'Ile De La Passion'

Short story I wrote for a recent NPR competition....

‘Ile De La Passion’

It never announces itself, though truthfully, he never expects it to. It just appears, like an albatross signals the approach of unexpected land, a winged messenger synthesized from the pale blue awfulness, so does the island come to be. When the boat nudges up against a dull crescent of sand, it is not the island pushing back at him so much as a hard crease in the murky warm liquid that has consumed him over the past month at sea. His mind is now made of salty, amorphous brine, it seems. The pillars of dripping white guano rising above the beach, fluorescent in the sun, fail to perturb his icy calm. ‘Ile de la Passion’, the French call it, though he feels this place is too primitive, too tied to the fickle habits of the sun and the wind to succumb to such arrogant colonial typecasting.

The air is still, hesitant but also complacent. The only sound he discerns is the incessant scuttling of millions of little orange legs, the alien-looking land crabs ready to carry him away like some bastard child king. He is not a child anymore though, this he knows, feeling the sharp stubble across his chin, the freckles spread like a badly drawn map of late adolescence on his arms. Lost in the translation of solitude, he fails to notice the two men who approach him with the bored confidence of home, their gait neither excited nor lazy. When they stand before him, he opens his mouth mechanically, but nothing comes out. Only a breath, followed by another shallower, more ragged gasp, the way a fish fights and then lies splendid and shiny on the docks, resigned to the inevitable.

The older, taller man, sporting a soiled maroon bathrobe and meticulously styled facial hair, introduces himself in flawless Parisian French as ‘The Governor.’ The younger man, trembling slightly with excitement, is a caricature of 20-something vitality. He rattles off a list of ‘nearby’ points in similarly brilliant French, before introducing himself as ‘The Subject.’ ‘Acapulco, Mexico: 1,080 kilometers. Socorro Island: 950 kilometers. Galapagos Islands: 2,260 kilometers.’ The young man smiles vacantly. Distances have no meaning anymore. They dissolved when Julia’s body sank like a ghoulish jellyfish into the translucent green water off Pitcairn Island, only to reemerge some hundred meters distant. He saw her white dress caught in the same lifeless stew the boat festered in, brilliant under the metallic eye of the sun. Or when the last of the Samoan deckhand’s lay supine and peaceful across the foredeck, his lips split apart and eyes sunken from the temptation of drinking seawater.

He hadn’t wanted to survive- he’d felt his youth pass before him like a train before relativity dissected time into a science, the way men grew suddenly old. This was before the world knew such awful truths as the Internet and transoceanic airplanes, of course. The wind wouldn’t allow it, though, and The Subject holds his head lovingly as he coaxes delicious tea and little neon slices of native fruits into his stubborn American mouth. Tears flow from his cheeks like the Ganges in flood, not from the physical revival of nourishment, but from the touch of another young man as unlikable and human as himself. The Governor stands before them like Napoleon upon arrival in Saint Helena, both infallible and terrified. At first, he says nothing, letting the intermittent sobs of the young man and the surreal cooing of The Subject compete with the crabs and the sun. Suddenly, he raises his fist toward the sky, as if the sun is a secret ally in his private tyranny, and speaks in unblemished English- ‘The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet the wild beasts of the island, and the Satyr shall cry to his fellow, and find a place of rest.’ He throws his head back in awful laughter, and The Subject follows, their cries synchronized in surreal humor.

The young man feels himself rise from the sand like a phoenix, shedding the memory of Julia and the Samoan like the itchy golden grains that cling to his skin. In a swift motion, he fells both of them. Like chess pieces before an unruly god, they crumple to the earth, and soon are nothing more than orange mounds, the crabs feasting jubilantly. ‘Welcome to Ile De La Passion’, the young man declares to the crescent of sand and the soft, fallow waves. Their edges fail to suggest the sterile magnificence of the Pacific that lies beyond the reef. When the sun finally is relieved of its assault on the island, the Governor is nothing more than a moist skeleton, lying opalescent in the orange sunset. The crabs gradually retreat as they have consumed what they knew was theirs to begin with.

The Subject has risen though, and the young man finds him to be even more beautiful and permanent than when they first met, when he slid bright slices of papaya into his helpless American mouth. He never knocked him down, it seems, he was always aside, always a ‘very bad man’ while referring to the Governor as an ‘exceptionally good man.’ Never had two people been more suited to each other, the young man thought, but he knew from first sight that The Subject was to be his alone. He completed him both physically and ephemerally- his vitality forced the memories of Julia and the Samoan out across the stale horizon. The Governor was merely an obstacle, an interference of their singularity. He still could not speak, so he knew that The Subject’s hold on him was firm and indelible. The young man lay helplessly aside him in the little hut made of palm fronds and thatch, while the crabs scratched against the inky black night outside.

The next day, he was not allowed to return to the boat. ‘I have everything for you here, my love. Do not think of them, do not think of those places, only of me.’ The Subject speaks to both the young man and the sea equally, though his eyes seem vacant and vaguely troubled, fighting the inward battle of isolation. His skin smells of strange oils and spices, and while he is fair and blond, his eyes carry the exotic colors of the east. He wears a long rectangle of mauve fabric around his torso, an ersatz sarong, it seems, and beneath this, thin, pale corduroy pants hacked off above the knee. The young man wants to devour him, to feel his sins absolved in some new purpose, the fulfillment of a month’s drifting across the Pacific. His family back in Boston, his research group and schoolmates at Yale- he knows they have all taken him for dead. Somehow the finality of being lost comforts him nonetheless; it is unflinchingly linear and unidirectional.

He wonders sometimes if The Subject is his brother, some distant lost Kin. He knows his love is not just fraternal though- it is a desperate, necessary protection from the awful pillars of dripping guano and raucous seabirds. Their personalities now feel nebulous, blending into a single animal constituency. He relishes this absolution from self, the distraction the elements provide. Small as it is, perhaps no larger than a few square kilometers, the isle provides for them in begrudging paternalism, yielding shiny fruits and sleek fishes in little bursts of sustenance. The Subject is like an albatross- flighty, distracted, prone to wander the sharp coral and mushy sand in search of pieces of colored plastic and torn nylon. The detritus of man is inescapable, it seems. He knows that when he leaves, the sea will swallow him as it has wanted to do from the start, and he will join Julia in the icy depths of solitude.

