vOYAGE:O'Side

by Francis Kroncke

CHAPTER 15

  Geographer! The call and sound came often. Once at least at sunrise, midday and sunset. It was the Captain’s habit—a nervous habit, a pestering habit—to want to know if, “On course? Steady?” At all times, it was for Frantz to answer and be the modulator of the crew’s collective breathing. Beyond here lie dragons!

  Frantz is also comfortable with his name as with his occupation. But neither in terms of past comforts where names and positions permeated him with a feeling of unity and fullness. Not as “Otto” and “Friar” had been, but, nevertheless, a comfortableness—which meant on one level that he stood on the upper deck and did not feel compelled to cast himself overboard!

  “Geographer!”

  At one moment he had thought of it as heaven—except for the lack of clawing flames he realized it might also be hell, but it was heaven—as heaven in that he was a disembodied spirit, a possessor of his fleshly mask, a consciousness riding upon the senses as this boat pressed through water and air: there was a thickness which was real—indeed, one which was most real during the bouts of fog, especially the deep banks … it was inside himself that they sailed, and as he lost sight of others on the boat, as he lost sight of the boat, only feeling it alive to his blind touch upon a railing or a steadying spar, as he lost sight so he saw: peered with the eyes of the fog, became the fog, an engulfing lightlessness, and all which had been, stayed just there as “been,” a past, for it was not the past which the fog saw but the future, a future with its unknowableness yet its absolute knowableness as it exists as the boundary of the right-now; so was the fog, it was right-now.

  “Are we steady?” Pipe stem cracking under the question. Frantz wondered how his teeth stood yet solid.

  “Steady.” Frantz has come to know that this is all that need be said. It makes him laugh, to himself, under his serious chin, delivering this comfort and knowing it as a lie, for Frantz has no idea where they are truly going. “Geographer, indeed!” he has railed at himself often in silent dialogue. But it was so. He didn’t want to question the how. Didn’t want to press too far back into the face of Gerald, a face pressing back at him as if his own.

  But he knows. Knows how to plot by the stars. Knows how to read the swells of the ocean and the layering of the clouds. Knows how to wield iron instruments which he had never once before held, feeling them—this a comfort truly his own—feeling them like the cold instruments of Inquisitorial Torture: nothing as comforting as the compass, as if his secret weapon, with which to torture “Steady!” from out of the Void, the Chaos; wearing a compass strung around his neck, always … Frantz knows this connection with an amused snicker: a renegade pleasure played out between lips and cheek, but knows it more in his consciousness as the weight of these kin creations: playing them up and down, lightly tossing them from right to left, left to right, extending his arm and positioning a sextant at an arm’s full length—it is in such moments that he knows: knows that he has always known how.

  That it is his heritage to know; bestowed patrimony.

  The first months were majestic. Everything was so curiously novel and alien, so terrifyingly unusual. The splash of the ocean on rough days gave him to grasp what his fellow mates never articulated: that the ocean was drinking them, had drunk them, and it was swirling them around as one does strong wine against a bad tooth.

  Monsters!

  Frantz came to know the world not as round but as wet. He did not need to ply his measuring rods nor even the tenets of a reasoning mind, rather, he just knew: the wet was larger than the dry. At such a moment he knew his dying as Gerald had so desired.

  Then there was the land. In its trickery as lands. Trickery, for Frantz sensed that the delights or terrors of weather: the heat of some islands, the frosty blast of hail storms—all these did not change the humans who lived upon the land. While their languages fascinated him; their food equally pleasuring and sickening, their dress and bizarre actions, customs baffling him—underneath he knew they all practiced the same rituals.

  He alone would have stated it as such—alone for there were none on the ship, certainly not the steadily agitated Captain who so peered—no, he stated it to them. Talking in his mind as if addressing them: with Gerald foremost among them. To them his observations were instant, and what he knew they wanted was to know about the rituals, and so he spoke: of burnings—of fruit and vegetables and bewitching stones like incense; of sacrifice—of animals and captured foes and first-borns: but of human sacrifice he had only heard, never allowed to observe, but the tales were told too frequently to be wrong, so Frantz believed. But of all these, it was the ritual of sexual coupling that he knew was his special mission, knew it as he had known himself instantly upon the call, “Geographer!”

  “Geographer,” the peculiar word hard and half-broken upon his lips, but Frantz follows.

  Past some buildings. Down some paths. Across some brush and stream. It was like they were tracking, hunting where the moonlight was shining down. The old man who had called him was a chief, maybe even the head chief, but that mattered little. He was “the one,” as in each place so had such a one come forward and contacted him, led him, and delivered him to discover that which he had journeyed to find.

  Into a hut. An opening. Anywhere: just an opening into.

  With a great sigh Frantz parts the thick netting beyond which is his fate—chosen one, high priest, Wiz...map maker.

  Candle light wavers splotches of light—under one splotch is her: maiden, young, with golden comb in her hair, a flash of red lip and upon her eyes: not dazzling, not distinct of color, but an abyss of invitation...Frantz docks his body and his soul sets sail.

  The morning brings him her slight breathing against his ear. He wakens but she sleeps. A child’s light sleep. A dreamy enticement still alive upon her buttery face. Ah! Frantz is shaken upon this wakening: “Steady!” calls throughout his own mind. For there is about this woman: full woman he has no doubt, though of her age he could not count clearly … about this woman—so many others: given to him, he quickly came to know, most often with derision, trickery—throwing at him, in the cavernous pitch, an ugly face or a bloated body, never without paint and jangle of charms, often with rotting breath heavily fragranced, betraying: the clutch of one who has spent her time being a common bowl which is daily mixed by spoons she can no longer count.

