Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

The red was wine blood. I compose my last words which will be the ordinary “I want to sleep now.“ Death will apply pressure to the meanings of sleep, drain sleep of all but its poetic potential. How Romantic!

I will be shipped back to England, bled dry and lung-less — the Greeks kept them, not my heart, steeping in a cask of disappointing port, decanted on deck of a third-rate frigate, riding on the neap tide of the Thames. Some devoted readers who've come to mourn are there to blot up, with the pages of my poems, the spilled preserving spirits to preserve me, the capillary action, the way paper drinks ink.

A PERIMENOPAUSAL JACQUELINE KENNEDY, TWO YEARS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION, ABOARD THE M/Y Christina OFF EUBEOA BOUND FOR THE ISLAND OF ALONNISOS, DEVASTATED BY A RECENT EARTHQUAKE, DRINKS HER FOURTH BLOODY MARY WITH MRS. FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT JR.

The barstools' seats are covered with the foreskins of whales, Ari loves to tell his guests, and it was at this bar that Jack first met Mr. Churchill, but you know that, you've heard that before, as I am in the habit of wading through the historic, an archipelago of scattered captions, a sign myself, as I allocute, droning through the landscape of vetted plaque language, appositives and modifiers and subordinate and restrictive clauses, the constellation of the museum label, your tour guide tape, who sooner-or-later says the barstools of the Christina were upholstered with the foreskins of whales, baleen, and on them Jack who would be president sat drinking Bloody Marys, with the former wartime prime minister of that precious stone set in a silver sea, that other Eden, that England, two sailors they fancied themselves, their fannies parked on the tooled foreskins of whales, cetacean.

The right whale got its name for being the right whale to kill, and off the Cape we chased them chasing a panicked pod sounding and sliding down beneath the launch like sleek needles sliding beneath skin. The cows are each as big as an island and sleep like reefs, lolling; the rookery of birds along the rocky spine started every time a calf breached, leaping up on a mother's back, slipping off and into the water and breaching again and tumbling back, again and again, trying to wake her, it could be days, a wake of waking.

The Christina is itself a big white whale making way with its trailing catalog of chase boats, though this flotilla appears thinned, anemic compared to when we cruised off Ithaca after Patrick died, remember? They thought they caught me then, broadsides of telephoto lenses. Now they lag. They stall. Chips off the ship, it seems, they grow smaller in the distance, wreaths or buoys, wallowing in the troughs of waves, our own towed islet chain, a random map.

Cyclades, Dodecanese, Ionian, Sporades — the island chains. Skiros, Skopelos, Alonnisos, Skiathos are the Sporades we are steaming to, we are steaming to the Sporades, sporadic in the northern Aegean. Spores. You should see the charts. Someone has cast the joints of bone like die, not so much a chain these islands but a broken and scattered string of trinkets, and now the dice-like houses on those dice-like islands have tumbled down the dice-like chockablock basalt acropoli, the Hora horribly tossed and tossed into the agitated sea, new peninsulas of chunky ruin, deltas of limey whitewashed dust. Ari says we will all give blood, our blue, blue blood when we get there, and the Christina's hold holds vats of water, pallets of blankets, bushel bags of sour trahanas, and egg crates of bottled gas — a dry goods convoy to another powdered and pulverized disaster.

I always heard it said that George Jessel invented the Bloody Mary, half vodka and half tomato juice, the after drinks drink, a sober drink to get you drunk the first thing after the last thing you remember, the transfused eulogy. All the blood in the world could not save Patrick, who died drowning in the liquefied air in which his lungs came packed like a surplus jeep in cosmolene. He was early. It is late. We island hopped too through that mourning. One tragedy after another. The syrup of tomato is just what the doctor ordered, an elixir, a tincture, a kind of plasma. To my blue baby. To the Toastmaster General, our contemporary Pericles who works blue.

To avoid the circling bulls, the she whale rolls over on her back, and it's a sight to see the males attempt to mate that way, climbing, scooting up the beach with all that now not buoyant tonnage, up over her underbelly to the peak of the breach of her and her, just then, rolling over to take a breath before she rolls back over again on her back — a shoal, a hostile jetty, an unnavigable bar. This too goes on for hours, for days, as everything with whales runs in whale time, in whale space.

Whale-shaped Eubeoa hugs the shore of mainland Greece it fractured clear of eons ago in some strike-slip quake that shook the big island free. At Halkida the channel narrows to the narrowest of cuts, and Aristotle himself spent time there on and off through the years observing the tidal flow through the strait first one way, then the opposite, a river reversing itself, ass-backward, plum plumbing there. All that motion to no end, an ecstatic static.

But in the veins there are baffles of valves that eddy the spent blood flow upstream, fish ladders, toward the heart. The cells, those dimpled mauve lozenges, lining up like shallow draft coastal tankers en route, convoying oxygen away from the spongy anchorage of the lungs.

Around here somewhere the Greeks becalmed and beached, a thousand island chain of triremes in irons, no way to be made on the way to Troy. It was that headland, or that headland there, where they kited Iphigenia into the sea, a debt owed to some god or other, to wake the breeze, to make it freshen. Troy would be thataway. Telling that story over and over, the tellers want what happened to happen differently like running a length of film back and forth, seesawing the eye, the eye hopping from one moment to the next, island frame to island frame, hoping that this time it will all be different, that other gods will intervene. As one did in Iphigenia's fall, intercepting her midair and turning her flesh insubstantial, her blood into aerosol, and transporting the mist of her beyond the Aegean to some sacred steppes someplace where the history of history one steps into is never, never the same twice.

Oh, let's blame the bloody sun, the bloody, bloody drink. Hell, it's hell, this body in this in-between. The hot, you know, comes at you in waves of layers, molten lava sandwiched between melting glass. The blood, what there is of it, boils and pools, rises to the thinning skin, the blush shedding sheets of heat; I shimmer in my own juices, evaporate, another order of being, state of sacrifice. How did it go, Winnie's witty turn of phrase, the eulogy's eulogy? Not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. The end of the beginning, then. The end of the beginning.