Heritage of Smoke Page 18

  When he said goodbye to Miriam absentmindedly, looking at shattered windows above her head rather than at her, she stood on tiptoe. Her lips embraced his lower lip. In surprise, he didn’t withdraw right away, and her lips squeezed his softly and irresistibly, like some kind of submarine creature its meal. And as though an electrical eel had gripped his lip, a scorching sensation shot deep through him, and a freezing one enveloped his skin.

  He stepped back, and the glass shards on the cobbles screeched and cracked beneath his feet. Her frizzy hair apparently pulsed blue light blindingly. He ran. Even when he reached his doorstep, he felt the hot lips printing their vertical lines on his lip, and he shivered, thinking of the millions of invisible creatures crawling inside his lip onto his gums, tongue, throat, and lungs. He leaped up the dusty and dank stairs to burn his mouth with slivovitz. As he slammed the door behind him, the bottle tipped over the edge of the shelf and crashed on the floor, and the salvific spirits sank into the thirsty wood.

  IN THE SAME BOAT

  A white sailboat rattled through the waves of the Pacific with the North American continent as a rugged blue shade in the background, like a distant and violent oceanic storm. The thumping of the boards against the hissing waves mesmerized the two men in the boat. The sunshine permeated their skins and warmed their bones; they had surrendered themselves to the sun, the god of the Incas. Peter, blond and pink with his large, translucent blue eyes, blinked, and his pupils shrank to two points to protect against so much light. Francisco’s narrowly set eyes flickered through long eyelashes above his thin, aquiline nose. They both wore white T-shirts that didn’t hide the lines, curves, and teeth of their muscles.

  On the second day of their journey, they woke up as the sun was buoying out of the ocean. Francisco sang Gracias a la vida, stretching his arms wide as if to embrace the sun; his armpit hairs sprouted out of his shirt, and thick blue veins calmly branched from his biceps over the elbow into his forearm. Peter rubbed his thick eyelids and ejected his night-spittle overboard.

  On a propane cooker, they grilled fish they’d managed to catch in a salt-eaten net. They separated the flesh and the bones and threw the white comb-like skeletons with slanted ribs into the grape-colored water. The sun scattered its bronze radiance over the sky, and Francisco and Peter fell asleep, dreaming the second day and the second morning were good.

  On the third day, they fished, ate, worshipped the sun without looking at it directly, just as Moses could not look at God’s glory but only at the radiance that went after Him. The water sprinkled over their skins now and then, enough to soothe them against the sun. No border patrol was in sight. They felt the day had been good.

  The fourth day the tranquility became boredom. They no longer paid attention to the sun and failed to worship it. They talked with their voices dry, recalling anecdotes from their recent past. They went over the details of their friendship the way lovers would.

  They had met in Gillette, Wyoming, playing pool in a bar where laid-off oil rig hands hung around—some missing their fingers, and some who clenched beer cans in artificial fists of steel.

  “What are we playing for?” Peter had asked.

  Francisco replied: “For your Social Security number!”

  “If you want my IRS problems and debts, go ahead!” Peter had dropped out of Baylor Medical School after his first year, with his student loans exceeding thirty thousand dollars. Without an SSN, Francisco, as an illegal alien from Mexico, could not hold a job for more than one paycheck period, fearing that the Immigration & Naturalization Service agents would track him down. So Francisco worked on Peter’s SSN, on an oil rig as a worm, splitting his salary with Peter, and sometimes Peter worked and Francisco stayed back; they counted as one person for the social security administration. They stayed together in a bunkhouse, drank vodka, and shot pool every night, and nearly every dawn Francisco, badly hung over, put on his gloves and a cracked plastic helmet and pushed drilling pipes dangling from the derricks, one over another, until one struck him in the head and knocked him out with a brain concussion. He had refused to be taken to the hospital, scared that after his papers were scrutinized he would be tossed in jail or over the border. So he recovered with Peter in the bunkhouse, drinking Coke and reading a National Geographic report on the Incas. He fancied himself in Machu Picchu, in golden robes, glittering in the sun, surrounded by lovely bronze maidens, supple dancers coiling around him. Did they sacrifice the maidens? Did they eat them? He had talked about the Incas so much that Peter said, “You must’ve been an Inca king in one of your previous lives to have these vivid dreams first thing, as you recover from a concussion!”

