ISBN: 9781483520872

I.

In the crevice of the hospital corridor where Clarissa had stalked him, she just had time to pluck her mascara box from her white summer bag and refresh her eye shadow before he emerged from the men’s washroom. She had waited for this moment all day and in the night, while she lay awake into the long hours dreaming the dreams of her age, lost in the Indiana summer while the Oriental mosquitoes buzzed the taut skin of her long white legs, she had seen his face again and again as he now emerged, white coat flaying with the speed of his departure from what had obviously been a most unnecessary and unpleasant function, a waste of his valuable time. His hair spun into a Cox comb on the top of his head and his broad shoulders carrying the hurried curve of his all too slender legs seemed to as if they were hurled by a huge bird perched on the back of his neck and clean shaven chin. She crouched in the Formica hospital chair, waiting room to the clinics where he appeared at the appointed hour on the days she had memorized, and in the instant that he passed by her she did not expect him to honor her with even the most cursory glance, but today to her amazement he actually looked at her. Taken aback she gasped visibly, which audible sound brought a sneer of contempt from his chiseled features, his mouth curling almost in a snarl until he conspicuously almost snapped his head in the opposite direction, towards the wall, in his onward march to the secret small doors at the end of the corridors near the escalator, entrance to the monastic secrecy of the operation retreats where he would spend most of the rest of the day. Clarissa sighed audibly and not knowing whether she should cry or shout for joy, she selected the most logical compromise known to the Indiana debutante and removed her mascara box and rouge from her bag again to inspect her face and see if any damage that had occurred could still be repaired. Actually she was not entirely displeased by what she saw, especially as it was all now seen as it had been mirrored in his eyes. For that brief moment of ecstasy she had been young and beautiful again, the lines stripped of their deathly etchings, the sagging eyes lifted to the half moon of the Oriental night, their color reflecting the green light of that sky so far from the blue hues of her childhood and youth, the low arched mouth smiling and gay, mouthing pleasantries in the far away ball room of the town hall decked in flowers and lanterns, the scene of her coming out party of so long ago. That was even before she had met Roger.

Roger. Even the name had an unreality to it that she could not place. His lean pink face, pale blond hair and ethereal blue eyes, always in the same uniform, white starched with the medals pinned to the chest, epaulets sown onto the shoulders, black shoes shined to an eerie sheen, that was all that was left of him, that and the tears. It was strange that she could not remember clearly anything before that time, not specifically, not times and places at any rate. her, she remembered that, but not much else. The telegram. There had been the telegram from the President. Shot down in Vietnam, his country was grateful, the President was grateful. A lifetime of tranquility and happiness crowned by the President’s gratitude. Like a floating cloud the twenty years of marriage existed only in some secret place in her mind. She pushed the image aside, like a great cloud it had blurred her vision and distracted her from the task at hand. Ahmed.Or at least that’s what she called him. She knew Ahmed wasn’t a Chinese name but an Arab name and that his Chinese name was something like “An Men”, which she had discovered, after considerable investigation, meant something like “People’s Great Peace”. Chinese always gave themselves such names, exaggerating their humble existences with such pompous self-importance. Or maybe they gave themselves these kinds of names, as the men at the American Officer’s Club used to joke, so many years ago, just to confuse the foreigners. But in Ahmed’s case, she was sure, it different. He was guaranteed to take her mind off Roger at any case. That wasn’t a Chinese name, and Ahmed was Chinese or at least Taiwanese. That wasn’t a Chinese name, and Ahmed was Chinese or at least Taiwanese. Ahmed was an Arabian name, the name of an Arabian prince, to be exact, the dashing black prince on a white courser, lean, cruel, unable to speak, unwilling to speak because speech was unnecessary. She pushed the image aside, like a great cloud it had blurred her vision and what she called him. She knew that wasn’t his name.

Looks were speech, love was speech, his warm embrace was speech. In his canvas tent, he would lie with her, undress her, caress her, close his mouth to hers, his hands would press her, the very thought made her gasp. Of course she knew Ahmed was not his real name, he did not live in a tent or ride a horse-or did he? It seemed unimportant to her.

