CASSANDRA IN PARADISE

Somehow, she’d always known that the world she’d want to live in would not exist until a thousand years after her death; the life she’d want to live would not be possible until ten centuries after hers had ceased. And the man she could love would not be born until she’d been dead a millennium.

Now her upper eyelids stuck to the lower rims as though drapes unopened since forever that came to be glued to dusty, sticky window sills. Someone sat beside her. She could feel a presence. When she finally freed her lids with all of the force that her tugging forehead could muster, she saw her. This being was dark, lithe, resembled her younger self, and she leaned her head in closer to Cassandra’s. The golden eyes glimmered, not in a scary way but radiating overwhelming warmth and compassion.

Tears leaked down Cassandra’s face. The woman blinked; her head appeared to tremble. She looked perplexed.

“I’m sorry; I’m so grateful. I never thought I’d get another chance.”

Her guide—and somehow, she knew her also to be a sister of sorts—calmed and the woman’s lips returned to their soft, accepting smile. Yet her gaze possessed a natural intensity that counterbalanced its softness. She watched Casandra’s mouth as though it might throw out cues that she could catch.

The furniture she found herself reclined on did not qualify as a hospital bed. That was the last piece of décor that she remembered. This, though, made her think of an oblong lounge chair made purely of white merino wool on a wicker stand.

Now the guide, whose floaty movements added to her seeming openness, raised herself to the full-length of her six-foot body and motioned Cassandra to stand. “I don’t know,” her pupil said. But she rose, afraid of toppling over, which reminded her of the shakiness the year before she…

Apologizing for the wobbliness of her gait, she obeyed the guide’s motioning hand. The arm flowed forward. But Cassandra wanted to stay in the present room, its safety and sleek hospitality so pronounced with its lack of sharp corners, harsh colors and unnecessary surfaces.

Still, she obeyed the forward wave of the beautiful sleeveless arms, displaying skin flawless as though modeled on chocolate whipped cream. And suddenly, they were outside. A bright unsullied sky at first seemed to explode in blinding glare because she had grown accustomed to a few layers of grime to filter out the sun.

Cassandra, dizzied, nearly fell. But she could feel her guide’s hand support the small of her back. And she heard the feint bell and clacking sounds that a newborn’s tiny rattle might make. The guide she guessed tried to tell her to be careful, slow down.

The trees were as tall as skyscrapers and the low-rise buildings were as meek as elms. People sharing the streets in good-natured crowds, a multiplicity of hues, looked even healthier than Canadians.

Understanding rained down in her mind like miniature searchlights pointing to ideas usually veiled in the imagination. What she saw, or was allowed to see, she guessed represented this kindly society’s attempt to not overwhelm her.

For instance, the guide might not in reality be practically passable as a sibling, but have features that her hosts feared might startle her. Yes, she bet they were all robustly healthy. But that could mean that she’d find them scarily gaunt (they knew fear descended readily in someone from her world). The days of living to eat were over, and they ate only what they needed. She knew that, in the same way you know that someone resents you, or has a crush on you, or you can feel a person is staring at you from a distance.

The guide led her to a school playground. Cassandra watched carefully. All the little kids moved and jumped and made silly faces as though they had no more or less right than anyone else to exist, to play, to laugh, to approach another child in friendship. No child was scared or angry or silenced and devastated.

“This is the world I want to live in,” Casandra said. “This is it.”

But was the guide, her smile flattening a bit, responding with doubt? Cassandra desperately wanted to say, what? What is it?

They moved on. Cassandra met the guide’s eyes, she listened closely to the odd sounds she made. The woman stepped in front, gingerly placed the palm of her hand on her pupil’s stomach. She realized she was trying to say, “Slow down.” And, could she be telling her to “be gentle?” But Cassandra could never imagine that she wasn’t.

They sat down on a park bench. The guide wanted her to rest; she could tell. The sounds people made had stopped sounding like popping soap bubbles but the more articulate swish of a modern washing machine. While the literal meanings of surrounding conversations flowed beyond her grasp, she understood the rhythms.

Back in her world, she’d left child psychology and gone into marriage counseling hoping to contribute an ounce of prevention. She’d learned what people said meant little. How they said it, that counted. Love lived in the listening pauses, the understanding silences and the intimate repartee. She could feel that here, rising from the populated picnic-blanketed grass and parkgoer-lined benches.

“This is the life I want to live,” Cassandra said. “For the first time, I want to live not just as an alternative to…the alternative.” The guide tilted her head onto Cassandra’s shoulder, who understood this as an attempt to console, as though she knew what her pupil had gone through.

They rose and walked farther into the city. The hilly land and stately shapes implied a university lay ahead. A mature-looking group of men and women stood talking, their open stances making them appear a cross between colleagues and family.

Oh my God! As they neared the cluster, she could actually understand what people were saying. “Please go slowly,” her guide said. “Be gentle.” She could now understand her too. Cassandra stopped and faced the woman. “I don’t know who you are, if you’re my niece’s great, great, great granddaughter and then some. But I just wanted to say that I am so proud of you, what you all have done here. Thank you.”

Cassandra climbed the stumpy hill toward the group. She didn’t readily see sidewalks that might lead there. They talked of how to help a student who struggled with his studies due to a death in the family.

She felt powerfully drawn to the man at the center. She could see that his tenderness dwelled in his graceful hands, his genius in his eyes, his wit in his clever lips. He was elegance itself, intellectually, aesthetically and morally. And it didn’t hurt that he bore a tantalizing resemblance to Barack Obama. So, she apologized to the others and they ungrudgingly left.

She did not want to be forward. But it was a different world. It was safe to say what was in her heart of hearts. “You—” she said. “I feel that you’re the first man I could ever love.”

He looked at her for a moment, his eyes generous. Then he said, “And I could love you too if you hadn’t stomped all those ants to death back there.”

The End

(With no disrespect intended to the lovely Mrs. Obama…)