Verge
Page 13
Hours pass. He has no idea how many. Things grow darker. He feels his own edges dissolving a molecule at a time.
Eventually there is a knock at the door. He looks at the door, one-eyed and weak, then walks over and opens it.
The flash is whiter than the mind can imagine. “Surprise.”
The shutter releases him; things go back to gray. It is the young man, smiling the way men do before age captures their faces. “It was no trouble at all. Turns out there’s a shop right around the corner, and they had a glass lens, used but not a scratch on it. I got you a good deal. But now I’m afraid you owe me dinner.”
Jackson stands there, more innocent than the present. Something happens, then, in the frame of the door there. As if his memory had been released from his brain, pouring out of the hole in his head. He follows the words, slow and dumb, taking orders. This beautiful man has taken his picture in Key West, Florida. In the doorway of the Conch House, a hotel. The beautiful man has repaired his camera. The beautiful young man wants dinner. He gives up entirely.
After dinner they walk along the night beach with their pants rolled up at the ankles. Eventually they undress and slide into the black water, warm as the body’s fluids, salty as tears. They float on their backs. He looks up at the roof of the world and thinks, This is exactly what it looks like when you close your eyes. Only the stars are different.
* * *
• • •
STORE IN WATER or saline solution.
* * *
• • •
THE NEXT DAY he wants to be in his car, but differently. It is dawn. He dresses and leaves the room. He takes his camera, goes to his car, and drives down to the beach. No one is there. He keeps driving. He drives onto the sand, even though cars are not allowed. He keeps driving. He drives up to the lip of the sea. Then in. Slowly and without alarm. Only a little ways, until the wheels are submerged. He opens the car door and steps out. He leaves the car there like that, the camera in the driver’s seat. Let the sea take it.
He sees the body of his lover, floating like kelp, beautiful, rhythmic, not mangled from the shot through the windshield, not splayed with arms and legs bent wrong.
In a day or two, he thinks, the young man will leave. Jackson will sell his car and live on insurance money there in Key West for as long as he can. Perhaps he’ll grow a beard, even wear a patch. It will be all right to go this way, to live in a kind of sleep or shortsightedness, in a place where the road ends in the sea, as if its motion could be cupped forever—since any other life would drive him to his end.
TWO GIRLS
They are sixteen and swinging, swinging hands and the hands hold the wrists of sixteen and swinging, around and around and dancing their feet in the sand in circles, in circles at edges of sea foam and dancing and swinging at sixteen, and swinging are girls of sixteen with hands holding wrists and wrists held in hands they are swinging, they are circles of round and around and the love of sixteen and swinging is sea foam, and the foam is their mouths into smiles and mouths making laughter at light and swinging, making laughter at light and the bright of her teeth is the bright of her eye is their heads rocking back into love and to sea foam, and the sea is their hands and the sand is their hands and the hand over wrist to the wrist over hand is their swinging, they are sixteen and swing and the song of their love is the sand and the sea foam, and no one is looking at two girls and circles and out of the world into spiral and flight.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book simply would not exist without the heroic efforts of Rayhané Sanders and Calvert Morgan.
All love and enduring gratitude to Brigid, Andy, and Miles for keeping me afloat.
Thanks to art and heart comrade Lance Olsen for the endless creative lifeline spanning years.
And to everyone anywhere who lives in the in-between of things: I get it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan, The Small Backs of Children, Dora: A Headcase, and the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards, a Willamette Writers Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the 2012 PEN Center Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
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