THE JEWEL OF PARADOX
A Visionary Spy Story by Gill Schwartz

Chapter Two

When the Prima Materia is first found or identified,
it is often fragmented, a welter of accumulated,
ill-matching Elements, isolated, alienated.
This first Procedure of the Opus brings all the relevant
Elements of the Prima Materia together.
They are placed in an appropriate vessel
and moistened with the prescribed solvents,
mixed, blended, and brought to the desired consistency
for the Procedures that follow.
My understanding of the needs of the Opus,
determines the extent of this moistening,
from a slight dampening to drenching
the compound into a fluid state.
Emotional concern moistens the
Prima Materia's aridness to nurture
and enhance its soul qualities.

This Procedure quenches deep thirsts and
dissolves parched, rigid boundaries.
It softens and allows the various Elements
to be permeable to each other,
open to reaction and interaction.
They are activated to blend and recombine in new ways,
to explore the possibilities of unique configurations.

The Alchemical term for this moistening Procedure is:

SOLUTIO or SOAKING

Crossing through the airport's maze of bland, impersonal passageways, Jason thought of the thousands of miles he'd flown on such missions. His more than two decades with the Order now seemed like the Muzak that dogged him -engaging enough to keep him moving, but given real attention, found banal and totally pointless. Washed out after his fitful, self-punishing night, Jason submitted to duty and numbly moved along.

He pictured being alone with Melissa again and his gut clenched with apprehension. Even so, he felt a little throb down below too. How would she see me, he wondered critically. His reflection in a bookstore window caught his eye, and he stopped to look. Still looking trim and fit at 48 was a satisfaction. More gray in his trim beard than pleased him. His widow's peak was higher than he'd pictured, and sparser. As guarded and tightly controlled as he felt inside, he noted that he wore his usual posture and expression of friendly ease. He couldn't see the color of his eyes against the backdrop of multicolored book jackets, but he knew Melissa had always been taken with their deep blue.

Searching around the cramped waiting area of the Garuda Heavenly Bird Airlines, he spotted her. There she sat, an aisle over, reading a book with a drawing of a spectrum twisting spiral on its cover entitled "Beyond the Third Dimension". Her kind of pleasure reading.

After last seeing Melissa in that black cocoon of robes, he was startled by her now. Her breast-hugging, trim jacket and high slit skirt showed her body sleeker, more toned than he remembered. He caught his breath at the sight of her shapely legs, as bits of past intimacies flicked through his mind. He could see she felt his eyes on her, though she didn't look up from her reading as he approached.

They hadn't really spoken since their week from hell on assignment in Costa Rica blew them apart. That was over a year ago. The Abbot had sent them there as a team to pursue a drug cartel chief supposedly making connections with cocaine distributors from Columbia. The Order had been called on because the cartel chief had partners, it was rumored, in the F.B.I. But the drug lord had somehow been informed and was well prepared and brilliantly led Jason and Melissa dangerously astray. They barely survived that week's intrigues and seeming betrayals, either as work partners or as lovers -almost not even as people. It was his sudden disappearance that he'd imagined trying to explain to Melissa the night before. Jason was never sure what had upset her most -his own stubborn bravado or the drug-lord's bewildering deceits and ambushes. But she swore that she would never trust Jason's word again.

Though their relationship had always been stormy, when it worked, it was great, Jason felt. It was worth the compromises. But that episode of nearly killing each other chasing after phantasms in that tropical paradise affirmed their deepest uncertainties about each other. Even with Jason's spirituous efforts, nothing seemed able to patch things up.

"Good to see you again," he told her, and mostly meant it, coming to sit at her side in the row of lounge chairs.

"Uh," she replied, voice flat, chilly, barely glancing sideways at him. "Let me remind you, Jason," she enunciated in sharp, dry tones after a long breath, "We are together under assignment. For no other reason! So clear any other ideas out of your mind!" She looked sideways at him, coolly waiting for his reply. Her wavy auburn hair was loose. He liked the way it framed her face, setting off her large green eyes. But the look in them was icy intent, uncompromising.

Jason's breath caught in his throat. This wasn't going to be easy assignment. Or even a pleasant one. Maybe even dangerous. "All right, Melissa, I'll remember that," Jason assured her. He nodded and turned away in resignation.

