The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  He has a collared shirt and a close-shorn haircut.

  He has a cell phone.

  Is this why Gray left the monastery and its village?

  Because he looked out the window of his hut in this remote village—

  —and saw that civilization had arrived, even here?

  The driver’s name is lost to her.

  They’d tried some pidgin attempts at interface—but it quickly became evident that neither knew a lick of the other’s language, the words as foreign as the intonations.

  Thus, once the destination and price had been fixed—thanks to the translation of some third-party drivers back in the village—they were on their way, driving in silence, the only voices those of the flexing axles, the crunching shock absorbers, the deep mud sucking away at their tires.

  The jungle too, outside the rolled-down window: a hot symphony of a billion trillion insects.

  I have to hand it to you, Gray.

  You go all in.

  All-all in.

  The world disappoints you and you run.

  You get as gone as you can.

  Then, once you realize there’s another level of goneness still waiting beyond, you go there too.

  What could hurt that much?

  Wouldn’t you in the end just get tired?

  Get old enough and wise enough to stop running, stop fighting?

  Why do you keep going?

  You’re what, ninety now?

  Almost?

  (See, I knew it, Lil.

  Told you he’d be alive at the end of the story.

  [But you have to hand it to me—to us, whatever—

  —we tracked him down, or just about.

  This was a cold case.

  Even the pros—the Bruces of the world—]

  —I’m not giving him 20 percent—

  [You’re still caught up on that?

  Whatever, even the Bruces of the world couldn’t find him.

  But you and me, fat little stiff-upper-lipped nobodies, we narrowed the timeline.

  We CSI’d the hell out of this.

  Cut the time he was missing from seventy years to two months.

  Hell, maybe we should be heir finders.

  Out-Bruce Bruce.]

  Lawdalmighty, Lil.

  You’re addressing yourself as We.

  [It’s the Jungle, Lil.

  It’s the Jungle.])

  The voices stop.

  All the voices that had filled the silent space between Lily and the Driver—

  —the axles, the road, the jungle, her inner Sybil—

  —they come to a violent, echoing stop when the Driver jams on the brakes.

  Lily’s face about hits the back of the driver’s headrest.

  Before she knows it, he is opening his door.

  Which makes no sense, not the way he’s doing it, with such determination, with such aggression.

  They are in the middle of nowhere, but this particular stretch of road—overgrown to the point that the sun is only a shattered suggestion of itself through the boughs above—is desolate beyond measure.

  That’s why none of this makes sense—

  Why this driver, with his exchange-student face, is yanking her door open—

  Yelling at her in a fury of spittle and bulging neck veins—

  Grabbing at her—

  Pulling her hair, yelling—

  His shrill Burmese caroms around the inside of the car, the inside of her head, while the jungle around them swallows the evidence.

  The first thing she thinks is he is going to kill me.

  I have done something wrong—

  No, he wants money or sex, it can only be those things—

  She fumbles for her money belt because she wants it to be money, she doesn’t want it to be sex—

  She will give up that money so fast, she will shower him with it—

  (These are the disenfranchised you wanted to shower with money, remember—

  [OH GOD SHUT UP!])

  But she doesn’t get the chance, because he punches her hard in the face, right between the eyes.

  Everything goes electric inside her head.

  Like her brain has been jumped with a car battery.

  Like a supernova has burst within, spraying a staticky confetti of color across her vision.

  Good God it hurts—

  BAM!

  BAM!

  BAM!

  She can’t see anything.

  There’s blood on her nose and her lips and in her eyes and God knows where any of it came from.

  He’s yanking at her, yanking at her money belt, tearing it free—

  —she feels the belt tearing away the skin of her neck before it snaps—

  —then he roughly grabs her, pulls her out of the car and into the mud.

  The mud is hot.

  (Whenever is mud hot?

  [That’s what you’re thinking right now—?]

  Better that than what’s about to come.)

  For she knows she is the one in the movies.

  The one facedown on their stomach.

  The one that is about to be executed.

  She won’t think this, won’t think these thoughts, she will not look at that truth—

  —better to think how hot the mud on her face is.

  He’s got her by the hair again and he’s pulling her up.

  Dragging her.

  (No small effort, little man, because I am certified Grade-A American beef.)

  Then the next thing she knows is she’s falling.

  Smashing down through the trees.

  Turns out there was a hillside here, tucked just inside the jungle line.

  He’s cast her off into oblivion.

  And while she is terrified, the rocks and branches snapping and cracking and cutting her as she falls, she also feels strangely a relief—

  —she is free of him, he will not come down here, she thinks.

  And then some moments later her body is jarred to a wicked halt, her back smashing flat against the face of a large boulder.

  Anything she has left at this stage is driven from her—her breath, her thoughts, her will.

  She lies there.

