| THE NIGLU by Matthew Licht |
The sea talks to me. I don’t mean like good morning, how’s it going, the mackerel are extra-tasty today. More like come on in, clear sailing past the sand bar. Or not today, sit down and watch the surf instead. You bet I listen. Doesn’t matter where I go or what sea I look at. Simple statements, instantly understood. Rough windy day at Point Hueneme. Got out of the car to watch massive waves. Waves are a problem, at times. They can cover what the water underneath wants to say. So you have to pay closer attention. We sat on the sand, put our hands on our knees and stared. Mixed messages galore. Let’s go. Don’t even think of it, are you nuts? Come on, what’re you waiting for? You chicken? Has life become burdensome? Instant suicide du jour between currents and sharks. “Don’t go in,” Maddy said. She was my girlfriend. Maybe she saw the sea the way I did. Maybe she heard and understood what the sea said. I didn’t jump in just because someone told me not to. Definitely not like a bunch of other drunk guys dared me to hit the roiling main. I didn’t need to test myself. I’ve got nothing to prove, far as swimming in the sea goes. But I peeled. “You’re crazy,” she said. “I’m not even going to watch.” Maybe she thought I’d snap back to sane reality, follow her to the car, pull my clothes back on along the way, forget the whole morning. Toes read the watery Braille on how long you can stay in, how much it’s going to hurt afterwards. Toes short-circuited on contact. Too cold. Too hard. Too fast. Too rough. Too salty. Too late. I was in. I was off. The only thought is to get past the waves. Keep your eyes closed, keep going straight, hard as you can. Don’t think. Couldn’t believe the waves. Pac slaps hard, so don’t mess around. But she seems to have less killer instinct, fewer infanticidal urges than her flip-side, the Atlantic, or jealous, malicious little Med. Her waves are only immense, not necessarily violent or mean-spirited. There was a reason to go further out. Keep going. You’ll see. But I had to stop. Cramp. Cramps are dangerous. Toes curl in, the arches constrict painfully. Feet become fists that say, no more. Only thing to do is go limp, sink, stretch them out manually. Close my eyes. Can’t see much anyway, blurred shadows and flashes. Fetal position in the ocean’s churning womb. The blood leaves my fingers and toes. Dive reflex taken to its logical but ridiculous extreme. Corpse-white phalanges mean I can stay in longer. Core temp stays high. Suffer more when I get out. Incandescent needles and razors. Full circulation and feeling take hours to restore. Not good, the sawbones said. So I stopped talking to doctors. People who tell me to stay out of the water obviously don’t know what they’re talking about. The guy at the surf shop said a 4.3 millimeter neoprene wetsuit would help, or better yet a drysuit would eliminate the problem. He nodded when I said man you don’t wear rubbers with your mother. Not going in or coming out. He understood the gross indecency, or pretended. The hard sell was no use. Don’t know what I wanted in the surf shop anyway. Most of the time, I don’t know what I want or what I’m doing. Past the waves everything becomes clear. Go out. Feel the water. Feel alive for as long as you can stand it. Lose yourself in the swim and the world disappears. Ideal conditions are gray sky, heavy chop, dawn or dusk light. In other words, the worst possible conditions. Shadows above and below, swim or fly between two worlds, the sky and the sea. The infinitesimal percentage of solid matter in between is you. The cramp passed. I looked back at the beach because I wanted to wave to Maddy. Reassure her. Everything’s cool. Just a little further and I’ll head back. We’ll go look for work or something. Couldn’t see the beach. Heap bad sign. Ventura hills hulked miles away. Sea pussy. Riptide. Undertow. The shadows could be sharks. But you have to stay calm, relax. You can rest but the stroke better be regular when you get going again. Sea lions come right up. They’re aggressive, bossy, noisy. They have really bad breath. But they’re harmless. Once I saw what I thought was a sea lion at first. Uh-oh, here comes the fish-fart bark lecture. You’re on my turf and too near my females, Jasper. But the thing had a long thin neck and a face like a camel. Enormous eyes too close together. Water dripped from shaggy brown hair sort of like a man’s. Look of total surprise, then anger. Sea lions just make a lot of noise. The camel thing wanted to hurt me. Then it changed its mind, went under and was gone. Fix on an antenna-encrusted hilltop told me the rate I was being pulled out. Pretty fast. You’re supposed to swim across the current, swim towards the beach in an arc. Pick a direction and don’t stop. I picked further out. Swam with the current. Felt easy. Felt warm. Not supposed to be a good sign, when you start feeling warm again. A head, ahead. Not dead ahead. Maybe ten degrees north, or right, if the Ventura hills were still behind me. No way to tell, in the rollers. Don’t want to look back, on