After the Sun

by Jonas Eika

  “Hey, guys, welcome to the club,” I say six feet away with a not-too-humble bow. “What if I were your personal boy this morning? Shade, sun, sunscreen, drinks and snacks, whatever you need—I’ll take care of it?”

  “I think we can put our own sunscreen on,” one of them says in a thick American accent.

  “But some drinks would be nice . . . ,” another says, looking innocently at his friends.

  “Well, then, follow me,” I say, showing them to my section. On the way down the boardwalk, we pass Bill, and when he greets the two women with a noble bow, a nervous child breaks through his figure, contorted and attention-seeking. The eggs expand and hatch. I kneel and smooth out three towels on three lounge chairs. The guys order three Long Island iced teas and a bag of peanuts. There’s something greedy about the way they recline in the sun in their tiny swim trunks. Their clean-shaven legs and chests are bulging. They lather themselves up in tanning oil, Australian Gold, which makes them glisten and lifts them up to the sun, three bronze plates swaying and swelling over the sand.

  * * *

  —

  I shoot steady through the water, propelled by my lower body: its five pairs of paddling legs in constant motion, slightly staggered. It’s only a matter of getting started, and then the speed spreads through my joints until they feel like one big buzzing organism that’s both mine and foreign, and my tail fan works like a rudder. The other boys swim up alongside me, appearing at the edge of my panorama: three gray-brown, almost transparent shrimp with serrated rostrums and dark-red eyes on stalks. We swim across the bare sandy bottom, away from the coast, where the water is full to the brim with light and perforated by human legs. A shadow is cast like a solar eclipse by someone in a swim tube. An imbalance, something bitter and sour and foreign in the water, makes me close my mouth and block my gills. I flash a yellow, jagged pattern down my back, see a veil of sunscreen hanging off the body in the swim ring and go faster. Finally away from the bitterness, I pump water through my gills and feel the oxygen spread its clarity through my body. Our paddling legs propel us farther along the seafloor, into the depths of low seaweed and seagrass. Beneath the big, bowed leaves, all the light disappears in the water, but I’m not alone; the distance to the bottom, the other shrimp boys, the movements in the water and its chemical composition, it all makes itself felt through my antennae: it is also under my shell. The middle of it stiffens into a slightly thicker carapace that connects my head and my upper body and ends between my eyes in a horned snout.

  * * *

  —

  At the zenith we’re all really busy, everyone wants water and breezes and sunscreen for their bodies. Even the three Americans, who have been meticulously oiling up and changing position every hour for maximum exposure, want to be shielded and have their parasols put up. “Sure you don’t want me to do it for you?” I ask as they’re futilely grasping at their backs. “For a little extra money?” When I add that they must be sore from all that working out—don’t they deserve a little massage?—it’s like they finally get the attention they’ve been waiting for; in any case they turn into supple, willing flesh in my hands and tell me all about their workout routine. Meanwhile, I notice a young woman standing up by the entrance, staring at me. I can’t see her face from here, only that it’s turned toward me, that her whole body is. For five or ten seconds she stands there, on the verge of coming down here, and then it’s like she changes her mind; the tension leaves her body and mine. A freight ship honks out on the ocean behind me. She turns around and gets into a cab that swings out and slides into the shimmering traffic.

  On my way to get drinks for the guys, I look out over the club and suddenly can’t help but laugh at all the things I hate: the sun-bleached boardwalk that stretches from the reception desk to the beach chairs; the beach chairs that hold a little time in their big vibrating grid and fix the sun in the zenith; the guests greedily soaking up the sun, offering themselves without reserve, wanting its rays all over them, only to block it out by any means possible: fans and broad-brimmed hats, water bottles, parasols, protective and cooling salves, soothing remedies for a cult that worships a sun that will soon leave them, or receive them. All the things here are ridiculous without the sun. Shadowless objects under the open sky, translucent and relegated to a dim life on the sand, in the skin, under the sea.

  * * *

  —

  With my tail fan I steer slowly toward a rock of molted shells between dull corals: furry gray columns, a hard pale-yellow brain, sponges with soft folds and stony skeletons. Each coral is a colony of polyps. They pull their skeletons out of the water, grow them over many generations, surrender them to the big communal skeleton when they die. I catch the bottom with my legs, the thin sticks that dangle when I swim. A complex, organic taste of food and danger excites me. Our eyes rolling in semicircles, we wander across calcified limestone, keeping an eye out for crevices where mollusks might suddenly emerge with their tentacles.

