Sea and Stones Chpt. 1

SEA AND STONES:

Voices From Atlantia

Thomas R. McKague

GLB Publishers San Francisco

SECOND EDITION

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

Published in the United States by

GLB Publishers

P.O. Box 78212, San Francisco, CA 94107 USA

Cover by GLB Publishers

Cover Photos by Joseph Alcala

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 1-879194-81-3 (POD)

Library of Congress Control Number:

2001091284

2001

BIONOTE

Thomas R. McKague received his B.A. degree in English from St. John Fisher College of Rochester, NY, and his M.A. degree in English from the University of Rochester. He completed Doctoral course work in English at the State University of New York, Binghamton. He has also done graduate work in TESOL at Syracuse University. He has Professor Emeritus of English status from Onondaga Community College, State University of New York at Syracuse, NY, where he taught Composition/ Literature, Creative Writing, Intermediate and Advanced ESL, American Poetry, and Multicultural and Gay Literature for twenty-five years. He is currently teaching English as a Second Language (including Cambridge and TOEFL Test Preparation) at Embassy Center for English Studies in San Francisco.

He has published short fiction and poetry in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Art Times, The James White Review, On The Edge, Bitterroot, Third Eye, Embers, Poet's Pride, Blueline, The Blue Unicorn, Esprit (editor and writer), Wordsmith (editor and writer), Lake Effect, and, most recently, Poetpourri, The New Press Literary Quarterly, The Gay Nineties: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, and A Natural Beauty. His chapbook, Waterlight Dreams, has been published by The New Press, and two book-length collections of poems, Stormlight and The Violet Hours, have recently been published by Mellon Poetry Press.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the following people for their encouragement and moral support in the production of this book: RICHARD DEERING, MICHAEL BANNISTER, SONIA MARI, and, most especially, JOSEPH ALCALA.

There's a theory...that we are all Atlantians....
Do you want to hear it, or are you getting stuffy on me?
Go ahead. Tell me a story.

Well...in one of our last incarnations,
we were all citizens of Atlantis. All of us....
We lived in this lovely, enlightened kingdom
that sank beneath the sea a long time ago.
Now we've come back to this special peninsula
on the edge of the continent...because we Know...
in a secret corner of our minds, that we must return together to the sea....

Tales of the City

Armistead Maupin

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.
Yet when we came back, late, from the
Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed' und leer das Meer.*

1. Burial of the Dead

The Wasteland

T. S. Eliot

*vast and empty is the sea....

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.... It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

"The Dead"

The Dubliners

James Joyce

I cannot live with You-
It would be Life-
And Life is over there-
Behind the Shelf-
So We must meet apart-
You there-I-here-
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are-and Prayer-
And that White Sustenance-
Despair-

#640

The Complete Poems

Emily Dickinson

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Part I: Papa (1)

I have not spoken of this to anyone, but I will tell you. We are reasonably happy here on this arid hillside facing the Pacific, my granddaughter, Julia's child Lara, and I. But I am old and weary. I cannot chop enough wood for the fire we need every night to keep the child warm. Nor can I manage the long walk down the hill to The Bay, as it is called locally, for supplies, and walk back again. Thank The-Powers-That-Be for the old Syrian-Kurdish woman who checks in on us once a week from the village. But I can teach Lara languages: she is only three and already knows quelque mots de la Francias, wie bitte Deutsch, all-but-fluent English, and also a few words in Kurdish, mostly curses! She will be totally articulate in a matter of months, but I'm not sure in what language. Her mother would be proud of her. But Julia is gone.

The sea is constantly thrashing at our ears. It sounds like the groan of some disheveled god. Never can we escape whatever it is that we hear, but whatever it is it reminds me of a warning I heard from an old Catholic priest once long ago when I used to go to confession: You Cannot Escape The Truth Of Your Nature, And Your End! Maybe the sea has no mystical messages at all for us, but I know Lara and I are affected by her colors, her moods, and her contours, which every day change like the whims of a passionate woman. The child will often whimper for no reason for hours as the sea churns, while I read Rimbaud over and over on the rough-planked cracked doorstep until the sun sets. We live with an old grylow, wart-ridden dog in a cabin with an outhouse facing half of the world, the titanic Pacific. I tell Lara every day, as we throw stones down the hill till they disappear over the cliff into the pounding surf below, Out There somewhere is China. We just can't see it from here! She giggles and says, It's there I know Papa…somewhere, because you say so. So we throw more stones down the hill, to let the Enormity know we're here, or there, that we exist, such as we are….

