Death, Sleep & the Traveler: Novel (New Directions Books) Read online

  “By all means,” I said, squinting up through the cocoa-colored lenses of my dark glasses, “let’s go to your cabin.”

  She descended. I lifted her from the ladder. Hastily we used our towels, silently we collected our straw slippers, our books, our towels, our lotions, our straw hats for the sun. Her skin was brushed with lightlike pollen, I decided that the two little flesh-colored latex garments in which she swam had come from a cheap and crowded department store. The energy of her preparations, doffing the rubber cap and so forth, caused me to hurry.

  “Not now, Mr. Larzar,” she called to a broad-shouldered man dressed like the rest of the ship’s officers in the somehow disreputable white uniform, and waving, “I have an engagement with Mr. Vanderveenan.” And then, to me: “He wants his trousers pressed.”

  “But you are joking,” I said as we descended to the dark corridor, “only joking.”

  “Whenever I am on a cruise I press the trousers of the ship’s officers. I am not joking at all.”

  “I see,” I answered. “But at least I would not want you to press my trousers.”

  “But of course you are not one of the ship’s officers,” she said in the darkness of the corridor below and laughed, shifted the things in her arms, unhooked the brass hook, stood aside so as to allow me to enter first, then closed the door.

  Blue jeans flung on the bed in the attitude of some invisible female wearer suffering rape, underclothes ravaged from an invisible clothesline and flung about the room, a second two-piece bathing costume exactly like the first but hanging from one of the ringbolts loose and protruding from the porthole, and cosmetics and pieces of crumpled tissue and a single stocking that might have fit the small shape of her naked leg, and magazines and sheets of writing paper and mismatched pieces of underclothing—in a glance I saw that the context in which her personal trimness nested, so to speak, was extreme girlish chaos of which she herself was apparently unaware.

  “You may sit on the bed,” she said, noting the antique typewriter in the upholstered chair, and without hesitation dropping towel and robe and slippers and so forth into the plump impersonal chair with the old machine. “Just clear a place for yourself. It doesn’t matter if you’re a little wet. Do you like my cabin? Is it as nice as yours?”

  “Tell me,” I said then, deliberately and gently, “why are we here?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said, kneeling on the unmade bed where I was propped, “but I like this cabin because the porthole opens directly in the side of the ship. Whenever I wish to, I simply kneel on my bed and lean in my open porthole and smell the night or watch the sunlight in the waves. Do you see?”

  While talking she had knelt on a pillow and pushed wide open the porthole and now was leaning out head and shoulders with sunlight falling on her little narrow back and tension concentrated in her nearly naked buttocks made firm by the bending of her legs.

  “That’s a very agreeable demonstration,” I said, “but for me it produces a certain anxiety.”

  “Why is that?” she asked, drawing in her head from the wind, the spray, “are you afraid I’ll fall?”

  “You are not very large, whereas in comparison to you the porthole is big and round. So I do not like you to lean out of it. My feelings are simple.”

  She knelt beside me, she studied my eyes, with both hands she better situated one of her small breasts in the little flesh-colored latex halter, the sun was a bright ball of light on the opposite wall.

  “Mr. Vanderveenan,” she said, “you are an old maid. I would not have believed it.”

  “I am not a man generally teased by women,” I said slowly, filling the sentence with the white cadences of my native speech, and extending my hand which for a moment she lightly held, “and I do not enjoy the prospect of open portholes.”

  She was sitting on her heels, her knees were spread, I could see the outline of a label sewn inside her bikini pants as well as a little pubic darkness protruding like natural lace at the edges of the crotch. The sensation of her two hands on my extended hand was light and natural.

  “Very well,” she said, “I don’t wish to cause you anxiety.”

  She smiled, I noted just below her navel a small scar in the nasty shape of a fishhook, for a moment she raised my hand and touched it with her two dry lips. And then she drew back from me, got off the bed, rummaged about in an open drawer from which whole fistfuls of cheap underthings had already been half pulled, as if by some aggressive fetishist, until she found what she wanted and rose from where she had squatted, displaying to best advantage the roundness and symmetry of her little backside, and returned to me with the battered oblong ease clutched to her chest. I rolled up from my slouching position. I sat on the edge of the bed. She sat beside me with the ease on her knees and her shining skin smelling of talcum powder.

  “So,” I said as she opened the ease, “so you play the flute.”

  She nodded, she smiled into the ease at the sections of the silver instrument tarnished, I saw, with the myriad sentimental stains of a poor childhood focused at least in part on music. Then slowly and expertly she began to fit together the sections of the aged instrument which already reminded me of a silver snake suffering paralysis. It could not have been more clear to me that the poverty of her childhood had been forced to make way, finally, for the flute, as if the musical instrument, like a fancy name, would prove to be one of the avenues away from broken fences and a poor home. It was typical, it seemed to me, and the assembled anomalous instrument was proportionately much longer than I had thought.

  “But this is a surprise,” I said. “I did not know you were musical. Did you learn as a child?”