The Subject shows him his collection of once-buried treasure, assembled atop a few palm fronds and ripening coconuts in the safe cocoon of the hut. Coins of the most mysterious and fantastic enumeration greet him in flashes of silver and gold. The sun makes them looking gaudy and obscene, he thinks. He fills his cupped hands with them, letting them spill over into the sand with a satisfying ‘ching’ as they bounce against each other, their worth both an abstraction and intrinsic. The Subject kisses his neck; then bites it in jest, drawing him languidly across his lap so that their eyes are fixed and level a half-meter apart. He speaks to him in nonsensical French, the syllables all strong and convoluted- his secret, mindless love songs, the young man decides. The soles of his feet slowly grow strong and his flesh atrophies into leathery sinew under the sun. He is not weak though; rather he is composed fully of lean muscle, the complacency of American adulthood beaten out of him by the isle.

Sometimes they do nothing, letting the day wither under the near-constant battering of the sun, vengeful in these latitudes. In the late afternoon, dark blue storm clouds mass unexpectedly, and rain falls in warm, soft sheets that seem to insulate them from the terrible vastness of the sea. The young man is fed, he is loved, he is at peace, yet somehow his neurosis precludes truly mindless joy, his sins still cling to him like the vacant black eyes of the crabs. In the night, he clings to the Subject in fear; fear of the black nothingness, fear of Julia floating to the surface of his mind again like seaweed in the tide. The next day, in what is likely a week but could also be a month from his arrival, the Subject speaks to him unequivocally and directly for the first time.

'You must promise never to leave', he whispers in his ear as the crabs wander aimlessly across the beach, their orange carapaces brilliant in the dewy morning light. 'No', answers the young man. The Subject strikes him, not with intent to harm, but merely a violent afterthought of their oddly incestuous melodrama, and he falls into the warm sand. The young man is not angry- rather he is passive and limp. His mind boils yet his body is like Julia's- content to have its fate determined by someone else. 'I hate you, Oliver. You took me to this godforsaken place because you knew you could, because you have the goddamn charisma to fuck people over', he heard her say. In the next few minutes, their future had been decided, the awful black cliffs of Pitcairn island fading on the uneven horizon, a sight he’d wanted to forget was even land, so hopeless a place had it been to him. They had buried the Samoan there. The locals seemed to understand. They were kind, primitive people, beleaguered by their unspoken history, their indifferent resiliency. They were descended from the HMS Bounty mutineer's of some 2 centuries prior, but he knew from their first arrival that this was not to be mentioned.

He’d seen their culture as despondent yet also pure. The weathered mutineer was still apparent in their worn out smiles and calloused, bare feet, the stubborn volcanic slopes a collective skin they clung to. Julia had hated it. Lately though, she'd begun to hate everything, and at night he thought of her perfect lips, her straight blond hair she fussed incessantly over, how it would look wrapped in the wraithlike form of the sea. Twice he thought quite seriously of tying the stubborn lead stern anchor to his feet and jumping overboard. The Samoan, Tunga Mata'Afa, would have helped him. Now his cracked lips and hollow eyes stared in eternity at the fertile black soil above Adamstown, whilst banana and citrus roots worked their way through him, oblivious to life or lack thereof. It wasn't that he had killed Julia- he’d fulfilled her wishes. She could have done the same for him, but she was too afraid. He had at one point loved her- not in the way of flesh and thought, but in the abstract obligation one feels to assist another, to provide, to be infallible despite the circumstances. The islanders on Pitcairn understood this, how contrived and contextual love could be. When upon setting up order on the isle they initially banned alcohol, tobacco, dancing, and even public showings of affection, it was not so much repression as a response to the isle itself, its omniscient wrath.

He could have left her on Pitcairn. He knew setting off for the east was fatally flawed, the Achilles heel of his travels, but he went anyways. He didn't want to feel old or young, weak or strong- merely present. At first, she had been a spectator, there when he wanted her to be, and absent like land or the wind when he saw it fit. When the outer Cook Islands had failed to materialize past Rapa Iti, she was always there though. Always inquiring, always letting her giant blue eyes bore into his failures with the singularity of trust- theirs was the tragic pairing of two difficult people. From the moment he'd met The Subject, he knew that things, while not absolved, would now move irrevocably and unilaterally forward.

He was now able to catch tuna successfully on his own. The tight pull of the marlin line across his hands was better than anyone's touch, anyone's condolences- the tug of a fighting, animate thing in his hands the sort of high that breached the solitude. The Subject had shown him how to, of course- he was his now such that his own learning was merely an expression of his obedience, his lapping at the pool of inequity. The tuna never wore on him- it was red and fleshy without the blood, without the thought of taking a life. When he brought the fish up out of the dull turquoise lagoon, it fought viciously, dangerously, but soon the sun and sweaty air subdued it into a final stupor. He let The Subject slice it without the slightest thread of compassion, surgically removing little moist red cubes from sharp teeth and fins, and he ate them with the most metaphysical guilt. That evening, he spoke to the young man again. 'Oliver, you rescued me from the most painful apathy, you know. I kept up appearances for the crabs and the sun for so long. I drank the brackish, tainted water here like it was my own blood, scribed my name in the sand so it could be washed away by the next wave.' 'Where did you come from?', Oliver asked quietly, and immediately regretted it.

'It is not important, actually, it may not even be true, but I am from Paris’, answer’s The Subject in English. ‘I studied ecology at The Ecole Normale Superieure, was well liked, and generally a caricature of desirable style and physique. Not that I thought so highly of myself- those are merely the words of others.' He pauses to slice open a single coconut with a swift, ruthless motion of his machete, and the warm, milky fluid spills across his fingers as he hand’s it to Oliver. He drinks emphatically, as if for the last time. ‘When I came here, I knew it would be forever’, The Subject continues. ‘I’d never even left Paris, but when the land unfolded before me on the flight to Los Angeles, the sprawling desert’s of America, the great shining cities, I saw everything was in its right place.’

