I got a job as a teaching assistant in my later college days. The class was called “Comparative Civilizations,” a two-term, multi-instructor survey course in the humanities, and its only unifying thread was how brief, sweeping, and overly general nature of its various modules. The modules were based not upon literature, philosophy, or history, but rather on geographic regions. The students got a couple weeks on Africa, a couple weeks on South Asia, a couple weeks on East Asia, and so forth. It was taught by lazy emeriti in waiting, also-ran associate profs, and go-nowhere adjuncts. This amounted to an academic dog’s breakfast, which was harder to take as a TA than as a student. I spent every minute of my free time cramming ahead on cultures and continents I’d barely read a thing about, let alone studied in any academic depth. Atop that, every two weeks there was a test to mark. The students loved it, though, for every two weeks the class left them feeling like experts on a new, exoticized culture. They were mostly pre-med and pre-dental types trying to knock off their humanities requirement without having to write a paper. Every two weeks, I was left to decipher their grossly over-generalized scribblings about “the marvelous continent of Africa” and “the wonder that was India.”
The faculty member entrusted with handling South Asia was an unintelligible Indic septuagenarian. He spent an inordinate amount of his lecture time talking about Advaita Vedanta, or non-dualism. When you have so much to cover in so little time, I suppose sticking to this sort of all-encompassing monism is as good a strategy as any. Advaita was, he insisted, the essence of all Indian philosophy and religion. I got a spate of emails from students who couldn’t make out the accent and couldn’t parse what the prof was saying. Still, no one showed up for my office hours, which afforded me more time to read ahead.
The day before the India exam, the shutout was broken. A knock sounded on the door to the honours-student carrels, which I’d left ajar. I looked up to see a young woman in big glasses clutching a textbook to her chest. When she confirmed she was in the right place, I invited her in.
She started by reclaiming her previous exam, which I fished out from the stack in my carrel. She had received a 78%, and she explained that this was considerably lower than her otherwise unimpeachable GPA. Her sights were set on medical school, and she would need to maintain at least a 3.9 to even have a shot at admission.
She was very attractive, but this was not necessarily remarkable for pre-med and pre-dental types.
“So what I’m saying,” she said, “is that I need to do way better on this test tomorrow. But I’m going crazy trying to study.”
“What’s the issue?” I asked.
“It’s this Advaita Vedanta,” she said. “I just can’t wrap my head around it.”
“It’s monism,” I said, in a tone that would probably later qualify as mansplaining. “Everything is one. It’s actually quite simple. It’s all Brahman, the singular essence of the universe. Atman, which we can think of as the individual soul, is the same as Brahman. Realization of that through knowledge is enough.”
“But it’s not,” she said. “Everything is not one, and it’s not all Brahman.”
“Oh?” I said.
“No,” she said.
She pushed her glasses up on her nose, gearing up to deliberate. She was not only attractive, but she was adorable, too.
“The problem is Maya,” she said.
“Oh?” I said. My voice sounded calm enough, but mentally I was scrabbling through the cognitive lexicon I’d wrought from the course notes.
“Yes,” she said. “This guy Shankara—it’s Shankara, right?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, he talks all about Maya, this illusory force, creating the plurality of appearances that make all the things in Brahman look different. But if there’s another entity acting on its own to create this plurality, then isn’t that two things? Isn’t that dualism?”
“No,” I said. “Maya’s not real.”
“But aren’t its effects real?”
She a lovely skin tone, and every part of her was pert. She had lowered her textbook down into her lap, revealing a horizontally striped t-shirt that strained atop her bosom. Her breasts were very firm, very high and very sizable, and I presumed (running that quick, fleeting inventory that the heterosexual male gaze enables), that she had a preternaturally perky bosom (especially given the size of her breasts). Either that or she benefited from a push-up bra. Whatever the case, it was no lasting concern of mine, as I was the TA and she was one among a slew of students who were complicated enough without personal ties. Moreover, she had philosophical questions she wanted answered.
“I wouldn’t worry about it for the test,” I said.
This was the best I could muster. She wasn’t satisfied. Her brow stormed over.
“What if,” she said, “Maya is more like a power of Brahman? Wouldn’t that make more sense?”
“That,” I said, “is whole different school of thought. Pure Advaita, it’s called.”
I was impressed with myself for having retained some of my ancillary reading.
“So what’s that all about?” she asked.