They sat in silence. She continued to read, apparently enthralled with the multidimensional concepts and formulas. He looked around watching the others waiting and watching. As the planes took off and landed, Jason pictured them off to span the globe in all directions. Early on with her, he'd tried to tune into her interests in that abstract math and quantum mechanics. But he had neither real interest or ability. If he was able to follow any of it at all, it was when it evoked an image of those realms, some way to grasp it with his feelings or poetic sense. He'd always preferred Rumi or Antonio Machado to take his mind where he liked it to go.

Jason reminisced how he'd first met Melissa at a mutual friend's party in Greenwich Village. That first talk of theirs was so pure, so full of unaffected sharing that she felt dear to him even before the taste for romance came. She shared that she'd recently completed a university level convent education. He was beguiled with her fresh, innocent beauty, and her talk of her being engrossed with mathematical studies in hyper space. Jason shared that he was in a kind of religious order himself, more to impress her than actually reveal what he did. Following Judas' teachings, not only didn't he let his right hand know what the left was doing, he actively deceived the one with the other.

He was bemused by her sarcastic reaction to his being in an Order. She explained, without going into details, that her many years in a convent environment left her cynical about such religiosity. Though he wasn't free to share the Teachings with her as a non-initiate, his generalities about them intrigued her.

A few months after their love-affair began, he recruited her into the Order as a courier. By the time she entered the Formation training, she knew what their special calling was. She got her Confirmation of Vocation and merited assignments to administer the Last Sacraments. Jason was assigned as her mentor, and after a few dozen missions, they were known as the Order's "fatal duo".

The shift in her started early in their missions. Jason soon noted that she used her sharp intelligence as a sharp edged tool, dismissing every way of thinking other than pure rationality as unfounded and suspicious, a universal disdain. Over time Jason watched this turn into sadism in her. Nothing unusual in their line of work. But it seemed harder and harder for her to let go when it wasn't called for, to relax back into just being a person. Her jaggedness and inclination to punish, to tear things apart, came through more and more. Their calling can do that, Jason understood and felt some guilt that he'd set her up to get spoiled like that.

But she'd found the status and power she was hungry for. After their fiasco in Costa Rica, she decided she was solo star material. To flaunt her independence and success, she ended their partnership, moved out on him and left him to lick his wounds. Looking back, though he knew he carried some blame, it didn't make it any less heart painful.

Jason mulled over this till their flight was called to board after some 25 minutes. As they approached their plane across the runway, the Garuda Heavenly Bird Star Ship looked to Jason like a rehabed British Airways four engine plane. Amateurish paintings of jagged winged, soaring dragons were on its sides. Jason gasped as they entered the plane. The air inside the cabin was close and stale. Obviously, there'd been smoking in it over many years.

As the pert Asian stewardess showed them to their seats, Jason assumed Melissa would stay occupied with her book and happily took the window seat. Still wearing her icy shield, she sat at his side and was soon absorbed in her reading, swept a million cold miles away. No chance there, he conceded. As he heard the hatch close and lock, he accepted that there was nothing to be done at this time about any of the uncertainties in his life. So, with pleased resignation, he let go of his cares and gave himself over to the elating adventure of the flight.

After some starts and stops, the Garuda Star Ship took off at last. As always, Jason delighted in the exhilarating rush as they broke free of Earth's gravity. And this time, he felt the breaking free go very deep within him. Tension washed from his thoughts, from his body. As the plane ascended and circled around to head East, towards the sunrise, Jason felt in with some sense in his being, that he was also turning towards a new beginning.

Soon they'd flown beyond the land's edge and were out over the ocean. Late afternoon sunlight glowed through the infinite space around them, unmuted and pure. Expansive, fluffy islands of cloud floated in the vast distance. With nothing else to distract him, Jason's attention also floated, expansive and free.

Suspended in that in-between, he was lulled into an extraordinary state of consciousness. Washed clean of all the muddy happenstance in his daily life, he drifted released from even the me that was its source. Now, there was another me that held Jason's consciousness, the visioning me. He knew this as an innermost me, where his life's deepest realizations and experiences unfolded. He'd had glimmerings of this seer me since childhood, but it had never been so fully present to him, so clearly seen and thoroughly experienced.