  Finally we reach the cleaning station. Ginger and Bill position themselves on the protrusion between two copper-red stone corals, flash a row of violet stripes down their backs and wave their antennae from side to side. The reef is pale with scattered dull colors, the corals stressed by the acidic water. Two large, eel-like fish swim toward us and settle with open mouths in front of Ginger and Bill, who get started on one of them. The other seems a little uneasy, so me and Jia stroke it with our antennae before we start to clean its teeth and oral cavity. With our front legs, we scrape them clean of food particles and eat whatever tastes good. Then we float around on our backs for a bit, Jia’s legs around my neck, and look up at the vaulted darkness speckled by teeth. It’s nice and warm here, nothing to fear in this fish’s mouth. Every once in a while, its jaw snaps and the light disappears, but we come out whole and keep cleaning. We smell and taste our way to the dead tissue and parasites in its skin.

  A little later, in the middle of cleaning a set of greasy gills, I feel a tight, skeletal sensation in my flesh, a growing stiffness traveling through my back and abdomen. A sense of something important that’s going to happen on the beach. My shell softens, the light is fading. It flickers through the water in dim, crooked rays that don’t really reach me.

  When we were done getting dressed, our shells on dicks ribbed and prickling in spines of jelly on the sandy ground, we went down to the beach carrying buckets of living water. Black sky and sand illuminated by the reddish glow of the beach chairs, which had absorbed the sun’s rays in their gridwork. In the sand we dug a circular basin a little larger than a parasol and filled it up with living water: dim orange, viscous, full of milky eggs with veins. It was steaming in the cool air. Around the basin we planted four parasols upside down in the sand, twisting them down into the viscous layers. The shafts protruding a hand’s length above the sand, we greased them with after-sun before we lowered ourselves to straddle them. We threw a beach chair into the basin and sang:

  After the sun, after the sun / things are beside themselves / quiet, futile, set free / into the unknown life we’re asking about / Why does the vulture always start with the eyes? / Which sides of you didn’t we see / beach chair, after-sun, Para-sun / making the best of the things that are / after the sun, after the sun . . .

  Dawn is coming: a dim light-blue shimmer that merges with the earth’s shadow, the dark sky. The earth is turning a new side to the sun, but slowly, reluctantly, doubting. It isn’t morning. My eyes can’t make out the feet in the sand, the backs in front of me, the sand from the water from the sky. Or whatever the landscape might be to our left. We listen to the sea and walk north. Me and Jia and Ginger and Bill, and lots of other boys from the beach clubs we’ve passed through. We carry a beach chair, some after-sun and a parasol, the way that they emerged from the living water, a little beside themselves. We tell each other what happened on the beach:

  The beach chair sank a few inches and was caught by the living water. Rock
ing on our shafts we sang for hours. And when the after-sun and our secretions ran dry, the pain and the blood started to run. The water became warmer, the surface pearled. The beach chair flickered and blurred in the basin. We could no longer tell our own voices from one another’s assholes from the hole deeper inside us that the pain and the foreign blood ran down the hollow parasol shafts softening the sandy soil beneath the basin. A pool of color whirled at our knees.

  Para-sol, Para-sun / luminous funnel in my mouth / my gut, my earth / makes the next of the things that are / without the sun, in a house without a master / things that were / become nothing / in Para-sun, Para-sun . . .

  “Listen,” someone says up in front, and makes everyone stop to listen. From the sea, rippling through the water and up to the beach, comes a continuous sound like a foghorn, combined with deep grunting, and once in a while an even deeper, rising “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba . . .” “It’s the fish ringing in the dawn,” another says. “They see the light before we do because they’re deeper, deep down.”

  The water lit up and changed from blood red to violet to orange with belts of white. A slimy fog in the same colors rose from it and condensed in the vague outline of a beach chair with a web of veins. In the mist around it, transparent images lit up for a second and blurred: corpses of tourists sinking into hotel beds with jellyfish and crabs, compacted and pressed into a thick, dark-brown fluid . . . sinking through the hotel’s skeleton and running out and stiffening in solid shapes on each floor: shampoo bottle, hair dryer, fan. On the beach, a cave of beach chairs, swelling red with the warmth of a fire or the warmth of the earth’s core. The owner of the club is sitting in a hidden room above the reception desk, watching everything that happens on the beach. A thick cable is plugged into his neck, which converts our movements into light that’s spread across thousands of white faces with sweat on their upper lips . . .

