which Jack, from a middle class Chicago family where cleanliness was indeed next to Godliness, found annoying if not at times offensive. Ludwig was a brilliant student though, and passionate in his commitment to the priesthood, however indoctrinated as he was in the all too modern ways of thought in the church current in Europe. After lessons in Chinese language and culture with Jack, Ludwig would begin long dialectical arguments on the connection of personal sensuality with the spiritual sensuality inherent in the Christian’s love of Christ. As Jack’s relationship with Clarissa deteriorated, he found himself drawn into the arguments with Ludwig in a more engaged way that previously, largely out of the desire to find another object to focus his emotions on now that Clarissa had more or less ceased to represent all the passions of his future hopes.

Often despondent to the point of distraction, Jack would ask Ludwig to join with him in his painful evening prayers and meditations where his agony was so great that he felt he had abandoned the more civilized Catholic faith for the more elemental Hebraic one of despair and helplessness. The youthful Ludwig at first appeared oblivious to Jack’s agony, but slowly as Jack began to confide in Ludwig about his relationship with Clarissa and her wayward behavior, Jack noticed a surge of emotion in the young man that while raw and uncouth as was common to his race was filled with a passion that seemed to fill the void that had been left in Jack’s heart with the virtual loss of his own personal Madonna. One evening as they both kneeled in prayer on the Persian carpets of Jack’s private suite, Ludwig began to sing a Wagnerian aria. Stunned, Jack ceased his prayers to view the young man from top to bottom and upon the fall of his glance Ludwig suddenly undid his fly and pulled his member from his pants, masturbating wildly until he had ejaculated to the end of the room on the walls where hung Jack’s precious collection of Chinese watercolors in black and white ink with poems written in Chinese characters. Shocked beyond belief, Jack turned his head away and began his prayers again as if nothing had happened, but this time he realized much of the agony had gone from his heart, and the emotional tone and tenor of his dialogue with God and Christ had returned to near normal. Later that night while Jack turned restlessly in his sleep, Ludwig opened the door to his rooms and crept into his bed, falling on his body with his blond hair tossing over Jack’s naked stomach and legs.

Sobered, Jack felt it necessary to summon the chastened Ludwig to his office in the morning in order to confront him with the severity of his most sinful impropriety. Far from being contrite Ludwig aggressively presented his argument that his love for Jack was a simulation of Christ’s love for his disciples and bolstered his argument by the information that it was common practice among the young seminarians in Germany to use homosexual love as a means of understanding the passion that enabled Christ to confront the sufferings of Gesthmene with equanimity. He argued with impeccable logic that homosexual love did not break the spirit of Christ’s teachings or that of the Church father’s since the sin of sexual intercourse proscribed by the Church was focused on reproduction as the main cause and effect of sexual intercourse and as in homosexual love reproduction was a biological impossibility, the actual reasons for its prohibition were solipsistic. Jack, who was in his middle fifties, suddenly began to feel his age. The previous night had indeed been the most joyous of his life. He had in his youth and on occasion even in middle age practiced onanism, but his prayers of contrition and confession had led to such a complete sense of absolution that the effect of this venial sin had been nullified in his mind. This time, he knew, there could be no absolution. He would not dare confess to his superior of the previous night’s event. If he should, he would no doubt be blamed and punishment would fall hard upon him – even to the point of being retired to some remote monastery, forbidden from performing his pastoral duties, and quite likely transferred out of Taiwan altogether, a thought too abhorrent even to contemplate as it would remove him forever from the orbit of what he had come to realize was his idealized Madonna – Clarissa – and all hope, however now remote, of fulfilling his dreams of joining their lives’ paths in serenity and spiritual purity. Taking a more practical tack, he decided reluctantly to chalk this unfortunate situation up to the vicissitudes of Church modernization, and with a true Jesuitical twist decided to wait judgment until the dialecticians who had started this whole revolution of thought resolved the matter to everyone’s satisfaction. Unquestionably such a thorny doctrinal issue would have little effect on ultimate salvation and absolution; it was only a matter of understanding God’s will as it manifested itself in these troubled modern times.

