The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  She is done.

  And they continue to crash through her, dizzying mad visions of isolation.

  She is a thing like so many birthed into a world indifferent to her.

  A thing going on in spite of itself.

  Tromping through the daily illusion of participation.

  But in reality connected in no way to the rest of existence.

  It’s all there in her throat, isn’t it?

  Once the stomach has purged itself.

  All the pain its associations are right there in the throat, constricted beyond measure.

  Just below where the neck connects to the skull.

  That’s where she wears it.

  Where all the sadness finds its expression.

  The crying muscles.

  (You are separate from this, you realize that, don’t you?

  [You are watching.])

  And indeed she is.

  The pain continues to come, continues to curl her into something that must look like one of those desiccated mummies in museums from afar.

  But there is a parallel track developing now that she has quit fighting.

  Like she is both feeling it and watching it.

  Something strange fills the spectating half.

  Fascination.

  No doubt about it, this is what you have feared your whole life.

  Falling apart.

  Utterly.

  And you are doing a bang-up job of it.

  Good God, you are letting the jungle have it.

  The jaguars must be scared of you, with all those drooling wails.

  They think a ghost is among them.

  But I ask you.

  What is it besides Pain?

  What is it beside tears?

  Why is this whole experience of falling apart to be feared?

  This is what you have been ducking all these years?

  This is what you have been strong for, to avoid this?

  This is what you have been stiff-upper-lipping your way past?

  Look at you.

  A child writ into an adult’s body, like the rest of the world.

  We’re born to cry.

  We cry to get on with things.

  You belittle your humanity by denying it.

  Unfortunately for you, you had to come here to figure that out.

  There is nothing left.

  It has passed through her.

  She is just this thing lying on the muddy rocks.

  Breathing.

  A corpse trapped in a system convinced of its perpetuity.

  Seeing dimension come back to the land.

  There is a sun up there above the canopy, or will be soon.

  The shadows shrink.

  Color climbs out of the darkness.

  There is a creek beside her.

  Narrow.

  Gurgling.

  Ever busy.

  She doesn’t move.

  She doesn’t think or feel.

  She is just this thing lying on the muddy rocks.

  Sensations wheel through her consciousness.

  The colors of the land present themselves for her consideration.

  So too the sounds, which decouple themselves from the larger symphony.

  Her ear is somehow more attuned.

  She can hear the layers of the sound—the insects, then the leaves, then the water, then the light breeze as it wanders invisibly through this place.

  Everything momentary, indelible, then gone.

  To be replaced by the next.

  And onward it wheels.

  She watches.

  Through the window of her consciousness.

  Without comment or categorization.

  This must be what it is to be dead.

  All struggle firmly in the rearview.

  Nothing resisted or paved over.

  Just surrender.

  The world a constancy with or without you.

  Joy and pain twin states of perpetual dissolution.

  Oh thank God.

  Thank God.

  Thank God nothing matters.

  There is a beer can.

  It’s shiny there in the rocks.

  New as a spent beer can can look out in the middle of the jungle.

  It’s been down there below her feet the whole time.

  The royal blue of the label holds the shards of sunlight that hit it like a jewel.

  Someone was probably sitting on that rock, she thinks.

  That one by the creek.

  Good spot to sit: flat, broad.

  Water gurgling at your feet, merciful shade everywhere around you.

  Sit and have a beer, let the world get on without you.

  There’s another can, farther down the stream.

  And another.

  They’re all fairly new, though if you give them a closer look, you see that the blue in the label holds the sunlight in different vibrancies.

  All of them jewels, some more radiant than others.

  Some older.

  Fading.

  (Someone comes up here, don’t they?

  [Of their own volition!]

  [They don’t dive out of cars!]

  They come up here again and again and again.

  Drink beer maybe by the day, and leave the cans behind.

  And the cans fade ever so slowly, each one chasing the last toward discoloration.

  Someone finds value in this spot.

  Who’d’a thunk?)

  With some doing she sits up.

  And like she has aged thirty years, spends the next half hour trying to get into a standing position.

  The cans carry away downhill, a little breadcrumb trail of them.

  A few empty bags of crisps glinting in between the creek rocks.

  They didn’t come down to this place as she did.

  They took a more civil path.

  Up.

  She trudges downhill, following the creek.

  Sensations cascading emptily through her.

  The stomach and the knees and the cracked, dry lips.

  She drinks from the creek.

  She is just another movement in the jungle.

  Like the creek, letting gravity take her.

  She will see where this goes.

  The ravine opens up sometime later.

  The left wall flattening into terrace.

  Into a tiny rice field fed by a small viaduct carved away from the stream.

