Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books)

by Hawkes, John

  He steamed the mussels, he seasoned them, I heard the clatter of a wire whip, I smelled the aroma of cold tide and aromatic herbs, and the day began to dissolve in butter, wine, steam, laughter, the clanging of the abandoned blue kettle rolling down the rocks, the hiss of the coals, the showering light of the wine as it fell in an are from the mouth of another opened bottle to a waiting glass. Together we sat on the blue blanket, dipping each opened shell into the little tubs of melted butter and sucking in the golden mussels and licking our fingers, smearing our cheeks with the rich butter, tossing empty shells and now and then a limpid mussel or chunk of bread to the white gull that was standing on a nearby rock like the fourth in our party.

  Minute by minute the day dissolved into its bright shadows. Ursula insisted upon feeding us, first Peter and then me, by holding a slippery mussel between thumb and first two fingers and then thrusting it against our lips and into our waiting mouths. The mussels were sweet and flavored with the depths of the sea. Peter remarked that they were ovular. The gull stalked along the top of the shipwrecked rock amidst cloves of garlic, crushed barnacles, flakes of the rusty iron, kernels of pepper. Below him we were lying in the wash of our own debris.

  “Where’s my romantic time, Peter? Is this all I get?”

  Ursula lay on her back with her arms drawn loosely upward like those of a ballerina. One knee was raised, the lower edge of the yellow skirt was gathered so as to barely drape the pubic shadows. Her eyes were open and to me her stomach looked invitingly rounded as a result of her unstinting meal. Peter had provided chocolates and even these she had eaten.

  “Peter? Is this all?”

  I leaned forward and with my handkerchief wiped a large oily smear from Ursula’s cheek. The gull stood still, no longer pacing in stiff dignity the top of the rock. Peter rolled to his knees and unbuckled his belt. I smiled and climbed to my feet.

  “Allert,” Ursula said then, “where are you going? Don’t leave us. I want you to stay.”

  I smiled down at her where her soft lower body was already in motion though Peter had not yet removed his athletic shorts and though she was looking not at him but at me.

  “But I must relieve myself,” I said in my heaviest accent. “But I will not be far off. And I will return soon. Besides,” I added, preparing to step carefully between the stones, “I have already witnessed this scene a good many times, my dear. Have I not?”

  “But you enjoy it, Allert. I know you do.”

  And so I did ordinarily. But for now my interest lay only in the narrow sun-struck path that climbed along the edge of the birches and then among the birches, and in another instant I was ascending the path in a stride that was slow and free, though now and then interrupted by a gentle stagger. My modesty was always amusing to Peter and Ursula, but I had no recourse but to follow my own inclinations and withdraw from time to time into a dark corner, a closet of green ferns. So midway up the hill I relieved myself, peered toward the island that long ago had broken free of Peter’s shore, and then sat down, lay down, rolled over, dozed. When I regained consciousness, sitting with my back against one of the tilting birches, I was fully aware that I had dreamt a short concise dream about Ursula exposing her breasts at a party. It was a fleeting dream and not worth reporting to Ursula.

  When I returned to the scene of the meal, a scene now cast in the warmest of shadows, I found Ursula lying in the center of the white tablecloth we had spread on the blanket and Peter sitting cross-legged on top of the black rock. Ursula’s yellow gown had become her pillow, Peter was naked and sitting with his eyes closed and holding in his lap one of the sweating unopened bottles of cold wine. The gull was perched defiantly on Peter’s castoff athletic shorts. Ursula’s eyes were also closed and she and Peter were smiling.

  “Come,” I said quietly, “let me open the wine.”

  Some kind of telepathic understanding rippled down the length of Peter’s bare side and with effort he raised his arm and extended the bottle. I drew the cork and, filling a much-used glass, carefully placed the brimming glass in Peter’s listless hand. He nodded. He did not open his eyes.

  “Drink it, Peter,” I said. “The party is not done.”

