Twin Signatures: November 1988

 

. . . and Cosmo.

 

We live fast and are always having adventures, adventures which are like patterns of another adventure going on somewhere else all the time. A very different sort of affair, a state suggested if you like in a good work of art. The things down here seem hints of it, but there is nothing to make us sure that it is a reality. Quite the contrary. We get into trouble over it, it runs after us, runs away from us, runs away with us, makes fun of us and fools of us…. We have our courage and our imagination. We have to be as subtle as our memories. That’s all.

—Mary Butts, Armed With Madness

I was now carrying around three or four books at a time plus a notebook or two. My World Famous book bag was getting heavy. So it was on the Saturday afternoon, November 5, as I waited in Mac Hall for Jana to finish another lesson. I was sitting far enough away from the Coffee Company this time so that if You-Know-Who came along I would be well out of snubbing range. Didn't need that sort of thing again, though to gaze at her from a distance would be sublime. It had been over a week now, and I was hurting again for a hit of heavenly heroin.

Along about 4:30, that's exactly what I got, as I spotted them, the badminton racquet brigade, three abreast, heading for coffee. I was four or five tables away, but it looked like she saw me anyway. She glanced my way, and then they walked on for a bit. I was about to turn back to my reading when I noticed they'd stopped. The Bodhisattva conferred briefly with the other two. Then they all turned around and began striding purposefully toward my table. "My God", I murmured to myself, "Are they coming to finish me off?" Then I realized she was smiling brightly at me, just like the evening of her return. Maybe Lisa had been right, and everything was okay after all. As they approached, I wondered whether I should bother mentioning our awkward encounter the previous Friday. As it turned out, I didn't have to.

"Hi!" She greeted me and, before I could say a word, she continued. "The other day, when you smiled and waved? It wasn't me, it was her." Once again, I was transfixed by her singular beauty and so relieved to see her face again that I had barely glanced at her two companions. Kari gestured to the girl on her left. "This is my little sister, Larisa. Larisa, this is Peter." And I gazed upon the slender, youthful, roseate beauty I had greeted so enthusiastically (and mistakenly) the previous Friday. I smiled at her sheepishly. She did not smile back. She just nodded, blushing slightly. I lowered my head to the table and covered my eyes in an exaggerated gesture of embarrassment (well, not that exaggerated, actually). Genuinely relieved, sheepish and amused all at once, I straightened up, managed to look her in the eye and say, "I do apologize. Very nice to meet you."

Yes, she was definitely the Bodhisattva's sister. I understood instantly what had been happening all along. Their features were so intriguing and distinctive – their rich, dark hair, their very dark eyebrows and slender, almost Asiatic eyes, their high colouring, that hallucinatory sensuality in the shape of their mouths – that of course I had taken her for Kari from the beginning. So profoundly had the memory of Kari's face imprinted itself on the retina of my soul that I had noticed only the similarities. Larisa looked more than enough like Kari to fool me – and just enough unlike her to make me look like a fool. She was younger, I guessed three or four years younger, and her features were more slender, more boyish, not quite as richly feminine as her sister's. Why hadn't I noticed? She had even been with Kari on the evening of the 26th, I now realized, but I had barely noticed her. And it hadn't even occurred to me to ask myself how Kari could be on campus during the day if she had a job teaching ESL. I had been blinded by divine ecstasy.

What a boob.

I think that was the consensus around the table at that point. Having straightened out the confusion, they were preparing to leave, without even introducing their other cute, friendly-looking companion, who had been silently beaming at me all along, as if she knew something. I felt I had nothing to lose, so I interrupted their departure with a belated expression of interest in the term paper Kari had talked about. "Maybe I could . . . borrow it sometime?" I asked tentatively. She wrinkled her eyebrows a little and agreed. "I'll leave it with Larisa and you can get it from her next time you see her around." She looked at Larisa, who seemed barely able to keep herself from rolling her eyes. Everything hung there for a few seconds before Larisa finally nodded assent. Then her little friend broke the tension, quipping, "Yeah, you can just wave at her again!" We all chuckled, and they said their goodbyes, still without introducing the third girl. I dared to hope I would get another chance.

