Shelter in Place (3 page)

“I'm sorry,” she said, “I'm sorry.”

And I said, “For what? Why are you sorry?”

She didn't answer, but pushed me deeper and I kept whispering into her neck and watching the waves.

There were days and days of this. I remember her, but not her name, and her face is only a wash of color. But I know just how she felt in my arms at the fire, and the way she put my head in her lap and stroked my hair. How I wanted to tell her about the bird and the tar, but didn't have the language, or the courage. The way the mussels tasted and the beer and someone singing who could really sing and not a single day of rain. Someone with a laugh so high it seemed invented though it wasn't.

One of us running naked into the cold ocean.

A girl gone missing and that thrill and spike of fear, and her being found just before the police were called. Then a lightning storm and loud thunder and rain for days and whatever had been was over and we left our camp and dissolved into our lives in various vehicles going on to various places.

Is it possible that the blond girl came with me? That we continued up the coast together? I can see her sitting shotgun. Her bare feet on the dash, toenails painted blue. But that may have been only for a ride to buy more beer, or someone else entirely, from another time, another place. I can see her running across a different beach, a vast beach that looks more like Oregon than California.

But perhaps not. Perhaps that too is stock art stolen from some postcard. I did love her though, on that beach, by the fire, in the back of my truck, in the cool mornings. That didn't feel anything at all like a lie.

All love being borrowed anyway.

Whatever the case, with her or without her, I drove on from Big Sur out of the storm.

Surely I'd return to all of those people again.

I must have left with that warm feeling of shared experience and friendships deepened, our years in Los Angeles together somehow confirmed and authenticated by our days in Big Sur. Not only in Los Angeles, but there too in the land of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller we were friends.

And so we would be forever.

From my table here I watch the water on the glass, and the wipers snapping back and forth, cutting the rain to infields, and maybe that windshield was mine, and that rain was the rain coming down as I left, but maybe not.

T
he next evening I drove into Cannon Beach in the rain. And because it was raining, or because I was tired of camping, or because it was getting dark, I paid for a room at a motel. It was too much money—thirty-five dollars a night or whatever it was—but worth it for the shower, the neatly wrapped soap, the cup sealed in plastic, and the fresh towels, and the clean sheets.

Then, naked beneath the spray of hot water: an abrupt and inexplicable detonation.

A switch thrown. I was overcome by pleasure, by a sense of overwhelming power. Rapid rise. Sudden swelling euphoria. Savage ecstasy. My heart huge. I was absent all fear. I was standing on the bed. I was dressing. The clean shirt like some kind of wonder fabric, making my skin hum, and I left that room pulsing with mysterious rapture, qualities I'd never known, and outside by the Coke machines I broke the shell and withdrew my body until there was no separation between it and myself, it and the night sky. I put my head down and flew like a fish. All my muscles fast twitch. My bones pure black oil. My blood made of gasoline. There was no cold. There was nothing I could not control. I stretched my arms and legs. Arched my liquid back and sailed. I was a traveler, a man. I had weight and fire. I found a bar and walked inside like some kind of Clint Eastwood cowboy, some fearless hero soldier on leave. I see all of it. From the hot water to the do-not-disturb sign to the wet street to the bar door. The way I began to swing upwards from happiness into something else again and then again, higher with my eyes all clear, and my body humming and my heart ever-expanding. Something like I'd never felt in my life. No drug had ever come close. Eyes huge, I saw every detail of every surface of every object. The place was full of people, but I glided past them. I was a skier, a dancer, a skater. I ordered a drink I'd never ordered in my life.

“Beam, rocks,” I said.