the way up. Good way to get swamped. The head was alive. Dead bodies sink, then float to the surface all stretched out. Drown and bloat, take on water. The flesh tears, then the fish start in. Nothing left, unless you float ashore before the fish get done. Crabs finish the job, unless someone alive finds you first. Then gawkers, cops, ambulance, morgue, someone who knew you nods, then you’re underground, or ash, flying, floating back home. The head stayed afloat. The body treaded water out of sight. Didn’t want to scare the head with an unexpected touch. Panic’s dangerous in way-out conditions. “Hey.” The head spun. A look the opposite of what the camel-faced sea monster shot. Sweet relief. Oh so I’m not alone after all. Saved. Safe. Then she saw I was alone too. Not a boat, just another fool in deep trouble. Riptide pushed us together. Short hair, pale skin, pretty face, broad shoulders, basketball boobs. She was a near circus-grade fat woman. No bathing suit. Me neither. You go out the way you come in. Leave your clothes on the beach. The border between the clothed world and the naked is the shimmering shoreline. Stand and shiver till you’re dry enough to get dressed. Or get dressed wet and split the beach scene fast. Grab your clothes, streak to the car and get dressed in there. Public beaches are no fun. We treaded water, floated further and further out. Suppressed the urge to grab each other in violent, selfish desperation, drag each other down. But I wanted to touch her. She looked soft. “You OK?” “Not really.” She wasn’t in a panic. She was exhausted. She wasn’t swimming any more. She’d given up. She was letting herself be pulled along. Hit me then why the ocean said come on in even though she plainly wasn’t in the mood to be peopled. Someone’s in trouble. You could do something about it. The Pacific’s not cruel or bloodthirsty. Rough, at times, but full of life. The ocean gives life. We decide ocean death on our own, usually. “OK, listen…I can get us back to the beach. But you have to stay extremely calm. Unless you totally relax, we’re both screwed.” She was calmer than I was, twice my size. The water floated her weight easily, but when you drag a live deadweight meat-barge, you swim at half-power, one-handed. You tire out quickly and get cold. The lifeguard job’s not all sitting on a white wooden altar to absorb radiation and female adoration. But the lifeguard job was a long time ago. Management displayed low tolerance for non-lifeguard behavior. The blackball bounced fast and nation-wide. “OK,” she said. “But I didn’t mean to cause anyone any trouble.” “No problem. Everyone makes mistakes.” “Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.” She kept her eyes on me. I kept my eyes on her, got closer. Meantime, we were being pushed along at a rate I almost couldn’t believe. Like being in Outer Space. Once you start moving, you can’t stop until you hit something or something hits you and there’s not much to hit out there. Not in the ocean either, or so you hope. Don’t want anything to touch you out in the middle of the water in the dark. But I wanted to touch her. She was a flesh iceberg. Got an idea of the submerged part when I almost involuntarily looked at her tits. No bikini bra straps, no tan lines. She was a routine skinny dipper or she never went near the beach. Some fatties don’t care, others care too much. Swimming nude’s a different feeling. Swimming nude is swimming for real. But she wasn’t swimming. Maybe she didn’t know how. She was a floater. Which usually means a turd or a corpse. Explain the difference. She had booze on her breath. She spun slowly, kept me in sight. “You have to let me get behind you. Relax. I’ll put my arm around your neck so you stay face-up. Breathe normally. Tell me if you’re getting too much water. Let me do the rest. Just lie still and float along. I think we can make it.” “Sorry. This wasn’t the idea. We’re so far out. Did you see me? Or did you have enough too?” “Enough what?” “Couldn’t take it anymore.” “I just went in for a swim. I like it rough and cold.” She didn’t believe me. I didn’t know the ethics of rescuing someone who wanted to kill herself. I guess you’re supposed to try to save her. The law of the sea isn’t too clear on that point. Or any point. I didn’t know the law of the sea. Maybe there’s no such thing. You have to make it up as you go along, as you’re dragged along. She let me get behind her. She either changed her mind or didn’t care. Or she didn’t believe we could make it back to the beach. Any beach. Dry land. The world of the clothed and living. She was warm. Like she had fever. I expected an armful of clammy flab, got an electric blanket. Whale noises floated past in the air, songs and spouts. Nice not to be alone. Nice to have a reason to be out struggling. When I went in, I didn’t know I was supposed to save someone’s life. Even if it was a woman who decided she didn’t want to live anymore. Now I knew. Maybe I didn’t want to live anymore either, when I went in. The ocean’s not the easiest or surest way to end it, but it’s always there. I