“Please,” I said in a low voice, and momentarily allowing my free hand to cup the mound of my sex, “please do not stop.”
Her mouth was wet, her eyes were on mine constantly, except when occasionally she glanced out of the porthole or at the heavy helpless grip of my hand that was now the fulcrum on which I was minutely rocking, though still on my side. And throughout this improbable experience, simultaneously gift and ordeal, she was apparently unaware of the incongruity of all she was giving me behind the locked and louvered door.
And then in mid-phrase she stopped. She removed the flute several inches from her small chafed reddened mouth. Wet armpits, steady eyes, no smile, small breasts never exactly motionless, old flute held calmly in a horizontal silver line, the song quite gone, thus she abruptly stopped her performance and spoke to me as if nothing at all had happened.
“I’d like to relieve you now quickly,” she said. “And will you spend the night here in my cabin?”
Then she moved, and in the silence of the disheveled cabin I could hear that all the low notes of the silver flute were still making their serpentine way beyond the porthole and in the transitory wastes of sea and sky.
I was standing in the bow with my feet apart, my hands gripping the wet iron, my collar open and tie loose, my shape defined by the steady pressure of the invisible wind. It was dawn, the sun was bright, my face was wet, the sharp prow was rising and falling steeply, slowly, as if in some slow-motion field of monstrous magnetism. I heard what sounded like a city of distant voices and smelled the faint smells of a landfall, though on the horizon there was no indication whatsoever of ship, shore, island, volcanic cone. Directly beneath my spread feet I felt the rumble of the anchor chain. I heard that terrible noise distinctly and felt the black chains descending link by mammoth link as if we were going to drop both anchors and remain forever in the midst of that natural desolation known only to birds.
But we continued to move up and down and forward in the dawn sea. I composed myself and took deep breaths. I thought of my young friend. And on we sailed.
In the earlier stages of my voyage I contracted a rash. At first nothing more than a constellation of a few blemishes or pimples circling the navel, slowly it reproduced itself on the front of my belly until, months later, it had grown into a thick circular bed of inflammation surrounding the navel like a graft made from the livid flesh of ripe strawberries. No doubt my skin played host to the first spores while from beneath bare arms I watched the small figure of the young woman sitting alone at the pool. The first seed must have lodged in my eye. Or was the rash sexual in nature and intended to affect the organs of the loins, and had it somehow become displaced instead to my receptive belly? What began as a pimple or two has flowered into a large circular field with the navel as the undamaged hub. Soon it will become a constant and faintly breathing girdle of wet contagion.
The two small naked figures were crawling and squirming in the palm of my hand. Though the photograph was in fact safely concealed in my jacket pocket, still the two white figures were clearly there, small and fiercely wriggling on the smooth glossy skin of the palm of my right hand, as if the pink living skin of my palm had become a little bed of photographic emulsion developed and hardened and translucent.
But when I reminded myself of the similar plight of Macbeth’s poor queen, and then rubbed the offending palm against the fruit of my own genitalia, the little image of the old-fashioned naked lovers faded and fled completely away for once and for all.
Her cabin door was wide. She was at her ironing. Wearing only her frayed tight denim pants so that her feet and torso were quite bare, thus she stood with her back to me and her hair pinned up and her iron traveling down a crease in the white pants. I hardly paused but it was enough for me to see the finger marks down the length of her spine, the shadows moving at the edges of the little shoulder blades and in the nape of her neck, the red teeth marks where the elastic band of her underpants had been, the new skin of the upper buttocks shining against the tightness of the leather belt, the fleeting impression of one small naked breast flung partially into view in the exertion of her girlish labor. And my accidental passing was enough to reveal to me that the large and hairy shank of the man stretched out on her unmade bed and reading, waiting for the return of his trousers with his face concealed behind an open magazine and one brutal and hairy leg raised and bent at the knee, belonged not at all to the wireless operator as I had expected but instead to some other ship’s officer newly favored with my young friend’s generosity.
I forced myself to continue on to the ship’s pool where immediately I dove to the bottom and competed for breath, for time, for anguish, for peace, with the other shadows I found lurking there.
In my dream the night is as pure and dark as a blackened negative, and yet I am well aware of the field at the edge of which I stand and of the chatcau which is somehow silhouetted on the opposite side of the field, though the horizon itself is not visible. I stand there, realizing that nothing whatsoever exists in the world except the night, the stone chateau, the waiting field, myself. The chateau and field are thick with significance, though I have seen neither in my past life.
As I cross the field, taking slow careful steps but determined to reach the ominous yet familiar stone building at any cost, I become aware that the entire sloping field has been blanketed with enormous soft round pads of cow manure. They are round as flagstones, thick as the width of a man’s hand on edge, spongy within and thickly encrusted without, soft and resilient and yet able to bear the full weight of a heavy man, though there is always the possibility of piercing the crust and sinking into the slime within. I am picking my way with care and yet also treading on the uncertain field with excitement because no one has ever crossed this field before. But suddenly I know that the shapes lying like dark and spongy land mines beneath my feet are composed not of cow dung, as I had thought, but of congealed blood. With awe and a certain elation I realize that I am walking across a field of blood. And I know too that though I am proceeding toward the chateau, I am also walking somehow backward in time.
I step carefully. I do not want to pierce the crusts and sink to my ankles in coagulated blood, and yet it is necessary to walk across the field, and I do so with pleasure as well as fear. The pads of blood have been arranged on the field’s dark acreage with their edges touching, symmetrically, and to me they seem on the one hand fresh and moist and on the other old and long-ripened like cheese or manure.
Between the far edge of the field and the dark stone facing of the baronial hall there is a ditch. I am positive that the ditch is there and yet I fail to see it and spend no energy crossing it, though I am conscious that I have in fact passed beyond the empty ditch in the middle of the unchanging night.