He should really like me now. I duck into the tent, wet and pathetic.
He’s sitting up like he just went to a movie and dinner, completely normal.
“Clay?”
“Yeah.” He sounds cool and raw.
I begin to cry. I didn’t feel it coming. The tears just flow out. “I’m scared. I’m so sorry. I love you. I can’t stand the thought of being without you.”
“Do you know what just happened to me?” He acts like he didn’t hear me. Why isn’t he pissed off? He should be jealous or sad.
I made him try to kill himself. I want to remind him of me and Anar, simulate us coming together, thrust out my hips and fake jerking off and shooting on Anar’s chest.
“I died and came back. It was so amazing.”
What’s he talking about?
“There was real peace. It was calm. No one around.” His voice is full of wonder and naiveté, like he’s amazed how words sound coming off his tongue. “There were fish, and glowing rays. The current was stronger than I’ve ever felt. Farther and farther. Can you imagine the way true peace feels? Tranquil amongst the war.”
What the fuck? Hippie boy speak.
He rolls over and lies down, cuddling with the sleeping bag. His tattoo faces me, like a medieval shield designed to scare away enemies.
“I’m sorry, Clay. I fucked up. I hate Anar.”
He must think I’m such an immature little fool. “You look so cute. I can’t believe how cool you look. You’re like a mystic sea-boy.” He looks at me like I’m a swirling psychedelic poster and he’s tripping. He could baffle the most accomplished psychiatrist right now.
“Do you feel all right?” There’s definitely something wrong with him.
“I’m cold.”
Yes! A chance to make him feel better, to have a use for once. I wrap his flannel sleeping bag around him, and he pulls it up to his neck and tucks it under his chin like a little boy.
“Where’s that guy?” Something’s not connecting in his head.
“He’s asleep, I guess. I don’t know. Are you sure you feel all right?”
“I feel good. Really good. I don’t know… yeah, like… really awesome good.” He turns the other way and takes a sip of beer. “You can’t just ignore him, you know. He’s full of light. It would be cruel to blind yourself of his aura. He’s a powerful being.”
This is awful. “Yeah, OK. Don’t worry.”
“You learned all your bad qualities from me. Take solace.”
I can’t keep my hands still. I feel cornered, wierded-out, guilty, embarrassed, and worried. This is really confusing. Yell at me. Punch me in the eye. Be the macho surferboy that I knew before.
Guys out on the beach chant in Hawaiian. “E ulu I ka lani, e ulu I ka honua, e ulu I ka pae aina o Hawai’i.” It’s louder than the wind and rain.
“I bet you wanna escape right now. Don’t deny your feelings. Run away if it feels right.”
Fuck. He’s the anti-Clay. I wanna scream, Leave me alone, you demonic alter-ego of Clay! I get a chill that makes me shudder. “I just wanna make sure you’re all right. That’s all I care about.”
He closes his eyes, like he’s thinking about something that makes him happy. I’m not sure if I’m imagining his expression or if it’s really there. There’s only this flickering kerosene lantern to see by.
“Why’d you go into the ocean?”
“You know.” He rests his head back on his arms.
A sharp chill runs up my spine. The lantern is blown out by a strangely cold gust of wind that felt like it came straight from the Arctic.
“Something was in the water, Sam. This feeling. It’s like I understand.”
“Understand what?” I try to light my lighter. I keep flicking it, but it just hurts my thumb.
“I know why you did that with Anar. I know how the world works…”
My lighter lights like magic. It burns really bright for a few seconds. “Oh.” I’m too stunned and scared to say anything else.
“You thought it would make everything better.” A strong breeze that smells like sweat and blood floats surges the tent. “I don’t blame you.”
“You should. I was acting like I accused Tammy of being.” I can’t believe I just said that. Is nothing sacred? I don’t like all this out in the open. It takes the romance and mystery away. What will I hope for, now? Reality is stealing my dreams. I feel exposed and exploited.