  Francisco suggested they should go to the Andes and live like poets on the beauty of the mountains. They were sober when they decided to go to Peru, and in genuine Peruvian manner they reconsidered their decision when they were drunk. Three days later, liking the decision in both states of mind, they adopted it. Peter dreamed of collecting ancient pottery and selling it to Sotheby’s in London. They chose the cheapest form of transportation with the fewest number of borders: the wind and the ocean. They had stolen a sailboat named Kon-Tiki in Santa Monica, California.

  Now, on the boat, they went through their stories many times and they told each other many anecdotes. Peter told this one: During the Great Depression in Berlin, it was not advisable for well-fed provincial girls to get off the train at the Friedrich-strasse station, looking for work, because they could reappear at the station as sausages sold to the hungry passengers. A butcher there would offer employment only to slaughter and then process them through sausage-making machines.

  On the eighth day of their journey, they ran out of stories. The image of the high jungles and icecaps of the Andes paled in their minds. They fished, ate chunks of flesh from the ocean, and yawned.

  On the twelfth day, the horizon kept tilting; frothing water spat out from the waves, which resembled broken teeth cracking once again while the new ones rose through the dark indigo gums. In the evening, a great wind plunged into the ocean and the ocean leaped into the wind to drive it away, but the wind only grew windier at that. Lightning flashed and the high, long waves carried the boat up and then laid it down low, as if on a railless rollercoaster. The waves screamed and howled and hissed like thousands of lions and snakes, but they did no harm to Peter and Francisco. By the morning, the tired storm lay down, thin, prostrate, and the ocean became as calm as a glacial lake. The sun, the bald Old Man of the Sky, reddened, as though ashamed of his violence, and the heat of his cheeks warmed the waters.

  The friends lost count of days.

  One day, perhaps the thirtieth, Peter cast the net into the water. For a long time no fish hit the net, and Peter yawned. All of a sudden something big smashed into the net. The ropes cracked and would have pulled Peter overboard but for Francisco grabbing his hand. A shark dragged the boat the way a horse drags a sled over the blue snow. Francisco fired his gun. Some red mixed with the salty foam, resembling a strawberry shake. The shark convulsed and pulled so vehemently that Peter and Francisco and the gun fell overboard. The men quickly swam to the boat, which floated away from them just as quickly. With the image of the shark jaws snapping their feet, they plunged their arms into the water, splashing. Francisco reached the boat and extended an oar to Peter, then lifted him aboard.

  They gasped and when they grew hungry several hours later, they realized that they had lost their net, their food.

  Peter had once fasted for three weeks, drinking a gallon of spring water a day, and when his mother saw him after it, she burst into tears. He smiled at the recollection.

  They had to ration their water, which was down to three gallons.

  They sliced the sail to make a net. They managed to catch nothing; another big fish tore the net.

  Five days later they lay in a stupor, no longer hungry. Big ocean liners and tankers noiselessly passed by at a great distance, and Peter and Francisco at first stood up and hollered and, later, as they watc
hed ships slide noiselessly over the line of the horizon like setting suns, they gave up.

  Francisco missed the earth more than he missed women. When he got a morning erection, he masturbated, as if his sperm could promise life, and he imagined not luscious women but grassy ravines and rivers. Ejaculating, he watched his sperm fall onto the boards and ooze.

  Peter shouted, “You idiot! What a waste of energy!”

  “True, maybe a whole hour of my life.”

  “Maybe your whole life because you could be short of the shore that one hour. But what am I saying? We’ll make it. We’ve got to believe it.”

  “Power of positive thinking, ha? I don’t even know for sure what the coast looks like.” Francisco kneeled and licked his sperm the way a cat laps milk.

  Peter said, “That’s some improvement. If you have to do it, at least eat it. But your body can never restore the energy you lose through the sperm. At best, the body can use only about thirty percent of the energy from food.”