Two of them! And virtually twins! My mind was already reeling from the sheer algebra of the thing. Let x be the amount of maddeningly youthful, exuberant, innocent beauty that existed in my world 10 minutes ago. Then the amount that existed now = 2x, courtesy of this unexpected revelation. I hoped for my sake that I had taken sufficient notice of their differences to tell them apart from now on. Kari and Larisa. Larisa. What a splendid name to throw into the mix. The sort of name you could say over and over again without tiring of it. And only one letter's difference from Larissa, the semi-divine muse of our old friend Dr. Z.

So it was Larisa I had seen in the library and in Mac Hall the first two times. With all the inexplicable puppy-dog staring I'd subjected her to, no wonder she thought I was weird. Well, I was weird, of course, but not in the way she probably suspected. Yes, it was no doubt a weirder sort of weirdness than she was used to, gentle girl. Hell, even I wasn't used to this sort of thing yet. Somebody up there had a delicious sense of humour.

They weren't quite through for the day, either. I glanced down at my book, The Religious Experience of Mankind. I had just started a new chapter. Title? "Chinese and Japanese Religious Experience". Well, that fit the Steely Dan Bodhisattva song. "Shine in your Japan, sparkle in your China."

Subsection? Amida Buddhism, the Pure Land sect. I read on:

The mythological side of this movement centred on the Buddha of Boundless Light, Amitabha. He was the focus of popular devotion and sentiment, though sometimes his place was overshadowed by the gentle figure of Kuan-Yin.

Now this was the first I'd heard of Kuan-Yin. In the index I found a subsequent reference two pages hence, so I turned to page 228, where I found:

The latter [Kuan-Yin] is a [female] transformation of the well-known Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara (The One Who Looks Down With Compassion).

So Kuan-Yin was the Bodhisattva, too! And female, to boot! When Kari had returned the previous week, on the 26th, I'd bestowed her magical name impulsively from the male form of it I found on the page of Kerouac's Visions of Gerard I was reading at the time. Now, as if to confirm my choice, here was the female form. Twin Bodhisattvas, twin literary references, right before my very eyes. My, what pleasing symmetry! It occurred to me that the books I was reading were beginning to take a pretty active role in things – not just as witnesses, but as catalysts and voices in themselves.

It was nearly two weeks later – Friday, November 18 – before I got far enough along in that book to discover the real punchline. I was just starting the Muslim Experience. I finished page 480 and my eyes moved to the top of the next page, which I quite reasonably assumed would be page 481. Instead, I found myself back on page 225, the page I had been reading 13 days earlier, just before I met Larisa!

As an editor, I knew immediately what was going on. A binding mistake. An entire signature had been erroneously repeated. Thus, an Eastern section was now embedded in the Western section. East meets West. A signature is made up of 32 folded pages. Twin sisters, twin signatures, twin references to Kuan-Yin. And hadn't I just been reading in Joseph Campbell somewhere that James Joyce had used the number 32 in Finnegan's Wake to symbolize the Fall? A typical Joycean pun, the acceleration of gravity being 32 ft/sec/sec. That was close enough to Genesis for me. My manic reading was catching up with me again. And – wait! – there was that crazy Nails song, "Phantom Heart," with the Genesis reference. Now I laughed out loud right in Mac Hall – fortunately the Friday afternoon din swallowed it up – as I recalled just how that song began:

Love has a sister; she's called Desire.
One lifts you up, I said, the other one takes you higher.
The Word is Flesh in a bright red dress.
To coin a phrase, it is Genesis . . .

"Love has a sister" – gimme a break, I thought. Now the little joke was complete. Shivers up my spine again. The same old questions. Who, exactly, were "They", or was it "She"? And was this indeed going to be Love, or – gasp – something  even more important? Was it the Living or the Dead I should be paying more attention to?  One thing I was now sure of: these celestial sisters were now IN THERE, part of the Riddle.

Next Up: Signs and Wonders