ALCHEMIES OF THE HEART. David Dorian

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      When Crustaceans Love

      I drove to the address on Fifth Avenue. I walked for a while on the wide pavement, examining Armani windows. That evening air had an odor of burned plastic and sweat. My breathing was labored. I had my inhaler in my jacket pocket just in case. I stopped at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway and ordered a coffee with a petit pain au chocolat. I sat down on the long communal table and sipped my brew. An elderly man, dressed fashionably, was sending an e-mail to someone called Sebastian. That’s a name one doesn’t hear anymore since Suddenly Last Summer, that play by Tennessee Williams which was turned into a movie with Montgomery Cliff and Elizabeth Taylor. My oblique gaze read: “It was going to end anyway, and you knew it, there’s no solution.” He was breaking up with his beau. Was it a suicide note? Should I engage in a therapeutic dialogue, flash my medical credentials, and save his tortured life? He beckoned the waiter and ordered a tarte aux framboises. French pastry saved the day.

      I rang the ninth floor. The elevator ascended, straining and whining. On the landing, there were three doors like in fairy tales. On one door, a Chinese word was painted in red in a flamboyant calligraphy.

      The bell sounded like chimes caressed by a sea breeze. An old Chinese lady ushered me into the massage room. I asked her about the word painted on the wall in the landing.

      “Ah, yes. Tiantang. That is ‘heaven’ in Mandarin,” she echoed.

      The wilted card on the pale-yellow wall read:

      This is a legitimate establishment. Do not ask the attendant to perform any act of a sexual nature.

      If you do, it will be denied and you will not have access to these premises.

      Thank you for your understanding and your cooperation.

      —The Management

      Then, why the dimmer, that plastic knob in the wall, which, with a flip from the finger, could regulate the luminosity of an incandescent bulb, turning it into a thousand suns or instill the darkness of interstellar space where the apotheosis would be consummated?

      A Chinese screen flashed a Buddha with androgynous lips gleaming with the lure of a promised nirvana. His pale hand was holding a flowering bush of droopy, trumpetlike white flowers.

      I took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, and donned a sandalwood-scented kimono. It was a pastel-green robe with embroidered cranes engaged in a mating dance.

      I stretched my body on the massage table.

      On a wall, I noticed a print of a painting of Hokusai’s Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. In this canvas, a reclining geisha is being orally assaulted by an octopus. I was transfixed by the woman ravished by a mollusk, the ravenous beak of the crustacean digging into her fleshy corolla. The image was intriguing for a legitimate massage establishment.

      The door gyrated, and a shadow filtered in. She looked thirty, but I knew her face sealed a secret of the mystery of aging. Asian women weather artfully the ravages of time. Their ivory faces and nubile alabaster skin are impervious to the erosion of aging. There is a timelessness about their physique and an eternity about their physiognomy. An elegance of lines, an eggshell skin coloring graced her ovoid face. Utamaro would have committed seppuku to have her as a model in his depiction of the women of The Floating World.

      She removed my kimono. I pointed with my fingers at my bronchi where the disease was lodged. An enchanting melody from Madame Butterfly filled the room.

      Examining the contours of her well-penciled eyes, I traveled in time. I recalled photographs of movie actresses from the fifties—Garbo, Stanwick, Blyth, etc.—whose dreamy gazes turned inward. Everything about those women spelled the sublime.

      Light dimmed to its ultimate blackness.

      I was blind like a one-celled organism in the primordial sea, tethered to the world by her precarious touch, connected to the living by a cutaneous anchor. I complied, surrendering my body to her inquisitive hands, capitulating to her lubricating touch.

      Ointments basted my body. Oiled hands kneaded dormant muscles in silence.

      Time streamed beyond consciousness or reason.

      Voices chanting a Buddhist sutra rose rapidly to a crescendo. I was inside a monastery with monks intoning sacred words in Pali. The incantation magnified my inward emptiness. Filled with the void, I witnessed the annihilation of my self. Memory evaporated in the vacant universe.

      I got dressed, sluggishly. The air I was inhaling was ethereal. Objects had lost their angularity.

      I left money on the massage table. I don’t know how much.

      “I am Gabriel, and you?” I muttered as I limped toward the door.

      “Mantuo Luo.”

      I ventured into the street feeling diaphanous and vaporous like an inebriated monarch butterfly in the beginning of its migration to Mexico. The day poured out, and with it departed the man I used to be. That unforgettable afternoon, I had received my stigmata.