The cabin itself is a casualty of a century and a half of history, built by a failed '49'er I suspect: dirt cheap to rent, given its nearness to Atlantia; ramshackle; one room with warped redwood plank walls; a potbelly stove for heat and cooking; running water, pumped occasionally from a sporadically full well, depending on rainfall; a roof that sags due to ferocious oceanic winds and dry, splintered timber; many scurrying, all but invisible mice; and rustic charm that would infatuate an eastern American tourist for about one-half day maximum. It was all I could afford, after Julia left…. And it was a place to retreat…to escape…to heal…to take care of my own blood, Julia's child… all I have left to call my own….

So you see, life is Spartan here. It grows more and more minimal every day. Everything, that is, except Lara. She grows more ample with each moonrise. She is her mother's child: alert, curious, sometimes voraciously enthusiastic about the allure of life. Even with just me for a companion, and the dog she calls 'Cal' for some indecipherable reason. Just us….

But you must know about Julia before we can begin the whole story. Julia was a beautiful, healthy, rotund baby. Her mother and I used to plunk her down on her grandmother's donated sofa in our first cold water studio, Buddha-like, and watch to which side she would helplessly, gently topple over. We would laugh at her lopsided contentment; she would coo with baby-spittle in horizontal bliss as we laughed. Those were happy years, her early ones, the first years of our forced marriage. You see, we were eighteen, Margarette was pregnant, and we were both indoctrinated, if not devout, Catholics then. So Margarette's father arranged an impromptu wedding for us (I remember in those days both our fathers had to sign permission slips in the town hall, since we were both underaged-- does that regulation still apply?), and it was plainly evident to all our relatives at our reception the reason for such haste: Margarette was already in the full bloom of her fifth month! Her father also treated us to a one-night 'honeymoon' at the local No-Tell-Motel, where we released our apprehensions by avidly fucking unto orgasm three times in a row, although our first evening of legalized abandonment concluded with my having an asthma attack! I think I knew even then that we had been tossed on the ragged rocks of a doomed Fate, the consequences of exploring our late-adolescent uncertainties….

No! You must understand! Margarette and I did love each other! Before the pregnancy, we would read poetry together for hours on that faraway town's riverbank in the orange glow of summer's throbbing late afternoon sun. Then we would enter touch with all the trembling tenderness of curious novices. Later, we would thrill ourselves with a clandestine passion in the privacy of her father's enclosed back porch during the after-dinner hours, the household silences of dusk, though never going all-the-way, as they used to say--never complete insertion, though evidently my seed found its way despite our precautions to its allocated destination. At the time it all felt as natural as…Youth!

I remember the day Margarette called me to meet her for coffee in the outdoor college café. Margarette, curly black hair, voluptuous breasts under her clinging mauve blouse, her long-lashed violet eyes downcast as she sipped her coffee, leaving a smear of rose-red lipstick on the edge of the chunky white cafeteria cup, saying simply, I'm pregnant. But I don't want you to feel trapped. At least, now we know we're both Fertile. What should we do?

Being unwilling to face the consequences then of my own nature, being a responsible Catholic boy, being enthralled by her beauty and the depth of her caring, and most importantly, wanting some semblance of what was then, and perhaps is still, considered respectable normalcy, I reached out to hold her hand across that plastic white table and said with feigned self-assurance, Then we had better get married. That table was a Table of Lies!

So it began, the long journey down convoluted, twisted and torturous pathways to this barren hillside overlooking the ever-thrashing, indifferent Pacific. Julia (a 'love-child,' her grandmother would call her, not without disdain) would travel with us through many rocky years, our only pearl in a sachet of stones that got heavier and heavier. It finally sagged beyond its limit until it ripped apart after seven years, unearthing an avalanche of regret….

