Winter, and it’s three a.m. in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Late January. Icicles hang from the apartment’s eaves. He shivers, his teeth clicking faintly, reminding him of when he was a child on a beach and came out of the water, shivering in the rain. His mother wrapped him in a big blue towel and gave him biscuits and cheese.
The cemetery outside is net-shaded with skeletal trees, and full. Moonlight stirs among its headstones like shoals of minnows. The scene is a bosk without leaves. He hiccups, thinking the dead may get up to dance. He sees it all from the young woman’s apartment, from her living room, despite windows misty with dust, and delicate, white curtains.
They sit and fumble on the couch, giggling, clumsy with little sleep and much red wine. The couch is deep and soft. His shoes slide on grains of dust along the frozen, wooden floor. The cold tightens his knees. He clutches her gently between her thighs. Heat.
Doesn’t anyone kiss anymore? she says.
I will – kiss, you – my dear! he says.
They kiss, and the couch engulfs them for a while. And there, he would, if he could, drown in its folds with her.
They met at midnight, in a bar in Cambridge, and she lives
here in this haven, she’d said, for mostly West Indian refugees. It’s so cheap, she said earlier. Especially near the dead! And winked, tossing her red hair. She bought him many drinks. She’s from a milk farm in Wisconsin, wants to be an actress, studies at Emerson College, and even has a part in a Beckett play at the Huntington Theatre! She’s very elegant, very pale, and says good night too soon.
And goes to her narrow bed.
Stay! Let’s talk. Look at the world. Drugs, war, famine, disease.
We must live as if there is hope! More wine! Some more kisses!
Hiccupping, he’s glad at least for the couch, but not the
dead. Their lair tonight looks surreal, as if, well, expecting something.
He waits, hoping she’ll return.
He waits.
Can’t he just have her warmth, her perfume – perhaps her
nest of long red hair?
It’s four forty-five a.m. in Dorchester. The now windy haven of drab, wooden houses and apartment buildings offers him only the deep kingdom of winter night. The trees’ bare branches play their shadows across her bedroom door, his face, and the blankets wrapped up around his neck and ears.
He is alone. Near five a.m., he begins to nod off; and
then the abundant dead, wrapped in silver scales, for their gowns are made of minnows, gather round his huddled limbs – and waltz – against all his tomorrows.
Ghostland Insomnia
Unable to sleep, he leaves his studio on Cape Cod just after midnight, not far from the sea, and steps down the steps. There are birch and maple trees stark against the sky. It’s so quiet he can hear surf in the distance, the lush sound of his own emptiness. The air is moist, like the breath of a lover.
There is mist tonight. On the quiet marsh it sits silver-
still in April, like a thick blanket lumpy with sleeping bodies. He’s going toward it, barefoot across the grass, and now onto the road. His walk is tender, slow; he moves to no tune. He imagines his bones and flesh flying to places made of dunes; it’s wild. No reason he knows, except such thoughts chose him when he was a child.
The marsh, the mist, everything remains silent. Pale houses,
sleeping, seem ethereal, seem to pass him by. During the day, they don’t: harsh and lavish, they stare at him, taking note of his movements: their garages enclose Volvos and BMWs.
There is a star-laden solitude above him. He stops, looks up, and thinks: If they could the stars would pull me into their depths. He wonders if that is what they have been doing all along, since he was born.
The mist is moving now, fading, the blanket already worn,
and there is a definite absence of heat, like the last breath of the moon.
Then an odor of floral decay, a faint whiff of lovers’ sweat. He wishes. He retreats. Back up the road, which inclines and winds through clusters of pines seeming attentive to him.
He's on his way to the coast, where silver surf breaks on the
beach, and passing his studio, leaving the way he’d gone, he walks faster and faster, hoping to see one or two ships go by.
A Brief History of the New World
The wooden villa is on a steep, hibiscus-and-azalea lush hill. A concrete drive, engraved in bricks of faint red, takes you upward from the winding access road, through the shadows of tall trees swaying above like ballerinas in a slow pirouette. It is late afternoon, off-season, cheap in August. You have some reading, writing and relaxing to do. Your mother’s friends in Trinidad have arranged a few days for you alone in the villa.
Trinidad, where you left more than willingly, escaping its blather and pollution, its violence and corruption, has begun to fade from your mind; already you’re feeling something like a balm behind your eyes. You realize you need this.
