by Michael Gira
“Way down, waaaaaaaay down, waaaaaaaaaay down ....”
Forgetting the words to the song, he lets it trail off. He sits down on the edge of the ditch staring at a blister on his hand, watching it rise in the heat.
The American lets his pick fall in the dust and looks at him. It dawns on him that his friend’s skin looks like bacon.
“I think we better put our shirts on ... I wish we could get out of the sun.” — the first words he’s spoken since they were dropped off by the truck. He sounds like an old woman gurgling her last dying wish.
“What? Yes! What!. ..” The Irishman doesn’t look up. He stares at his hand like a curious fossil dug up in the ditch.
The American repeats himself, carefully articulating the words as if reading from an abstruse textbook. The Irishman is still looking at his hand, turning it over, comparing the pearly color of his palm — each pad torn with perfectly round penny-sized blisters like cherry skins — to the gristly back of it.
“Yes... we ... better... get... out... of... the... sun. I don’t think I know where I am.”
The American walks over to him, leaving a low trail of chalk-colored dust hanging in his wake. His shadow darkens the Irishman so that he seems to be sitting huddled in an amber pouch cut out of the fabric of sunlight. They put on their shirts and drag their tools and the water and the gourd of wine over to the toolbox at the beginning of the ditch at the side of the melting black asphalt road. Their shirts cling to their blisters, some of which burst instantly with friction, blotching the thin white cotton with sticky fluid. The Irishman stands rotating slowly on the axis of his feet as if his head were a planet dislodged from its orbit — a world of vertiginously shifting planes punished by the relentless solar flood. He looks in both directions down the absurdly tiny black ribbon of road, an impotent scratched line on the face of the desert. He sees no sign of the truck returning.
“We-must-get-out-of-the-sun-now,” he recites like a law of physics he learned somewhere in school, suddenly authoritative and coherent. He’s the older one at 19, and he’s assumed the role of protective older brother though he’s only known the American a few weeks, having met him along the road just outside Istanbul. The American claims to be 18 but looks his true age of 15.
They overturn the toolbox, the size of a traveling trunk, emptying its contents beside the road. The tin sheeting riveted to the wooden box reflects the sun like a polished high-tech mirror, flashing random messages up into space. With the lid open, they prop the box upside down and at enough of an angle to allow them to sit crouched beneath it, hiding in the shade from the sun. The inside of the box smells like motor oil and cement and suntan lotion. Intermittent gusts of wind spray sand up under the lid into their mouths and eyes. They grind it between their teeth and wash it down with wine shot in hard sour jets at close range, swallowing more opium along with the sand.
They wait, the Irishman mumble-singing half-remembered fragments of current pop songs, as if they constituted a running voice-over narrative description of their predicament. The sound of his voice is hollow and dead beneath the box. They watch the sun moving slowly over the sparkling patch of sand just outside the grey shadows of their shelter. They nod in the enclosed heat like dying flowers, sitting cross-legged and hunched over like the limp bodies of two holy men deep in meditation in a portable cave as their souls fly out over the lifeless desert towards the water.
The foreman’s palm slapping the box rousts them from sleep. It explodes in their dazed heads like steel doors slamming. They see his feet before them in the sand, the toes protruding from the plastic sandals huge and calloused, the cracked knuckles powdered with white dust.
“Idee-yotez! Allo! Allo! Come out play now! Iddeyotez!”
The foreman throws the box off them, revealing them for inspection to the sun, like two broiled game animals pulled from their trap in the earth, their features caricatured with red blister sacks as if a possessing demon were straining its fingers against the skin of their faces from within. The workers, penned in the back of the truck, let out an “Ahhh” in unison like an audience overwhelmed with spectacle. The foreman stands above the two boys as they cringe in the light, hands on his hips, performing for the crew.
“You shtoopid two! Geddup now! Geddup! I tell you. Use de hads, wear de shirds, use de crame! Why-you-nod-lissen? I tell you!”