  He nodded, he made no move to raise the glass from his loins to his lips. So I shrugged and removed my shirt and trousers, took a few puffs on one of the little cigars, standing for those moments with my forearm resting in the small of my back and a foot raised on a boulder of quartz, and eyes looking down at Ursula. Then I threw away the cigar, in the process offending the brave gull, and walked to the blanket.

  Later, much later, she pushed me off with brusque but loving hands. We lay on our backs, side by side. I smelled the golden snake of kelp, without looking I knew that the little black islands were knocking against each other and moving in our direction.

  “I hurt,” she murmured, casing the crumpled yellow gown between her legs. “Thanks to my two selfish friends I hurt in my crotch.”

  But she was smiling. A moment later, when Peter called my name, I used my elbows and raised my head and shoulders and saw that his eyes were open and filled with light.

  “I tell you, Allert,” he called, “your sexual organs reminded me of the armored bulge of one of the better-endowed British kings. How’s that for a compliment, my friend?”

  “I thought you were dozing,” I answered. “I did not know you were watching.”

  “But yes, indeed,” he answered and raised his glass, “indeed I was watching.”

  For our return to his home, Peter draped himself in the white tablecloth on which we had feasted. A mere ten days later Ursula was planning my trip in her crudest mood.

  We spend most of our lives attempting in small ways to know someone else. And we hope that someone else will care to peek into our darkest corners, without shock or condemnation. We even hope to catch a glimpse of ourselves, and in this furtive pursuit we hope for courage. But on the brink of success, precisely when a moment of understanding seems nearest at hand, and even if the moment is a small thing and not particularly consequential, it is then that the eyes close, the head turns away, the voice dies, the surface of the bright ocean becomes a sea of lead, and from the very shape we know to be our own there leaps a man-sized batlike shadow that flees or crouches to attack, to drive us away. Who is safe? Who knows what he will do next? Who has the courage to make endless acquaintance with the various unfamiliar shadows that comprise wife, girl friend, or friend? Who can confront his own psychic sores in the clear glass? Who knows even where he is or where in another moment he may find himself? Who can believe in the smoke from the long clay pipe, the beer in the tankard?

  Who then is safe? I wish I had known my wife and friend. I wish they had known me. I wish we had been only dark figures within a gilded frame. Like a child I wish we had found each other tolerable. I used to wish that I could have cleaved Peter down the length of his back and pulled the halves apart as though they had belonged to a gutted dummy and then climbed inside. If I had been able to enact this fantasy when I wanted to, I would now be dead. All speculations, like loose phosphorescent threads shot dreamily into a cold night, would be at an end.

  Who is safe?

  In my arms she was like a small child struck by an auto. Together in the dark we swayed on the deck as if I had just dragged her from a wreck at sea. I was holding her horizontally in both my arms. Her eyes were glazed, she refused to speak. The white officer’s cap had fallen from her head only a moment before, the white tunic fell open from her nude body like the remnant of some outlandish costume for a masquerade, which indeed it was. She was limp but watching me, though the eyes were glazed, and she refused to speak. The moon was a streak of fat in the night sky. I could not feel her weight. I heard a shout. I turned. I heard a splash. The deck was a hard crust of salt. The night was cold. I heard the splash. I could not feel her weight. And then along the entire length of that bitter ship I saw the lights sliding and blurring beneath the waves. Clumsily, insanely I wrestled with a white
life ring that bore the name of the ship and that refused to come free. I saw the ship’s fading lighted silhouette beneath the waves.

  Who is safe?

  “Look,” cried the purser, “the horse has two rumps and six legs! Shall we give the prize to this happy monster?”

