he mailbox was open to the moonlight. The little metal walls glinted. There weren't any letters inside. I had been inside all day reading and my eyes were blurred from the effort. I had come outside to check the mail and the earth felt as if it had been sprinkled with water and taken out to dry. Everything had been created earlier that day when I hadn't been paying attention. The sun was falling behind the bright green mountains over the swimming pool, and there was a feverish tint in the air, that suggested erotic undertow. There didn't seem to be anything in human life that could hold my desires anymore--at night, I would turn in bed, hoping that a chasm would open in the floor and let me fall away from waking life, into a dream, down where hell would be in legend and not in life, soothed by oceanic blues and greens. Wet sucker mouths down there. Dark and soft forever.

But nothing gasped open, nobody ever spoke. Everyone knows the feeling deep in your bones at the end of a long work-shift, when you look in the mirror and the whole world has slid away from you, you a nerveless reflection in its big mouth, a reflection with a will that has to choose to be reborn before it even speaks. That was how I had felt for weeks--the energy was gone from life, but something still glimmered far behind it. I was numb to the beauty of the night skies, everything whirled out of focus when I tried to grab at it with my eyes, which were all I had to tackle the miracle. I was afraid to begin sensing my own life in my blood, because if I did it might erupt in an unceasing tumult, and then how would I go to work as a cashier every day? Someone would catch the wrong glint from my smile, the wrong angle from my staring eyes, they would know that I was removed from the rhythm of their everyday world, and I would be revealed as a ghost. Everyone is afraid that everyone else will find out that they don't actually exist.

I walked, footsteps bare and alien, patting the tar like the hands of an infant crawling away from its home for the first time, and found a wooden walkway that led toward the ocean. The water was so large in that direction that the sky looked like a huge funnel behind it even before you could see the waves, and the lapping of the water sounded like it was coming from the skies. Waves crashing inside me, as well. There was a clubhouse of some kind pasted against the sky, attached to the planks beneath my feet, and a white boat drifted out of its side, scorching the world. I wasn't paying enough attention. Nobody was paying enough attention. I hadn't glanced at a newspaper in three or four years. It didn't seem to have anything to do with my life, and I felt cleaner and cleaner and healthier the longer I stayed away. Our forms of public communication had ruined our lives, and our forms of private communication bore the strain and were never aired in public. People don't really feel anything, do they? I know I don't.

I saw, over a frail wooden fence, a world of children with floating devices strapped to their arms, round lights like headlights coming on as night came in the walls of the pool, and the smell of chlorine burned through my nostrils. I felt like a naked ghost. The children were laughing, unaware of their shrillness. They pierced right through me. I remembered my heartbeat. I had a body again. The adults had lost their glimmer, and sat around the pool on plastic lawn furniture, waiting to die. Wishing the children would all stop laughing so they could fall asleep and be bathed in lightless breezes.

I watched the water, and the way it moved made my whole life wobble. I was aware that to pay close attention to beauty was to lose money. I knew from experience that if I let my passions fly up, out of the capability of my body and into the seagull-flight of wordless inspiration, into the strain of not knowing how the painting I had to paint would come out yet, that I would become incapacitated for work at the liquor store where I punched those little buttons so that other people could sleep without dreaming. I hate you. One man gritting teeth behind a wall of glass, unable to speak to the rest of his race. How many spirits have been lost that way?

One girl in a pink suit crawled out of the water onto the smoothed concrete, the moon hanging in the last sunlight right above her and the foggy lights below her in the pool and walked dripping across the horizon, invulnerable to it all. They, gathered around the pool, would teach her to be afraid. But in the sucking water, in the cleansed pool between chalky walls, two adults suddenly appeared in my peripheral vision, I turned to look at them. They were batting a beach-ball between the two of them, grinning, they were gradually reclaiming what the little girl held in her effortless eyes. The girl dove, water splattered across the sun and it simmered out behind the hills. The two adults blinked in the spray and laughed quietly behind the gasping tumult of condominiums that stacked up behind the dunes where stiff little tufts of undisturbed grass trembled in the fragile breeze.

I had stopped and put my arms on the wooden fence around the pool area, I removed them and my skin was chafed. I tore my vision away from the remnants of paradise that I'd seen, and kept walking toward the louder world of water beyond, where the pool led into the ocean, where the water seethed out of our control. It simmered on the horizon, the white boat had drifted out of it and over the curving edge of the world while I watched the hairy old children play, and the beach drifted up out of it, a long plank of undisrupted sand and the water had covered and then withdrew, the sand was cold and rippled in the dawning moonlight. Through the dunes the town blinked occasionally reminding me of its existence, that it had long sheets of numbers. A world to my left, invented to torture me. Another to my right, too large and strange to comfort. It was dark and cool enough now for life to take place quickly, and ghost-crabs moved across the glinting surface, legs like dreams, moving with impossible lightness. I wish

I could move like that. I hadn't gotten any mail today. Recent bills were paid. Nothing called me back into the world until the next day of work. My wrists were cramped from punching buttons on a machine I'd uninvent. There was time to notice things: stars pushed out of the stillness far away from the moon, and then in the closer reaches, the place where the light of night comes from. My wrists hurt. When I am old I won't be able to move my hands. Some of the stars are still alive. I can see them along with the ones that are dead. I have never woken up. The screams from the chlorine pool are diminishing. I walked until the noise of the world retreated, then stopped, because I was halfway between the pool and the fishing pier, where the noise of the town began again. Something gave way in the wet sand and tickled at my toe, like a little mouth that knew what it was doing. I jumped, afraid that jellyfish or something else from the depths had leaped ashore to poison me. But nothing moved on the sand, except for the place where my toe had slipped in, which gently spluttered and audibly gasped. I looked and the moonlight intensified on it, there was something alive in the worn-out muck. I kneeled and saw the water wash past the spot, watched for some small and innocent creature to come out of the soft hole. Nothing. Then the water

