Contemporaneous: Chapters 25 – 26

25.

Every aspect of my life seeps back in: the weight of my body; the tiredness in my eyes and my muscles; the imbalance in my mind, thoughts too quick; the way the nerve damage has scrunched up my right foot, and the break welded the ankle until it’s almost fused; and then the dissonance, of feeling I’m not fitting, and unsure what comes next.

But that’s different, like feeling the onset of a bug, feeling it gradually worsen, feeling it become incapacitating, but that now happens so quickly, almost instantaneously, and only in feeling it come on do I know how far removed I am from whatever I shouldn’t be.

And then that’s eclipsed by a single thought: I’m back.

I’m at my computer, writing, knowing Lana’s coming and that I have limited time this session before she arrives.

The most unusual thing is how my experience exists as commonplace as any other everyday memory, like coming home from work, or flicking the television onto Netflix, or taking a pee – it’s just there, something that happened whose veracity I don’t question.

It is, and I accept it wholly.

When my anxiety was bad twenty-five years ago and I confided to my psychiatrist I was worried I might start hearing voices (as I had a schizophrenic friend so he always seemed like where I was heading), the psychiatrist told me, “Neurotics build castles in their head. Psychotics live in them.”

And there’s an instant I think that perhaps this is some psychotic episode – just over ten years ago when my anxiety was flaring and I was worried I’d snap, my GP warned me that anybody can just snap; it’s part of the human condition. So maybe that happened.

But I have a week’s worth of experiences and insights, and now the distance of sobering reflection about how fucking tatty I navigated it all.

Switching my computer off, I rise.

26.

When I hear Lana’s car in the drive, I get myself a beer, and find her a wine glass. She’s surprised to see me already waiting for her in the living room, rather than having to call me out from my study.

“Hey,” she says.

She plants the pizzas on the coffee table. I grab the bottle of red wine from her – I never have wine on my premises. Beer’s the only alcoholic beverage I drink, although that’s a result of being diagnosed fructose intolerant. Wines and spirits would set my stomach off, which isn’t pleasant.

“How was your day?” she says, putting the TV on.

So, as I open the wine bottle and pour her a glass, I tell her about finishing Melody’s edit and returning her manuscript to her, and my concerns that Melody won’t take onboard my feedback. Lana listens patiently, not overly interested in publishing, but appreciating that I’m sharing and, at the end of it all, she tells me given my age and experience, Melody should listen to me rather than be precious.

I flick on a movie – not Last Christmas this time, but Can You Keep a Secret? which is just as bad, and we watch as we eat, and I puzzle over the course I’m taking because I’ve automatically taken it, I’m automatically following it, and I’m unsure why.

These Groundhog Day type stories – somebody reliving time and getting to do things differently – are common, and I think subconsciously I’ve decided to make the best of what I’ve committed to: Lana. When we first got together, it was about a future together. But after a while and some growing apart, most of the relationship was in a limbo, outside of the give here, the take there, which confused my sense of orientation and what I wanted.

Once she’s finished her wine, she’s leaning into the coffee table to grab the bottle and pour herself another, but I suggest going to bed.

“Already?” she says, surprised.

Because we generally don’t go to bed early, and it’s been a long time since going to bed early was a metaphor for sex, and I don’t even feel amorous (which may be strange for a guy, but not necessarily a guy about fifty).

We undress unromantically, then hop into bed and kiss, although I hate the taste of wine on her tongue and in her breath, and I think about how I’ve kissed less and less as I’ve gotten older. That wasn’t the case when I was a teen, sneaking into clubs and bars, and even in my thirties, when I stumbled out into the world. But in my forties, post that last fucking awful bout of antidepressants, it’s become something hyper-analysed to the extent that it seems, well, sorta stupid – smacking two mouths together and twirling tongues for sexual stimulation. Fortunately, my budding erection’s never been privy to those councils.

She slithers from my arms and under the covers, which I dread, because I dread her oral technique but have never had the heart to tell her. I’m not trying to write this sexily, but it isn’t sex – her efforts always make me think that her tongue’s battling my cock, like it’s some sort of thumb wrestle that she’s determined not to lose, and which sees my erection capitulate to deflation, like it’s tapping out of the fight.