Their early courtship in Indiana, honeymoon in Hawaii, his enlistment right out of college, the long years of intermittent waiting while he was stationed in Japan and then Korea, and his final posting in Taiwan, in the days when the U.S still recognized the Ching Kai Chek government and had the huge base military here. Then the assignments from Taiwan to Vietnam, only the top were picked for the missions from here, Roger of course being a “ Blue Angel” he volunteered for the secret mission, missions that had only recently been revealed in the American press as having taken place illegally, without the consent of congress, over Cambodian territory, where U.S. forces had been forbidden by Congressional decree to be. She realized after the press reports that Roger must have indeed been shot down over Cambodia. Was it possible that he was still alive? One of the MIAs? It was a thought she could not contemplate. If he were still alive, did he remember her? Did he even know who he still was, locked in a Cambodian jungle jail now for over fifteen years? It was a problem that she sometimes discussed with her dear- perhaps her best friend – Father Mulroney, the man most responsible, she supposed, for her continuing to stay in Taiwan , even long after the military had left here, the Officers Club sold to the Chinese, Father Mulroney and Arthur. The tears had nearly drowned her, she remembered that, but not much else. The telegram. There had been the telegram from the President. Shot down in Vietnam, his country was grateful, the President was grateful.

Roger. The President was grateful. A lifetime of tranquility and happiness crowned by the President’s gratitude. The tears had nearly drowned her – she remembered that. Their early courtship in Indiana, honeymoon in Hawaii, enlistment right out of college, the long years of intermittent waiting while the was stationed in Japan and then Korea, and his final posting in Taiwan, in the days when the U.S. still recognized the Chiang Kai Cheek government and had the huge military base here.

Rushing down the hospital corridor, Ahmed realized that he had only five minutes to eat the first protein he had since eight in the morning before he could complete his one last operation of the day. After the operation just finished Ahmed for the first time in a long time began to feel the effects of working nearly 20 hours every day for as many weeks as he could remember. This last operation had been particularly difficult, but a real challenge – a complicated combination of femur transplant into a small boy with leukemia in second stage of remission. It had called on his skills as an orthopedic surgeon, plastic surgeon and oconologist or cancer specialist. His most recent acquisition of skills in the latter field had allowed him to complete his fourth chief residency in the last decade, building on the expertise he had developed in endocrinology and which was especially succulent to him as it had allowed him to complete that particular residency in the beloved homeland of Japan. He had been back in Taiwan now only for six months, but the memories of the two additional golden years in Japan granted him by the Gods lived with him as a constant presence. He had been granted the inestimable honor of completing his residency as a research fellow at the Tokyo Imperial University, sacred ground of his paternal blood, second to none in the world academically and made even more estimable by the fact that it bore the name and imprint of the holy Emperor himself. In addition the grounds of the University were a mere two hour subway ride from his father’s home and only another half an hour by car to what was him perhaps the holiest place in the world – Plum Blossom’s ancestral home. Plum Blossom. He dare not think of her. She was lost to him permanently in this reincarnation. The inferior Chinese blood of his mother’s genes had made her unobtainable. He did not deserve her either he knew, and he had devoted his life to attempting to compensate for that which was inferior in him, in his blood, his bones, genes, hormones, the inferior protoplasm of a weak and malformed race. Endless study and accumulation of medical knowledge was his pact with his miserable karma. Only by incessant self – improvement and the personal suffering it entailed could he hope to even face with some modicum of dignity that part of himself that was pure and immutable – his Japanese “ yang” or male side. Suffering and self – sacrifice would enable him to purge the inferior Chinese or distaff female side of himself. Pure male, pure Japanese he could hope to face Plum Blossom in the next life if not in this, and it the next life she would accept and forgive him all. His capacities for accumulation of knowledge to a degree that astounded even the most learned professors and surgeons in his fields had enabled him to make the necessary calculations as well. How many years he had to live and exactly what he would do with each day allotted to him; how much he had targeted to learn each day, each week, month and year until the inevitable – and much longed for – end. The sum total of what he had accumulated at the end of this blessedly finite time span would stand him in good stead when he confronted the Buddha face to face as the next revolution of the wheel of reincarnation was to be spun – not haphazardly this time though, the work he done in this lifetime would have seen to that. Even the Buddha himself would not argue with him on that score.

In the next turn of the reincarnation wheel he would have earned himself a position on the wheel’s turn that would put him on a level equal to that of Plum Blossom.

