Richard Brautigan

"Counting Toward Tijuana" from The Abortion

What an abstract thing it is to take your clothes off in front of a stranger for the first time. It isn't really what we planned on doing. Your body almost looks away from itself and is a stranger to this world.

We live most of our lives privately under our clothes, except in a case like Vida whose body lived outside of herself like a lost continent, complete with dinosaurs of her own choosing.

"I'll turn the lights out," she said, sitting next to me on the bed.

I was startled to hear her panic. She seemed almost relaxed a few seconds before, My, how fast she could move the furniture about in her mind. I responded to this by firmly saying, "No, please don't."

Her eyes stopped moving for a few seconds. They came to a crashing halt like blue airplanes.

"Yes," she said. "That's a good idea. It will be very hard, but I have no other choice. I can't go on like this forever."

She gestured toward her body as if it were far away in some lonesome valley and she, on top of a mountain, looking down. Tears came suddenly to her eyes. There was now rain on the blue wings of the airplanes.

Then she stopped crying without a tear having left her eyes. I looked again and all the tears had vanished. "We have to leave the lights on," she said. "I won't cry. I promise."

I reached out and, for the first time in two billion years, I touched her. I touched her hand. My fingers went carefully over her fingers. Her hand was almost cold.

"You're cold," I said.

"No," she said. "It's only my hand."

She moved slightly, awkwardly toward me and rested her head on my shoulder. When her head touched me, I could feel my blood leap forward, my nerves and muscles stretch like phantoms toward the future.

My shoulder was drenched in smooth white skin and long bat-flashing hair. I let go of her hand and touched her face. It was tropical.

"See," she said, smiling faintly. "It was only my hand."

It was fantastic trying to work around her body, not wanting to startle her like a deer and have her go running off into the woods.

I poetically shifted my shoulder like the last lines of a shakespearean sonnet (Love is a babe; then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth grow.) and at the same time lowered her back onto the bed.

She lay there looking up at me as I crouched forward, descending slowly, and kissed her upon the mouth as gently as I could. I did not want that first kiss to have attached to it the slightest gesture or flower of the meat market.