Clay looks at me, unabashedly. He’s embarrassed by nothing. “It’s different. You have good intentions. Tammy’s just insecure about me. She caught me jerking off to a picture of you.”
Strong hot blood floods my veins and arteries. I feel my face turning red and hot. What photo of me? How did he get a photo of me? Is it old? Maybe, I’m younger and more innocent in the picture and he prefers that to how I am now. “What’s up with you? Why are you being like this? What’s going on?”
He looks amused. His eyes follow my hands and my every movement, while I shift my legs and adjust my T-shirt to get more comfortable. He doesn’t realize he’s being different.
I sit helpless in the face of my own creation.
He’s everything I wanted him to be.
I hate him. I ruined him. My thoughts changed reality. I feel like we’re in a different dimension. I should have kept my thoughts to myself. I want his arrogance back, his tough-boy charm. I should have left him alone. A roar coming from the ocean builds. I’m scared. The earth is coming to get me.
Down the beach, people yell and howl like animals. The rain starts pouring down even harder.
I look out the tent door and see silhouettes in the rain.
The ghosts from the ‘60s have come alive to antagonize us.
I let my eyes focus and adjust to the darkness.
Girls throw off their bikini tops and drop the bottoms on the sand. The suits look like jellyfish washed up on shore. Boys fling their shirts off and jump out of their shorts. The color of skin replaces the flower-printed colors of fabrics.
A guy flexes his thick white thighs, like in a tribal dance. Two girls run by, naked. One carries a dead fish in her hand.
A man with a fire torch, burning bright despite the rain, dances, then throws it as far as he can, leaving a fiery trail traced in the sky. Another thin blond guy jumps around. His dick is halfway to a boner while he watches naked girls run past him.
A tall girl with black long hair like Pele masturbates in the surf with her back arched dramatically.
A couple has sex in the surf. They’re painted with warrior body paint. The girl rides him on top, with her arms flexed, like a bodybuilder’s. The guy moans and pushes into her as hard as he can.
Clay and I are doomed. Someone or something out there sees our inevitable demise. I zip up the tent door, leaving only a small-screened window to look through.
A strong wind picks up. The tent would fly away if we weren’t inside. This storm could cut us off from the world by covering the tall mountains in orange, slippery, impassable mud.
Clay won't be able to fend for himself in his new weakened state. He’ll starve.
“Let’s go outside!” He says like a little boy, as he sits up with a hopeful expression. His surge of energy comes from nowhere that I understand.
I look out the window flap, half-expecting some guy to be out there casting a spell on our tent, an explanation for Clay’s burst of energy.
He sits up and looks intently out the window beside me. “Come on.”
I feel heat radiating from his face and a glimpse of strange naiveté in his expression. “No. You have to rest. You don’t know what you’re saying. Something happened to you.” I stop myself from saying any more.
He looks at me, confused.
Chanting echoes off the cliff walls. Primal pond scum is organizing and forming multi-cellular creatures right before my eyes. The world is re-beginning. I don’t believe in God, but this is an awful lot like what those Christian freaks said would happen at the year two thousand.
I need to calm down. I light the lantern with my “Hang Loose Hawaii” lighter and look into Clay’s eyes.
He looks back at me unabashedly and romantically. His eyes reflect the lantern’s glow. He looks innocently in love with me. It’s not real.
Clay’s nowhere in sight. His skin might as well be cold and blue.
Tears blur my vision before I feel them coming. My chest constricts. I might throw up. I need to see something I recognize. I’m homesick. I never thought this would happen with Clay around. I can’t explain this. I look out toward sea, where the sky is black. It’s the same ocean I stare at during some point every day of my life. I feel nothing. I’ve never seen such black clouds. This isn’t my ocean. “Stay here, please,” I say forcefully to Clay and I run over to Anar’s tent, lit by yellow lantern from inside.
A tan muscular guy runs past me, calling Hawaiian words, like a tribal chief. Tea leaves tied around his biceps and red lines painted on his body accentuate his muscles. He looks like a warrior.