He had treasured those two years in Japan, granted him in his adulthood, penitence paid with such enthusiasm in all of his incessant efforts to master each branch of his beloved medicine and each technique of each branch, no matter how detailed or difficult, for his miserable birthright. These two years were the life renewal of his early years of childhood and youth in Japan when he lived in his father’s home, brought to Japan to study and to master the sacred language which he had title to if only in part. Plum Blossom, his third cousin had lived in the adjoining villa on the outskirts of a Tokyo that was being rebuilt in gigantic leaps by the superior race, rebuilt to mock and then to hold rightful sway over the evil “gaijin” [foreigner] who had deluded themselves into believing that they had subjugated the Japanese race and brought the Emperor to his knees. On his occasional days off from work he would take the subway and then a taxi to the grounds of Plum Blossom’s childhood home. She no longer lived there of course. She had been married now for almost ten years and was already the mother of two children. Her husband was Suichi Matsu, once a neighbor, never a friend. Ahmed tried to block out the image of the hated Suichi in his mind lest it pollute the picture he always kept of Plum Blossom, he imagined through all the networks of frontal and lower brain lobes, and which predicated all actions which would take him forward towards the higher notch on the wheel of reincarnation. Whenever he had a few leisure minutes, he would use them to recall her picture, and polish the dust, as it were, that surrounded the aura of her beauty. Such dust was Suichi. How important it was to have visited her ancestral home so recently, to savoir in recollection the memories of Plum Blossom performing the tea ceremony as a young girl on the lawn by the side of the pebble-bottomed pool laced with lotus leaves and lilies. How beautiful she had been as a child! The seed of an even greater beauty to spring from her incipient flowery root in mature womanhood. Another such speck of dust that had recently appeared as a blotch on the perfect picture of Plum Blossom, black hair tied back in the traditional bun, eyes like cherry blossom drops, skin as white as the snow on the peak of Mount Fuji, dressed in the mottled kimono of the Meji Restoration era style, tied in a red sash, was this hideous old “geijin” woman who seemed to follow him everywhere. He had operated on her for a broken arm several months ago and for his pains, she plagued him incessantly, paging him at the hospital at odd hours with complaints of pain, complaints that emanated from the feeble constitution of her race, compounded by the indiscretion of her sex. As if that weren’t enough, with the clumsiness characteristic of her race, she had gone and broken her leg while taking a bath some weeks ago. He had refused to operate on her again, instead handing her over to his chief orthopedic resident, Wei-Chun, also his protégé, and live in lover.

Even though Wei Chun was entirely of Chinese extraction, he was not a blot on the perfect mirror of Plum Blossom which Ahmed kept always in his mind. This was because Wei Chun provided the important function of physical release for Ahmed, a release he knew he needed to keep healthy enough to perform his exacting work and fulfill his ultimate destiny of repurified reincarnation. From his exact biological calculations Ahmed knew that so much sperm being produced in the male testicles needed to be ejaculated lest the individual feel extreme discomfort and all normal systemic functions become disturbed to the point of general malfunction. While manual masturbation by the individual himself could to some extent forestall the ill effects of sperm production without ejaculation, the interaction that was part of sexual activity had a beneficial effect at least double if not triple that of individual auto-masturbation. Ahmed gave Wei Chun his instructions in the same way that he had trained him to surgically operate on the bone and muscle system of the orthopedic system and he obeyed with the same alacrity and gratitude he had shown as Ahmed’s most promising student. As far as Ahmed was concerned, intercourse with a female would be an unthinkable violation of his pact with the spirit of Plum Blossom who was wedded to him, if not in this world, in the next. While Ahmed was not a virgin, some sexual experiences with females having proved unavoidable due to his father’s, Hiro Matsui’s, insistence on taking him to geisha houses during his youth and on his return visits to Japan, sexual intercourse always made Ahmed feel ashamed after the act was performed. It was the conscious knowledge of his disloyalty to Plum Blossom that so affected him and so he would never willingly seek out a female partner, a prostitute, or even one of the massage girls in the local Taiwanese “barber shops” which were so popular in the city and which specialized in manual masturbation of the customer. His sexual experiences with Wei Chun, on the other hand, were entirely clinical, more like a surgical procedure than a sexual act, they performed the necessary biological restorative function to the system and were quickly and cleanly forgotten.

But this gaijin woman, hobbling on her crutches, accosting him at every turn, with her pallid white skin like dust, resembling one of the ghosts of the “Kabuki” theatre,

Menacing, horrific and to be avoided at all costs, she was not only ugly, but also insolent. If it had not been for his absolute commitment to self-sacrifice through acquisition of medical knowledge and the care and salvation of the sick and the infirm, he would have had her bodily thrown out of the hospital. As luck would have it, the old gaijin lady’s leg was not healing well, and Wei Chun suspected a severe case of osteoporosis, brittleness of the bone brought about by the trauma of the fracture. Without begrudging Wei Chun on the brilliance of his diagnosis, Ahmed had congratulated Wei Chun and was forced to accede to prescribed treatment procedure of an extended, if not unlimited, course of physical therapy with heat treatment, short wave therapy and spinal traction, the latter being necessitated by the damage to the spinal nerve in the diffuse line of the primal fracture extending into the lower vertebrae. What this meant of course was that the old woman would be in the hospital almost daily. Due to the unfortunate combination of his moral scruples and his avid aversion to her, he would have no choice but to see her on the same regular basis. He could do nothing but try to avoid her and do his best to ignore her, a difficult enough task given her seeming determination to harass him and disturb him in his daily routine. Indeed it was difficult for him to understand the source of her malevolent purpose. Indeed at times he wondered if she were some kind of sign that the fates were perturbed with him, and that she had been sent to warn him that in the great wheel of reincarnation there had been a snag of some sort. Had Suichi already made his own pact with the Great Buddha for the next notch of the revolution where he would once again possess Plum Blossom and Ahmed would again be left out in the cold? What kind of pact could that truncated boar have made with the Great Buddha to have gained such an advantage again? After all, Suichi was merely a middle manager in the company set up by Ahmed’s father’s own company at the onset of Japan’s new and glorious restoration. He contributed nothing to the salvation of souls – nothing except absolute obedience of course.

