Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  The sky turns from pink to violet to a gentle, pallid blue. The beach seems to go on for miles, but he can hear the sound of the surf far off in the distance, a gentle, irregular whooshing punctuated by long periods of silence. A gigantic burr is stuck in his foot, and when he pulls it out, it leaves a bleed. The sand is too large and too sharp on this beach, full of larger pieces that cut at the soles, red-bodied ants that bite and leave a sensation of tiny, targeted burning. The sand is full of bushes and thick, thorn-covered plant lobes. Sometime later, there’s still no water, but he finds a road: as he crosses, the drivers on both sides stop to let him go past. It’s grown hot and inconceivably bright: some unseen disturbance ripples and dances in the air at the horizon line, and he pulls his shirt up over his head and lets his beach body breathe in the beach air. He can see the faces turn to follow him as he passes in front of their vehicles, he can feel the engine noise thrumming close to his human skin. Dark, broad-winged seagulls circle overhead.

  When his feet begin to bleed, he goes on his hands and knees. Even the most distant parking lot is only fifteen or twenty minutes from the sea. From his position close to the ground, he can see so much more: dark, glossy beetles the size of bullets hurry around the base of plants, freezing for a moment as his shadow passes over them and blocks out the caress of the sun. Tracks cross the land before him, little ovaloid dents from rabbits and the multi-toed paws of coyotes. Small, teardrop-shaped birds with a computerlike chirp rush back and forth in front of him, and away into a cluster of low, dry bushes. He’s never seen vegetation like this on a beach—except for the strips of coarse, frayed sea-grass on the dunes farthest from the water, nothing much grows where the saline threatens to invade. In the distance, he sees a thousand small, varying shapes that he can’t remember the name of. He experiences surprise and wonder when he catches sight of his hands: the skin is an urgent pink, the palms lacerated, marked by dozens of small, mysterious punctures that he doesn’t remember receiving. The bright spots of blood buried in his palms remind him of berries in the wintertime, or is it berries in the summer?

  It’s only when he notices the strange tree that he understands there’s something very wrong. The tree is ten or twelve feet tall, the size of a full-grown apple tree. The trunk is too narrow, the upper portions covered with an incomprehensible furring of shaggy brown bark. The limbs are almost as thick as the base, and they end in tough, spiky bursts of green. The tree is impossible, he thinks to himself. He can’t imagine a person, a man like himself, coexistent with this tree, standing or crawling next to it, bleeding next to it. It belongs to some other epoch, to gigantic cats with scimitar tusks and dinosaurs grinding the knifelike leaves in their hard mouths. If he is witnessing this tree, something has gone horribly wrong. It’s impossible that he should be standing here alive to witness it, impossible that he should exist at all. Either he exists and the world is an illusion, or the tree does and he is the mistake.

  Suddenly nothing seems familiar at all. The sky too blue, the air too hot, the sand too big, the ground too grainy. The world tears in half, one side all names, the other side all images, with no point of contact between them. The plants smell like soap, and they are rotten with lizards, darting in and out of tough, knotty root systems. He crawls faster, looking right and left and finding more trees, freakish trees with arms uncannily human, reaching up toward the sky as if in celebration. He recognizes nothing, not the round, spiny plants or the endless brown movers jumping and hopping and flitting in and out of hiding, not the big blue thing or the white things beside it, not the small hot thing that hurts his eyes.