A naked girl runs towards me. She turns quickly, to avoid smashing into me. Her long, black hair slaps me in the face stinging my eyes and skin.
My face feels hot and red.
She runs away like a maniac, without saying sorry or acknowledging me. Primitive-looking fire torches burn fiercely in a grass hut that’s probably been here since the ‘60s. Hawaiian guys with green, leafy leis lying on their shoulders stand around in a semi-circle flexing their chests, calling out chants in scratchy, guttural Hawaiian, like they’re preparing for a sacrifice.
A chill runs up my spine, like when I was a kid running down a dark hallway, imagining a murderer running up behind me. I lean down and peak inside Anar’s tent. Dark red candles are burning. I don’t know where the hell they came from.
They look up at me. Anar lies on his stomach, in his shorts, and his sister and her blonde friend sit Indian-style, playing “hangman” on a piece of crinkled notebook paper.
Anar smiles at me. He looks happy that I came over here, and it makes me sick. He should want me with Clay, watching over him, making sure he’s all right. Anar has no sort of real sense of right and wrong. That’s a hippie trait.
I wish he would rape me or punch me really hard or kiss me or tell me to get the fuck out.
“Hi Sam.” He sits up and reaches to his feet, doing some Tai Chi stretch. He doesn’t notice what’s going on outside. He’s so unaware.
I sit down next to him, close enough to make him feel like I don’t hate him. I might need him later to make sense of all this, or for a hug, or a final disappointed look that lets me know I’m full of shit and shouldn’t bother to continue trying to be a part of society. “Clay’s acting really strange. I think something might be wrong with him.”
“How’s he acting?” Luna asks with a professional tone in her voice.
I don’t know how to answer. I don’t want these three to know anything about our lives. I have a hard enough time facing these things with Clay. “I’m not sure how to put it. He’s just not himself.”
“Is he mumbling, having trouble breathing?”
“No, he’s talking normal. It’s what he’s talking about.”
“I deal with a lot of near-drowning victims. Tourists trying to swim at Jaws, getting caught by riptides. Sometimes they’re in a degree of shock for days. It’s not unusual for him to be out of it, lethargic, tired. He may seem dull or even dumb. The brain needs quite a long time to recover parts that were on the brink of being shut off.”
I don’t want to tell them this, but I have to get Clay back. “He says he understands.”
“Understands what?” Anar interrupts, intrigued by the spiritual sound of this, I guess.
“Understands. Like, everything… with people, life… ”
Luna’s friend sits up and acts interested, even though she was in a pot-induced nap during the tragedy. “Maybe, he, like, saw the other side.” She says this with a stupid, fake-mysterious tone in her voice.
I get a chill. I hope not. I don’t want him to know the outcome of everything before he has a chance to live things out,
Clay bursts into the tent. His bare chest drips with big, clear drops of water. He looks shiny and clean and magically vibrant. His skin glows a healthy brightness. He looks at Luna, then to her friend, a longer look at Anar, then his eyes stop on me.
I can’t have eye contact with him in front of these freaks. I look at Anar, then at his sister. I close my eyes. I can’t find a place to look that doesn’t have some sort of meaning. I look at the tent door, through Clay’s legs.
He tilts his head sideways. “What’s up?” he asks like he wants to party.
I want out of here. Everything’s colliding. I don’t want to share Clay with them, especially in his current and possibly impressionable state. I get up and duck out the door. “Come on, Clay.”
I want Anar and Luna to know that I’m not on their side. I run out into the pouring rain. I like being able to switch sides so easily. It makes me feel cool. They’ll think I’m as chameleon-like as Clay. I guess I understand why he changes so often. Changing frees you.
He follows me out, runs behind me, and tackles me onto the sand.
I fall sideways with him on top of me into the wet sand. The tiny grains stick to my skin. My arms look like a sand monster’s, covered with tiny round jewel-like pebbles. It’s like the whole universe is sticking to me. Each grain of sand is different. Infinite possibilities of color and size and shape. Each contains the world.
