I kissed him and on the other side behind his mouth I found blood blooming in a beaker of water. A hot resistance steeped in the shadows of a large doomed animal, a kiss and a drink of enveloping velvet steam suctioned to a large wilted flower. His sour presence, long shadows rising off the sand… This is forbidden! — what we’re doing is outlawed. You live on the beach. What are you doing here? “I followed you here.” His weight shifts on top of my body and my head spins and my mouth fills, my eyes are full, he’s kissing me and his eyes are filling my mouth my chest my memory, I’m flooded with dreams of death. Dreams of his death are racing through my veins. You’re attacking me. I didn’t ask for this… “I’m sorry I followed you. What am I supposed to say? Don’t go.” In the middle of all of it I felt the presence of another man lurking behind his eyes. I felt two men before me and I buckled under the pressure. They drained me together. They stole my senses but even then I began to feel one of them slip away. Like he had been dismissed the boy/ man’s weight lessened, he dimmed and I tried to hold his face in my hands:
stay with me, stay here
. I bit at his face I clawed at his chest in an effort to get him back. I felt myself devouring what I could of him to keep him with me but the presence of another man rose in him and I felt weighed down by a force that was irresistible and inextinguishable and could not be escaped, deeper and deeper into the quickening sand the whole beach shifting around me and I felt myself lose it on top of the mystery man and just as suddenly, inside the wooden shed I’d seen in the distance a shadow was framed by the open door. I felt him tear into my neck.
I woke up under many layers of the cast-down skins of old Eucalyptus bark. He had come to rest on top of me and was stealing my breath as he kissed me. This mystery man — the Warlock — tore at me and his breath was a dull magnetic lightening storm that drained and drained me. He slid off of me and bolted upright. I struggled under the shifting debris and just like that he was gone. The Warlock had found me. The taste in my mouth readily surrendered its evidence, I tasted my lips and his name appeared in my mind.
He begs for me. His voice slips and erodes as he speaks. Begs. His voice prowls me and breaks off and I wonder what has happened.
The smoky, salty pressure of his lips on mine makes me think of all the spent fires along the beach. He roasts and sputters just outside of me; I can almost grasp his presence, but feel myself lingering intimately at so great a distance I feel as if he is playing a game with me. He flashes near and far and it boggles my mind and makes me uneasy and growling with my face in my hands: Who
are
you?
Pink wire cage bits of fuzz caught in hardened glue beads… cane furniture, reed brown green clear glass worn in fine white scratches at the edges of creaking baskets, reed mats. Fan running at full blast, spare brown pants bunchy in the wrong places; the hook fly and pocket stuck inside out. Yellow light globe plastic egg sitting on the carpet… blue plastic straw with brown sugar crystals lining the spout… I was awake but my brain lay twisted among the rotten pilings and the weeds that stank in saltwater. The way I stood with one foot on top of the other made men take notice. I felt them looking at my ass, pulled up into an adorable little punching bag. I guess my own body even felt fucked up and serene as it pulled tight against my jeans. So this is what it feels like to be desired? To be folded up and put at the bottom of some secret drawer? I felt like I was close to unlocking the secret look of male desire, the one that says not “I want to fuck you,” but “I want to keep you.” I was sure it was a different look. There was a difference but it flickered in and out of my sights. But I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. I only had a partial view.
Had I ever looked at a man and said to myself, “I want to keep you?”
The impossibility of it made me unsure of what I wanted. His attention had left me confused. Edgy, wandering around playing the events in my head over and over and got panicky when they had already started fading away. The smells were gone, the colors getting flatter until the memory hung in front of me like a laundered sheet, stained with a bitter bleached cartoon of what had really happened.
Men who lived on the sidewalk washed in the ocean, at the edge of the septic tap water creek… Men on the sidewalk called out to me. All over town they followed me pessimistically with their eyes. I was never left uncovered by their eyes. I shoved my hands into my apron pocket and stepped carefully around their black and yellow boiled-egg eyes. My shoes swept the dust out from under their didactic signage and the sight of my bare legs sticking out from under my skirt thickened the straps of cured turkey breast hanging in their sweatpants. I wondered what happened to all their women, where did they go? Did these women ever see the sidewalk start to creep into the corner of those black and yellow eggs watering in the center of the men’s faces? Do they know where to find them now? On this band of concrete tethered between the living and the dead, the waking and the sleeping, the forest and the city — out there somewhere pumping their fists to music they’ve never heard before?