Not that those early years were a paradigm of wasted youth, you understand! There were the adventures of conventional, traditional couplehood grasping for a cosmopolitan sophistication while hovering on the edge of an erudite but erosive poverty: elegantly simple dinners with other young couples in the spring under the budding elm trees, usually involving daring experiments of cuisine like brie with string beans, couscous, rabbit stew; discussions into wine-fueled wee hours about the then avant-garde cinema verite, Fellini, surrealism, sexual aberrations and free love (which we all accepted, but would never dream of espousing); the sharing of esoteric book-finds, which would abet the spontaneous flow of potentially stimulating conversation the next time around. Oh, we were building the scaffolding for a new, intellectual mode of living, a lifestyle as remote from our Depression-era parents' as this barren hillside is from my beginning!

Picture this, if you will: a generally overcast northeastern rust-belt city dominated by shades of gray, brown, and mud-green houses and hills; soot-flecked slush in the streets for five months of the year, eventually running into milk-brown floodwater every April; huge clusters of white, violet, and indigo-black lilacs, lush beds of purple-and-grylow-faced pansies, suddenly repudiating the gloom one Sunday morning each May, a day which was locally called Lilac Sunday, planned and celebrated with much hoopla; the palpable silvery humid heat of summer sticking like angel-floss in the branches of the drooping willow fronds; neon-lit corner cafeterias right out of a Hopper populated by a solitary figure draped in drab at 10PM. Get the picture? Out of this unpromising milieu came Julia, child of sunlight and sorrow. And of course, Margarette and I, both of whom felt at first that our future could be transcendent if only we could translate all we had read, fantasized about in our college literature courses, into the transcript of our lives together.

Well, we're getting toward the knotted core, the heart of my story already, the time when I wanted to die. Strange, now that I am so old, that mere life then would seem such an expendable commodity; now it is a blood-red ruby, sorely lit by a flickering flame from within, a glow as faint as this shaft of moonlight. That life persists at all is perhaps because the child provides a purpose….

Sonia, the Syrian woman, just left. There is a basketful of food--pita bread, falafels, marinated goat meat, couscous in plastic containers (oh, the irony of life!), grape leaves soaked in oil and vinegar and wrapped around rice and beef, and of course milk for Lara--on that not-so-fashionably-distressed old pineboard table. Help yourself. I've written her a check, given her a list of commodities that we will need next week scratched out beforehand on a brown paper bag--extra firewood, for which she will have to burden and drag her reluctant old mule all the way up here; canned soup and vegetables, since I simply am incapable of cooking; eggs; more bottled water; animal crackers, a treat for Lara when she's good; tonic water, limes, and Tanqueray (such a luxury!) for you and me. Sonia is a treasure, still with remnants of erotic appeal at sixty with her curly iron-gray hair, her full bosom, her wide hips, belted-in waist, her olive-black eyes, her suggestive demeanor. Every week, when she comes, she says, So, Sir, you see I no forget you two. Of course her English is fractured, interspersed with Kurdish words when her vocabulary fails, Kurdish curses when she's frustrated with me. Sonia's only been here twenty years, after all. She must miss her own kind, of which there are none other in The Bay. Perhaps she feels her marriage to that Russian River Bait-And-Tackle store manager was a mistake, merely a ploy, in retrospect, for automatic citizenship. I miss my own kind, too…whatever that kind is…. That's why I'm so glad you're here to listen to my stories, Zack. But this is only one story--Julia's. And Margarette's. And Mine. And Lara's. And, I suppose, His…. And, perhaps in the end, Yours, too….

Lara was a brutal twist of fate, after all. She wasn't supposed to happen. She is, of course, blameless. But Julia's love for…I will not say His name just yet…was so immense, so unabashed, that there was no hesitation, I suspect, despite the fact that he was her… father's… there's no other word for it but…Lover. I've never told anyone but you, Zack, because…let's say…Just Because …. Perhaps he wasn't really ever in love with me, but twenty some years of living together surely counts for something…. No?

I don't want to talk about it! But you're here. Many evenings lately you leave your fishing shack on The Bay and walk all the way up here on that trail that Sonia bitches about whenever she comes (All that twissle caught at my skirt!) to hear my stories. It's actually one story, like one wilted rosebud shedding its petals, gone to seed. And we drink our gin with tonic water and lime, while I babble….