I don't know where it came from, whether I was conjuring some actor, or some guy who used to come to Chez Jay, or what. I'd never much liked bourbon, but I was going to like it now. It was still coming on that thing whatever it was, whatever it is, and then I was the sudden scorching center of that place, the very marrow of it. I looked around and I waited and on it flowed into my blood. And when you feel it, when you've got it in you, and your eyes are like that, and your skin is humming and your heart is deadly, there is no memory, there is nothing but the present world, which pours in and pours in and all you want is more of it. You want everything and the room was full of women and it was as if they moved together in some unified rhythm, as if it were some code, some bodily language that only I could read. My heart firing, my eyes so sharp I could kill with my vision. I had perfect control of the room. I saw every inch of it rolling into me through my eyes and skin and I waited and waited and then I crossed the floor for that one woman who was something else, who was not part of the heaving mass. I wove through to her as if I were a person accustomed to crossing rooms that way, yet I know that was the first time in my life. I looked her in the eyes and said, “My name is Joey I find you extraordinary I'd like to buy you a drink and talk for a while if that would be all right,” and when she looked at me as if I were a lunatic and her friends gaped, I said, “I'm not crazy by the way, I'm not dangerous, it's just that I find you so graceful and so I'd like for us to have a drink together would that be all right? Would that be okay?” She gave me her hand and laughed and curtsied and said, “Why, yes, sir, it would be just fine, just fine indeed,” mocking me, putting on a bad southern accent. Her friends teased her and disappeared as if I had dissolved them myself with a flick of a finger. We drank and danced and drank and danced and I saw everything. I saw her face as whole and I saw it disassemble. I saw her tongue move over her teeth, saw her green eyes, her throat, her lips, her small breasts, her narrow hips, her bare shoulders, her big feet. I saw her turn to water. She was everywhere. All of her falling through me, her lemon smell, her liquid skin, her soft wrists, her heat, and when I found the sweat at the back of her neck hidden beneath her hair, I trailed my tongue across it, she leaned back against me, and I said into her ear, idiot child that I was, “I might die of you.” “What? What did you say?” She was turning and then looking at me as if she'd seen a thing she didn't like, and right then something splintered. In my chest, behind my eyes, in the air.

“What did you say?” she asked again.

“I might die of you,” I said, but it was no longer joyous, no longer drunken, no longer light. It was something else. I had lost the elixir. It was running out of me. I could feel it subsiding. She looked and looked and I thought she would leave me there. My eyes were shrinking. I was losing my sight. I was falling. All the edges were softening, but still I tried to see. Before it was too late, before it was gone, I tried to see, and then after a moment of the two of us standing still, while all those other people warped and buckled, she took my hand in her strong fingers and she pulled us from the bar.

We were changed in the air.

Or I was.

We came to a stop out on the empty street pulling our coats on with the door closing to dampen the music. Though I tried with real concentration, I couldn't get her face into focus.

I was running out of sentences.

“What did you say in there?”

I didn't want to say it again. It felt as if it had been years ago. The whole night was fading. I couldn't remember where I was. I'd forgotten the name of my motel.

She said, “What does that mean? What does that mean you could die of me?”

I shrugged again. I didn't know what it meant. I was having trouble reconciling this woman in the street with the woman in the bar.

Christ, I'd been alive barely twenty-one years.

She shook her head. She seemed angry and I was afraid that she'd leave, which I did not want. I did not want to speak and I did not want her to leave.

“You've lost all your charm,” she said. “What happened to that? Where'd it go?”

“I don't know,” I told her.

I noticed that the noise was gone from my head, that there was now a wonderful stillness.

I wished that we'd stop talking, but I knew that I'd need to speak to keep her there. I must have said something, made some noise.

“Are you talking to yourself?”

I looked at her.

“I thought you said you weren't a madman,” she said.

I smiled.

“But you are?”

“I don't know. It's possible.”

Her eyes were on mine. She wouldn't look away.

“Are you trying to decide if I'm going to kill you?”

“Yes,” she said. “That's exactly what I'm doing.”

I laughed. She squinted at me.

“Well?”

“No,” she said. “No I don't think you will.”

“In that case, maybe we can walk somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I don't know. I just got here. I barely know where I am.”