‘I stayed in LA for some time…I couldn’t tell you exactly how long. Time escapes me. Eventually though, things closed, got tight, threatened to hurt me. I went south. Ended up in Acapulco. God, it was awful. I felt so transparent amongst all the plastic, the thin people living out thin dreams on some overcrowded beach, drinking Margaritas subsidized by slaves.’ He pauses again to catch his breath, and Oliver draws his hand across The Subject’s abdomen instinctively, feeling its vibration, tight and youthful. The Subject sigh’s deeply, closing his eyes as he lies inertly across his lap. Outside the hut, the wind builds restlessly, pushing the sun off somewhere to the west. ‘So when I met the Governor, it was not simply that we were two difficult people, it was that our salvation was as much our mutual company as the place we were to venture.’ Sensing Oliver’s confusion, he tries to explain.

‘The formalities were that I was to assist him in tending the lighthouse and weather station here, our allegiance being to both the Mexican Navy and the French science bureau. I met him in the Acapulco city library…he joked that I was the only young person he’d ever seen there, and I told him we were part of the same Karass. So, we spent the rest of the day discussing Vonnegut and our vague contempt for the mainland, before he offered me a job assisting him on the isle.’ ‘The isle…’, Oliver whisper’s back to him. It sounds so lovely through The Subject’s lips, an incantation across the muggy evening air that he needs to feel it work for himself. ‘Yes, the isle’, The Subject replies, but he says it with a disaffected modernity that betrays romanticism; his relationship to this place is as dreadful now as it is necessary.

‘When I first arrived, it was such a bleak place, so terrifying and immediate, that I listened to every word the Governor spoke as if it were from god himself.’ ‘Why did things change?’, Oliver hears himself ask rhetorically, but the words are not his own. Perhaps the Governor’s spirit is hanging over them, he thinks, it is shrouded around ghoulish white guano pillars, its voice the brittle waves that shatter on the outer reef. Here was a bleakness, and austerity he associated with the American Midwest, a gently rolling hopelessness that was simply colored in shades of neon instead of brown. He saw his youth in the mindless cornfields, the bright sun of August in Iowa the same as it was here- angry and incessant. He’d met Julia there. She was product of the Middle American resolve, both plain and beautiful.

He’d been home from college in Boston, rutted in the dichotomy of his new ‘cool’ life at school and his roots, humble and earthy like the soil that crunched under his feet in the early January frost as he walked across the neighbors fields. They had gone to different high schools, the arbitrary line separating the districts a stone’s throw from the modest little ranch she’d grown up in. Its gaudy, cheap plastic nativity scene was still out on the lawn- the aspirations of straightforward people. She was a dreamer though- worse than him, he decided 5 minutes into their walk across the field together. ‘You see that hill over there?’, she’d asked him. It appeared to Oliver as a topographic disturbance barely worth noting. ‘That’s the highest point for 50 miles in any direction. Might even be the highest point in Iowa for all I know.’ He nodded slowly and tried to suppress the smirk creasing his lips.

She was indifferent, aloof in her own radiance, he thought, as she’d continued her seemingly incongruous story. ‘So, think of what it does to your dreams when this is a mountain- it flattens them, compresses everything onto the dead corn husks under our feet.’ She sensed his judgment and added a quick qualifier- ‘Not that people here can’t be great- I think in a way they’ve figured out a private greatness people in the cities are too neurotic to decipher. I just mean it’s not for…’ ‘Not for people like us’, Oliver said, finishing her sentence, and they were nearly inseparable for the following two and some odd years. All the way until the shadow of Pitcairn island began to obscure her memory, two weeks, or perhaps it was years prior. Their relationship had never been sexual, he’d told her from the start he wasn’t attracted to women that way. Sure, there had been sex; it had nothing to do with confusion, and he became quite certain of its necessity as the land faded with alarming finality off the ragged Maine coast, their journey having begun late last May.

‘You always have to be so certain about everything’, he recalled her chiding him as they cracked the expensive champagne bottle against the shiny fiberglass hull that warm May morning, his landlocked parents standing aside on the docks, wide-eyed and vaguely terrified. ‘This isn’t the sort of graduation present we envisioned’, his father had said gravely, but the twinkle in his eyes betrayed him, spoke of the Midwestern insurance executive who never got to postpone the ‘real world’ when he was Oliver’s age. His mother was not pleased. She was a strong woman, squarely built with sturdy, square thoughts which flowed out of her head and down cascading blond ringlets, her eyes the furious blue of the upper Midwest Scandinavian. She was proud of him though, ‘so damn proud’, she couldn’t remind him enough if this, it seemed. He’d played their game, and partly made it his own- 24 and a fresh Harvard graduate, ready to be sprung unto the world in all its terrifying immediacy.

Julia didn’t speak to her parents anymore, she’d informed him a long time ago. It hurt him more than her, he felt. His warm, fuzzy, insulated nuclear family always betrayed his thoughts of radicalism, of splitting in some unlikable direction. ‘If only they could see me know’, he thinks aloud. The Subject kisses him on the chest, knowing his thoughts once again. Feeling his touch, how it grates against the awful thoughts of Julia, Oliver cries out in sudden anguish: ‘Why did I have to do it? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck… I killed her! Did you hear me!?’ The Subject forces him down into his lap like he did on the first day, such that the sand and palm universe is temporarily invisible. He sees only the terrible sun and the strong, tan flesh of The Subject’s chest, which he finds neither attractive nor repulsive- it is simply there. ‘There is no ‘why’…only now’, The Subject replies.

Oliver doesn’t care if this is bullshit or not. He just wants to be spoken to, to witness something he can make more important than his own awfulness. ‘Circumnavigating the globe’…it had sounded so romantic. It still sounded romantic, he thinks. Just to be moving again, to be off this isle…he forces the thought out of his mind. He returns to the past tense. The Subject is approving of this, though Oliver notes he has never wavered from the present, even his own story was a sort of apparition, a half-truth spoken from beyond his own means. He sees himself in the first week or the journey, the weather miraculously calm, their bubbly laughter at the freedom of the open sea pantomiming the little white clods adrift in blue nothingness, both above and below. He sees them in the first storm, the swells battering the boat in ruthless steel gray, Julia sobbing in quiet terror below deck. He sees the sky parting the next day like the chasms of hell the ancients spoke of, the mist rising over the even green horizon, and wonders why it took so long to finally see god. The places, they have all blurred into a monochromatic fray, such that the gray cliffs above Cape Town might be the impossibly green palms of the Seychelles, or even the rank squalor of the Jakarta slums, alive with sweat and yearning.

