Pauli the Ghost

Renata looked out of the attic window, and there were the new tinted security windows facing her – silent, watchful, maybe afraid. Again, as she had done in the past, she wondered whether Hubber could be an ally. Stupid thought really, because he had been such an unfriendly neighbor almost from the start, rejecting her so brutally. She knew he was just following the bully culture as a way of being accepted. Maybe now he would be able to change. He had done many things, like coming up in the middle of the night up her porch, and touching the screen of the window where she slept – something that suggested he wanted to connect, but didn’t know how… Without having thought it through, she exclaimed – –Hubber! She sensed he had heard. But that was all that answered her, the feeling that he was listening to her, by his computer. Aware of her. Exhausted by the sleepless hours of harassment by the Sotos, Renata turned off the stick lamplight by the futon. As she touched the pillow, an embrace of warmth and what could be considered care rolled onto her shoulder, across the room from Hubber’s window. It stayed: not static like a thing but evolving like life. An emotion, a gift presented, a need – following with heart steps that wanted a resolution. Renata felt happy. There was nobody with her, just this energy: this ghost. That Pauli Ghost she had pretended to know so much about, something that scared Hubber and kept his friends away from experiment parties after she hung two oversized male underwear on the fence between the two houses with a message. It read: Dear Pauli Principle Ghost: did you leave this behind last night in the house where you went to fart. Happy New Year. Renata sensed his fear. She was into something. And he didn’t want the secret outside of the circle of friends, which maybe included Soto Jr., who had probably taught others. There was nobody there with her, although it wasn’t really true. A cool breath came close to her face, and hands that were not hands caressed the hills of her breasts like a skilled mountaineer who loves every step and sight, and for whom it’s more of a joy to retrace the way than to get to the top fast. Pauli the Ghost moved like an accomplished lover, reaching the left side of the futon with an agility that suggested not only a light frame in his everyday material life, but a calculation of the distance of his targets exactly to the nano-millimeter. Pauli caressed Renata in her flesh from the consciousness of his own desire – he didn’t seem to need a finite body to understand pleasure. Renata felt he may have studied anatomy with angels – so knowledgeable Pauli the Ghost was about something so human – and also gentle and thoughtful and passionate – with that enviable softness of ethereal beings that can be in two places at the same time, and manage with poise and authority the realities of more than one dimension. Most likely, Pauli had learned all this exquisite loving with real bodies, and as a real body himself – bodies he was not afraid of – younger men at college and the military academy – tender and willing and virginal and pure in intent – without ties or future. The present. Deep. Satisfactory. Forever. This didn’t mean that he would not return – just that he didn’t have to. Renata most likely would think he was a product of her dream state – the space between the oppression of our days and the liberty of eternity. Pauli the Ghost knew of certain kind of love but had no heart to place over Renata’s beating one, and thus ground a union of souls. Anything like a memory of him could be ascribed to the realm of Einstein’s famous “Spooky action in the distance” phrase. (Except that now it was near, and there was nobody to guide anyone in the understanding of what to do. And this oversight by the official side of science was terrible, because it left the whole world at the mercy of the unethical.) But back to the event and its vocabulary. With the elegant authority of the master, Pauli the Ghost caressed his way down Renata’s body to the belly button. Not mechanical, at all. His thing, felt Renata, was design. The discipline of the form, its meaning: the feeling it awoke. A physical sensation, a movement of beauty like a dance. Something of accomplishment. Something of substance for Memory’s Hunger. But who says that the awakening of pleasure is not the meaning of life? A well-conceived circle around the bellybutton, where life begins. Deep, probing, pitiless, sincere. Revised thoroughly again. By Renata’s left arm an added artery pumped, fresh and laborious, as if Pauli could bring himself to breathe for the occasion. To Be, finally! To take responsibility for the moment laying down next to the woman he has betrayed, as if waiting for a sealing kiss. But Renata is happy. She stretches on the futon, knowing Pauli the Ghost is next to her, although not daring to look at him. At whatever Pauli is. She goes down to the bathroom and wonders whether he will take a shower here in the morning or cross the two walls of their houses and vanish. The way he came. All feels new. The bedcover and her shirt. The way the moonlight falls through the skylight by the foot of the bed. The thought of breakfast in the morning. The pumping sounds by her left arm are a little less vital, mostly empty. Sleep is coming over Renata, thinking of breakfast and that shower – and on the how of it all – she falls asleep, blossoming like a sidereal bride.