This prompted my regurgitation of all I’d read about Shuddhadvaita Vedanta. For the next fifty-ought minutes, I told her about how the soul was of the same essence, but not equivalent to, God in Suddhadvaita, among other Vedantas. She asked about these other Vedantas, so I told her all I could remember. It was an unfamiliar thrill to have a science-type undergrad so rapt.
“They’re pretty much all united,” I told her, drawing to a close, “by the fact that it’s not simply knowledge of the oneness that gets you to liberation. It’s accepting that you’re not fully god, and then drowning yourself in devotion to him or her or whatever, that gets you salvation. And salvation isn’t just oneness. It’s separation.”
“Because that way,” she jumped in, “you can still, like, feel love for god, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’ve got it. Why be the sugar when you can taste it?”
“Yeah,” she said, irises burgeoning behind her big glasses. “Yeah. Man. That makes a lot more sense than Advaita. And Advaita’s supposed to be the be all and end all of Indian philosophy? It’s too simplistic. It’s too deeply flawed. Why didn’t we hear about all these other ones?”
I shrugged. “The prof’s got his biases. And it’s too much in two weeks. You could do a whole course on all the kinds of Vedanta and you still wouldn’t get through them all.”
“There’s more?” she asked. “Tell me about them!”
She touched my hand and I shot up in my seat as numbness shot up my arm. I looked at her face, which was so eager, and then my eyes retreated to her hand atop mine, the wristwatch on my wrist.
“No can do,” I said, relinquishing my hand. “Office hours are over.”
“That's all right,” she said. “Can you do coffee? I’m free in an hour if you are. There’s a Starbucks I always go to after class down in the mall and—”
“No,” I interjected. “I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“TAs aren’t really allowed to fraternize with students outside of class. It’s a bit…unseemly. They make us do a web workshop on what’s acceptable and what’s not. This wouldn’t be.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well. Thanks very much for your help. It feels like I’ve learned more in the last hour than I did in class.”
“Have you had trouble understanding the prof?”
“No,” she said. “I’m fine with the accent. It’s this Advaita that I can’t come to terms with. Anyway, I think I can handle it on the test tomorrow.”
She reclaimed her textbook and hugged it to her chest anew.
“Thanks again. And I’m Aubrey, by the way. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
***
I did not, as it turned out, see Aubrey at the test the next day. The class was split up into two lecture halls so as to space the students out and prevent academic dishonesty, and Aubrey was with the other group. As I waited for my group to finish, I leafed through a leftover copy of the exam. Sure enough, the essay question was on Advaita Vedanta.
***
I ended up marking the papers of the group I’d supervised. Because of the way the TA hours were divvied up, the prof had to mark the other half, much to his barely perceptible but nonetheless intensive chagrin. We finished marking by next Tuesday and posted the marks online with a notice that they could be picked up early at office hours. Come Wednesday, I lugged the stack into the TA office, and then waited for students to show. No one did.
Except for Aubrey.
She showed up in a fluttery rose-print sundress and white heels. She wore a choker around her throat, and a red beaded necklace around her shoulders.
“Hi,” she said, poking her head in through the door. “I came to pick up my paper.”
“Aubrey,” I said. “Hi.” I skimmed through the test papers. “Here we go. Right here—”
I trailed off as I noticed the mark. She took the paper from my hand, flipped to the back.
“It’s rough, I know,” she said. “I failed. I took a risk, I guess. It didn’t pay off.”
She adjusted her glasses, brought the back page of her test booklet and the backhand red-ink scrawl thereupon closer to her face. She nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “For the long answer I wrote about Pure non-dualism and how it made more sense. ‘Any Vedanta but Advaita’ was how I put it. I said Advaita had philosophical problems, and probably political problems, too. When everything’s Maya, what happens to all the world’s problems, you know? What about poverty? What about, say, the caste system, or whatever it’s called. He says here that this was my own ‘whimsical vision.’ His words. He says I’m ‘too far removed from the real matter at hand.’ Oh well. At least he didn't give me a zero.”
“I wouldn’t have failed you,” I said. “There’s some actual critical thinking there. That’s a lot more than I got from most people.”
“That’s sweet,” Aubrey said. “And I want to thank you again for everything. I learned a lot. Maybe you’ll even let me get you a coffee.”
“I told you,” I said. “I can’t.”