One of my concerns in this Procedure
is that Prima Materia carries the proper thirst:
Preparation for its moistening.
Jason's craving now grows boundless.

The whirl of the plane's props becomes the crashing roar of a torrential down pour. Jason finds himself in the binding grip of a mammoth whirlpool extending out as far as he can see. All around him, also trapped in this downward vortex is everything imaginable -trees and houses, elephants and people, fish and planets, all caught in the flood's immense, unrelenting grasp, spun round and down into this Cosmic Whirlpool.

Of the countless others that whirl round him, most look insensate, defended with numbness, stupefied with the tedium of their narrow minds and lives with no capacity to grasp the cataclysm happening all around them. A few, too terribly few, show some awareness, some response to this unfathomable happening, with looks of fear, urgent confusion, some even with excitement.

At first, Jason is awed with the expansive scene. Then he's intrigued, watching the multitude tragicomedies of other's helpless dilemmas. Then, finally, he's left enraged at being trapped like a helpless speck of flotsam in this plummeting spiral, sucked down by the viscious twisting torrent into the dark, threatening abyss below.

His rage at being so enmeshed sets his core life-force afire, magnifies this flame until his spine and arms flex back into an arch of rebellion. His muscles surge with aliveness that strive to fling him up, away from this down-rush. In that gesture of total defiance -body, will and soul- he's suddenly alive to being joined to an exalting surge of force that wondrously transcends his own. It is a Grace of empowerment from beyond all the narrow dreams and dramas he perceives about him. The two forces merge -his wholehearted gesture of rebellion and this influx of Grace- to tear him free from the enslaving surge, to miraculously ascend back up towards selfhood and Light.

As he braves upward through the torrent to escape the destroying tide, he discovers other people striving upward too, also being aided by this Power beyond their own. Though each starts striving from their own limited reasons and means -frustration, fear, anger, heroism- Jason's visioning shows that even these gestures serve to bring each of them into alignment with higher purpose and calling.

Divine Impulse now surges through them all, impelling them upward towards fuller selfhood and Its Fulfillment. These rays of Grace weave them together in common calling. It brings their efforts into resonance, multiplying their effects and potency. These intertwining strands of Grace grow substantial and reveal themselves as a WEB of light. Jason's visionary Knowing reveals this as an emanation and aspect of the Wholelife Energy Bond.

Jason grows aware of a multitude of others clinging to those entwined with the WEB. Not moved by or involved in their struggle, these are drawn to merely cleave, desperate to escape the engulfing catastrophe. At first he's resentful of their passivity, but soon they too feel like part of the revelation, an affirmation that Grace serves all who reach for it. Like pearls woven through Its ascending golden swirl, each being is an embellishment of the splendor of the Wholelife Energy Bond.

A timeless while, Jason swirls in this Cosmic Whirlpool, entranced in his strivings with it. Gradually, he came back to himself, back to his space-time bound self sitting on the Garuda's Star Ship. Confused and bemused, he realized that he'd just experienced both a powerful sign of release from his life's woes and a revelation of his Calling. Yet, in spite of the powerful intimations, Jason rested in a calm, spacious awareness.

The night sky was now a clear, darkest, star strewn midnight blue. All the lights were off but the dim overheads. Melissa slept soundly on her tilted back chair, her face rolled towards him. Watching her breathing softly through her mouth, as she did in deep sleep, touched an old tenderness in him. Most of the other 20 or so passengers mostly slept.

At Jason's window, the heavens were backdrop to his reflection. A trellis of stars, intricate and splendid, nestled in the shadows of his eyes, merged with his gray flecked beard. The Garuda paused, suspended between those starry heavens and the Ocean's sparkle-reflecting surface for timeless hours. Jason drifted in that spaciousness while his thoughts remained absorbed in recall of the Cosmic Whirlpool and his strivings its it, inwardly attentive, reflecting.

Gradually realization dawned...

Yes, that vision of the Cosmic Whirlpool did reveal the truth of his life. He was caught in just such a torrent, being swirled down into oblivion. The terror of the realization broke Jason's habitual boundaries and defenses, opened him to sense new depths in himself.

He witnessed how habitual fears and defenses flung him first one way then another, always deflecting him from following his soul's deeper leadings. Though the vision revealed these torments, he was certain it was also a promise, a foretelling of guidance and Grace there for him. Though his chattering mind continued to question and rationalize, Jason prayed that at least a trickle of this higher provision would seep through some chink in his defensive armor.

