Animal Self

We seek not rest but transformation. We are dancing through each other as doorways.

~Marge Piercy

*

Father finds it has come to haunt him over the years. The look that had been on her young face; or rather the look that wasn’t.

She wasn’t frightened. He knows that now. She wasn’t defiant, not in the way he might have expected any normal adolescent girl to be under the circumstances.

No. She was angry.

But not at Vincent, Father had eventually realized. At me. At me!

Why had it taken so long to see it? Lisa had never been afraid of Vincent. More of a tomboy than most of the tunnel girls, she’d never shied away from roughhousing with boys to settle an argument or insult, perceived or otherwise; disconcertingly fearless, she’d shrugged off the inevitable bumps and scrapes her bravado invited. There wasn’t a man in the tunnels who’d been a boy during that time who didn’t have a scar or two or three from Vincent’s claws; they were a badge of honor, and like the boys, Lisa too was proud of hers.

And that night, the awful night that defined a turning point he shudders to recall but which his conscience will not allow him to forget, she didn’t flee, or cower, or weep or even frown, and though she was breathing hard, her eyes were bright, her gaze unblinking; she was in total possession of herself, which Father had found deeply unsettling in one so young.

What was it about her expression? So infuriating! She had seemed… Father had struggled to place it. She’d seemed watchful, intently listening and processing something– what?– on another level, one entirely beyond Father’s reach, inwardly focused on some private thing that concerned Vincent and herself alone, as if Father were not even there, as if the two of them were ever more alone together in their impenetrable secret world and he, Father, the intruder, the eternal outsider.

But what was it that she had been listening for so intently as she held herself so still, seeming oblivious to the pain of her deep wound? Father had wondered for some time after. Could it go some way toward explaining the otherworldly hold this unholy siren, this demon, had on his son?

He has for many years replayed these indelible moments again and again in his mind, seeking relief from his unease:

Lisa had seemed to start toward Vincent but when he felt his son tremble, felt the powerful, shaking young body straining with anguished hunger toward her touch, Father had reflexively tightened his grip on Vincent and placed his own body between them, between this frightening creature and his precious child, his gesture unmistakable:

He’s mine. Vincent is mine.

In his mind’s eye Father can still see Lisa stop mid-rush as the intensity of her inner focus, the coiled stillness he found so disturbing, reversed itself and shifted terrifyingly outward as she looked straight at Father and into him and then beyond him, her gaze seeming to take in the contours of some unknowable outcome he could not imagine as he stared transfixed at her face and realized that the tightening of his jaw and the ringing in his ears were not, as he would have preferred to tell himself, due to a quite reasonable parental anger;

They were due to fear. He was afraid of the girl;

in part because in this moment he sees before him not the hysterical adolescent he would have preferred her to be– and over whom he would have felt justified exerting his natural authority– but a woman, looking back at him as if she were his equal.

As he remembers each second of it there’s simply no way around it;

the young dancer had been flushed with a sensual sheen that had made his mouth go suddenly dry. Though her figure was still coltish, her glowing athleticism and exuberant joy in her own physicality had lent her an aura of confidence and poise beyond her years;

…like Vincent, Father realized with dismay.

A little wave of nausea invariably accompanies this memory, which is one of several reasons he does not like to think of the events of that night;

For Lisa had been every bit the young wild thing his son was, and, like Vincent, she was coming into her power and Vincent’s response to her, across the depths and breadth of his being, consumed him utterly; they elicited an abandon in one another that, if it wasn’t already, would all too soon become carnal. There was something animal between them, something elemental, something seismically primal that Father could no longer allow himself to deny, something that, although it encompassed sex, had also– shockingly– transcended it, and was infinitely more dangerous.

*

A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres, indeed, of an experience or stage of life that intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.
At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope.
This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual… take your time; feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.

~John O’Donohue