Well, it's getting late. The firelight is getting dim, and the child has to be warm, so would you be so kind as to get some of the chopped wood stacked just outside the door? And would you let Cal in for the night? He's getting old, too, and wants to rest his head near the scent of the living. Of course, you can stay over if you like; that perpetual cold, clammy fog is pouring in in earnest now. I have an old sleeping bag stored away somewhere in the shed. Or, if you'd rather, a few extra blankets and pillows on my bunk. I have precious little company these days. While you get the firewood, I'll put this food in the refrigerator, our one modern luxury. (I don't know if PG&E is aware that we haven't paid the bill in months; perhaps they've forgotten we're here, on this nondescript arid hillside, in a tumbledown cabin facing the Pacific, as if we were an accident of time, history, nature--sort of The Past 1obotomized!) I hope I don't sound like I'm feeling sorry for myself. For us. I'm not. It's just that, in the end, we're all as remote as separate galaxies are…. Anyway, I'm glad you're here with me. Us. Tonight. Under that vast indigo sky out there pocked with stars. Still, I feel more and more tremulous as we get closer and closer to the Heart of the Matter…all that has come to pass. The truth is not always Redemptive. But it is always There. Stay for a while. Yes, Stay.

Good morning, Zack. Here's a cup of coffee for you. Cream? I'm so glad you stayed over last night. It was luxurious to lie next to another warm body, to share the dark hours with another, for once. It's been so long since I've had any real human contact with my own kind…. Just maybe we aren't really dead yet. Though God knows Death's pitch-black maw is gaping at my back, gnashing his teeth while sharpening his scythe!

Anyway, it's one beautiful October morning. The fog's burned off already, and an effulgent gold sun is steaming the dew off the eucalyptus trees on the top of the hill. Did you sleep well?

I must get back down to the fishing shack. The wharfside restaurant pays handsomely for 'the catch of the day,' as they say, if I get it to them well before the dinner hour. Yes, I slept just fine. But you snore, Old Man! Zack chuckles, then sputters in his laughter, coughing up the residue of all his Pall-Malls.

Who's calling who old? We'll neither of us ever see sixty again! Well, I'm not sure I'd want to, anyway. That was about the year Julia disappeared. That was quite some time after I left…Him, or He left me…as you will. All those years without so much as One Word--can you imagine, after twenty some years of sharing one's life…can you grasp it? That stone-dead silence has been reverberating like a rockslide ever since, 1ouder than that surf pounding incessantly down there…. But I'm rambling on again, no doubt in cliches! Let's get this new day on the road, shall we? It's another beginning of sorts. Yes? Don't answer. Just come back soon. Often what's unsaid is all that more poignant….

The silence after a door has closed; the half-finished cup of coffee still steaming on the pine table; the recollection of Margarette's lipstick-smeared white cup; the thrashing up of the years on this jagged shoreline; October's pristine blue and burnished gold brilliance just beyond the window ledge; the shadows that wordlessly shift about the cabin gloom as I sit seemingly for hours grinding up the verbs of memory, all that has happened, over and over in the gristmill of my heart; the hope to salvage some wheat from chaff, substance from chimera --yes, I am a fond, foolish old man. But last night, last night! I am still capable of giving, and receiving, affection, if only a kiss on the back as tremulous as a hummingbird's wing! Oh, the dream of Love's Possibility! How do we ever find our way in this dark tangled thicket when that is gone? But you, old man, must cease your reverie! Lara must be wakened, and fed.

I hear her rustling in her bed. Yes, Baby, I pledge, as I always do to assure her, stirring my old bones out of the chair, Papa's coming. Cal, move! I gently nudge the all-but-comatose dog off my feet. I am Lara's now.