However, far from taking Jack’s mind off Clarissa, his newfound nightly orgiastic releases with Ludwig churned new and unthinkable thoughts and feelings in his mind. While in the throes of mutual masturbation with Ludwig, Jack would imagine it was Clarissa’s petite head on his center of physical excitation, her small and delicate hands caressing his most sensitive spots and her soft and watery orifices being penetrated. These thoughts disturbed him far more than the actual physical acts he was now routinely engaged in performing with Ludwig, and for that reason he decided to bring both his relationship with Ludwig to an end and to begin a new tack with Clarissa in order to restore his original dream for their happy future, although now, in the quality of that dream, innuendoes of sensuality were pervasive if not insistent, making the fulfillment of that dream more important to him than it had ever been. With a missile to the prelate in Rome who was in charge of seminarians studying in the Orient and another to Ludwig’s parish priest in Munich, it was only a matter of months before Ludwig had been transferred out of Taiwan and sent back to Germany for further basic instruction in theological principles. Although Jack was forced to share Ludwig’s sorrow at leaving his new posting so soon and feigned total ignorance of the reasons for the decisions of the central authorities to so abruptly terminate Ludwig’s Oriental seminarianship, he was in fact felled with a deep sense of relief. For indeed while he had experienced great physical pleasure in his nightly forays with Ludwig, such relief had paled next to the distaste and guilt which inevitably followed each encounter. Whatever Ludwig’s arguments were and however certain theorists in the Church might advocate them, Jack knew in his heart that they were altogether un-American and would never be accepted in practice by his own Church in the States. He could imagine his mother now, long since dead form a heart attack in her fifties, slaving over the hot stove in the lower east side of Chicago in the early days of her marriage, during his own childhood, toiling to feed her seven children and her husband before six so that her children could all remain healthy, understand routine and discipline and get to bed on time and to school on time in the morning, hearing of such a change in Church policy. Or his sisters, still in the same middle class neighborhood, so proud of their brother the Priest, converting the Natives to the true faith. He laughed to himself. Physical pleasure was a self-conscious renunciation of his youth, a consequence of his faith, and pride of his family. Homosexuality, whatever the primitive Germans or corrupt Italians might make of it, was still a vile perversion and he would not continue to have any part of it. Infiltration of the Church by Communists in Europe was no doubt the reason for such perversities creeping into the thoughts of the central doctrinaires, although their day was blessedly nearing a much deserved end. Political compromise was always a necessity on the troubled European continent, but in the blessed land of sanity, security, commonsense and democracy, perversions, along with heathenisms, would always remain unacceptable.

Jack drove the downcast Ludwig to the plane himself, and after seeing him off with feigned sorrow, he returned back to his quarters with a great sense of relief. For the first time in many months since his affair with Ludwig he was able to pray without the pangs he had experienced due to the awful secret he was keeping from himself and his colleagues. But also he noticed that his prayers were without the agony that he had experienced prior to the affair with Ludwig. He knew he had committed a grave sin, but not one, he noted that could not be rectified by penitence and prayer – if not by confession due to the delicate circumstances. Like the heathen doctor he had performed an unnatural act, and like the heathen doctor he had enjoyed it. But unlike the heathen doctor, he knew that this act was vile and called for rectification. He experienced guilt whereas the heathen doctor had no experience of this emotion at all. This was because the heathen doctor had no conscience, so that whatever errors against God and Christ were committed could not be known to be wrong and hence never rectified. He realized he had set the scene for his sin by his abandonment of his attempt to save Clarissa’s soul, and that this abandonment had shown itself in his lack of compassion towards her and his lack of patience. In his evening meditation he asked God’s help in changing his own sinful behavior, not just in abdicating all future engagements in homosexual acts and desires, but in putting real Christian effort into assisting Clarissa to rid herself of the demon that was possessing her and threatening to rob her of salvation.

On his next weekly visit to Clarissa, Clarissa noticed Jack’s change of behavior immediately. He was no longer glum and morose as he had been these many months since he disclosed the painful news of Ahmed’s secret life. She had known nothing of Jack’s relationship with Ludwig except he was a promising seminarian student whom Jack spent an inordinate amount of time tutoring in Chinese. As her mind was in fact almost entirely concentrated on Ahmed, she was little concerned with the details of Jack’s life and it little occurred to her that her imaginings of Jack’s homosexuality might in fact be real, even less that he might have been engaged in such acts with the young German priest. Yet she was rather curious at the great relief he seemed to evince at the fact of Ludwig’s departure. She was even more taken aback by the change she noticed in his facial features since she had last seen him. He seemed to emanate a certain radiance; his eyes glowed and his lips curled in a perpetual smile. She wondered for a moment if he had by some chance entered into the three-dimensional world which was by now her most natural habitat, but quickly dismissed the notion as soon as he began on the same pedantic conversational tone a usual.

