by Brian Hodge
The window is a large sliding glass door so heavy it rumbles in its track. It is the sum of shock-absorbent design and ball-bearing motion within clean aluminum grooves. As the waning sun sets the ocean afire, the man sees his own reflection coalesce by degrees in the thick planes of pure glass, fired without imperfections.
There I am, he thinks. A phantom.
Picture this man, looking at the picture of himself and imagining himself dead, a shade, a disembodied animus unanchored in the swells of freakish chance. Something inside him has definitely died, but a little death is not a whole death, which is why he is still here to ponder his image.
He waits for the woman he knows will come in the night. His reflected eyes are prominent in the purple blaze of twilight.
The magic hour.
The woman feels the gaze of a stranger, prickling the fine hairs at the small of her back and working upward, causing an involuntary shiver. Her hair is damp with sea spray, half-dry and ragged. She rests her weight on one leg, embedding her heel deeper in moist sand, as she imagines the stranger, imagining her naked, wanting to turn her around, to see.
To her right, the sand was blank, anticipating her passage the way flesh senses teeth marks or the approach of a tattoo needle. To her left, a meandering track of lone footprints, an impermanent record of her passage, undistinguished and awaiting erasure in the hope of something better to come. Before her, the ocean, all of it, beckoning her to stroll into its amniotic embrace equally forever. No turning back from that tempting sojourn. Her hair would float, alien tendrils in an environment hostile to the mere breathers of air. She would see fierce color last of all, sliding to black. This pull back toward her own chemical basics seems forsworn, inevitable…
But for the stranger at her back.
What did he want? She already knows. What would happen between them, if anything? She already suspects. She stretches her arms to the sea in supplication, seeking, perhaps, a sign as she is hit by aerosol–'a hydration, a baptism, a cleansing, making her whole, making her wet.
She decides to give random chance five more minutes.
The first time the man fell through the doorway to the past was on the first anniversary of the death of Lorelle, his first and never-to-be wife. He had been sitting on the floor, brooding sourly at his reflection in the sliding glass door he had designed specifically to gift the space with a breathtaking view of the ocean. Once a wall, now a window; once a door, now an unanticipated conduit to an earlier time. He could not dope out how it had happened; it was too overwhelming to recollect the incidents that culminated in the breakthrough itself.
After a wallow in reverie and past fulfillment, it had occurred to the man to torch his beach house outright; put a fiery end to a pile of hard work that now existed merely to damn him with its perfection and promise. His emotions have become an allergy to him. He had already forgotten so much that on occasion he cannot remember his own name.
So he sat, staring into the window and out toward the ocean beyond, a jerry can of gasoline on either side of him as he contemplated the potential power of a half-buck cigarette lighter. He wished that Lorelle was close enough for him to feel the warmth emanating from her skin, radiating her special scents. The ghost in the glass looked back at him and warned that wishes usually come bearing hefty price tags.
She was still everywhere in the house, motes of her. A year later, and he could still find strands of her hair lodged in furniture or deposited behind an undisturbed book on the shelf. There were probably microscopic flakes of her plainly in front of him, too tiny for vision to perceive. Maybe there was a particle of Lorelle in the freezer, something that might be cloned…
He defocused on himself and took a long visual taste of the Pacific Ocean.
Gray like boilerplate, neon blue, opaque and verdant with kelp, the ocean would always be there. It was a lie, of course, that the seas themselves were unchanging. As he watched, the rolling water was becoming clogged with discharges from cannisters of radioactive waste and petrochemical sludge from leaky oil tankers and dead Russian spies and all the other mung that had not been part of the mix as recently as a decade ago.
If not the sea, or the sand, there were always the stars, eternal and unchanging, right?
He remembered the first time he toured Lorelle through the house, before he moved in and changed everything.
"Look!" she had said, excited and dashing about. "We're up on stilts. Pillars. Phone poles."
