On the Shoreline

There were no sounds and there were no sights, no sense of touch, no prickly taste, just a very faint smell of freshly-washed sheets. He had put them in the laundry the night before, leaving his book on the table nearby and staring into the little maelstrom through the plastic window like he was looking for a signpost. The spinning finished and he realized this fact half an hour later, bringing himself up slowly and transferring over the cloth and nylon and polyester like a poorly trained servant. It was night now. He adjusted himself with a shudder, though it was warm in the room. Immediately and with the composure of a monk he propped himself up, came to the bathroom, smiled in the mirror, then promptly slathered various portions of porcelain in a chunky chicken-stew froth. It will be a great day, he thought.

The woman met him at a typical tavern, decked in local camaraderie with an oaken bar and the seedy atmosphere that seems dry and unfilled in the daytime. He was surprised how fast the night receded and morning had dribbled by, and the woman took his vague surprise as a personal compliment.

“Do you like my shirt?”

“Sure.” He in no way meant to suggest that he was more impressed with something else of her, but it came out that way. She continued.

“Oh, is there something else, then?”

“We’ll see.”

“Oh?”

And so the conversation continued, his unintentionally coy apathy combining well with the woman’s poor eyesight. She couldn’t tell that he was staring some twenty feet beyond her, at nothing in particular. They agreed to something later in the night; he couldn’t remember, or at the least didn’t care to. She left smiling and he left shortly thereafter, picking his pants out of his ass and wondering how many buses there were in the city, or at least the metropolitan part.

He came back to his house, and everything seemed clearer with the drowsiness and nausea gone. Tennessee-style living room. Bland, sharply-defined kitchen. Clean and as clear of life as it could be. Even his mark was swept away by a habitual attention to cleanliness. He had no socially compromising habits in this department, however, it had occurred to him on more than one occasion that cleaning might be more fun stark-naked and dancing to the most terrible Reggae he could find. The thought no longer made him smile, though.

During the afternoon a call came in, some lawyer talking about estate transferal and blah blah blah he was busy on the internet and a few yes’s later he was off the phone and free to do the browsing he so desperately gravitated towards. Media of all kinds. Some days he’d just read the whole time. Others involved copious amounts of porn. Every once in a while he’d go out and walk, but the days felt dry and the warmth of the sun was oppressive rather than sensual or life-affirming.

Dinner came around and he ordered something. The person taking the delivery sounded like a very bored man, and for some reason he could not stand this, and made every effort to cheer him up.

“What’s your order?”

“I’d like 7,428 cheese pizzas, please.”

“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t take orders above ten at a time.”

“Ten? What if I’ve got a soccer team? Do we really need to make two calls?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’d have to talk to the manager.”

“Okay. I just want one medium pizza.”

“We don’t have medium. Small or large.”

“Okay, I’d like a smarge pizza.”

“Didn’t catch that, sir.” He conceded to his failure and finished the call.

As cheese oozed off his chin and onto the table, he realized with a kind of depressive clarity that it had been a year to the day. But the memory was just as it had been the day after. It just kind of sat there, inert, while he waited patiently for some kind of response. He cared, that was sure, but as it happened he was merely calm, the care more like the easy care of decent friends rather than intimate family members. He’d lost more than a few friends from his curious attitude, though friend was a dubious term and congenial acquaintance was probably more fitting. His response to their accusations was equally serene, and at one point he started countering their invectives.

“You’re terrible.”

“Nah, I’m pretty good at water polo.” Bafflement, followed by more complaints. He hung up the phone. Another met him in front of his house.

“You have no heart.” He brought his hand to his chest, brought his other hand up with his index finger raised, indicating that they wait.

“Are you sure? Do we have to get a sonogram or something?”

And on and on, until there were no more congenial acquaintances left, until there was simply a house and his parents somewhere far away and a few good friends who were busy in their own life and offered more personal condolences that he could actually sympathize with. One of the curt ones said, “shit sucks, gotta do what you can”, which was one of the reasons he liked the guy so much and wished he lived a little closer to the dude. A female mired in marketing more or less dismissed him and said, “if you need someone, I can’t really be there, but you have a good imagination, so I’m sure you’ll manage if it comes to that.” which was also truthful and one of the last times he could remember genuinely laughing out loud.

By instinct he was well dressed and out the door, and by instinct he came to the place where he agreed to meet the woman. It was an entirely emotional response, the streets and his pace and his demeanor simply feeling wrong or right, the physical manifestation something near nausea. His instinct had never been this good and he was a bit worried at his newfound precocity. He could not, however, get himself out of this very fortunate funk and instead went straight to the pier, smiles in hand and nothing in mind.

