“Most little people think the world owes them something because they’re little. Most little people got this idea they should be treated special. Well, the world doesn’t owe us anything. God gave us a rough way to go, that’s all.”
Soon the words blur on the page. Under the flat, aqua glow, the wound in my palm seems smaller but denser, etched like a biological Rosetta Stone. The itch, though, grows daily. It grows like the plants grow. It spreads into the marrow of my bones and I can feel it infiltrating whatever part of me functions as a soul.
That night I dream that we are all “pure energy,” like on those old future-imperfect cardboard-and-glue space journey episodes where the budget demanded pure energy as a substitute for makeup and genuine costumes. Just golden spheres of light communing together, mind to mind, soul to soul. A world without prejudice because we have, none of us, a body that can lie to the world about our identity.
VII
The day my parents left me for the sea, the winter sky gleamed bone-white against the gray-blue water.
The cold chaffed my fingers and dried them out. My father took off one of his calfskin gloves so my hand could touch his, still sweaty from the glove. His weight, solid and warm, anchored me against the wind as we walked down to the pier and the ship. Above the ship’s masts, frigate birds with throbbing red throats let the wind buffet them until they no longer seemed to fly, but to sit, stationary, in the air.
My mother walked beside me as well, holding her hat tightly to her head. The hem of her sheepskin coat swished against my jacket. A curiously fresh, clean smell, like mint or vanilla, followed her and when I breathed it in, the cold retreated for a little while.
“It won’t be for long,” my father said, his voice descending to me through layers of cold and wind.
I shivered, but squeezed his hand. “I know.”
“Good. Be brave.”
“I will.”
Then my mother said, “We love you. We love you and wish you could come with us. But it’s a long journey and a hard one and no place for a little boy.”
My mother leaned down and kissed me, a flare of cold against my cheek. My father knelt, held both my hands, and looked me up and down with his flinty gray eyes. He hugged me against him so I was lost in his windbreaker and his chest. I could feel him trembling just as I was trembling.
“I’m scared,” I said.
“Don’t be. We’ll be back soon. We’ll come back for you. I promise.”
They never did. I watched them board the ship, a smile frozen to my face. It seems as though I waited so long on the pier, watching the huge sails catch the wind as the ship slid off into the wavery horizon, that snowflakes gathered on my eyes and my clothes, the cold air biting into my shoulder blades.
I do not remember who took me from that place, nor how long I really stood there, nor even if this represents a true memory, but I hold onto it with all my strength.
Later, when I found out my parents had died at sea, when I understood what that meant, I sought out the farthest place from the sea and I settled here.
VIII
At the office, I have so much work to do that I am able to forget my palm. I stare for long minutes at the sentence I have written on my notepad:
David was leaving the flesh.
What does it mean?
I throw away the sentence, but it lingers in my mind and distracts me from my other work. Finally, I break through with a sentence describing a woman’s grief that her boyfriend has left her and she is growing old:
She sobs like the endless rain of late winter, without passion or the hope of relief, just a slow drone of tears.
As I write it, I begin to cry: wrenching sobs that make my throat ache and my eyes sting. My fellow workers glance at me, shrug, and continue at their work. But I am not crying because the sentence is too perfect. I am crying because I have encapsulated something that should not be encapsulated in a sentence. How can my client want me to write this?
IX
Emily visits me at lunchtime. She visits me often during the day, but our nights have been crisscrossed, sometimes on purpose, I feel.
We go to the same park and now we feel out of place, in the minority. Everywhere I look dwarfs walk to lunch, drive cars, mend benches. All of them like individual palm prints, each one so unique that next to them Emily appears plain.
“Something has happened to you.” She looks into my eyes as she says this and I read a certain vulnerability into her words.
“Something has happened to me. I have a wound in my palm.”
“It’s not the wound. It’s the plants out of control. It’s the sex. It’s everything. You know it as well as me.”
Emily is always right, on the mark, in the money. I am beginning to tire of such perfection. I feel a part of me break inside.
“You don’t understand,” I say.
“I understand that you cannot handle responsibility. I understand that you are having problems with this relationship.”
“I’ll talk to you later,” I say and I leave her, speechless, on the bench.
X
After lunch, I think I know where my center lies: it lies in the sentence I must create for David Jones. It is in the sentence and in me. But I don’t want to write anything perfect. I don’t want to. I want to work without a net. I want to write rough, with emotion that stings, the words themselves dangling off into an abyss. I want to find my way back to the sea with the darkness coming down and the briny scent in my nostrils, before I knew my parents were dead. Before I was born.
David Jones found his way. If a person drinks too much alcohol, the body forces the stomach to vomit the alcohol before it can reach a lethal level. Jones never vomited. As he slept, the alcohol seeped into his bloodstream and killed him.
My shaking fingers want to perform ridiculous pratfalls, rolling over in complex loop-the-loops and cul-de-sacs of language. Or suicide sentences, mouthing sentiments from the almost dead to the definitely dead. Instead, I write:
From birth, David was learning ways to leave the flesh.
It is nothing close to layered prose. It has no subtlety to it. But now I can smell the slapping waves of the sea and the alluring stench of passionflower fruit.
Before I leave for my apartment, Emily calls me. I do not take the call. I am too busy wondering when my parents knew they might die, and if they thought of me as the wind and the water conspired to take them. I wish I had been with them, had gone down with them, in their arms, with the water in our mouths like ambrosia.