Lorelle had planted her palms on the unpainted redwood of the deck and seesawed forward, hinging at the waist and pointing her toes like a dancer. Her legs, in particular the muscles behind her knees, always stole his eye. He watched the broker's look of approval snatch itself away self-consciously. Male programming.
"The tide can't possibly come up to cliff level," recited the broker, a ratty little weed named Speaks who had apparently last overhauled his wardrobe when he thought disco was going to alter the course of his life.
"I mean, I suppose it has slopped over a few times, but the last serious time was in the 1800s, before there were Burger Kings on the Pacific Coast Highway, if you know what I mean. Even if there was a coastal hurricane like the one that hit those poor suckers down in Malibu in '82, why, hell, their asses were slung over the surf. Their houses were all anchored in mud and caliche. Like trying to pound a tenpenny nail into sand."
Ten feet below the deck, a patch of desert scrub ran west for thirty yards before terminating at a cliff, busily eroding itself into the ocean. When the tide was out, there were rocks, crabs, shells, deepwater enigmas unveiled against a craggy strip of beach. Tide in, and saltwater came to smash rhythmically against the cliff and blow white spume skyward. You could station yourself in a tuck between rocks and get soaked admiring the predawn spectacle.
The man tuned out the spiel and patter of Mister Speaks and, in his mind's eye, began to fill the virgin space. He had just made the cover of Architectural Digest for the tenth time and was feeling less like a wunderkind, two times twenty-something, and more like an enfant terrible on the wane. He conjured seamless sheer glass to bring the dead west wall to life, shot top to bottom and secured with bright beams of burnished aluminum. The middle of the area begged to house a sliding door, permitting the occupant to stroll. right into the vision it offered.
Now, jerry cans at the ready, the man tried to imagine the space as it had been before his will had been imposed upon it. A wall–with no glass in which to recognize his own accusatory reflection.
Hadn't he become just a bit overwrought? Obsessive? Hinged to the past, bereft of new emotions and stagnantly content to convert their home into a ghoulish shrine to her memory? Balance had been misplaced. In here, it was Lorelle who was favored, and as a consequence of an ailment he called love, he was now in mortal danger of being dragged under by the riptide of what she had meant to him.
How about a more important question? Wasn't he entitled to destroy it all, and thereby exorcise the decay that had festered in him for a year–a year spent steeping in death, rather than the concerns of remaining alive?
The thing that stopped him from using the cigarette lighter was the sight of the woman on the beach, in darkness. A stranger. Her magenta bathing suit, a streamlined one-piece, rendered her starkly apparent in the twilight. His eye was magnetized to her, and it was so simple for him to make the transposition–
–to his second night in residence at his then-new home. With Lorelle. On the roof. Another sunset, another twilight time.
Vermilion, mauve, soft orange, he brought her iced tea up the side steps while the sun was going down. Climb, Refill Man, climb. Lorelle had a one-piece bathing suit. She was using it as a pillow.
"I was wondering where you'd gotten to."
Beckoned, he came. She blessed him with her mouth. Their arms, their legs entwined and arranged and the next thing he knew it was nearly midnight. He could see a crescent moon through her expired glass of tea. The drink had doubled in volume from the melted
ice into that over-under, oil-and-water transparency; it magnified the moon.
Down from the house, around the cliff and thence to the beach, a beaten dirt path could connect him to the mystery woman still standing there. Maybe she was communing with the ancient vastness of the sea in some terribly hip, parapsychological way. Wanderers often used the man's path as a shortcut when the tide was in and there was no beach on which to leave footprints.
He watched the woman stretch toward where the sun had vanished past the horizon. She entreated the elements. Beautiful. He remembered Mister Speaks taking in Lorelle the same way, breasts to butt and back again.
Before she could move away, he moved to keep her in sight. Tidal pull. Silly, frivolous.
A week after his memorable rooftop christening with Lorelle, her doctor had phoned to request a backup appointment, a "probably nothing to worry about" double-check. Everyone had behaved in an adult fashion. Tests and second opinions were logical things that grown-ups did.
