After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  That night, I was awoken by the sound of scratching. It lasted for five seconds at a time, accompanied by a sharp and dry vibration in my spine, like someone was running a barber’s knife slowly down it. I lay there, getting scared, heard someone breathing between the scratching, counted to three and rolled fast onto my stomach. Between two of the pallet planks I could make out the bottom of a face, a small, tight mouth without lips, which opened and said sorry. What the hell are you doing! I said. You can’t sleep there, you really can’t. But it’s just me, she said—Ellen, I said—I like it here, it’s better than the living room. Her breath was sweet and dry. We debated a bit. She sounded harmless and frail in the dark, and I couldn’t be tough. Okay, I said, and turned onto my back, but can you at least stop scratching? I’ll try, she said, and started up again a while later. And then I couldn’t help but imagine that we were buried together like a married couple, Ellen below, tirelessly scratching the lid of her coffin. It’s like that for some people, I think it is, maybe for most; they have to lie in the ground and practice dying because they didn’t manage to get ready while they were alive. Their whole existence reduced to a dry breath in ash, a leg stretching, the sound of nails on wet wood.

  The next day I couldn’t even enjoy the service. The high, the way the vowel turned me into one big glowing nervous system, felt mostly like an opportunity or a demand I couldn’t live up to. The hunger and numbness that would follow shone dull and desertlike through the euphoria, and drove it away. I had the thought that this feeling would never stop, and couldn’t shake it off. It made my intestines contract, and then I felt a jab, like from a little piece of cold iron, deep in my belly. Some of me passed through the hole in a quick and piercing movement, as if it were being snatched up by a bird of prey, into some foggy, directionless landscape, but it didn’t make me less sad.

  I still don’t understand, I said when we were sitting on the train headed back home. Aurora turned her face from the glass and looked at me. She was actually ugly, or at least each individual feature was unattractive—snub nose, narrow pursed lips, dull eyes set deep in her face—but she was beautiful. I don’t understand why you take those pills . . . why you hang around after. Oh, Casey, she said, exhausted, you’ve been there too. How would you explain it? Terrible, I said, I just feel weak. Me too, said Aurora . . . but that feeling, it’s like it’s right for me. I think it’s what I am. Are you scared? I asked. Of what? The baby, I said. Why, it’s coming either way. But you can still be scared. Ahead, the dark semicircle of the Thames tunnel approached behind her. It rose and gradually filled more and more of the gray sky, and as we entered it she said, I’m just tired, Case. I’m so tired of waking up every morning at the crack of dawn with this light in my body. I wake up with such a dumb, totally physical appetite for the day when I should stay in bed. And with a baby in my belly when I don’t feel like it . . . like it should be there. There shouldn’t be anything there. It makes me so hateful.

  The train raced through the tunnel, both jangling over the tracks and drifting away, the darkness expanding the space. The exit signs swished by, gave way to Aurora’s face. I reached a hand across the table and placed it on her wet hands. But I’m not scared, she said. I couldn’t come up with anything else to say besides that I was there for her and would play with the baby and give it milk at night when she didn’t have the energy, and then I could see it: me and the kids, there were two of them now, wrapped in our blankets in front of the television before Rory and Aurora got up. Rory had built a loft in the living room.

  The flat was aired out and the makeshift beds cleared away, but it was full of people whom he must have picked up as soon as he realized we weren’t coming back early after all. There was something pointless and impotent about his protest now that he had said it out loud. Like stirring a pot full of water. We woke up around midnight to a fresh wet mattress. Aurora pushed us away, panting through her contractions alone. The light from the cars slid bluish across her forehead and hair. Two of the homeless people came in to ask whether she was okay. I hurried to push them back into the living room, where the others were sitting up in their beds, not knowing what to do with themselves. I started tucking them in, pulling the blankets up to their chins, placing a hand on their foreheads, but stopped when Aurora came out of the room, and ran to grab her hospital bag instead. In the middle of the room, she hesitated and said to Rory that she refused to give birth until they were all out of the flat. He turned to them, clapped three times and asked them to leave. Get them out of here! Aurora screamed. They hastily threw on all of their layers, laced up their boots and walked past her with their eyes on the ground. Let’s get going, Rory said. Her too, Aurora said . . . Casey too, she repeated without looking up, but sent an exhausted nod in my direction. Get her out! Rory turned toward me, and he was about to get it past his lips when I handed him the bag and left, on legs that felt ancient and foreign, through the door, down the stairs and out onto the street.