As Clarissa poured Jack his usual aperitif of Irish coffee, she could not help but notice that the radiance in his glowing eyes gave him the appearance of having donned mascara. Curious, she tried to draw him out. His change of demeanor was pleasing to her if only because it suggested that he might no longer brow beat her about her love for Ahmed, but also possibly she might even draw from him the sympathy, even support, that had been so comforting to her in the first few months of her obsessive love for Ahmed, and that had never failed to lend her renewed hope in the possibility of a true relationship developing between them. Clarissa was not to be disappointed and did not have to wait long to receive the kind of commiseration she had so longed for, although Jack, in an attempt to act as if he had never deviated from this sympathetic frame of mind, led into his recantations with the maximum amount of delicacy. She began hesitantly, “I have been thinking constantly about the things you told me about my beloved doctor, Jack, and I can’t tell you how distressed I am to think that a man of such capacity, such responsibility, such devotion to humanity, the suffering and the sick could really be living the life of a depraved homosexual. Surely, on reconsideration of the matter, you must agree that such a situation is impossible, “she asked with the commanding whine in her voice that always appeared whenever she spoke of Ahmed to the recalcitrant priest.

Savoring his brownish brew of blended cream and whisky, Jack peered at her with an expression that she might have described as sly if had been able to conceptualize the priest she so trusted in such a manner. “To tell you the truth, “ Clarissa he began, languorously leading into the subject and enjoying with an almost devilish relish the eager anticipation that appeared on her slim features, “I have given the matter a lot of thought lately. I was very perturbed by your distress over this young doctor, and I have had some indication from what I shall call, my sources, that Dr. Ahmed may be undergoing some changes in what I should call the habits of his (uh) previous lifestyle.”

“You mean you may have been wrong. He is not a homosexual! I knew it all along. After all, it would be absolutely impossible.” She jumped in, visions of him caressing the naked body of the young resident melting away from her mind as if they had never existed, as if all of these painful imaginations were false de facto because they were painful and would cease to exist for that reason alone.

“Now I didn’t say that”, Jack quickly retorted as he enjoyed the previous instant of ecstasy that had inflamed her face disappear to the more usual tortured look of anxiety and fear, looking to him for approval, support and consolation, as if he were the sole giver of truth in her life and hence, whether she realized it or not, her ultimate raison d’etre. “I can’t go that far,” he continued languorously, relishing the attention finally being focused on him, however he might detest the fact that such attention had as its sole aim this depraved heathen.

“What I meant to say,” he went on, suddenly afraid that too an extreme negativism would trigger her previous negativism towards him and his own passive withdrawal which he was now so painfully aware had been a sinful act on his part. “Was that perhaps your Dr. Ahmed’s – shall us say- flirtation with homosexuality was in fact no more than that, or that the situation is not irretrievable perhaps.”

“Do you mean to say his relationship with Wei Chun is ended then?” she exclaimed excitedly, feeling justified in her belief all along that the entire tale had been fabricated anyhow, or at best a case of misinformation.

“No, I didn’t say that. I don’t think that’s true or even possible”, Jack want on, his lifelong habit of Jesuitical logic prevailing over his warmer intentions. “After all, “he qualified, as he again noted, this time with a certain sense of moderate alarm, that the despair that had once again crept into her face. “After all, Wei Chun was Ahmed’s student, even, one might say, his protégé. They work together and they do live together, “he added with the last words blurted out with an almost malicious intent that he almost immediately regretted.

There was a long silence. Clarissa got up from the antique Chinese settee and walked to her large front window facing the brightly lit lights of Tien Mu. Beneath her window she could see the Chinese vendors still hawking their wares of plastic copies of ancient porcelain, small jade souvenirs, houses and Buddha’s, and the inevitable late night noodle dishes, with their accoutrements of sliced pickled pigs ears, seaweed rolls and chicken wings and giblets. She was wearing a long flowing brooded Chinese housedress that extended to her slight feet in straw Chinese house slippers and Jack felt his heart wrench by the slender form, so lost, alone, a stranger forever in a strange land, beset by heathen influences that seemed beyond his capacity to contain. With his mouth in his throat, he caught his breath again and added hastily, “But just because they live together and will always remain the best of friends does not mean that it is not possible that Ahmed has come to see the error of his ways. After all he is a very creative man. There is no question of his accomplishments.”

Clarissa turned away from the window beaming at Jack.

