Yearning, like days and days without protein and then seeing a marshmallow-sopped ice cream and licking it down, while your muscles become red marbles scattering, scattering on a beach with bone-white sand, burrowing down like the pale soft albino crabs with fairy-moth legs. They make obeisance to the sea, the sea with its white serpent tongues lapping on the sand, the beach an ashtray, the honey mustard money buster’d café smelling of fish, everyone high as a kite with bleach-surfer hair, the sea angry beneath a blue jeans blue cheese sky, breaking everywhere, stinking up the place with polluted rain. Come on again, come on, kite surf when it’s a storm, let the wind take you by the kite and slam you on the wet asphalt and you’ll be a kid again, a kid with scraped knees and teeth falling out all over the place, a kid with chewed-up bubble gum hardening in your pocket, a kid with the irony of a lollipop after the dentist but you can’t eat it yet because you’ve got fluoride on your teeth. Everyone says be realistic, man, be realistic, you can’t handle the truth, and I say that I’m flicking my cigarette teeth onto that ashtray beach and let that suited tooth fairy find them with her metal detector.

Don’t tell her the suit scares me. I need the hips that sway, the artist who seeks the artist, the one who gets a tattoo on her left shoulder blade, thinking of me one long smoky summer afternoon, and as the needles go in and out, in and out, her muscles will scatter into red beads, red beads that make a necklace across time, and a beaded earring hanging off a carnival ear, and when I think of the thin tie-dyed cloth wrapped around her waist with all its little plastic-metal coins, and the samba with no music, not in a club but in a back room, poorly lit with the shutters drawn, when I think of that I’ll shudder, whether from the blue-jeans storm or the smoke or something else I’ll never know. Her eyes watch me and as she turns, turns like a record on a record player, turns like an infinite dancer in a childhood music box, as she turns I watch that tattoo and that tattoo watches back and says hey man, I can’t take it anymore. Hey man, hey man—I just want to slam the headphones over my ears, tight enough to block out the sound of the giant robots wrecking downtown, and I just want to breathe in the smell of lavender burning, or the Wizard of Oz poppy fields, back before I knew what poppies were for, back before I knew that empires rose and fell and that it means something different when the poor bleed, back before I knew that you’d find needles in a dirty gutter outside a homeless encampment and wonder why, and how, and who, and not ever get it because you’ve never had just one soggy dollar left in your pocket and a soda can with the top ripped off. Because you’ve been one of the lucky ones. It’s my confession to the priest who isn’t there, to the priest of the wild things, to the priest of the ones with the hearts made of so many petals, but they’ve got to keep them in a box proper-locked. I can’t face the truth, not now, not propped, not as Jack, not as Jack-in-the-box. I’m no jack of all trades, might be master of none, might be master of one, master of fun, master of one-and-done, master of the sea.

So see here, see me sitting here in a bar, missing her, missing her from afar, missing her shoulder blade, fingering my older blade, the jackknife from my grandmother’s grandfather, someone who wore a dead animal cap no doubt, not somebody wearing some French hat eating a baguette but the opposite—so I’m sitting in the bar, wondering if I missed the map that was supposed to lead me to some stupid central part of myself, some stupid central park, where the air isn’t smoky and the birds don’t look like birds because they’re actually angels. She’s sitting in another bar for sure, on the other side of the fake city where they pretend they’re a real city, and she’s pretending that she’s forgotten I have a ring in my backpack I’m never dropping, until one day turning through my fingers it turns blue and turns true and turns one too many times and slips onto the beach and the ashtray swallows it up. Hey, man, it’s not the seventies anymore.

#

I love parallel lines. They go on forever and ever, and never intersect. I love destroying parallel lines. I take the pen, grip it hard in my fingers till it hurts, dig the pen into one of the lines, and drag some ink down, scraping the paper, gouging a canyon in it, a flood-carrying canyon, Noah’s ark in there with all the life that I’ve ever lived, and I force those lines to touch. No more going on for infinity like that. You’ve got to shut up at some point. You’ve got to touch, to match, to do something. And that’s how I know about the man with the bleached hair who sells coconuts by the dirt road, the man with the machete and the machete grin, the man who knows the young coconuts from the old and rips off tourists charging ten bucks a coconut so he can get some extra days off to surf and still pay his electric bill.

Some days when I’m itching in my suit I want to be him and I know that I am him, because I made the sacrifices to know, not with a crystal ball thrown across an incense-scented room, not with a crystal ball setting fire to the curtains, but quietly, alone, in an incensed room, with the senses, with two cents, with a penny for my thoughts.