The night proceeded in a similar fashion, his gut feeling doing in his estimation a downright wonderful job of handling conversation. His selection of words was part of his chameleon approach to conversation, appropriating others turns of phrase and mannerisms is subtle ways that he himself had a difficult time noticing. The night twinkled blandly. Someone was stabbed and they had to leave. It was the perfect opportunity.

His come-on was practically engrained to the point of ritual, though he could not remember having ever done it before. The evening coasted gracefully though his detatchment was such that he wondered, while humping, what the average optimal path might be through the parking lot at the nearby supermarket. It consumed him. Where do the employees normally park? What’s the usual density and distribution of cars? Are there any habitual shoppers than can help the density? Shopping cart schedules would also be important. He conceded at his lack of information and made a very dedicated mental proposition to shut the hell up and get on with the fucking.

The next morning contained a few more rounds and in his dazedness he was a little more coherent and concerted. He patted her warmly and asked about her family, what her life was like. But that lasted only until breakfast, and by then he was once again the loving automaton that made good jokes and exuded the appropriate kind of confidence, while he was more concerned about spatial densities represented by words or Stanford’s prison experiments or whatever came to mind.

And during the evening he came back into focus, pain splintering his hand. He was on a beach. He was punching a rock with a very stern dedication. His face, he realized, was folded into something near anger. Wait a minute, he thought. I’m punching a rock. It was so stupid to him that for a moment he just stopped and wondered what he had eaten, wondering what drugs had made him trip, and where he might score some more. But then the events of the afternoon piled and congealed and he at once started to understand this rock. As he recalled it, he was still miffed that he had to find himself punching the rock, of all things.

His wife had been in the habit of wearing a little blue tube top when they went to the beach. It functioned as her bikini and the form-fitting nature combined with water was a sight he could never disagree with. His son had noticed and had asked how mommy got blue skin. She would often sit on the rock, cross her legs or, when he was the only one watching, open them wide and pull aside her underwear. This was in fact a rock they had been near often, a rock they had straddled as they died, but their deaths were kind of inconsequential to the whole rock beating thing.

She walked around their house like a stray feline. Her movements were quick and smooth and graceful and always with a hint of paranoia, like the wall might jump after her or, more appropriately to the metaphor, animal control was hiding in the closets. He had passed this off as a quirk, some sort of habit culled from childhood, and didn’t care as she seemed to be in heat almost constantly, her itinerant nature providing for quite the house-exploration and more than a few explanations to the curious son about storks, birds, bees, and anything else that would generally piss the son off.

A few days before their deaths she walked up to him, barefoot, keeping the heels of her feet elevated with every step, the hardwood barely creaking under her petite frame.

“I think we should have some real fun.” He smiled, the worry sufficiently buried.

“Oh?” He hugged her, stared down at her. “Like what?”

“We should have fun with him.” She looked past, though he already had the feeling he knew as she was walking up.

He was unsure what to think. His imagination had led him to every possible avenue, most of which appealed to him, but the application to reality was often complicated enough that he just ignored it and stuck with a fairly conventional role.

“We could work on a daughter, if that’s what you’d like…” She licked him from his chin to his ear, making a noise that might as well have been a cat purring. He had to bend down for her to reach his ear. He was rigid with excitement and not the least bit ashamed.

“I… agree… we should, uh, talk about it first. I mean, after this.” She raised an eyebrow but was not frustrated.

“Fiiiiine.”

The next day they sat down. He was dressed casually, and she was unkempt. There was no sign of the son around.

“Where is he?”

“Over at a friends house. So, what do you want to talk about?” She was direct and seemed genuine.

“Well, uh –“

“Hey, your concern is perfectly understandable. I don’t disagree with it at all, I know all the arguments against it. However, he’s hit puberty and as you know I don’t agree with most ideas of sexual taboo anyway, most of the arguments being a matter of belief rather than objectively reinforced fact.”

“I don’t like the taboos either, um… I don’t know. Maybe you could give me a day or something? I’ll have the day off tomorrow, I won’t be bothered by work.”

“Sure.”

“But don’t take too long. He won’t be… that way forever.” He nodded robotically and left the room. He could hear her sigh as he left.

The sunset was paled to gray by a broad swathe of clouds when he went out the back door and sat on the deck. He didn’t have any problem with her proposition. The kid was smart and curious, actually in the habit of reading the more mature aspects of authors like Heinlein, and he himself still had a few similar unlived fantasies hanging around his noggin. He had hated his own family, their deeply conservative and dull path, so this could be something like vicariously living a dream, in a way. But he was still nervous. Not because of the sexual freedom – no, he approved of that wholeheartedly, even encouraged it – but something else. He was terribly tired and fell asleep on the couch after he returned to the living room.