didn’t want to end it. I hadn’t had enough of living. Maybe just enough of living the life I was living, the life that was living me. I didn’t know. Left my clothes and my girlfriend Maddy on the beach and took off. Maddy was either still on the beach, or she took off in the car. My car. Our car. Her car, now. She went to get help or she went home. Maybe there’s a law you have to report a suicide or a missing person. Usually, you want to report someone killed himself or someone’s gone with no explanation. Or you freak and call the cops without thinking. Maybe Maddy didn’t want to call the cops. She’s pretty cool. Maybe she had enough of me too, anyway. I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d wonder or complain I wasn’t around anymore. Maybe there’s no law says you have to report a person missing or a suicide. I didn’t go to Law School. Maddy went, for six weeks. She didn’t like to be reminded. No questions asked about garbage bags full of men’s clothes deposited in Salvation Army bins. “He just took off, Officer. No fight or nothing. Just left. Didn’t say where he was headed. I think he’s got family in Pittsburgh. We didn’t really know each other too well. We were just close for a while, living together. Sex thing. Life thing. Can’t explain. But I don’t know where he is. If you want to search the house, go ahead.” Maddy wouldn’t even be lying. We didn’t fight. She saw me take off. I didn’t tell her where I was going. The car was a rolling piece of shit. She had the pink slip. These things happen. People ditch their earthly possessions, friends and families, and take off. Cops know this as well as anybody, assuming they even give a god damn. No complaints equals no further questions, your honor. Swimming across the current didn’t work. The water was pulling too fast, pushing too high up and down. No way to tell which way was across. The waves looked like hills with snow-blowing trees. Hypothermia wasn’t a problem, though. She was on my back. Blood flowed through my wrist veins and armpit artery heated by her glowing, flowing flesh. Like pulling a human foam-rubber cloud. The sea is like the sky, boundless, direction-free, as long as you’re looking up. “Don’t wear yourself out,” she said. “Stop a minute.” She pulled me in, wrapped herself around like a wetsuit, put my hand between her legs, moved my hand till I figured out how to do it the way she liked or needed. Felt like a cat purring. She got even warmer. We zipped along at 20, 30 knots whether I swam and pulled or not. So we held on to each other and let go. A woman who’s easy to please is hard to find. Didn’t seem fair you practically had to commit suicide. When I saw a beach, I almost didn’t want to see it. Pretended the dunes and palms were a mirage. Then I hallucinated a shark fin. Maybe. Tracked the slicing shadow involuntarily. Turned her ever so slightly. She saw the beach and the beach became real. “We can make it,” she said. “I know.” “If you’re too tired, I can pull you.” Another fin went past. Glossy gray like a friendly dolphin’s, but the water hissed. An underwater body bumped my leg. Nobody really wants to be eaten by sharks. Death by exposure is a kind of favor, out on the ocean. Protein-deficient life finds its way in. The ocean’s generous with all her creatures, without favor. Make your own luck, kids. Don’t come crying to me. Time to go. Felt like a throbbing industrial suction cup hoisting engine blocks across a furnace-factory killing floor, fifty feet over the humping workers’ heads. Try pulling your hand out of that. Get used to a place and suddenly you have to move. The place you want to stay is the place you have to leave or don’t belong, a place where you can’t survive. Get stubborn and it’s all over. She got into the drowning victim position like it was second nature. I did my lifeguard thing. No effort. No more current to swim across. The current was headed for this beach the whole time, last stop, the end. I practically had to slam on the brakes. A wave rolled us over. She wound up on top, shoved me into the sand. Rough, cold, unpleasant, unlike her weight. She coughed, barfed seawater. The shakes hit hard. I was under an upside-down opaque suet gelatin bowl-mould in the shape of Esther Williams as the Venus of Willendorf. Big woman in the flesh wetsuit finally felt cold when it looked like we were safe. Nude, exhausted, a whisker from hypothermia on unknown beach territory at sunset. I dug out from under her. A great white shark sprung from the water, flipped like a happy sardine. A cement monolith was stuck in a dune like a disproportionate desert tombstone. Stone absorbs and disperses heat slowly, like water. Sand’s cell structure cools fast. Grade school physics in a Planet of the Apes-scape. “We have to get over there.” She got to her knees, heaved another gallon of Pacific, steadied and stood like an Olympic weightlifter. Head and a half taller than me. Shoulders like a football gladiator in pads. But she was a woman. Same shape, only bigger. The gray bunker box was a hotel someone built on the beach for tourists who