But, perhaps, he mocked himself, perhaps all this was simply a clear sign of how overstrained he was, how close he was to drowning in his own delusions.

Finally, with sunrise just hinting on the horizon before the plane, he wearily admitted to himself that he didn't know what any of it meant at all. But he was certain that he'd cherish the chance to find out.

Jason dozed again and woke to find the plane coasting down over a high mountain pass into the rose colored morning. Seven hours of flight and five hours of time change. He smiled with a kind of satisfaction that his watch was still right, 6:27, though 12 hours difference. The plane banked, opening a view of the saucer-shaped city below. Five spokes of ravines meandered out from it into the encircling mountains -like a flower's petals, or a squid's tentacles, he chuckled. The clarity and high detail of the tiny scenes below struck him like coming to land in Lilliput.

Choice of this next vessel is determined by the
Procedures to be done and my use of them.
If it is transparent, I can observe.
If it is opaque, I can't. Need it be sturdy or flexible?

Balangpur, the name of the capitol city as well as the Kingdom, was bunched together at the basin's center. Looking down, it seemed to Jason a magical maze. In a labyrinth of narrow dirt lanes twisted back and forth and stone roads were ancient buildings, palaces, temples, and strange tall towers. Jumbled in with these were broad areas of scattered straw-thatched shacks and quadrangles of multistoried, aluminum sided housing.

Where the town's only two black asphalt roads crossed -creating an 'X' at its center- stood a huge palace and several splendid public buildings. Reaching out beyond the rim of this basin of urbanization, lay a patchwork quilt of postage stamp sized fields terraced up onto the surrounding mountains.

As the plane glided down towards the landing field, below dot-high farmers walked behind their teams of toy water-buffalos. Tiny carts and crowds wove through the threadlike lanes, gyrating beneath them as the plane circled to land.

"This dream is a city," Jason exclaimed, surprised at his pleasure.

The plane bounced on some air-pockets, slamming his and Melissa's shoulders together. That snapped Jason back to the tension between them and he grimaced at Melissa as if it were her fault. As they deplaned and the muggy heat and smells assaulted them, his dream of the city began to decompose.

A smartly uniformed young man in shorts and a paisley shirt met them at the foot of the plane's mobile stairway. "So kind of you all to place foot in our humble nation of Balangpur. We hope to repay your honoring us so." A rough translation of a traditional greeting, Jason imagined and smiled.

With a large toothed smile on his caramel colored face, the steward glanced around the group of six foreigners that had deplaned. Seeing their flushed and sweaty, heat-assaulted expressions, he crooned to them reassuringly, "Yes madam/sirs, it is still only the Hot-Wet Season. But next month is coming for sure the Rain-Wind Season. Except for tornadoes, then it will be nice for cool." His eyes folded into creases with pleasure at the thought.

"A month more of this!" Melissa hissed. "Why, I'd kill to get out of this muggy heat," she muttered, then turned to Jason with a scowl of shame at her slip. No notice was taken of her comment by the others, and their welcomer continued to grin and nod in hospitality.

As they crossed the tarmac, Melissa moved close Jason's side, surprising him. She whispered intently, "You hear what he says, Jason. This is not the time to be in Balangpur. So let's see if we can get our business done without too much fuss. It would make both me and the Abbot very happy. Him for the political favor. Me, because the new lines are showing in New York next week. And I do need some things. Let's see to it, please, that we don't get caught up in any side adventures!" She delivered all this in one breath. Then she pointedly cleared her throat for emphases.

This wasn't going to be an easy one, Jason grimly cautioned himself.

"O.K., then," the steward called after the group as they went to pass through customs, "Maybe see you for after." Magically, without effort or complications, Melissa and Jason found their scanty luggage next to the plywood custom's shack, chalk squiggles indicating they'd already been seen and passed. A turbaned porter piled their three suitcases on his head and escorted them out to where a multitude of transportation awaited them. On the street outside were hand-pulled rickshaws, peddled cycleshaws, donkey drawn tongas, a few bullocks carts and several mini-taxis.

