“I wasn’t there, but I can feel the pain,” words leaking through her heavy lips. “Pain, if only you’ll call right this minute.”
It isn’t really me you miss. Inviting and inflicting pain are insufficient. You want to understand, to pursue every forensic detail.
“Call.” She tugs hard on the rings. “Help us feed the world.”
Porpoises leap and plankton luminesce. Poor men pull nets by torchlight. I wasn’t there, but…She tugs. Her eyes insist. She raises and lowers one open hand, a hand as rigidly flat as any technician’s rule.
Drinking heat from a tin can, squatting in front of a pretty face, who am I to refute those eyes? I wasn’t there, but I want to see her lap up cold rice, rinse shirts in a bucket, weep beside the wire fence. So I give in, match point conceded. All tracks converge; feast and famine, solitude, solicitude, appearance made weightless, expectation pared — all finish up in pain. Then I click her off.
Getting away like a bug down the slot of a toaster, and staying away. All women want to haunt. Every kiss contains a gift. Each joy may be the last.
51
OCEANIA. I WAKE UP more hounded than haunted. The taste in my mouth is like jetty sludge. Hard sun thuds away, saying the same to me as to someone stranded on an atolclass="underline" Here again, here forever. No breeze, no breakers, ground zero only. I swallow aspirin dry. I say to myself, You really ought to be keeping a diary. In there you could be thorough. You could talk about animal companionship or bitter women or great blind sea depths impenetrable by light. You could write in a forbidden alphabet, with charcoal.
Unfathomable. And just when I thought everything was under control. Law of the desert: Don’t turn around. Anyway, I ought to have suited myself enough by now to the waiting game so as not to need an audience to play to, a little book to fill.
Treading water. I move through the hard, comfortless sun with no determination other than to be on the move. My arms hang limp. Green surgical pants hang low on my hips. I start to remember my sister crying on the beach, stung by…But I click that off. The atoll man goes crazy from too many swipes at an irretrievable life. Forever here, nowhere else — hold on to that and don’t let yourself sink. White clouds hang at the edges of the sky. Shadows hang in abeyance. I press calluses on the soles of my feet, pleased by their thickness. I feel droplets sliding down my neck like seepage from vestigial gills.
Red tide. Drink from the ocean, so it goes, and you thirst forever. Without thinking, I’ve veered over onto the path leading to the well. In a hounded condition, you gravitate to the familiar, and this is a route I can navigate in the dark. How far could I walk without resting? How long could I rest and still be able to stand up? Already I can smell the cows who loiter near the well like cleaner fish around a reef. Scarred and scrawny like Rosing (part of somebody’s write-off herd, I assume), they approach expectantly, with lolling, pebbly tongues, as I climb the fence. I read “help us starve the world” in their eyes; tight gray hide under my hand…But now there is an evil, uncow smell thickening the air, and I’m drawn along like a cartoon hobo by the fumes of a cooling pie. Corpses swollen with gas float in the well water, coyotes beheaded and skinned.
Undertow. My fear is an approximation, the way barnacles resemble teeth. What would the atoll man do, his one water source poisoned? Would he shrug and take another backward swipe? Dusk eddying around the patio, my sister uncorking Moselle and saying, “Do we really need glasses?” Click. Click click. This one doesn’t want to be turned off. Fine. I’ll just climb back over the fence then. Fine. I’m dry all over. My feet break through crusts and the earth below is cool. Continue down and down, immeasurably, unsoundably down, and there will be the last pit where marine debris once landed, layers of shell and bone compressed by the vanished ocean, dry all over.
Sandbar. Rosing greets me with a soft, appealing butt. His waiting ears are angled forward. Under the awning we nibble at air and I describe for him the sabotage of our well.
“Gangrene soup.” I shrug. “Nothing for it now.”
Rosing shuts his eyes, picturing the culprits, no doubt. A couple of sporting boys, welders on a weekend.
“So I asked myself, what would the atoll man do? And I thought, well, maybe he’d hunt for it scientifically.”
Rosing’s eyes remain closed. Probably as he works through variations of goat revenge.
“Dowsing. Hydromagnetism.”
Forking my hands, I demonstrate. Rosing stays slumbrous as a bivalve, but bears study. I note the angle of his horns, their theoretical point of convergence, and plot therefrom at ninety degrees a line to the damp end of his snout. He’s the dowsing rod come to life, far more receptive than any stick. Nose to the ground, comrade! We’ll open the ocean.
Immersion. Charlie Manson promised his children underground fountains of chocolate soda to nourish them during the prophesied race wars. If you can posit buried rivers and caverns of porous rock, then why not a favorite flavor too? Posit a Cambrian implosion. Posit the sucking action of a whirlpool.
Rosing wambles, lacking aim, failing to keep his nose to the ground. He is not to be urged or coaxed. I keep my distance, whirling through one liquid supposition after another. How agile my brain, light as cork on a fast current. Shrivel me timbres. I’m smiling buoyantly. I’m smiling a challenge to the atoll man, cell for cell. I’m ready to drown him.
Neap tide. The spot Rosing indicated was a depression between two ocotillos. I bent over the entrenching tool with ceremony. As I dug — patiently, pacing myself — I noticed compositional changes in the earth, sandwiching of a kind. Sun poured; it was thick. The hole, while it got wider, wasn’t much deeper. Ants bit my legs. Rocks felt numb. I didn’t hear echoing. I didn’t feel the big suction. Following after Rosing again, I lost my shovel on the way. I thought about pants made of seaweed.
Unless glare deceives, I’m back on the well path again. Missing heads and the smell of cows. My sister wiping Moselle off her chin. Footprints that fit. Surf in, surf out, the comforting repetition we keep trying to regain, as though to be babies again with our sea in a sac. Pull back and push in. Never quite arriving but forever here: floating bodies.
52
THIS IS THE HEADLINE I have furrowed deeply in the sand, in letters so huge it can only be read from aircraft passing overhead: MALAYSIA BANS VIDEO GAMES.
Q: Why is this information important?
A: Because the letters are big.
I shrink; I peel myself. I dig up quail eggs and slurp them down. I dream of tomato-flavored icicles and midair neon and wake up with an erection that won’t go away. Or I strike poses in the indistinct mirror of silver Airstream skin, imagine my own skin as a page and the tracks of sweat as something to read.
Nothing moderate or tentative allowed. I am clean. I am decisive as a surgeon. Video games banned, outlawed. I have pulled the circuit boards, yanked the wires. All intervening, interfering material removed. Pure signal only. An unbroken arc from source to target.
Discovery: I can control the air.
It is necessary to set myself out of motion, to disremember the automatic commands I have followed for so long, so many years of willfulness and waste. No more deconstruction or synopsis. Only pure unbroken signal. I open wide and it comes in so loud and clear that I twinge all up and down.