Fear is primordial. Occipital beats forebrain.
"Nothing" turned out to be a yoke-sac tumor meshed into Lorelle's spinal cord, and despite love, she died in their bathtub when one of her lungs threw a clot and her body simply forgot to breathe any more. He found her submerged, her hair radiating above her face, the surface of the bathwater unmolested by a single bubble. So still.
He slid back the huge door and stepped outside. He shoved and the door whispered shut. He had performed this simple act hundreds of times, without regard. You opened, you stepped out, you closed the door; it was so mundane it could make you laugh with guilt. His lotus time on the cushion had been meditative, and his decision to burn down his home had provided a lull in his mental tempest. This time could have been any other time, on any other day.
He merely stepped outside.
And his thoughts were not of Lorelle. Normally she was in his mind a thousand times an hour. But tonight, she had slipped aside, replaced by the woman in the magenta bathing suit. He just wanted to watch her, a bit more, to put his morbidity in a calmer place. Lorelle had escaped his memory for a fragment of the clock–the instant that he stepped outside.
Later, he had plenty of time in which to contemplate this mechanism. Thinking about it brought multiple stab wounds of guilt and gratitude. Guilt, for forgetting Lorelle, if only for the moment; wasn't it his job to keep her flame hot enough to sear his brain, sterilize the nerves through which he could still feel pain?
Gratitude, for what happened next, as night breezes soothed his face and he heard Lorelle's voice calling to him, from somewhere up on the roof.
Kayce's last notch had been a doozy. As usual, tradition had been her undoing.
Back during a time she had female friends, Kayce noted their irritating consistency to view all sexual disport as a matter of either conquest or submission. They adjudged sex with their assorted partners like an Olympic swimming competition: Who got furthest, who gained most, scorecards. Kayce had little taste for men who had to be maneuvered or tricked into bed. The social dance and the art of the sexual deal held zero allure. She determined not to rate men according to their lowest common denominator–as lunatics, predators, or victims. In her life she had experienced all three in mixes of varying potency, and while she did view the male of the species in sexist terms, especially upon first contact, she never blundered into sexist rote. Her desires, while frequently immoral, were never amoral.
She distrusted people who declaimed from some lofty moral high ground. They generally brought rancid agendas to bed with them, hidden tumors of madness, time-bombs of rejection.
Secure in her own identity, liberated from the fears programmed into her upbringing and youth, she sauntered forth into the world, head high, and commenced her own slow self-destruction. By low ebb she was playing every one of the games, by rules she despised. In the end the only real and lasting pleasure was the power she could wield as a woman, and the auto-consolation in which she simmered ever deeper with each self-programmed bust-out.
She read magazines with disdain. Magazines had become like printed shopping malls; flash, cockiness, brevity, no depth, we'll give you the world in twenty seconds. Like the affairs of the heart in her life, they were vacant of genuine nourishment. She read in a magazine that, according to a very important nationwide poll, the median number of sex partners in the lifetime of a now, with-it, au-go-go man was 18.9. She chuckled, superior, having crested triple digits years ago, in a time beyond the maudlin compilation of sexual hit lists in the dead of lonely nights. She did not bother to remember names or faces whole, merely bits of sensation–moments, glimpses, brief shocks of a maddeningly ephemeral pleasure she craved for a time past the capacities of a single man to supply. More sublimated need than any ten of her personal bests could appease.
Cort, her most recent notch, had burst out of the gate looking fine. A worthy challenge. The vacancy he had left in her was so small it could not even contain an echo of feeling.
For the longest, cutest time, Cort had been afraid of kissing her for real. They bussed, like children. It was quaint and attractive: Cort, an ex-drug runner turned scuba enthusiast, mountain scrambler, and self-made gym entrepreneur, had sweetly confessed that Kayce was different, that he did not wish her to feel attacked or assaulted, the victim of the base hungers of a prospect playing out the aggressor role. That, saith Cort, was just fucking, and fucking was a bore.