  Now the horizon is almost visible, the sea a bit grayer than the sky. The blue light spread through the atmosphere stretches its tentacles down and draws out the contours of the things before us: a few trees and bushes in bony terrain, maybe some rocks. Fleeting legs, shoulders and the back of a head walking in front of me. I’m hungry, but don’t feel like eating in this light that doesn’t hide the stars. Dawn is coming. A morning before morning, a night before night. The time of the fish, the lizards and the felines. They slither across the earth, rustling in sand and shrubbery.

  We threw a bottle of after-sun into the basin and sang. It rose in a slimy fog and breathed: spitting its contents out in little squirts, releasing the pressure and recovering its shape. In the water, after-sun sprawled into rippled images: people in the desert luring the sun with lotion in large pools. Lizards and succulents and crawling humans digging through layers of earth. A choreographed dance on a public square. A child stands in the middle of a group of older, more experienced dancers, watches their movements and copies them a bit out of sync . . . takes a step forward and gives over fully and nervously to each step, takes a step back and waits for the next. In the intervening beats, the child looks like a remnant of itself, a potential unaltered by the attempt to learn the new customs of the planet on which it’s arrived.

  We walk along the water, over rocks and sand, past the ruins of small fisheries, ruined hotels and jetties, large parabolas that the ocean has eaten away. That’s how it looks in the gentle light. Dawn is coming in the soil now, orange and dusty. It oozes out, some places thicker than others, slithering along the sand and the rocks and finding itself. It doesn’t hurt to look at, because you can only look in it, and looking in that light is more like eating. It doesn’t make things disappear. They linger in their outlines like a promise of themselves and something to come. My lips are cold and cracked, my muscles sore. But deeper inside, at the base of my abdomen and close to my spine, there’s something that hurts in a different way. It’s accumulated inside me at the beach club, during the video recordings, under the sun. It is dawning now: a weak orange light in my asshole, just like it’s dawning in the other boys and in the things, binding us together in a web that’s still dim. One day, it will lead to something.

  We threw a parasol into the basin and sang. A slimy fog rose from it and condensed in a long, hollow shaft and a fabric full of flickering images: fire spreading through the club, through towels and parasols, a flaming grid seen from above. We use a huge towel to contain the smoke and release it in shifting intervals, a hazy code . . . A low, crawling forest where the trees bend and curl toward the ground, pressing their crowns into the soil. In the twilight, parasols with their fabric stretched inside out make funnels that catch the rain and lead into big pools full of seaweed and crustaceans. In the water a deep orange light. It’s led through grooves between the trees and illuminates the first few feet above the ground . . . All the while we focused on singing the words, on saying them just to hear them in our mouths, to make room for their moisture, their hardness, their flickering unfolding: Para-sun, Para-sun, that was our prayer: an emission of sound waves in the right frequency, waves that made the living water oscillate. And when the thing rose, suspended above the basin in slimy fog, we tried to sing in a way that would resonate with it. When the word grasped the thing, the thing took the word onto itself and into the water with a splash.

  The sky slips into a darker blue, black at the edges. The beach arcs red in the west. We follow it until we come to a cape where we can see out over the ocean to both sides. It’s bulging with Para-sun that drives the blue out of the sky. The yellow along the horizon fades. Everywhere the earth flares up in a mild, orange light that traces its slope in the black morning. “Come, let’s go inland.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A thank-you from the heart to everyone who read and cared for this book as I wrote it. A special thanks to: Andreas Amdy Eckhardt-Læssøe, Rolf Sparre Johansson, Anita Beikpour, Stinne Eika Rasmussen, Pejk Malinovski and Basilisk Books.

  A number of writers and artists helped inspire the stories in this book—some of their sentences and images are hiding under mine—Chris Marker, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Lars Norén, Paul the Apostle, Simone Weil, William Burroughs and Roberto Bolaño.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR

  Jonas Eika has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Nordic Council Literature Prize. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker. He lives in Copenhagen.

  Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg is a writer and a translator of Danish literature, most recently of Johanne Bille’s Elastic and Ida Marie Hede’s Adorable.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.