  They both dozed off and neglected to steer the boat. Peter woke up and shouted at Francisco. Francisco seated himself and steered.

  Peter was falling asleep again, falling a-dead. His body was stringy and dry and his blood moved slowly. His every breath, every motion, was slow; he felt his body was precise, with its sensation of bodily control stemming from its opposite, the lack of control. He admired his minimalistic body economy, pure, neatly abstract, a spirit with hallucinogenic visions: waterfalls, filled with the luminosity of the sun, splashing over him. He awoke with his throat parched and sore, and thought, I can have only two glasses of water a day. If Francisco weren’t here, I could have four!

  When Francisco fell asleep, Peter poured himself an extra glass of water, water stolen from Francisco’s blood. Peter’s hand trembled. His Adam’s apple leaped like a stone in a rough brook as he gulped the water.

  Francisco groaned in his sleep as if aware that his plasma was being drunk. He awoke and touched his face, eclipsed by bones. His eyes glowed, and he narrowed them because the platinum sunrise was too brilliant. He squinted at Peter; Peter’s eyelids were nearly fully drawn over his eyes, their skin creased and purple.

  They stared at each other with an acute, shared consciousness. What were they now? Still best friends? How could they be? Friendship is the highest form of being human, and they were no longer human nor animal; they were dying life, and dying life like a wounded lion knows no mercy, no friendship, only struggle and revenge. Neither could seek vengeance on his own self. They could not attack a shark, they could not attack the ocean, they could not attack the sky. They could attack only each other.

  Peter appeared to Francisco stranger than any stranger, slowly disappearing from his sight and mind, and his sight and mind were slowly disappearing also.

  Peter’s heart thumped against his rib cage at the thought that Francisco was flesh. Meat. He could kill Francisco, eat him, and live. But how could he, his best friend? A raspy voice kept repeating in his ears, somewhere from within: “Kill him, kill him, killim, killim, killm, kill!” He shuddered, and thought that it would be better to kill him or be killed by him than that both of them die. He thought about the Incas with their human sacrifices. They would have the Andes right on the ocean; two hungry men with nothing to eat but their flesh. Flesh is singular. There are no porks, sheeps, fleshes; it’s all one. Peter lustfully stared at Francisco’s musculus gracilis, the graceful and lean muscle crossing the inner thigh.

  Peter’s blood cried like the spilled blood of Abel, except that Abel’s blood shrieked against murder and Peter’s for it.

  Francisco let his arm hang loose overboard, staring into the water like a cat at an aquarium; his teeth chattered, and soon he dozed off. Peter wondered, Maybe he doesn’t want to kill me. Maybe he doesn’t know I want to kill him. How could he sleep otherwise?

  Peter could not sleep. Even when snoring, he was half awake. Fearing death, he was exhausting himself and inviting it.

  Presently, Francisco woke up and stretched his arms. Peter didn’t look him in the face, thinking that the seed of murder that was growing in his blood must have reached his eyes, lurking in them. They each had a glass of water, their only glass for the day; their rations were down to one gallon.

  Around noon, the sky and the water turned gray and dark. The air was musty with water hanging between sky and ocean. Yet the water wouldn’t fall.

  Francisco said, “It will rain.”

  “Why?”

  “My leg hurts where I broke it years ago playing soccer. The leg knows.”

  The water suddenly fell from the air above them; it fell into the ocean in massive avalanches. Peter and Francisco opened their mouths like baby hawks awaiting their mother to drop torn sparrows into their beaks. They tried to collect the water in a fragment of the plastic boat cover.

  The flashing and lightning through the darkness seemed like a dance of death to Francisco. He was homesick for the land. The real homeland was down there, buried in the grace of the ocean. When I’m dead, maybe none of my bones will be buried in the soil, not even on the ocean floor. Sharks will tear me apart. Maybe one of my molars will touch the floor, heavy with gold.

  Francisco touched the golden tooth, a memento from the earth, from rocks—the purest part of a rock, used for dirtiest greed, dividing people into rich and poor. It comes from the ground but is not ground because the ground is never pure. Gold is a symbol of purified self because it has no traces of the soil or anything else; it is only itself—noble, and it inspires you to try to become noble, a pure self detached from everybody, selfish to the extreme, inhuman. A human being is a mixture of elements and cultures, and to strive to create anything purely individual, purely mono-cultural, is purely monstrous.