The villa is two-storied, its roof’s edges are frilly with fretwork, and the couches and chairs are cushioned in flowered patterns of red, white and green. Durable mats and rugs shade the floor here and there, their colours matching the walls’ pale tans. You settle into rooms that are pitch pine and teak fragrant.
There are arched doorways and high, triangular ceilings full of cool sea air. You sleep in the bedroom upstairs; it has a spacious bathroom. Your room faces east. On mornings the sun sets the jalousie-shutters aglow in silver light; soon they yellow to the colour of corn.
The hill that slopes away from the steep drive and the villa has a grove of fruit trees, many of them towering breadfruit trees. Birdsong gushes from them in the mornings. There is even the lusty squawk of the cocorico, rufous-tailed guan (ortalis ruficauda). When you hear the cocorico, you go downstairs to breakfast. There are so many birds here; their colours are wildly imaginative, as if bits of rainbows had been used to paint them.
On the balcony off the upstairs bedroom, or on the verandah below and outside the dining room, you can hear the sea and see it. It is not the ruthless pounding of some dark sea, hoary and immensely melancholy in its vast expanse. The sound here is one of weather at ease with itself. The waves, sluggish and green, collapse on the beach. You sip your coffee and munch your toast. The light is bright and pleasant, striking deep blue above.
For the rest of the morning, distracted only by sudden brief rain, you
write in a quiet that makes the world feel new. For most of that time, the sound of human voices is absent; they exist only in your mind, where you create them.
During a stroll to the beach you encounter the swimming pool, just beyond the shaded access road to the villa and adjacent to the large bar. The bar is part of the villa, and you have the keys. You make yourself a vodka tonic with lime, sipping it as the brilliant blue of the pool dazzles the air, your eyes. The pool blue fills you, somehow, despite its suggestion of artificiality, with the promised serenity of the hours ahead. The temptation to stay and savour the variety of beverages at the bar, to glide in the pool, is removed by another, by a glimpse of sea blue through an opening in a cluster of rubber plants (ficus elastica) and tall trees.
As you enter the shade of the trees and rubber plants, the sand here soft and deep, a tang of sea spray drifts by. The August-fickle sun, in early afternoon, casts silver light on the shore and glints the rainwater in fallen, dish-shaped leaves, dips in the sand, and drops falling from rocks and trees.
The beach is wide, and its pale beige sand meets the edge of the forest’s dense vegetation whose roots curl with an almost gnarly menace. There are eleven tourists further along the beach in sun chairs; five of them lie sprawled on the sand, as if beaten down by the sun. Four have been reddened into a sad-looking foolishness, while others appear bewildered and pained by their new skin colour.
Little sandpipers (of the family Scolopacidae) skitter along the waterline in time with the up-and-down of swash. Their fine, elegant beaks and sleek heads can endear you to littoral strolls. Robust pelicans glide confidently in the distance, just above the water, now and then rising and banking sharply to dive. At night, you remember, large cumbersome leatherback turtles plod up the beach to relieve themselves of hundreds of eggs.
Late afternoon comes swiftly while you’re reading and idling away the hours with rest and swimming. Sometimes lunch is a heavy affair (the sea air makes food taste much better), so the dopey post-meal effect, combined with continued doses of sun, induces a state allowing you to slumber through the remaining heat of the day and to rise when the land is cooling. When the promise of dusk is in the sky.
You return to the villa and sit with your Earl Grey tea and book on the balcony. You watch the end of the afternoon, and the evening begins. You listen to the rhythm of the sea, still at ease. You think, for some strange reason, possibly because the sea is so big, so near and you are alone and far away from anyone you know, that maybe Columbus saw some of the landscape you saw today. Perhaps he watched leatherback turtles laying eggs on the beach, eggs the colour of moonlight, of stars and surf. You remember a movie you saw about Columbus’s discoveries in the New World in which he describes these islands as Eden, as Nature having more imagination than humanity has in its dreams. Such a statement leaves you wondering about Columbus, about the kind of man he was. You wonder, too, about the men who came after him, and what they, too, said and did, and didn’t say and do. You think of brave Bartolome de las Casas, and sigh.
Did the Dominican Friar really try well enough to save the world? Did he know what history was doing, and would later do? Do we? Or maybe the question should be: Did we?
There is too much history of people and the sea.
You stay where you are, reading and glancing at the fading light, at the sea. Sometimes you read until night comes, until the pages of the book are the colour of eggs and moonlight.
Then you sleep.