never showed. Architects and developers miscalculated sharks and deadly riptide currents. Or else the drawing-board boys knew the lay of the land and didn’t clue the owners in. Possible real estate sucker scam. Get rich quick schemes lose heat and glitter faster than sand through an hourglass in the shape of a beautiful beach. Dreams crumble with a heartbreak soundtrack in time-lapse forward motion. Dreams built of sand, on sand. Dunes were eating somebody’s dream-resort. Sand, egged on by the wind, swallows hotels. The lobby was buried. Skeleton in a loose-fit hotel-flunky suit sat next to a bell dummied-up by sand. Bellhop in permanent Pompeii crouch will never carry another bag for anybody. Four stories still stuck up through the colossal dune. We went in through a balcony. The sliding doors still slid, glass and mesh screen. The king-size bed wasn’t made, but it was there. Blankets in the closet stank of mildew and animal afterbirth. But there were blankets in the closet. We rolled. I was warm, she was cold. Physicists call the phenomenon thermodynamics. Million words for what we did to stay alive. The wind howled. Whales answered. There was a whale on the beach when I went out to have a look around the next morning. Beached whale with a rusty machete stuck in its stomach. Some beachcomber stabbed the carcass, or we were in a whaling country where Ahabs in rowboats used machetes for harpoons and messed up their kills. Abandoned hotel in a Twilight Zone Nantucket. The dead whale was stretched out on its side, right fin under its ponderous head in a kind of bathing beauty cheesecake pose. Help yourself to some belly blubber, big boy. Use the knife provided. Sperm whale sashimi for breakfast on a windswept beach. The mosquitoes smelled me come back to life and attacked. Barely made it back behind the screen door with the chunk of gore. Lard for my large new girlfriend. The balcony wall seethed black with starved insect predators. Scared me worse than the sharks. She wasn’t all the way warm yet. Rubbed her down with the blubber she didn’t want to eat. Slick like suntan oil to hold in heat. Whale grease made the horsehair blankets smell even worse. The sense-combo had a strange effect. Sperm whale protein made me hump like Frankenstein, howl like the Wolf Man. Got my woman warmed up for a gene pool workout. Fifty laps fast, flip-turn, breast-stroke, sprint to the finish. Happy high school swim-team memories. Furtive grope session in the shower room with Miss Paterson, aka Fat Patty, the girls’ swim coach. Only happened once, but man-oh-man. Poster language in abandoned halls, labels on beer bottles ditched on the stairs said we were in Mexico. Sprawling hotel kitchen buried under coarse gray-brown sand. The floor that counted as ground was three or four feet deep, with higher sand-drifts in the corners. Desperate owners and managers frantically hired peon sweeper squads. The service road slowly disappeared. No driveway. Nearby postcard-fodder beaner fishermen villages devoured by dunes. Burgeoning beach, palms with roots buried too deep to sway, sharks cruising past hip-deep territory, swarthy mosquito fog. Even whales dreamed of suicide in this scenery. Humans assign mating motives to the whales’ absurd migrations. We scoured four doomed floors, couldn’t find food. Sheets and towels gray with mildew or dry rot did duty as plague-time togas when it got cold at night. Decorative serapes and ponchos stuck to the walls turned useful, in the end. The shower nozzle in room 917 leaked fresh water, tangy with rust, fungus. Majolica bowl in the hallway caught and contained bare survival drip. We hit the beach wrapped like modern art because we were afraid of the sun, sandstorms, mosquitoes, dune monsters. She started to cry when she saw the whale. Not many things look sadder than an immense mermaid stretched out in death while seagulls and crabs do their dirty jobs. Horny sailors looked at dugongs and saw Marilyn Monroe. Live whale films on TV spread the vibe that life’s OK, plenty of room and clean water. Relaxed fluke gestures as post-hump humpbacks vault skyward with improbable grace out of pure joy. Pint-size shrimp and sea-fleas mean 50-foot, 40-ton behemoths get enough to eat. Whale milk is sweet-creamy lobster bisque. Listen to the whale calf guzzle. Whale songs only sound sad to puny untrained ears. Whales are happy. Really. I think they’re happy. Try explaining whale serenity to a distraught fat female who probably caught more than her share of whale humor in high school. Maybe she thought I offed the whale to feed her. She over-estimated me. Maybe I saved her life when I swam out despite the ocean’s ambiguously worded warning. Maybe she was indestructible, despite self-destructive impulses. She saved my life with her heat-transfer internal combustion engine. The sea spared two useless creatures, spat them onto a dangerous beach. Greedy developers looked at a windswept stretch, saw Miami. They built a hotel, saw it swallowed, turned and ran. “We could eat the crabs instead,” I said. “Since I’m a man, I’m supposed to