The thought made Ahmed shudder.

After all, what did the Great Buddha demand above and beyond absolute obedience? For that matter, what did the sacred Emperor, temple of the Great Buddha in this reincarnation, demand above and beyond absolute obedience? Had Ahmed somehow missed the point? Was not absolute obedience a virtue beyond even the curing of the sick, prevention of death and salvation of souls?

It was a question that Ahmed did not care to dwell on. After all, he was a doctor, not a philosopher or a priest. He knew what his objective was and he was determined to fulfill it to the best of his ability, to the very core of his marrow, to the center of his heart. It was a testimony to the ability of this old “gaijin” woman to disturb the center of his tranquility and certainty of his life’s purpose that he could even contemplate such disturbing questions and in this way interfere with his professional performance. It might be quite possible that she could even drive him mad if he allowed her to continue to interfere with his set routine in this way.

For Clarissa, with Ahmed gone, the day was for all intents and purposes, over. It was time for her to go home, a short trip by taxi to her apartment in “Tien Mu”, the Americanized section of upper Taipei. The translation of “Tien Mu,” was “Mother of God,” an irony, Clarissa noted to herself, unusually grandiose even for the Chinese. Her apartment was on a fourth floor walkup in one of the more modern apartment buildings on a tree lined crescent; the floors were parked and wooden fans hung from the ceiling, an anachronism of design as most of the apartments had room installed air conditioners and electric fans could be purchased at almost every corner store. Her furniture was Chinese antique, one of Roger’s hobbies being collection of such furniture when it was still cheap during the days of the American military presence in Taiwan. The furniture and a cabinet of silverware and Lemoge china, legacy of her dowry were the among the few relics she had kept from the three room modern bungalow she and Roger had lived in on the American compound before he was killed.

Almost in a daze from her brief but emotional encounter with Ahmed she set out to prepare herself her usual frugal dinner. Breaded fish sticks and frozen peas bought from one of the few stores hat stocked American food only in the “Tien Mu” district, boiled in hot water on her portable gas burner in an otherwise bare and mostly neglected kitchen, were eaten sparingly, the leftovers from the meager meal carefully stored in her near empty refrigerator for morning breakfast. Clarissa had no television and rarely listened to the radio. Sometimes she read the magazines or books lent from the library of the local Church, but tonight, more enervated even than usual, she decided proceed with her usual routine of a brief wash in cold water and retiring to her rather luxurious queen sized bed where, due to the heat, she wrapped herself in a single sheet and let her mind wander as it might for hours before she would drift off to sleep, dreaming of Ahmed and waiting for another chance to see him the next day. Indiana was like that, but she realized it only in retrospect, as her mind began its usual cinematic meandering. The days had drifted by there too, week passing into months, months into years with no visible change. Life had been set as by some predetermined routine, the origins of which aroused no curiosity among anyone and whose plan was fulfilled without question by everyone and certainly without complaint. During the hot summer Taipei nights she would try to remember what she could of Roger and her early life in Indiana, but she began to realize that the first thirty five years or so of her life had had no order and no time plan, contrary to what she had always assumed. She’d known Roger since junior high school. Although they were both Catholics, they attended the same public junior and senior high schools in Bloomington. Clarissa’s father was head of a small ball bearings factory and Roger’s father was an engineer who Bloomington country office of public works. Roger’s mother was a kindergarten teacher, while Clarissa’s mother, whom the neighbor’s all said had “airs” had never worked and looked down on Roger’s family for the reason that Roger’s working mother evidenced the relative poverty and inferior class of Roger’s family. While she lay in bed at nights in the sweltering heat she tried to remember the faces of Roger’s parents but could not. She could not remember their schoolmates, not their faces, nor their names. Even her own mother’s face was a blur. In her mind only her father’s face was clearly delineated; he was always laughing, holding his arms out to her and laughing or taking her out on the swing in the large back yard of their white frame house and rocking her back on forth, “my little angel’, he would lilt as the swing flew up in the sky and down again and she was hysterical with childish laughter, her giggles filling the flat blue Midwestern sky on those happy weekend afternoons so long ago, yet always with her, they would still cause her to smile to herself.

