I won't lie. I thought about walking down those stairs then, down to the sands of End Beach. I could see the ocean lapping at the shore like a cat's tongue at a dish. I could see the blood from the day's sacrifices running into its mouth.
Someone that day had given up a hand, and learned to paint with the other. Someone else had written an apology for everything in the sand and let people fuck on it. Another person had built a tower of unsold canvases, and that was the bonfire that night, a pile of portraits of her lovers. I heard a smaller barter carrying up from the beach, two boys bargaining for dinner, one boy offering another his only memory of his grandmother singing, in exchange for a cheese sandwich.
I stayed up on the top of the cliff instead. After a while, I went back into your house and tried to forget you. If I was giving you up, if the memory of you was my sacrifice, I'm not sure how much of me would be left on the other side. You flooded through me and mixed with my blood, and I don't know what of me is mine and what is yours.
Now it's winter, and End Beach is empty. No one's trying to sell their precious things down there anymore. I turn the bracelets on my wrists, and turn them again. Wherever you are, I wonder if you remember the first night we spent together, and if you knew that I almost let myself kill you. You were bandaging my wounds, and I was sitting on the top of your toilet, looking at you. I could see the tears in your eyes, and I almost ran into them, trying to save myself from falling in love with a human again. I could have poured out of you, torrented, flooded you from the inside out until you drowned in a teacup's worth of salt water.
But I didn't want to kill you. It'd been four hundred years since I'd stood in a courtroom, dripping, and let a town convict my lover of loving me.
“What was I to do,” he said, pleading. “She came up out of the stream, naked and wet, and she said be with me. What would you do, Sven Andersson? And you?”
“Not what you did, Peder Jönsson,” said Sven Andersson, but he was staring at me, salivating. Finally they decided on a hanging, and my love was strung up from a gallows with me unable to do anything about it. I had no sway over wood, no sway over rope. I threw myself down a well and stayed at the bottom, eating insects, holding my breath, waiting for another century to come and comfort me.
I was frightened of you. You'd torn me from my tank. But I let you bandage me, where I was bleeding, and when you told me you didn't have to know everything, I told you I did. When you said you had no secrets, I laughed at you. When you said you were simple, I laughed some more.
“No one simple would have seen me,” I said.
But you didn't tell me everything.
I make a decision at last. I've already lost you, and you're the best thing I ever lost. It's been long enough that I've read all your books and touched all your pictures. I've drunk the last of the tea you left.
“It's part of the thing,” you said, and so I go to your basement and get the chains. There aren't any special costumes, I don't think, or at least you never said there were. Just the bracelets. I thread the chains through the loops on the rock, and then through the fish on my wrists. I stretch on my back, looking up at snow falling, and then I lock the locks.
“It's silly,” you said. “Come down to End Beach with me,” you said, but I didn't. Maybe if I had I could have kept whatever happened from happening. You got swept away, or swept yourself away. You let the ocean take you. I don't think you're riding a bus somewhere, or under London on the tube. I don't think you've flown across the ocean and are hiding from me in New York City. I think you're gone.
I chain myself to the rock hanging over the shore, and perch there until I'm covered in ice. I hold my breath, waiting for another season to come, spring or the middle of summer, with light like blood and every green plant drinking girls like me up from the ground. I think about everyone I ever tugged down through a river, every diver I ever touched gently underwater, until they couldn't do anything but drown for me.
Through the ice on my eyelashes, I can see the ocean surging, the dark spinning and stirring, an abyss below the surface of the world.
At dawn, I watch the monster rise up out of the sea, its body a blackness the size of a lake. It's too large to see it all at once, and so I don't. Ink spilled in a glass of water, shifting and spreading, black bleeding into blue, edgeless. I watch the monster surge up over the sand and look at me, eyes gleaming, claws on the cliff face.
I am not afraid of monsters. I've never been afraid of monsters. I'm afraid of love. Love is offering your body up to some god other than the one you were taught to worship.
I look into the monster's eyes. It's no monster I know, no monster in a category I've seen before. There are the old monsters that tore ships from the ocean, the ones that leapt from caves, the ones that waited underground for heroes. There are the monsters that trampled mountain ranges, the ones that ate all the cattle, and then all the children. There are the monsters of the air, the ones that fly, the ones that sing songs so beautiful every city sleeps. This is a monster I've never met, a monster of the end.
I look at it and see not just sadness, but fury.
“Are you the one who does the sweeping out to sea?” I shout. “Are you the one who takes the sacrifices? Did you take him away? I want him back.”
“He's not everything,” said your neighbor. “I should know. He eats women. You don't know what I've seen. I've lived opposite him for years. It's not your fault you fell for him. I fell for him too.”
But the monster just looks at me, eyes shining, and I want to turn to water and become its tears. Love is what you see coming and don't run from. Love is the swift rising darkness darker than the dark. Love is the creature you covet, the wound you want.
The monster looks at me and says nothing, and of course, I know you. I'd know you anywhere.
I move my fingers, trying to get between you and your scales, and I get one nail under your skin. My heart is still made of hammers. I drive it in deeper, puncturing you until I smell your blood.
