The Seas (13 page)

Everything is more than I could have imagined, like having a square ice cube in your mouth and you can’t swallow it. You have to let it drip slowly down your throat. Having him this close after years of wanting him this close, smelling deep in his hair and it’s not just my hair, my pillow pretending to be him, it is him. Tasting his ear and having it taste differently then I ever imagined. How exciting that waxy difference is after years of wondering what the inside of Jude’s ear tastes like.

“Hurry. Then I’ll tell you” he whispers very quietly in my ear, losing more of my clothes. There and there and there. I had never felt love in my lungs before. Jude looks like a horse. A seahorse. He is pushing up against me and inside me and every time I kiss him his lips are wetter than before. He is melting and he has been drinking so that I feel like I am rocking, like we’re on the sea.

Even after, when we are sitting on his bed with our legs around one another. I pet his face and listen to his breath and cannot fall asleep because there is a foreign feeling in my veins, it is the feeling of finally getting what I wanted, and the feeling is colder than I ever thought it would be. The feeling won’t let me sleep.

Eventually Jude lies back, and through the night he drips and drips. I stay awake listening for as long as I can. The drip, drip, drip of him is the last thing I hear before I drift off.

In the morning it is still raining. Jude is no longer in bed. When I fell asleep he was wrapped around me but now he is gone. I touch where he slept. “Jude,” I call but get no answer. The rain is coming down hard and loud, not in drops but more like it is pouring. I wrap the sheet around myself to look for him. He is not in the shower. He is not in the kitchen, though I see the bottle of whiskey we started last night. Someone has finished it. Jude must have drunk the rest sometime in the night, because it wasn’t me. I enter the living room to investigate. “Fuck!” I land with a crack. My feet slip out from under me and I land with a splash on my back, knocking the air from my lungs, landing in a puddle of water in the middle of the living room floor. I rub the arm that I fell on. I look at the ceiling, thinking Jude’s roof must have a leak. The ceiling is dingy white, but dry and coated with the webs that dust makes. No leak. I sit up in the water. It smells familiar. The puddle is large, far taller than me. I lower my face to the water and, there, I have a terrible thought. “Jude?” I ask. I can see my reflection. “Is that you?” I touch my tongue to the water that has pooled on the floor. I taste it. It is.

Jude melted. He really melted all the way to nothing but water. I unwrap the sheet that is covering me and I lie back on the living room floor so that I can be in the puddle.

The night before feels so near I reach my hand behind my back, believing that I can touch it. As I lie in the puddle I can still feel Jude from last night and it feels so real, not made up this time. I experience the memory as an electric shock of thought in my brain. I wonder and worry about this electrical discharge in a pool of water.

“Jude. Jude. Jude.” I turn on my side so the water goes in my ear. I put my lips just on the surface of the puddle, without touching the floor. “Don’t go,” I say. I kiss Jude everywhere. I swallow him. I drink the water from the floor. I have to lap it the way a cat or a dog would. It is dirty with dust and sand and filth, but I drink it anyway, and when I can’t get anymore with my tongue, I sop Jude up in the bedsheet and wring the last drops of him into my mouth. “Jude,” I say once I finish drinking all that is left of him.

“We’re getting out of here,” I say. “Let’s go.” I find Jude’s keys on his kitchen table. Underneath the keys on the table there is a pen and a letter written from Jude to me. The letter is tucked into an envelope where Jude has written on the outside:

THE REST OF THE STORY

I stuff the envelope into my jacket pocket, being careful not to fold or crush it. “I’ll drive,” I say. It will be hundreds of miles before I have to decide where we are actually going. For now we are just going south.

I feel buoyant. I feel light and ready. I feel like we are getting out of here and mostly I feel Jude inside me and it feels like love.

I look again in the rearview mirror, and quite suddenly there is a beautiful blue as though the storm finally broke. It is truly a gorgeous color. This blue is chaotic and changing. I recognize it immediately. “Jude,” I say and I point into the rearview mirror. “It’s the ocean. It’s coming up behind us,” I say. I watch as the blue rises up like a tidal wave so quickly that I am certain it will catch up with us soon. “It doesn’t want us to leave,” I say. I check the mirror. “At first, I thought it was a bunch of cop cars chasing us with their lights on but now I can see that it is the ocean.” I accelerate. “I don’t think we can outrun the ocean but I’ll try for your sake,” I tell him and continue to accelerate.

