They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.
—William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
I saw all this from really weird places in my life. I'll tell you what I can. Some things I won't be ready to talk about now. I'll tell you about her, everything I can. Then maybe the rest. First her. Watch:
The sea is smoothed out but charged, its blues bleeding off, its greens and browns blinking in transparency. Shivering and on the verge, it licks patterns, perfect mysteries on the lost beach. A long dark calm colors the vein of sky above this interplay. And to it, to this darkened vein, covert clouds, converging, conspiring, are drawn. Baby waves hatch on the surface of the water.
A hush. A flash. Clouds crush. Look at it, look what happens to the sea when clouds spill into it: crystal blue cut with ribbons of jade, rippling and flashing beneath the lightening sky.
Look, look.
Watch the golden rain falling– these showers are purposeful. They hit the beach. Drop on drop they firm to form a wet gold suitcase. On top of the suitcase, from drops of the same stuff, in the same way, she crystallizes.
Her eyes are open, and she's facing the sea. Everything around her is rolling; she drinks the colors, mingles with the grays and greens, the blood red of the trapped sun slowly plunging behind her.
She's sitting there, absorbing the fine mist that has become the air around her and seeps from inside her too. Now she's stretching her legs. Putting her head between them. Quickly. She's bringing it up now, having seen the blue current shock out of herself.
She stretches her arms. Pretty arms and pretty hands and pretty mirrored nails so finely crafted. The seamless mirrored band that was formed with her body has slinked down one arm and now is still, having wrapped itself around a wrist which she tilts a little so as to catch the reflection of her eyes: backgrounds of washed jade flecked with gold flashes. Emerald pupils, off center: twin stars in a forbidden universe.
A slight slip of the wrist and she sees wet lips, milky teeth, a darkening tongue.
She wants to see more.
She puts her wrists together, and the mirrored band slinks from wrist to wrist, glowing and almost disappeared.
She looks up at the sky. It's been waiting for her, absorbed in a game for her pleasure: splashing and swirling colors across itself, drawn and held – dissipating, then new.
She watches for a little time, then gets up, lifting the suitcase by its handle.
Watch her move toward the beckoning sea. Watch golden toes knead wet sand.
As she moves toward the sea, a piece of it, ragged, rises and smoothes itself out to make her a mirror. Seagrass and seaflowers gather to trim it. She's looking at herself. Her body is a smooth wet thing, her hair a mirror running down her back.
She feels a little lost to look at herself, a little funny to see these productions of sea and sky. She drifts to what she remembers of her prefiguration:
First she was a strange twist on strange lips that stilled to hold down a depression that gave just enough space for a returning ache that pushed from tightly wound to brutally exposed. The ache tumbled and threw the twist. Then the ache expanded and condensed into motion that squeezed out the extraneous until, of the twist, only a spark remained, echoing the screams of its creator:
One thing! One thing of sheer beauty! One thing that might transcend this endless vanity!
After that she was heaving and gathering force. She was screams and frenzy and lucubrations while her creator collected his tools.
Spun and flexed she turned into that taut wire... Oh the frustration. The snap. Oh to be there for that snap. And then she was she.
Awake and gratefully insomniac throughout her creation, she was, at one point, flooded by a dizzy calm: she became his blinding exclusive vision, fashioned to confront hallucinations, delusions of illusions.
Finally, she was ground to liquid and spilled into the sea.
The sea didn't reject her, and she could feel his defervescence, his watching, his breath on her as she – his? – was churned sweetly and drawn by the clouds that exploded to execute his release.
And now, here on the beach she feels him hoping he'll never want again, that his vanities have been successfully transferred.
The sea mirror relaxes into itself. The flowers float. She feels a small elastic ache as she turns so easily from the water.
She gets a little lift from her first shiver of the sensation of recognition when she sees a man standing on the beach watching her with a knowing and growing fear.