  The crowd, which packed the midnight saloon, dancing and tangling themselves in clouds of confetti and streamers of bright paper, cheered in a polyglot of affirmation. I recognized the drunken purser with distaste, in my arms my little partner was wearing her bikini, the white officer’s cap at a rakish angle and, with sleeves rolled to her fragile wrists, the official white tunic with its gold buttons and lightning bolt at the collar. Her small dark face looked like a child’s. The dance floor was awash with gin. My partner was impersonating a wireless operator, while I (with distaste, with severity, with self-consciousness) was impersonating a heavy-set and class-conscious burgher from Amsterdam. I wanted to slip my wet hands inside the tunic.

  “Allert,” she cried, dragging me to the edge of the crowd where the purser was hanging a lopsided floral wreath around the horse’s neck, “look, it’s Olaf!”

  And there he stood, now holding the horse’s head in his arms and grinning. And there too stood the ship’s drummer and the ship’s saxophonist, two coarse and grinning women exposed now from the deformed horse’s unzippered double rump. For a moment longer they demonstrated how they had crouched and swayed and danced, one bony woman to each rump. At the purser’s insistence the wireless operator, now wearing the ring of flowers around his own naked neck, lavishly and drunkenly kissed them both. The crowd cheered, my partner clapped her hands, the vibraphone player smeared his silvery instrument with congealed blood.

  “Kiss me, Allert,” she whispered, wiping my brow and fixing my tie. “I am enjoying this party so much. I want you to kiss me. Right here. Right now.”

  Who is safe?

  When the divers descend and open up this unfortunate ship, I thought, they will find all the drunken passengers packed in confetti and paper streamers tangled like dead rainbows. The ship will be rusting, but the travelers will still be packed together in silent joy. All of them will be preserved in kelp and seaweed and bright paper—a dense and soggy conglomerate which will be to the sunken ship as the marrow is to the broken bone.

  Who is safe?

  I now think without doubt that I, the old Dutchman dispossessed of the helm, am the living proof of all of Peter’s theories. Or almost all. Yes, I tell myself that I am the legacy of my friend, my wife’s lover, our psychiatrist. Yes, I am that dead man’s only legacy. But unwanted legacy, I suddenly correct myself, unwanted legacy. Of my friend Peter but also of the women I have known.

  In the darkness I am their entire legacy, the filthy sack of their past and mine. And unwanted, every drop of it.

  “Ursula’s complaints are meaningless,” Peter was saying, “quite meaningless. You must simply ignore them. Most wives complain about their husbands. As a matter of fact, my friend, if you were not as emotionally strange as you arc, Ursula would not like you at all. A curious paradox but true. And you will note,” he said, smiling up at me with the wind in his face, “you will note that I did not say ‘sick’ but merely ‘strange.’ I will not pin you down, to use a vulgarism, until you request me to do so, professionally.”

  His long dark fingers continued to stuff the little white bowl of his pipe with shredded tobacco, the sun was a cold ray in a dark sky, his smile belonged not on his weathered and sardonic face but rather on the little round sculpted face of some clever cupid. He continued to stuff the white pipe. I removed the shells from my gun.

  “But what is so wonderful and so hard to believe,” Peter said then through the clarity of the fierce wind, “is that she cares for us equally. To her all our differences are nothing. And what a capacity it is to be able to elevate two such different men to the same level of acceptability. She has the gift of love, my friend. The gift of love.”

  Cupped in his two dark bony hands, the flame of the match was pale beside the intense red color of his hunting shirt. Then the pipe was lit and the two of us, side by side and thinking in our different ways about Ursula’s love, were heading home.

  He bolted forward from the bench. In the dry and desperate heat, in which the three of us had been reposing as if in a dream, naked and white and at our ease, suddenly Peter bolted forward from the wooden bench and, in complete silence, flung his hands to his chest and looked around him with eyes filled with the joy of extreme pain. His chest was a network of small bones, every hairy filament in his pubic growth appeared electrified, his white legs and arms were long and oddly muscular, his nipples were dark, his loins were a nest of blue veins.

  “Peter,” Ursula said in alarm, “what’s wrong? What is the matter?”

