Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  My body responded to what it heard and saw and went on without me. There was no sense of time. I remember a point where my stomach began to burn with hunger. After a while the feeling went away. Someone brought me a pitcher of water and I drank it all.

  The next thing I noticed was the sunset spread like fire across the west. The sky to the south was the dark blue of the abyss, the color of a feeling that I have no words for, a feeling I’ve been carrying all my life. Only the feeling was in the sky now, where I could see it, and that made everything easier.

  Someone put more and more wood on the fire. It was pitch dark and I saw the headlights of cars as they pulled off the highway to watch us. I no longer cared.

  Then Walker came up to me and put his hands on either side of my neck. They felt cool against my skin. My feet stopped moving and I stood swaying in the sand. He turned me until my back was to the fire, then he kissed me on the mouth. His lips were dry and barely brushed mine.

  “Your father,” he said. He lifted his right hand, the first two fingers pointing vaguely behind me, toward the fire.

  I turned around. I was off-balance and the sand sucked at my feet. My heart pounded. I felt myself reel with fatigue and hunger. I blinked. “There’s nothing—”

  My father walked toward me from the center of the fire.

  It looked like he was projected onto an invisible screen. He was the same age as in the picture I described to Walker: middle thirties, dark hair slicked back, mouth set in a private smile. He didn’t look at me.

  “Dad?” I said.

  He closed in on me, slowly, steadily.

  “Dad?”

  He wasn’t blurry, wasn’t a dream, wasn’t an optical illusion. He was hyper-real, hallucinatory. The colors of the dancers’ clothes were electric. The flames left hot yellow afterimages in the air. I smelled smoke and sweat and the musky salt of the sea.

  “Look at me!” I shouted, my numbness gone, anger in its place.

  He ignored me. When he was only a few feet away I ran at him. I had my left arm out in front of me, my right hand balled up into a fist. My left hand went into his chest with no resistance. I swung at him with my right, aiming for the thickness of his nose, and my fist slipped through empty air.

  I went down on my knees in the sand. I thought the dancers would have stopped. They only got more frenzied. They looked at me and then rolled their heads back and yelled at the sky.

  My father walked right through me. Not like he was a ghost.

  Like I was.

  I staggered away from the fire, through a line of tourists who scrambled out of the way. I found a sand dune and lay with my head against it, watching whitecaps flash.

  Later I saw somebody walk across the beach toward me. I was a shell around emptiness. I couldn’t move.

  She stopped in front of me.

  “Lori?” I said.

  She knelt beside me and brushed the hair from my face. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  “I saw my father,” I said. “He was in the fire.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. And he…and he…” I couldn’t talk. My throat had closed up and tears were running down my face.

  “Come here,” she said. “Come here, baby.” She pulled me against her chest and I let go of the last of my resistance. I cried till it hurt. My nose ran and my eyes ran and I drooled. Strangled noises came out of my chest. There was soot all over my face and hands and I left black marks on her clothes.

  When I was able to talk I said, “He didn’t care,” and that started it all again.

  “No,” Lori said. “He didn’t care. Or couldn’t care—what’s the difference? He let you down like my momma let me down. So did your momma and so did my daddy. In this whole round world all we have is ourselves.”

  The coconut smell of her skin, the touch of her tiny, delicate hands, turned the agony instantly into lust. I pulled away far enough to put my hands on her face and pull her into a kiss.

  “Easy,” she said, when I let her go. “Easy. You got me all maternal and now you’re crossing my wires.”

  I fell back in the sand. “I have to be out of my mind. I’ve totally humiliated myself.”

  “No,” she said. She leaned over me and kissed me, one hand on my stomach. The hand was both reassurance and promise. I knew then that we were going to make love.

  She swayed back and got onto her feet. I watched with disbelief and joy as she unbuttoned the same faded red shirt she’d worn the first time I saw her. She tossed it on the sand and I watched the moonlight slide over the sleek lines of her body. She stepped out of her cutoffs and she was naked.

  Everything was still clearer and brighter than life. I had to stare at her for a long, timeless moment because I had never seen anything so beautiful. I sat up and pulled my shirt over my head. A quarter of a mile down the beach the dance went on, I could smell the smoke from their fire, but they might as well have been on another planet. I got out of the rest of my clothes and reached for her. She backed toward the far side of the dune, beckoning. I scrambled to my feet and went after her and she turned to run.

  I caught her by the wrist and she spun around. Her eyes blazed. I pulled her against me and kissed her, again and again, her neck, her shoulders, the front of her throat. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God.” I dropped to my knees and kissed her breasts. She made a breathless noise and fell to her knees too. She sucked my lower lip into her mouth, biting it, devouring me. I pushed her onto her back and moved over her and she said, “Yes. Yes.”

  It had been so long. Everything about Lori was new. Her exotic, overlapping tan lines, a patch of freckles on one shoulder, the warm, sweet taste between her legs. The scent of her skin, the sound of her sighs and moans and cries in my ear, the feel of her fingers twisted in my hair. We were both covered with sand. When I came it never seemed to stop, only to slowly fade below some threshold of recognition.