The Subject rises slowly from the sand outside the hut, as if to aid him in shedding the memories. It is evening now, and cooler than it has been since his arrival, he notices. Perhaps there are in fact seasons here, a way of distinguishing tomorrow from today, but he doubts it. ‘When I left Paris, I saw it not as a departure, there was no finality about it’, he begins to say. Oliver wants to stop him, to tell him that the isle is no place for all this juxtaposition of past and present, but he does not. ‘I felt I owed nothing to my family other than to be incessantly happy and healthy, which I am.’ ‘So there.’, he adds emphatically after several minutes silence. ‘So there…’, Oliver thinks in lukewarm abstraction, but the loose ends of Julia’s death still rattle his contentment. He thinks of he surreal thermocline of the open ocean, where a layer perhaps only a meter deep of bathwater floats above the icy depths, such that one’s feet dangle into the crystalline edges of the void, suspended over so much nothingness.

The lagoon would never threaten him like this, he thinks- it is almost comical in its circular enclosure of their world, hiding none of the shadowy beasts one who has grown up in suburbia expects to find. There were dangers, this was certain- somewhere between the first and second weeks, The Subject had taken him out into the aquamarine center of the lagoon, where the violent equatorial sun pierced perhaps 15 meters of water, alive with darting frames of neon. He hands Oliver a mask and snorkel, and shows how to float so that only a 2-dimensional sliver of his body feels like it is actually submerged; himself compressed onto the even blue plane above the spiny reef. They glide over urchins whose spines seem to reach out a half meter, waving back and forth in the sluggish current menacingly. A small fish festooned in brilliant blue and gold fins meant to look like Dali-esque coral appears from behind a rock- its face is the most striking aspect of it, though, so ugly and content, bulging eyes and lips that seem both fearful and challenging. ‘Do not ever, ever touch one of those’, The Subject informs him gravely.

This ugly, humble little creature, a rare lionfish species, The Subject informs him, was the source of his near brush with mortality a few weeks into his arrival. ‘You know, I was insubordinate, questioning of The Governor until then. The pain… you cannot even begin to imagine. If I’d been stung by the dorsal fin spines a few seconds more, you would have arrived to find my bones bleaching in the sun like those rocks over there.’ Oliver glances instinctively towards the awful white pillars of guano, fluorescent even in the waning moonlight, and shivers. ‘He revived me so thoroughly I wasn’t even sure if I’d been alive before the experience. I spent the better part of July wavering between life and death, everything was waxy and pale and rough, my skin boiled in the most horrendous blisters…I couldn’t stand the way I looked, it was worse than the pain.’ Oliver put aside the fact that his audience had consisted on the crabs and an insane Frenchman, he understood this private narcissism The Subject spoke of all too well.

When Oliver had struck down the Frenchman though, he didn’t see anger or sadness in The Subject’s eyes- they had been hardened by the vastness of everything, of the sea compared to the isle, of the present compared to the past. It was not that the Governor was tyrannical or barbaric, though truthfully they both knew he was. It was that he was an obstruction, his presence somehow invalidated theirs, and as two unlikables, they had no choice but to strike him down, it seemed. They had first buried his body in the sand. The next day, seeing the way the crabs scuttled over the thin sand covering him, their empty little eyes atop black stalks hungry in anticipation, they decided to float it out to sea atop a raft of dead palm fronds. It took a while for it to breach the dull, mumbling waves on the outer reef- enough time for Oliver to be further critical of himself, the possibly trivial contemptibility of the two of them.

The next day, they will begin a new routine, The Subject informs him at dinner that evening. The time has come to leave. It will not be rushed, he assures Oliver with distracted authority. They will build a raft, something to make the Kon-Tiki look frail and humorous, he claims. Oliver doubts him. Not his motivation, which is genuine and overflowing, but the resources necessary for this. The island is already sinking- each day he knows the waves lap a little higher and retreat less, their onslaught catalyzed by some distant coal power plant in the American Rust Belt. The small, scattered palm groves that first seemed like private wildernesses now stand thin and transparent under the moonlight- he wants to be enveloped by them, but knows they are transparent. When he awakes the next morning, he frees himself from The Subject’s arms, wanting to glimpse the palms in the full honesty of the morning light.

They are thinner and more alien that ever, leaning sinisterly towards the lagoon, ready to reach out and cut him with their sharp green fronds if he gets too close. The island is not his own anymore. Nothing is his own, he decides. The young coconut milk, the ephemeral white liquid he used to think was better than water now pains his throat, he gags unconsciously if he thinks too much while drinking it. The bright neon slices of fish and fruit become sickly sweet, infused with the gaudy pointlessness of the tropics. This is a land of fools and idleness, he tells The Subject, who replies that he’d rather be an idle fool in the tropics than a temperate wage-slave. The Subject has begun to rise at dawn, working feverously on the raft until his hands shine bright with blisters and eventually dull calluses. Oliver hates how they feel on his skin when they make love, all purposeful and leathery. He wants them to encourage each other’s apathy, to make excuses to god and each other, and perhaps the sun as well, resplendent in its cheery awfulness.

Slowly, the raft comes together. Sometimes Oliver helps, but never out of motivation to leave, only because he wants to be near The Subject, to watch his veins dilate in delicious proximity, to feel his breath warm and ragged across his neck as he holds a palm trunk in place while it is bound tight by vegetable sinew. Everything is the same to him. The day and night are barely distinguishable, just a contemptibly even cycle on the great overhead dimmer switch. He feels that the equatorial sun is the real culprit for all the terrible deeds done by men against each other in the tropics, imperialism and tribalism are merely slight approximations of its wrath. The rain is the only respite- each afternoon he sits in the shade beside the little hut as the clouds build, stripping the worn threads from his salt-crusted skin as the first drops wipe away the previous day’s indecision.

