The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan (4 page)

We withstood the attack. Blackened grouper helped. We held each other.
Now, she is sleeping next to me in bed. Beautiful, peaceful. I wish for her an easy day tomorrow.
We are in our state room cabin now. I hear her breathing as I write. I think that her breaths are mine also. Without her breath, I could not breathe. Without her smile, I have no interest in smiling. Without her touch, nothing touches me.
Seven-foot swells keep me on my back for some two or three hours. Nausea threatens my filet mignon dinner and my rum punch happy hour cocktails. This ship holds thousands of twisted tourists—I would never have thought it small enough to be batted about so easily by waves and wind.
This is the worst nausea I’ve felt since before my marriage. A long time ago, I darted a fertilizer saleswoman. If ever a profession was a metaphor for a life, hers was.
The nausea was as bad as that disgust I felt at the Peanut-Brained Writing Awards Ceremony, where the category winners comprised former judges, employees and even chefs working inside the organization—the most obvious award-fixing since Charles You-Know-Who’s resignation from the National Book Award committee was rewarded with the award itself. Or the university writing department that groomed student stories for the state’s largest daily newspaper’s annual creative writing contest, which was "coincidentally" judged by the same faculty. What a surprise that only that university’s students ever won the awards. The general public had no chance. Thus in my writing the via college gave way to the via collage.
The nausea reminded me of sitting in the back seat of my parents’ station wagon as my father sped along twisted mountain roads when we visited our vacation home, an Aframe near Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Blackie, our German shepherd, locked in a cage in the back, lying atop a pile of old burlap potato sacks, competed with me to see who would hurl first.
Javelins fly over bridges; shots are put into arms; discs are slipped through bars; pies are chipped onto farms.
In Earth-sha we all smoke. It drains our energy so that we sit still and notice before acting. Of course, normally we fall asleep before we do anything. Smoking is isolating: the individual can maintain her or his distance by putting up a wall of smoke. Of course, even where you are, one could find people holding smoking up as a defense against normalization. The more it is outlawed, the greater its appeal. That is why the tobacco companies are funding the anti-tobacco advertising. It’s like that here, too.
Let’s put our differences aside for the Olympics.
The Mexicans won the jumping bean contest. The Peruvians fared poorly. Or course, they were using Lima beans.
I can’t wait to see the swimmers submerged in Greece.
The Central Asian middleweight boxers were impressive. Uzbekhistan, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were represented well.
I had pork chops for dinner. Martina Navratilova is playing doubles for the US versus the Ukraine. That’s lady’s an amazing tennis player. A southpaw. The court has "windy conditions"? It looks indoor, but can’t be.
The world is becoming uncultured, but that’s what it wants—not for the Olympics, but for the lack of equal celebration for the arts down to equal subcategories equivalent to synchronized diving. Experimental fiction would contain dozens of subcategories. Ah, pipe dreams, as O’Neill would say.
Our world is aggressively shedding its mantel of art. Or is America alone in this as well? Should it hang its head and look aside while its artists are silenced? The marketplace silences them. Commodification silences them. Competition silences them.
We’re not writing for baubles or trinkets, are we? Respectability means something. No?
We’re not a carny sideshow of solipsists on ice. And we’re not all heathens.
We’re civilized and shovelized and randomized until the order looks like chaos.
We’re winterized and Simonized and Martinized until we’re purple.
We’re Dewey-decimated, baseball-captivated, digitally calibrated poor s.o.b.’s who despise forming plurals with apostrophes.