“Yes, I have always tried to tell you how capable he is, “she added by way of confirmation.

“Indeed. Men you know sometimes, well, they may experiment with certain kinds of aberrant behavior for a time, “he said, knowing that he was speaking from his own joyful but painful experiences. “But that doesn’t mean that they will necessarily continue with these behaviors as a matter of a lifetime habit. Sometimes it may done out of a kind of convenience, or may happen even as an accident, “he went on, as if talking to himself.

Beginning to lose patience with what seeming his rambling non-sequitors Clarissa summoned up her courage to put the question to him more bluntly,, hoping to obtain the specific information she needed from him, information that she herself was already sure was true anyhow but would seem all the more comforting by hearing it form Jack. For in spite of the fact that Jack felt that he was her teacher, she his student, Clarissa really believed the opposite was the case. As Jack continued to inhabit the two-dimensional world without any real awareness that there was another dimension to reality that he was consistently unable to access, she could, like a reproving parent, guide him to the proper speech and behavior if only to make him to conform to guidelines whose purpose he was not yet – and indeed might never be – aware of.

“Well, what I want to know Jack is do you in fact know that Ahmed has given up his aberrant lifestyle or do you just think it? I mean do you have information from the sources you told me about before, those sources who were so bold, bold as brass I might say, as to regale you with such slander.”

Again allowing the cruelty of honesty to thwart his best intentions, he answered candidly, “No, I just think it is true. I don’t really know for sure.”

Exhausted with the subject and beginning to feel disgusted with Jack’s continuing abstinence, Clarissa plopped down on the settee again and helped herself to another aperitif of Irish coffee, patronizingly motioning her willingness to pour Jack another glass as well. Feeling thoroughly chastened, Jack took a deep breath, this time determined to put his Jesuitical logic behind him once and for all, at least as far as this delicate situation was concerned, and fulfill the purpose he had come for with all the best of intentions.

“Of course I don’t know for sure. I don’t know anything for sure for that matter. I may be a priest, but I am not God you know. Who can know the future? Only God can know for sure. Surely as a good Catholic you understand that, Clarissa. However, there is, as far as man in concerned, always more or less reliable or accurate thought or prediction. In this case I am as sure as it possible to be that my thinking – not my knowledge of course – is correct. I do think, and I am reasonably sure as I said, that Ahmed has, will give up his aberrant behavior and that, well, once he has embarked on a normal course of behavior again, there may in fact be some hope for the fulfillment of your love for this man.”

Although Clarissa had distinct sense that Jack was lying, she was so happy at that moment that she wanted to put her arms around him and kiss him. Whether he was lying or not, she reasoned, it was irrelevant anyhow. What mattered was that he was willing to support her, that he accepted her own sense of truth, a sense gained through her own private bridge to a world Jack could never or would never want to inhabit. She was in short, assured of his loyalty to her through this final capitulation. Indeed there was no longer any need to continue on with this train of conversation and they could return, most happily, to the topics of conversation that were of their mutual interest, the state of the arts in the Catholic world at home and in Europe, the meandering of the local government and the inconveniences it inevitably caused for the Americans living in Taiwan or the “ex-pats” as they fondly referred to themselves, and the American political situation, from both the domestic and international perspectives.

Later that night as Clarissa lay in bed she remembered that she had forgotten to give Jack a call at the appointed hour, as had been their accustomed routine. Since their reconciliation they had agreed to renew their habitual near daily communiqués by phone and near weekly outings. Clarissa rolled over to check the large American made alarm clock and realized it was already too late to call him. Although as one of the most senior members of his order he had his own telephone, she knew he disliked being awakened after eleven-thirty, as he had to get up early every morning for prayers and to give mass at one of the several local churches in the Taipei area. She had forgotten to call him of course because her mind had already drifted off into its usual highly reverie on Ahmed, with the heightened expectation that she would be seeing him tomorrow and the quality of emotion that would arouse in her.