The next day he no longer felt the nervousness. He realized at once what the problem was – his tiredness. Whenever he spent a long time focusing on something, as he did the day before over a computer screen, his brain fatigued. When it did that, even the slightest and usually-dismissed fears would culminate into horrors that he could not escape. Today he felt fine, ready to accept the proposition and more than a little interested in what her ideas included.

They were nowhere to be found so he turned on the news, and the first image, in some stranger-than-fiction kind of coincidence, was his mangled car and a police line with a reporter speaking in front of it. He was not a dull man, nor was he overpowered by emotion save on the very rare days of true mental fatigue. He knew what had happened and turned the television off calmly, waiting for the phone call which he would answer with a cheerful hello and receive the news with no noticeable change, like pouring water into a lake.

Nothing came to mind. He was expecting a racing heart, he was expecting some frantic attention to detail where he would remember every aspect of the television, the weather, the world as it was, but it did not materialize then. Instead he just idly watched T.V., wondering with visible languor what to do now that they were gone, as if a couple of buddies had moved out and now he had to pay all the rent.

His wife had been the owner of a large estate near the northwest end of Montana, and while he was now entitled to it, he planned to take all the time he could in getting it for no reason at all. It didn’t interest him. She had inherited quite a bit, and his work was the product of an idea that he occupy himself with something he enjoyed. Now it was a life of utter peace, the terrible ideal kind, where he could waste away in indolence and avoid conflict like so many myopic morons wished for, apparently unaware that any kind of peace where everyone and anything gets along perfectly is stupid and uninteresting, to say nothing of a dystopia.

He later looked over the counter where he found a note by his wife, presumably the last she ever wrote, which said,

“Dearest – I had the pleasure of introducing him to a few new things, all of which he enjoyed immensely – and he wants to learn more! Sorry I didn’t wait for your answer, but you said you didn’t mind it last night before clamming up, so I figured you just needed some rest.”

He was surprised at her powers of observation or, he guessed it would be now, at the powers of observation she had possessed. And that was all. He had nothing to forgive her for, nothing he had but memories and times and a son and a few other things, and they were gone and what did he have now to believe in? He had lived for them, really, and had a poor time living for himself. The thought of making another family was reasonable, but he felt as if he had turned off the engine, just sort of drifting off the track and into the grass, to roll to a stop and watch as the vegetation slowly consumed him.

And yet that was not the reason for his punching of the rock. A few months later, languidly rolling in bachelordom and apathy, he came up to the rock in a drunken haze with a few parasites of present cheer, those boring and chirpy folk who are eager to revel and loathe to live. They played around near it, the memory floating around in his head, a little chunk carved out from where the car and hit, and it did not affect him.

“This is the kind of rocks! Woooo!”

“No, that rock is totally my throne, man.” Neither was really sure what the other was talking about.

They sat on top of it, vomited on it, then drifted off to another bar down the beach, laughing the whole way.

“Dude, I heard some people died on that rock man.”

“On it? No way, maybe near it or something. Like you’d want to cook people on a rock like that.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, dude, I mean some people did a wicked crash right into the thing.”

“Oh, bummer. You hear about that?” They turned to him, and he replied with what sounded like a full heart.

“Yeah, I knew them too. Must’ve sucked for the husband.” A few yeah-mans were had in reply and they continued speaking about whatever came to mind, veering towards lighter subjects.

He looked back at the rock, thinking matter-of-factly, that is where they died. Or was it after they were extricated from the car? Did they die later? Dramatically? Instantly? He didn’t know. In his drunken ambling he turned back to the conversation and ignored the dark splat of quartz adrift in the sand as it faded in the distance.

A month before a year had gone by, he returned to it, unsure why he was there, quite positive that he was not going to wish inanimate flesh luck or pray or anything like that. He had never understood praying to begin with. It seemed to him a fear of death and a practicality regarding the stink of dead flesh purported that, and he only agreed insofar as burial simply to do away with the smell. But he kept staring at the rock. The rock, the rock, a dimpled thing, reddish and a nice contrast against the dull blue sea. For the life of him he couldn’t fathom why he came back. It was a pretty place, but that was it.

And then the day of, sitting there with his hand mauled and one his knuckles broken, tears descending quickly and haphazardly upon the rock, the wind calm and moist, pushing his hair and prickling his scalp, warmth seizing his chest and what else? He did not know, did not understand, looking at the rock. It was not loss that raged at him, not discontent, but something he could not rightly place. He wanted to beat the rock more, but it had found a place, a purpose, and suddenly he understood that he had lived as if guided, as if uninterested, as if he was tenant to this fated flesh and fortunate instinct, looking over the lolling combers like he was watching the rolling numbers of a metered life, and it was there as he caressed his bloody hand that the world suddenly came into focus, if only for a brief and unsettling moment before fading back into cozy, instinctual apathy.

He met the woman the next day, and she was glad to see him.