He's wearing somecolor shredding slacks and a sunpure t-shirt over a dark long body that wants meat but not tone, not sinew. His hair looks sunbleached and has grown, curling, up and out instead of long. He's either cleanly shaved (doubtful), or isn't much burdened with facial hair. He rubs dark, dazzled seentoomuch eyes hard with his fists, and now he's watching her (this thing) coming toward him, holding that suitcase, turning her back on the moon rising heavily behind her now in the still twilight, and no longer can he deny that that this (she, it) is not a hallucination, though there have been hallucinations. No longer can he deny that this is not a warning.
Visions of terror — dueling pens, spilling slashing ink, white walls, fields, pages — too many letters, shapes, symbols! — begin to fly out of him. She catches these terrible visions and urges to take them with her to the sea. Instead, she throws them off — they disperse into memory — and inspires the man with a series of deep breaths. She wonders if his dark sunny eyes, which look to me kind of swimmy and jaded, hold something outside her world of water and mirrors.
His face looks solemn to me. Now he cringes, tremors and releases, now decides to look at her as just another face of madness for him to handle.
It's not like this is a surprise. He's been, after all, expecting this to happen. Has seen glimmers of her coming in dreams for as long as he can remember. The weather threatened to unleash just such a shock for some time. Clouds blended and spread and set just above the water, casting strange animate codes on its surface. Whispering winds. The quality of the rain on his skin. The air so thick and quiet. Hazy days and hazy nights where sleep and wake blend too easy. The sea barely rolling. Like glass in the day. Like glass in the night.
The fact of the matter is: he knows he came tonight to wait for her. Was waiting for her when she came. It was all he wanted to do, what with mad and desperate accelerations inducing him constantly to an end. Always escaped and afraid to go home.
If only I could believe for a while/believe for a while/ believe for a while... A constant echo. An odd sensation.
To find something like this.
She's moving in closer to him now and he holds his hands out. Now he's feeling her skin so crazy cool. He runs his hands over her, can't stop feeling her. And now he's holding her hand, starting to talk to her.
His tone is Confidential. He thinks she doesn't want to talk, and thinks he knows exactly where she's coming from.
If only I could peel through all her troubling layers. Ahhh, who needs it.
They move down the beach, she quiet, he talking calmly, darkness bridging the gap between it and them. They cover uneven ground, windswept and mingling lightly with the sand, the fine mist, the moonbeams, the sun's soft fade, the crepuscular drench. Confines eased. Alone in their world. Despumating creatures, like gentle dreams, their eyes reflect everything, like the calmest easy calm.
Hit with a stripped comprehension, he stops under the moon, higher now, a bright darkness coming on, to look in her eyes, try to see his reflection. He's reaching out to a madness, still, deeper. He looks away, shaking it off after absorbing the velvet reek of it. They press on, the night, thick with haze and breeze gone still, closing in around them. He wonders how far it will take him.
Trembling lightly she concentrates on absorbing herself into the man's voice until she's listening closely to the syllables and intonations. The skin of his hand feels like air forced through a small jet.
They're almost to his place.
"I smell it," he says, fingers digging into the soft flesh of her wrist. "Can you smell it?" His nostrils brace to the teeming green and brown smells of so much live and dead plant matter, to the smells of feasting hyperorganic growth and decay that pervade his home and that he himself is starting to reek of.
"It was wild at first. When it started. Started to go bad," he tells her. "Everything around here, on my property, started growing very hard and very fast. I was fascinated by all of it. Thought it was me. That I was controlling it. The speed of growth. Everything. Out here with no one to talk me out of my bad ideas.
"Soon I realized that my house was changing too. Growing. Not aging like a normal house ages, but remodeling itself. I had to know it all along. Small things. Shiftings in the night. Things easy to deny. But I couldn't deny for long. Rooms sprouting in rooms. Invisible, pulsing barriers knocking me down. Doors opening to nothing...
"Can you think of it? Heavy vines busting through the windows. Broken glass. So much broken glass. Heavy vines holding shut my doors from the outside. The Obscene Garden menacing me night and fucking day.
"I always knew it was gonna be something like this," he says, stopping to catch his breath.