He points to the pile of tools in the sand. Mixed in with the sledges and hammers and crowbars are two grimy cotton hats, a wrinkled and flaking aluminum tube of sun cream, several sets of massive baked-hard work gloves, and even a few pairs of cheap scratched plastic sunglasses.
Tying this fresh information into their ongoing chain of hallucinations, they get up and each one takes a hat from the pile. They walk over to the truck, where they’re helped up by the ragged workers. They hang from the rails along with the others, looking down at the enraged foreman. He stands beaming his disgust up at them and the entire crew. They look like a truckload of dusted lepers corralled for transport to a desolate stone valley off in the wilderness. They deflect the foreman’s condemnation with the glazed unblinking eyes of exhausted cattle. The foreman kicks the sand, sending a hive of dust roving off into the desert. He gets into the cab of the truck and signals the driver to start the drive back to the gulf. He leaves the pile of tools where they lay beside the road — there’s no one to steal them and he’ll send another crew back here in the morning.
By the time they reach the gulf, the sun hangs low in the solid wall of sky, torching a white hole in the deepening blue just above the smooth sand hills that lead off into the Sinai. The water sits expanding out in a still lake, as if the sand had melted and flowed down filling the bay with liquid glass. The foreign workers climb down from the truck and congregate on the hot asphalt around the cab, waiting for the foreman to pay them for the day’s work and to pick the laborers that can return tomorrow. Everyone is picked except the Irishman and the American.
“You two, you go home now,” says the foreman, waving his arm out from the window like a farmer shooing some chickens away from his truck, hazing them off towards their countries, continents away.
The truck heads in towards the town, leaving the indigent crew on the road that ends at the edge of the beach. The rest of the crew wander off across the sand along the beach towards the vagrants’ encampment, a scattering of homemade tents made from filthy sheets, torn t-shirts, and sun-bleached cardboard that sits like a small garbage dump at the base of the hills that feed down from the desert and empty into the flat turquoise water of the gulf. They look like a sun-crazed pack of dog-men as they shuffle aimlessly away in the ankle-deep tides of glittering silicon. The sand quickly roasts their feet and sends them kicking weakly through the listless waves that feed quietly onto the shore. The skin of the foreign workers is brown leather and their hair and beards are matted with salt from their sweat and the white dust which forms a ghost patina on everything. Most of them are irremediably addicted to opium, though some manage to scrounge syringes and locate in the town the glassine packets that feed their heroin addiction.
The American and the Irishman walk in the opposite direction along the beach, towards the cafe that empties out from the vacant tourist hotel. Along the way, they stop to wade out into the tepid water. Metallic fish shaped like silver valentine hearts dart at the fluttering cloth of their submerged pant legs, pulsing rainbows as they attack. Sometimes a fish finds an exposed toe protruding from a sandal and bites it painlessly, almost playful, like a child’s weak fingernail pinch.
As they wade out further into the water, their legs refract out like giant stilts spread at wide angles beneath the surface. The dust melts from their clothes and floats in a white cloud around them. Their boiled flesh stings in the salt but it feels good, antiseptic.
Eventually they stand with the water up to their necks. Their heads float like inflated balls on the silver surface as they look out across the dazzled sheet towards Aqaba, in the east, opposite the Sina
i, nestled in the enfolding umber hills that cup it like a toy city in Semitic hands, spilling it out towards the open mouth of the gulf. A single rope of smoke rises from its center, twisting and unraveling up into the utterly cloudless sky, now graduating from pale blue to luxurious purple as the sun sets into the scorched embankments gouged out of the Sinai, in the west.
They wade out of the water and sit on the beach, squeezing the last wine from the water-slicked gourd, flavored with juice leached from the leather. The air is still hot enough that by the time they reach the cafe their clothes are no longer dripping, just pleasantly damp. A German hippie, barely groomed and shaved enough to merit his job as waiter (though he sleeps in the encampment with the rest of the foreign workers, and is himself a junky), approaches them at their table at the edge of the concrete slab beneath the corrugated green plastic roofing. He sets their gear down beside them — two sleeping bags and a small duffle bag — and they pay him for watching it during the day. They wash down the last oily black pebbles of opium with lukewarm beer and sit watching the sun set and the color drain from the sky. The water changes from turquoise to velvet blue to mirror black, reflecting the lights of the tourist hotel like handfuls of stained glass fragments tossed onto an obsidian table, rimmed at the edges with a hem of phosphorescent white foam.