Her relationship with Roger had happened neither by accident nor design. The few Catholics in the public schools of Bloomington were united by a bond predetermined by their religious affiliation, by family alliance, by lack of other alternatives. In the junior high school hops the Catholics dated each other, and by the time of senior high school when everyone was collecting their own “steadies”, it was inevitable that Roger and Clarissa should exchange rings and declare to their classmates their all-American intention of that age and time to date no one but the holder of their class ring. Kissing which was mandatory led to petting and by the age of sixteen Clarissa had lost her virginity to Roger in the back seat of his father’s old Chevrolet while watching a horror movie at the local drive in. It was not that she had not enjoyed the experience, but it seemed little more to her than the winning goal in the local girl’s field hockey team to which she belonged. For Roger the experience had been a bit more exhilarating and from that time onward and after each of their subsequent weekend forays he was planning the day of their wedding. There was the fear of pregnancy of course on her part, but it had never happened, not before their wedding and not after. They never attempted to find out which one of them was at fault. It didn’t seem to matter much to either of them, and within two years when they were both in college, concentration on their studies induced them to find out methods of birth control so they could both graduate with the least inconvenience and this in spite of the fact that birth control was against their religion and neither of them ever confessed their sin to the priest in college chapel. Their lives were, in short, she realized now, uneventful. Emptiness was the ruling principle of all that they had lived through. Their was no question of endurance or suffering or misery. She had only known these feelings since Roger’s death and they had intensified to the point of being unbearable since meeting Ahmed and falling in love with him. Roger’s death had totally disoriented her, not so much perhaps she realized because she was so much in love with him – love had always been assumed by her to be part and parcel of their whole relationship from childhood, culminated by the first act in the back seat of the old Chrevolet and immutably solidified by the fifteen years of marriage. The disorientation was rather caused by the fact that for the first time in her life she had to ask questions of herself and found that there were no answers.

After Roger’s death Father Mulroney had attempted to convince her that she was going through a crisis of religious faith. He had provided her with books on passion of Christ and had introduced her to the writings of the Japanese Catholic, Endo, “The Life of Christ” and “The Silence. “Instead of providing her with the answers she was looking for these books only raised more questions in her mind. Despite Father Mulroney’s best ministrations, her questions seemed to swirl into an incessant vortex of self-doubt and ultimately skepticism. Was Roger walking now with Jesus Christ in heaven or had he been stolen from her by some dark force that cared neither for Roger’s soul nor her own peace of mind? Even worse was the thought that Roger’s death had been nothing more than a casual accident, that his body was crushed by physical forces and that he had simply ceased to exist, both in this world and in the next, the very existence of which seemed to her to be highly questionable at vest. These were terrible, heretical thoughts that Father Mulroney had tried his best to assuage, and indeed it had seemed to become one of the central tasks of his life and his vocation to put these thoughts to rest for Clarissa by whatever means at his disposal.

Father Jack Mulroney had befriended Clarissa and Roger during the early days of Vietnam when Jack had been stationed in Taiwan; a young priest from Chicago, Jack had been ambivalent about the war from the outset and his while his chapel sermons conformed to the US governmental and army policies, in private to his friends, such as Clarissa and Roger Carlton, he was more candid. He had deplored the loss of life in Vietnam, and being a devoutly sincere and pious young priest, he was as equally appalled by the loss of Vietnamese as American lives. In the Carlton home in the early days of the war Jack Mulroney had led many private meditation and prayer sessions in which he implored God and Jesus Christ to save the precious young lives of American servicemen and fliers and Vietnamese civilians and to lead the two countries to a way of mutual understanding and tolerance. Jesus Christ walked among all peoples, he would tell the eager young couple, his breath of love and friendship filled the spirit of every race and would lead mankind to harmonious cooperation and brotherly love. He prayed for the spirit of Christ to guide the American President and his cabinet and generals in finding a peaceful solution to what seemed already in those days an unstoppable blood letting on both sides. Clarissa had prayed in those days with an open and sincere heart; she knew now that her prayers were hypocrisy because she had no concept of what blood letting meant until she had lost Roger to it. After Roger’s a death, Jack’s faith never appeared to waver.

