Inner Tube: A Novel (26 page)

It isn’t really me you miss. Inviting and inflicting pain are insufficient. You want to understand, to pursue every forensic detail.

“Call.” She tugs hard on the rings. “Help us feed the world.”

Porpoises leap and plankton luminesce. Poor men pull nets by torchlight. I wasn’t there, but…She tugs. Her eyes insist. She raises and lowers one open hand, a hand as rigidly flat as any technician’s rule.

Drinking heat from a tin can, squatting in front of a pretty face, who am I to refute those eyes? I wasn’t there, but I want to see her lap up cold rice, rinse shirts in a bucket, weep beside the wire fence. So I give in, match point conceded. All tracks converge; feast and famine, solitude, solicitude, appearance made weightless, expectation pared—all finish up in pain. Then I click her off.

Getting away like a bug down the slot of a toaster, and staying away. All women want to haunt. Every kiss contains a gift. Each joy may be the last.

O
CEANIA. I WAKE UP
more hounded than haunted. The taste in my mouth is like jetty sludge. Hard sun thuds away, saying the same to me as to someone stranded on an atoll: Here again, here forever. No breeze, no breakers, ground zero only. I swallow aspirin dry. I say to myself, You really ought to be keeping a diary. In there you could be thorough. You could talk about animal companionship or bitter women or great blind sea depths impenetrable by light. You could write in a forbidden alphabet, with charcoal.

Unfathomable. And just when I thought everything was under control. Law of the desert: Don’t turn around. Anyway, I ought to have suited myself enough by now to the waiting game so as not to need an audience to play to, a little book to fill.

Treading water. I move through the hard, comfortless sun with no determination other than to be on the move. My arms hang limp. Green surgical pants hang low on my hips. I start to remember my sister crying on the beach, stung by…But I click that off. The atoll man goes crazy from too many swipes at an irretrievable life. Forever here, nowhere else—hold on to that and don’t let yourself sink. White clouds hang at the edges of the sky. Shadows hang in abeyance. I press calluses on the soles of my feet, pleased by their thickness. I feel droplets sliding down my neck like seepage from vestigial gills.

Red tide. Drink from the ocean, so it goes, and you thirst forever. Without thinking, I’ve veered over onto the path leading to the well. In a hounded condition, you gravitate to the familiar, and this is a route I can navigate in the dark. How far could I walk without resting? How long could I rest and still be able to stand up? Already I can smell the cows who loiter near the well like cleaner fish around a reef. Scarred and scrawny like Rosing (part of somebody’s write-off herd, I assume), they approach expectantly, with lolling, pebbly tongues, as I climb the fence. I read “help us starve the world” in their eyes; tight gray hide under my hand…But now there is an evil, uncow smell thickening the air, and I’m drawn along like a cartoon hobo by the fumes of a cooling pie. Corpses swollen with gas float in the well water, coyotes beheaded and skinned.

Undertow. My fear is an approximation, the way barnacles resemble teeth. What would the atoll man do, his one water source poisoned? Would he shrug and take another backward swipe? Dusk eddying around the patio, my sister uncorking Moselle and saying, “Do we really need glasses?” Click. Click click. This one doesn’t want to be turned off. Fine. I’ll just climb back over the fence then. Fine. I’m dry all over. My feet break through crusts and the earth below is cool. Continue down and down, immeasurably, unsoundably down, and there will be the last pit where marine debris once landed, layers of shell and bone compressed by the vanished ocean, dry all over.

Sandbar. Rosing greets me with a soft, appealing butt. His waiting ears are angled forward. Under the awning we nibble at air and I describe for him the sabotage of our well.

“Gangrene soup.” I shrug. “Nothing for it now.”

Rosing shuts his eyes, picturing the culprits, no doubt. A couple of sporting boys, welders on a weekend.

“So I asked myself, what would the atoll man do? And I thought, well, maybe he’d hunt for it scientifically.”

Rosing’s eyes remain closed. Probably as he works through variations of goat revenge.

“Dowsing. Hydromagnetism.”

Forking my hands, I demonstrate. Rosing stays slumbrous as a bivalve, but bears study. I note the angle of his horns, their theoretical point of convergence, and plot therefrom at ninety degrees a line to the damp end of his snout. He’s the dowsing rod come to life, far more receptive than any stick. Nose to the ground, comrade! We’ll open the ocean.

Immersion. Charlie Manson promised his children underground fountains of chocolate soda to nourish them during the prophesied race wars. If you can posit buried rivers and caverns of porous rock, then why not a favorite flavor too? Posit a Cambrian implosion. Posit the sucking action of a whirlpool.

Rosing wambles, lacking aim, failing to keep his nose to the ground. He is not to be urged or coaxed. I keep my distance, whirling through one liquid supposition after another. How agile my brain, light as cork on a fast current. Shrivel me timbres. I’m smiling buoyantly. I’m smiling a challenge to the atoll man, cell for cell. I’m ready to drown him.