You open your jaws and pluck me from the rock, the chains that hold me there breaking. Down below us, the coastline erodes and End Beach itself is swept out to sea.
I met you, love of mine, at the end of centuries spent alone. My body has been every decorative lily pool in Japan, and every waterfall in Africa. My body's been the Amazon, full of snakes, thigh-deep wading for explorers, and the Mississippi and her floodplains, spilling out across miles, looping and twisting to surprise the houses. My body was the last moments of the Aral Sea, the final drops drunk by a camel and carried away. When you found me in that fish tank, I was too lonely to travel.
So I dissolve onto your tongue. I rush through your tears and pour myself beneath your skin. Water will always find its level.
In the sea off End Beach, we swim out, our flesh one thing and then two again, you naked and me naked too. Maybe every love affair is the sacrifice that saves the city. Behind us, I see buildings not falling.
The rocks are black and sharp, and the teeth of dead monsters are all around us. Some of them starved to death, and others were killed by heroes. Some of them swallowed ships in starvation. Some of them, maybe, got harpooned by their lovers. You taste like tea, like salt, like ice.
“Do you eat all the artists?” I ask you, “Is that festival for you?” and you look at me and tell me you have to have some secrets.
“Do you drink all the drowned?” you ask me, and I tell you I have to have some secrets too.
No one knows the end of this. Not me. I don't know if I'll end up in a gutter, or in a teacup again, in a champagne glass, in an ice cube in someone's freezer, trying to wait for forever to pass.
“This is simple,” I say.
“Nothing's simple,” you tell me.
A long time ago, I used to know a fisherman. We met when I was his fish, and he called me up out of the water to grant him wishes. I told him nothing you wish for is what you think it's going to be, that even if you wish for
riches, you'll end up buried in coins, suffocating on metal. He asked for love, and I told him that love will kill you.
“I don't mind dying,” he said.
So I gave him love. Later, I rolled his body in a sail and then into the ocean, with rocks at his feet. I watched him drop through the water, and at the bottom, I watched him eaten by the little creatures down there. When all his bones were bare, I made him into a house, and lived inside him for a while. His love gave me shelter beneath the waves, and my love gave him the last thing he wanted. I am not sorry.
I turn my head to look at you, and you're all around me, this giant span of fins and tail, teeth and eyes.
“Swim,” I say, and I become the ocean.
The Scavenger's Nursery
A boy finds a baby in the garbage. It's hotter this summer than it was the summer before. Everyone in the city is trying to get to the country, because in the city, the rat population is exploding. Rats themselves are exploding, though not of their own volition. Sometimes rats swallow explosives. Sometimes explosives are wrapped in little bobbles of food.
The boy, Danilo, has been doing some work in this regard. Rats are a renewable resource. Today, he's tracking a big rat up the mountain. Beneath his sandals is a hill of plastic and peelings, rubber, blank screens, glass formerly glowing, now reflecting nothing but sun. He looks through red knock-off sunglasses labeled GUCCY. His feet skid on something. Something across the hillock ignites, and he looks suspiciously at the area, judging distance. Fine. No wind today.
This mountain can be seen from space. It has a name, and on maps, it's part of the topography. It's only when you get closer that you can see it for an assemblage, invented earth. Secretly, the boy calls the mountain after himself: Danilo's Bundók, as though he's the first explorer to reach its summit. Beneath Danilo's feet, the mountain shudders. A quiver, a coursing, and garbage slides.
In the town below, roofs clang with tin cans, and automobile parts thunder down. It's a storm of junk.
As the avalanche subsides, Danilo becomes aware of something at his feet, pushing out from the layers of refuse. The rat, he thinks, ready for it. It's long as his forearm. He nearly spears it, a wet black thing, its skin shining, blurry, dazzled eyes opening. But it isn't a rat. It is an animal, its flesh hard and soft at once, like a banana bound in iron.
He'll take it home, he thinks, and make it a pet. He's owned other pets, some friendly, some feral. There's a chicken in his history, smut-feathered, beak shiny and perfect, and when he owned that chicken, he stroked it until he lost custody and it became a soup. This pet won't be eaten. There's nothing about it that looks edible.
The thing blinks, showing pale yellow rubbery eyelids, somewhat transparent, and Danilo reaches out and picks it up. It shifts, comforting itself against his fingers, and he thinks Baby?
Danilo once held his sister over his shoulder, her silken cheek resting against his neck, her fuzz of hair brushing his face, and so he tries to hold the thing using the same method. He jogs it a bit, and coos, shifting his sack to the other shoulder. Below him, metal roofing vibrates in the sun, hot and glittering, but where he is, far above the town, he's king of the bundók.
He considers his new pet. It's not a monkey, though it has a tail, and grasping fingers. It has a feathery black fringe around its neck, and small rough horns made of something very solid. No teeth, but a clamping mouth, the sort of mouth that would cause a bruise were it allowed to bite. It is very ugly.
Danilo knows he hasn't seen everything. He hasn't seen the stars, though he knows they exist, or once did. On the mountain, he found a tourist magazine with a yellow jacket, and photos of places all around the world, including the bottom of the sea, where a glowing jellyfish orbited in the dark, like a balloon caught in a current, floating higher and higher until the clouds took their color.