I watch the blue in the mirror. It is so beautiful that it is hard to look away. “Jude,” I say, “fuck the dry land. I am a mermaid.” I turn to look at him, but Jude is not sitting beside me. “Jude?” I ask and stare at the empty vinyl seat where he should be. I reach my hand over to touch the empty seat. But I look too long. I collide and burst through the guardrail and then I am sailing down into a deep ditch beside the road. For a moment I soar through the air in Jude’s truck and I figure that might be it, time for one last thought. And so I sit, holding onto the wheel, waiting for that one last thought to arrive. I wait as the truck’s nose dips and lands like an explosion, followed by a deep silence. The crash is over. After a moment I open my eyes. I look out the smashed windshield and see smoke or fog in the rain. The fog starts to turn blue and finally a thought arrives. I am still alive. That’s the thought. Just then the truck breaks the silence. It begins to sizzle as though it is angry at the accident.

“Jude?” I turn and ask, but before I can get any response the water rushes in like a couple of police officers with their blue lights flashing, with their guns drawn. The water rushes in like a couple of police officers would rush in to surround the smashed up car of some drunk people who are evading the law. The water is like two officers, one on either side of the car both with guns drawn and pointed at me. The first officer opens my door and it creaks after the crash. He points his gun into my neck. His hand trembles so violently that the barrel of his gun shakes, tapping the bone at the bottom of my jaw. We stay together in silence. The engine is ticking, his hand shaking between my neck and chin, until he finally asks me, “Will you get out of the car please?” He drops the gun back to his side where it continues to shake. I slide out of the car accident.

“Jude,” I say.

“Miss,” the policeman says so softly I can barely hear him in the rain, “You are under arrest for the murder of Jude Jones. Anything you say or do—,” the man says and continues but after the word murder paired with Jude I stopped hearing. The water rushes in and throws me into the back of a patrol car that returns me to town, that passes close by the ocean so that I can smell the shore’s scent of decay. I can hear how the waves sound like breathing or snoring until we drive past and the ocean wakes up and watches the police car go by.

“We almost escaped,” I tell the sea.

And the ocean spits what it thinks, like a storm, “Don’t you ever try that again.”

In the back of the patrol car the seat is built as a hole. It is very low and dark so that both the outside world and the front seat are obscured. I can only see the very top of the back of the policemen’s heads. One, the young one with the soft voice and nervous hands, has cut his hair back so far so that it rises up as bristles at attention, in the same way one would expect the spine hairs of a porcupine to do. The other man, who is older and rounder, has only a corona of hair, short fibers that circle his pate and leave the wrinkles of pink rolls at the top of his neck exposed. That haircut is like a monk’s. The monk does the driving. “Sorry I was so nervous,” the young cop says to him. “I never pointed a gun at an actual person before is all. Especially not a girl. But sorry. Now I’ve done it and I’ll be all right,” he says.

“I know you will,” the monk says. “You’ll be fine,” he tells the young officer and adds as an afterthought, “I’ve been on the force thirty-two years and this is only the fifth homicide I’ve ever even heard of around here,” he says. “You did fine.”

“A homicide?” I say to the policemen, but they do not answer me. I think they cannot hear me back here in this hole seat. That or else they can’t hear me because they are on the dry land. “Are you guys looking for Jude?” I ask louder. Still they don’t hear me.

“How’d you know?” the young cop asks the older one.

“Her mother called us. She was worried.”

I ask again louder, “A homicide? Jude is dead? My mother?”

“Miss,” the monk-haired policeman says without turning around, he’s driving, “It would be better for you if you didn’t speak to us. You’re all over his house. You’re all over the body in the living room and, goodness, you’re fleeing the scene in his truck.”

“The body?” I ask.

“That’s the part we still can’t figure out,” the young man says, and I have to lean forward to hear him. He turns to look at me and stares, making me feel trapped and awkward. He watches me through the metal grating between the front and back seat as if I were an animal. I can barely make him out. “We’re wondering how in a bone dry living room did you manage to drown the poor guy?”

So I stop talking.

Inside a small cement room with a wall of one-way glass they say, “Tell us what happened.” The one-way glass seems extremely serious, and I find it hard to believe that such a formal room for interrogation would be wasted on me. I didn’t kill anyone.