  Like she is awake inside of a dead body.

  Add emotions to that.

  She cannot feel anything either, in the sense of fear or sadness or such.

  She is in a perfectly neutral shock.

  Consigned to listen.

  To consider the landscape she now finds herself in.

  Jungle.

  Of course.

  But in a tight gorge, a creek gurgling indifferently nearby.

  Above, it must be a million miles up there, there is maybe—

  —maybe—

  —the sound of an engine being engaged, a vehicle driving off.

  It is dreamy, half-realized, as much a wish as it is a sound.

  She’s splayed against this rock, in a sort of inverted “C” shape, her legs and arms bent half back around it, like gravity wanted them to keep going, but her torso’s rough impact with the rock overruled that.

  Any thoughts on this one?

  (Lily?

  [Lily?])

  ?

  The jungle grows dark before the sky does.

  She is stiff.

  The impact was in her back but she feels it in her stomach.

  Like the muscles have hyperextended.

  She wonders if she’s torn something.

  Should’ve done sit-ups like the articles told her to.

  Strengthen the core.

  But who reads Glamour and actually does what they say?

  No it’s just me, all scraped and torn up and distended.

  In this goddamn mudhole.

  Swell.

  She wonders how far she is from anything.

  Truly.

  They’d been in the car for hours.

  Dicey situation, Lil.

  It makes her want to laugh.

  But doing so asks too much
of her strained stomach muscles, so she nips that in the bud.

  (Maybe we get properly scared here.

  Thoughts on that?

  [Since when have you done fear?

  You of the stiff upper lip.]

  Hey, I shit my pants here, I’m done.

  I shit my pants ever, I’m done.

  [Story of your life, isn’t it?])

  She’s up on her feet.

  It’s getting properly dark now.

  A primordial dark, untouched by the glow of Man.

  Shadows collapse in each other, metastasize.

  The dark spreads, voracious.

  It’s just her and the blackness beneath the canopy.

  If there is a moon above, with any sliver of merciful light, it does not reach this place.

  The hot symphony of the jungle has become something else.

  The sickening song of insects before was somehow an inert thing.

  A billion voices cast forth from a stationary perch.

  But now the symphony has a new component: movement.

  Branches move.

  Twigs and leaves.

  Tiny rockfalls.

  The jungle is in subtle but constant motion around her.

  She doesn’t like this.

  But, Jesus.

  Time to move.

  Time to dig in, even if your torn knees and strained stomach don’t want to.

  You’ve got to get up.

  Climb.

  Get up to the road, however far that is.

  It’s an insurmountable idea.

  But stiff.

  Upper.

  Lip.

  In a jungle full of movement she is perhaps the slowest moving thing.

  Desperate, blind, clambering over unseen rocks and footholds before her.

  Every step, every articulation of her legs and arms is a dagger to her stomach.

  The dagger: old, rusted, jagged.

  Goddammit.

  That is her mantra.

  She goddammits up the hill, an inch at a time.

  Big steps graduate to a fuck.

  Really big ones to fuck you.

  Who she’s fuck you’ing she’s not sure, but it’s cathartic.

  Better than wincing.

  Better than not fighting.

  She’s sweating and she’s gasping and it’s impossible to tell if she’s crying.

  Her face is running, from forehead and eyes and nostrils.

  She’s a feral thing, ever climbing.

  (And even when you get to the road?

  [If this is the right way.

  You could be climbing the wrong side of the ravine.]

  What if something eats you?

  [Or someone finds you tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, and he rapes you.]

  Not helping things.

  Who the hell are you, anyhow?

  […]

  Listen to me.

  All of you.

  From God on high to the ant or whatever the hell it is crawling behind my ear to the peanut gallery in my head.

  Never.

  Never never never.

  I will stonewall you and I will stonewall the universe and I will never quit.

  I move forward, I move up.

  I don’t look back, I don’t look down.

  My movement is my resistance.

  You cannot beat me if I do not stop.)

  She falls.

  After a number of hours, and some calculations of progress in her head—for she cannot see well enough to give dimension to the headway she’s made—her feet find a stone she’s entrusted with too much of her weight.

  It slides beneath her toes, dislodges from the muddy hillside, and before she knows it, she is falling again.

  A series of tumbling, capitulative somersaults.

  The fight out of her before she comes again to a wicked halt some one hundred, two hundred yards down the muddy slope.

  She lies there for a long time.

  You want to break me.

  Is that it?

  I am near broken, it is true.

  I will ask you a question.

  One that only the weak ask.

  Why?

  That is why I don’t ask that question.

  Because no one answers.

  Easier not to ask.

  Easier to stiff-upper-lip it.

  But my lip, it’s trembling, isn’t it?

  Funny.

  Yes, those are probably tears.