I gather her by the shoulders and draw her up, turning her so I’m top; now the countdown is on – I’m already withering, and this has to get underway or I’m going to lose it totally (and the two beers in this case don’t help). Does anybody else think this much or do they exist in the moment? I existed in the moment younger, but it’s like a lifetime of mental health stuff has made me the most hyper self-aware person on the planet, and every thought it like a firework exploding, demanding my attention, until the next one explodes, and so on, and so on, and I can’t just go with the flow and enjoy it.

But I slip into her, although I’m not fully hard, but hard enough, which has almost become my default – except when I take a mid-afternoon nap, and descend into this restful (much more restful than sleep itself) limbo, and often I get these impossibly hard erections. I don’t know why – maybe it’s because as I fall into the nap, all those random thoughts and distractions fall away, so maybe that power goes elsewhere.

Melody pops into my head. And Dom. And my mum. I have to do all these things again. What’s the course? Will it be like this – this attempt to the best version of myself? Ewww. I thought about my mum as I’m have sex. But Dom’s bald head appears, too. If I drew a circle around the circumference or his cranium, then a line down the middle, his head would look a dick. I should submit Wunderland elsewhere, too. Fuck, I have the Regina meeting again, too. Maybe I should cancel that. She wouldn’t mind. Well, she would. She’s coming from interstate, although it’s not specifically for me. I’m a byproduct. Who thinks this much during sex? I wonder if that’s a symptom of the way my mind functions nowadays. How did I get so much like this? I remember Lana and I were watching the TV series Prison Break once, where they said the protagonist, a genius named Michael Scofield, had something called low latent inhibition; whoever the character was said somebody might look at something, like a doorknob, and just see it as a doorknob, but they said Michael Scofield would see a doorknob, then break down what it was made of, then look at the grain in the texture, then at the screws, and keep going down and down and down with his thinking process, and Lana had turned to me and said, “That’s you.”

Lana.

Is any of this going through her head? She’s making the right sounds, and her face is blissful – not because I’m brilliant or anything; and she is beautiful, stretched out before me. I’ve always liked how breasts splay out when a woman is on her back, and their motion during sex, because it shows that sex isn’t just this mechanism reduced to genitalia, but it’s something where the body’s wholly involved, and in that there shouldn’t just be synchronicity, but almost merging, this unification, although maybe that’s silly romanticism because I’ve never felt it.

How long has this been going? Long enough that I feel I’m losing it – another peculiarity. This never happens with my nap erections. But I don’t know if my overthinking makes this act pedestrian. Pedestrianises. Hey. My overthinking pedestrianises my lovemaking. That’s a word! Uh oh. My mind’s straying again. But now I’m conscious that I’m straying. I’m straying on the straying.

“You close?” I say.

“I’ve already gotten there,” she tells me.

Because that’s her orgasms – no trembling or wailings or moaning or shuddering or spasming limbs or anything out of the status quo, but these commonplace things that I’m sure must feel extraordinary somewhere internally, but externally don’t manifest as anything out of the norm, as if (and I often think this) Lana’s reluctant to relinquish any control of what she’s feeling, because she doesn’t want to show that vulnerability.

But that means my duty’s done, at least in the here and now, and now that leaves only me. I’m unsure of the etiquette, even at this age. Would it be insulting to deflate, and declare my involvement done? Would she (or anybody, for that matter) see that as an indictment that I just wasn’t that into this? It’s no fault of Lana’s.

There are multiple reasons, like my imagination so often overflowing on every facet of whatever happens in my life, extrapolating such extraordinary narratives (that I only grasp at, but never capture) that everything else seems ordinary. Then there’s the antidepressant I was on for five years. That made it so hard to get aroused, to stay aroused, and then to see an act to fruition, that remnants of that desensitisation remain with me, even twenty years after ditching the fucking med.

Kylie Minogue. I like Kylie Minogue. I developed a crush on her from her first appearance on Neighbours and have maintained it over her career, even though I’m ambivalent about most of her music, and she obviously has no awareness I exist. But if I could have some magical fantasy fuck, it would be her, although now that I’m thinking about her (although I have done in the past when similar problems have arisen) I wonder if this constitutes cheating.

I don’t consider it any further as I begin to ejaculate, finally, and I collapse on top of Lana.

She hugs me and holds me, and for now, we’re one.