Letter to a Phantom Lover

Letter to a Phantom Lover

Dear Karl,

Thank you for visiting my sleep last night. A long-awaited, enchanted gift. For being young, shy, fresh, and untainted. Alive. In spite of the sick, sad condition of this ill-treated world we share, or I assume we share, I would like to imagine you are alive somewhere, under the same sun and moon as I, if not the same leafy shade and blood-stained sunset.

So many decades since we exchanged a word or glance—it was never much more than that. Still, there was such enormous longing. The kind of tormented pining felt only by a 17 year-old girl disallowed, in our tiny microcosm of society, from making the first move. There were so many tacit rules back then. The kind of ardent yearning that constricted her passageways when she locked onto your warm brown eyes in a crowd, and gasped to find you returning her stare.

Because you chose to sit behind me in History class, sliding onto your seat before the bell sounded to pick up our continual, ongoing discussion of reading discoveries, our fantasies of exotic travel, our common love of Yosemite National Park, I began to take care of my verso. Whether the back of my hair and dress lay straight, clean, shining, unwrinkled, which side showed my uneven profile to better advantage, these considerations rose to the surface of my consciousness with a vengeance. Did you ever notice these nods to your attention, or was it just granite and iguanas with you?

At that time, you were enthralled by a novel about tribal Afghan customs, hard, sometimes cruel men trekking over freezing, treacherous, narrow mountain passes skirting steep sloped drops of thousands of feet for several days. They arrived from villages far and wide to participate in the buzkashi ritual. You insisted that I read it. I introduced you to Crime and Punishment. Our exclusive book club. Our passionate, whispered discourses, so much more engrossing than the tedious, uninspired, glossed over lesson, inevitably spilled over into class time, protected by the inviolate, magic circle we had drawn around us. Or so we dared presume in our tentative, flirtatious friendship. As if we were toying with a headless goat. We tested its borders until the arid teacher intervened to separate us, predictably, moving you to the front, directly under his red veined nose.

For a day or two, you sprawled into the aisle, leaning your elbows on your lanky legs, head turned aside to gaze into my equally sorrowful eyes. Then, abruptly, astonishingly, spell pulverized and kicked over the cliff, all promise, contact, dialogue was terminated. Obliterated by a few yards of geography, together with your shyness, after we had traversed the Hindu Kush, scaled El Capitan so companionably together.

Only once before this exile, you invited me into your basement to show me your cages housing reptiles, your colorful iguana in pride of place and fascination. Apart from surreptitious glances across the crowded public library, where we spent most evenings, that was the sole out-of-school territory into which we ever ventured. No clumsy, embarrassing, groping in an old car on Rattlesnake Hill. Therefore, I find it immeasurably curious that you, an odd, sympathetic, quiet boy, have continued to haunt my memory and, literally, my dreams, after so many lovers and companions have come and gone. Corny, but no less true for that.

Perhaps that’s it, the innocent, unconsummated nascence, so palpable one instant, atomized out of possibility the next. On one precarious occasion, imprisoned in a hospital bed, with only the brick chimney of a crematorium for a view, day in, day out, I dreamed that Armageddon had arrived. The blast of the ultimate explosion had wafted the two of us—you and me—into the heavens, where, intrepid, we reached for one another, entwining our naked, still youthful bodies, making tender, unhurried love, rising higher and higher, Karl, until we were overwhelmed by such a tumultuous orgasm that I shuddered awake, metal bed clanking. All quite natural, no shame, no shyness, no surprise. Only joy dissolving into infinity. The ultimate big bang.

Have you ever given me another thought, that is, after high school? I suspect not. We have both had mountains to climb, although in some perplexing way, your yearning for the beyond remained hooked to my harness like a safety belt. We remained tethered together, one above the other, on the occasions when I lost my foothold and fell, like a wet, melting flake of camaraderie.

A few years ago, I googled you, with little success. Essentially a private person, you probably don’t want to be found, your sequestration invaded. I understand. I think I discovered a reference to you, living remotely in Utah. A much younger climber had referred to you on some venue as an old-timer. (Shocking. You are eternally 17.) A local climbing legend. Apparently, you tramped the American West, naming small overhangs, colossal stones after yourself. I was so tickled that I hope it is true. I hope it was you.

This evening, my 49^th of quarantine in St. Petersburg, Russia, it appears the Armageddon foreshadowed 33 years ago in my troubled, though redeemed sleep has caught up with us, or, at least, me. I wish I had the wherewithal, in every sense, to leave you this letter like a marker, pitoned to Cathedral Spire in Yosemite, but my mountaineering days are long gone. There is plenty of water in my vicinity, but it too is inaccessible for the receipt of even a message in a bottle. The best I can conjure is to tie a stone to my missive, and fling it as high as I can from my balcony—well, not MY balcony, unfortunately—hoping it won’t land on anyone, and that it will arrive safely in the empty park across the street, assuming it fails its mission to reach the dying stars. Alas, Myasthenia Gravis and its comrades in arms have made a mockery of my early athleticism.

Sleep well, Karl, on whatever peak you attain.

Your friend,

Dunya