The Subject hardly smiles anymore- the raft has consumed him. It is too large now for him to manipulate by himself, and Oliver watches it fearfully in the night, waiting for it to lift itself into the sea when he closes his eyes and abandon them. When they hold each other, it is mechanical, a necessity against the merciless assault of solitude. Sometimes, he thinks of love, if he has ever truly known it, or perhaps if he knows it now, his mindless sacrifice of self its truest approximation. The gulls are his companions; they gather on the rock at the far end of the atoll each day with indifferent precision, perched above the water like the gargoyles of Versailles taunted the proletariat, begged them to inquire their necessity. He cawed at them once, climbed arrogantly up the sharp black basalt and challenged them at point-blank, but they merely looked at him with the same empty coal eyes of the crabs, too consumed in their own isolation to notice him.

Exactly one month from his arrival, the little coral pieces he has arranged in the sand behind the hut tell him, The Subject abruptly tell him it is time to leave. Truthfully, there is nothing abrupt about his statement, it is merely the crest of a dark, unspoken wave whose edges curl and froth until they come crashing down into action. On the morning of their departure, a fresh breeze is blowing from the east, the first such wind he has noticed. He wonders to himself whether they will be swept to Mexico by the equatorial countercurrent, or back towards Pitcairn, towards Julia’s white dress bobbing in the swells, infinitely patient. He knows it does not matter- what he’d wanted in the first place is now not a want but an ultimatum, a fate as perfect as it is terrifying. As they row out past the reef, the crabs massed on the beach are visible for a long time.

'Rounding The Cape in a Strong Gale' Chapter 7

It was early June, the first real turning of summer, the end of that unseasonably wet and dreary spring of 1975. He was 18, and contentment was the murder of the possible, he thought quite suddenly. It was in this newfound, firm resolve that he decided to leave the Tri-State area for good. The staleness of a place half-realized, strung out like a bad coke binge of shopping centers and neat suburban driveways had unwound the methodical gearing of his mind to where everything threatened to come down. He needed to escape all this sewage spilling over from the excess of New York City, and the logical progression moved him westward with the big diesel locomotives and shiny chrome tanker trucks.

The shallow strip of dull black asphalt shot west like a laser, parting from it's earnest singularity not even for mountains or rivers, choosing instead to pierce the organic geometry of nature with man's insistent will. He had been accepted to Brown that fall, to his parents surprise and seemingly unending pride. Given his grades and penchant for telling authority to fuck off, his mother had secretly hoped for the state college, or even a 'work-study' experience as a runner-up. His essay, as arrogant and presumptuous as it was, must have hit some note of either frustration or brilliance with the admissions counselor, because when the oily white envelope arrived in the mailbox and was in fact not a single sheet of deferment, he rode his bike all the way to the park to tell his burnout friends. He shouted to the birds and squirrels and split the dull suburban traffic down the middle, no handlebars and all.

He took this pleasing of his parent’s goals as a great excuse to put off everyone’s expectation of him until the fall, working his ass off in 2 menial jobs that winter and spring such that he might travel the next summer instead of 'academic preparation' as his father so dryly put it. They loved him, nothing was perfunctory or banal about that, but their love was traditional, it had bounds and margins, it seemed, and he needed to escape that for a summer to see if something different, not better, just different, might be found amongst strangers. When he left, he decided that the true 'experience' couldn't start from his doorstep, he had to ease into it, to gradually acclimate to life on the road, so he took a greyhound bus from Long Island across grimy, gridlocked New York and got off at the Delaware Water Gap at 7:00 am, where the humid stench of decaying leaves and morning fog filled the valley with alarming silence. He promptly got a ride with a man whose face looked like one of those high school earth science classroom maps of the lunar surface, deep pockmarks and craters telling a story of industrial woes and unkind weather. He was a man of few words, kind but difficult to pry open. Most importantly, though, he seemed to accept Clark completely, his odd collection of expensive sneakers and preppy jacket carrying a faux-bohemian external frame backpack and a whole pack load of issues.

He crossed sleepy, pastoral Pennsylvania early in the morning, the damp summer mist still hanging in the valleys like suspended thoughts. Soon, the old man's aging pickup was in Ohio and amongst its native landscape, the Rust Belt, its notorious poverty somehow inexpressibly beautiful and raw. The countryside was littered with ghostly apparitions of half-abandoned towns and machines; unchanged since the height of American industry a quarter-century earlier. When he'd informed his parents of his plans to travel to the west coast that summer before college, they agreed in the forced sympathy of a different, more passive generation, where wealth and education converged along the same path, and any postponement of the inevitable middle class boredom was acceptable. So, with this modest approval still fresh in his thoughts, and the sharp pinprick of social stigma faded behind Brown's exclusive brick walls, he had set off.

He thought back to the urban wilderness of his youth in New York with hazy discontent, the kafka-esque groupings of featureless concrete edifices in Brooklyn and Queens where some people seemed to dwell all their lives awaiting nothing. This was not to say he wasn't going to miss the tremendous waves of bright creative light that swept the physically bleak cityscape, which gave it a youthful dimension he wasn't sure he'd find out west, wherever out west ended up being. He recalled a postcard he had received as a child of ten or so, July 1967 he believed it was, which depicted ghostly lime green trees with sinuous branches reaching out over a long, fog-swept crescent of sand, with "Greetings from Santa Cruz" written in gaudy white letters at the top. The yellowed image of the mysterious California coast has fixated him since, and it held a prominent position over his bed in his childhood home, a symbol of lost exotica suspended with scotch tape in a bedroom in Suburban New York.

A high school friend had mentioned with covert excitement this rogue hippy colony that apparently had taken up camp along the verdant green fringes of the U.C Santa Cruz campus, plotting domestic terrorism and writing LSD-fueled manifestos in the fog-shrouded redwoods. Clark was smart enough to see the entitled, righteous hypocrisy of the weathermen and the SDS-er's though, their pale white prophecies of equality hollow and plastic. Nevertheless, he'd gladly take hollow prophecies over the toxic arrogance of the blueblood minions that constituted his life at home, so the arrow of change still shot west to Santa Cruz. Life was so worthwhile, so tangible and green, he had to keep reminding himself, or the nervous anticipation of tomorrow overwhelmed him.

The trip west was fantastic and surreal, framed in fleeting greenish-brown blurs of the fertile heartland, the earnest towns along the Mississippi and the rusting industrial cities scattered around the 2-dimensional expanse of cornrows and swampy lowlands. The man with the lunar face even bought him a cup of coffee, Walt Sanderson he introduced himself as, several hours into Pennsylvania, and they talked harmlessly for a few hours about life, the economy, the inequalities [as if Clark knew anything about this], the demise of American industry. He got a ride late that night with a somewhat surly long-haul trucker headed to Omaha with a load of wicker furniture, whose transport by this burly muscle man amused him slightly. The furniture-carrier only made it to eastern Indiana, however, before informing Clark that he was headed home to see his family for the evening on the way to Nebraska, and he better find another ride.