Jack Mulroney was a neurasthenic fellow, lean with white blond hair and pale green eyes. His father was Irish, but his mother was Polish and he had a conspicuous aquiline nose. Father Mulroney’s struggle for the soul of Clarissa had taken its toll on his own quavering faith, and the kind of doubts that had emerged in what seemed even to him as an increasingly torturous Jesuitical logical over the years had had the obverse effect on Clarissa from what Jack would have wished. While Jack’s Mission was far removed from the cataclysmic changes taking place in the Church in the U.S. and Europe, the isolated Mission was freer perhaps than Missions in the west to experiment with the new ideas that were conveyed by Missile or word of mouth than Missions under the critical purview of Western parishioners. Many factions in the Church had advocated greater awareness of human sexuality and sensuality short of marriage if not sexual intercourse in order to invigorate what many believed were a dying religion. Jack’s early seminary training had left him unprepared for this change of perspective coming from the highest echelons in the Church, but his near obsessive concern for Clarissa had infused these policies with innuendoes for him that disturbed routines of a lifetime and caused him to reevaluate principles and tenets that he had up to now considered absolute articles of faith. In short, Jack was afraid that he had fallen in love with Clarissa, and with this frightening realization he prayed continuously for a means of reconciling his own awakened feelings of sensual love, the new and often quite shocking re-orientation of the new Church and the basic tenets of Catholicism which for him were the foundation of his life’s work and his own personal identity.

With Roger’s death, Clarissa was faced with the horrific realization that she had depended of Roger not merely for love, security and a sense of belonging, but also for basic physical gratification that she had always taken for granted and had accepted as one of the basic benefits of the married state, even though she still held in her mind the traditional American woman’s view that only men, not women, sought physical gratification and that it was entirely perverse to think of marriage as a socially acceptable vehicle of obtaining sexual release. Actually, Clarissa’s sexual relationship with Roger had been entirely mundane. The major satisfying aspect of the sexual relationship was that it had commenced at such a early age that neither had been able to acquire the inhibitions towards sexual intercourse that normally occurred with those who married or who first experience sexual relations at a later age. In other words, their sexual relationship had been neither erotic, nor passionate; it simply existed as part and parcel of the same dullness of which all the other components of their lives were composed. Clarissa had cooked dinner; they had both enjoyed it. Roger mowed the lawn; he brought home the paycheck. Clarissa cleaned the house and swept out the kitchen. They both watched television and went to church on Sundays. In the evenings before they went to sleep they had sexual relations. When Roger died, Clarissa began to realize, not without a certain amount of horror, that almost all aspects of her life were the same with Roger as without him,, except for the physical relief that she had always taken for granted a part of life. Once she began to recognize the function that Roger had served, she began as well to question the nature of her love for him as well. Had she loved him just because he satisfied certain physical needs, or had she loved him as a person? Lying in her bed, the sheet resting on her naked form, she could not even remember what he was like as a person. It was only with the greatest of difficulty that she could recall his face, and she was not at all sure that if she saw him on the street in Tien Mu that night, if perhaps he had come back from the prison camp in Cambodia, and even if he had been restored to the perfect physical condition in which she knew he left her, that she would even recognize him. And if Roger was not a person, indeed had never been a person, what then was she, had she been?

It was when these thoughts began to cascade in her mind and seemed to overwhelm her very sanity that the picture of Ahmed would reappear in her mind. She could not for the life of her understand what Ahmed’s existence had to do with Roger having ever been a person or her now being a person. For one thing, Roger would have detested Ahmed and would have refused to either speak to him or of him. Of that she was sure. Roger did not consort with the natives. It was not army policy, and Indiana’s, not white Indiana’s, to consort with coloreds, especially and in particular, not foreign coloreds. Orientals of “slant eyes” were even more particularly frowned on, given the fact that Americans had been at war with the “slants” of Vietnam. Before that there had been the war with Japan. Both her father and Roger’s had been in that and had plenty to say about the cruelty and bizarre behavior of this devilishly dangerous “yellow peril” of another era. Roger had lost his life to them. Of course Ahmed was not a Vietnamese, he was not even a Communist, but he was a native, a colored, an Oriental. From Roger’s perspective he was a non-person. He did not exist. But did Roger exist either? Had he ever existed?

