John Hawkes - Death, Sleep & the Traveler

“Allert,” Ursula said then, “where are you going? Don’t leave us. I want you to stay.”

I smiled down at her where her soft lower body was already in motion though Peter had not yet removed his athletic shorts and though she was looking not at him but at me.

“But I must relieve myself,” I said in my heaviest accent. “But I will not be far off. And I will return soon. Besides,” I added, preparing to step carefully between the stones, “I have already witnessed this scene a good many times, my dear. Have I not?”

“But you enjoy it, Allert. I know you do.”

And so I did ordinarily. But for now my interest lay only in the narrow sun-struck path that climbed along the edge of the birches and then among the birches, and in another instant I was ascending the path in a stride that was slow and free, though now and then interrupted by a gentle stagger. My modesty was always amusing to Peter and Ursula, but I had no recourse but to follow my own inclinations and withdraw from time to time into a dark corner, a closet of green ferns. So midway up the hill I relieved myself, peered toward the island that long ago had broken free of Peter’s shore, and then sat down, lay down, rolled over, dozed. When I regained consciousness, sitting with my back against one of the tilting birches, I was fully aware that I had dreamt a short concise dream about Ursula exposing her breasts at a party. It was a fleeting dream and not worth reporting to Ursula.

When I returned to the scene of the meal, a scene now cast in the warmest of shadows, I found Ursula lying in the center of the white tablecloth we had spread on the blanket and Peter sitting cross-legged on top of the black rock. Ursula’s yellow gown had become her pillow, Peter was naked and sitting with his eyes closed and holding in his lap one of the sweating unopened bottles of cold wine. The gull was perched defiantly on Peter’s castoff athletic shorts. Ursula’s eyes were also closed and she and Peter were smiling.

“Come,” I said quietly, “let me open the wine.”

Some kind of telepathic understanding rippled down the length of Peter’s bare side and with effort he raised his arm and extended the bottle. I drew the cork and, filling a much-used glass, carefully placed the brimming glass in Peter’s listless hand. He nodded. He did not open his eyes.

“Drink it, Peter,” I said. “The party is not done.”

He nodded, he made no move to raise the glass from his loins to his lips. So I shrugged and removed my shirt and trousers, took a few puffs on one of the little cigars, standing for those moments with my forearm resting in the small of my back and a foot raised on a boulder of quartz, and eyes looking down at Ursula. Then I threw away the cigar, in the process offending the brave gull, and walked to the blanket.

Later, much later, she pushed me off with brusque but loving hands. We lay on our backs, side by side. I smelled the golden snake of kelp, without looking I knew that the little black islands were knocking against each other and moving in our direction.

“I hurt,” she murmured, casing the crumpled yellow gown between her legs. “Thanks to my two selfish friends I hurt in my crotch.”

But she was smiling. A moment later, when Peter called my name, I used my elbows and raised my head and shoulders and saw that his eyes were open and filled with light.

“I tell you, Allert,” he called, “your sexual organs reminded me of the armored bulge of one of the better-endowed British kings. How’s that for a compliment, my friend?”

“I thought you were dozing,” I answered. “I did not know you were watching.”

“But yes, indeed,” he answered and raised his glass, “indeed I was watching.”

For our return to his home, Peter draped himself in the white tablecloth on which we had feasted. A mere ten days later Ursula was planning my trip in her crudest mood.

We spend most of our lives attempting in small ways to know someone else. And we hope that someone else will care to peek into our darkest corners, without shock or condemnation. We even hope to catch a glimpse of ourselves, and in this furtive pursuit we hope for courage. But on the brink of success, precisely when a moment of understanding seems nearest at hand, and even if the moment is a small thing and not particularly consequential, it is then that the eyes close, the head turns away, the voice dies, the surface of the bright ocean becomes a sea of lead, and from the very shape we know to be our own there leaps a man-sized batlike shadow that flees or crouches to attack, to drive us away. Who is safe? Who knows what he will do next? Who has the courage to make endless acquaintance with the various unfamiliar shadows that comprise wife, girl friend, or friend? Who can confront his own psychic sores in the clear glass? Who knows even where he is or where in another moment he may find himself? Who can believe in the smoke from the long clay pipe, the beer in the tankard?

Who then is safe? I wish I had known my wife and friend. I wish they had known me. I wish we had been only dark figures within a gilded frame. Like a child I wish we had found each other tolerable. I used to wish that I could have cleaved Peter down the length of his back and pulled the halves apart as though they had belonged to a gutted dummy and then climbed inside. If I had been able to enact this fantasy when I wanted to, I would now be dead. All speculations, like loose phosphorescent threads shot dreamily into a cold night, would be at an end.

Who is safe?

In my arms she was like a small child struck by an auto. Together in the dark we swayed on the deck as if I had just dragged her from a wreck at sea. I was holding her horizontally in both my arms. Her eyes were glazed, she refused to speak. The white officer’s cap had fallen from her head only a moment before, the white tunic fell open from her nude body like the remnant of some outlandish costume for a masquerade, which indeed it was. She was limp but watching me, though the eyes were glazed, and she refused to speak. The moon was a streak of fat in the night sky. I could not feel her weight. I heard a shout. I turned. I heard a splash. The deck was a hard crust of salt. The night was cold. I heard the splash. I could not feel her weight. And then along the entire length of that bitter ship I saw the lights sliding and blurring beneath the waves. Clumsily, insanely I wrestled with a white life ring that bore the name of the ship and that refused to come free. I saw the ship’s fading lighted silhouette beneath the waves.

Who is safe?

“Look,” cried the purser, “the horse has two rumps and six legs! Shall we give the prize to this happy monster?”

The crowd, which packed the midnight saloon, dancing and tangling themselves in clouds of confetti and streamers of bright paper, cheered in a polyglot of affirmation. I recognized the drunken purser with distaste, in my arms my little partner was wearing her bikini, the white officer’s cap at a rakish angle and, with sleeves rolled to her fragile wrists, the official white tunic with its gold buttons and lightning bolt at the collar. Her small dark face looked like a child’s. The dance floor was awash with gin. My partner was impersonating a wireless operator, while I (with distaste, with severity, with self-consciousness) was impersonating a heavy-set and class-conscious burgher from Amsterdam. I wanted to slip my wet hands inside the tunic.

“Allert,” she cried, dragging me to the edge of the crowd where the purser was hanging a lopsided floral wreath around the horse’s neck, “look, it’s Olaf!”