Julia dealt with Atlantia like one would deal with an 'all-you-can-eat' Sunday brunch! Of course, there is much I must tell you that preceded this, but all that will come in time. Her ravenous consumption somehow led her instinctively here, to Atlantia. We are only about fifty miles north of there now, you know. Nevertheless, when she descended by Greyhound in Atlantia, she, at a mere nineteen, knew that she had found Home. Yes, I admit, a home that her mother could not provide, a home that I and…what's-His-name…couldn't, either. Whatever, she began immediately to consume men like they were so much spittle, neither gristle nor meat. She went through so many so quickly that I, despite urgent phone calls to-and-from the East, could not clearly evaluate. Nor judge. Nor even blame. It was she that was wreaking havoc in her life, Margarette's life (for some remote reason now spent in a Texan suburb, unmarried but coupled with a younger African-American man), my life, His life. But she entrenched herself in Atlantia, supposedly to dabble at an experimental college she had read about in a catalogue the year she was a high-school senior that promised, in bold red letters: FREE SELF-EXPRESSION, FREE-THINKING, FREE-ART, FREEDOM BY THE SEA. I blame myself here: she was so difficult for us all, so rebellious as a teenager, that we allowed her a year (was it two?) in an unstructured, new-age self-discovery type of high school. Her radical decision, NEW COLLEGE SF. ANT., was thus, I suppose, inevitable, though none of us really approved, since we were at heart so traditional, even, strangely (given the circumstances), conventional…. A bad choice, but her choice…. The beginning of an ending….

Anyway, I will tell you more about Julia, Margarette, Lara, the yet unnamed Him, me, and Atlantia. And the time I tried to kill myself…. But first I must sleep. I am an old man, after all, and so much has happened…. And I feel such a need to articulate, clarify, reassess now, though I don't really know why, unless it's that damned sharpened Scythe at my back…. Remind me to tell you tomorrow about how beautiful Julia was at that point: a neophyte in Atlantia, she was voluptuous, sensuous, nubile; she was big-breasted like her mother, yet slim as an Italian actress (Sophia Loren comes to mind, but that is our generation's icon, not hers--remember Sophia in "Two Women"?); she had cherry-red, pouty lips then, just ripe for kisses…. She was lovely, and voraciously ready for life. And of course broke. And unemployable. So there she was, at SF. ANT. Greyhound Station, disheveled as that rough sea out there now after a cross-country bus ride, stepping down in worn sneakers on the concrete of Atlantia, ready to begin, to design a new life of her own. And believe me, she did!

Don't snore, Zack. Lara and Cal are sound asleep. You sound like a spinning reel on a taut, arched rod! Is my story boring you? I close all the windows. The fog is pervasive tonight. Even The Bay is invisible. I cover Zack with an army blanket, and take his drink out of his hand. Even I know he is benign in his fatigue, innocent of any indifference. And that he is simply old, asleep, and dreaming of tomorrow's big net-catch….

Good morning, old friend. Here's some coffee. I extend a mug to Zack, who is scruffily awake.

What time is it? I have to get the boat out, he says with half-conscious but suddenly alerted acumen.

Only seven. You've got time.

No. I'm late. He quickly puts on his army green sweatshirt with a worn gray insignia across the front that reads THE WHARFSIDE, his faded denim jeans, stone-washed, sea-salt-splashed denim coat, a somewhat torn, very battered straw-brimmed hat, and gulps the coffee. Once again, thank you, is all he says as he hands me the half-drained cup and hurries out the door and down the hill to his fish.

Lara cries over her bread slathered with local Gravenstein apple jam, soaked in milk. She's out of diapers, but occasionally forgets the outhouse ritual. Oh, if only we had a bathroom!

Lara, go to the outhouse first, then we'll wash up. And for God's sake, don't feel guilty about a natural occurrence! Of course Lara doesn't understand the word 'guilty' (in any language), but she's old enough to feel shame. Is it endemic in the species, the genes, or am I just a bad substitute parent? In any case, she must do the Outhouse Thing and then wash herself, so I lift her off her chair, point her out the door, and say as gently as I can, Go, come back, I'll run some warm water, you'll wash. Then we'll eat.

OK, Papa. She runs off to the outhouse relieved, as if nothing is amiss. And nothing really is. Of course I love my granddaughter (despite the bizarre circumstances of her conception). And I will do all I am capable of to ensure her well-being. I'm beginning to care about Zack too. But that is just silly--a couple of foolish old men who like to lift a Tanguerey and tonic together occasionally, and maybe just to…Share with each other…. I am beginning to feel that I should live a little longer…. At least until Lara is secure…. At least until I know if Julia is alive or dead…. And whether I am or not….

Lara is running in the fields in front of the cabin now, up and down the hillside trailed by Cal, who is drooling with exertion and old-dog fatigue. I call out the open door to her, Lara, don't overdo it with Cal, or he'll have a Stroke!