“Yes,” she said. “You can. I dropped the class.”
“What?”
“It’s going to kill my GPA. I'll just take the withdrawal penalty and be done with it. I can still get into something else. Now how about that coffee? Are you up for it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “For sure.”
***
We did not, as it turned out, go to the coffee shop. She took me to her place, one of the row-houses just off campus with a slanted roof and eyebrow dormers. She lived here with a few other young women. None of them seemed to be at home. Her room was on the ground floor. There was a desk, a dresser, and a twin-bed. The closet doors doubled as mirrors. A window looked out over the backyard, and sunlight poured in.
We sat on the bed and kissed for a while. Her kiss had a bright taste. Then Aubrey got up and closed the curtains, so just a thin tine of light shone in onto the bed. Smiling, she pulled her sundress up over her head. She wasn't wearing a push-up bra. In fact, she wasn't wearing a bra at all.
Some people make a big deal about breast implants. Personally, I don't have any issues. I don't think of them as “fake tits.” While they are sometimes a bit uncanny or glossy, they are as real as their effects. And contemplating the perfect, protuberant globes on Aubrey's chest, the effect was a pronounced erection that distended the front of my jeans.
Aubrey saw that erection and sank gracefully to her knees. She took my zipper between her thumb and forefinger and slowly lowered it. She reached into my pants and claimed my cock, gently wrestling it out. She hefted it in her tiny, hot hand, and then pecked at the very tip with her smiling lips. Her tongue poked out, its tip tracing the foreskin and the upper venations. She slowly ravelled back the foreskin and traced her lips along the crown of my cock. Soon, the empurpled glans glistened with the tracings of her spit. She opened her mouth and abruptly took three quarters of the length in one go. Her glasses slid down, and she pushed them back up to the bridge of her nose. She did this periodically as she sucked my cock. All the while, I squeezed her implants, as if spurring the dick-sucking movements of her head. I cast occasional glances to the full-length mirror, the little college girl postured perfectly pertly, naked on her knees sucking cock in the sunny afternoon, and me, with my hand in my pocket, contemplating her sucking my cock.
She laid down on the bed on her back. As she crawled back, her legs opened, displaying a vadge like a halved peach, plump pussy lips glistening in the tine of sun that traced the untanned span of flesh around her mons. I crawled into the diamond-like perimeter of her legs and jammed my tongue into that esculent cunt. She tasted like salty, slick candy. My tongue lapped manically, auto-piloted by passion. Aubrey whelped. As her torso writhed with waves of pleasure, it was as if her pussy was wringing itself out.
Smeared in saliva and secretions, she was more than ready for my cock. She told me as much. I crawled up onto my knees and guided my member between those pudgy pussy lips. Soon, I was mired sweetly. Soon, she'd rested her pretty ankles on my shoulders. In the mirror, I locked eyes with myself, gaze concentrated as I fucked her, lips pursed. She looked over, too, mouth in a gaping smile, eyes fluttering. I watched myself lean in and bear down, pressing her sleek shins back all the way to her collar. We were almost forehead to forehead.
“You like it? You like it?”
“I fucking love it, I love it, I love it!”
Her manic, murmured mantra trailed off into a keening wail. Her brow stormed with a pleasured frown, and she hollered out as she came. I eased back, and, as I accelerated my pace anew, I wrapped my fists around her nimble ankles. I churned my member deep into her—as deep as I could go—and, with my arms, manipulated her sprightly legs back and forth as if I were a cross-country skier. She laughed through her moans.
Still gripping on her ankles, I pulled her legs sideward and she rolled over onto her stomach and up, her beautiful hind pressed out in full splay. I buried my face in her pussy, nose squarely in her ass. Her anus had a chokecherry musk. I moved my tongue up into it, the salivating tip circumnavigating her pristine chokecherry Cheerio. Saliva ran in rivulets down toward those fat pussy lips. Those rivulets eased my re-entry. I fucked her doggy-style for a while, gripping up mounds of milky flesh on Aubrey's heart-shaped hind. Soon enough, my hands found their way into her hair, gripping it, pulling back. She didn't bridle at having her hair pulled. She snickered saucily. Braced as such, I quickened the pace of my fucking, issuing brusque thrusts in which my thighs and crotch percussed her ample ass. From time to time, I'd let up, letting her circle that ass in what was essentially a slow twerk atop my enveloped cock. Eventually, she pushed back, and I laid down on my back while she turned to face me, feeding my cock up into her pussy.