be smart enough to start a fire. We’ll heat up stones, wrap the little hyena-fuckers in this…antler kelp or whatever it is…got to be some stones around here somewhere. Have us a luau, a clambake. Aren’t crabs supposed to be related to oysters?” “They’re alive,” she said. “They want to stay that way. They don’t know what they’re doing. Just hungry, is all.” A feeling she understood. She empathized with ugly crustaceans dismantling nature’s over-ambitious living dream. Not me. I stomped a crab into the sand. He sank his claws into my heel with his last spiteful gasp. Miserly driftwood was loofah-like cactus skeletons, tequila corks, twigs. A log would’ve been like winning the lottery. Barbecue an entire baleen whale with a briquette. Evolution means you know when to give up. There was nothing in the dead hotel to generate sparks, flames. When daylight wore out we huddled on beds pushed together in the dark. “Where did you go in?” I said. No fat-girl clothes puddles were visible on the sand at Point Hueneme. “Just south of Santa Cruz. People on the roller coaster got me down. Depressed, I mean. The screams, mostly. Didn’t even go for a ride. Didn’t want to go alone. So I hit the surf.” She went in and didn’t want to come back. The ocean swept her past where I went in, not sure what I was going in for or whether a return lap was in the rolling foamy cards. Maddy said don’t go. Maddy was sensible, wary of nature’s dangers. She watched me go out, saw me get swept away, either freaked or went home and thought well, that’s that. Life goes on. Maybe Maddy knew I’d had enough and respected my last wishes. Honor the dead by forgetting them. Live independent of their lives, their weight, which is nothing. Live independently of loads borne by the lives around you. A lone whale broadcasts loneliness in underwater soundwaves. Every whale wants to belong to a pod. Group bubble feeding’s a good scam. Engine noise from cargo ships, cruise ships, battleships, pleasure yachts and whaling trawlers drown out mating moans, calls for companionship. The ocean’s anything but silent. Whales can’t even hear themselves think anymore in the vast upside-down underwater cathedral aquarium. “We can’t stay here,” I said. “Nobody cares. Nobody’s around. There aren’t any No Trespassing signs or security cameras. We can stay as long as we want.” “We’ll be like the whale in a week or two.” No way to keep track of weeks. The calendar in the hall was severely outdated. “Then let’s stay long enough for me to lose a hundred pounds.” “I ain’t got a hundred to lose.” “Thanks for reminding me. You got the whale.” “Few more days of sun, crabs and sinking shoreline quicksand action and I won’t.” “You got me. I’ll be your whale.” She was good as her word. She kept me warm as she shed weight. I lost my appetite for whale long before there was nothing left. Crabs and seagulls got the ripe steaks and skin, gravity got the rest. The whale carrion sank into the sand like the hotel that housed starving sex-crazed live ghosts. She said I told her my mother wanted to move in with us and decided the time had come to leave. She didn’t think she’d get along with my mom. She wrapped me like a mummy with towels for shoes. Pachuco peasants in a rusted Ford flatbed picked us up. Weird white Tuaregs who wanted to hit Tijuana, but were headed the wrong way. She wasn’t much at solar navigation. Hotel living and no-protein diet means you forget the flaming sky-ball rises east and sets west. Maybe such considerations are contingent on which way you’re turned when you shoot the sun with the inborn cerebral sextant. Survival sex vibes knocked out any orientation besides sexual. What happened at the disappearing-hotel-trick site was strictly straight, vanilla, female-superior. I lost the strength for exotic adult action fast. Pachuco peons fed me home-jerked machaca and hand-slapped tamales. Leftover bottles filled with pulque homebrew showed me the world with new eyes. The pez who picked up white gringo towelhead sun-worship cult crazies were headed to Ensenada. Their goal was to purchase poultry at the massive Third World livestock market. Live chickens meant cheap huevos rancheros. Ensenada meant a fast-life weekend for Baja dirt farmers. They dropped us off at a church. The old woman who took care of the place gave us clothes, said we could use the phone. Neither of us wanted to use it. We talked a truck driver who stopped for fish tacos into taking us back across The Line. We hid under blankets on the unmade bed in the back of the cab. Border guards knew the guy as definitely not one to shag wetbacks. He went down with a load of clothing components that needed final stitch assembly, came back with sparkling fresh lettuce and invisible slim dryback stowaways. Totally legal. She got a waitress job in San Diego. When she was established as a stand-up hash slinger, she convinced Bob the Manager to give me a trial run as a line cook. She told him I made rotten whale flab taste like filet mignon. The truth is, I make a decent hamburger.
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