"Let's take a rickshaw," Jason suggested, guiding them towards one. "For the adventure. My friend Phineus recommended the Hotel Impeccable." The rickshaw wallah's grin seemed to confirm this choice when Jason told him.

The wallah lifted the beams of his rickshaw, tilting them back in the woven rush seat, and set jogging on his way. From outside the tiny airport, they had a swift ride down one of the black asphalt roads. Then there were a few twists down roughly cobbled side streets. At an ever steady pace, the rickshaw wallah took them down narrow dirt roads past marshy fields thick with green sprouts and workers in wide straw hats. Shanties with roofs peaked like pagodas doted the landscape. Festive cloth streamers wind- whipped over the sprouting rice fields. They passed through tall sugarcane fields, the rows of straight russet stalks flickering by.

Out of nowhere, abrupt flashes of lightening streaked down the clear sky. Rolling groans of thunder followed close behind. In an instant, a tropical deluge of thick, drenching rain fell. The rickshaw's canvas roof was more for shade than shelter, and, in an instant, Melissa and Jason were soaked . The road collapsed into mud that splashed and clung to the wallah's feet and the rickshaw's floundering wheels. The instant fury of the storm was so bizarre that Jason laughed, amused at the sudden chaos it created.

Then, the deluge stopped as suddenly. Back in the town again, they clattered down another few cobbled streets, then stopped. The wallah, with nods and smiles, let them know they'd arrived at the Hotel Impeccable.

It was a three story, red brick building in a sparse, turn-of-the-century Raj style. Jason remembered Balangpur had been part of the British Empire at one time. A small, aluminum-sided hut was tacked to side wall of the Hotel. On its corrugated roof, a garish neon sign in blue and orange declared "Air-Conditioned Bar Attached."

"Now, that looks good to me," Melissa sighed, "after we dry off." Jason nodded and could picture some cool drink working through him, too.

The lobby was a caricature of turn-of-the-century Raj. The huge Persian rug that covered most of the wooden floor was as old and worn as the building itself. Placed about it were a number of potted plants, most just barely surviving. Empty bookcases lined two walls and there was a fireplace, it spite of the tropical climate. The steps of the stairway that grandly swirled up to the first floor were covered in transparent plastic. After they checked in with the weary looking East Indian desk clerk across the Formica top of the ancient reception desk, he confirmed that the "Attached Bar" was open.

They wearily climbed up the wide sweeping stairway and dropped their bags in their airy, high-ceilinged double-room. Silently, if not hostility, ignoring each other, they got towels and dried themselves from the torrential rain then, backs to each other, changed into dry clothes.

When they'd finished and returned back down to the lobby, Jason asked the desk clerk if he knew anything about Plang Mengli, assuming, as the Court Wizard, he might be well known.

"Oh, yes. I am an honored disciple of the Master Wizard. He is such a blessing to my life," the distracted man said without enthusiasm. "He is giving his Wisdom Talk at Victoria Hall this evening. He likes to talk with foreign peoples especially. And now is not too many because is not best weather."

"Yes. We've been told. It's the Hot-Wet Season," Melissa grumbled with a tight, sarcastic grin.

"So, perhaps, he may have time to speak with you. Is wonderful opportunity for you," the clerk assured them, still with no sign of interest on his exhausted face. They left him nodding and muttering and walked through the doors at one side of the Lobby that he'd indicated led to the Bar.

It was quite dim when the door closed behind them, just short of pitch dark. The air conditioner's Arctic blast felt like it might frost the sweat on Jason's brow as they wove their way around the clusters of bent wire tables and chairs across the nearly deserted room to the long Formica bar. A full- bodied, grandmotherly woman in a sarong greeted them with outstretched arms and a deep smile. "Yes, poor little birds, come out of that terrible heat," she welcomed them. "Please, let me give you something to cool and soothe you," she suggested in her native lilt. At a nod of assent from them both, she turned to the array of bottles behind her. She chose from a variety, mixed them in a very large tumbler, filled two cocktail glasses with ice, and poured their drinks. Her motions were smooth and dance-like, an undulating incantation.

"It's called the 'Tears of the Prophet'. It will help you see things differently." Her full jowls held a smile that assured their satisfaction. "Make you feel better in no time at all."