With the soles of her pretty feet staked in the sheets, she bounced up and down on my cock, globe-like breasts in an almost imperceptible quaver. Eventually, she hit her knees, smothering my cock in her tight, muggy vadge. She circled her hips tirelessly. Her hands played in her hair, stringing it out, spooling it around her wrists. Faster and faster she went around, and then bore down—up and down—fucking my cock until it was coated in her slickness. Then those sleek calves pressed up, and, sliding a finger her under her clit and stretching that sweet flesh upward, mouth at full gape, she let out a brief, hot effusion that pattered hotly onto my abdomen.
“I want to taste my pussy,” Aubrey said sunnily.
I stood up, feet sinking into the mattress. Her mouth found my cock. Slick with her juices, I slid deep into her gullet. She was her own best lube, her head speedily moving up and down on my member, eyes closed behind those big frames. I steadied myself with one hand on the bulb of her shoulder. My other hand steadied the base of my dick between the curl of my thumb and forefinger, keeping it squarely ensconced in her mouth as her head rifled back and forth. She was slurping back, getting a good taste of her nectar, and I envied her. I gripped her by her hair, pulled her mouth off my cock, and hunched down to kiss her fiercely. My tongue was profligate, lolling around in her hot, sticky mouth. That kiss tasted saccharine.
She drew back, coughing out ropes braided with saliva and the sweet secretions she'd sucked so as to reclaim. She placed tiny kisses along the length of my cock, which ran parallel with her thin little smile.
“Are you going to come?”
“Pretty soon,” I said. “I want to fuck your tits first, though.”
“Okay,” she said, then fell back in cruciform toward the foot of the bed.
I kneeled atop her tiny, cylindrical waist, pushing my member between her implants. Squeezing her round breasts together, I pushed forward and back between those sleek, spheroid hillocks, keeping my eyes locked on Aubrey's, even as I sped up the pace. Saliva and secretions served as my lube, enabling a rapid glide between her breasts. Aubrey's smile was as tireless as her hips. She put her hands on her breasts, thumbing either nipple, and squeezed her titties together tighter. As I manically fucked her implants, an involuntary moan coursed out from my throat. I was close and, hearing this, Aubrey beckoned me closer. I shuffled up on my knees, squared myself.
I knelt atop her chest, her implants cushioning by thighs. My dick dangling perpendicular across her pink lips, I kneaded my glans furiously between my thumb and forefinger. At last, the come surged forth and shot out in arcing jets onto her high cheekbones, her pretty smile, her noble brow, her hair, and most of all onto her glasses. Her dark eyes were open wide, and soon so too was her mouth. As I blissed out draining my seed, I was only faintly aware I was letting out along with it a long, sustained growl. Aubrey unwrapped my fist from my cock and replaced it with hers. She squeezed the final beads of semen from my cock-tip. Come had clotted on the frames of her glasses. A long, opalescent rope decorated her left eyebrow.
I rolled off her and sank into the twisted comforter. She took her glasses off, setting them on the nightstand.
“Tell me more,” she said, “about pure non-dualism.”
I let out a gust of air. I folded my hands behind my head.
“Maya is real,” I said, sitting up. “It’s how god reveals himself endlessly, and it’s how we realize god. And do you know why he does it?”
“Mmm,” Aubrey murmured affirmatively, her mouth full of my cock.
“For his own pleasure. He conceals himself with Maya only so he can have the pleasure of revealing himself. And love,” I said. “Pure love is the only way to bliss.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Aubrey murmured. She drew back. “That’s beautiful,” she said.
I guided my cock, swelling anew, back into her mouth.
We eventually did have coffee, but not before I’d shot another salvo of come deep into her throat. She stirred three whole sugar cubes into mine, even though I’d asked for it black.
***
When Aubrey and I parted ways later that evening, we made plans to see each other again. We never did, however.
I suppose Aubrey went off to medical school, or wherever people go who don’t get in. They return to their anonymous towns and boroughs and neighborhoods, I suppose, to spouse-hood and parenthood. It’s as if they never existed.
But Aubrey was all real, and she’s a realization that reveals herself to me anew whenever I taste coffee that’s too sweet, and whenever I pull chokecherries off the branch to chew and swallow whole, seed and all.