He is a small-g god, crouched hidden inside a host body, siphoning my breath through host lips, animated and full of borrowed electricity. He grabs at me, to hold me, but his hands are different and I can feel his spine through his shirt, which makes me think of death and mortal things and I am confused. Being combined with one that is not just “one” is disorienting and I try to find a way around coming to any conclusions because there aren’t any.
Grizzled men sang on the sidewalk. They clutched kittens on leashes to their chests and nuzzled the little things awkwardly. There were so many men out on the sidewalk today. Some wore their tanned hides like a badge of honor. They liked sleeping on the beach, but the post office lobby would do nicely too. The men teased me from the street, somewhat vague accusations about being a “kitten hater,” but the truth was I just didn’t want to linger there listening to their broken singing any longer. The men were gonna come for me, the main one bellowed. Where did you guys come from I asked, and why does everything in your life need to be on a leash? The men on the sidewalk said, Look girl, if only we could get up from our places on the sidewalk you’d see exactly what kind of leash we’d fasten on you… a short one! Ha ha ha. A thick one, ha. And then their cheeks got redder and their eyes got stare-y-er and their arms tanned at hyper speed and they leapt up from their places on the sidewalk and strained to lumber toward me, roiling around on the curb all tangled in a thicket of rag pants and pocketknives.
Surfaced in a strange man’s house. He painted the undersides of my body with hot soapy water where a sleeping bag was half-unzipped and spread over me like a big purple scar. Light seemed transformed, the irregular cloud of his strange funk like a man-tree sprawled over my body. I could hear the soles of his boots from far away. I licked at the last drifts of sleep, opened my eyes but couldn’t feel anything else below the neck. I looked down and saw myself sleeping but felt a lively burr of clear tiles clanking around in my chest. He dragged me out from under a midnight paradise and sat me up at the table for breakfast. The roads filled with rain; he shoveled gravel outside the door, piled rugs in front of the doorway. I set myself up in his beach lair and it was as if the floodgates had opened and he now had a reason to touch me with an urgency that before would have been blasphemous, abstract, and suspicious. I tore into him making a mess with ferociousness like eternal night.
Messages from the immobilized seared through the airwaves, piercing the membrane through a small radio playing quietly late at night. Their stale grey eyes were closed in hibernation; the swallowed voice caught like a ball of wax in the throats of the immobilized. The sleep of the dead — from which they do not wake easily — penetrated by the enlarged fang creeping into the flesh as it is given, coolly, in the dead hours of the morning. The smells taken in by the immobilized pasted together the lapse, the jump cuts, the forgetting. The wash of memory pierced by that fang and its smell like fat burning on the stove, like lust plastered on your burning body, black like the smoke that escapes your mind through your breath. Your mouth an oven of lust, love smoldering in the dark like a growling stove, black smoke leeching out from between your teeth. You seethe from between your teeth (you seethe from behind my eyes). Black smoke creeps along the skin of your burning body in a tangle of mists, secrets, whispers.
He’s the one who stoops in the corner and laps at the foot of your bed. He is unforgiving of the limits of mercy, such lapping only reveals that much more death, that which dashes the flash of life from your forehead in a burning smile. He laughs smoke clouds, he laughs and smoke clouds his eyes and he
laughs
. He reaches for your burning body and he falls deathly quiet, smoke laughing in the caustic shadow on the wall at his back. Jerking with every convulsive swoon of pity. Diseased shadows spill over the bed. Out spill black bones onto the table and black bones in patterns of a secret code for which the key is obscure — perhaps it is “white.” Out spill a tangle of black bones like shadows of bones. The table quakes, casting negative shadows in white up through its surface, mingling within the tangle of black bones, the dream lurking in the crevices in among the tangle of black bones that quivers as squirrel skulls pop out of negative spaces, some turning black themselves.
