Leaving the Sea: Stories

First Love

I could not sleep until I had labored through a regular lust application performed with motion, gesture, and languageflower. There was no script or dance step to the discipline. I administered it to her whether she was home in the head or away, no matter the score between her heart and the world, whether she swooned or cringed when I held her, or if she gazed into space or feigned sleep.

She received my application with short, gasping tones she made with her own breath. The tones could have been stolen from a song. Every sound she made was borrowed from what was once known as music. It was not clear whether I should have responded with sounds of my own, which I had once used to draw people closer to my body, or any noise I could make to harmonize her noise into something passing for speech, which might then tell us what to do. Her sounds emerged most forcefully when the motion of my lust was pistonlike, an event that often featured my person volleying above hers, as if flying in place, she pinned beneath me, wilting in my shadow; or me behind her, as though driving a chariot, while she carved a location for herself into the bedclothes.

When we pursued the discipline, we fought toward the seizure known as nighttime. Nighttime promised a better statistic of invisibility. It was our primary collaboration, to arrive where we wouldn’t be seen. We fantasized about a place where we could be wet and boneless, where no one would dare attribute a feeling to us. The safest thing to say about water is that it has no bones, unless a person has been trapped in it.

She would announce her seizure some seconds before it occurred. She used American sounds known as phrases. She said: Here I come; and: Good lord. I imagine the sounds she made once passed for words. When I announced my seizure, often by reciting her name, she held my hand. The sun was briefly refuted and I achieved a dark area. At such times I could see the two of us walking through a garden, looking at the world as though for the first time, believing that the flaring, bright obstacles that kept us from seeing deep into the earth were actually only called flowers.

In daylight she wore motion-limiting weights called shoes. She had a wet mistake buried in her chest. It should never have been put there. Someone had concealed a weapon, which helped her manifest a wound. She tried to sweat it free by performing a function called crying. The five knives of her hand were once called fingers. She stabbed her face every time she tried to eat; the cuts released small blasts of clear air that made the day feel cool. The flag of sadness that concealed her arms was known as a sleeve. The flag flew the colors of her body, which there is no longer another name for. The word body used to refer to the evidence left behind that someone had died.

The first time you meet a potential partner presents an opportunity that will never come your way again, the chance to handle them freely, to smell their parts, to disrobe or possibly dismantle them, to mount their hind, to bark at them, to pull back their hair or grip at their scruff and whinny, to rope them to a post, to insert a wire into their back and control them through radio, to scull or tack in their perimeter, to kiss them gently, to hold their face and kiss their cheeks and shelter them from the wind with your wide, hard body.

Your appearance and behavioral strategy play a part in gaining this access to someone new, so it is imperative to keep your person clean and keep his tank and limbs filled with the appropriate fluid, seasonally correct and rich in emotion, to be sure his shoes are hard on top and solid for the long haul, to mind that your own person is posture perfect and can aim his body true, accounting for the possible refractions of light that occur between the people of today, also known as the new wolves.

The shovels we use to cleave the air in two—and possibly reveal a person we might fail against—were once abbreviated as hands. This was when we had two shovels each, and we apparently used them to scoop up objects we thought we needed, or to toss away those that did not please us. When we faced off with a person, the sound of our four shovels colliding produced a shield of silent, wind-free air known as home. This was when there were only two choices how to behave, on or off. We would apparently put some objects into our mistake tunnel, which was still the main opening in the face, and the tunnel was able to convulse around them and propel them deep into the body’s grave, which was then called, I think, a belly. The tunnel often became wet, but it had dry sticks in front known as teeth, to provide a final reflection of every object we buried in our bodies. Those people who wanted to consume us could then take an inventory of our assets simply by staring us in the mouth or, more obviously, putting their mouths over ours in an investigation known as kissing. Whenever she kissed me, she was prying for secrets.

My secret was my lucky bone, worn behind my face for good luck. It was an excellent protection against sorrow. Now seldom seen, at least in the daytime, this bone was once worn as an amulet above the neck to ensure a human appearance. Without it, a person might be considered an accident of light. It is a bone that grows in time with the body and achieves a round shape to best support the face. Some cultures call it a “head” and decorate it with paint and stones, or cover it with veils, gels, masks, and helmets.

In America the head sprouts either soft or coarse hair, features small apologies called eyes, and has a round mistake tunnel known as a mouth. The mouth asks for help by carving wind into short breaks in silence called languageflower. During escape tactics such as walking, the head precedes the person and falsely advertises his mood and what he might say. One of its functions is a decoy event called a smile. The head is better known as a flare for trouble. Some areas called cities feature millions of these flares hovering at eye level, and the effect is blinding. The Spanish word for this is crowd. In America there is a phrase—Bury your Head—which originates from the Dutch and translates, roughly, as: to marry.