  And then, suddenly, he sees something he does recognize: it’s the man from the roadside, the man in the suit. He feels the man is a friend. The man smiles like a friend. He wears a double-breasted charcoal-gray suit of a cotton flannel fabric. The suit is not of the moment, but with its sleek cut it will never quite fall out of style either. He would like to call to the man, say hello or ask him his name, to give his own name or comment on the absurdity of his situation, but his tongue won’t move, everything in his mouth tube is stuck and dry. Then he remembers his hand. He holds his hand up, turns it horizontal, thrusts it forward. The man in the suit has eyes that crinkle kindly at the edges and a look of calm, diligent authority on his face. A handshake will seal their bond. Patrick crawls forward and forward, his hand straight out before him, he crawls toward the embrace of his new friend, a person he has never met but who is as familiar to him as his own forgotten face.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  At the seam of the sea, the only sound is water slapping on shore, steady as a beating heart. Birds don’t call, fish don’t swim, no voice will raise a cry across the surf. Where the wave throws itself frothing against solid ground, it leaves its thin skin on wet rocks. Dense mists drift across the ocean surface and dissolve, but some linger too long: a cloud as monument, writing in vapor that vanishes unread. In many millions of years, monoliths will rise in the inland distances to form pillar forests of fungi as tall as sequoias, forests to cast shadows where no leaves yet grow, forests to have their soft torsos devoured entire by the first exterminating insects. Until then, in the shallows where the heat of the sun warms the surface, proteins come together and break apart and come together and break apart until they don’t. The thick sky lit by bursts of pink and green, the ocean empty to the eye, if there were an eye to see it. Rafts of foam in the unceasing churn. The only rule is: what lingers will linger.

  * * *

  —

  The animals have no eyes and no ears: they hear with their bodies, each presence a touch. Plantlike fronds rooted in clay, waving in noiseless motion. Flowerlike faces, pliant fingers fanned out around an open mouth. Some crawl across the seafloor a centimeter a day, flat and disc-shaped, mistaken for a shadow on the sand. Heaven could be a fiction told about this place: light soaks the water as living tufts stray into the tendrils of medusas, floating in and out of life. Everything is soft here, and death has the roundness of an embrace. A worm-shaped thing crawling the seabed reaches a colorful polyp and begins to pull it into its mouth. A sensation like tearing travels through the blossomlike body, flashing with lingering bursts of fear. The flesh moves, quivers, folds inward as it is pulled into another’s body tube and severed from existence. The pain is a buzzing in the air, not a scream, less like dying and more like coming undone.

  * * *

  —

  As the strange fish struggles onto the coast with fins made for supple water, the sun beats against the unbroken surface of the sea, raising vapor. Heat and light lick at the shifting expanse, the single ocean like the white of an eye, surrounding an island of earth backed like a whale. Stranded in air, the creature lives. It multiplies, lays wet-walled eggs in ephemeral lakes. Its offspring die, but some live long enough to copy themselves again and again on dry ground. Their spines lengthen, their skins grow thick and tough to hide the moisture within. Deep below, the ocean floor is made and remade in hard, liquid fire. At the world’s first end, a rock from elsewhere blots out the sky, casting perpetual twilight. And as the armored bodies collapse onto the earth, they are scavenged by small, furry creatures, swarms too numerous to count. The mammals stand upright, the stone comes to a devilish point. But even this new epoch is only a splinter, lodged between long before and longer after.

  * * *

  —

  It begins in a loose circle, each man or woman about twenty-five feet from another, casting long shadows against the hay. Almost the entire town is there, familiar faces holding unfamiliar instruments: rakes, hatchets, poles or sticks, even frying pans. Sarah Irwin, the town’s best seamstress, stands squinting into the sun with her pitchfork, and William Beale (who owns the bulk of the county’s lettuce land, and organized this brave hunt) waits with shotgun ready to strike the butt against small scared skulls. On a signal from the foreman, they take one step in, then another. Before their feet, the unseen
scurry away into the tall grass, fleeing the advancing line. Their terror a rustling in the golden field. Tighter and tighter the circle grows, until all the town could join hands and sing in unison. Until the circumference breaks and folds in on itself, a collapsing star. The rabbits swarm at the center, a convergence of fear and roiling fur, climbing over one another to stay in place. There’s nowhere for them to run, noosed in the crowd: the town raises their weapons, clouds above gather and shadow the earth. The feverish heat rising up from the parched earth, the levitating odor of metal as rabbit blood breaks from the bodies and leaches out into the dry California air.

