“Where were you?” I ask Jude. He looks out the window at the rain.
“Somewhere southeast of the capital,” he says. “I walked until the town spread out and disappeared. Then I kept walking. I walked so far that soon I could tell by the patterns the wind had left on the sand that no one had walked where I was walking for a very long time, and I kept walking, feeling a nice freedom, like maybe I could walk the whole world.” Jude stops to refill his drink. “You need another?” he asks, but I haven’t even begun to sip the one he already poured for me. I shake my head no and he continues.
“The small peaks formed by the wind was all I could see. Like tiny waves, each one. It was kind of like being able to stand in the middle of the ocean. The peaks were no larger than my hand and each one composed of thousands, maybe millions of grains so tiny that they approached invisibility. For a second I thought, I am not like all those grains of sand,” and he points a finger down to the floor. “I am just a walker.”
Jude nods and kicks his legs under his kitchen chair.
“I started to dig a small hole, and as I dug I changed my plan. I thought, Wait. Fuck walking. I’ll dig my way home. Like the hole to China. I’ll walk through the very center of the earth and that way, I thought, people will know that I’m different.” Jude bends his head to whisper to me even though we are alone. I can smell his breath. He whispers because he feels guilty to say it. “I thought of how messed up every vet from Vietnam I know is and I was terrified to be like them. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life having to think always about the war, ’cause it scares me when I see old vets walking around wearing fatigues sometimes still, like forty-fucking-years after-the-fact.” He stops whispering. He pulls his head back from mine. “I didn’t want that so I thought I’d dig my way home and I’d be different, noble and removed. The war won’t leave a scratch on me, I thought. It was stupid, this plan, the hole to China plan. It lasted about four or five minutes until my hands couldn’t take the digging anymore, and I realized that China is not on the other side of the globe from the Middle East. The Pacific Ocean is. I couldn’t dig through that.”
Jude folds over his legs and traps his arms in his lap. Without using his hands he puts his lips on the side of the fresh drink before him and takes a sip without ever touching his hands to the glass. He slurps. When he sits up he says, “After an hour or two, I had seen nothing but sand for a long while, when I noticed something up ahead. It was a small gatehouse or a toll booth, a tiny cabin built of wood and glass with a flat metal roof. It was weird because there was nothing else around.
“For a second I thought that superman might swoop down out of the sky and duck into the deserted gatehouse in order to change back into Clark Kent. I looked up. ‘Superman,’ I said. I was going home with Superman? But there was no Superman, just the sun. So I had another idea. I looked under my shirt thinking well maybe I was Superman and all I had to do was duck into this tollbooth, but all that was there underneath my clothes was a white cotton government-issue undershirt. I was fucked. I was fucked and roasting. I went inside the gatehouse. It was no mirage. I knocked on its wood.” Jude taps shave-and-a-haircut on the table and then he swallows some whiskey. “Maybe a superhighway had once passed over the desert, but now the superhighway had disappeared in some apocalypse that I had slept through and all it had left behind was its small tollbooth.” He wrings his face and hair.
“What the hell?” I ask about the water, but Jude doesn’t seem to notice. He just keeps talking.
“I kept walking. I wanted to see what was on the other side of the gatehouse, what had been worth guarding.”
“Weren’t you getting burned and thirsty?” I ask him.
Jude nods his head yes. “I wasn’t feeling things one hundred percent. Just walking, happy to be away from the war. I thought about how my brain was getting cooked inside my skull and how cooking it would make it more tender. I wanted that. Plus the desert was all these gentle rolling hills that hid what lay ahead. They made me curious, so I could forget being thirsty and think about what was on the other side of the hill. And hill after hill just revealed more hills, until I reached the top of one.”