"Nobody is above fast passion," she had told him. "That sudden heat, like an electrical storm in summer. The people who pretend they are, become tricksters, and if you play that game, something vital and human withers inside you. Believe me, Cort–I've known enough therapy junkies in my life to stay leery of over examination. It's a shield, but not a wall, if you understand the difference."
That made him fidget, scared now of being too careful, as she had designed it to. She placed her hand on top of his. He did not draw away. He was rife with warring emotions, filled to the rim with potential, and screaming to be cultivated. He enclosed her hand with both of his, one above, one below. Cort had a good grip.
Such a joke, really: Cort, flaunter of the law and adventurer, now opting to turn the sentimental romantic. It was a lure Kayce found difficult to resist … not that resistance was ever a question. From first contact, she felt in control of their exchange.
That was probably the best hairpin of the whole maze: First contact, the initial physical attraction. A turn of head, a pose, an appraisal, an unspoken decision there and then that charged the air and ruined it for boring people.
For Cort, orgasm was not the objective. Safety was.
Then followed another good part: The night she told him she needed him, wanted him inside her, and I do mean goddamn now. She waved a condom in front of his face and read his fear. Then she installed the condom on him using her mouth, and read his helplessness. His erection was all her doing.
A day after guiding Cort's hands to and fro on her body, she coyly thanked him for "teaching" her how to masturbate, and god, did that ever swell his ego to bursting–the result being exactly what she had engineered, a night of sex to remember.
It was a strain for her not to rush right into the Sugar Daddy trick, or suggest to him the new and exciting uses for melba toast. Those would probably have made poor old Cort's head explode at the time.
Few of the men Kayce had known in her life had been daring or confident enough to do the things that genuinely excited her, procedures and concepts she was hungry to mold into Cort's psyche. Bold enough, yes, crude enough, sometimes–but crudity had to be schooled to become a wanted temptation. Otherwise, it was just rough handling, domination, and a dichotomy of sex that turned her off like a kill switch.
They made love on the beach, her beach, and she held him close. Uncertainty flooded him, evacuating the feelings she sought to nurture. The closer she held him, the more she could feel his spirit pulling away. In the pattern of the stars unadulterated by city light, she could read their future together and knew she had
already blown it by pushing him too far too fast.
They would begin to chew each other to shreds over schedules, over priorities, over money–the usual foibles that keep us flawed and keep us human. They would indulge the vices of the older, immutable rules, adapting them to their sense of "modern" fair play. What fools, thinking they could beat such an entrenched system. Familiarity. Contempt. The rotation of the Earth.
Kayce would have to beat the system alone.
Relationship was nomenclature with too low a ceiling. Relationships were prisons built of elapsed time, of promises at war with lies. Relationships decomposed as though spoilage-dated. Relationships were phenomena she gauged on a one-to-ten scale: If one was first contact and ten, one elderly significant other burying her mate, then Kayce's entire life had been aimed at becoming a world-class expert on one through three.
From this, Kayce deduced that love–love as defined by drama, by art, by movies and books and beer commercials–was an absolute, and in her universe there existed no such hard rocks. Physics could bend. Love was, in fact, a private, personal thing, like a possession you lost before it broke or turned bad or got abused, a thing which thereafter provided a reliable, if small, candle flame in the darkness of the heart. Love was something sacrosanct, something one kept to one's self, if it was truly valued.
Love was not marriage, children, longevity, or shared insurance. These were social contracts designed to buttress a feeling fully capable of standing alone, without the crutches of other feelings, more lies, more promises.
Men want sex, and women want love. God, was it so simple a thing as the maxim laid down by her mother, so many years back? Her entire life summed up by a single cliché?
After her first fight with Cort, Kayce brisked through a halfhearted affair with another woman. When she had safely tucked their disagreement into irrelevance and re-moored his sense of self, she related the various intimacies of her deed. He did not make a face at the news she had lain with her own sex. He was interested to know what she had discovered, because, as he had put it: