Wild Gestures

by Lucy Durneen

  The night sky above your apartment prickles with light. You make a wish on the brightest star you can find. Only as you’re closing the windows to shut out the damn milonga do you see the star is in fact a landing aircraft. You don’t retract the wish because—who knows.

  The next time he calls, he asks about the tigers in the Zoologischer Garten. You tell him how the tiger enclosure is currently closed because a keeper was mauled to death. That’s a real conversation killer. You are both silent, imagining, maybe, the light of the tiger’s green eyes. The wreckage of desire. The kind of death that comes from doing something that meant the world to you, once.

  ‘Damn it,’ he says.

  ‘Damn it,’ you say back.

  Everything you cannot say with any of the spoken languages of the known world you translate into wild-gesture. It doesn’t matter that he can’t see you. This is the way humanity says everything it has no words for.

  What is this?

  It is what it is.

  And what if it isn’t?

  To the men I have tried to seduce with prose –

  –I make no apology.

  But it’s hard to give up bad habits, like drinking before the bar opens, or checking your horoscope. If there’s a Mars-Jupiter trine combined with a Spring Equinox, it helps to know it’s really going to screw everything. Shoot me. There are worse vices.

  And what is fiction if not the healing lie?

  I don’t recommend Hemingway, Proust or Anna Karenina, for reasons that if you’ve received such passages, you’ll no doubt be aware. Those lines from The Shipping News, the ones where diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, how many times have I typed them to myself? I know I’ve a tendency towards a prose of repression, but—I’m whispering here—aren’t we always in the wrong story? The one that mustn’t fit, isn’t that the one where we feel most alive?

  You will summon true love with Ondaatje, a fortune cookie predicted, years before.

  If I have tried to seduce you with prose, come close and listen. Come. The truth is I was showing you how to seduce me. The question everyone asks about the location of the clitoris is the wrong question. What I am saying is: tell me about winds. Fuck me in the violets above Fiesole.

  And if I had used poetry–?

  Once I flew across the Indian Ocean, hard and fast into the light from the oncoming dawn. I thought of you—so dangerous—and what I told myself was: how much safer my life if I just gave nothing away.

  This is Eden

  Naturally, Adam gets the drinks in. Once it fell to me to fight change into the cigarette machine, but times have changed; even here you can no longer smoke inside. You can’t stick a postage stamp on an envelope with the queen’s head upside down or touch the trilithons at Stonehenge, although there is an old by-law that still permits a pregnant woman to piss in a policeman’s helmet if the need takes her.

  The music is fast and loud, just right for slamming Tequila, but it is a myth that you will find a worm at the end of the bottle; only for a gimmick is it sold con gusano. Adam smiles at the waitress and says, ‘Dickens walks into a bar and orders a Martini. The bartender asks: Olive or Twist?’

  The waitress sucks the piercing in her lip as she serves him. She smoothes down the bar towel and works her fingers through the blur of her dark hair, and I am reminded of lights flashing in muddy water. Min min lights, the light of the dead. She plucks at the jasmine that rests above her ear. ‘I don’t get it,’ she says.

  Maybe he explains it to her while I am checking in my bag. When I come back he is lining up shots, squeezing the lime, rationing salt, and all the time the waitress smiles lazily, her mouth wide and pretty, the easy way he likes. It’s taken ten minutes and they’re on first name terms. I stand just out of view and watch them as if it is not the rest room that I have been to but the other side of the world, as if there is something I have forgotten in some room far away, something important, and I cannot for the life of me remember what it is I am missing.

  For all the things you can say about him, Adam is surprisingly unoriginal. And so it is to alcohol and women that the guilty man turns.

  This is how it begins. A man walks into a bar. (Ouch. You’d think he would have seen it.)

  The Flaming Sword Motel is lapped on four sides by water, dark, stone-filled water, clotted and dirty with a hundred years of secrets. But when the clouds cover the moon only the crying of the gulls says you are no longer on land. It goes without saying that the rules are different here. Across the world are places like this, set adrift like rogue asteroids, the ones humanity is so terrified of.

  The Sword attracts what it likes to think of as a select crowd; writers, painters, magicians, illusionists and, rumour has it, a princess or two, all of whom will wait hours for the causeway to telescope out through the waves before crossing to the island to dance their asses off until morning. An ex-Pope took control of the pool table for eleven days straight, back in the day when the winner still stayed on. The gossips say that Houdini was a regular, but the only trace of him now is the unpaid tab behind the bar. Even the air is heavy under the weight of words. When you want another drink you have to push past playwrights who orbit the bar like stars, greedy for each other’s light. A good night is one where you make it to the bar without being stabbed in the eye with a quill.

  We sit high on stools and suck lemons that dry our mouths and make us wink suggestively at strangers. There is a breeze this evening and a party at the bar for Penelope’s divorce. Penelope dances on the table, a chain of flowers round her neck, the plastic kind you would wear at a luau. She has a glass in each hand, a man nibbling the toes of each stilettoed foot. People know her here as something of a homebird. But tonight there she is in heels, shining and free, grinding it to a shimmering bass.