Her nightly reveries on Ahmed were visibly different from those she lost herself in during the endless hours of the day, whether she was in the hospital waiting for a glimpse of him, or on the streets attending, to the best of her ability, her disabled leg, or at home during the days after these tasks were over. All these reveries were in turn different from the reveries she maintained while with friends or in a social situation where it was necessary for her to make small talk, or engage in a pretense of interested engagement however she might feel otherwise. In these later reveries the image of Ahmed was held in the back of her mind, somewhat like an egg waiting to hatch just at the right moment, when her sense of ennui had reached a point beyond which it was unendurable or when, with a great sense of relief, as if an enormous burden had been lifted from her chest, the tedious “pseudo” communication (or so the called it to herself) would blessedly come to an end, and the amorous reveries could begin once again in earnest. Of course none of the reveries had an exact content; they were what she termed to herself as “flotation’s”. As if she were on some drifting sea, in a gentle swaying boat, Ahmed everywhere, the sea, the boat, and the sky. Sometimes his face would dominate, with its delicate features at once lean and hard, always certain, and when smiling, with a bittersweet curl to his lips and eyes that seemed to dance out of his head to penetrate her very heart. Sometimes it would be his form, slender yet muscled, always moving with firm determination, never at odds or without purpose, swiftly with a lilting gait that made it seem as if he were flying off the very floor. At other times, memories of the sweet moments she had shared with him when he first set her broken arm and treated her with such loving tenderness, tears welling in his eyes, she was sure, at the sight of her pain, hand pressing her taut skin, infusing through her blood a heat she had never thought possible could exist. From these reveries came the inevitable others, Ahmed undressed before her, she undressed before him, her touching of his masculine parts, red, feline, no longer thought of as sexual in any sense she had ever known before, but of a channel to some other ethereal world where sexual union was the gateway and sin was a word irrelevant to the reality of that three dimensional world of which he was entirely a part and which, through him, she could enter too. It was in these reveries that she confronted the fact that her barrenness in her marriage with Roger was a consequence of the shallowness of their existences. She had never really wanted Roger’s children. She had never in fact ever wanted Roger, not in least in any way that resembled the way she now wanted Ahmed. She had taken Roger because he was given to her. She did not want him, had never longed for him. All of her life in fact she realized had been an exercise in taking without asking. Never having been denied, she did not know what it was to want. If children had come from her union with Roger, she would have taken them too, undoubtedly, but she did not want them. Now that she was approaching the age of menopause she found she longed for children – Ahmed’s children. She wanted these children not merely because they were his either; she wanted them because she wanted him. The two wants were at once connected and inseparable.

It was a strange sensation for her. In particular having been a good Catholic all her life she had always been taught that children were both the will of God and His gift. Never had it occurred to her until now that children were the will of the man she longed for and his gift. For one thing she had never longed for a man before she met Ahmed, and certainly would not have demeaned herself in believing she longed for such a gift from a man! Strange thought that it was, curiously it aroused her sexually and she fell straight away into her nightly ritual of sexually stimulating herself with fingers, reaching heights of ecstasy on the basis of imagination that she never dreamed could exist even in the most passionate love affair between the most passionate and charismatic of individuals. Certainly the heights of ecstasy she reached this way, all on her own, were beyond anything she had ever been able to imagine previously between herself and any other man. She knew it was this ecstatic transportation into the third dimensional world of Ahmed’s love that so inhibited her from responding to the real advances of men in her life that occurred periodically, in particular her inability to respond to Arthur’s unceasing overt advances, as much as she admired him as a person and valued his personal friendship and the generosity and gallantry with which he treated her. Also of course she suspected that it was such ecstatic transportation that was somehow blocking her responses to whatever it was in Jack that made of their friendship such an enduring bond. Although it was a thought that she would not let herself admit openly, in the back of her mind she suspected that Jack, priest or not, would also have made the advances that Arthur made so openly if only she had given him the slightest hope that such advances might be welcomed. Of course tonight her reveries and sexual ecstasies were more poignant and delicious than ever. She knew she had Jack to thank for that. His assuagement of her worst fears that Ahmed was lost to her forever – not through homosexuality per se of course – but through his sexual love and emotional attachment to another person, whether that person were male of female was irrelevant in such a case, had devastated her. Attempting to sort out the possibilities that still might allow Ahmed to become hers had provided her with a modicum of security, but the doubt had lingered in her mind, and combined with the outright rejection she suffered daily from Ahmed, the agony was always near the surface of her heart, threatening to overwhelm her. The thought, however it might have been illusory due to the fact that Jack might indeed have been lying to her in order to mitigate her suffering or for some other reason of his that she had not yet discerned and in fact did not care to, that Ahmed was in fact still unattached and therefore at least potentially available to her as a real lover and possible husband, father of longed for children yet unborn, had filled her mind with the happiness that she had experienced when she first met him, when he touched and treated her so lovingly.