Jude stops to sip and looks me in the eye. “Nothing I can say could explain what I saw, but my first thought was, ‘UFO. It’s a damn UFO.’ I thought that was wonderful. I didn’t have to dig home or walk home or wait for Superman because a UFO was going to fly me home.” He stops and spreads his arms like a bird and makes a whistling noise to simulate flying through the air. “I stopped walking and stared down from the lip of the valley to where a solid wall of baked mud bricks rose straight up and out of the flat land. It towered. It was smack in the center of a tremendous fucking valley. It was larger than my eyes could see in one glance. It required multiple looks. This thing was as large as an entire city and the perpendicular it cut to the earth was such a sharp opposite angle from the desert that I felt nearly queasy looking up at it. Even when it dawned on me that it probably wasn’t a UFO but more likely something really, really old, like a ruin or a pyramid, I still couldn’t shake the idea that it was from outer space.
“So I walked down into the valley. I wanted to touch it because I thought that it might also be a mirage. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the valley floor and the distance surprised me, as my perception had been skewed by how empty the desert had been up until that point. When I finally got to the wall of this thing I put my hand up against one of the bricks that made the wall and that brick immediately sucked all the moisture left in my body out, carrying it, I imagined, far back to the center of this thing like a hive of bees would do for their queen, like it hadn’t been touched in years.”
Jude holds his hand up to demonstrate. But to me it looks like he is waving to someone standing behind me. I turn quickly. I am still nervous. No one is there. He continues, “I brought my other hand to the wall and the heat of the ruin that must have been sitting there in the sun for centuries burned me so badly that I felt the burn in the back of my calves. But I kept my hands there. I wanted the wall to suck not just my sweat but all of me through, too. Slurp my entire body back through the baked mud bricks and into the center of the temple where it must be dark, cool, and moist. I stood waiting for a burst of light, or a flash of electricity, or something magical to happen, something so that I would know I wasn’t like everyone else, just going along with the shit the government told us. I waited but after some time I realized nothing was going to happen.
“So I turned, pressed my shoulder to the bricks, and walked along the wall instead. While I walked, the distances in that desert seemed to grow, rather than shrink, like a cartoon where the illustrator had drawn two stretches of land, and once I had crossed one panel, he’d bring that panel in front of me again. The same waves of sand repeating over and over.
“Walking with my shoulder pressed against something as large and as old as the ruin, the war seemed tiny and the purpose of the war looked like a pinprick, like a damn dim light because people die so quickly already without war. I thought about how, to the ruin, people must be mayflies, measly, annoying mayflies and mayflies only live for one day. Then I imagined a war among the mayflies but anybody at all could see how stupid a war among mayflies would be. People die so quickly already.
“What I didn’t know but figured out after I got home was that what I had found was a ziggurat. There’s a number of these throughout Iraq. They’re these ramped, tremendous spiral structures, like the pyramids. They were once temples. The one I had found was one of the best-preserved examples that there is because it had been rebuilt a few times throughout history. First in 2100 BC a king named Ur-Nammu built a whole series of ziggurats. Most are gone now, but that one had been lucky for a long time. That one was once in the city of Ur, a city that had been famous for its library. Ur,” Jude says. “Urrrrrr. I like that name. That ziggurat was originally called Etemennigur, which means ‘House whose foundation creates terror.’ And that was true. And it seems incredi
ble that the name could still hold true after 4000 years, but it did.
“Finally I finished walking one side of the ruin and turned the corner, starting down the next side. At first I thought that someone, a sergeant, was screaming in my ear. The wind was so loud on that side that I had trouble believing it was the wind. It yelled and hummed, deep and low as if it had come from inside a belly. Not like anything I’ve ever heard here,” Jude says. “Then I saw why it was that loud. There was a hole, a gigantic hole in the ruin, and the wind was getting caught and disrupted as it tore across the hole, making this hissing or screaming noise, like a rip. The hole was a seam, kind of a canyon, or a sharp, jagged tear. The hole was unimaginable. It was a gulf that opened up the entire inside of the ruin. When I got there, I climbed down inside the hole and inside it was shaded and cool. I followed the seam of the hole as far as I could. Chunks had been torn from the ruin’s walls. The bricks had exploded and had been tossed about like boulders. They were that large. I was scared that the bricks above me might crash down on my head so I walked in real slowly. Through one blast in the ruin that resembled the state of California, I saw another blast that looked like England, like one was inside the other. And I had a thought and it was, ‘Cannibals.’”