Neap tide. The spot Rosing indicated was a depression between two ocotillos. I bent over the entrenching tool with ceremony. As I dug—patiently, pacing myself—I noticed compositional changes in the earth, sandwiching of a kind. Sun poured; it was thick. The hole, while it got wider, wasn’t much deeper. Ants bit my legs. Rocks felt numb. I didn’t hear echoing. I didn’t feel the big suction. Following after Rosing again, I lost my shovel on the way. I thought about pants made of seaweed.

Unless glare deceives, I’m back on the well path again. Missing heads and the smell of cows. My sister wiping Moselle off her chin. Footprints that fit. Surf in, surf out, the comforting repetition we keep trying to regain, as though to be babies again with our sea in a sac. Pull back and push in. Never quite arriving but forever here: floating bodies.

T
HIS IS THE HEADLINE
I have furrowed deeply in the sand, in letters so huge it can only be read from aircraft passing overhead:
MALAYSIA BANS VIDEO GAMES
.

Q: Why is this information important?

A: Because the letters are big.

I shrink; I peel myself. I dig up quail eggs and slurp them down. I dream of tomato-flavored icicles and midair neon and wake up with an erection that won’t go away. Or I strike poses in the indistinct mirror of silver Airstream skin, imagine my own skin as a page and the tracks of sweat as something to read.

Nothing moderate or tentative allowed. I am clean. I am decisive as a surgeon. Video games banned, outlawed. I have pulled the circuit boards, yanked the wires. All intervening, interfering material removed. Pure signal only. An unbroken arc from source to target.

Discovery: I can control the air.

It is necessary to set myself out of motion, to disremember the automatic commands I have followed for so long, so many years of willfulness and waste. No more deconstruction or synopsis. Only pure unbroken signal. I open wide and it comes in so loud and clear that I twinge all up and down.

Programming notes: There is viscous, circular music layered like currents of the wind. There are different frequencies of sleep, a reptilian buzz filtered through rock or the slow tick-tock of bats. Most of all, there are the elliptical intimacies of the moderator, her ugly whims and many surprise guests. No topic out of bounds. Always a challenging format.

But still I take up tenuous space, like a razor blade floating on water. Balance is lost on days and nights when nothing comes at all, but suspension hones me for the next time. It’s like the difference between an insect’s chitinous exterior and the liquid essence held within, two discrete forms, each sustaining each. Shadow wrapped around pure signal.

Rediscovery: The air controls me.

“And that’s so awfully trite,” says the moderator, beginning in the middle, as usual.

The tight skin and the lax mouth, lower lip swollen as if from a blow, hair awry. Her beauty, as usual, opens me like a dagger.

“But we know he can’t help it.”

Her face dissolves into the dark rippling underside of a pier and applause overcomes the noise of surf. I race up the beach in lawyer’s pinstripes, closer and closer until my face fills the screen.

“Just like his father,” the moderator says heavily.

Cut to—

Nineteen forties New York. Prim brownstones on the sunny side of the street. Women in cloche hats and men in long overcoats maneuver around one another. They seem on the verge of dancing.

Moderator: “Suspicious as hermits, both of them.”

I slide to the edge of the mattress, peeling myself. “Not so.” Heat thick as cream inside the pod.

Rain falls now, the stoops shiny with it. A cortege of black sedans and a voice like paint blistering. “Students of swingology, class is now in session. From the Chatterbox Room of the Endicott Hotel, it’s Professor Chester and his Horns of Plenty. Turn it loose!”

Camera pulls back to reveal moderator on high stool. A man in hospital whites kneels on the black studio floor to shave her legs with a piece of copper flashing dipped in grease.

“Our topic?” She thoughtfully taps the foam-padded microphone against her chin. “Subterfuge. Machination. Some people,” pulling a minstrel’s cakewalk face, “well, some people think that’s what power means. But really, they never go through with anything. Hermits, varmints, who needs ’em? I say, strike up the band!”

“Adeste Fideles” by muted brass.

Talking heads in extreme close-up—

Violet: “Did you bring me a present? I thought maybe, for a change…”

Opatowski: “Wide open spaces could mean like bomb craters.”

Sabra: “Quit it! It’s late and I’ve got to get out of here. Stop. My shoes…”

Delvino: “A numbers cruncher? A guy in a tie? So fuck you, I read Moravia in bed and listen to Scarlatti tapes in my car.”

Andrea: “You can be like a thug if you want, but I know…”

Gordo: “I’d give all that I own if I could but atone to that silver-haired daddy of mine.”

Tasha: “Did you bring me a present?”

Rain falls big and hard on the surface of a swimming pool, splats on turquoise cement like newts shot from guns. Then rain forming in a cloud, each step textbook-labeled. Then rain melting the streets of a frontier town, falling on black gangster raincoats, ship decks, parade grounds, cathedrals.

Darkness with ugly mob hubbub, industrial grinding.

Fade up on—

A moiré of the beautiful moderator, like unprocessed data from a compound eye.

“We are back,” she says, assembling very slowly into one. “And want to thank the Abbey of Captain Video for supplying footage. Because we can’t do it alone.”

Her head falls forward with exhaustion, bobs up again, and the skin looks so tight it could rip.