Later they lay on their sleeping bags on the beach, their scalded flesh glistening like pink salmon meat in the silver light of the stars. Each of them keeps a pocketknife open beside his head, in case of attack by predator junkies in their sleep. The Irishman is sleeping spread out, flat on his back like a mummified corpse in a glass case waiting patiently to be lifted up to heaven on a stairway of moonlight. The American, awake with alternating waves of fear and fever, sees a black shape approaching along the sand. At first he’s not sure if it exists or he’s hallucinated it in the darkness, so he watches it without breathing, motionless, his knife in his hand as it creeps forward. It seems to be floating just above the ground, as if it were drawn forward on rails. As it gets closer, just a few feet away, he sees its red rat eyes.
“Hey! Hey!" he shouts at it, to sound threatening. It stops, looking at him, appraising. He gets up and runs towards it, scooping up handfuls of sand along the way. When he’s about to overtake it, he throws both handfuls into its face. It disappears, shrinking into itself, a black melon-sized oval instantly reduced to a single kernel of evil that flies buzzing out over the gulf.
He returns to his bag and lays down. The fogged light of the stars rains down on the agonized planes of his skin, passing through him. He looks over at the Irishman — still sleeping, mouthing formless words in a comatose dream. The waves regurgitate a few yards down the beach from their feet, swallowed by the sand. The moon hovers full just above the black horizon line of the water, a murderer in garish clownface, watching, spraying glitter out its mouth across the mirror.
Sometime in the night, the American wakes to see a bonfire as big as a house burning down the beach off towards the vagrants’ encampment. He clutches his knife in his fist, frozen. Sparks swirl up like flocks of crazed miniature birds escaping from hell through a fissure opened in the earth, igniting as they funnel up into the vaulted blackness. Knots of fire explode like flung handfuls of flaming snakes spitting out from the infernal core. Shadow figures stand in a circle staring into the flames, chanting and shouting drunkenly. A phlegm-throated chorus unravels circular melodies, muffled by the velvet cloak of darkness encroaching around the perimeters of the glow. The song evokes a celebration, but also seems to auger a final malevolence, a sacrifice.
Squatting at the edge of the banks leading down to the beach, just outside the circle of light, the leader of the proceedings looks down with the reflective ebony eyes of a stallion. Its human torso grows out from the body of a bull. Its face is a human mask, as if the peeled and dried skin of a corpse were stretched across the frame of its skull. The eyes drink in the light of the fire as if it were gorging itself at a fountain of blood. The mouth is torn into a smile, the cavern entrance that leads down to the black cisterns in its insides. The American feels himself drawn into its mouth, flung down into the pit of its guts where he screams, muted and hopeless. He drifts in and out of sleep, his knife ready in case they come for him. Once he wakes to see the creature pointing towards him, its face lit with ruby light. But sleep protects him, and he lets his body fall through fever canyons flashing from hot to cold as he twists, dreamless.
He wakes in the first greys of morning, the fever broken, the light soaking up from behind the hills. If he strains his hearing, he can detect the last grains of the sound of the amplified call to prayers echoing across the water from Aqaba. The dimmed static of the waves frames the silence. He gets up and walks across the sand. It feels like a cool liquid between his toes.
When he gets to the spot where he’d hallucinated the fire, he’s surprised to see that there actually is a smoldering black pit where he’d dreamed it, the sand disturbed around it as if by a crowd. He hurries back towards their place on the beach to wake his friend and show him.
For the first time since waking, he looks at the Irishman. Just beneath the chin, a neat red wedge has been carved into his neck, exposing the shiny interior meat of his throat to the light. Otherwise he lays there just as he had in sleep, flattened out on his back as if presented, like a specimen. The knife is gone from beside his head, stolen along with their bag.