Jude runs his finger over his top lip and smiles. “See, my thirst was deteriorating my thoughts. Plus I was fucked. I had a seat on a pile of debris. When I sat the pile moved so I jumped. It was just the mess settling, but it scared the shit out of me. I thought the whole thing was going to fall. There were loads of rocks and old mortar and sand in the pile. I was digging through it, thinking I might find some odd treasure but instead I found a cracked bomb casing that was almost as long as my forearm. It was stenciled with white paint saying, TED STAT and then below that in pencil was a handwritten message. FUCK YOU TOWLE HEADS! It said. They spelled it wrong. I couldn’t believe that our country had blown a hole in a ruin that was probably one of the oldest things on earth.”
Jude looks at me. “No one in Iraq even wears towels on their damn heads,” he says. “I kept walking and that night I slept out in the middle of the desert with the UFO on one side of me and miles of nothing on the other. I took off my boots. I thought that was the proper way to get ready to die. I was hoping death would come find me that night.
“But it didn’t. I woke in the morning and there were two MPs standing over me asking, ‘Are you crazy? Are you a goddamn loony?’ I didn’t answer, so one of them kicked me. I said nothing, so they determined I had mental problems. They said anyone who would walk as far as I had must have mental problems. And so they took me to a field hospital where the doctors were under orders to get as many soldiers back out fighting. So first they said, ‘Nah, this one’s all right,’ and I was like, ‘Shit yeah, I’m all right.’ But just when I was about to be sent back out to fight, the shifts changed, and a second doctor came on. She had to review my chart before I left and she saw things differently. She said I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and that I needed to be watched around the clock. She thought I was getting ready to kill myself and I told her, ‘Shit yeah, I’m getting ready to kill myself.’ So she made arrangements for me to receive a medical discharge. She said she couldn’t get me on a flight out just then ’cause the planes were for soldiers who might not make it, but she said that there was a hospital ship going back to the States, a ship where she thought someone would watch me around the clock. She said I could go home on that.”
Jude puts his forehead down on the table as if the telling is exhausting him. He hasn’t ever spoken so much.
“I’m sorry.” I pet the back of his head so that he’ll know it’s all right.
“Don’t do that,” he says. I stop touching him. “No,” he says. “I mean don’t forgive me. I wouldn’t forgive me if I were you.” Everything is quiet except for the rain. “Do you understand why I couldn’t go on?” he asks me.
“But you did. You went on, Jude. See. You are here. You went on, Jude. You were just doing your job.”
“Umh,” he says and exhales as though it hurts him. “There’s more,” he says. “I didn’t go on,” he says.
“Right.” With sarcasm. “You’re dead.”
“That’s right,” he answers in all seriousness. “And you’re a mermaid.”
I never told Jude I was a mermaid before.
I stand to walk to the window. Jude stands also. He sounds like the rain when he stands because drops of water spill off him. “Why are you melting, Jude?”
“We have to hurry,” he says, so I think he is going to tell me the rest of the story. “We have to hurry,” he says again, as though he is nervous. I turn to hear the rest of the story but he does something very different than tell me the rest of the story. He pulls me toward him and wraps his arms around my back. He is soaking wet everywhere. He is melting and it rubs off on me. He puts his head in my neck and then quickly he picks me up and pushes my back up against the wall. I stand very stiff because I cannot believe what is happening. I think he is either going to kill me or start kissing me. He splits my legs open and wraps them around his hips.
“You’re melting,” I say, and then he does kiss me. He is drenched and his kisses leave a trail on me. After a moment I realize what is happening. I kiss him back, his arms, his chest, his neck. I lift his shirt and I can taste his scars. He puts his hand on the small of my back and underneath one of my legs. He pulls me even closer and I can’t believe what is happening. He puts his thumb between my legs right up the front of me.