  I took the train to Stratford and walked straight through the empty church. In front of me, still framed by the wide-open iron door, the field and the overcast night sky slid into a big pile of mud. It thawed and received me to the ankles. There wasn’t a single light or star, only the cold, wet wind I imagined was coming from the sea to the east. What was there for me in the east? I walked back and forth, all around, in and out of the mud that was warmer and sweeter than the air. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, but then came the fog. I lay down on my stomach and fell asleep. At some point, I was awakened by some sticky sounds, and out of the damp, white fog there came two, then ten, then twenty and then a whole crowd, muddy and tired like me. I slid in between them and walked alongside them. When we reached the industrial quarter by the City Church, I followed them into a random hall and stamped computer chips for hours. After the service, I followed them back across the field, found a bed that was free in a room for five and was inaugurated into Group Therapy: taking turns, you talked for fifteen minutes about whatever you were feeling, while the others listened without judgment and helped you get to the Hurt, the places where the pain lay hidden. Reaching them would cause bodily reactions: sweats, shakes, farts, tears, yawns and laughter. I slept and ate and showered, serving my five hours at a new factory each day. Everywhere the buzzing of machines, and the fixed direction of the production line that I started to follow from hall to hall. In the factories closest to the church, work was easy and manual. We welded computer chips, cast rotor blades and fans, put together plastic and electronic parts, carrying out a few motions in a process that resulted in a processor, turbine, or motherboard. Farther out they were assembled into respirators, and in an adjacent hall, into servers that were transported to a building about the size of two football pitches and full of server racks in dead-straight rows. A set of keys and a laptop were pushed toward me through a crack in the wall, and for the next five hours, I followed the others: strolled up and down the rows, connected the computer to the servers that lit up red and followed the troubleshooting instructions on the screen until they stopped. Meanwhile, I saw glimmers of what was stored on them: data about individual patients, their productivity stats, medical files, records, transcripts of Group Therapy. Much of it was quantified, entered into charts I couldn’t interpret. That I could move freely between the halls also meant I didn’t have to work, I knew that. But I wanted to see where the respirators ended, and the hours of repetition made my grief foggy and mechanical, my feeling of not meaning anything to anyone. I missed Aurora all the time. One morning, in the parking lot in front of the church, someone recognized me and asked where she was. She needed to take care of some things, I said, as people flocked around me. She told me to tell you guys to go on without her. The last part just slipped out, but they looked like they understood. And without the vowels, one of them said. We need to continue authenticating our addiction. Some days, when crossing the field, a bird of prey would emerge from the clouds, and we would lean our heads back, watching it dive
with its long, stiff neck and its claws. At the rehab center, we had the afternoons off and could relax in the rec room where the lighting was low and ambient. It made you want to sit on the rug or in one of the furnished corners and chat with the other patients, or with the nurses moseying about at our disposal. There was always someone to talk to. And I discovered a pressing need to talk, a whole database of thoughts, feelings, fantasies and memories and quiverings in my nerves, that suddenly became accessible to me. Things felt true when I said them aloud. One day, with the help of a stolen ID, I entered the fenced enclosure farthest from the church, wearing a lab coat like the other employees I had seen coming out of there. The tall brick building was full to the rafters with a cool, rattling sound like wind in fallen leaves. Separated by stands bearing respirator equipment, hospital beds were arranged side by side in long rows, sixty or eighty beds total, housing the Newly Dead: warm, breathing, urinating and pulsating corpses that blood was being drawn from and drugs were being tested on, until it was time to harvest their organs. I was careful not to bump into their bare feet, their fresh faces. I recognized some of them from the center: people who had committed suicide or overdosed, I had seen the nurses rushing to their rooms with the defibrillator.

  BAD MEXICAN DOG

  The sky is overcast through and through, the beach still covered in silent bodies. There’s a sweet, heavy, electric smell of thunder and sweat. There’s a time, between when the rain appears in the clouds and when it hits their bodies, that the guests refuse to believe it. They’re still lying there, in 24 rows of 20, with glossy tanned stomachs and sunglasses on because they’ve paid to lie in the sun. The drops fall and prick the sand dark, shattered by the plastic of the beach chairs, multiplying, impossible to tell apart from the sea and the sky and the beach. The guests cling to the shafts of their parasols, but the white fabric is quickly soaked and dripping. “Parasols look ridiculous without the sun,” Jia says, laughing. “They’re completely beside themselves.” The guests look in our direction for help, but when it’s raining we’re supposed to leave them to themselves. It’s something the owner came up with, to remind them of the exclusive order they’re paying for. And the benefit of getting themselves a personal boy: only Manu is still on the sand. He’s carrying the French lady’s bag, shielding her with a tarp he found in the storage room when he smelled the rain this morning. Stooped, they weave through rows of beach chairs, turn onto the boardwalk and pass the bamboo bar and reception hut. A corner of the French-Spanish dictionary she uses for their lessons is poking out of her bag, getting wet; the pages are swelling. His hair sticks to his back between his shoulder blades. Up on the boulevard, he helps her into the back seat of a cab and is about to shut the door when a long, bony arm reaches out and pulls him inside.