  Beyond the window the causeway glints like slate and the surf breaks from a cold horizon. Tiny fish hurtle out into the dark. It is the age of the sea, not its depth that scares me. You can smell it in the room when you pick up an ashtray, and you can feel it move the hairs of your arm, like the nervous memory of an amputated limb.

  There is a story going round that a local man went down to the shore one night where there were rumours of a mermaid in the vicinity. At first he thought it was an oystercatcher, spiralling downwards to the seabed like a blade. Then he saw the white-green flash of her skin, the cold gleam of the fish’s human eye. He waited until the moon was full and fucked her in the dunes, the sand like a hot razor against the delicate flicking of her scales. But it is well enough understood, the strength of the lovesickness that a man feels for the things he cannot have. He knew he already had her body, the pulse of her cold-blooded limbs forced close to him as a rumour, the possession of her guaranteed. But rather than let her body return to the sea, he chopped off her tail and with it took her soul, or so the story goes. He stood there on the beach, they say, surprised by his own triumph, her heart held tight in his palm like the coin in a magic trick while the waves turned red with blood.

  It is a new moon tonight.

  Some people say this a good time to mend things, unless it falls on a Saturday when it portends twenty days of wind. Others say that if you turn over the coins in your pocket you’ll have luck in all your affairs. I knew a man who would, no matter where he went in the world, send home a photograph of the night sky, scrawled on the back the words; look at the moon!

  There is a place I sometimes dream about, a place at the head of two rivers facing to the east; an ancient place of dark rain and grey moonlight. It’s a place that reminds me of the coming of a storm, the feeling that everything has an edge, that everything ends somewhere.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ Adam is saying, downing his third shot. The fourth he spills across the bar, a steady, sticky ooze that snakes out over the square of mango wood that separates us from the optics behind. ‘It wasn’t love.’

  Of the ten steps to rekindling romance, we have reached an impasse at number three: creating a relationship vision. Step Fo
ur is learning to know your lover. Step Five is learning to know yourself. The former, I suspect, will not be a problem because I have always found it easier to understand the absurdity of another person than I do my own.

  ‘Of course it wasn’t love,’ I tell him. Only in films do people find themselves fucking someone who isn’t their wife out of love. For the rest of us it’s boredom, the need to feel the burn of a stranger’s hotel room carpet against the crest of our spine a symptom of there being little else to do. The shape of the heart has long been painted on the signs above brothels, but it is not a symbol of love. It is the shape of a woman, swollen and heavy with the intolerable weight of desire, the breasts and the open cunt calling out like a song and a warning, to rich men who wanted the smell of dirty sweat and foreign perfume at their fingers, to sailors, who tattooed it on their arms and colonised the world with the lie that the heart is an organ of romance. Here is what the man on the beach did not understand. The mermaid. She gave away nothing when she left her heart behind.

  From the end of the bar a man in black Levis and evening gloves signals to us, sizing us up. It’s an interesting combination that makes me want to ask him about his childhood, but something in the way he spears a cocktail stick through an olive, holding it in front his face like a tiny lantern, makes me think better of it. ‘You together?’ he says. For a minute the olive spins around the stick, smooth and purple, like some kind of nascent planet. Then it’s gone, the oil dribbling down his goatee.

  ‘We’re together,’ I say, because once it was true. The man’s eyelids are painted bottle green. He is wearing lipstick. He is older than either of us, much older, but the music he asks the barman for is something with a beat only the young can keep up with.

  ‘Eve,’ I say, and he kisses my outstretched hand. The weight of my fingers feels alien in the soft, kid prism of his gloved palm.

  ‘What are you drinking, Eve?’ he says.

  The Mai Tais arrive with a little lake around the tray, delivered with a flourish. I drink mine the way Don the Beachcomber intended: with aniseed and a garnish of soft, fleshy fruits. Adam is a traditionalist and asks for his over shaved ice with a sprig of mint. Strictly speaking, accepting drinks from strangers is exactly the kind of thing we have agreed not to do while following the programme; all forms of compulsive behaviour, including gambling, lying, Facebook and Ebay, are to be avoided. But it is only advice and I have ignored better.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ I say, turning to Adam, because we still have unfinished business. I am suddenly exhausted. ‘Don’t tell me. She wasn’t better, just different.’

  The man in the black gloves looks interested. ‘Don’t answer that one,’ he warns Adam, smudging hashish resin along the line of an unrolled cigarette. But Adam is already face down in his glass, a mint leaf hanging from his mouth, and the man lights up, tips his head back, the smoke ascending like a plume and the smell puts me in a kind of dream where I can see my son, both my sons, and my first dog, all of us looking out towards the ocean, where the air is purple and violent as a storm comes in from across the mountains. But in just one lightning flash I am at school, sitting my midterm History paper. The invigilator stares and when I look down I am naked.

  ‘You want some?’

  I open my eyes and the man is holding out the joint, delicately, like I have seen people hold fragile animals and scale models of famous battle heroes. There is a faint scent of soap about him, lavender cut with something hard and antiseptic. Close up to the bowl I can see the olives are marinated in little pieces of garlic. The way he holds it, the joint, it is almost tender.