  They collected several gallons of water.

  After the storm, the sky cleared, the ocean pacified, and though Peter and Francisco had filled their stomachs with water, they were dizzy. Francisco looked at Peter’s shoulder, several streaks of muscles, and felt like chewing them. He thought he was merely entertaining himself with the fantasy, but it took hold of him. Can I kill Peter? How? Maybe the oar could smash his skull. How can I think like this? Peter is my only friend. But we are animals; life is above everything. Life means eating life. Life communally survives on love, individually on hatred. Only mothers can die for their children, mothers and Jesus Christ. Haven’t I always been a cannibal? As a child I sucked my mother’s breasts, draining her flesh. I longed to taste the salt of her blood through the salt of milk, trying to replace the blood that used to come to me through the umbilical cord, to flow through me like alcohol through an alcoholic. Maybe only those of us who remember our mothers’ blood become alcoholics, trying not to forget but to remember. We started with the mother; our basic nature stems not from the assassination of the father but from the slow killing of the mother.

  Francisco was startled at his thoughts, as if it wasn’t him thinking, but someone else in him. Harboring the thought that he should kill Peter or that Peter would kill him, Francisco could no longer sleep. Half awake, he tightened his hand on the oar. Without saying a word, each knew what the other was thinking, their alertness incriminating them.

  Nights unsettled them. Francisco constantly imagined himself taking up the oar and crushing Peter’s skull. It would take too much time. Peter would notice. They sat on the opposite ends of the boat. It was the third week of their starvation. They saw all the flickers of the light: is that a knife blade flickering? They heard all the rustling of waves: is he getting up to kill me?

  A dawn at the end of the three weeks of starvation announced the divine splendour of the sun. The sun was scarlet. They both looked at it in amazement and then at each other’s faces, overcast with a red hue; their eyes were bloodshot. They watched each other through a prism of blood, all the salty rainbows of the world collected in one color, rusty red.

  They looked at each other with pity, too, regretting to see biology vanquish their spirits. Their spirits
were still friends, right then in the calm, as they reconciled themselves with death and didn’t care to listen to the voices within them. Tears appeared in their eyes, at the same time. They no longer cared for life at all costs. Peter was ashamed of his knife. But to throw it away would be to acknowledge that he had imagined a murder scenario. The scenario was hovering in the air, resembling a dome painted by Michelangelo: pink muscles of edible flesh, elongated, darkened, as if Peter’s ceiling was filled with Franciscos stretching and flexing their flesh in various postures; Francisco’s filled with many Peters, while some deltoid and trapezius muscles floated detached, like doves and kites. But to acknowledge it required too much courage.

  Friendship somehow resurged. In their muscular chapel, they had both concluded that they were animals and not humans struggling to live. That was an exaggeration; thought usually is. Their friendship now spited their arteries. The salty tears, the bit of the oceanic water that rose through their eyes, were salty from blood yet not bloody.

  Their eyes protruded out of deeply creased skin, piously gazing at the sharp outlines of their muscles. Their veins ran along like branches of a leafless tree.

  A tooth irritated Francisco, and he shook it between his forefinger and thumb. The tooth remained in his fingers. Blood gushed and he spat it. Peter kneeled and licked the foamy blood off the boards. Francisco sucked his own gums.

  Peter’s gums bled too, and Peter swallowed the blood thirstily.

  They continued to stare at each other with pity, love, and hunger. Their own blood shook them and crossed out their white flags of peace with death. The red shade disappeared from the sun but, through their drooping eyelids, the light still assumed an orange hue. In the evening the sun was larger and redder than they had ever seen it. The gory circle pushed toward the ocean slowly and unstoppably. It stabbed the ocean, cutting its stomach open; the true color of the ocean came out of the blue veins—red, echoing the sky and the sunken god of life and violence, the sun. The ocean swallowed the Old Man of the Sky without a sound.