Chapter 31: The Morning After
Davie
Early that morning, about the same time I’d awakened cold the other night, I woke up and slipped out of the warm bed I now shared with Kaitlyn. I put on my civilian clothes, unfastened the cargo racks from my bike, and wheeled the now lightened machine out the back door.
In the natural desert landscape behind my house, I extracted several seeds from the plants I found there and slipped them into a small pill bottle I’d grabbed on the way out the door. I selected a sagebrush, a few desert grasses, and three small cactuses.
I rode out to Kaitlyn’s apartment, stripped, and planted the seeds I’d picked in the xeriscaped plot outside her front door, then called on the power of Gaia to grow the plants. The frontmost was a sagebrush, and as it grew, I used my will to shape one of its branches into a claw of a particular dimension, pointed at Kaitlyn’s parking spot, into which I slipped a small note I’d prepared at the kitchen table of my house before leaving.
I dressed and rode back home, unseen in the rural early a.m., undressed quietly, and slipped back into bed, my absence apparently unnoticed. I was asleep again just a minute after entering the back door.
The next morning, Kaitlyn woke me up, saying she had to get home to take a shower and get to work. I offered my shower, but then she pointed out that all her stuff was at her house, so I had to let her go. We’d both biked to work on Friday and met up for the trip in the parking lot of a grocery store about halfway between our respective offices, so her car was still at her apartment. She biked back home, taking her camping gear with her.
I felt bereft, even though I expected to see her again soon.
Kaitlyn
I rolled into my apartment parking lot, cassette clicking quietly in the silent small town night as I bled off my speed, gloriously happy but once again under time pressure, back in the civilized world. As I wheeled up to my front door, I noticed that the xeriscaping plot beside the door looked different. It was…more!
Then I saw a small rectangle of unbleached paper clutched in the branches of a small sagebrush, one that hadn’t been there when I’d left on this trip with Davie. I removed the paper, unfolded it, and read:
Thank you for the most amazing weekend of my life.
Your friend and lover, Davie.
I had a difficult time getting through my front door, tear-blinded like that.
Davie
Later that day, I called Kaitlyn and invited her to lunch. We went to my favorite little locals-only place and had shredded beef tortas, a kind of Mexican take on the sloppy joe. It took me a little while for my Indian palate to get used to Southwestern food; they can both be spicy, but in quite different ways. I judged it to be a good thing that I’d come down into this new life from the north of the state rather than hit what I now called the true southwest straight-on. It was kind of like easing into a hot tub.
Kaitlyn opened the conversation with, “So, I saw you did a little gardening last night.”
“That’s right, and it was naked gardening, I’ll have you know,” I replied. “I grew your new plants from seeds, right there last night.”
She got an amused smile on her face, “Oh, that’s an image: you in your skin, squatting in my xeriscaping plot in full view of my apartment parking lot! You didn’t get caught?”
“I don’t think so. No one came out and busted me, anyway. If someone saw me, I hope they enjoyed the show!” I said.
“Well, thank you for the little garden and for that image. The one will remind me of the other every time I go home!” Kaitlyn said warmly.
“Better than flowers?” I queried.
“I’ll take flowers, too,” she returned.
“Greedy.”
“Yup! Gimme gimme. Also chocolate, but only the good stuff; I’m spoiled,” she grinned.
On that note, I decided to swing for the fences. “Kaitlyn?”
“Yes?” She could tell I was nervous and gave me space.
“Um…I was wondering…if you’d spend the night with me again tonight? Please?”
She beamed. “Of course I will! Why so nervous, after what we’ve just done?”
I had to think about that for a bit. “I guess it’s because being out in nature and being in my private home, where I’ve lived mostly alone for years…they’re just so different. Also, you kind of just dropped into my other world. This is the first time I’m formally inviting you into my world. All the way in. Before, we had some space to ourselves where the other hadn’t gone, a place we could return to find solitude. I want to knock that barrier down now.”
She got a little gooey at that. “Wow, Davie…as a fellow introvert, I can empathize. And thank you. Thank you for letting me in.” We stared into each others’ eyes for a while. “But what about last night?” she asked.
“Well, that was different, wasn’t it? Kind of a continuation of the weekend. You needed a place to sleep, and I was going to my house, and we were in such rapport… I wonder if we even could have gone our separate ways last night? If you’d turned off for your apartment, would I have followed you, and would you have even thought to send me back to my house? I was in the lead at the time we passed the turnoff to my house, and you followed, no explicit negotiation needed.”
“I think you’re right, Davie. It was so strange last night. We’d been reintegrating into civilization for hours by that point, starting from the point where we had to go streaking,” she smiled with her shoulders hunched, embarrassed, “to get away from those tourists. But you’re right, we were still in rapport by the time we hit town. I couldn’t still sense your thoughts consciously like I could back on the cliff, but I didn’t even think to turn off towards my apartment. What happened?”
I explained, “It’s only the second time I’ve been under like that with another person, but my speculation is that when you get deep into a Gaia trance like that, especially when you meld with the land all spread out like we did, it takes some time to recover your sense of self. The longer you spend in that state, the longer it takes to recover. Being under with someone else just entwines them in the same state with you; it happened to us once already, back before we were interrupted by that dirt bike crash. I don’t know if you noticed it consciously at the time, but think back: you didn’t come back to yourself immediately after breaking the trance and running off to help that guy. It’s why we were able to pull off that short con with him so easily, with hardly any instruction or planning: there weren’t two plans colliding, with us trying to merge them on the fly, there was one plan.”
A few seconds later, she said, “Yes, you’re right. You were barking orders, and I wasn’t even thinking to argue or propose my own ideas. I just did it.” Then after a few seconds, she got a bit of a scowl on her face and almost growled, “Did you control my mind, then?”
“No!” I insisted. “You’re missing my point. We had a plan; not I, we. I could just as well accuse you of twisting my mind to follow your plan. But both accusations are incorrect. We formulated that plan between us, subconsciously. As the time after breaking rapport increased, our plans started to diverge, but by then, we had the framework down and were just able to follow it through.”
“Oh,” she said, quietly.
“This time we were under for, what…five hours? Then we walked back to the trail in much the same state, probably six or so hours total before we really touched civilization again. That’ll have a lasting effect.”
She thought about that for a while, then said, “Sounds dangerous. But I want to do it again!”
“Me, too, my love. Not every day, but often.”
We just sat and thought about things for a while, in a comfortable silence. Some time later, I proposed, “I’ll clear out a drawer for you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We can go slow. I’m not moving in, but this week… I think I might be over there a lot, okay?”
“I was hoping you’d say something like that.”
We were very busy that week.