  There is a shanty here.

  A woman in a sarong and boots, following a muskox as it plows through the two-foot-deep mud.

  Lily appears before her.

  She knows she must look like a ghost.

  The woman looks at her like she is indeed a ghost.

  Or something even more pathetic.

  She calmly halts the ox, composes herself.

  Crosses to Lily.

  Says something in Burmese.

  Lily shakes her head, smiles a dry, cracked smile.

  The woman understands.

  This broken white thing before her doesn’t know a lick of the language.

  But nevertheless needs help.

  The woman holds up a hand.

  Crosses to the shanty.

  Returns a minute later with one of those blue-labeled beers, opens it, hands it to Lily.

  It is warm, and it is not Coors Light, but it is proof to Lily, in this moment, that there is heaven.

  The woman squats on her packed-dirt floor.

  Watches Lily as she eats the curry she’s prepared.

  Watches as she negotiates her way through the accompanying fish paste.

  The world, Lily thinks.

  The world in this woman and this fish paste.

  Lily puts her hand on the woman’s arm.

  Electricity in that.

  Another’s flesh receiving hers.

  Lily offers her a Thank You in English.

  The woman’s Burmese reply is no doubt You’re Welcome.

  Lily has nothing to offer h
er.

  No money belt, no passport, not anything.

  She mulls this, continues working at the fish paste.

  She lies on the woman’s floor that night.

  Their bodies a few feet apart on a soiled old blanket.

  Lily watches the rise and fall of the woman’s ribs.

  It is a silent movie, their relationship, and yet in it is a distilled reality she cannot fully grasp.

  It is warm and good and right but she cannot name it.

  Up in the jungle there was that frustrated certitude.

  That the universe was trying to break her.

  But what if it is not that?

  What if what was trying to break her was not without but within?

  Could it be that we unknowingly seek circumstances to break ourselves?

  That we drive ourselves through our folly toward pain?

  That there is a mechanism somewhere within that we cannot see directly, that nevertheless compels us onward toward what would appear to be our destruction?

  A mechanism that seems masochistic, weak, proof that we are a broken breed.

  But what if that mechanism knows more?

  What if that breaking point it is driving us toward harbors the seeds of release?

  What if it is lining things up so that we might crash and burn and in turn see the light?

  Do our demons have a wiser agenda?

  The woman walks her to the nearest village the next day.

  They have pantomimed their way into the understanding that this is what Lily wants.

  Lily with her scratched face and torn clothes is no doubt a sight to the villagers, as much as they are to her.

  The people: Red Karens.

  In earthen hand-sewn dresses, scarves.

  Barefooted.

  Some even with the elongated necks, trained that way by the dozen brass hoops fitted beneath their jaws.

  She has seen these people.

  National Geographic or Discovery or Animal Planet.

  They have flashed through her living room more than once.

  And now she is in theirs, the shoe on the other foot.

  They are not the curio, she is.

  Their huts are on stilts.

  Kids are up there with little faces watching her intently.

  Like she is a traveling road show, a circus of one.

  Look what has come to town, their eyes say.

  What a curious creature.

  How downtrodden.

  How in need of help.

  She absorbs the people in turn.

  Ancient-faced, even the children.

  Primitive, you could say, but how in God’s name are they so vibrant?

  The paths are mud, the huts compromised by the elements, but their clothes are radiant—a riot of pinks and reds and oranges and royal blues that seem unsullied by their surroundings, like the color is more pure than the dirt, and the dirt in turn cannot ever compare.

  It’s a pageant, a costume party, a musical, and they don’t even know it.

  Lily’s wallet is empty.

  All of her cash and credit cards: in that money belt.

  Somewhere down in Yangon probably, the exchange student with the fine face burning through it at the massage parlors, the bars, the nightclubs.

  The King of Yangon on her dime.

  So it goes.

  Drink up, boy.

  Own the night.

  It’s yours.

  I’m rocking a different kind of currency up here in the middle of nowhere.

  The only currency I have, but it is like gold.

  I am passing it around to these people.

  All of them with their prismatic scarves and sashes and skirts and man-skirts.

  I am in the middle of a hardscrabble rainbow.

  My currency: the one thing you did not take.

  Flat in my breast pocket.

  That old black-and-white of Gray.

  I’m showing it to these people.

  They’re as much enthralled with the novelty of a photograph as anything else.

  How’s it made and who is he and why’s it important?

  That’s what their faces are asking.

  Not a word, mind you.

  Not a word of English.

  And from me not a word of their native tongue.

  But it is a most exquisite pantomime.

  Us in our unspoken collective.

  Brethren, sistren.

  I bet you do not have this, down there in your glorious whoring.