  When the cab is gone I turn my head and look at the beach like the others: Jia, Ginger and the new boy, Bill, with his thin, combed-back hair and, when he doesn’t know you’re looking, a slightly wounded expression on his square face. We stand in a row beneath the reception’s palm-frond roof, in the steam that won’t leave our bodies in the saturated air. Behind us stands the owner, smoking. The surface of the ocean is dissolved in grimy gray fog without a horizon. The beach is becoming part of the sky too; streams of rain and dirt from the boulevard turn the sand liquid. Beach chairs are pulled out of file, look like insects floating around in an ancient tequila sunrise, shades of red at the bottom: beach boy blood and the blood we shed to get them back. The rain stirs it up like it makes the rocks give off the earthy smell of their blood, like it makes the living water in the changing room overflow: between the guests, little sandy slime creatures rise for a moment and groan before they’re swept away by the current and dissolve. The rain makes the best of what it’s got. Its smell makes us calm, I can hear it in our breath filling the air beneath the awning. “All right, boys,” the owner says, tossing the smoking cigarette butt over our heads. “The rain is winding down. When it’s gone I want everything back in order.”

  * * *

  —

  There’s supposed to be 480 beach chairs total, 24 perfect rows of 20, and we’re 4 boys, it’s a demanding job. First, we comb the sand with a broad-toothed rake until it’s Bounty-white again. Seaweed and tubes of lotion, magazines, plastic packaging and bottles mount into piles that we load into the dumpster behind the changing room, at the back of the square bamboo hut. And then Jia sets up the tool we use to restore order after rain: a pole five yards tall with a clear, pyramid-shaped crystal on top that refracts the sunlight in a grid of orange rays. From the crystal’s square bottom they’re projected all across the beach. At the zenith, the grid is perfect: we run up and down our rows, placing a chair at each point. Halfway through, I feel nausea on an empty stomach and acid in my legs, but if the setup takes more than ten minutes, it starts to strike the eye. Just a bit of quivering is fine, the owner says, a weak vibration along the rows, that’s how you introduce time into the grid.

  While I’m on all fours trying to catch my breath, someone places a hand on my neck and runs their fingers through my hair. I look up at Manu, who’s broad and dark with the sun behind him.

  “Where’ve you been?” I ask.

  “Working.” He smiles, holding a fist full of cash down in front of me.

  “We could have used your hands down here,” I say.

  “Oh, c’mon,” he says. “You know I would never touch that old hag. And actually, that’s not what she wants either—”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “She wants a . . . grandchild. A young, little friend she can cultivate and converse with. People her own age are so boring, she says, they don’t have any passions anymore.” He leans over, tightening his grasp on my neck when he moves his lips to my ear. His breath is the same temperature as the air, but drier. He says, “You know you’re the only one I want to touch,” and there’s tenderness and also something aggressive or threatening in his voice. Ever since he started seeing the French lady with the sun hat, something harsh has come over him, a big, stony parasol, forcing its shadow through his face and limbs. He carries himself more with his shoulders than his hips now. He speaks to me and touches me like he’s trying to get closer and farther away from me at the same time. It makes me sad. It turns me on. He pushes my head into the sand and runs away laughing. I jump up and sprint after him, grab him from behind, and we tumble into the sea.

  * * *

  —

  Then it’s night and he pushes me headfirst into the pool in front of the bench in the changing room. Seawater steams orange, comes up to the middle of my thighs. It’s thick and living with the jellyfishy blobs we’ve been filling it up with day after day; they’ve fused with each other and the salt: little, veined, whitish eggs bulging in clusters. I’m on all fours in front of Manu, who’s on his knees, feeding me the living water, shoveling it into my ass with his hand. The sun is inside me now because the sun sets in the ocean. Then he shows me a transparent, hollow shrimp shell he found on the beach, sticks his hand into his swim trunks and pulls out his long, thin dick. “Do you want to?” he asks, nodding, and I nod too, and he twists the head off the shell and softens the rest in the living water. It fits snug around his dick except for the legs dangling from its base. I let myself float in the pool with my back arched and my ass in the air, let myself relax inside and feel him slide in: a ribbed and prickling sensation in the slime and cold. Through the hole in the wall, the sun makes a column of light in the water. He moves inside me, my spine turns to jelly. I can feel the eggs inside it: we’re throbbing at the base of the spine, wandering slowly through the abdomen. Squirt of thick white juice, first Manu inside me and then me with eggs in the sun lands on the sandy ground. We make the best of what we got. Through the slimy membrane I can see the other eggs hatching, and out of the bubbles a few elongated creatures swim clumsily away, laughing, intertwined with each other, rolling around in the stirred-up sand. Something hits my face, a sof
t foot in my belly. I hit the ground and am thrown back toward the other small bodies in the light. In a glimpse, a glowing red eye is laughing at me through the membrane. A thin leg across my upper body holds me down while someone tickles my belly with their antennae. I laugh and wriggle against the membrane, flapping and kicking with all of my legs. And then suddenly I hatch and start moving. Arched along my ass, my limbs like organic paddles, I move through the water, gliding, steady, at a speed that feels just right for my little body. The other boys are somewhere in the water too. We are all very small.