He considered sleeping in a nearby field, the ‘Huck Finn in the Midwest’ romanticism still misguiding him, but his still-bulging wallet and sheltered upbringing directed him instead to a nearby motel, where he slept with fitful anticipation of tomorrow. The next morning, he walked a half mile or so to a quaint small-town diner, where old people talked in low, gossipy murmurs while steaming coffee and white porcelain plates of warm, amorphous things passed by in the arms of sturdy woman. He ordered a coffee and some eggs at the little rounded tile counter, and, entranced by the starchy aromas filling the little restaurant, added 2 pancakes to his order when a pleasant woman who called him 'honey' came over to refill his coffee. His neighbor was a gruff looking old man whose eyes were incongruously soft and watery, as if tired of looking tough all the time. They chatted a bit about the wet spring, and Clark managed to ad-lib some half-knowledge of crops and the local growing season, which seemed to please the man, a local beet farmer. Hearing of Clark's cross-country travel plans, he mentioned that he had to haul a load of beet sugar to Grand Island, Nebraska that day, and offered him a ride in his old diesel freight truck. Clark promptly paid for the man's breakfast and thanked him warmly. The old man smiled silently and his eyes wandered off into the distant cornfields, as if recalling some adventure of his own distant youth. Clark helped him fill the truck with beet sugar from a massive whitewashed silo on the mans nearby farm, his veins quivering with exertion as he struggled to control the bucking ten inch wide hose suspended from the silo and into the trucks main hold. They set off later than morning into a vast, almost featureless gray plain, the green tendrils of summer belated and hesitant from recent cold and rain.

The monotony was broken somewhere around western Nebraska as he felt the imperceptible sensation of rising; indeed, each little town he passed now proudly announced its elevation, 3000, 4000, 5000, till suddenly he was crossing the high, windswept plains of Wyoming, huge snowcapped peaks dotting the otherwise even horizon. The beet farmer had left him off at Grand Island, a windy and transient-looking place, caught between the no-nonsense Midwest and the unpredictable true west. He waited a few hours on the edge of the highway, tempted to venture into the town to explore, but more focused on glimpsing the mythic Rocky Mountains by sunset, and eventually caught a ride with a small, wiry trucker bound for LA [LA!] who talked animatedly about anything that crossed his mind in a strange upper Midwest inflection.

Soon they had crossed decidedly from the high plains of eastern Wyoming and into the legendary and romanticized American west, and it proved ever more vast and unkempt than Clark had imagined; somehow at odds with mans vain insistence that it should be populated by cows and coal mines, rednecks and cowboys. The barren plains of Wyoming epitomized the potential of the true west, he thought; vast and uncharacterized, hewn of the same fabric that made men risk all their opportunities on one singular landscape. Silvery, crystalline, the interstate still burned west, resolved to escape the dry interior and dive headfirst into the ocean, reckless and abrupt. The long hours on the road strung indecipherably together, and soon the chipped red paint on the wiry mans truck bathed in the giant convex oven of the Great Basin, an ill defined, shimmering expanse between Utah and California.

The journey across it became a phantasmagorical experience as sunset changed to night; the mirages of each passing mountain range a promise of forever. The days with the animate little man, whose name was Wily, blended together, 48 hours stretching into what felt like a year. He was not a typical trucker, this one; he did not seem bound to anyone else's schedule. When he explained after some time that he owned this rusting red behemoth of a truck and worked freelance freight jobs only when his family needed money, Clark felt the instant bond of someone else who was working to live, not living to work.

When he was thirsty, he drank from a voluminous steel Army canteen, cool chrome water in the stubble on his chin. When he was hungry he ate, heaping, steaming, plates of pancakes and potatoes, steak and fries nourishing the simple American ideal. When he was restless, he wrote, strangely nuanced sentences tripping over each other in his little brown notebook, mostly because writing connected the pinpoints of life into a single condensate, a map of the future coalescing out of the haze of the trip. He left Wily and his will-work-for-sustenance red truck early in the morning in Carson City, Nevada, where the baking heat of the June desert was already building up to be intolerable at 8 AM. The next week was unhurried and somewhat unmemorable, a lot of short rides west and then back east, camping on the beautiful but touristy shores of Lake Tahoe, climbing the silent, old growth pine forests of the Sierra foothills till his legs and lungs felt ready to give out, awaiting some unseen impetus to reach the coast. This delay was largely due to his fear of the coast somehow disappointing him, the sinuous green branches of the postcard disguising a western Coney Island.

One morning, he found himself sleeping in the bright, dewy mist along the imposing eastern flank of the Sierra, the tilted block of the North American tectonic plate suspended over the desert. People here believed in god and government, the preachers and the politicians, the endless landscape they resided in merely an aesthetic backdrop for a pastoral life. These days, it seemed everyone was so boring, or perhaps just difficult, because for Clark, picking meaning out of so much dullness and self-loathing was like sieving boulders through a screen; it just wouldn't fit. He was surrounded by that lovely adolescent existential crisis in which the past and future where indistinguishable, and life was so colorful that a single monochromatic blur emerged from the fray.

The waves on Capitola Beach came in long, sweeping sets, their muffled arrival betraying energy carried across the whole Pacific. Their even, intent geometry was at odds with the ragged coastline, and he marveled at the western end of America, as the interstate had long since faded into neon reflections in the rear view mirror of a kid on his way back to school in Santa Cruz from a weekend home in Sacramento. Sleepy, vintage roadways of central California, winding down to the coast, replaced the laser-cut highway. He crossed the fertile, fog-shrouded Central Valley, its productivity a clever guise against nature, and crested the low Coast Ranges, where the Pacific plate eked slowly to the northwest in a barely perceptible struggle. It was 3 in the morning in late June and the cool evening humidity hung like a half-finished thought as he finally met with the mythical Highway 1, gateway to the promised land of Pacifica.