  * * *

  —

  Sitting at the edge of Gratitude Creek with a pad of paper on her lap, Nora tries to sketch the shape of the water flow. At each moment, she works to focus on one point in the stream and follow it with her eyes as it zigs and zags away downstream, like a rabbit running in terror from a dog. The task requires that she move quickly, eyes always on the shifting liquid, quick to dart to its next point of contact—the purpose of the exercise she’s given herself is to teach her to dip in and out of flow, experiencing her own uniquely human means of merging with the rushing water. But she’s having trouble concentrating: though her eyes and hands go through the motions, the lesson doesn’t feel real. Beneath it, something else is occupying all the wordless spaces she doesn’t have a name for; after each stroke, she goes back and does it over to make up for being only half involved. The side of her hand is dark with graphite; something prickles the inner corner of her eye. She looks at her pad: it’s like the lines are weeping all at once, running wildly from the top down to the bottom of the page. Her dad is gone in some new way today, and it’s like there’s a smooth, round stone lodged in her chest, cold against her heart. The water she’s watched is already traveling far out of sight, leaving her behind, falling back into the sea, mixing irretrievably, irreversibly. The water, her father, the water, her father, the roar so loud and so constant she can’t hear herself inside her own head.

  * * *

  —

  Cassidy can see tracks leading indelibly into the desert, a trail of footprints arrowing out straight into the vast beyond. A desert walker, full of purpose, headed straight for water that’s not there. She stands outside the house that is not June’s and squints into the bright. The tread is Patrick’s: a heavy, stiff shoe that leaves ridged patterns in the sand. It’s not a good idea to go after him, she knows that much: the simplest thing would be to call the closest Memodyne, in Cathedral City, so they can come and hunt him down in one of their clunky green vans. But now that she’s talked to his wife on the phone, now that she’s learned his daughter’s name, she knows it would make her a Bad Person if she let him just get taken away and warehoused with all the others. Looking for Patrick is the human thing to do. Or does she mean humane? Cassidy grabs a half-full gallon of vintage Poland Spring as she heads out, adding the imprint of her size-six sandals to the unbounded sea of sand. Under the hard, down-slanted desert light, Cassidy Carter barely resembles herself. Her hair is dulled yellow, not gold, and the shadows cut deep across her mouth and under the eyes, making her look like another person, one who wouldn’t be recognized on the street, even in the town where they grew up. The sun a white void, the clouds unmoving above.

  * * *

  —

  On Highway 210, toward Calabasas, Horseshoe adjusts the rearview mirror so that the Arm is visible lying unmoving in the back seat, covering his eyes with his hands. Though he’s mostly vegetative, Horseshoe watches for those fleeting moments when some familiar life force repossesses the slack, stubbly face. Sometimes he’ll speak then, or sit up, or he’ll look out the window with an expression of distrust, causing Horseshoe to patter soothingly as to a dog or child, telling him, “Don’t worry, bro, that’s just a billboard,” or “Do you see the waves crashing into the shore? Don’t they look so cold and fizzy, like a frosty bottle of cola?” As the surf-glitter gleams in the distance, the Arm sits up, blinking into golden light. He looks around at the scratchy upholstery before registering the world scrolling by outside. In Horseshoe’s observation, anecdotal though it is, the Arm always seems to perk up when they’re approaching the sea—maybe it’s the way the setting sun angles down into his eyes. Or some oceanic drive, a return to the water.

  “Why am I in the back?” the Arm says. “It’s my car.”

  “I know, buddy,” Horseshoe answers patiently. “But we agreed I’d make a better driver, because I have a higher level of coherence than you these days. No offense meant by that, simply a description of our comparative realities.”

  “Are we going to the…” He trails off, searching for the word. “The beach?”

  “I wish we were,” says Horseshoe, with a tinge of sadness. “We’re headed westward right now, then we take the highway down along the coast, swing east on Twenty-two before Seal Beach, and then back north until we hit the Two-ten. That’s the loop.”

  “But why drive in a loop?” the Arm asks.