Everything is more than I could have imagined, like having a square ice cube in your mouth and you can’t swallow it. You have to let it drip slowly down your throat. Having him this close after years of wanting him this close, smelling deep in his hair and it’s not just my hair, my pillow pretending to be him, it is him. Tasting his ear and having it taste differently than I ever imagined. How exciting that waxy difference is after years of wondering what the inside of Jude’s ear tastes like.
“Hurry. Then I’ll tell you,” he whispers very quietly in my ear, losing more of my clothes. There and there and there. I had never felt love in my lungs before. Jude looks like a horse. A seahorse. He is pushing up against me and inside me and every time I kiss him his lips are wetter than before. He is melting and he has been drinking so that I feel like I am rocking, like we’re on the sea.
Even after, when we are sitting on his bed with our legs around one another. I pet his face and listen to his breath and cannot fall asleep because there is a foreign feeling in my veins, it is the feeling of finally getting what I wanted, and the feeling is colder than I ever thought it would be. The feeling won’t let me sleep.
Eventually Jude lies back, and through the night he drips and drips. I stay awake listening for as long as I can. The drip, drip, drip of him is the last thing I hear before I drift off.
In the morning it is still raining. Jude is no longer in bed. When I fell asleep he was wrapped around me but now he is gone. I touch where he slept. “Jude,” I call but get no answer. The rain is coming down hard and loud, not in drops but more like it is pouring. I wrap the sheet around myself to look for him. He is not in the shower. He is not in the kitchen, though I see the bottle of whiskey we started last night. Someone has finished it. Jude must have drunk the rest sometime in the night, because it wasn’t me. I enter the living room to investigate. “Fuck!” I land with a crack. My feet slip out from under me and I land with a splash on my back, knocking the air from my lungs, landing in a puddle of water in the middle of the living room floor. I rub the arm that I fell on. I look at the ceiling, thinking Jude’s roof must have a leak. The ceiling is dingy white, but dry and coated with the webs that dust makes. No leak. I sit up in the water. It smells familiar. The puddle is large, far taller than me. I lower my face to the water and, there, I have a terrible thought. “Jude?” I ask. I can see my reflection. “Is that you?” I touch my tongue to the water that has pooled on the floor. I taste it. It is.
THE S
EIZE
Jude melted. He really melted all the way to nothing but water. I unwrap the sheet that is covering me and I lie back on the living room floor so that I can be in the puddle.
The night before feels so near I reach my hand behind my back, believing that I can touch it. As I lie in the puddle I can still feel Jude from last night and it feels so real, not made-up this time. I experience the memory as an electric shock of thought in my brain. I wonder and worry about this electrical discharge in a pool of water.
“Jude. Jude. Jude.” I turn on my side so the water goes in my ear. I put my lips just on the surface of the puddle, without touching the floor. “Don’t go,” I say. I kiss Jude everywhere. I swallow him. I drink the water from the floor. I have to lap it the way a cat or a dog would. It is dirty with dust and sand and filth, but I drink it anyway, and when I can’t get anymore with my tongue, I sop Jude up in the bedsheet and wring the last drops of him into my mouth. “Jude,” I say once I finish drinking all that is left of him.
“We’re getting out of here,” I say. “Let’s go.” I find Jude’s keys on his kitchen table. Underneath the keys on the table there is a pen and a letter written from Jude to me. The letter is tucked into an envelope where Jude has written on the outside:
THE REST OF THE STORY
I stuff the envelope into my jacket pocket, being careful not to fold or crush it. “I’ll drive,” I say. It will be hundreds of miles before I have to decide where we are actually going. For now we are just going south.
I feel buoyant. I feel light and ready. I feel like we are getting out of here and mostly I feel Jude inside me and it feels like love.
The Seas Page 10