Ahmed’s face appeared to her again. The burning black eyes, decisive cast of feature, cruel and angry as they were, evinced a purpose to which she could only clumsily hope to appreciate. He detested her, she was sure of that. But somehow that made no difference. When she first met him when her arm was broken so many months ago and he had attended her and set it, he had not detested her then and that was always what she remembered, no matter how he changed his attitude towards her, lost interest in her and come to feel only contempt towards her. When she first appeared in his clinic, crying and in acute pain, he had come to her with love and warmth on his face. He had put his arms around her shoulders and begged her to stop crying. When he had applied the anaesthetic, he had first held her hand and explained to her, patiently and lovingly, what the effects would be and how she would rapidly recover. She could still feel the warmth of his hands on hers and in a fever of turmoil became sexually aroused again, putting her fingers on her own narrow opening between her legs, feeling the heat that surged through her slender frame until she was engulfed, imagining it was Ahmed touching and caressing her, imagining him undressed before her, naked, raw, primitive, in a fury of sexual torpor, his body a primal feast of the unholy love which to her was the sole satisfaction her body craved even to the point where the spiritual part of herself seemed to vanish to a point where it no longer existed and no longer mattered.

While such auto-masturbation never satisfied Clarissa, it produced an entirely different effect on her from the kind of “normal” sexual relationship she had had with her husband. Roger had satisfied a physical craving, simply, openly and without much ado. His love making neither aroused her nor enticed her; certainly it did not intoxicate her. Yet the very thought of Ahmed was enough to center her heart and all of her feelings in the core of her sexuality. Yet there was no reason for any of this, she knew. She had tried to discuss her problem with Father Mulroney many times. Talking about her unrequited love and inexplicable admiration for Ahmed was something that Father Mulroney would discuss with her in an accepting way, try to rationalize it and integrate it with his acquired sense of tolerance and love of all peoples, men and women of all races. Father Mulroney, or Jack as she had been tending to call him more and more in recent years, was a strong believer in inter-racial relationships and had himself presided over the marriages of many whites and Orientals. Jack had tried to explain to her that she admired Ahmed because of his devotion to medicine, his vocation of healing the sick and attempts, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to prevent death. St. Luke had been a doctor, as Jack pointed out, and it was no doubt his acute skills of observation and love of mankind that came with the professional practice of medicine that made him one of the Lord’s most faithful disciples. Jack himself had once thought of being a doctor, he confided to Clarissa, on one of the near weekly meetings, they had come to have and to take for granted as part of a their close relationship.

Rather than meeting in the church Jack and Clarissa would find an opportunity to make a regular outing out of their meetings, going to the National Palace Museum to view the ancient Chinese treasures or spending the day in the Yang Ming National Park to view the cherry blossoms during the spring season or to enjoy the seasonal weather of summer and fall among the hot springs and ranging Oriental mountain landscape. Since Clarissa had broken her leg, they had had to limit their meetings to dinners in the few Western restaurants of Taipei with their superb French cuisine or sample the Taiwanese seafood restaurants by river in Tam Sui [Water Talk], easily accessible by taxi. Often at weekends they would spend the day at the American Club and return to Clarissa’s apartment where they would have an aperitif to top off a day’s conversation, increasingly concerned with Clarissa’s mounting obsession with Ahmed.

Yet Clarissa’s attempts to discuss her sexual obsession with Jack seemed to have the opposite effect from what she intended. She received less and less sympathy from Jack for what became increasingly the major passion of her life. As Jack’s routine efforts at prayer, meditation, confession and absolution had visibly less effect on Clarissa’s own feelings and the central topic of conversation on her part, Jack instinctively felt less inclined to go through the motions of what was obviously an exercise in futility. He began another tack, spending countless hours in the University libraries attached to the Catholic missions researching abnormal psychology and he used considerable effort in locating such psychological counselors who might exist in this remote Asian outpost of a Catholic persuasion, or at least such counselors who were not outright anti-Catholic. Jack had come up with the inescapable conclusion that the character, Ahmed, Clarissa was describing, exhibited all the symptoms of psychopath and might prove to be extremely dangerous to her should she actually be able to carry the relationship any further. Whereas previously Jack had set out to inundate Clarissa with every sort of theological treatise in an attempt to win back her faith and persuade her to forget her obsession on the basis of moral principle and Catholic belief, he now set out to inundate Clarissa with all possible written treatises on abnormal psychology. In depth studies of psychopathology, borderline schizophrenia and sado-masochistic behavior were presented to Clarissa week after week. As she lay in bed dreaming of Ahmed, she would leaf through these learned and often frightening texts, filled with case studies and analyses, only to close the pages with his face searing her brain, his eyes boring through the marrow between her eyes, penetrating to the crevice between her legs, and twirling herself in a vortex of ecstasy at the very memory of a look he had given her, however in contempt and detestation, she would slip the learned tombs to the pillow beside her and losing consciousness in the passion that seemed no longer hers alone, she would fall asleep without having completed whatever essay or chapter she had started out on with the best of intentions. On closer reflection she realized that whether or not Ahmed was a psychopathological individual or not seemed as relevant to the problem at hand as whether or not he had type A or type B blood.