  ‘I ever tell you what I love about you?’ Adam says, but he passes out before he can tell me what it is he loves. And the man in the black gloves is persistent. ‘So what did he do?’ he asks. ‘Forget your birthday?’ He sighs a hot bubble of air across the bar.

  ‘We’re trying marriage guidance,’ I say and laugh, because suddenly I have heard it aloud.

  ‘Waste of fucking time,’ he says, flexing his hand around a dirty coin. ‘But it’s up to you. What the hell.’ He rolls the penny across his knuckles. ‘Heads you make it work,’ he says.

  ‘Tails you move on and give someone else a shot.’

  ‘I don’t make decisions based on chance.’

  ‘All decisions are based on chance.’

  He puts his head on one side, challenges me to consider the possibility that this is the only true option. ‘Good girl,’ he says, beckoning the barman over. ‘I’m buying. Anything you like.’

  In this watery place we have to learn to separate the sound of the waves from the sound made by the things that undo us. Always it is words—my weakness. I am only half aware that the man in black gloves is speaking to me, his mouth pressed to the skin under my ear. Outside, he is saying. Come outside, baby.

  The roar of the night surf pounds like blood in my ears as the man in the black gloves fucks me hard against the stone wall, the way you would stoke a fire, efficiently, and with purpose. For all his fury his mouth is soft, surprised by its own urgent, animal calls. There you are, he says, pushing his gloved fingers stiff against my tongue. There you are. There you are.

  His skin on my skin like I am a ball of plutonium, rolled between his thumbs. I half expect to see burns, shiny and slick, searing my thighs, my cunt, everywhere he has been.

  I think of another joke just as he comes. It might be that I even tell it aloud. Descartes. That’s how it starts. Descartes walks into a bar and the bartender asks, ‘Would you like a beer?’ ‘I think not!’ Descartes says, and vanishes.

  Afterwards he offers me the obligatory half-smoked cigarette and I inhale with gratitude, looking out to sea as if I am scanning for a landmark that will root me somewhere, just this once. But there is only water. There aren’t even any stars. Here is the true meaning of un-coordinated. The column of smoke leaves my mouth like a bird ascending and I imagine that far away someone will see it and perhaps for them it will be a different kind of sign, a thrilling sign that connects them to something real that is happening far away, that will make them feel more real in return.

  ‘I gave up,’ I tell him apologetically, as he buckles and rebuckles his belt with a speed that tells me I’m not the first to have felt the sharp ridges of the sea wall at the Flaming Sword Motel grind into the small of my back.

  ‘No you didn’t,’ he says, and takes the cigarette back, stubs it out, gently, lovingly against the stone.

  You don’t need me to tell you that other worlds exist beyond this one.

  I ended up in Eden for what you now call crimes against humanity, but the truth is that a man simply wouldn’t have had the courage to do what I did. Visiting hours are three until eight and all appointments have to be made a fortnight in advance - subject to cancellation if it is not in the interests of the residents’ emotional health. You come to see the patients through what we joke is the servants’ entrance. A river flows through the main gates and if you follow its banks from outside in, it is said you will forget your soul and can never leave. You want to say it’s bullshit. But then are those who’ll tell you that the soul is constantly trying to escape and you just don’t realise it; it is why they insist on saying ‘bless you’ after a sneeze.

  My name means life, but you probably know me better as an afterthought, something brought into being by necessity and not desire, although if I am particularly unlucky you will think of me as the source of all human agony - and that’s fine. There is nothing ceremonious about being crafted from a rib; you take whatever glory you can get. This morning a newscaster reported that female promiscuity is the cause of recent volcanic eruptions that have disrupted the globe and caused untold economic hardship. I should be offended, but I have always known I have the power to make the earth move.

  There was light, and then the heavens and last came Earth, the sudden hush of the sea, and following that, animals, birds and man. I came last. I came at the world from the shadows, hooded and shackled. I arrived vowing to
take as much as I could and give back as little as I could get away with.

  In those early days some things got a little muddled; it was only to be expected, given the high maintenance design for a planet where a shift of one degree on its axis could spell mass extinction. There were times when the light seemed to be water and the water seemed a dangerous, black light and I was drawn to it, because that is the inherent property of both water and darkness: they pull everything in. Something I did not expect: when the teething troubles were ironed out and the elements became fixed, the darkness would linger, like a beautiful woman passing a mirror. Something I expected even less: that when it comes to the crunch we are more afraid to be ordinary than tragic.

  Cassandra calls it Scarlett O’Hara syndrome, where you don’t want something until you absolutely can’t have it, and when you realise it you’ll fight to the death to make sure no-one else can have it either. Cassie, dropped on her head as a baby, thinks she has a gift, the kind that has half the new girls queuing up for relationship advice and the wardens asking for lottery numbers. On long evenings when there are no visitors at all she entertains me not with stories of past exploits, but visions of the future. I try to tell her that all this soothsaying is old hat. Seeing is not knowledge, I tell her, the future isn’t fixed. It’s constantly being assembled, you could change everything at any moment. Or perhaps everything could change you. Love, even. Who said that—that love is a form of becoming?