  When I rolled away she said, “Now. Touch me here.” She guided my hand down between her legs, into the thick, hot fluids, showing me what to do. She moved against me, a short, convulsive roll of her hips, her whole body tied into the effort. I leaned into her, kissing her, and when she finally came I felt it too, through my hand, through her mouth into mine, like some kind of spirit escaping her body, leaving me changed where it passed through.

  I remember thinking, whatever this costs, it’s worth it. It’s worth anything.

  “Was it okay?” she said, her head buried in my shoulder. “I mean, my not being able to come and everything, was it still okay for you?”

  I realized that the drums were still playing, quieter now. “You came at the end.”

  “But not with you inside me. Did that ruin it for you?”

  I lifted her face with both hands and made her look me in the eyes. “It was the best I ever had. I’ve never wanted anybody so much in my life.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Okay,” she said. She put her head back on my shoulder. “You can’t blame a girl for wanting a little reassurance.” She rubbed my chest. “Ray. Ray. I want my own name for you. Something nobody else has ever called you. What’s your middle name?”

  “Ray. I’m actually John Raymond Shackleford Junior. You can’t call me John because it’s my father’s name.”

  “I want us both to have new names. New names for everything. Our own language, so we don’t have anything to do with the rest of the world.”

  “Or the past?”

  “That’s right. We’ll make it all go away. It’s abolished. We can both be twenty years old again, with our new names.”

  “If we were twenty again, how would I know you’d turn out the same as you are now?”

  “Better,” she said. “I’d turn out better.”

  “No way.”

  “Sweet.” She kissed my neck. “But you know it’s true. The real world is going to pull us apart.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.” But it was too late. “Oh Chr
ist. Is it Tom? Do you have to go?”

  “No. I told him I was going to dance tonight. I told him I might be out all night.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He accused me of sleeping with you. I told him I wasn’t, which was the truth. At the time. He said you were crazy and told me about the drop-off.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I told him I didn’t care, I wasn’t interested in you anyway.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said, laughing, and sat up. She got to her feet and used her shirt to dab between her legs. “What a mess.” She looked back toward the fire. “The tourists have given up. How about a swim?”

  “Not yet,” I said. I walked over to her on my knees and buried my head in her stomach. “You smell like sex. I don’t want you to wash it off. Not yet.”

  It was different the second time, slower and at the same time more urgent too. Afterwards we swam and then lay together on my clothes, holding each other for warmth.

  “Come away with me,” I said. “Leave him and come back to Austin with me.”

  “And what, move in with you and Elizabeth? That would be cozy.”

  “I can put you up in a motel until I get her out.”

  “And if she doesn’t want to leave? Ray, think about it. I can’t just sit in a motel while you sort all this out. And I’ve got sorting of my own to do.”

  “Lori. I love you.”

  I felt her stiffen.

  “Not saying it won’t make it go away,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I told myself I didn’t care that she didn’t say it back to me. “I can’t let it end like this.”

  “This has been the most wonderful week. It’s been like one of my novels. Don’t try to make it into anything more.”

  “It is more than that and you know it.”

  “You say that now, with the waves crashing and the drums beating and the tropical moon overhead. Once you get home you’ll think what a great adventure you had, and you’ll get back in your routine and you’ll think, she was really crazy. I’m better off without her.”

  “I love you.”

  She pulled away. “I’m freezing to death. Come on, we better go.”

  It really was too cold to lie around any longer. We got dressed and she started off across the sand. “Well?” she said. “Are you coming?”

  We rode back to the dive shop in silence. I refused to believe this was the end, frantically tried to find an argument that would change things. When we pulled into the driveway I said, “At least come in long enough to shower and dry off.”

  She shrugged. “Okay.”

  She followed me into my room, still sullen, and went into the bathroom and shut the door. It was only two in the morning. A minute or so later I heard the toilet flush and the shower start. I knocked on the door and went in.

  “What?” I said. “What did I say? What’s wrong with you?”

  She hadn’t gotten in the shower yet. She had hold of the cheap fiberglass shower door, as if to brace herself against an invisible storm. “What do you think?”

  “I think you don’t want me to go any more than I want to.”

  “Bingo,” she said. She was naked. I’d never seen her naked in the light before. God, she was beautiful. She got in the shower and I got in after her.

  I held her in my arms under the hot water. “You’ve told me so much,” I said. “Why couldn’t you tell me that?”

  “Because I’m tired of scaring people away.”

  “You can’t scare me away.”

  Finally, finally, she smiled. “Easy for you to say.”

  We washed each other’s backs and toweled each other off and I convinced her to stay until the last minute, until she absolutely had to go. She told me to set the alarm for five o’clock. I set it for four-thirty and she fell asleep in my arms.

