by Tim A. Cooper

Penn Ulster Brae

Inside the ruins of a long ago bombed lebanese motel, where shelter from the rain is unexpected, yet shelter nonetheless...

There she is. Across the room, on a raised dias pillow bed surrounded by dark green velvet drapes descending from a heavilly shaded red lantern six feet above her. Wrapped in pearlescent, semi-translucent, luminescent silk, she is supplicant to my feverish, enduring addiction.

My eyes fix on her eyes to see a worthiness of my desires and suffering. She is able to show me so much in her eyes that I begin to fight shame for possessing any ounce of doubt. My senses complicate and drift on her comforting smile from lush purple hued lips infected with metallic lighted stars where they reflected from the lanterns flicker.

At her hush, all complexity divides into it's basic components. Paralyzed by an absence of structure, humbled by her singular nature, freed by a tangible lack of dominating will, my spirit integrates with the nameless presence. Before I begin to think, whether about standing, sitting, speaking, anything or nothing, I feel light and all sight turns to vapor, while my body slips and is lost with my breath.

Such warmth as would make all the unborn children envious drew me forth from my nascent slumber in her arms. The folds of her silk were withdrawn for her forearm to grace one half of my face, while her wrist comformed to my chin and her palm to my other cheek. Her hair, a blend of soft golds and rich browns, shades me from the world. My head rests in her shoulder, and part way down my arm, her elbow extends and returns to my shoulder, which she acknowledges my notice with a pleasant squeeze.

At the moment, there is no addiction, and I seek no cure. I am a creature in flight and an angel my pilot. Not human, not prone to any fault, I must be a thousand miles away from the room beneath the ruins of the lebanese motel where rain invades every floor but one. It can be any hour other than the first hour of night.

The clothes on my body feel so good, I would not risk losing this level of appreciable satisfaction for anything in the world. I move so cautiously I want to stop breathing. Smelling her body I remember a dozen days in my life where she could have been, or was, handing me to each hour of personal victory and taking me back into herself. Closed, my eyes see her as a silouette of light before a gentle fragile feild, and tears slowly stream down my face from this extreme love.

"I am tired.", she finally speaks in my mother tongue. Like a child my thoughts glide to find a response both true and pleasing to her. "You are beauty.", I say.

"You...," she paused, silently inhaling more words than she would speak, "You are beautiful." Upon this she kisses my hair.

Finding I have a bounty of patience, I am freed from the confines of time, and soak up each second of her affectionate lips, as if it were a masterpiece oil painting being intricately finished. I speak when I cannot forget that kiss. "I am full of your beauty." Again, a childish thought, yet I mature into sympathy. "You are tired. I can go, before I take too much."

"Too much...," she repeats, releasing me. There is not an ounce of protest in me. I could have no more of her than she could give in pure love. Rising, I feel her ancient burden. She slips from me, and I realize we will not be able to communicate now anymore. Having this before me, I embrace the experience, and add this to the luggage I will bring into Heaven.

A thin, blue robed figure quickly came from the next room. Her woman's form was apparant through her deep blue, woven cotten, hooded apparell. Taking my hand, she leeds me into the other room, where I go willingly to no longer see the Aestrogen turn her head to the left, and leave our universe.

Sitting on the floor on a cushion at a low table, I see a modern ceramic teapot with steam coming from the spout, and became aware that this room is so much colder. "I am Aerienne. My real name is Adrienne, and I am from Cherbonne, but I was born in Paris.", she says as she tips the cups up and pours.

"I," I say, not knowing what to say, "I really don't want to talk right now." I confess. "But, I'll listen." Aerienne is going to be talkative, and I can predict what she is going to talk about.

"You," she announced, "don't know your real name. but, um," she continued, placing a sparkling fingertip to her temple as she shut her eyes in concentration, "you go by the name Penn-Ulster Brae, after the town name of the closed factory on the riverside outside of Ulster, in Ireland. Uh, um, oh!"

Blinking at my eyes, she extrapolated from her telepathic revelations. "Say, you don't remember anything before being found at the factory, do you?"

With a sombre admission, I allow words, "No, I don't. I dug myself out from under the floorboards, behind the old office, and that's all. I had no clothes, money, or memory. I might as well have been born in that ground."

"Except the chains around you, you forgot those. I saw thick rusted chains." Her powerful talent could obsiously extract memories I had not been conscious of in her presence.

I drank from the cup. So near in time to the ecstasy in the other room, I could taste nothing. My senses were still alive with echoes of her, floating in me. The tea was wet, but no more, not warm, not saccarine, nor fulfilling. She was, in me, the high cliffs of Dover, and all the sea, wind, and sun crashing down would not shake her.

Aerienne spoke, breaking my reverie but not my mood. "Uh, Penn, she says she needs you to have something." Her hood shaded eyes glanced to the other room, and back. Pressing a button on a leg of the low table, near the floor, she leaned back. Up forth came a metal framed glass cylinder in which glowed a kinetic gel, a circulating polymerase that moved in an arcing spiral. It was mostly clear, yet tiny bubbles trapped in the spiral arms yielded a light in a rotating sequence of colors. In the density of the spiral cluster, all shades of light combined into a bright white.

"What is it?", I inquired.

"It is her life. She makes so much. You should think of it as a pure liquid form of what you experienced in the other room. The light is the bliss, but not the clear part. The clear is a plasma polymerase, pushing against the rotation of the spiral bliss and also reflecting its light back in on itself." Her eyes mirrored the light in a kindness and wonder. "It's a miracle, actually, that it exists in this container at all. The plasma polymerase should reduce the mass of the bliss to nothing, and no light should be visable. I spent five years at university trying to create a purge substance for this material. First I made a a containment device that first should have negated the physical then the dimensional aspects of the substance. This plasma gel is the perfect antithesis. I programmed a shift in the amplitude of the emission field that keeps the liquid energized, first as an ether then compressed back into a liquid plasma state in the container. The chaotic shift keeps it at it's highest antikinetic density, which should crush the bliss energy substance inside but it can't. I mean, it is crushing it, but it also unfolds at the same time. It's brilliant." Her head leaned to the side and her voice became more like a child's. "Like infinity plus one."

"Times x, if x were time."

"Not really. More infinity plus one. It's the first one after infinity that is something special." She broke from her own excitement, and smiled as if caught in the shameful act, mid-marvelling. "You see, for me, it's been like a flower that is constantly blooming. But flowers evolve, and at the point when it changes into a new species, it represents the expansion of the joy a flower, or two flowers, or two flower species, can bring."

"Infinity plus one. The first one begins the new age on a larger infinite scale." Though I understand, I realize there is no way to harbor my opinions to my self, perhaps even ones I will have. "It accumulates. So it also escalates, and not just in ways that bring joy."

A worried look overtook her face. "She says you know why you are here now."

.

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