In some parts of America the little bone above a man’s neck is considered to possess skills such as pain storage and escape strategies; the bone is suspended above the man as a charm against other people, who would otherwise seize his body and pour themselves into it, a self-camouflaging sacrifice known as a relationship. But other people also use the little bone as a buoy that one should not approach, because someone will die in the space it covers. If you get too close to the buoy, you will be trapped as a mourner. Circling the head is referred to as courtship. It is like chalk around a body before that body has died. It hovers in place and appears attached to the fear spout that was once called a neck. In truth, every man’s body is an announcement of a future disappearance. Just by being in the room with her, I was foreshadowing our separation. My head was simply the point where that disappearance would occur. If we ever need to know what will go away, we need only to look at a person. Anyone.

Sometimes the disappearance can be traced. We conceal a part of the world and it’s called swallowing. Many of the best objects, including the world’s first engine, a fault called the heart, are hidden in the body. It is a competition to hide as much as we can, a form of ballooning that is believed, in some languages, to make us more attractive. We say we love someone, which means we covet the hoard they might be storing in their bodies. While they sleep we reach at their hoard with our hands, an excavation better known as caressing. That is why lovers often say things to each other like: X marks the spot, Come and get me, I have a secret. Having a secret means: I have swallowed part of you and that is why you feel incomplete. Massaging the skin is another way to feel for a secret entry. It is unfortunate that most people do not come equipped with a map and some cutting tools. So much time would be saved. Instead of saying, “Pleased to meet you,” we might make a small incision in the chest, wide enough for us to slip inside if the air will no longer tolerate our presence, if the population in the room is just asking for our omission.

In the current era, the male treasure hoarder uses someone else as storage space for his spoils, in case his own body is looted while he sleeps, a violation certain Americans still refer to as dreaming. There will then be bodies that carry his assets after he has been found out. This grouping was once known as a family. People produced families to disperse the treasure and keep the sniper, who was once mistaken for a bird, guessing. In some American dialects, the word family means “scatter.” Having a family increases the number of targets, cuts down on the father’s risk. With more people for the sniper to shoot at, the father has a better chance of getting out alive. His wife and children function as his bodyguards. This is also probably why relationships are referred to as “bulletproof vests.”

I had been advised by the Authority that a ritual at the outset of our union would create a relationship, which was then seen as a preferable condition. So I sent her some of the water I had blessed for the dedication of our relationship, telling her to have some of it to drink and to apply some as a lotion to the place she least wanted me to discover, so long as this place occurred on or near her own body. The water might protect her, even if I repeatedly touched her or looked at her, which was admittedly going to be my early plan. But if she spilled the water on her father, there would be a chance that I would kill him. It was a favor to warn her against my worst intentions. I wanted to show her my unsatisfiable side, to get the worst part out of the way, but it turned out that it wasn’t just a side, but my entire body, and even the space around it that was unsatisfiable. Wherever I put my body, I left behind areas that could not be fixed. In a relationship every person gives a gift, usually by leaving something out. The best and most cherished gift is to give her the first clue as to why she should begin plotting her escape.

There are men blessed by water, whom women cannot see. This is the only favor water can grant, to cloak our mistakes by adding a layer of reflection to our skin, which helps other people take more responsibility for us, once they see how horrible they can look when we reflect them. We have bodies of water, known also as failures of land, to show us where mistakes are made, because water gathers near error, to magnify it and make everyone feel responsible. This quite natural atmospheric process was once understood as guilt. The apologetic men are laid out flat, ashamed to have ended up a mirror to other men. Dry men have made no mistakes. To look at water is to admit the possibility of error. Some men are still shy around water.

It was her belief that water, taken in drink form, would provide the necessary ballast for her to remain with me. But Americans believe it is unlucky to drink water, because those who do so will live. The body will thrive and grow; and growth, particularly in English, implies movement away from others. The first word for it was escape.

Commitment, on the other hand, is an abbreviation for an inability to move, which is why couples often become heavy together, stiff and slow-moving, eating pounds of food to ensure each other’s immobility. Feeding a lover is like making her swallow an anchor. This is why getting married is described as swallowing iron. Marrying is never referred to as “casting off,” although sometimes the phrase “taking on a passenger” is used.

Relationships fail when the mouth is too small or refuses food. Touching one’s own mouth is the first gesture of masturbation, because it explicitly advertises self-sufficiency. Men grow mustaches and beards to become less attractive to themselves, to decrease the chances of making their partners obsolete. Cultures that eat with their hands are boasting about their lovemaking abilities.

I hoped to find the place she wanted to hide, and I suspected her place was hidden on another woman’s body, someone who sulked in her shadow and answered to a different name. Thus an investigation occurred that featured me, in full color, sounding various skins for her secret place, an action more technically known as intercourse, because the man uses his entire body to listen against the skin of another. Often I was obliged to make lust applications to those host bodies that were possibly storing her mystery. Because I was intent on making the future come true, I looked for examples of her everywhere. The bodies that hosted my intercourse often overlapped with the bodies of the people she called friends. They made altogether different sounds and words, and none of us could produce the sound that, in America, had come to pass for her name.

She sent back some of the water she had swallowed and it was clear that she had related to the water by letting it down her throat. This was water that had trafficked through her person to a place I had not been allowed to see. It had more access. I was jealous of everything she ate and drank. The water she sent back to me came in the form of rain. This was when changes in the air were known as weather, when low-flying bullets were still called friends, and periods of suffering were broken up into intervals called days. Back then, the sun still honored the world’s objects by letting them contribute the occasional shadow to the surface of the world. Every day something fell on me and my temperature changed. Temperature was another way to remind you that you weren’t dying quickly enough; it let you feel too viciously alive. These changes of temperatures were called moods and they had interesting foreign names, but I no longer recall them. I have no memory for anything that happens outside of my body.

I cannot recall the precise words for the phrase: “I’m sorry.”

When I learn these words again, I will never stop saying them.

Fear the Morning

His name had been scratched off his documents years ago. There had been little reason since then to refer to himself, and his rigorous daily schedule kept him from thinking what he might be called if someone addressed him.

In the morning he would make a plate of eggs and dot it with hard cheese. He ate until he was tired, then put his plate in the sink, combed his dry, curly hair until his scalp hurt, then put on his long coat and went out for his tour. Every day the tour followed a different track away from his house, sometimes climbing a hill, other times descending one. He did not wish to see the same people. Their faces troubled him. Any one of them might be the very person waiting to replace him. If he could not avoid a greeting, he said “Hello,” and breathed down at his feet while he walked, listening for their departing steps behind him.

Under the coat was a naked body that he fussed at with a special lotion. He thought of it as his own body. A pocket of the coat was torn through at the bottom, allowing his hand to spread lotion while he walked. If he saw a person, his feeling faded, no matter how fast his hands moved. People were no good for his feeling, but he could not have the feeling alone at home, either, so he risked sighting them at large in the world around his home. He preferred to see trees, but forests were no good. Too many trees suggested too much possibility, and his feeling faded. He had to be moving along at a swift pace, with trees looming in his periphery but not surrounding him, clusters of green growth like clouds of algae bursting in the air. Then he could massage his area until his stomach steamed with friction and he became hungry for lunch.

He took his meals in the center of town. Ham was his preferred dish, especially in the winter, when it was shaved transparently thin and rolled inside flavored paper straws. Usually he washed it down with a steeped citrus drink, depending on the season. He liked berry drinks, but his town rarely produced berries, and if a berry-flavored water was ever made, it was bitter and gritty in his mouth. Mostly his town sold long hollows of bread lathered in fruit. The meat was flown in from the north. He ate a meat that had traveled high in the air.

After lunch, he walked home for his appointment in front of the television, where he watched a daily show that concerned people who fought to board a very small boat. Once aboard, they had to row themselves to a pre-agreed target, often an island, but sometimes a town that fronted a river. He had his favorite characters, usually the redheads, because they were seaworthy and never backed down from a fight. But he was more interested in the water and how the water made everybody on the show look sleepy. He liked to see people bursting out of it, scrambling onto the lip of the boat, having their hands beaten by the passengers who had already secured a berth, then slipping back into the water. Sometimes the people said things just as their heads entered the water, so the words were partially muffled, and he tried to give his words that same kind of sound. When he filled his mouth with bread, he could sound like one of the strong redheads slipping underwater after a struggle.

In the unspoken-for hours in his afternoons, he delivered phone calls from a hard, gray phone that had been carved into his wall. There was a code he could press into his phone that changed his behavior when he talked. If he prefaced the person’s number with this code, he could speak smoothly and at length from a set of feelings that were not his own. He never wanted to forget these three numbers, so he wrote them on a little white sticker and stuck it to his phone. The numbers he dialed were from a special phone book purchased at a store outside of town. He believed it gave him access to more extraordinary people than the ones he had to see on his morning tours. When someone answered on the other line, he opened the conversation by apologizing to them, using their name and a special, sorrowful voice, which often led them to believe he was someone else. His phone book seemed to have many numbers of people who were waiting by their phones for a man to call and apologize to them. In the afternoons, before his special dinners, he was often this man. Minutes would go by before the people discovered he was someone else, and even if this made the people angry, he often learned about who he had been, and he felt like someone else for a little while, which was so hard to feel for very long, and always made him a little bit hungry.

He had to signal for his dinner with a special light he pointed from his window. Then there might be a crackling knock at the door, as if someone had stepped on a small bird. Sometimes the knock on the door came before he signaled with the light, but he knew at least not to eat his dinner until he flashed his signal.

Dinner was never much other than a plate of potatoes run under a broiler until it blistered with heat. The woman who brought his food stood near him and touched his cheek, and he would endure this gesture until she had left the plate on the table and closed his door behind her.

Once he ate his potatoes, he knew that very little could happen, and that, with some special effort, and much thought, he could arrange things so that even less might happen, until possibly nothing would, a circumstance he might very well be rewarded for. It was a matter of skill. He would perfect this skill until he had arranged for a situation that would go on for as long as he wanted it to, in which absolutely nothing occurred. Even if people defied his wish, and walked the streets and roads in greatcoats spreading lotions over the territory, he knew that no one would see them, or, if they did, they would never remember it. The disruption would seem dreamlike, with artificial colors. The people would be made of bark.

His bedtime came when the potatoes still sat high in his stomach but he could not keep his eyes open. He unrolled a flannel sleep shirt. He ran a toothbrush through his mouth. He coughed his special words into the speech hole in his bedroom.

Last came the only ritual that might help him disappear. If he pressed the three-digit code into the phone again, he could, with any luck, become someone else before he went to sleep, which meant he could give the gift of rest to his other person, the one that he secretly oiled with his hands while out touring, the one he was seducing into taking his place in the great world. He could give his other person a chance to dream and sleep and wake up and toss and turn in the sheets. Then maybe there was a better likelihood that, instead of himself, it would be the other person who would wake up, and something different might happen, something that had not happened yet. He would know what to call himself then. His name would sound very much like an engine does. The other person would be in charge now, and he’d have a very different idea of how things should be done. In this way, he, the first person, the one who had started this, and kept it going day after day with almost no help from anyone else in the world, with the small exception of the woman who brought his dinner, could take a break himself, and hide out close to the new man’s skin, right there on his body, under the long coat that moved near the world’s trees, where the lotion was smooth and soft, and no light could get in. This was where he wanted to be. This was why he entered a code into the phone and slid deep into his soft, clean bed, waiting for morning.

Origins of the Family

A man and woman sometimes gather in the evening to discuss their future projects together, a conversation that takes place in a hushed, bone-free room. They tap the walls and call out some of the more popular names for people, to make sure they are alone. The names they recite are shaped inside a bone hollow called a mouth. Their conversation most often freely circles the shame zone that hovers over the table. They take turns arranging the net of bones their skin is concealing so their bodies appear to move. She lifts a small bone resembling a finger, he slides a long, heavy one into place over a chair and expels hot temperature called breath. When they discuss children, they are trying to discover if they can create a new set of bones together. Their difficulties are architectural: can the house support the bones, or will structural changes be required? They submit sketches across the table, editing each other’s ideas about the new person. When they rehearse the names they might call it, and illustrate their visions of its ultimate shape and color, each of them listens privately for a vibration in their bones, pressing their fingers into their flesh to determine what they might feel.

Bones prevent the heart from beating so loudly it would deafen the person. They were first called listening sticks, because they absorbed the body’s sounds and allowed men and women to hear their own voices during intricate skirmishes in the home. This is why settlers erected mothers-of-bone in loud rooms such as the kitchen. Only later did people bag and animate the mothers so that they might move from room to room, accomplishing broader functions within the family. Boneless people did and said little. They were not capable of fighting. They could hide inside each other’s bodies. Without bones, a person, upon entering a room, would deafen the people stationed there. He would have to throw blankets in advance of his body, to baffle the sound he was bringing, an application of fabric that amounted to laying a heavy rug in a room, but sharp-bodied girls could be smothered in this way. Sometimes instead of blankets he would throw another person into the room ahead of him, which was referred to as “turning on the light.” These people were said to have a blinding effect, particularly if they arrived unannounced and appeared to be strangers. Loud people have thin, hollow bones. They can be broken in half and discarded into a pit. They snap as easily as children do, but they will not burn as long in a fire. If a loud person tries to store his voice in a jar, he will not be able to, unless the jar is a mouth worn on the face of someone in his family, which he must prize open with his fingers while shouting deep into the hole there.

One year, people stacked bones outside their houses to absorb the sound of the police, who were talking loudly and pounding on the door. If no bones were available, an entire person was used, who would be escorted away and locked in a room. Every family kept a young person for this purpose. Often they sent him out on thieving missions smeared with a special scent, to attract the police’s attention. Now the police are required to carry a small bone in a polished black toy bucket called a holster. If they wish to be heard, they must hurl the bone away from themselves into a field, creating a current of deafness in the air that passes for weather so mild, even birds can fly in it. When birds actually manage to lift off without instantly listing into the colder turbulence that circles a house, where they might crack open over a roof, it indicates the looming presence of the law, and many family conversations grow nervous at the first sign of birds, with fathers sticking their hands out into the air, to test it for sound. When men cough or talk into their hands, they are praying to their own bones, hoping to change their minds about something. The police ride velvet-covered bone cages called horses. Horses are sad because they hear their own bodies sloshing and cracking. They produce an aggressive, highly pitched physical weeping known as galloping, and in this way spread their feeling across large fields of grass.

People have bones so insects won’t flood their limbs and inflate their bodies to normal size. A person who is insect-controlled often sits and drinks tea, though an insect fluid called blood flows quickly beneath her skin. She has an accurate walking style and can converse in one or more languages. She sleeps lying down, and uses a filter called hair to attract her mates. The small people in her house call her “Mom,” and she answers them by collapsing the tension in her face, a surrendering of control that passes for listening. When she pursues an upper-level-difficulty slalom run of housekeeping throughout her house, she has most likely failed to seal her bones from escape with fixatives called clothing. Her actions become commanded for the good of something larger, such as a naked man who resembles her father, although he might be younger and smaller and weaker, as if playing the part of her husband, though not convincingly. Her motion is voice-activated. When he addresses her, she stands on her toes and lets her arms raise up at her sides. She does a forward bend in the morning to be sure her blood pools at the top of her head. If you sliced her arm open, you would hear a faint buzzing. She has one pair of eyes, and they are often tired and red. When she uses her arms to prop up a document of regret known as a book, her bones form an ancient shape, and a brief, flashing signal is sent out through the window into the fields beyond her house, where the hive is.

If you possess the long, white tubing implements meant to prevent people from squeezing through small holes and disappearing, you have boning material, and you can begin to secure people to your team, insuring them against sudden departure. Bones of this sort were devised by Father so his children could not hide from him. They would no longer be able to collapse their dimensions and defy the restrictions he had built into his house. He had grown tired of a pocket-sized person devoid of shape who could not be broken. He wanted a guarantee, a chance to break something he could not fix. “Having a talk” with Father meant submitting oneself to the insertion of these bones, no matter how much it tingled.

When children fall into a well after being yelled at, it is not the power of their father’s voice that has sent them there, but their desire to enter a long, hollow bone in the earth and become cleansed of sound. They would prefer to hide within their own bodies. When children are yelled at by Father, their skin tightens into a grimace over their faces because their bones have grown swollen with his voice. Most facial expressions result when the bones of the head respond to the difficult sounds produced in the outside world. Churches were originally built of bone as an answer to hard noises that troubled people, but the small fathers and mothers who were envious of the unused space around their own bodies entered the churches with hammers and cups. They positioned themselves near the walls and took stones from them, attempting to grow taller, wider, bigger. When you pray with your hands against your face, you are trying to add bone mass to your head, which has most likely become weak and crackable, thinning out over time. When a priest lays his hands over his congregation, he presses his thumb into the soft part of a person’s pudding until the person weeps his full share.

Bodies are hidden in the earth after they have finished breathing so that our towns will appear more peopled to the birds that fly over them, scanning for a weakness in our communities. Their vision does not tell them who is living or dead. They only see the depth of our ranks, namely, how many persons deep we are, what type of hard, white scaffold supports the town, whether our underground people have an organized or chaotic shape. The more buried bodies, the better. The dead, if buried together, create the illusion of an army. A latticework structure is offered for those who still stand aboveground, who must walk over the bones of former people with no guarantee that the earth will not collapse beneath them.

At certain moments, men, women, and children fall to the ground, breathing weakly, clutching their throats. Sometimes these moments are predicted and planned for, which means a hole is prepared in advance and a report is written. After a person dies, his bones still function. Although bones become dry, and the marrow can be scooped from them, and they can be broken in half even by children, a person who was once built of them, however tired and still he might seem, can at least drape a skin over himself and block the important doorways of the major houses in the town from the approaches of nearly anyone, including the people who live there.

Against Attachment

I was fortunate to find a person who would solve my solitude. She would use her hands on my person until it was soothed. She would chop at my husk, then spoon out my sorrow and be its keeper. I located her at a castle. My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. It was a tangled area of preening people, mostly diaper free, with real feet and hands, and each was traveling alone. You could ask about the weather there, and people would answer you in English.

The great Horace, childhood lover to Homer the Blind, when asked of love and its effects by the town council, who were conducting their Survey of the Mysteries, gathered his robes, stood up, left the auditorium, and never spoke again.