"She's gotta know I'm crazy," he says, and putting his hands on her high gold cheeks moves her face close to his. "You give me a good feeling," he tells her, grinning and toothy. Now he's remembering watching her fall from the sky with the rain, remembering watching her gaze at her reflection in a mirror of sea. What is this to make me forget that, even for a few minutes, or however much time has passed between then and now? Good god, what time is it? Sweet madness, hello again. What is this to make me forget my days and my nights? Was I thinking of her as a real girl?
More of the same, kid. She's only more of the same.
"If they'd called when I asked them to. Just made the call like I told them. Just once. Just listened to me once. One time, boys and girls, just one time. The role was mine, made for me. Misappropriated because of one call. One call that wasn't made to get made." He raves on, plagued by pockets of sanity in which he wonders: how won't I think of her all the time when this is over?
Look now. He's ready to face the familiar aberrations of home.
He leads her through his treacherous and harshly lit foreground. "Obstacles," he tells her, above the buzz and din of life condensed. "Watch it, kid, sweet kid," he says, gripping her elbow. "Deadly obstacles. Some big enough to fall into. My flowers. They spit their digestive juices at me sometimes. It's a tease. They want me back in."
He kicks at snapping plants that look hungry for a taste of him tonight, hungry to plunge a hot spike in his flesh.
"This is not something I can take back." His voice is ragged, scratching, as they near a door of his house. "And do you want to know the real bad part of it?" He pauses, drawing breath. "It thrills me, the madness of it, the madnessmadnessmadness thrillsmethrillsmethrillsme."
In his house now. "I don't have a choice," he tells her. His voice is unraveled, now decrescent, now a whisper: "You're part of it, little baby. A carnivorous flower in my carnivorous garden."
"Yes, I got it eventually. I got the drift. The gravity of the implications. The scope of the ramifications. Too late though." He's leading her down a transparent hallway.
"It's wicked the way I live. But it's mine. My murderous child. But that kind of thing wouldn't bother you.
"So, if you've had enough of the tour, let's go to my room."
His room is a seamless mirrored tunnel, low lit and bare.
She puts down her suitcase and begins to spin, her hair picking up flecks of light and space.
He watches her: a little weary, a little knowing.
Now he's rushing her, holding her against a mirrored curve. And she is molten, and she is liquid, and she is cool.
He guides her down with him. Smoothes her to sit on the mirrored floor and then sits across from her. He looks, from my vantage point, hypnotized by her gold dipped nipples. He stares at them for too long and then finally asks: "Do you have milk in these?"
I snicker. She doesn't reply, but I imagine her voice an amplified transfrequency flow. He steadies himself and puts a finger in her mouth. He taps the tip of her tongue, which is not entirely responsive, but does flicker up slightly to brush the first little tap. Now he's tasting his finger and wrinkling up his face a little. Now he's stretching her out on his mirrored floor and sucking from one of her breasts. A sweet seadew seeps from his mouth, bluish and phosphorescent. It's illuminating his body and seeping into his brain.
Time passes funny, and he pulls back.
She makes a noise: something between a moan and a scream, but with a rhythm, a touch of music that makes a hot tight knot in my stomach.
The man mumbles something about words as he's spreading her legs and looking between them. He sees the current of aqua light coming from her opening.
"I need to be inside," he says. His voice is low and damp. Like a balmy night can be so damp. He pushes against her with a hand, palm up, until his elbow rests on the mirrored floor.
His hand swims out of her on a gush. He's spread out in front of her, has got a hand under her ass lifting her. He's pushing his head against her until that (face down) is inside her too. Spitting involuntarily he opens his eyes. He's twisting his body around to take in all the angles. He's laughing. The laughter travels up through her, tickles her throat, spreads her tight lips, then hits the air: a spending sound. She clings to it like I cling to the lost traces of a gone lover.
He's taking in all her colors now, all her swirling visions and he's forgetting, forgetting everything but his eyes and their sight – his drug, his only ever drug.