He lies on top of me and breathes into my ear. The drawn out pulses of air feel like they’re penetrating me, calming my tense muscles and spine, making me go limp. It feels like good drugs.
My body makes an indentation in the sand.
Clay rolls off of me and I roll over next to him.
Seawater rushes in and fills the mold of me. I’m water--salty, buoyant, cleansing, with the ability to disguise and dilute small amounts of pollution. I could harbor animals that glow in the dark that have more tentacles than octopuses and fish the color of fire. I could flow, according to moon phases and tidal rhythms, and I could build up into waves for dolphins and surfers to catch.
Clay opens his eyes and looks up into the rain. He breathes in the freshness of the water. Some was on my skin, my balls, my hair, my tongue, and in my blood. He looks at my face, like he’s looking into a mirror. “Do you wanna go?” he asks.
The fire torches are finally snuffed out by the rain. The guys holding them walk gently back to their tents. Naked girls and guys hug and talk in couples scattered around the beach. Nothing looks so macabre anymore.
The rain tapers off and then stops. All the fucked-up shit that happened on this haunted beach could disappear if we just walked away and never said a word about it every again. The fast relationships that were formed out of insecurity, revenge, and hopelessness could vanish with a couple hundred steps into the valley, but I don’t want to let myself off so easy. I would be escaping the way Clay always did. There was always a monster inside me waiting to break hearts and create distrust. I’m not a Samurai. My devotions go only as deep as I can understand them. “Yeah, I wanna go, but I’m not sure we should.” I’m afraid that an innocent, trusting part of me will be left behind here, and I’m not sure I know how to get it back. I can’t let the old Clay be left here to join the spirits. I’m not willing to give away large chunks of his personality to the universe, to the hippie ghosts that still haunt this valley and this beach. I’m too possessive for that to happen. “We have to stay here till this is figured out. Don’t we?”
“Oh, Sam. I love you.”
I can’t even fathom that he said that. I want to hurl but I haven’t eaten the whole day. I almost don’t even want to hear it now. He’s not himself. I want to bring out the passionate insecurity and anger of the Clay I fell in love with. I need to provoke him. “You’re acting really weird. I can’t handle this.”
He rolls back and giggles. “I know. I love you.”
I look up to the sky to find the North Star. “What do you mean? Where are you going?”
A light sprinkle starts.
“I have to find out where I went when I was underwater.”
“I know where you went. Underwater. It’s not that complicated.” I sound mean.
“I think I was an animal, like a seal or maybe a whale.”
Just the mention of a whale makes me think of the lame ‘70s when everyone was painting those creepy murals on every building. Huge paintings of whales and dolphins diving through perfect waves with planets and moons and unicorns and rainbows above them. “A whale? Dude, you almost drowned. If you were a whale, you could have used your blowhole.” I totally set him up for a dumb-ass Clay joke.
He just looks at me, wondering why I would say such a stupid thing. “Yeah, a whale.”
I feel like I’m talking to some hippie boy who thinks he’s so deep and in touch with nature and the universe he simply can’t be bothered by such a materialistic, superficial, judgmental little brat. He’s giving me a hopeless, floundering feeling that has no resolution. I try harder to be smart and cool, and I just end up more shallow and fake.
“I’m going on a vision quest,” he proudly announces.
I can tell he thought of this right on the spot. “Is that a Nintendo game?”
“It has nothing to do with you. Don’t be so defensive.”
“I’m not.”
“See. There you go.”
I hate this trap I’m in. I have to slow down. “What’s a vision quest?”
He sits up, as if he’ll think clearer looking out to sea. “It’s a Native American journey that every boy takes once before being accepted into his pueblo as a man. They would to take peyote, then walk alone into the wilderness to learn about themselves and their place in the order of things. Also, you learn to identify with an animal that rules your spirit. You find out where you came from, and maybe, where you’re headed. But I’ll just get high.”
Clay's Way Page 18