  But this one!

  Steady.

  His reports were, at first, about them: describing them with a geographer’s eye: the rise of her chest, the bend and curve and play of flesh around hip and legs, legs like hilly islands or skinny peninsulas or supple beeches swaying in a peppy wind…in full description: the taste of their breasts, the hunger of their lips, the yielding of their womanly mouths, the swimming up and down their backs and backsides and the tickling of their feet…but he knew more, knew what it was he was charged to discover, and so he set about as if his own body was the quill: faithful to this reportage: deeply would he plunge within her, testing her, finding out how she received him, what it was she wanted to have from him—was it terror, fear, submission, a moment of blind servitude or freedom, liberation, redemption—happiness? He knew that he was an instrument... of cold spiritual iron.

  All this an instant report about this strange people, about their heart, how much of a threat they were, what it is they were seeking upon the earth, the power of their gods and goddesses … inside her was this discovery: she the map, he, faithful and fate-filled Geographer of the Inner Journey…knowing now his body, as it could never have been known by Otto, knowing it as what he had conjured up that instant filled with his final torture of Mother Dolor: a knowing which could not have been back then: for all that was his with her, back then, was the burying, here, it was a burying of himself in her, her as alive: her as his body and blood.

  However she was presented to him, so did Frantz take her. Most often what he found was what he had already discovered at prior landings. That the cup was shallow. Tha
t the fire was barely above an ember. That the holes in her body were not caves to explore but mere devices to quicken his manly pleasure and then snap shut.

  But not with this her. Looking at her. Flesh, a mixture of color not quite definable. But that wasn’t the issue. For her people, the males of her group, were boisterous and loud and given to much physical contact: to great hugs and lifting of bodies upon greeting, to the flinging of their bodies into aimless bouts of wrestling, to clashing large gongs and blowing screechy horns as they drank their “demon drink”—How else to report it?—and became even more rowdy and boastful and fired up into clouds of frenzied dancing…all this but yet no violence, not a fight nor a single blood-drop spotting the ground, not bashings with cane or sword or chasing away with a hail of rocks…all day this male bumping and thumping and melee, but issuing into a placid calmness of night.

  Now, Frantz knows why!

  She had whispered her name, a simple name: repetitive sound; odd because it was more sound than name, but which he accepted as her name, not even thinking that it might be a made-up word or sound, but it was clear that she was giving him...something: Da-da-da. Not throughout the night did Frantz call her name: for it was a name as secret gift, the first she gave to him. This he had never experienced before. He was totally swept up. He knew his name only as hers. At a later date he understood that she had swallowed him: totally and consummately devoured.

  Upon her he laid, quickly, as he had with so many. Doing so—even now—to get past the night: with practiced clutch he pins her—yet, with the grace of tears falling she slips away from under him. Before he can gather his wits, she is all hands within him, not just upon him brushing his hair and caressing his cheeks—although this she does do—but inside him, touching inside him with her eyes, eyes which now still betray no color but which fixate him: he feels like the worm upon the hook but it is a worm lounging upon the hook, happily waiting...he is threaded upon her, feels his hands touch her and though there is a warmth of flesh and a swell of breast it is a weaving which takes place: a threading of his tongue with hers and his presence knitting to hers...for this is what denies him image and metaphor and words of sound to transmit to Gerald—that she has accepted him, not he taken her.

  It is beyond his rational grasp and will be so upon his clear memory, but it is Mother Dolor Innocent before him. It is the innocence of acceptance.

  Frantz will remember many things. He will jot some down, then destroy the paper for he knows that no one on the boat would, could...Never would!...understand, not a jot or a tittle. That Gerald could understand—for once he does not care. It is a moment which gave him to see that whomever Gerald was, he was not more than he, himself.

  Da is how he lets his memory recall her.

  Da had pleasured his mouth with a thousand kisses. Pressed her smallish lips, thin and moist upon his, licking him, sweetly inhaling his breath, sharing the darts of her tongue and the playful enticement of labia from north to south and when he was in her she would turn the world upside down and he’d be gazing up at her and from these depthless eyes came a beam of light, a light which he knew was sourced in his own hard rod upon which she rode, for there was a feeling now upon his private which he had never felt—it was her as cloud, as a rush of clouds across the sky and so she was all around him and then like storming cloud so she was lighting up from within him, him finding himself thundering up and into and out from her eyes and back to himself, taking the beam of light into the center of his forehead, there knowing her as a warm rub, as puddling water, like tropical rain shyly but warmly pooling upon the deck…there was a softness which he became, so soft, so malleable, so like a gentle breath upon his own neck, the back of her hand, lacing around, pearling her ankles: this he became as she became hard, her whole body hard, stiff, rock-hard, she the rod...she leans down upon—leaned over him as he had over other women—leans down, pins him and he spreads his own legs...she ruts and she heaves and she splices him in two—he feeling her like a broad-sword severing his right from his left, and it is inside of him that she is...plunging, diving deep, holding her breath and descending into him, there to latch upon his spine, to latch and then curl up and then come to rest.…

  Rest: He had woken completely rested. Restful. A singular experience.

  When he returned from his brief and hurried morning expulsions and ablutions, Da was gone.

  “Geographer!” It was midday.

  He did not need to ask. Frantz shouted quickly, “Steady,” but with a quickness strengthened by a clarity always before denied. Steady. Frantz knows that he has read the map as the map wanted to be read....Da—vOYAGE: O’SIDE