The Upright Man

by Michael Marshall

  When it began to rain again we found a place half-sheltered at the foot of high rocks and sat, a little distance apart, and watched the sea. I realized then why we respond to the sound of the waves, and the falling of rain, and wind in the trees. Because they are meaningless. They are nothing to do with us. They are outside our control. They remind us of a time, very early in our lives, when we did not understand the noises around us but simply accepted them in our ears; and so they provide blessed relief from our continual needy attempts to change our world in magic deed or endless thought. Meaningless sound, which we love against the anxiety of action, of pattern-making, of seeking to comprehend and change. As soon as we picked up something and used it for a purpose, we were both made and damned. Tool-making gave us the world, and lost us our minds.

  For an hour we did nothing, two people on the edge of the world, with our backs to it all. When it got dark we went back to the hotel. I took a shower, changed my clothes, then went around the wooden walkway to knock on Nina’s door.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You want to go get a drink?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Is this, like, a date or something?”

  “No,” I said. “It is not.”

  A couple of streets away we found a place called Red’s Tavern where you could sit and drink strong beers they made upstairs. After a while the bar began to fill with locals, and eventually a pickup band coalesced down the far end. A couple of guitars, a lap steel, a violin, washboard; people sat and played for a while, wandering off and back as the whim took them. The lamps were low and warm and I realized, for the first time, that the woman opposite me had auburn lights in her hair. We listened to the music the band made, and we clapped and sang along when everybody else did, and we watched the barmaids dance and laugh behind the counter as they filled pitchers with beer as clean as stream water, and I finally got myself a bowl of chili and it was not bad at all.

  The band was still playing, but more quietly, when we left them to it. We walked back to the hotel, bought a bottle of wine from the market on the way. We lit the fire in my room and cracked the window open a little, so we could hear the sound of the waves and the crackling of the wood at the same time. We sat on the floor with our backs to the end of the bed, and we talked for a long time, talked until it was late and yet didn’t feel late at all.

  We kept putting wood on the fire because we didn’t want it to burn down, and in the end the room was dark and warm enough and didn’t need any more words.

  She made the first move.

  She’s like that.