John Hawkes - Death, Sleep & the Traveler

She climbed into the carriage and sat beside the Dutch corpse, as I thought of myself at that moment, and leaned forward and roughly shook the old driver’s arm.

“We shall go back to the ship alone,” she said aloud. “We shall go without him.”

The startled old man took up his reins. We rode in silence. From the crest of the hills, with the umbrella pines behind us and the little silvery city stretched out below, I noted that the sun was setting like a fiery cargo on the deck of the ship. And later, after Ariane had softened, after we had dismissed the carriage, after she had followed me wordlessly to my dark cabin — it was then that she faced me and seized my arms and ran her hands up and down my arms, touching and squeezing them as if to reassure herself of what she felt for me and that I was there and real. She was small, she was standing as straight as possible and searching my eyes, her features were sponged with dark shadows.

“Allert,” she said at long last and in a whisper, “please….”

I heard the tenderness of her appeal, I smelled the depths of the evening sea, I deliberated, I thought of the reptile house in total darkness. And then I relented.

That night the drunken wireless operator returned to the ship supported by the two women members of the ship’s band. The next day he and Ariane spent half the afternoon in the warm wind on the volleyball court.

“Allert,” she said, turning to me abruptly in the act of dressing, “I want to ask you a simple question.” She rested her hand on the back of the leather chair and then, watching me, moving across the room, she stepped into a pair of underpants which once in place looked less like a silken garment than like a faint hue that might have been spread long ago by a bearded painter. Again she paused, again she stared in my direction. I knocked the ash from my cigar. “Allert,” she said then, “why are you here? Why exactly are you here? Do you know?”

But if Ursula was capable of asking me such a question, how could I possibly have been capable of finding the answer?

On a morning as clear and dense with the cold as any I had ever seen, and while Ursula and I were driving down the snow-covered road in Peter’s car on our way to the village, she remarked that during the trial she had had sex every night with my attorney. It was her way of rewarding herself, as she expressed it, for her loyalty. At that moment I was tempted to tell her that they had greeted me in my cabin with black handcuffs the night we docked. But I controlled the temptation then and thereafter.

I awoke. I was wet. The sheets were double thick and stretched beneath me like some enormous scab peeled from the wound of the night. I could see nothing, I could feel nothing except my weight and the sensation of my own sweat laving and filming the sheets. But where had I been? What had I dreamt? Why was I so wet and stricken in clear paralysis? From what depths had I fought my way to this dead surface? Flat on my back, lips parted, waiting, body slack on the sheets and wet with sweat — thus I lay alone, though next to Ursula, and thus I gave consciousness to the agony of true thirst, though my mouth itself felt thick and warm. But what had I dreamt?

Later, after I had returned to the moonlit bedroom from the blackened lavatory, to which I had carried myself like some wounded animal to the midnight water hole, and where in the tiled darkness I had turned on the tap and listened to the flow of cold water and drunk my fill, it was then that I stood in the doorway and saw that Ursula was sprawled in the moonlight with her nightdress high and her right hand undulating in the considerable erogenous zone between her spread and partially lifted legs. The heat from her body reached me in waves across the moonlit room. Even in sleep Ursula’s active erotic life was not to be stilled.

But where had I been? What had I dreamt?

“Well,” I said, “why rock the ship? Why must you rock the ship?”

“The word is boat. I wish you would speak like anyone else. I do not find your verbal affectations amusing.”

“But really it would be better if you did not rock the ship. After all, Peter had the consolation of dying in the presence of both of us. Surely one of us deserves to die in the presence of the other. Perhaps you would like to change your mind and stay. Why not?”

“You are already dead, Allert. You do not need me. I have mourned at your funeral far too long already.”

Throughout this brief exchange, which was one of several, Peter’s dusty pipe lay in my ash tray and Peter’s automobile stood empty, locked, covered with a glaze of frost and cobwebs in our old garage. Ursula was smoking a fragrant cigarette.

In my pajamas and bare feet I entered the bathroom which was wet with steam and filled with Ursula’s perfume and with another still richer smell that made me imagine Ursula milking herself into the bathroom sink. I sniffed the humidity. I gripped the edge of the sink and smelled her hair. I did not know the hour and had not even glanced out the bedroom window at the world of white snow, as was my habit. The bathroom was dark and wet and smelled of Ursula — her hair, her skin, her soap, her scent of flowers, her thin passionate jets of milk.

I turned on the tap. Nothing. I turned on the other tap. Nothing. I flushed the toilet. In a kind of fever I turned the chromium fixtures in the deep tub and beneath the goose-necked shower. Nothing, nothing at all. I trembled. I stepped into the corridor that was packed with the stillness of the morning sun.

“Ursula,” I cried at last, “there is no water! What has happened to the water?”

And then I heard the sound of a car engine, and behind me the sudden furious rumbling and gushing of water in the toilet, the sink, the tub, the shower, as if my cries for peace and purification had been answered by some watery monster of indiscretion. I hurried back into the bathroom to turn off the taps.

In endless discovery of the musical imagination, I told myself, as stretched out in the stern of the ship in the folds of my canvas deck chair I listened to the syncopated late afternoon tinkling of the ship’s trio. Had it been some other ship, a different journey, no doubt I would have been wrapped in a coarse blanket in my canvas chair, and the sky would have been gray, the sea rough, the air cold, our approaching destination defining without question the time of day, the nautical miles. As it was I needed no blanket and lay stretched out in the wood and canvas chair on the fantail, for no other reason than to bask in the glare of the day that had no hour and listen to the shouts of the bathers in the ship’s pool and to the unstructured melodic background music of the ship’s band. The music was appropriate to the day, the ship, the voyage, since it gave no indication of purpose or cessation. Without turning my head or opening my eyes I could nonetheless visualize the three musicians, and on this occasion found myself indifferent to the vibraphone player’s two hands loosely wrapped in bloody bandages, and indifferent as well to the two middle-aged women, drummer and saxophonist respectively, who looked so much alike they might have been sisters.

My eyes were closed, my terry cloth robe was flung wide to the sun, our course was level, I was well aware of the tender waxed composure of my face, my cigar was aglow — and I told myself that for once I was indifferent to that foreboding trio.