“Come,” she said and gave me her hand.

Out on the enormous beach the sand was firm from the rain and the sound of the waves was a constant white-noise roar. It felt good to be out in the low wind with her. Even if it had all run out of me, and I was exhausted.

“What's wrong with you?”

There wasn't much light, and it was difficult to see her face.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Why did you say you could die of me?”

“Just a thing to say to a pretty girl in a bar, I guess.”

“Asshole.”

“Not really,” I said. “And anyway, why would you come out here with me?”

“I don't know.”

“So neither of us knows anything.”

We went on like that crossing the vast beach toward the waterline. And all I wanted was for her not to leave me. As if without her I might not survive the night. And the thing was that it seemed we were both trying to answer that same question about what was wrong with me. And then as we came to the ocean gliding silent across the sand we stopped and watched for a while. The silhouette of Haystack Rock against the sky, and the wide blue bubbling tongues of foam moving in and out of the water.

“Why would you come out here with me?”

“Because you were very charming for a while,” she said. “Mostly though because you're so sad.”

“Am I?”

“You were.”

“I don't know.”

“I do.”

“And you like that?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, I'm glad you're here,” I told her. “I wouldn't want you to be anywhere else.”

“Ah, there's the charm again.”

“No,” I said. “I mean it.”

I looked at her dark shape.

“Are you looking at me?”

“Yes,” I said and reached for her.

My uncanny mind was very quiet then and all I felt was that warm body and the ocean throbbing its gentle pulse in my brain.

Later, we walked back across the beach toward the lights of the little town softened by the blue fog. She returned with me to the motel without either of us making the suggestion and when we stepped inside it was as if we'd entered someone else's room. Someone I might have known, whose things I recognized, but were nonetheless not my own.

She undressed me and then herself. For a moment we stood together, my chest against her warm breasts, my hands moving over her smooth back.

She was lovely, but I felt no desire, no lust. I wanted only to keep her against me as if to ward off the bird, which I could sense circling. There were brief twinges of that weight, ominous contractions in my chest, but nothing that lasted. I became convinced that she was my protector.

She kissed me and then again with more passion. I picked her up and laid her on the bed. I pulled the blankets over us and then her tight to me. She reached between my legs. I was soft.

“If we could lie here tonight,” I said. “If we could just be still. If we could just be quiet.”

“You're a strange boy, Joey,” she whispered. “Joe. Joseph. So strange.”

“It's only recent,” I said.

She sighed and fitted herself to me with all her warmth and I thought she was relieved to give up sex until she said, “So what, baby, you just want me to hold you?”

I laughed and closed my eyes and we lay there falling asleep, while together we battled back the bird, which circled and circled above us looking for an entry point.

I
woke early from the kind of black, motionless sleep that no longer comes to me here. Cold air moved through an open window. I drew the covers over us, closed my eyes and matched my breathing to hers. The night was gone. The bar felt a thousand years ago.

She was so warm with her skin cutting the trailing cold, and I wanted nothing else to happen. I wanted nothing else but for nothing to change.

But she will open her eyes soon, and curl against me and kiss my neck and whisper, “Good morning, Joe, Joey, Joseph.” She will climb out of bed and walk naked to the bathroom and close the door. I will listen to her pee and the sound will make me happy. I'll hear the toilet flush and as it refills, the sound of water running into the sink. She is splashing handfuls of it against her face and then she is reaching for one of those clean towels hanging from the cracked chrome bar.

What I see and what I saw and what I imagined and there is no difference. Not a single difference in the world between those three things. They are equal. In memory. In value. In clarity. Equal.

I love to watch her standing naked at the sink. She is twenty years old. She is unafraid. She is not careful. When she's finished, the water is everywhere. It is always everywhere when she's finished and will be forever. Her cheeks will be flushed with color. She will favor her right leg and press it against the porcelain so that when she returns from the bathroom there is a pink line across her thigh. She is fearless and she is sure.