  Her sentence was the only one spoken from that moment forward in the sauna. And yet throughout that terrible ensuing time, during which Peter pantomimed his death and Ursula and I our helplessness, through all that time, which on the clock was nothing, I heard Peter’s voice (jocular, lofty, confidential) inside my head. As we watched, moved, tried to assist him, and while he lurched and staggered about in the small circle of his dying, I thought I was listening to every word he had ever said, and I did not know which was worse, the brief and wordless struggle of our performance there in the sauna, or the confidence and unbroken flow of that silent voice. There he was, talking away at the moment of his own painful death (which was from his heart, I realized at once) and in complete ignorance of the advice, the pronouncements, the elocutions of middle age, the sparkling tones. He talked to me even after he lay dead on the floor. I could not bear to listen.

  When he fell, tall white fishlike man I no longer recognized, I could hear his nose breaking on the slats. He lay on his stomach lurching and trying to crawl after the trail of bright blood that flowed from his nose. A moment before, and in shock and ignorance, I had seized his arm and attempted to steady him. But as he collapsed he tore loose from my grip. Now we could hear the very sound of the pain inside his chest.

  Ursula was kneeling at his head with her face constricted, her breasts in a chaos of motion, her breathing heavy, and had somehow managed to lift his head and was now holding his bleeding head in her two hands. At his mid-section I too was kneeling, one knee raised, the other burning on the wooden slats, and I heard the faint popping sound of the tubes that were parting inside Peter’s chest.

  His body looked like dry fat and cartilage. He looked like a creature that had been skinned. He was still flicking with movement. But then that awful movement ceased. He was dead.

  And then he defecated. Yes, even while Ursula rocked his head and tried to soothe the contorted face, and even while I knelt helplessly at his side, listening to my friend’s silent voice, suddenly Ursula and I knew simultaneously what had happened and together stared in shock and grief at this last indignity.

  He was dead. The smell was strong. We could not move. We did not know what to do. The fecal smell of Peter’s death was overpowering the smell of eucalyptus that was filling the small room. I thought that Ursula and I would soon die like Peter there in the heat. But I could not allow my friend’s body to remain unclean, that much I knew.

  In another moment or so I acted on that lingering knowledge, and using my flat hand as a trowel, slowly scooped the terrible offending excrement from Peter’s corpse. And bearing in my hand the last evidence of Peter’s life, I managed to gain my feet, open wide the door and stumble to the edge of the cold and brackish sea.

  As I hurried up the path toward the house and telephone, naked and stumbling and in my own way deranged, I thought that my hand would be forever stained with the death of my friend.

  Moments later, and after I had placed the useless telephone call, I was joined at the house by Ursula, who, draped in a towel, looked at me with an expression of terror and fury and collapsed in my arms.

  They fished aboard an infant octopus that was already dead. The sea was in steady m
otion beyond my porthole as if someone had at last discovered our destination. A sailor hung the infant octopus outside my door. The motion of the passing sea was swifter than at any time during our journey. The sea was dark, the sky was exactly right for a holiday. I could hear the swishing of a few dumpy women still playing their deek-board game with sticks and pucks. Now we were on course to a destination. The impartial sky was chilly, bright. But they told me I was confined to my cabin, as if I were an officer instead of mere passenger, and accused of a crime. They told me the wireless operator had been relieved of duty and was under sedation. They told me they had spent the entire day searching the ship from top to bottom, fore and aft. But to no avail. They had looked in the cabins, the lifeboats, the engine room, the companionways, the lockers, the wireless shack, the crevices beneath the flywheels of great machines. But to no avail.

  The purser was sitting on a wooden chair outside my door. His trousers were freshly pressed. We were a mere speck in the empire of that dark sea. The purser called to the attention of strolling passengers the baby octopus white and swaying on its length of cord.

  They assured me that the search throughout the ship was continuing.

  The islands became more numerous. They were small and golden, each one a perfect bright sphere for exploring. But I was confined and he was heavily sedated.