  She nodded, she tapped the little metallic keys, she arranged her arms and elbows in the contorted position all flutists assume when they commence to play. She tested the broad silver lip of the flute against her own small lip that was smooth and dry.

  “I learned as a girl,’ she said, without lowering the old and battered flute from her childish mouth. “I was one of those fortunate schoolgirls to play in the local orchestra.” “And since that time,’ I said, and laughed, “you have continued to play your flute. It’s a surprising accomplishment. It’s quite wonderful.”

  “I think it is. And I want to play for you right now.”

  “By all means,” I exclaimed, filling my words with whitewash and ducks and potato soup, “a little concert. Excellent, excellent.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. But you’ll see that my flute playing is not what you expect.”

  “Come, come, I’m listening,” I said, laughing and attempting to strike the condescension from my heavy voice. “Let me hear what you can do with your flute.”

  “Very well,” she answered then. “But it may not be as easy as you think. You see, I play in the nude.”

  And there in the little pathetic chaotic stateroom she did just that. With the door locked and the porthole wide to the menacing trident of the god of holidays, and standing within easy reach of my two clasped hands, slowly she removed her latex halter, stripped down the little latex bikini bottom, seated herself cross-legged on the end of the bed, picked up the instrument, puckered her lips, stared directly at me with soft eyes, and began to play. The first several notes moved me and surprised me even more than her nudity, since the notes were deep prolongd contralto notes, sustained with a throaty power and intention that suggested some mournful Pan rather than a small and ordinary young woman on a pleasure cruise.

  “Forgive my banter,” I whispered, allowing myself to slouch back again on the unmade bed and listen and to stare into the eyes of the naked flutist. “Your talent is serious.”

  From lonely little girl among stupid old men lewdly picking their strings and blowing their dented horns, from school orchestra composed of indifferent unskilled children, from days of practicing in an empty room smelling of beer and damp plaster, from all that to nudity and self-confidence and the ability to set into motion sinuous low notes loud enough and pla
intive enough to calm the waves. And I had expected none of it, none of it. So I lay there propped on a heavy elbow. I was sexually aroused in the depths of my damp swimming trunks as I had not been since long before the disappearance of the ship’s home port, and yet at the same time I was thoroughly absorbed in the shocking contralto sounds and the body bared as if for the music itself. I listened, I heard the reedy undulations, I noted the hair like a little dense furry tongue in the fork of her canted thighs, I saw the flickering of the little pallid scar and realized that she was taking no breaths, that the sound of the flute was continuous.

  “Please,” I said in a low voice, and momentarily allowing my free hand to cup the mound of my sex, “please do not stop.”

  Her mouth was wet, her eyes were on mine constantly, except when occasionally she glanced out of the porthole or at the heavy helpless grip of my hand that was now the fulcrum on which I was minutely rocking, though still on my side. And throughout this improbable experience, simultaneously gift and ordeal, she was apparently unaware of the incongruity of all she was giving me behind the locked and louvered door.

  And then in mid-phrase she stopped. She removed the flute several inches from her small chafed reddened mouth. Wet armpits, steady eyes, no smile, small breasts never exactly motionless, old flute held calmly in a horizontal silver line, the song quite gone, thus she abruptly stopped her performance and spoke to me as if nothing at all had happened.

  “I’d like to relieve you now quickly,” she said. “And will you spend the night here in my cabin?”

  Then she moved, and in the silence of the disheveled cabin I could hear that all the low notes of the silver flute were still making their serpentine way beyond the porthole and in the transitory wastes of sea and sky.

  I was standing in the bow with my feet apart, my hands gripping the wet iron, my collar open and tie loose, my shape defined by the steady pressure of the invisible wind. It was dawn, the sun was bright, my face was wet, the sharp prow was rising and falling steeply, slowly, as if in some slow-motion field of monstrous magnetism. I heard what sounded like a city of distant voices and smelled the faint smells of a landfall, though on the horizon there was no indication whatsoever of ship, shore, island, volcanic cone. Directly beneath my spread feet I felt the rumble of the anchor chain. I heard that terrible noise distinctly and felt the black chains descending link by mammoth link as if we were going to drop both anchors and remain forever in the midst of that natural desolation known only to birds.

  But we continued to move up and down and forward in the dawn sea. I composed myself and took deep breaths. I thought of my young friend. And on we sailed.

  In the earlier stages of my voyage I contracted a rash. At first nothing more than a constellation of a few blemishes or pimples circling the navel, slowly it reproduced itself on the front of my belly until, months later, it had grown into a thick circular bed of inflammation surrounding the navel like a graft made from the livid flesh of ripe strawberries. No doubt my skin played host to the first spores while from beneath bare arms I watched the small figure of the young woman sitting alone at the pool. The first seed must have lodged in my eye. Or was the rash sexual in nature and intended to affect the organs of the loins, and had it somehow become displaced instead to my receptive belly? What began as a pimple or two has flowered into a large circular field with the navel as the undamaged hub. Soon it will become a constant and faintly breathing girdle of wet contagion.