What's a stroke, Papa?

It's something old dogs and people get when they stretch their limits.

What are limits?

Never mind. Just stop running in circles for a while and let Cal rest. And watch out at the cliff's edge!

OK, Papa. She flops down on the dry golden grass like a suddenly unstrung, loose-limbed puppet and smiles up at the fog-rinsed, azure California sky, while Cal hunches over her, licking her sweat-dewed face. Cal, stop it! You're slobbing all over me, she giggles. I suspect she means 'slobbering,' and wonder when I taught her that word. Probably in connection with her occasionally sloppy eating habits. Well, she's only three.

But generally she is such an easy child to deal with…. In some ways I've been really lucky….

But in other ways…. I still dream of Him most nights, after all these years. Not happy dreams, certainly. They usually involve assorted houses, packing up, various infidelities, moving out…. Frequently in dawn's earliest light I suddenly wake up, startled from a nightmarish dismemberment of some house we lived in, whether by earthquake, thieves, bitter quarrel…. Chairs lie strewn about with broken legs, windows are shattered, whole rooms are suddenly stripped of contents. Once even Half a House was gone at the end of a hallway, having slipped off its foundation! If He is there at all in these dreams (He is usually a provocative Vacancy), He is there as an antagonist telling me that he must go, that our roof has at last caved in….

Just this morning, while Zack was snoring contentedly over some fisherman's dream I suppose, while Lara was puffing contentedly in her sleep, while Cal was whimpering at her feet over losing rabbits off the cliff's edge, I woke up weeping. The sky at the window was sea-fog white, with only a few stars poking out, all the more crystalline in their shining through. Yes, I heard myself shout out, Yes, I loved Him like I've loved No Other…. He was All for a long, long while…. But that 'Yes' cut like a knife….

Do we ever recover from a final, permanent rejection? Do we ever see the part we ourselves played in the long-term process of growing apart? I remember Julia very astutely once saying, while we were wheeling infant Lara in a stroller through The Panhandle, well after the demise of one of her longer relationships (I think it was with Johnny), well after my own trauma, One never, never forgets Love Lost. No matter the Time…. If all these pre-dawn dreams really signify anything at all, they validate her conviction.

Isn't this a beautiful autumn evening, Zack? The air is as sweet as spring wine (from Napa Valley, of course), and the ocean is so calm tonight, as blue and dazzling as my lover's eyes were when he first said to me, You take my Breath Away. But that was so long ago, sometime before the Punic Wars…. Lara is sound asleep, with Cal keeping her feet warm. Let me freshen your gin and tonic. Why is Bay-Shop so short of limes or lemons these days, and here we are right in California? Well, thank The-Powers-That-Be that it's not Florida! And we have Sonia to scour the stores for us! Who would want to end up in Florida? Atlantia, and environs, is the best option. Anyway, I'll tell you about how I first met Him tonight.

It was in a laundromat, of all places. I had recently left Margarette, was living alone in a spare, suitably penitential monthly room rental with shared bathroom down the hall. Determined to maintain some semblance of civilized decorum, every Saturday I dragged my bundle of laundry, sheets, pillowcases and all, down the block to a place which announced itself as CLEAN-UP-YOUR-ACT in bold red letters taped to the window above all the handwritten notices: Missing Cat, Lost Meaningful Ring, Learn Yoga Today, Free Your Inner Self-- Buddha Will Tell You How, Jack-Off Club, Joe, Come Home !, March Against The War (which war, I wonder now?). I was tugging my laundry out of the overstuffed but 'cycle-finished' flashing washing machine, pulling it impatiently into the laundromat cart, when He came up to me from behind.

Excuse me. Do you have any extra detergent? I just ran out.

I turned to him, looked up at his face, and gasped for breath. He was a good four inches taller than I, with impeccably trimmed short black hair (a fetish of mine, I admit), taut tawny skin over a finely sculptured skull, and eyes as azure as that sea out there this evening. To say he was Stunning would be an understatement: his half-mast white T-shirt exposing a drum-tight belly, his blue jeans over long, lean, muscular legs, his Birkenstock thongs over athletic socks, his white teeth as wide as his smile--I was immediately Enthralled!

