June 21, 2006
Fiction
Khamaneztl
It takes three days by car, across dusty, time-scarred roads, to reach Lamak where the temple of Khamaneztl is located. The guidebook is vague in its description of this sanctuary dedicated to an obscure boy-god, but Corinne’s driver, Kamal, insists it’s not to be missed.
“Like nothing you’ll find anywhere else,” he assures her.
Corinne has learned in her travels to expect a certain degree of exaggeration about local points of interest, but that doesn’t prepare her for the wholly unimpressive sight the temple makes, the same dun color as the dust they’ve battled on the road, with the ungainly proportions of a squatting hippopotamus.
Outside the entrance, groups of old women cluster, swaddled in black shawls, their faces a dark shrivel like the dolls Corinne’s mother used to make out of dried apples when she was a little girl. The women lean their heads together and cluck over gossip, an unmistakable sound in any language.
Corinne squints at the building, searching for something, anything, to marvel about. One of the old women calls out to her, and she looks to Kamal, who translates, “She hopes your husband is very strong.” Corinne must look confused, because he shrugs. “It’s just something they say.”
The women break into hen cackles, their eyes fastened on Corinne, dark and bright like birds’ eyes. Corinne holds herself up very straight, towering over them, tree in a land of shrubs. She walks with conscious dignity to the temple’s entrance, more as an escape than from any real curiosity about what’s inside. Old women have always made her nervous. She’s not sure if it’s because she sees in them what she’ll someday become or everything she has yet to learn.
She glances back over her shoulder, but Kamal hasn’t budged from his spot by the car. “Only women allowed,” he tells her with a secret smile.
Inside, she stumbles in the pitch black and gropes for the wall. She carefully inches forward along the narrow corridor, feeling her way. She’s just starting to consider turning back when the passageway opens onto a room. It’s the shape of a circle, with other corridors leading to it, a wheel with many spokes. At the center of the room gleams a small gold statue, standing on a pedestal, aglow in a pool of soft yellow light, the source of which is not immediately discernible.
There’s a jadedness that sets in on a long trip, the wonders of the world blurring together, canceling one another out. Perhaps this is why Corinne regards Khamaneztl with so little interest. Gold statues are in no short supply in the museums she’s visited, and there’s a crudeness to the lines, a faltering of artistry, that makes it suffer in comparison. The only features that really stand out are the smile the boy-god wears, mysterious and a little too knowing, and the ambitious proportions of his penis, a mighty rod for such a slender, almost girlish figure.
Corinne lingers a moment, trying to give Khamaneztl his proper due, trying to justify her three-day pilgrimage in a car with non-existent shock absorbers. She shifts her weight impatiently, feels no spark, and finally just gives up, picking her way back down the dank corridor. Sunlight blares in her eyes as she opens the door. When the white blindness clears, she sees Kamal, greeting her with a polite look of inquiry. She shrugs and avoids the eyes of the old women. They climb back into the car, the promise of firewalkers still ahead a couple of villages over, raved about in the guidebook.
Lamak recedes, and the road unfurls like a decrepit ribbon. Corinne starts to feel the heat and rolls down the window, braving the dust. There’s a breeze, but it only seems to stoke the swelter inside her. The horizon starts to flicker, and her head reels. She wants to call to Kamal, but the chaos in her head blots out her words.
He must sense something, though, because he pulls over, into a cluster of mangrove trees, the low branches shady and sheltering. He eases her out of the car and into the back seat, and she closes her eyes, thinking she’ll rest. When she feels his hands on her shirt, undoing her buttons, she wonders why she didn’t think of that herself. If she can get the oppressive clothes off her skin, maybe she can get some relief.
He unhooks her bra, and the sun-swollen air laps at her nipples, making them hard, making them ache. He brushes his lips softly along the curve of her breast as if to soothe the troubled flesh. When his tongue wetly meets her nipple, it ignites the heat, making it worse, and so much better.
Their clothes just seem to fly away from them, time slows down, flows off them, until it ceases to exist altogether. Corinne feels the way she does underwater, lumbering and buoyant at once. A soft gold glow touches their skin, shimmers in the space between them, a trick of light, she supposes, the way the sun is sifting through the trees. But the heat is all-consuming — Kamal both the source and the remedy — and questions, speculation, are soon lost in the crucible of need.
By the time he pushes inside her, she’s already weak and shuddering. He’s large, frighteningly so if her vision isn’t playing tricks on her, but her body yields, flowers. As they move together, his long hair whispers against her cheek like the wind. She darts out her tongue, lets it play along his neck. In the salt-sweet taste she experiences the earth, profane and magnificent.
She’s focused in her pleasure, alive to contrasts, how blessedly cool he is while she’s almost primordially hot, hardness into softness, dark meeting light, and then it all starts to blur together. He becomes her, and she becomes him. And she understands at last. There are no opposites, no end and no beginning. “It’s all a circle,” she says in a stunned whisper.
Later, she’ll roll her eyes at the thought, but in the moment, it has revelatory power.
The car rocks and heaves to their rhythm, and Kamal doesn’t stop, doesn’t soften. Corinne presses her face to his shoulder, sobbing in exhaustion, in ecstasy, wondering if this is how forever passes.
Eventually the heat recedes, Corinne’s head clears, and she finds herself seated in the passenger side once more, Kamal behind the wheel, carefully picking his way through a flock of goats that has wandered into their path. She looks around, searching for some hint, some sign, something, but the world is just the same dust-covered bowl it was before, everything exactly as it was, as it has been. She starts to write it off as some crazy dream, the kind you have in the hot countries, but then she realizes there’s a swamp between her thighs, her nipples still hard, sensitive, brushing against the lace of her bra. She puts a hand to her chest, and the inferno flares inside her for a moment, a brief coda.
Beside her, Kamal drives on, watching the road as if nothing has happened.
“You bring all the female tourists here, don’t you?” she says, more as a matter of curiosity than an accusation.
His answer is a smile, mysterious and a little too knowing. Only now does Corinne notice how much it resembles Khamaneztl’s.
• • •
Caroline Burner lives and works in New York City. If getting the last seat on the subway were a sport, she would be a champion.