A half-mile to the north, they had coasted down a gentle grass terrace onto the gravelly beach, and, parking the truck behind some high bushes, stripped naked and ran into the fluorescent black mouth of the sea, the longest night of his life sealed with salty ocean water. The young man, Joe, apologized at having to leave his new friend to go home, but Clark brushed off his embarrassed 'sorry' with a broad, appreciative smile, and the two parted into the night. A quarter mile or so to the south, the dull amber light of a bonfire lit the sand, and a half dozen bums and hippies huddled round the ephemeral warmth, a staged protest against a society they didn't want. He was one of them now, he mused, yet he found their thoughtless, entitled disregard for work repulsive, and vowed to make this newfound vagrancy soulful and fulfilling, to himself at least. He was exhausted in the way the physique withers under stress, yet not in the soul, which flourished in this newfound expanse of space and sky, the tangled green edges of nature now firmly settled on him.

The sun rose slowly over the low, mysterious auburn hills to the east. Suddenly, cresting the broad, contemplative tops of the redwoods; was a brilliant looking-glass beside the sea, the ramshackle expanse of Santa Cruz spreading out to the north. He was hungry, and after a brief survey of the tangled blackberry bushes located nothing particularly edible or appealing, decided a stroll up the beach into town was of the utmost importance, to establish grounds for future judgment. The town was pleasant, no; utopian in a sense, built essentially from nothing, the cultural crossroads of a place fresh and growing, sprung from wet moss and sharp rock falling into the sea. He bought food. He wanted to think of money as something transient and unnecessary, yet only when he had it in good supply, the upper class paradox he loathed yet still hid behind; its safe plastic curves insulating him from fear.

Santa Cruz was slim and organic, ragged at the edges but bred from the wealth and easy contentment of the young people who had escaped from somewhere they thought mediocre and settled here. He walked into a downtown coffee shop with the air of feigned indifference; the cool calmness of someone terrified by his or her own potential. He was so human though, so bound by the sun and stars and ocean that the cheap smile of the boy behind the counter still shook his resolve to be neutral. The soles of his feet were now becoming raw and calloused, stubborn from too many sharp pointy things in the wild underbrush, clinging to the smooth quartz sand that squeaked under brisk footsteps. The barista was a young man much like him, interjected into a sometimes contrived, contextually irrelevant paradigm, free will something to be considered and then forgotten. He was a wild thing, he’d decided, a creature of the deep misty coastal valleys, where the sun never quite touched the ground the way it ought to, he thought, cast instead in steely oblique angles.

They made pleasant conversation that soon took on the delicious flavor of possibility, of an interest unspoken and perhaps unrealized, the quick exchange of intellectual flexing and playful one-upmanship stirring the restlessness, fueling the inevitable fuck up, he though detachedly. With this, he smiled and skipped out the rusty green door towards the ocean. The young people continued to gather down on the beach as morning lifted off. Their bright uniforms of feigned inequality were both shabby and purposeful, fraught with too much caring of what others thought, the opaque mud in the little tidal estuary to the north of their camp having colored their thoughts. They took him in as one of their own; indeed, he was, he met the unspoken rules of conduct with exceptional fortitude, the girls all inquisitive and flirting, the boys casually jealous and offhanded.

Their unofficial ringleader, a swaggering, surreal young man who they all called Heavy, who wore filthy cowboy boots and old wrangler jeans a size too small. His lean frame leered forward with intent and determination, balanced on comical, sharp heels, here on the beach in Santa Cruz. He proved earnest and likable though, his rambling stories infused with humble respect for the earth and plenty of self-deprecating humor. Heavy couldn't have been an ounce over a buck fifty, tops, and his skin was taunt yet robust over six feet of muscle and weatherworn freckles, tangled blonde streaks falling down his neck like a runaway train. The girls all liked him, they followed him and asked pressing questions with the urgency of unrequited attention; his answers always thoughtful yet illegible; written in the cryptic hippy language Clark had yet to learn. ‘Heavy had it figured out though man, he had tuned in and tuned out or whatever that fucking Leary guy had said’, Clark thought. He'd found a quiet place on the fringes of things to sit and think and watch the endless conveyor belt of society spin it's little metal wheels, sipping on a beer and drawing fine maps of the future in his head.

Heavy was a sketcher, an improvisational artist who took in the fleeting details of circumstance and made some meaning out of it. Clark, well he was more of a landscape artist, romantic and thorough, processing the myriad subtleties of place long after everyone else had forgotten. A blessing and a curse, he thought, the comprehension of too much and too little; he needed something to take the edge off this reality a bit, and quickly accepted when one of Heavy's girls pulled out a tab of acid for him. Though the contemplative morning fog had scarcely lifted, Clark felt the heat and pressure of a New York disco in the damp, warm trip he was setting off on, and settled down on a dirty blanket on the sand, jesting and wrestling with Caroline and Emily, their defiant style both posed and effortless. Life was so strange and circuitous; full of unseen collisions with people who you wanted to meet from the start; the people who kept you awake at night squirming under the covers in some suburban hellhole.

He thought the California coast was beautiful yet spoiled; exploited by slackers and the debonair, hippies and rednecks, all bent on experiencing the land in such a passive way, their grand beach houses and forest shack's merely appropriating a grandeur that needed no introduction. He always kept his body pointed forward, anticipating, ready to make a good introduction, and secretly despised the way Heavy carried himself with such effortless swagger, content to slouch and have the tribe come to him instead. The tribe, that’s what they were, not a family or a cult or a hippy clan, they had such minimal cohesion it amazed him that they all stayed together so tightly. The girls were well educated and pretty, their free-spirited demeanor a calculated escape from a neat and trim upbringing, caught in the claustrophobic confines of the 'establishment'.

The LSD and caffeine faded like a train whistle across the plains, and soon he caught the strong desire to climb something, anything, the beach had become filthy and gross, the sand itching as it clung to his feet and tan legs. He spotted a craggy gray outcrop a couple hundred yards to the north, and ran at it full stride, scrambling up the slick, mottled stone until suddenly he was the king of the world, or at least Santa Cruz. The bustling town spreads out to the east before him, and to the west, the horizon stretched unbroken to Japan, made of nothing but liquid and current. He heard a rough laugh and some jumbled dialogue below and turned to see Heavy and Meredith pointing and snickering, Meredith reeling backward a few feet and catching herself in the soft sand with each laugh. He quickly scrambled down the precipice and bear hugged the two before dragging them down into the sand, poking and laughing and tickling until they collapsed, gasping for air and breathing unspoken thoughts.