Jason's first drink tingled down, with just a slight aftertaste of mint. The second drink was a bit more penetrating, dissolving even more of his tension. While they sipped at the third, Melissa exclaimed to the grandmotherly woman, who watched them while resting her elbows and bosom on the bar, "This is good. What's in this 'Tears of the Prophet' concoction?" Melissa asked sweetly. The older woman shook her head, the movement rippling down her body. "Most foreign peoples is happier if they don't know all what's in it," she confessed.

Mystics and poets praise the art of fermentation
That creates a solvent for imagination's shackles.
Could they perceive the Infinite if not freed and
Washed clean from the limits of rationality?

Jason and Melissa listened to a few tunes on the jukebox, sampling from local tribal music to blues. They still hadn't really spoken. But the silence between them felt less barbed and threatening.

"That will do me, for now," Jason told her as he rose from the barstool, a little shakily after finishing his third drink.. "I need to clean off some of the travel grime. See you for after," he mimicked the local singsong and went back up to their room.

Jason noticed a welcoming vase of fresh-cut tropical flowers had been put out on the dressing table as he went through to the shower. Mentioning the Wizard seemed to have upped their status. Jason let the shower's tepid water dribble down over his head and body for some fifteen or twenty minutes till he felt drenched clean. Saronged in a large bath towel, he came out into the room feeling closer to human.

He found Melissa sitting at the room's French windows that extended out over the sidewalk below. Glass in hand, the 'Tears of the Prophet' seemed to be sitting well with her, if nothing else was. Her suitcase and overnight case were still in a corner. It didn't look like she was ready to unpack yet.

Below, they heard the grunts of burdened water-buffalo and donkeys, the jangle of cycleshaw bells, the shrill litany of street vendors and beggars. Another strange town halfway across the world from nowhere. "Sounds and smells like a circus down there," Melissa muttered, crinkling her face with distaste. She gave him a slack smile. "So here we are again, the "fatal duo". Off on another sacramental fox chase." He took the glass from her hand, raised it and toasted, "To the fatal duo," and took a sip of the "Tears".

Her downward sloping, jade eyes still beckoned him to mysterious enticements, even after their years together. Their looks just missed contact as they slyly studied each other, darting, jousting. Outwardly her smile was firm and noncommittal. Yet Jason felt an inner bubbling up of hopefulness, a melody that might find voice. As if it had been merely sleeping or strongly distracted, his lust for her sprang awake.

He watched her slide another ice-cube into the umber colored drink. She's still a lot to look at, he noted. Light boned, bosomy and not shy about it. The warm reddish highlights in her hair, the two greens of her eyes -one just to the emerald, the other to the jade- left him bewitched, as always.

"And here we are in exotic Balangpur. To see a Wizard!" Her giggle confirmed how sloshed she was. "The Abbot was so self-conscious about all this when he was giving our assignment. Cute the way he made it sound so mysterious." She slid the last word out.

"Cute!" Jason exclaimed. "He wasn't being mysterious any more than he was cute. He was baffled! Scared! 'Spells indeed.'" Jason mocked the Abbot's crackly voice. "What's left to do when you can't depend on the power of your threats?" A serious question for the Abbot who was in way over his head, Jason understood, trying to pretend it was all rational. When in reality, it is totally absurd. So, of course, he hands it over to his inspired duo. Although Jason felt nothing but disgust at the set up, he had nothing to say, as he was a consenting part of it.

"Jason, be reasonable. The Abbot's trying to be helpful, in his way," Melissa explained. "Think about it. Would he give you a mission like this if he didn't have confidence in you. Even though you've been difficult as of late, ignoring the Order's precepts and hierarchy. And your unorthodox ways of delivering the Sacraments." She paused to give him a grimace. "Use your mind for a change rather that just your reactions. He gave you this assignment so you can redeem yourself. Instead of censuring and disgracing you, he's trying to be helpful. And I certainly don't want anything but good for you." She was saying reassuring things, but he wasn't feeling reassured. "He did make it all sound mysterious though," she stage whispered, half in humor, half in awe.

"If there's any suspicion that this Wizard is compromising our Police Action," he mocked the old man's directive tones, "deliver the E.U.!" Kill 'em! is what he meant. Very mysterious!" Jason's tone left no doubts as to his own outraged state.

"Did he say E.U.?" she challenged. Her eyes flashed as if it were a sore point. "I'm very responsible when I take notes and I'm sure he said Extreme Unction."