My fingers trembled as I handed Him my box of Tide. I wondered if He noticed the uncertainty of my hand. Yes, I knew at once that I was lost…. So when we went for coffee while my clothes were tumbling in a dryer, His swirling around in my washing machine, I could hardly speak, looking into the Heart of Light, the Silence. But He graciously laughed as I stumbled for words and said, Again, thank you for the Tide. And the company. Don't you just hate doing laundry? I need a houseboy!

And I found the courage to respond, despite sloshing the coffee over the lip of my white cafeteria mug in my agitated but stunned state. Might I apply?

Apply?

For the position. Of houseboy…. I mean, You take my Breath Away…is what I mean.

And later that night He whispered the same to me, in bed, post-coitus. We both chuckled at the…delicacy… of the repetition. So it began. A moment, one episode of pure joy, a sojourn in T.S. Eliot's Hyacinth Garden, the first steps down a meandering trail of years… flowers and thorns, rain and drought…tossed up on an emotionally rocky shoreline not unlike this below by the inexorable tides of Love. Yes, I said Yes. Right then. Yet it was much more than mere passion…. You see, Zack, we had discovered during our very first conversation after the Tide, in that coffee shop, that we had an amazing number of significant things in common: children, previous marriage, divorce, age, profession, orientation…. And a Hope, like a lighthouse in the night of our new-found aloneness, to truly bond once again, this time with one of our own kind, a Fellow Wanderer….

Well, there you have it, the people of my life. All gone now, except the child. I suppose it is time to think, and speak, about what they call Final Things. You know what I mean? Endings and Beyond.

Zack, it's almost November now, so we've got to think about heat. Or rather, I've got to. You know no one ever freezes to death in Atlantia. That's why they come here. Or rather there. The homeless on the street are getting so plentiful you can trip over them when you walk out the door in the morning. Something should be done in Atlantia. Perhaps a new mayor? I'd better get a good stock of firewood in for the rainy months. Oh, will Sonia bitch about her back! But she'll help us. She's so kind!

Anyway, we're here in this cabin on a hill no one seems to care about, overlooking the Pacific, not far away from Atlantia's problems, and once again enjoying the view. Do you care about Atlantia's problems? Are we too far away? (It's only fifty miles, you know, south of here.) I suspect you are a Republican! Do you care about anything but your fish? Just snore away, old man. I can't sleep.

About God, I've never been sure. Surely there must be a Cosmic Plan; the sea, the seasons, the stars all move in apparently orderly fashion (we're old enough to recognize patterns by now!). But as for a God with a Personal Interest in us, I have never had even the slightest, vaguest intimation…. Perhaps it's just me, my vagaries, my indispositions….

In short, I have nothing one would call a religious feeling, even though I suspect myself of a reverential awe for Nature, from the web of a spider to the galaxies far beyond us. The mere Pacific is enough to stagger one's imagination--so There, so Powerful!

About Death, I'm sorry to say at this late date, I'm also ambivalent. Is it final Blackout? A mere Vacancy? Or does the elixir of the spirit somehow linger beyond the corruption of the body? Certainly not in the realms of Dantesque Heavens, Hells, Purgatories, the ones we were indoctrinated with! But perhaps in a transfer of the life force into new forms of sublime, or minimal, energy…. About one thing alone, only, I'm almost certain, without any evidence to the contrary: Individual Consciousness is Terminal; the Self is a Conclusion, only a vestige thereafter in the memory of others, perhaps, if we've been fortunate enough to have loved, and/or have been loved….

With such a bleak perspective on the Big Questions, you might ask, why go on? The answers are quite simple: if given more time, I might find out I was wrong…; the ocean and the stars may somehow reveal to us that we were, after all, necessary, maybe even important…. Besides, there are some pleasures left, not to be missed--Sonia's Kurdish snacks, Cal warming your feet, Lara's giggles, the variable colors of our Pacific, your company, Zack…. And also, the joy of revisiting fond memories: His azure eyes at the laundromat; Margarette's discovery and recitation of Baudelaire on that faraway, long-ago summer-lit riverbank; all the unexpected, provocative potentialities of Atlantia we all discovered, when the world was young, and we were all so ripe with expectation, and had a joie de vivre not to ever be forgotten….

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