  The two small naked figures were crawling and squirming in the palm of my hand. Though the photograph was in fact safely concealed in my jacket pocket, still the two white figures were clearly there, small and fiercely wriggling on the smooth glossy skin of the palm of my right hand, as if the pink living skin of my palm had become a little bed of photographic emulsion developed and hardened and translucent.

  But when I reminded myself of the similar plight of Macbeth’s poor queen, and then rubbed the offending palm against the fruit of my own genitalia, the little image of the old-fashioned naked lovers faded and fled completely away for once and for all.

  Her cabin door was wide. She was at her ironing. Wearing only her frayed tight denim pants so that her feet and torso were quite bare, thus she stood with her back to me and her hair pinned up and her iron traveling down a crease in the white pants. I hardly paused but it was enough for me to see the finger marks down the length of her spine, the shadows moving at the edges of the little shoulder blades and in the nape of her neck, the red teeth marks where the elastic band of her underpants had been, the new skin of the upper buttocks shining against the tightness of the leather belt, the fleeting impression of one small naked breast flung partially into view in the exertion of her girlish labor. And my accidental passing was enough to reveal to me that the large and hairy shank of the man stretched out on her unmade bed and reading, waiting for the return of his trousers with his face concealed behind an open magazine and one brutal and hairy leg raised and bent at the knee, belonged not at all to the wireless operator as I had expected but instead to some other ship’s officer newly favored with my young friend’s generosity.

  I forced myself to continue on to the ship’s pool where immediately I dove to the bottom and competed for breath, for time, for anguish, for peace, with the other shadows I found lurking there.

  In my dream the night is as pure and dark as a blackened negative, and yet I am well aware of the field at the edge of which I stand and of the chatcau which is somehow silhouetted on the opposite side of the field, though the horizon itself is not visible. I stand there, realizing that nothing whatsoever exists in the world except the night, the stone chateau, the waiting field, myself. The chateau and field are thick with significance, though I have seen neither in my past life.

  As I cross the field, taking slow careful steps but determined to reach the ominous yet familiar stone building at any cost, I become aware that the entire sloping field has been blanketed with enormous soft round pads of cow manure. They are round as flagstones, thick as the width of a man’s hand on edge, spongy within and thickly encrusted without, soft and resilient and yet able to bear the full weight of a heavy man, though there is always the possibility of piercing the crust and sinking into the slime within. I am picking my way with care and yet also treading on the uncertain field with excitement because no one has ever crossed this field before. But suddenly I know that the shapes lying like dark and spongy land mines beneath my feet are composed not of cow dung, as I had thought, but of congealed blood. With awe and a certain elation I realize that I am walking across a field of blood. And I know too that though I am proceeding toward the chateau, I am also walking somehow backward in time.

  I step carefully. I do not want to pierce the crusts and sink to my ankles in coagulated blood, and yet it is necessary to walk across the field, and I do so with pleasure as well as fear. The pads of blood have been arranged on the field’s dark acreage with their edges touching, symmetrically, and to me they seem on the one hand fresh and moist and on the other old and long-ripened like cheese or manure.

  Between the far edge of the field and the dark stone facing of the baronial hall there is a ditch. I am positive that the ditch is there and yet I fail to see it and spend no energy crossing it, though I am conscious that I have in fact passed beyond the empty ditch in the middle of the unchanging night.

  I approach the cold chateau from the side, moving as if by perfect instinct not to the main gate but to another and smaller entrance in the thick side wall. I know where I am going, I am in possession of myself, and yet I know too that I have no history, no recollection of the past, so that my life, which is specific, depends only on the field, the ditch, the night, and what I am about to experience within the chateau. I know the way. There is nothing else.

  The chateau is empty. I enter as if by plan, and I find that the great stone hall consists only of a single vast room that is empty, dusty, cold, from floor to roof windowless and desolate except for one small structure standin
g altarlike and frightening in the center of the stone floor. I approach, I am breathing deeply. Erect and with hands at my sides I face the sacred structure which is twice my height and circular at the base and pointed on top—like some prehistoric tribal tent—and covered entirely with dry and hairless animal skins.

  The skins are hard, scaly, wrinkled, and completely without hair. The light in the vast stone room is gray, the air is cold, the construction of dead skins is familiar and unfamiliar as well. Slowly and conscious only of myself as neutral and of the action as charged, slowly I descend to my knees, insert my fingers in the scam where two large bottom skins are joined, and slowly pull them apart until the darkness will accommodate my entry on all fours. So I, a man fully grown and yet also reduced to my simple and now curiously unemotional intention, on all fours work my way head and shoulders and hips and heavy legs inside the second structure where in a meaningless crouch I survey the desolation of my own beginning. The circular and conical space inside the dead skins contains nothing at all except a dusty floor and a small iron hearth partially heaped with ashes which are both dry and moist. The fire is gone, the ashes have stood so long that here and there they have become crystalline, I see a few bones and feathers embedded like Norse relics in the dead ashes. Now I realize that I had hoped for more, had expected more, and yet in the midst of such silence and immobility I also realize that my disappointment is nothing compared with the journey I have just taken and the barren actuality I have at last discovered.