  Could be sweat, but probably tears.

  I’m not a crier so I wouldn’t know.

  But it sure feels shitty.

  And despite how torn up I am on the outside, it feels worse on the inside.

  Someone please talk to me.

  Even You.

  …

  …

  …

  Please…

  (You deserve this, you know.)

  I know.

  I overreached.

  But I needed it.

  (Overreach?)

  No.

  Just all of it.

  It’s all I had.

  The only thing I’ve had.

  Try on the Lily-suit sometime.

  You’ll see how it is.

  You’d do the same.

  Overreach.

  Just to get out of the rest of it.

  That whole numbing Before.

  She feels like she is going to throw up.

  Something is welling in her.

  It’s so foreign to her she wonders if, to top things off, she’s somehow contracted food poisoning.

  Back in Yangon maybe.

  But what comes forth is not the acrid burn of her stomach’s contents, but instead a wave of throat-constricting saliva.

  It is somehow pure, clean, and painful.

  It roils from those strained stomach muscles up into her mouth, demands that she gasp, that she convulse, that she let it out.

  It is primordial.

  A heaving sob as old as she is.

  Probably as old as the world.

  It is a wail, a moan, as artless as something that emits from a baby.

  Oh God, no.

  Not this.

  But the train has left the station.

  This thing that comes forth is nothing less than the entirety of her.

  The secret chronology of her soul.

  Accreted drop by drop over time in the unreachable places of her self.

  The places she has walled off.

  Those walls in an instant shatter and everything bursts forth, a constellation of sensation, all five senses open at once, processed in maddening simultaneity.

  The smells of the operating room, its dried-out sterility, of a dead baby’s blood mixed with her own.

  The constriction of her own young throat, the upper mouth, so tight like it will implode, like she is being strangled by loneliness from the inside.

  Once He is gone and the baby is gone there is only Tish.

  And Tish is in the other room.

  Always in the other room.

  I cannot be in this head, Tish.

  In this body that failed.

  Please do the things that mothers do to make the pain go away.

  But I am out the door, and sent back down the line to the latest boarding school, aren’t I?

  All the men, all the boys, their bodies urgent atop me like I am the center of the universe.

  But how perverse that pleasure is once you understand its intent, the passing lie of the other between your legs!

  And maybe that is worse than being robbed of a womb—being robbed of pleasure—of trusting it, believing it is something other than a way station to pain.

  Oh hate becomes blame becomes guilt, doesn’t it?

  The holy trinity of the heartbroken.

  They’re all the same thing, it’s just a matter of directionality, which way the barbs point, whose soul and skin they tear.

  But you can’t go on hating forever, and you can’t go on blaming foreve
r, but guilt, that’s a lifelong relationship!

  Oh it’s a motherfucker, isn’t it—to feel the full brunt of life, because that’s what this is, Lil—the full brunt—everything that has torn you and twisted you and you have stiff-upper-lipped it through—you have not looked at it—but it looks at you now, and you are paralyzed—it owns you today—do you see how your body wears it, how your body has always worn it, encoded it into your muscles and tissues and brain, and has been there all along and you have refused to acknowledge it? It is the architecture of you. Can you believe it? Can you believe how much you have bullshitted your way through the years, how you have tried to scaffold that pain with the bullshit of strength even though it is the only true essential in you? They carved your baby and your womb out of you, God quit on your father, and your mother quit on you; the entirety of the world quit on you, all those harbors in a storm that would be men or potential family. Who would mourn for you now that you are gone? The world quit on you first, then you quit on the world. You are a lie of strength. You are a lie of wryness. You just wanted to curl up in mutual warmth and silence with someone who would never go away. Which is what the baby was going to be to you. You even named her. Lori. But you never uttered or thought that name again once it was done. Weakness hurts, doesn’t it? The weakness of need. And now you are here, thanks to the grand work-around that is your life. Curled up, all right. With something that will never go away, the earth and its apathy.

  You may die now.

  Alone as always.

  Walled in by your self.

  She reaches out for God, her hands groping like a tormented ghost, her voice weak, unintelligible, full of drool.

  (…)

  Anyone.

  Anyone.

  If it is not God, can it just be a man.

  Some farmer, anyone.

  (…)

  I just want to feel a hand on me.

  A fingertip.

  Even for a second.

  Please.

  The sobs continue to surge through her.

  She is ridiculous: the dam is broken.

  She is defenseless to the thoughts and pain and tears.

  To the point that out of fatigue, out of bewilderment, out of enervation, she capitulates.

  Kill me, she says.

  These words make it out of her, drooling, imprecise, but words.

  Kill me.

  She is saying this not to God or the world or anyone, but to the pain flood.

  She will not try to stop the feelings and thoughts or answer them or understand them or in any way impede them.

  They may have their way with her.