Soon she was fast asleep. Lately she had started to have more and more complicated dreams, most of the content she could remember very well in the mornings. Far from frightening her however, these dreams and the memories of them which lasted well into consciousness she found comforting. Indeed these dreams were reassuring to the point that they became merged with her daily reveries, and so mingled were the “flotation’s” of the day and the dreams of the night that she often could not tell one state from another, so much did they complement and enrich each other and add to her sense of being firmly planted in that third dimension that transported her beyond the realm of flat, mundane reality. At times it occurred to her that she might be going mad or having premonitions of an early death, but that didn’t bother her either. Madness was a conceptualization of the two dimensional world, as was death, although she wasn’t yet quite how that could be. Yet she knew it must be true. It occurred to her that the third dimensional world she had been elevated into through her love of Ahmed was in fact death, but the thought did not frighten her.

That night as she drifted off into sleep, the dream reverie was more vivid than it had ever been before. She was in graveyard filled with tombstones all of jade. The monuments and statues ornamented the gravestones were of animals, lions, tigers, panther, all also of jade. Suddenly one of the jade panthers came alive and started to speak to her. He had Ahmed’s face and he asked her to walk with him through the graveyard, viewing the stones and reading the writing written on the monuments which she couldn’t quite make out but which Ahmed was going on at great length, in a learned way and quite engaged in what he was saying, although she couldn’t make his words out either. With his jade paw he took her hand and led her into a giant jade mausoleum. Inside the mausoleum were the comfortable settees, tables and bedrooms of a luxurious American bungalow, also all of jade. There were mirrors gilded in gold and dishes and mementoes on the dining room buffet were also of gold. When he asked her to look into the mirror she saw herself as he had told her he saw her, and she realized that she too was made of jade, carved like a beautiful statue, youthful, regal, immortal. Later she saw herself in a great throne, encrusted with emeralds, rooms and emblazoned in gold, but she was not sure if it were a throne or wheelchair. This time she was as she was in the waking world, aging with hair turning gray, haggard and disabled, her leg broken. A young man with shaggy white hair and eyes red with desire stood behind her. She was sure the man was Ahmed.

Of course it had sometimes occurred to Clarissa that in her relentless pursuit of Ahmed she was acting the role of the “ugly American.” In a sense she knew she was persecuting the young man, indulging herself in an onanistic fantasy of primitive masculine beauty, a pristine naturalness that Occidentals had long ago lost contact with and had no hope of achieving given the cumbersome accoutrements of civilization which were part and parcel of their social lives, political power and personal identities. It was, she realized, the Occidental and in modern times, in particular the American, fascination with this pristine naturalness that had so drawn her and Jack to admire the art of ancient China and the modernist paintings of the French primitivists and romantics which Oriental art had so strongly influenced. Thus in a sense Clarissa realized, living between the second and third dimensional worlds, she lived entirely in neither of them, and was only in fact able to view the third dimensional world because she was so firmly rooted in the second dimensional one. In that sense her ecstatic transportation into the realm of the third dimensional world was voyeuristic. Only through the flat two dimensionality of the developed world, encrusted with material objects, was she able to view the third dimensional world, itself empty of all but the purity of naturalness long since lost to the over-civilized Occidental.

It was in fact Clarissa’s persecutory obsession with Ahmed that had invested him and his world with that lurid beauty that he himself perhaps could never appreciate, that she in fact would also never have appreciated had she belonged entirely to his world. It was perhaps part of the luxury of being an American to be a voyeur. In this way, as well, Jack’s persecutory obsession with her, so particularly subtle and beneath the surface, devious really, in that the realities seemed almost entirely obscured from Jack’s consciousness in a way which was not true of her persecutory obsession – or love as she much preferred to call it – with Ahmed was also voyeuristic. It was as if Jack’s obsession with her mirrored her obsession with Ahmed so that they both lived in a world of mirrors, always viewing, enticed in an onanistic way, unable to act or complete the compelling reality of human relationships without compunction. But of course they could not, for in the over-civilized two dimensional world, all joy was absent. Completion of a relationship was merely the completion of a relationship. It never went beyond the words that expressed the act or the event. Thus the voyeur was compelled to be exploitative, to draw his or her joy from those to whom joy was an integral part of their world without consciousness of it. Those in the third dimensional world experienced joy without consciousness while those in the second dimensional world experienced consciousness without joy. Straddling the two worlds as she did however did not solve the problem. While enjoying the benefits of both worlds at the same time, she was doomed as well to suffer their drawbacks also at the same time.