“Tell us what happened.” It is the monk and the young one. They have a tape recorder.

There is quiet for a long time while I think. They want the whole story I guess. OK, the whole story. “Once upon a time,” I begin, “far, far below the deep blue sea—”

The monk stands to leave. “I see. You are going to play the crazy card. I’m not buying it. We’ll come back when you are ready to talk.”

They both stand and stare again. “I don’t like it,” the young guy says. “She’s spooky. Her skin is so pale I feel like I can see through her,” he says. It is the first real thing that has happened today. He can see me. What the young man says works like a door or window opening. It lets the policemen in, for real, and it makes me wonder, “How did you cops get inside my story?” I say it out loud, as a whisper, but out loud.

“What are you talking about?” the young man asks.

“Your story?” the monk asks. He smiles. “You are the one writing this story?” he asks, and slowly I nod my head because I can’t tell if he is making fun of me. “If that’s the case then you must know what happened to your friend Jude, you know, if you’re writing this.”

“He melted,” I say but they stand to leave as if they don’t believe me. “Wait. Wait,” I tell them and then I say, “Jude wrote something too.”

“This?” the officer says and takes Jude’s letter from a plastic evidence bag.

“Yes. The rest of the story. Yes,” I say and take it back from the officer.

“Your friend Jude is dead,” the monk says. “Tell us what happened,” he says and I look at his request. It looks like lead that he wants me to turn into gold.

“I didn’t kill Jude,” I say. “I couldn’t have. Jude was already dead.” And then I pull the letter Jude wrote me from its envelope. I hold it close to my heart.

I read them Jude’s letter.

I’ll write it here cause if you have it written you can look back over this ’till the letter falls apart and maybe by then you will believe me.

At first I felt lucky to be on the hospital ship. I was happy to be out of Iraq and going home. I wouldn’t have been so happy had I known what the ship would be like. There were all manner of men missing arms and legs and eyeballs and noses and even one missing his center. His stomach had been blown out and somehow he had lived. They had replaced his stomach with a plastic bag where the doctors could watch to make sure the mush he ate was being digested. Despite the doctor’s orders I wasn’t watched all the time. I wasn’t really watched at all. There were too many other soldiers who needed help. So I was more or less free to walk around the ship. And I did.

Below deck it was easy to become disoriented because the hallways were long and indistinct. It was especially easy to be disoriented since I already was disoriented. The walls in the ship’s hallways were made of iron that met the floor and the ceiling in thick bumpy welds that looked like scars and each time I got lost the iron halls felt like corrals that said, “Behave, soldier, behave.” I was sick. On that ship I thought I’d have a fit from claustrophobia. That and feeling that the reasons why we’d waged a war were loose and shifting daily nearly made me really lose my mind. I tried to think of home but I felt trapped and I felt like the longer I stayed on board the deeper I sank in complicity. Not that I wasn’t already in deep. The only relief I felt was when I could hear the ocean beating the hull and know that the U.S. military did not own the water. Yet. Everywhere there were sick soldiers. There was vomit. There was blood and crying through the night. We were wrecked. All of us. And the only good thing I thought was that the waves could wash it all away.

I remember striking my elbow on the pointy corner of an iron stair railing and I didn’t feel anything. I puked and I didn’t feel anything. So I cut my arm with a shaver as a test and I still didn’t feel anything. And that feeling—the feeling of having no feeling—is the most terrifying thing I have known. I thought, “I’m dead. I’m already dead,” and so barely, without barely making a decision, I decided. I went up on deck and I decided. I jumped overboard.

It was the coldest ocean I have ever felt, far, far colder than here. The pain it gave me was good at first because I could feel it and feeling something, even freezing cold, battering waves was better than feeling nothing. For one moment of pure fear I forgot the war. The waves were tremendous. My ship was already gone and I floated for a minute or two before realizing what I had done. It crept up on me slowly. Feeling began to return. I thought of you. I thought how I’d never see you and I couldn’t believe how fucking stupid I had been. I couldn’t fucking believe it. I’d survived the fucking war and now I was going to die. From the trough, the very bottom of a fifteen, maybe an eighteen foot wave, I changed my mind. I knew even an ocean full of water couldn’t clean away a war. “Help,” I yelled just as a wave broke on me. Like who the fuck was going to hear me? It took me under.