Even if it could be definitively proven that Ahmed was a clear cut psychopath and/ or a schizophrenic, with or without extreme sado-masochistic tendencies, it would make no difference in the way she felt about him or in the way he made her feel about herself. Indeed the more he was denigrated the more acute her sense of self had become; the more aware she was of herself as distinct person with focused needs, desires and objectives. It was as if all her life she had lived on a flat two dimensional plane with flat two dimensional people, in square houses, on flat parcels of land, with graphically visible shapes that could be copied in pastel crayons an where people spoke to each other in words that were entirely transferable from one individual to another without such transference making any difference to the particular characters involved. Since meeting Ahmed she seemed to have been suddenly transported into a three-dimensional where the language she spoke, the movements she made and feelings that emanated from her spun over the two dimensional paper world in which her feet were planted, but not her head, so that everything she spoke and felt was no longer either comprehensible nor relevant to the world she had come from and still lived in, lived in but was no longer entirely a part of. Such a realization had, if anything, amazingly enough, heightened her awareness of her native two-dimensional world, and indeed heightened her appreciation of it. What she had always taken for granted as the absolutes of human life, social and religious, became a curiosity, aesthetic creations even, as exquisite and artificial as the fine jade vases created by the Chinese artisans of the eighth century or the Ming lacquer boxes with infinitesimal designs of houses, trees, landscapes and people, so intricate and detailed that they could not help but mirror reality yet so miniscule that the very attempt to view them and comprehend their wholeness was an intense effort entirely at odds with the mundane reality they purported to portray.

Her change of attitude came slowly to her, naturally and not deliberately. While she had for the many months since she met Ahmed resented Jack’s more and more conspicuous attempts to turn her against him, especially as her confession of her sexual passion towards Ahmed, became harder to suppress, or one might say perhaps, easier to express, lately she had begun to appreciate or even savour his evident discomfort. Not that she enjoyed watching his discomfort or forcing him to constantly retest his faith vis-à-vis her intransigence, but more that she was able to empathize with his inability to understand or comprehend the transcendence into the third dimensional world she had achieved and which she had come to believe had no relationship with her Catholic faith, but really was incidental to it. Of course she was entirely unable to communicate these thoughts to Jack for fear of losing his friendship and his companionship, the latter which had become increasingly important to her as her aesthetic awareness of the shared two dimensional world became more acute. For his part Jack became more and more distressed by the change in attitude he had noted in Clarissa. It seemed that she had determined, for some reason of psychic trauma associated with Roger’s death, or for some reason of plain devilish entanglement, to ignore all the rules of logic and all the precepts of the faith on which their lives and civilization were built and on whose foundations their souls were to be saved. Clarissa’s nonchalance regarding Ahmed’s obvious psychological diseases were a cause of great concern for him on several levels. From the perspective of the parish priest, Jack felt that Clarissa was abandoning the love of good for an obsession with evil. From the perspective of the clinical psychologist – and he consulted at great length with the psychologists he knew on this score – he feared for Clarissa’s sanity. From one point of view she would seem to have entered into a severe depression. From another, more gloomy prognostic perspective, she might herself be near a total schizophrenic breakdown, the causes of which were rooted in her or early childhood and which disease was being triggered by her age menopause, the traumatic loss of Roger, and the series of accidents which had caused her various bone fractures and brought about her osteoporosis.

Finally Jack decided to take the bull by the horns. If he could not convince Clarissa of her errors and the dangerous course she was racing into headlong by either articles of theology or reasons of science, he would be able to convince her, he believed, by the facts themselves, as if in a court of law. He decided to utilize his access to the considerable espionage network of the Catholic brothers to get the real facts about Ahmed and confront Clarissa with them, with no attempt to sweeten the bitter truth. After many weeks of sending out his inquiries and demanding action on the part of his colleagues of the cloth, Jack was able to learn that the brilliant young doctor in whom even the greatest physicians and surgeons held in awe and whose name was known in professional circles for his extraordinary achievements as far afield as the U.S. , Europe and the Soviet Union, was the illegitimate son of a Japanese war criminal, prosecuted by the McArthur command after the war, imprisoned and released only on condition that he continue to provide important industrial secrets to the U.S. government on an on-going basis. He was also able to obtain the critical facts of Ahmed’s depraved personal life. A known homosexual, Ahmed was infamous for seducing his younger male student doctors and was known to be now living openly with his chief orthopedic resident in what amounted to a homosexual marriage. In addition, there was wide spread suspicion among the informants whom the brothers were able to get to talk freely about Ahmed that his homosexual proclivities exhibited clear sadistic traits and he was suspected of whipping and otherwise torturing, even mutilating, his politically more vulnerable male lovers.