"Fergodsake," Jason moaned. "E. U... Last Sacraments... I don't commit his every blessed word to memory." He stretched out his arms in not quiet feigned exasperation, with just enough movement so that the bath towel loosened and dropped from his waist.

She stared at his groin and sipped her drink. She smiled up at him. "Now that's a good idea. We usually got that part of the relationship thing worked out pretty good. Don't go 'way. I'll be right back," she cooed at him as she grabbed her overnight bag and walked towards the bathroom.

Jason felt a familiar excitement, like looking forward to his ecstatic pitch of fulfillment on assignments as he delivered the Sacraments. All the lust and rage in his being bubbled up to be quenched, to be revenged. His anger at his own life seemed huge to him. But this torrent of revengeful destruction gushing through him at those times was like the rage he felt at being trapped in the Cosmic Whirlpool. A universal rage against life's tyranny. Jason felt it was expressed through him in that consecrated mayhem, but that rage was sourced way beyond him. So merged with it in venting the rage, he would utter some benediction to the penitent like, "May all humanity have but one neck. This one that I'm choking!"

What he now felt for Melissa recalled that same fervor. Lying on the wide, lumpy bed, waiting as she daintied up for their lovemaking, he realized, "This woman is all of womankind to me. All that I need from them. All I cast out onto them. My impossible yearnings and my darkest fears, I see in her. I'm torn between heartbroken yearning for her and lusting to fuck her to death."

He gasped as he understood. She's the vessel for my longing and its darkest shadow, the fury at its unfulfillment that poisons my life. My two antipodes, the longing of my soul and that human rage, I hold side by side in her. "In this Eternal Paradox is the Splendor," he heard those words from Judas' Gospel spoken with deliberate care.

Melissa sauntered out of the bathroom in a skimpy laced, mauve see- through and a mist of lavender. Her scent. Jason was completely enticed. But it struck him as odd that she'd come so prepared, considering the circumstances of their last meeting.

He'd been stroking himself in anticipation of her. As she approached, he invitingly pulled the flowery sheet back to reveal his handy work. What had been suspicion and hostility now flashed into searing passion. Soon they were in intercourse. "Let me put it to you this way, my child," Jason whispered and coaxed her with his arms and body. She flung him a quick grin and rapturously followed his inspired body. They contorted across the wide bed, gyrating like practiced gymnasts, pushing their tuned bodies in their nearly painful reaching for each other.

"Jason," she gasped, "You're quite incredible. So intense. So knowing," she purred, leering sweetly over her shoulder. A swath of goose-flesh swept over her back from the currents of the overhead fan. "We didn't even come undone."

"You know how thorough the Order's training is," he smirked. She enjoyed his being sardonic. And, with her, that was a safe way to be. There's danger if you let her see what you really feel, Jason reminded himself.

"You're an evil wag, for real," she scolded him with suppressed laughter. Then she took him to task in proving it in another bout of what she girlishly called their 'intercrossing'.

In the rhythm of their merging, her thick curtain of hair and mounds of flesh rolled in waves before him, a long sweet journey across a dark, impassioned sea. The swoop and dash of their hunger, the rediscovery of the ardent ways they could entice and thrill each other, brought him to an exquisite pitch. Melissa came soon after, responsive, as ever, to his ecstatic orgasm. They held each other in a long embrace. He tenderly stroked her brow and she started to gently weep. Tears rolled down her cheeks, silently, without any movement of her face. That shocked, then touched him.

"What? "What's wrong?" Jason gently asked. She looked into his eyes, then looked away, considering. "I thought we'd never be together again." She smiled happily at him through her tears.

As the spirits in the Tears of the Prophet
Liquefies some aspects of the Prima Materia,
Tears of the heart can dissolve many others,
While tears and longing together will melt most.

They held a while longer, then he rolled onto his back and stretched till his bones popped. He was quenched, sated, from his aching heart to his feline fervor. Wasn't that incredible! he pondered with awe. The two most incompatible parts of me not only touched in her, but truly merged. Jason smiled with his whole being as he turned back and clasped her to him again. Their mingled sweats trickled down between his belly and the firm arch of her bottom as they fell asleep.

 

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Copyright Nathaniel Schwartz 2010