  But as I say, we carry different currencies.

  No one has seen him.

  That is the wordless conclusion of things.

  No doubt about it, the picture is a hit though.

  Can they have it?

  Can she make one of them?

  It is not the answer she wants.

  She cannot be dead-ended.

  Without money, she only has momentum.

  And if momentum dies, she fears she will die too.

  Then it hits her.

  She knows how to get through to them.

  How to convey Gray in a different way.

  She stands, contorts herself.

  Everyone laughs.

  She realizes she’s expressing the wrong thing.

  She’s expressing Quasimodo.

  But that’s off by a mile.

  She crooks her wrist sharply inward, waves it about.

  Motions again to the picture of Gray.

  This man.

  Claw-handed.

  Now.

  Today.

  In the back, up in one of the huts, a woman murmurs knowingly.

  Lily goes to her, realizing as she does that everyone else is seated.

  This is like story time to them, or performance art.

  The dirty, scabbed-up shrew that appeared from the jungle is putting on a one-man show!

  Look how well she moves among us!

  How she holds the stage!

  What a curious, curious creature, all thick-legged and exotic.

  Lily nods up to the woman from the base of the hut.

  Nods up the bamboo ladder.

  You’ve seen him, Lily asks.

  She affects the claw-handed posture again.

  The woman nods, says something that, of course, means nothing to Lily.

  But it is the nod.

  Outward, beyond the village.

  It takes some doing, and a few little kids showing her the way, but in short order Lily gets it.

  There is a path there, leading to the next town.

  The kids all affect the clawed hand, motion up the path.

  In the next town.

  Du-wae, they say.

  Du-wae, she repeats.

  They nod nod.

  Again motion up the path.

  She finds the woman, her beer-and-fish paste benefactor.

  Hugs her, gives her back some of the electricity she’d bestowed upon Lily with her touch.

  You reanimated me, woman, the hug says.

  I will make an altar to you, it says.

  I will make a religion in your name, it says.

  Your heart is the axis around which the universe pinwheels, it says.

  Then it is done, the embrace released.

  They part with a smile.

  But otherwise no words are spoken.

  The kids walk with her, thank God.

  She would’ve gone alone; the notion of a safety net is quaint at this stage.

  The land will sustain her or it won’t.

  The kids, though: good company.

  Laughing stick-throwers.

  Buzzing around without cease.

  Gangly kneed and laughter-ridden.

  My goodness.

  They reach the next village.

  It is not necessarily what she anticipated.

  There is signage here.

  A few storefronts.

  Some of the signs with English beneath the Burmese.

  It is a crossroads town of ma
ybe two hundred.

  A gravel road suggests that somewhere far off to the south, civilization is tethered to this place, if only as a distant whisper.

  Du-wae, she says inquisitively to the kids.

  They shake their heads.

  Motion past the village, into more jungle.

  Du-wae, they say.

  She nods, prepares to continue the trek, but stops shortly as they move past the storefronts.

  One of the signs has in English subtitles the word INTERNET.

  She mulls that.

  It is one thing to die out here, as she may.

  She is given over to that possibility and she is fine.

  But shouldn’t someone know?

  Who?

  Who does your world consist of?

  No one.

  There is Tish, she supposes.

  And Bruce.

  Thus: no one.

  But shouldn’t they know?

  Shouldn’t someone know?

  If for no other reason than to shorten the timeline should anyone again try to locate the whereabouts of Gray Allen?

  Or if, God forbid, someone were to try to shorten the timeline on her should she go missing?

  The kids look at her curiously.

  She is dithering outside the internet cafe like a child outside of an ice cream shop without any money.

  The kids motion: you want to go in-in?

  She shrugs, then going into circus-performer pantomime mode, turns out her pockets.

  Yes, but there is a problem…those lint-ridden pockets say.

  One of the kids, one of the older boys, not much more than nine, smiles like all is okay.

  Like he will take care of things.

  If you want internet, that smile says, you shall have internet.

  Lily gives him a look.

  Your doting is gorgeous, but you are made of bullshit on this one.

  The boy looks at her cavalierly.

  Then withdraws a smart phone from his pocket.

  She sends two quick emails.

  Bruce and Tish.

  I am alive and good.

  Going to a town where Gray apparently is.

  A place in the north of Burma called Du-Wae (sp?).

  Will try you later.

  May have to borrow money to get home as I got robbed.

  (Don’t worry, I am fine.)

  L.

  They are walking again.

  Back through thickening jungle.

  The day is tiring but the kids are not.

  She tells them vainly in English that they need not continue on with her.

  That they probably need to get home and she understands.

  But they seem engaged.