Hob Broun - Inner Tube

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.

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.

Programming notes: There is viscous, circular music layered like currents of the wind. There are different frequencies of sleep, a reptilian buzz filtered through rock or the slow tick-tock of bats. Most of all, there are the elliptical intimacies of the moderator, her ugly whims and many surprise guests. No topic out of bounds. Always a challenging format.

But still I take up tenuous space, like a razor blade floating on water. Balance is lost on days and nights when nothing comes at all, but suspension hones me for the next time. It’s like the difference between an insect’s chitinous exterior and the liquid essence held within, two discrete forms, each sustaining each. Shadow wrapped around pure signal.

Rediscovery: The air controls me.

“And that’s so awfully trite,” says the moderator, beginning in the middle, as usual.

The tight skin and the lax mouth, lower lip swollen as if from a blow, hair awry. Her beauty, as usual, opens me like a dagger.

“But we know he can’t help it.”

Her face dissolves into the dark rippling underside of a pier and applause overcomes the noise of surf. I race up the beach in lawyer’s pinstripes, closer and closer until my face fills the screen.

“Just like his father,” the moderator says heavily.

Cut to—

Nineteen forties New York. Prim brownstones on the sunny side of the street. Women in cloche hats and men in long overcoats maneuver around one another. They seem on the verge of dancing.

Moderator: “Suspicious as hermits, both of them.”

I slide to the edge of the mattress, peeling myself. “Not so.” Heat thick as cream inside the pod.

Rain falls now, the stoops shiny with it. A cortege of black sedans and a voice like paint blistering. “Students of swingology, class is now in session. From the Chatterbox Room of the Endicott Hotel, it’s Professor Chester and his Horns of Plenty. Turn it loose!”

Camera pulls back to reveal moderator on high stool. A man in hospital whites kneels on the black studio floor to shave her legs with a piece of copper flashing dipped in grease.

“Our topic?” She thoughtfully taps the foam-padded microphone against her chin. “Subterfuge. Machination. Some people,” pulling a minstrel’s cakewalk face, “well, some people think that’s what power means. But really, they never go through with anything. Hermits, varmints, who needs ’em? I say, strike up the band!”

“Adeste Fideles” by muted brass.

Talking heads in extreme close-up—

Violet: “Did you bring me a present? I thought maybe, for a change…”

Opatowski: “Wide open spaces could mean like bomb craters.”

Sabra: “Quit it! It’s late and I’ve got to get out of here. Stop. My shoes…”

Delvino: “A numbers cruncher? A guy in a tie? So fuck you, I read Moravia in bed and listen to Scarlatti tapes in my car.”

Andrea: “You can be like a thug if you want, but I know…”

Gordo: “I’d give all that I own if I could but atone to that silver-haired daddy of mine.”

Tasha: “Did you bring me a present?”

Rain falls big and hard on the surface of a swimming pool, splats on turquoise cement like newts shot from guns. Then rain forming in a cloud, each step textbook-labeled. Then rain melting the streets of a frontier town, falling on black gangster raincoats, ship decks, parade grounds, cathedrals.

Darkness with ugly mob hubbub, industrial grinding.

Fade up on—

A moiré of the beautiful moderator, like unprocessed data from a compound eye.