The tangle of black smoke stands between us, that cushion of lust as we lap away at the burning at our sides. The black of your eyes is a poison pond I fall into as it falls into me without a sound, the silent torrent that shapes fissures and aches like a pox on your blackened body. The sound of sand burning blacker. He’s something new. Desire in exile. Black smoke of desire. Burning bodies of cream, yellow tide foam echoing up through a skin of steam in the sky of fire.
This realm of no return is a prison. We’re locked to the bed… Vaults are everywhere. The walls of this room are pockmarked with vaults, accordion-like seams for shadows and gathering places for the smoke that prowls the room. Every surface is covered in graves. Steam gathers and catches under brass grave markers that chime through the room when they are full. The sound of metal warming and expanding echoes in creaks and snaps across my field of vision. The graves are full, bloated with black smoke. Heat bangs at the door with fists of fire mist.
The Warlock smelled of all the spent fires in blackened pits up and down the beach. Little spines of broken sea kelp were trapped in his hair. You really live on the beach? I asked, and I knew the answer already.
He bathed in the ocean and rolled up his various clothes, first light of morning. He wasn’t going to give me anything. Silence coming from his part of the beach. He stared a little at my fingernails, which were pink but not at all shiny and said nothing. His fists grew at his sides when he saw the way the gulls salivated over what little scraps of food he had gathered, piled on the shore while he waded in the break. He would pummel those things when he saw what they had looted.
I was unprepared for this. I saw flies repeatedly smash themselves against him. Dead flies piled up on the ground at his feet. He had pummeled them with his fists. Piles of beaten flies lay like black raindrops.
He lumbered toward me and I stepped back almost aware that I should be running, and fast. But I felt the same impulse to remain, feet planted within snorting range of the enormous black horse. He was so close that his mane blew in my face. Shadows of black birds pooled at his feet, flaking into the sand. Brown stumps of sea-beaten driftwood twisted into fence posts, caging me. I was aware of some event vaguely earthless that brought them here.
Bees fell out of the sky. The ocean waves beat quietly against the jetty as sea lions and bands of kelp echoed quietly through the waves. Birds beat their wings against the waves; sea gulls fluttered and opened their beaks noiselessly against the approach of noontime… All over, animals are seeing through things into what rests beyond. They see through you and they see through me. All over, stones and dried kelp stuck together; sand stuck to the sides of birds, to the sides of rocks at noon. Sand burnished with patches of shade; cracks in the sand steamed up with thoughts of this impossible drift caught at the bottom of the world, this panel of land between water and silt. Silt of sand paste at water’s edge. Snakes and crabs grab what they can from the quickening silt, extracting pieces of kelpskin with their tongues and scoop-like mouths. Moss gave way to sand; moss devouring, making the sand a part of its futuristic body. Twisted gnarls of knotty bull kelp, twisted pressurized fibers straining against the unreal sun; dirt and twigs caught under giant foaming leaves, curled over into small caves at the bases of trees, foaming at the mouth: The forest and the beach at once. The forest fell from the bluffs above, down to the beach and there kept growing. All the sand crabs, looting worms’ and seagulls’ entrails, maintained their world underneath this beach grove. The roots made their way into the saltwater waves and rot and molt a layer of bark and then turned out sea snakes. Bare roots bred sea snakes; they slept in the knotted roots. They shed and molt and took off with a single stroke; salty snakes matted into the sides of sea-moss-crusted rocks teeming with salty custard swimming with snakes. Hissing rocks sparkling with salty sea snake eyes, big black sacks of coins twinkling in the heat. Fallen trees made homes for sea crabs; tide pools hosted large dollops of flesh like the undersides of horse hooves. Only those gulls and crabs and stones buried under this miniature forest knew both above and below and gazed up from the underside of these trees, up through roots and trunks into the uppermost branches, x-ray sights cast upward from under ground… He dragged me to his place in the sand surrounded by this forest in exile, having fallen from the sky, picking up where it left off, taking root and growing in an alien grove on the beach. He carried me to his shed-against-nature built of wood that shouldn’t be there, filled with fibers woven from scraps of alien hides. Skinned animals not from this earth or this time. The shed was full of flies. They beat themselves against the walls, forgetting, or punishing themselves for the trees and the shed that came out of the sky. The shed was hot and muggy and all the unkempt spores fell out of the trees and clogged the powdered thicket of light inside with nowhere else to go.