John Hawkes - Death, Sleep & the Traveler

The silence, the singing of the crystal, the plash of water filling the goblets, the bent heads, the sun on the naked shoulders of the girl who was wearing pants and a halter, all this told me that I should not have spoken, should not have revealed in hyperbole my loneliness, my distaste for travel, my ambiguous feelings about the girl. Again I glanced beneath the table and saw that the carelessly daubed white shoe was now pressed against the girl’s very small and naked foot. The girl, in the motions of her arch and toes, was encouraging the attention of the young wireless officer and even responding to his touch.

The girl’s halter was tight, triangular and dark blue over what it covered of her childish chest. The cuff of the wireless officer’s white tunic sleeve was frayed, and not only frayed but unclean, stained by a smudge of some substance pertaining to his job as wireless operator. The girl was ordinary yet unfamiliar, while the officer was a common type, a careless black-haired young man who singled out one special girl for himself on each aimless cruise. I knew his type and was not surprised to see that the coarse fingers of his right hand were constantly shifting my silver fork or brushing the rim of my waiting plate. As his secreted right foot performed its seduction, so his visible right hand had to give offense, and both for the sake of the girl who was seated across from us and watching.

Spoon to lip, eyes meeting those of the young girl at an odd angle, conscious of a high wide transparent wave of spray beyond the nearest sheet of plate glass, and seeing the varied faint colors in the fine spray, and hearing a few notes of the vibraphone, suddenly I realized that the officer’s effrontery was going to be far more extensive than I had imagined. His hand left the table. His hand slipped from the table in such a way as to engage my attention but not that of anyone else. In order to thrust his hand into the pocket of the wrinkled white tunic, he moved so that his bent elbow touched my heavy unobtrusive arm. Intentionally. For an instant I speculated about the girl’s age, I heard a saxophone barking distantly, I thought of the two great ponderous black anchors wet and dripping where they hung bolted like monolithic torture instruments to the high prow of the ship.

“Tomorrow we reach land,” the officer said to the girl while continuing to feel about slowly in his pocket and to invade my luncheon hour with the deliberate tip of his elbow.

“So soon? I thought we wouldn’t see anything for days.”

“First port of call tomorrow. There’ll be horses and carriages for sightseeing.”

I felt again the insistent elbow. I glanced down. I saw the man’s hand cupped palm upward on his thigh, the hand crudely tilted in my direction, the small glossy faded yellow photograph cupped and shining in his hand. I frowned, the girl was smiling, I returned the spoon to the bowl. I glanced down at what was obviously an example of very old-fashioned pornography. The fissured celluloid and two small white gelatinous figures were cupped in the man’s hand, framed in his palm, and now the young man was laughing at the girl and twisting, winking his stubby little antique picture as if he expected me to take it in thumb and forefinger and transfer it surreptitiously to my own white pocket. He began to make a brushing motion with his rude thumb across the two small stilted nudes as if wiping away some invisible film of dust. I put down my napkin, pushed back my chair, excused myself.

“Tomorrow,” said the girl as I got to my feet, “will you join us in one of the carriages?”

“Thank you,” I answered in my thickest accent, “perhaps.”

The ship was softly undulating, with knife and fork in hand the young officer was beginning to eat his luncheon. I spent the next day in my cabin waiting, listening to the noise of temporary disembarkation, feeling the heat of land, feeling the timbers of the pier through the ship’s steel, thinking that the thick yellow hawser visible beyond my porthole was to the stilled ship what a life preserver was to the floundering man. At least the hawser made sense of our immobility.

There were gongs, there were whistles, there were blasts from high-pitched pipes, screams of compressed air. Even from where Ursula and I stood together on the crowded deck near the gangway I could see that the ship was high and sharp and clear, a paint-smelling flowered mirage of imminent departure over the lip of the earth.

“You see,” said Ursula into my ear and laughing, nodding in the direction of the young woman leaning happily at the ship’s rail, “you will not be alone, Allert. Not for long.”

I turned, I looked again at the young woman who was leaning on the rail and smiling at the crowd on the pier, at the loading shed, at the other ships in the harbor, at the smoke rising more swiftly and blackly now from the pale blue smokestacks above our heads. The girl was standing with no one, she waved but not to anyone in particular down on the pier. And when I turned back to Ursula our own ship’s whistle blew, its vibration filling deck, sea, sky, bones, breasts, and tearing us all loose from the familiar shore.

“She’ll take care of you,” Ursula shouted into my waiting ear, “you’ll see.”

In my dream there is a table of rough wooden planks, darkness, another person, light coming from nowhere, and in the center of the table a pile of shining wet blood-purple grapes in a clay bowl. We are outdoors and I feel no apprehension. And yet it seems to me that the grapes, which arc clearly at the center of this late-night timeless experience, arc somehow moving faintly of their own accord. The air is without wind, without stars. The grapes are waiting, massed in a curious faint motion. The other person, who is female and stands well beyond the edge of the table, is not inviting me to approach the grapes, though she is standing beyond the table only in expectation that I will do so. Yes, I am aware of the other person and pleased at the sight of the heap of grapes with their tight wet skins and reddening color. But then there is a change in mood, a change in perspective, because now I am standing beside the table in the warm night air and noticing that the grapes are unlike any I have ever seen, since each grape grows not from the single short tough stem which is part of the usual cluster, but is instead attached top and bottom by tender almost transparent tubes to its neighbor. Yes, the grapes are heaped in the bowl in a single tangled coil rather than in familiar bunches. And now I see that these grapes are larger than usual, that their slick skins are watery red, that they are definitely moving against each other, that they are stretched and twisted into oddly elongated shapes instead of the usual spheres, and all because each grape contains a tiny reddish fetus about the size of the tip of my thumb.

The grapes are transparent, I see the fetuses, the other person has drawn appreciably closer to watch my reaction to the grapes which are wriggling now like a heap of worms. Despite their pale redness they are still purple. Despite their distorted shapes they are still glistening and large. But when a handful is separated wetly from the rest of the pile and is suddenly half crushed on the wooden surface of the table (by the other person who is clearly my wife), I am revolted and unable to eat.

When I told this dream to Ursula she asked me how anyone could be so afraid of life as to dream such a disgusting dream.

We sailed from Amsterdam, from Bremen, from Brest, from Marseilles, from farther north, from farther south, from Amsterdam. The brochure describing the voyage lay on the table beside my chair for weeks before the day of departure. I smelled the sweet smell of dust hours before we first sighted land when I went to my cabin. Ursula waved me off from the crowded pier. There was no one to wave off the girl at the rail. I had no interest in boarding that ship. I did not want to sit beside Ursula and drive to the pier. I was not attracted to severance, sun, sea, the geography of separation and islands and unexpected encounters in cabins like mausoleums. I did not want to float in the ship’s pool which was a parody of the sea it traveled on. I did not want to sail. But the return was worst of all since by then the girl was gone. I plan never again to look at the rough sea though I am filled with it, like a sewn-up skin with salt.