Time shudders still, and he comes out of her; her skin contracts easily. Look at him – eyes dazzled and dazed and poppied. Wouldn't yours be? His head and neck gleam with phosphorescent ooze. Reeking of her sea-sweet scent, he lies on top of her, and nuzzles, with his lips, her ear, and hums something into it that she and I strain to hear, but can't or won't or don't. His odor repulses her a little.
He stands, dizzy, pulling her with him in fusil hold. Holding her, he glimpses flashes of black and white in his mirrored walls. He squints: white paper, streaming ink, black words fly out of the reflective surfaces. Those reflections: white papers, streaming ink, black words swarm and swirl around them, buzzing buzzing buzzing. He's screaming, holding her tighter. She's thinking about the sea. The white papers, the streaming ink, the black words hush and dissipate. Now the mirrored tunnel reflects nothing.
"This is no good," he says and takes her hands and holds them hard (like you hold hard to your nightmares) and tries to pull her somewhere.
I have to get her out of here. Gotta get her out in the night.
She pulls from his clinging. She wants to go too. She moves to her suitcase.
"It's too late. Too late for all that," he tells her. Then caught by curiosity, he decides it would be in his interest to see inside her case. On their knees in front of it. She opens it and they look in. He sees nothing. "Empty horrors," he murmurs, laughing. "Same old empty horrors. I should have known."
She closes the case and picks it up. She's reaching for his hand. Her eyes are pressed with haze, her touch a strong cool shot.
A door leading out opens without any problem. His garden is quelled and serene now. Lovely beneath the moonlight, it lets them into the velvet night.
The moon looks too near, and the man shakes a fist at the swelled and watching clouds that surround it.
They walk on the beach, then move up a path to a sand street decked with puddles, lashed by moonlight. They dance, hydrophilic wanderers, in the puddles, sated and forgetful for a little time.
They move toward the mossy crumbling church (one of the few left). Its doors are open, and in its way they linger, looking in. Lighted candles spit pools of beckoning wax.
She shudders lightly at the degenerate inner walls of the place, climbing with breakdown, at the stripped concrete floor, stained and reeking with blank excretions and blinking revulsions. In a dank corner, two urchins sleep, dark and curly, wrapped together. She wants to wake them and ask them things.
Heavy bitten drape of fading, bloody velvets run the length of the space opposite the door; blindly rumbling muscular outlines stab and claw behind it: Does what lies behind the drape vainly seek the light? Or does it convulse so aggressively in veneration of its obscurity?
She's looking at the man, sees the red mad of panic in his eyes, his nightmares ripely hatching all over him. She looks away from him to look at the few candles lighted, each flame a piece of raging sea.
The man goes in the church and tries to forget her forever. He lifts a thin, lighted candle and in quiet frenzy moves about lighting candles unlit.
Pieces of a hard kind of beauty rise in her with the taking of each small flame.
He replaces that first candle, then stands in front of the hungry drape. He expires a hot breath. He shudders. His body is hitting the concrete. He's jerking and shaking and moaning a little.
She's still standing in the doorway, waking and wondering at the sleepers, the sleep, the restlessness behind the drape. She doesn't want to look at the man anymore. She's turning her back on the scene. She puts her suitcase down and sits on it.
She's thinking about the candle-lit world behind her, breathing in the night, unreasonably still now. Her eyes narrow and visions hit her brain like music:
Sweet lightning spreading in hyperactive mist. Candles hushed then reawakened. Barbiturating lovers spiraled beneath a moon, tranced in pooling embrace. Scented dreams squeezed from tubes. Warms and cools. Damps and freshes of dawns. Suns pushing up from somewhere, glorious and unreal, harbored by skies. A groaning ache: How to become all this? "The heart breaks of beauty," the man had said. His voice courses through the visions, repeats the words, from whispers to yells, until the visions switch, and she sees moaning emaciated throngs and flying limbs jetting blood and too many words etched against too many skies, and she feels like she's slipping under and she likes the feeling. Soon the visions thin into a crystal vein of understanding, and she's removed from her trance by a shift in the air.
She stands and picks up her suitcase. Something in her might be breaking. She runs.