The time was technical summer, a season that had been achieved by nature so many times that a clotted arrangement of birds created splotches of ink called shadows, and whole days passed without gunfire. Shadows were blind spots that everyone shared. Graves were called homes, and apologies known as writing were carved in their surface. Rotten bags were called people. Milk was never sprayed from a fire hose at children until they skittered over the pavement like weevils, but the children wore shields of clothing regardless, and the people who guarded them were often trembling.

There was a chance, however remote, that we—among all the others who also famously walked the earth—would not breathe again, however much our mouths looked wet and ready for action. If we pictured ourselves in the future, we were forced to imagine our coffins shifting on a loosely soiled terrain, slipping into holes.

In short, it was necessary to establish a romantic alliance and to publish the results inside each other’s bodies. When we referred to our fear as “tomorrow,” our only solution was to seek aerial sensations with each other. Although we pretended to choose whom we would destroy in the name of a relationship, we were instead forced at each other, feigning admiration for the way our bodies lacked fat, hair, and color.

Together we conceived of solitude as a math problem, such like the ancients must have encountered when they saw two different suns in the sky: a daytime sun that was hot and burned out the eyes, and an evening sun that was cool, pale, and white. Each would soon have its own name, but for the time being the suns were anonymous, and they careened to a complex logic, and they were frequently misunderstood. People often died of heartbreak because of them. Maps of the dead called snowdrifts gathered in the mountains. An obituary water called rain fell everywhere, and the ancients—desperate, scared, vain—turned the hammered surface of their faces into it, so that none of it could reach the ground.

Questions we did not ask, because Ovid already asked them so well: In what way would commitment to each other differ from a commitment against our own solitude? In what way would our daily compromises, the shifts against our own nature, build into bulldogs of resentment that we would soon unleash upon each other? In what way would our displays of affection toward each other differ from advertisements of what we most wanted done to ourselves?

A relationship between us—two average-sized people who could not be mistaken for chess pieces, however much our faces looked chiseled and wooden and mishandled—would be a chance to mutually seek solutions to the dilemma of solitude. Other people, we discovered, had a plus or minus charge, similar to those colored beads called electrons. To be around the minus people was to have one’s solitude erased, whereas the plus people seemed only to add to the solitude, which had a limitless growth potential, a way of swelling inside the skin, creating an aroma called disgust. If one of us experienced a deepening solitude in a crowd, a so-called Spanish Moment, we might conclude that a majority of the crowd was plus capacity, so overflowing with their own solitude that they could do nothing but share it with whoever entered their sphere. These people hated mud. They did not wish to be killed.

We were partners in a puzzle, then. The difficulty level was 9, or 9.3. There were no clues. We would have to wait until we parted from each other to discover whether we had won or lost. This was incentive enough to over-explore each other’s eccentricities, to enter a race toward bored familiarity.

This took place in an area known as the world, where people cannot fly. Cocoons called nightgowns adorn the bodies there. When the cocoons are lifted, an investigation occurs, and the result is often moist, a smearing on of fluids. In this country, we breathe into each other’s genitals with a periscope called a straw. We blow on them. We make a fan out of notebook paper and wave it over the area, using the age-old excuse that we simply love to read, and what better narrative than the one inscribed upon the genitals of our familiars? We play pipe organ music out of a stereo that looks like an old wooden shoe. Sex is not an event that someone is invited to, however much we sit by the phone anyway, waiting. There has been so much moisture between the people that streets have been built to collect the runoff.

We met inside the clear globules of fat known as air. There was no milk in the room. Swimming skills were not required. There were no weapons. A pocket-sized emissary named “Joe” introduced us. I did not love myself.

Afraid of the predictability of my attraction, I started a project called “I don’t like you.” It was intercut with other popular projects, such as “I am tired and scared” and “You are so beautiful that I am afraid to have sex with you.” Her project revolved around the “Everything’s fine” model. She held her cookie up high, and I jumped and touched my cheek to it. Through several mutual misunderstandings, we grew to need each other, a need that could be charted on a calendar. The parchment was signed with an evidence stick. Many children clapped.

It was agreed. She would chop at my husk, and I would begin publishing my name inside her mouth.

Courtship is based on hatred, according to one of the great thinkers, Robert Montgomery, a man who ate a series of meals, fell down a well, and then died. Hatred was a tactic the Phoenicians used when they met an enemy, and it has been the reigning wartime model ever since, however plain, however obvious. She and I, my solitude defeater, were no more enemies than any ancient man and woman bagged in cheap skin and fading hair, yet a battle was afoot, employing weaponry such as indifference and laughter, kissing and ambivalence, rubbing upon each other’s bottoms with a bath brush, and waiting to see who would have the honor of starting the first argument. The goal was not to admit that we each suspected a future dependence upon the other. We commenced a theater of attractive indifference in order to seal our obligation to each other. We engaged in a strenuous denial of need. A holiday might one day be made out of this behavior. It would be called “Monday.”