Antennae tendril against Danilo's face, radio, television, insect, whisker, he can't tell, but they belong to the baby. The little thing stares up at him, and he feels powerful. He might put the baby down and leave it here in the sun, or he might take it and save it. It's his choice.
It makes a sound, a gurgling crow. Then it begins to cry. Danilo gives it a bit of his T-shirt to suckle at, and it clamps its mouth down on that, nursing at the dirty cotton, smacking. He considers for a moment, and then wraps the baby in the rest of his shirt, constructing a small sling. He makes his way, bare-chested, down the mountain toward home.
As Danilo descends, the mountain pulsates. He looks around, wondering if there's a relief organization bulldozer bringing dirt to cover over some particular toxicity, but shortly, the quivering stops, and he continues, the baby sleeping against his chest.
The last of the river dolphins. The last of the poisonous frogs. The last of the polar bears. The last of the Siberian tigers. The last of the dodos, gone two centuries now. The first of these.
A small boat moves like a hungover partygoer in Times Square on New Year's Day. Nets stretch out to take samples from the patch — bones and tangles. It's a glittering gyre, colorful bits of wrapping, and metal-lined sacks.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine, somebody's music shouts from the cabin, and somebody else yells “Fuck off, Jack. That song's banned from this boat and you know it.”
“I miss the nineties,” says the somebody, unrepentant.
On deck, Reya Barr sifts fingernails through her fingers. A container of decorated plastic press-ons fell from a Chinese ship six months ago, and here they are, as predicted. She's mapped their theoretical progress on a current chart, but no one ever knows what the ocean will do, not really. She reads the pale pink ovals, one letter at a time. B-R-I-D-E. As though a woman might need to look down midway through her wedding and read her fingertips to tell herself who she is. She puts one on each finger, and crimps her fingers into claws. It's for the money, this cruise. Her student loans are due. BRIDE. Her other hand's all glitter lightning and storm clouds.
This is a particular kind of expedition, a sponsored sail though a plastic sea. The goal is to confirm that the garbage patch is growing, and also to confirm that it's drifting toward Hawaii. Everyone already knows this, but this is science; one hypothesis requires confirmation before another can be made. The scientists are mapping the boundaries of the mass. Garbage flows over the water like something fluid, but it's also distinct, each piece something that can be captured in a net, examined.
She imagines garbage crossing thousands of miles, drawn to this place. A kind of magnetic desire, drawing like to like. The world is collapsing under plastic ducks. Hula hoops. Water bottles. Were she plastic and thrown into a gutter, Reya might be drawn here herself. She'd sail across the sea, until she arrived in this civilization of crumple.
She leans far out over the rail, squinting at something shiny moving in the garbage. Maybe a gull or a trapped fish. There's an ancient smell out here — rot, salt, and darkness.
There's a kind of weird beauty in the reinvention of an ocean. It's not as though things have never changed before. It isn't as though what she floats on wasn't once ice. And the land she walks on, when she's at home? That land was covered with ocean, the sand full of bones of the sea.
She thinks about that when she feels like pretending that none of this is really going to have repercussions. There was oil geysering up in the Gulf of Mexico; the oil was in the news for a while, and then mysteriously gone, as though some giant mouth beneath the ocean sucked it away. It isn't lost. That much
oil doesn't get lost. But the world is content to believe that water is big enough to win.
Reya has vials full of water thickened with photodegraded plastic, a slurry of children's toys and dildoes, of baggies, shiny leggings, medical tubing and plankton, and all of it looks like the same thing. It looks like water.
Sometimes she dreams of dropping to the bottom, where none of the world has yet gotten, but even the deepest vents are full of mermaid tears and microplastic. The arteries of the earth are clogged with hotel room keys.
The world's ending, yeah. It's begun to bore her, the sort of horror that's dull when considered too deeply from the deck of a research boat out in the middle of the Pacific.
The thing in the garbage patch is still moving. She watches it idly. There was a storm last night, and today the mass has rolled over. New things are visible, bodies of gulls and fish skeletons, dead jellyfish wrapping about indecipherable gleam. She aims her camera at the thing, zooming in on its motion and filming it. She'll post it to the vessel blog. Look at this, expedition donors, this bit of plastic that looks like an animal. Look at this un-thing that looks like life.
The un-thing looks back at her.
“What,” she says, quietly, and then her voice rises. “What the hell is that?”
It's not a seal. It's not a shark. It's not anything like anything.
A cloud drapes itself over Mexico City, yellow with gasoline and cigarettes and souls. It hangs there like something solid, low enough to graze the skyscrapers, putting them to their original task, that of touching the fingers of god. But the cloud is not birthing a god; it's birthing another cloud — small, dark, heavy, wet.
In an office building in London, a janitor pushes a wastepaper bin down a hallway. Inside the bin, a plastic sack of shredded accounts rustles against coffee grounds, newspapers. Its heart is full of decapitated payables, receivables, half words and splintered sentences, crumpled muffin wrappers, its blood copy machine toner and printer ink.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 40