  “Because that’s our plan.” His tone is serene, but his eyes are bleary. “You lose your memory, I lose my memory—the freeway remembers for you, it gives direction. You can look around at everyone else and accelerate to their speed, you don’t have to know what you’re doing, where you’re going, just where the other guy is. You remember what you told me? You said nobody’s ever really been lost on the highway: even if it’s not where you want, you’re going exactly where the highway intends.” He turns around in his seat to look into the face of his friend, thrusts forward a neon-green Nalgene full of warm, sweet orange juice, hand-squeezed. “I used to play you this recording of you explaining the plan to yourself, but hearing your own voice coming through the speakers really freaked you out.”

  The Arm takes the container of juice silently, lost in thought. He unscrews the lid and swallows the sugar-bright nectar. Gently, dreamily, he presses the soft side of his hand to his reddening cheeks. “I think I have a sunburn,” he says. “Have we been doing this for a long time?” Palm trees along the freeway shake in an invisible wind as the seconds rush by.

  “Well,” Horseshoe says, “define ‘long.’ Long in a human time frame, or long in some objective sense? Driving translates reality into the language of the ego. When I drive, anyone I pass is a weak-willed idiot, and anyone who passes me is a narcissistic self-suicider. Driving cuts everything to the size and shape of the self—there’s no way for it to be too long or too short, it just is. Qualitative terms like ‘fast,’ ‘slow,’ ‘oriented,’ ‘lost,’ ‘safe,’ ‘in danger’ make no sense unless you make it clear that you’re using a subjective frame of reference.” He looks back expectantly at his pal, waiting for him to chime in, but he doesn’t. “If you have someplace to be, any perceived delay causes the length to dilate. But we,” he adds with emphasis, “are exactly where we’re supposed to be.”

  “Okay, but. If you told me the number of hours, would I call that number high?”

  “The higher the number gets, the better our plan is working,” says Horseshoe, looking out the window at a cluster of seagulls, reeling in wide, lopsided circles. The flock of birds, some real, some hallucinated, pass in and out of view as they intersect the strange cloud. A third of the sky is filled with its soft, sloped vastness, the shape as simple as a line in a child’s drawing. With its smooth base and its top gently curved, it resembles a whale, and nothing else: the strange cloud leaves no room for interpretation.

  “Just wondering,” Horseshoe says, “but what do you see when you look at that cloud out there? The big one?”

  The Arm squints and leans forward, his breath fogging the glass. “It’s a whale, swimming,” he says with finality.

  “That’s what I think too,” Horseshoe replies.

  They drive in silence, slowing and speeding up. The Arm lies down in the back seat and covers his eyes with his hands. He wants to dream of the girl he met on th
e highway however long ago—it must be weeks now, or years—but all he can remember are the words: girl, blonde, highway, sunshine. In a half-sleep, he wraps his arms around “girl” and holds it close to him, the sound long and smooth with a languid curl. The dream that follows is as dark and deep as a well in the dry inland plains. It is like turning the radio to a station that doesn’t exist: the silence heavy, concrete, containing within it the slightest fuzz of static, which lets you know you’re hearing nothing, rather than not hearing at all. When he wakes up, he blinks his eyes and stares into the sun as the glittering blue of the Pacific surfaces up ahead. The ocean reminds him of something, maybe a girl, maybe a highway. The car takes the exit east, then, many miles later, the exit north. They take the exit again and again and again.

  As the ocean comes into view once more, the Arm has a sudden revelation: “Are we going in a loop?” he exclaims, sitting forward, intent on the road.

  Horseshoe is silent, contemplative. He realizes now that it is the clouds that make it so dark: they cover the sky like a rash, like a burning. He can’t tell anymore where the smoke ends and the sky begins, can’t see the difference between earth and firmament. If he waits too long, he’ll forget the question.

  Finally, he admits it: “I don’t remember anymore.” The turn signal clicks frantically. The horizon line has disappeared. The vanishing point is everywhere. And as night completes its fall, even these distinctions will dissolve into air.