It was not illegal to know each other. It was just difficult. We used different cities as launching pads, when cities were linked by layers of chuff called roads and roads were not called devil carpets.

The ancients were so disloyal that they died and never thought of their loved ones again. Homer called dead people “traitors.” The greatest loves were simply forgotten, and the bodies of leaders and slaves alike began to melt. The love between two people has never been stored in a vial and sold in a shop, yet sometimes she and I, the two of us, on the threshold of no longer caring for each other, a precipice called the Waking Moment, lay together in the bed shaking at each other’s bodies as though we only had water inside us that could be easily poured away. We used a wringing technique called a hug and squeezed at each other with great force, hoping that somewhere on a floor beneath us there was a drain big enough to take the water part of this stranger we had been loving and wash them away, quite far from us, and then further still, until we could only hear the faintest sound, which we might mistake for a river.

Leaving the Sea

It was before I discovered I could survive on potatoes and salted water, before my wife started going for long walks into the thicket, before our house started leaning, started hissing when the wind came up after sunset, a house no different from a gut-shot animal listing into the woods, a woods no different from a spray of wire bursting through the earth, an earth no different from a leaking sack of water, soft in the middle and made of mush, when my children used their spoons to make a noise if I spoke to them, clashed their spoons in my face when I spoke, stood small before me using their utensils like swords, whether my words were hummed or sung or shouted, whether I was kind or cold of voice, which was before I felt the cold finger hanging between my legs, a bit of ice high on my inner thigh, a patch of clammy coolness, instead of a hot and ample limb that could dilate if I so much as smelled her, when smell was a theft of wind, when wind was a clear blood leaking from trees, before my mother began saying it was so difficult whenever she tried to navigate so much as some stairs, a sidewalk, the doorway to a home, before I likened waking up to a car crash, equated walking to a free fall, working in the yard to grave digging, cooking food for the family to slathering glue on the walls, dotting the glue with beads, with jewels, when I likened weeping to camouflage, opening mail to defusing a bomb, when my wife began to say “Only if you really want to,” before I developed the habit of pretending I wasn’t looking at her, when the eye was an apology hole, when the face was a piece of wood under the couch, when the couch kept the body from crashing through the floor and beyond, when beyond was something I had yet to think about at night, when unspeakable movies played through my head, before I went to such lengths in town meeting situations to cheat my face to show my good side to whomever might be caring to look, to anyone even accidentally looking my way, believing that if only my face was viewed from certain angles then I would win something and something would come true for me and the words that broke the seal of saliva between my lips might mean something to someone and be actually useable, the way a shirt is useable as a barrier, the way a piece of wood is useable as a weapon, before I realized that my good side was competing fearsomely to duplicate my bad side, matching and maybe surpassing it, so that the bad side of my profile appeared to be on the advance, folding over the border presented by my nose and mouth and brow, rising up my head like a tide, when a tide did not refer to the advance of water, when most words had yet to wither, when their meaning was simply not known, before I flexed my arms if my wife happened to pay out the hug I sometimes still suffered to ask for when we encountered each other in the hallway, and then noticed that she noticed me flexing my arms, yet hoped anyway that I could harden myself under her grasp and impress her with my constant readiness, when I tensed my stomach if she gestured to touch it, in case her fingers sank into me as though I were a dough, so that if she was ever near me I would contract, clutch, convulse, at first deliberately, then later out of habit, a set of twitches triggered first by her presence, then her smell, then just evidence of her person: shirts, purse, keys, photos, her name, seizure-inducing, threats to my body, when I had yet to conceal the terrible territory known as my bottom to anyone who might see it, including the children and adults and dogs of this world, whom I pitied by wearing big pants, even to bed, letting my shirts drape over my waistline to serve as a curtain for the area, when clothing served as a medical tent, an emergency service, before the phone started ringing one time only, the doorbell chiming off-key in the morning to reveal no one standing at the door, mail appearing with empty pages inside, little stones clicking against the window, footsteps fading on the lawn, scuffling sounds, rustlings in the hedge, all of us always at the table, in our beds, our rooms, at the door, somewhere, unfortunately always locatable, lost-proof, when there was never any going below the radar or keeping off the map, every person and noise accounted for, before I could hear everybody swallowing the food that I made, could hear the corpse sounds their mouths made, as though everyone were eating a microphone, the food going into their bodies and dropping there in the dark like stones, when I planted objects inside these people who were supposed to be my family, who had conspired to look enough like me to serve as a critique of my appearance, and these objects were not being digested, rather they were eavesdropping, spying for me as I positioned myself elsewhere, sitting on the couch with cookbooks or catalogs or magazines or books, when reading was the same as posing for a picture, modeling