The American looks at his friend for a while, memorizing, then rolls up his sleeping bag. He delicately pulls his shirt on over his blisters, then walks down the beach towards the road that leads north, where he waits at the stop for the bus that should arrive any minute.
(1994)
DEFLOWERED
The blood comes from my stomach in short aches. Warm syrup bubbles out from between my fingers. My feet are numb, distant, fishlike, but my body remains standing, balancing on rote memory, despite my need to fall. The waves break onto the road, throwing ice crystals across the air. The frozen spray falls down my face in clear unfurling sheets, but it feels hot. I’m singing — no words, just the phrase “Na na na na na na” over and over, slow and flat, without a melody. The sensation the sound makes in my mouth gives me pleasure, soothes me like a drug, though I can’t hear it above the gravel of the waves. Out on the edge of the sea, an oil derrick tilts, jerking with the swells, drunk on the concentrated energy of the storm. A wave claws at my knees, trying to pull me back out to its sinkhole beneath the surface. Eventually I might follow it home, tangled, dreaming in the weeds.
The road had arched up in a steady rhythm of hills and troughs, shining silver like a snake as it slid north along the edge of the rain forest, tracing the contours of the coast. As I walked, descending weightless into a trough, I’d lose sight of the horizon, surrounded on one side by the churning greens of the forest and on the other by the tilting steel wall of water. A disc of clear turquoise spun with hawks and gulls above me. The dull vertigo of the Seconal combined with the warm wine made me think the whole swirling mess of reality would come tumbling down on me like sand into a tunnel. Then I’d rise up on elastic legs as if the road itself were a wave in the sea and I’d scan the twisting line ahead for signs of change in the distance — a car flashing like a tiny shell, a road sign ringed with reflectors, a dark smear of flattened roadkill, or I hoped, eventually, the scattered beginnings of the next town.
The last car had passed an hour ago in a burst of chrome and mirrors. A sneering gaggle of children contorted their drooling mouths against the rear window as I chased stumbling. I fell into the wet grass along the side of the road, panting, watching them rise and fall as they disappeared up the road, getting smaller with each rise.
Then I noticed her, sitting with her back against a tree looking out at the ocean, her bare feet snuggled in beneath a thick blanket of pine needles, her fringed suede jacket stained dark with dew. Red hair erupted from her scalp in snarls of rusted wire, spilling over her shoulders in knotted clumps of barbed fiber, ador
ned with twigs and leaves as if she’d been sleeping in the brush. It flickered with sea mist, lightly sprinkled with glitter. Resting like a child in the arms of these twisted vines, where the ropes of hair mixed with the fringe of her jacket, her breasts rose naked like a sacrifice offered up to the light, like two huge peeled eggs, plump and melting in the weak warmth of the sun, threaded with a faint map of blue veins. She turned to me and smiled. Her mouth was a wreck of browned and blackened claws, but her tongue was pale pink beneath them, gleaming like the last surviving innocent animal in a universe of scum. Steam rose from her insides, drifting up into the trees.
I went back and got my bag, then spread out a place beside her in the pine needles and grass. I used my bag as a backrest and looked out at the same imaginary point on the horizon, where the sea blended with the sky, that she seemed to be looking at, stoned, as if Isolde were a vampire wolf waiting for her meal. Smoke rose from her white bony fingers, fanned out like crab legs in the undergrowth. The nails were long and painted purple, perfectly filed and shiny, and littered with little gold stick-on stars, as if she’d just been attended-to by a manicurist high on LSD.
She held a smoking joint tweezed between two fingers. She passed it to me — soaked in opium, she said. I passed her the wine, mixed with my spit by now.
We drank and smoked, watching the horizon and the shapeless glow of the sun behind the grey fog, curving downward towards the edge of the earth, where it ultimately would pull darkness in behind it. The first glimpse of the storm was just a dark blotch on the sky, creeping above the sea far to the south. Slowly, my mind emptied out, like blood flowing from a wound into the dirt.