  I was already awake when it went off and we made love again in that fragile, sleepy darkness before dawn. When I came she had both hands full of my hair and we were staring into each other’s eyes, both of us knowing this could be the last time, and when I felt it start, like a tearing loose in the exact center of my body, the beginning of the end, it made everything else come loose too and I was crying yet again, and so was she. I saw one of my tears fall thick and hot on the side of her nose and leaned down to kiss it away. Then I slid my hand down between us and brought her slowly to her own climax, me still inside and on top of her, still looking into her eyes, until she closed them in a long shudder that sent another flood of tears out of the sides.

  She showered again and while she was in there I lay back in the rumpled sheets and kneaded both hands into my crotch, rubbing her juices into my skin. Then I held my hands to my face and inhaled her smell deep inside me. The water stopped. She came out and dressed and sat on the edge of the bed. I started to tell her, again, that I loved her, and she put her fingers on my mouth. “Please,” she said. “There are all these things we’re about to say to each other and I can’t bear it, I absolutely can’t stand it if it happens.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She kissed me once, lingeringly, and went out without looking back.

  Four hours later I was on a plane to Austin.

  c h a p t e r 6

  NEW RISING SUN

  I slept enough on the plane to feel hollow and disoriented. I must have looked like hell when I got off: hair come loose from its ponytail, clothes hopelessly wrinkled. I used the toilet on the plane, and I was sure that Lori’s smell still clung to my penis, despite a long hot shower before I left.

  It wasn’t guilty conscience. I wanted Lori again already. I had a brief moment of gratitude that Elizabeth wasn’t pregnant, that we don’t already have a kid. I could see the future coming and it was going to be hard enough on both of us.

  She wasn’t there to meet me, no surprise, so I called home. She said she’d be there and hung up. I stood outside to wait. The sun wasn’t as bright as in Cozumel, and the air was thick with humidity. When Elizabeth pulled up to the terminal she squealed the tires against the curb. I got in and she avoided my eyes. We turned left on Manor Road and the strip centers and hills and low trees of Austin seemed both familiar and utterly strange.

  After a minute I said, “What’s wrong?”

  “You didn’t call. You were gone an entire week and didn’t call once.”

  I sighed and leaned back in the seat, pissed off because she was right. Even the postcard I’d written her was still in my luggage. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You could have left a message on the machine, even. So I’d know you were okay.”

  “It was a pretty emotional thing for me, down there.” I almost died, I wanted to say.

  “I have emotions too.”

  I looked at her. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d said something that personal. “Beth? Are you okay?”

  The car weaved in the lane. “No,” she said. “I’m not okay.” She swung her head around, looking for a hole in the traffic, and pulled off onto the shoulder, into the rough-cut grass and fast-food bags and beer cans. Tears came up in her eyes.

  “You want me to drive?”

  “No, I don’t want you to drive.” She swallowed a sob. “I want to know what’s going to happen to us.”

  “I don’t think this is the time or place—”

  “I do. I want to know now. Are we splitting up?”

  I froze.

  It took forever for my mind to function again, and then it instantly overloaded: Lori telling me how I was going to get back into my routine and forget her, the blonde in 1966 telling me that married men always protect their marriages, the hysterical fit Elizabeth threw when I spent that night at the motel. And there I sat, knowing that I should say yes, yes we were splitting up, that it was what I wanted, that I’ve wanted it for years.

  It was the last thing Elizabeth was ready to hear. It would say my happiness was more important than hers. It would be the same as if I hit her or smashed up her
antique furniture and her hand-blown glassware. I didn’t believe I was capable of it. I said, “Are we?” and was so ashamed of my own cowardice that I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  “What do you want? For once, just say what you want.”

  I couldn’t speak. I forced my lips apart and nothing came out.

  “You’re never here,” Elizabeth said. “Even when you’re here, you’re somewhere else. You never give me anything to, to push against. I don’t think you understand other people very well. I don’t think there’s anything in your world except you.” She slapped the steering wheel. “You’re going to make me do this myself, aren’t you? You’re not even going to help.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell me what you want. Tell me if you want me to move out.”

  “I could go.”

  “No you can’t. That’s your workshop, it was your grandmother’s money that was the down payment. I won’t throw you out of your own house. But if you want me to leave you’re going to have to say it.”

  I felt like I had a noose around my throat. Every time I opened my mouth it got tighter. “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, I want you to go.”

  All her visible emotions shut off. “Fine,” she said. Her tears were dry and she looked hard and beautiful. I knew if I touched her she would knock my hand away. She shoved the gas pedal to the floor and we shot back onto Airport Boulevard.

  I sat on my ancient leather couch. I could hear Elizabeth’s voice as she talked on the phone downstairs, but none of the words. I was too cold to move.

  “Frances is going to help me find a place,” she said, standing halfway up the stairs. I knew if I asked her she would change her mind. It would flood her heart with happiness and relief. I had that power. She only wanted a sign.

  “I want to keep Dude,” she said.

  I hadn’t thought beyond the moment. I hadn’t thought that I would lose the cat as well. “This is his place,” I said carefully. “I would be glad to have him stay.”

  “No, I need him.”

  Dude had been her cat before we met. I wouldn’t win this one. “Okay.”