yourself for the book so that you will be seen as you wish to appear, when looking at pictures was the same as swimming underwater, before I discovered the flaw with my teeth that I confirmed every time a mirror was near, checked as often with my tongue, whenever I needed a reminder that my chew pattern looked like footprints, discovered others checking it, their eyes never on my eyes but always cast down at my mouth, confirming the flaws of my face, the vein in my nose that looked penciled in, the unfortunate curve to my fingers that blunted my hands and promised no hope that they could ever again keep hold of a cup, a bowl, a plate, some money, some hair, before my private limb was diagnosed as crooked, before I ever, as a regular practice, got down on my hands and knees, took myself out of the world of the standing people, surrendered my altitude, dropped down into table position, burying toys and letters in the yard, chipping at asphalt with a spoon, cleaning the hidden parts of the toilet, chasing my children on all fours outside in games where Daddy is a bear or dog, so that they could jump on me and ride on me and kick into the place where I would have gills if I were something better that had never tried to leave the sea, something more beautiful that could glide underwater and breathe easily, on my hands and knees at work looking for files or papers or reports, on my hands and knees crawling up to my wife in the bath, on my hands and knees in the closet, in the kitchen, in places like home where the action seems best viewed from ground level, where the action has ceased and a person can retire from view, right where the dirt starts and the air ends, the last stop for falling things, where things come to rest and get lost, on all fours as a strategy against vertigo, to be someone who has already toppled and can fall no further, is already down, low, at sea level, but not yet underwater, so that someone could come up to me and accurately say, “Man down!” before it was safer to be a person, one who had to go by automobile to view the people known as his parents, before viewing times were established with respect to his parents, days of the week with certain times and restrictions, such as when the two of them would be sleeping, or priming their bodies for sleep, or dragging themselves out of bed for the purpose of sitting there on their couch on display to my children, who could arrive at the location that contained my parents and examine them, a procedure that passed for a conversation, for play, for affection, a deep examination of these old people who were somehow, and dubiously, affiliated to them, which was well before the man came, before the man came, before the man came, knocking at the door one night, a tight report against the wood, letting himself in, sitting with us at the dinner table in the fashion of family, the man a smiler with a better face than mine, getting down from the cupboard a plate for himself, extracting his own place setting from the drawer, which was the first drawer he tried, walking right to it, so familiar, sitting with the kids, talking to the kids, whispering to the kids until they put down their spoons and laughed and used their faces for the man, before he brought his arm up under my jaw one night when I fumbled out of bed to pee, leaving me not even on my hands and knees but on my back, not gasping or hurt or scared, just disappointed, to be on my back in my own house, so that nights thereafter when I groped over to the bathroom to pee even a drop, or stand there with closed eyes and wait until I discovered I had no muscle for the peeing my body was telling me I needed to do, I would keep my arms up to keep from being struck, walked with my guard up, averting my head, waiting to be felled, when even in the daytime around the house I was ready with my arms to block what was coming at me, before I discovered him in my place in bed one evening upon returning from the bathroom, a successor where my body had been, holding on to my sleeping wife, when sleeping refined your argument against your spouse, and looking at me from a face that once might have been mine, still well before our house felt thin, not windproof or lightproof or people-proof, but a removable thing that we could not weigh down enough, because, as the man said, we were hollow, though I might not have heard him, since this was still before I heard the airplane, before everything overhead sounded like an airplane, even when I could locate no airplane, just the most booming sound overhead, which stopped getting louder or quieter, as though an airplane were circling, but doing so invisibly, when invisibility indicated objects so close you felt them to be part of your own body, before I started hearing the big sound in the house when I turned on the faucet, the radio, the lights, when I opened doors or windows or jars of sauce to shush the white and gluey food I was offering everybody, and there came the sound, when everything I did seemed to invite more sound in, my motion itself a kind of volume knob, my body a dial, which if I used it would effect a loudness in the house that made life unsuitable, myself unsuitable, the world too loud to walk through, tasks such as walking, a loudness, washing, a loudness, speaking, a certain loudness produced by the machinery of the mouth, dressing for bed, a loudness like preparing for war, lying in bed, an earsplitting, terrible loudness, the noise of waiting for sleep, asking the children to be quiet, itself too much of a hypocritical loudness, my breathing itself, only my breathing, a loudness I could no longer bear, my breathing, my breathing, too loud for me to keep doing it. I was going to deafen myself if I kept doing it, breathing was going to render my head too packed with hard sound, it was too altogether terribly loud. Something very much permanent needed quickly to be done. A new sort of quiet was required. A kind of final cessation of breathing. A stifling. To be accomplished, no doubt, with those often out-of-reach weapons called the hands.