The air rang clear with the sharp call of the gull's and the shallow, heaving waves until Heavy broke the silence with a declaration. "Getting too warm here. How about you and me and Mer go up to my hideout in town and talk about the elements over tea, eh tiger?" Heavy called everyone tiger. He also spoke a lot of 'the elements', which as far as Clark could tell referred to drugs of sex. He was ok with either, as long as he was safe, safe from strangers, the cold, the dark, the wild, no!; he wanted the wild. But to be now was to be safe. The inside of Heavy's shack was warm and cozy. The uneven plywood and scrap walls were covered in tattered blankets, from which hung half-finished paintings, a brushstroke cut off suddenly like a car off a bridge. In one corner a huge mattress, or rather a stack of mattresses lay uneven and inviting, books scattered around their edges with bright little notes coming out of pages haphazardly.

Without warning, Meredith pulled him down onto the bed and demurely pushed him into the tangled mess of blankets and books. Soon, he was breathing shallow, ragged gasps, and slick with warm bare sweat, the three of them intertwined like some round, organic machine, gear's whirring with animal precision. He wanted this greatly and the mental fireworks came in uneven, staccato rhythms; yet somehow his mind still drifted lazily to ideas of the beach and the lime green trees, the ones that yellowed in harsh suburban glare back home. Heavy eased into him with smooth confidence, and he shivered with static joy as his hand came low across his abdomen, rough calluses on perfectly youthful flesh. "That's it tiger, I said god damn!" said Heavy, and Clark smiled nervously, he was his, he was taken, Meredith now sat aside and watched in quiet awe; two men alive and connected. Clearly 4 years at Concord Academy hadn't prepared her for this. When they were done, he laid passively aside a filthy orange beanbag by the stove for a good spell, naked in a thin blanket and conscious of the vulnerability of the present as if for the first time.

Meredith came over and started kissing, tugging at him again, but he declined irritably, then relented and wrapped her blonde pigtails in the shallow bony nest of his lap, the afternoon sun filtering in obliquely over the stove. There always had to be a next, he thought morbidly as the little teapot restlessly heated on the stove; always a next, now never lasted against the neurotic leanings of self. He liked the silent, faithful ocean, the mountains framed in cold solidarity against man’s impudence, how the only thing really familiar was the wild edges of what we'd made. Heavy's shack was Spartan and cool, plugged in yet still off the grid to all the non-believers out there.

"I’d rather be a whisper to stranger that a shout to a lover" Clark thought suddenly, as if speaking the first words after a monastic retreat, vocalizing eons of trapped intent. With that thought suspended like dewy morning ether, he bid Meredith a Heavy farewell for the moment and set off towards town, whistling and leaning back on his heels with a sharp spring in each step. The heavy afternoon air parted in swirling eddies in his wake, and soon he reached the colorful, pastel edges of downtown. He decided that a trip to the art museum [now free on Tuesday's after 5! a bold sign informed] was imperative, like Russia and America making peace or Nixon resigning, it just has to happen, goddamnit.

The bare white adobe walls framed a lot of hippy bullshit, and also some brilliant arrangements, bits of someone's life framed and hung out to dry in the intellectual oven of Santa Cruz. He half stumbled around, drunk on art and sex and youthfulness, until the older woman at the front desk politely informed him it was 6:50 and they would be closing in ten minutes. 10 minutes to the end of the world, he thought, and all he had to show for it were some fucking experiences, "I said god damn!" he whispered, and set off into the buzzing night. The Art museum was superb, yet he left with the keen sensory deprivation that comes with over exposure to everything, audiovisual assault, and his head reeled as if his eyeballs had been peeled back involuntarily. The early evening was the best part of the California summer, he thought contently, as the heavy oppressive sun faded over the green hills, replaced by intermittent whispers from the sea, fog moving over the sidewalk like a lost traveler. Encounters with other people were draining and physical; they demanded he brush up the rough edges of his personality. His last incident with Heavy and Meredith had been beautiful and unforgiving, and it left him wary of attachment. Perhaps it was the naive depth of experience he sought from strangers; either way it did little to elicit anything meaningful.

He impassively started back towards the beach, away from Heavy and Meredith and the claustrophobic inclusion of the cabin. He was filled with warm thoughts of the first night under the bright, the grass green trees in the sand, their crooked branches reaching out of the mildewy postcard. The beach was nature's democracy, the neutral zone between the familiarity of land and the flat, alien landscape of the sea. A martyred, patchwork blanket bobbed in a neat bundle behind his back, the crown on a modest stack of all the earthly possessions he might call his, right now at least. Lying in the itchy, plastic sand, making eyes with the dull cosmic particles in the sky, he realized he didn't have to wake up with any promises or expectations, just the honesty of the moment. His senses were still the master of him though, and he wanted the freedom the Bhagavad-Gita, the Indian holy text, promised: completeness only came when nothing was needed.

Suddenly he despised all the posers, the cretins, the cultural appropriators, they stole and worse, even worse they thought only when it pleased them, as if the experience was a part time gig. "Fuck those cowards who know only action and not consequence", he thought hotly, and with a pinprick of nervous hypocrisy, under the inky black sky. Soon he was crying, tugging at the sewn-together fragments of the blanket; he could be warm and content next to Meredith or some of Heavy's kids in the cabin, another tab of acid skewering his brainwaves; instead he was cold and alone on the wet sand. He didn't want them though, to be a follower, yet leading wasn't a goal either. He just wanted the acceptance of the quiet forest and heaving surf; nothing was even good enough for them. He stayed in Santa Cruz 2 more weeks, actually making a few bucks as a barista at the little coffee place he'd stumbled into the first day [he somehow managed to somehow charm the eccentric hippy matriarch of the shop into hiring him briefly]. At the end of these 2 weeks, the building summer haze and feelings of placeless drifting overwhelmed him, and, withdrawing the last of his cash, hitched north to San Francisco, catching the next flight back to New York and his parents nervous excitement; their boy was not only alive and well, but somehow cured of his dangerous wanderlust.