Withdrew. Some of the sand was washed from the spot, and something just under the earth's surface was alive, trying to greet me. The sand fell away from the edges, and a faint glow came from the spot. I moved closer and pushed some of the sand from the edges of what now appeared to be a fissure going down through the sand, something hollow but clenched tight against the salt water. I picked up a piece of shell and poked at the rim, and something under the sand squeezed shut, making a puckering noise. For some reason I thought of my ex-girlfriend and the expression she'd make whenever I hurt her feelings, her eyes unbearably sad, everything in the world having wounded them and me the one who was supposed to be her relief from the outer madness making the hurt deeper, carving out her last sense of safety. Something in her drying up. The mouth

(Because it looked like a mouth now), surfaced as I smeared the sand away from its edges, a faint glimmer of wet, mucus-covered lips moving open in the dark light. I looked up to see the empty beach, as if time had passed quickly to leave me alone with this thing, whatever it was. The water seemed to be making more noise now, urging, pleading, asking. The white roar filled my ears and blended with the moonlight. There was no President of the United States of America, no terrorist, no cameramen, no signs covered with digits, no billboards, no computerized noises, in the water. The water was clean, dark and smooth, tumultuous. It filled you with noise and vigor, it made you glow when you entered it and came back to the world after a swim, it had salts to cleanse you and disinfect you. I wanted to drown in it and come back to life, spluttering out the dark ink of my blood, filled with whiteness and marbled gravestone purity. A man formed from broken shells, with the noise of the surf coming from his mouth. The world filled

With brine odors, streetlights on full strength now in the town beside the beach glowing outside the dune, the condominiums like boxes of tissue paper, faint and illusory, a place too fragile for people to inhabit. My skin started to itch and fill with heat as I pressed a finger into the squishy being that lived in the sand, and to wear clothing was unbearable. I couldn't wait to get out of the cloth clinging to my body. I stood up and tried to take my clothes off, but they clung to my body in a mold of sand and salt and sweat, I was condemned to feel the wind through a sheath. I tore. Tore, the skies were frantic. Filled with me. I was told, by the drum inside every wave, you cannot impregnate me, I cannot contaminate you,

Come to me. The noise of tearing cloth was buried by a single crashing wave, the faint echoes of the town beyond, its glossy music and its mazes, died. I had an erection so hard that it hurt, like an animal that wanted to spring off my body and feed itself on something if I didn't get it food. It would explode blood and turn into a useless flap if I didn't get what it wanted. The mouth made a slurping noise beneath the thin water as if to beckon me, and I bent to the earth, poking a finger in first to see if it was filled with teeth, but the mouth in front of the waves was hot and slippery, threatless. I moved myself trembling over it, my body becoming a thin shell around the intensity of my heartbeat. I let the tip sink in, and the mouth palpitated around it in a spasm. Heat lightening sank hollow teeth into the sides of the sky. The heavens were a cave-mouth running with slight waterfalls. I sensed no danger beneath the first touch, and pushed easily into the sleeve inside the sand. It wound around my penis, a coil of muscles with terrifying strength. I couldn't withdraw, I knew that it would take what it wanted with me. Its movements were perfect, playing my nerves like a piano, sliding up and down in the right places, twisting across the right spots, better than any human sex. Is this what we chase when we take walks late at night? The water came up behind me, rushing with the weight of my orgasm, a particular star glinted on my skin, the night had been broken open. This is what it is like,

To experience something no other man has ever known. The waves, the water warm, drifted up through my helpless legs and caressed my warmth, my thighs, my back. I had been removed from shame, there was no name for what I was doing. The earth sucked and pulled, and I came again and again, feeling the impact muffled in the wide sands. The earth came with me, which I hadn't been expecting. I heard plaster walls and china shattering in the town behind the sand dunes, and the dunes started to shrink in the night as the earth quaked. The waters drew back in the impact the moon glowed bright as a lightbulb drifting and I was finished, my body was trembling and the undertow had taken my clothes.

I stood on the shore and by rising just a few inches the town was revealed to me, a weak structure, collapsed walls of condominiums and human hair bright with shards of skull pasted to the pavements, wide expanses of parking lots with crushed cars, and none of it reaching into my heart. I was gasping, but my noises were at the edge of the world where nothing makes an impact with its noise. Knives of my laughter skittered over the departed sunsets. I didn't know what to do, might never know what to do again. I turned around, tears of some emotion I didn't have the strength to name flowing down my face, and pictured myself walking down the street with my secret, knowing the miracle of what was possible. Nobody would believe me. Even if all their buildings had collapsed they would build one to lock me in for what I had experienced. The earth was closing up behind me, and when I turned I saw a little whirlpool, poked in the ground and found no answer, then the waters lapped and left no trace at all. I felt dry as a pillar of salt, I had no muscles left. I poked at the earth and nothing soft answered. Rough sand and nothing opening. I knew that what I knew was only to be for one time. A sand-crab danced past on the sheen of departing water, a spider without poisons, and he inside his shell had become a part of my body. Life had begun again, with a few less people and a lot more pleasure, and I was responsible.

 

[END]

© 2004 Luke Buckham - Contributor's Bio