“Would you like to know what we think?” She draws on her throat with a finger. “We think ambiguity is so exciting.”

I profuse.

“Believe nothing you hear,” says my immoderate sister. “And only half of what you see.”

Pure signal. Carla’s stubborn angel face coruscates behind gray strings of semen on the cold glass screen.

R
OSING WAS GOOD, FIBROUS
but succulent. The cookfire burned all day. I mounded books, clothes, shelving, the writing desk, my director’s chair, and sprinkled on my last can of fuel. The flames went high as a house. I skinned Rosing without skill, wasting a lot of meat. The way the sand sponged up blood made me think of snow. Lovingly, as an Eskimo would, I stroked the yellow fat. Birds were circling, getting too excited. While the fire was too hot to get close to, I tipped the Airstream on its side and pulled one of the axles to use as a spit. I ate the heart and liver first, roasting them in foil. I mounted Rosing’s head on a stake. His eyes were still soft and resigned. Days have passed without my counting. Someplace far behind me, many miles, ants and blowflies perform the final cleaning of the bones. Rosing’s eyes have been pecked out. Wind stirs up from one direction, now another, and the burial of blackened remnants has already begun. Here the wind is hardly noticeable, an afterthought Or possibly this has everything to do with the unreceptivity of my skin, which feels old on me and makes me think of dry gray boards. Here even the shortest distances blur, or possibly my sense of sight has dulled as well. I experiment, holding two fingers over the flame of my lighter, relieved when the pain doesn’t go away. But why don’t I feel hunger or thirst? I lie on my stomach, bracing my chin on both fists. Ahead of me are tall sandstone stacks. They’re always ahead of me and I can’t seem to get any closer. Or possibly with just a few more steps they will be close enough to touch. I lie on my back, looking at colorless sky. Suppose I were not alone. Suppose I had someone along who had known me all my life. I might say something like this: In our allotted time, it’s supposed, we do no more than compete in the passing on of our genes. But suppose the competition is actually among genes and we are merely the temporary receptacles in which they find themselves? Part of me is glad there’s no one here and that I don’t have to say anything. Part of me wishes to say and say and say until I’ve used up every word. Still another part perceives these other two but dimly, and very vaguely understands the act of saying. I stand up, brushing myself clean. There ought to be plenty of daylight left, travel time to continue on toward the tall stacks, though they might only be abstractions. Travel time, just walk along. The only things I have to carry with me are the canteen, my lighter, and a knife. Walking along, like I was designed to do just the one thing. Keeping my eyes down, away from targets. Here are dry yellow flowers in three U-shaped clusters branching off from a woody stem. Each flower is a sloping tuft, its longest and brightest bristles at the center. Here is flat red stone furred on its underside with some pupal housing. Here are flapping strands of spider silk, thorny seed containers, rabbit droppings, flaked lichen, chewed husks. Here, even here, is a piece of glass, clear, roughly triangular, deeply scratched along its shortest edge, a vestige. In examining it, I seem to have cut open the pad of my right index finger. The little knob of blood swells to its tensile limit and breaks. I catch the drips on my tongue. I taste like metal. With my other hand I scoop a little hole, put the glass in the bottom and cover it over. Walking along, I can’t remember if the cut finger is one of those that I burned. No matter. Vestiges are all buried, just that easy. When I lift my eyes to those stacks, they don’t make me remember or think of anything else. High rocks all by themselves, unconnected. No images and no figures, not one. Solid uncompromised rock, and still no closer. Possibly they recede in proportion to my advance. Possibly they echo with remembering while I do not. But I’m going along in my own way, not pulled by anything, roadless. I drink from the canteen even with no thirst in me, unable to remember how other liquids taste even while my mouth can make their names: sweet vermouth, sour mash, bitter tea, salt water. I walk my way, eyes down. Here are insteps rising and falling, toes and heels firmly printing themselves. Here are scallops in sand that could be recognized. No matter, I’m no more pushed than pulled. This is a trail that someone who’s known me all my life can’t follow. They can’t catch up now so as to say something like: What if we’re all empty of genes? What if competition’s done and the end designed right in? So I keep trailing along, eyes soft, and resigned that if someone caught up I’d make them all juicy at the end of my knife. And that would only seem to be the end. There’d be juice in the sand beside my fire with its trail of smoke, and I’d have to make a mark for the grave, something to remember. Colorless sky, blank. I am somewhere between close and far. I see the blood dried on my fingers, still no thirst in me. Inside, possibly, elements hide, pretending to have been emptied out. Dry heart, stony glands, and refuge in the crevices and crannies. I can still be fooled, even here. Unpulled, unpushed, eyes down, I still find myself asking. Here are the things I carry with me. What if? Possibly. My arms in the air, antennae, pick up whispers that die against unreceptive skin. There is so much daylight left to keep going in that I can stop here. I can lie down, folding slowly. Stacks ahead and footprints behind, a closure in between. The ground must be full of heat and that heat must be expanding into me. I must want to sleep. With no hunger to dream, I have pictures on my eyes even so. The pictures go by and they are colorless as the sky. I do not recognize any of them.