John Hawkes - Death, Sleep & the Traveler

The purser was sitting on a wooden chair outside my door. His trousers were freshly pressed. We were a mere speck in the empire of that dark sea. The purser called to the attention of strolling passengers the baby octopus white and swaying on its length of cord.

They assured me that the search throughout the ship was continuing.

The islands became more numerous. They were small and golden, each one a perfect bright sphere for exploring. But I was confined and he was heavily sedated.

Even inside my cabin I could hear the rumors. And a few dumpy women with wooden sticks and pucks.

“Allert,” she said quietly and behind my back, “it is not necessary to wash my underpants. You are always kind to me. But you shouldn’t bother to rinse my panties.”

“Oh, but it is nothing,” I said, and felt the life of the ship in the soles of my naked feet. “It is an unfamiliar chore for me and one I like. But surely if you can press the clothing of the ship’s crew it is somehow appropriate that I rinse your panties.”

Sitting as she was on the far end of her rumpled berth, small, indifferent to the hour of the day, Ariane was not within range of the small mirror fastened above the porcelain sink. I could see the familiar disorder of the little stateroom whenever I glanced from the frothy sink to the mirror, and even had a splendid reflected view of the opened porthole above the berth, but I could not see Ariane and could only assume that she had already removed her bathing suit as I had mine. At the sink I stood with a towel knotted around my waist but assumed that Ariane would not care to wrap herself in towels.

“Well, you are doing a very thorough job, Allert,” she said behind my back. “But don’t you want to hurry a little?”

“Two more pairs to go,” I said into the empty mirror that was quivering slightly with the pulse of the ship. “Only two pairs. And do you see? They look as if they belong to a child.”

“But, Allert, I think you have become a fetishist!”

“Oh yes,” I said heavily and raised my face to the glass. “Yes, I am a deliberate fetishist.”

I nodded to myself, I submerged my hands to the wrists and scrubbed the little shrunken garment that felt as slippery as satin on a perspiring thigh. I was enjoying myself, half naked before the sink and rinsing Ariane’s six pairs of off-white panties. They were not new, those panties, and the crotch of each pair bore an unremovable and, to me, endearing stain.

“There. You see? I am done. Now we shall hang them to dry.”

But that day Ariane’s wet undergarments on which I had worked with such prolonged and gentle satisfaction, remained in a damp heap in the porcelain sink. In a single instant I forgot all about Ariane’s damp panties (reminding me of the clothing shop windows into which I used to peer as a youth in Breda), because in that instant I turned from the sink to find that she had not resorted to a warm towel, as I was convinced she would not, but also that there on the other end of the rumpled bed, with the wind in her hair and her legs drawn up and crossed at the ankles, she was far from that complete state of nudity in which I had thought, even hoped, to find her. But I was not disappointed.

I did not know how to respond, I felt a certain disbelief and breathless respect. But I was not disappointed. Because Ariane sat before me girdled only in what appeared to be the split skull and horns of a smallish and long-dead goat. It was as if some ancient artisan had taken an axe and neatly cleaved off the topmost portion of the skull of a small goat, that portion including the sloping forehead, the eye sockets, a part of the nose, and of even the curling horns, and on a distant and legendary beach had dried the skull and horns in the sun, in herbs, in a nest of thorns, on a white rock, preparing and polishing this trophy for the day it would become the mythical and only garment of a young girl. What was left of the forehead and nose, which was triangular and polished and ended in a few slivers of white bone, lay tightly wedged in my small friend’s bare loins. The goat’s skull was a shield that could not have afforded her greater sexual protection, while at the same time the length of bone that once comprised the goat’s nose and hence part of its mouth gave silent urgent voice to the living orifice it now concealed. The horns were curled around her hips. On her right hip and held in place between the curve of the slender horn and curve of her body Ariane was wearing a dark red rose. I recognized it as one she must have taken from the cut-glass vase of roses that had adorned our table for the noon meal.

“Allert,” she said at last and into my puzzled and admiring silence, “how do you like my costume for the ship’s ball?”

Slowly I shook my head. The bikini made of bone and horn was the ultimate contrast to the hidden and vulnerable sex of my young friend. I now felt that the towel around my waist was a vain and undeniable irritant.

“Yes,” I said gently, “you are Schubert’s child. Who but my Ariane would fuse her own delicacy with the skull of the animal Eros? And the rose, the rose. It is a beautiful costume. Beautiful. But it is not for the ship’s ball.”

“But I promised the purser, Allert. What can I do?”

“You may cease your teasing right away.”

“Very well, my poor dear Allert. I have been teasing. I will attend the ball dressed as a ship’s officer. Are you satisfied?”

“Completely,” I said then, dropping my towel. “Completely.”

I sat beside her on the berth. I removed the rose. I seized the two horns and smelled the dark and living hair and the tangled sheets and the sea breeze. Gently I tugged on the horns until they came away from her with the faintest possible sound of suction. I could not believe what the goat’s cranial cavity now revealed. The goat’s partial skull fell to the floor but did not break. I smothered my small friend in my flesh, a huge old lover grateful for girl, generosity, desire, and the axe that long ago had split the skull.

To be wanted in such a way, what was there more?

Later, as Ariane knelt with head and shoulders thrusting through the porthole and as my spread fingers straddled her shining buttocks, like a thick starfish squeezing still to know the sensations of her youthful flesh, it was then that I begged Ariane not to attend the ship’s ball. I did not know why, I told her, changing my position and placing the great side of my face against her buttocks, but I felt a definite preference that she not attend the ball. Why dress, I asked, why leave her cabin? We would only become involved in a drunken frolic. Why not stay below and, if we wished, listen to the night’s music through the porthole?

But she insisted.

“Why? Why? Why?” she was saying. “Why must you always try to mythologize our sexual lives? Why don’t you come to my bed and have sex and stop dreaming?”

“But, Ursula,” I said, frowning and climbing up from the chair, “I am merely trying to articulate the sensual mind. I do not mean to offend you.”

“You are naive, Allert, naïve. If I punch your side I will smell only a puff of smoke from a cigar. You are the least sensual person I have ever known. There is a difference between size and sensuality.”

She left the room. Through the glass of the window I could smell the snow in the night. I regretted that I had offended Ursula.

The infant octopus hung like the carcass of a young girl in the sun.