Jack fat could eat no lean, Jack fat licked the platter clean. Jack spat once in the entryway to a tattoo parlor, somehow not a rude spit but a kind spit, the kind of spit you do when you feel so at home you forget you’re not home, and the big-skirted jangly woman who runs the place said to him, “What the fuck man this place is my temple!” and he responded, “You fucked in a temple?” and there was a laser-lash second where I thought she might punch him in the face but then she bust out laughing and he was laughing too, and then she clapped him on the back like they weren’t old pals but something much more combustible, and they walked off into the back room of the tattoo parlor and I was left standing by the front counter with my dollar bills, feeling like a fool, feeling like one leaf left on the tree at the end of autumn, feeling like I’d made a universe-shattering mistake. (Not that we get autumn on this island. We get hottum on this island, it’s so hot, it’s so far away from where I come from, and they say I’ll never think it’s home, and maybe they’re right.) So I put my dollars in my pocket and say, “I’m the woman” (like, “I’m the man”) and I strut out of there, strut like a sandpiper, even though it’s a fake strut. Build fake houses on fake struts and the wolf comes by and it’s too high to get in.

#

She was walking out of the tattoo parlor, wearing a suit—who the hell wears a suit in this humidity?—and she was looking like she should’ve gotten into a limo, but instead she just took out a metal detector and headed for the beach.

#

I stood by the waves on a day that should’ve been bluer, should’ve been cooler, should’ve been two and twoer coming in pairs, coming in hot, coming in like planes for a landing, and I chewed on my own tongue, just to see what it would feel like, just to fill the gap left by the bubble gum or the food that wasn’t there or the ghosts of all my childhood teeth. And in that moment I wanted a prawn basket, the kind where each prawn is the size of a grown man’s thumb. Vomit-worthy, that is, a basket of grown men’s thumbs. That’s some Genghis Khan going on. Then I think how once I ate a pound of prawns and got so sick I couldn’t eat the very last prawn and so I carried it back to my hotel room like it was a precious thing. I carried it across the beach for miles and miles, past the Neptune statue and the fancy resorts and the peeling motels, and after I finally got back, I thought how if my mother were there, she’d tell me to make it trash, Jack, throw that prawn away because it’s been out of the fridge too long. They say the richest people in the world have food in the fridge and every kid thinks about food first, guessing with wide-eyed awe that most people in the world don’t have food—that’s how it was for most of history and we’ll never forget that evolutionary scar written in our genes—but really, it’s about the fridge part, of course. The big hulking appliance. The ones that gather in herds in old Mack’s dump.

I asked old Mack once what she’s going to do with all those old white fridges, like old white ladies gathered for trash bingo or trashy TV or trash talk. I told Mack maybe she could make her own ozone hole, slash up the pipes and spill the coolant on the hot moist ground, but she said something about her daughter getting a job at the big tower downtown, the downtowner, what a downer, and I don’t think she heard me. She doesn’t even have a daughter. She was talking about a TV show no doubt, no doubter—no doubters allowed. This is a temple, after all.

She asks me if I eat corn on the cob like a typewriter or in circles, and I say it depends on my mood. Sometimes I do the typewriter, chewing up those kernels in a row as fast as they’ll go, like ripping the ASDF off a keyboard, and sometimes I do circles. That seems to be the wrong answer. Like you’re either supposed to be a circler, or a typewriter, but you can’t be both. Well why can’t I be both? I leave in a bad mood.

#

Don’t get another tattoo. Your body is a temple.

Have you ever seen a temple before? Don’t you think the Sistine Chapel is a kind of a temple? Of course I need more art. Like some 18^th-century collector, like a painting of a painting, like a painting I made with my fingers when I was young, when I started putting the paint down on my leg, just laying it down, smudge of blue, streak of yellow, balls of red, and that wasn’t even when I was a true kid it was when I was a false adult, young and alone in an apartment on the outskirts of that big East Coast city who-shall-not-be-named, with the brass statues of inventors on benches. And I lay that paint down, lay it on my leg, because my tears were coming down, and the person on the crisis line sounded so angry, asking me over and over if I was suicidal, but can’t someone be sad without wanting to kill themselves? So my sorrow didn’t matter in the middle of the night because I wasn’t going to kill myself. And I was left sad and guilty, guilty that I’d woken up this shrink in the middle of the night just so she could think I wasn’t that sad. So I painted my leg. It was acrylic paint and smelled too strong. Later on, so many years later on, I learned that if you paint with acrylics and then wash them off, they don’t rinse off your skin right, and you can shine a UV light on the skin and you’ll see glowing wherever the paint had been. You can turn yourself into an angler fish, minus the part where the light is part of your body. (That could be the soul: that could be the light: go to the light: go.)

So I say they should make tattoo ink like that, ink that only shows up under UV, and she laughs—oh, the pain of that laugh—and she tells me I should look that up on the internet to see if it’s already out there. What kind of fish does this internet catch?

So I sit on the back porch with her. The split boards, the nails you have to watch out for—she says it’s like herself, because that’s the kind of thing she would say just to poke at me, how the last time I fell in line was years ago. And she takes a drag of the ocean air and says where’d you learn all those big words. I don’t want to tell her. Because I’m actually like one of those vases from the antique shop, not the one some girl buys and puts in her cute color-coordinated apartment that’s going to get featured in some magazine, but one of those vases the curator drops on the floor by accident and it doesn’t get put together with gold like they do in Japan, no ma’am, no ma’am, hey man, hey man—it gets swept into a dustpan stained with dust and it gets thrown into the trash. But I just have to pretend that I’m not broken. Because if you manifest enough confidence, they won’t see what’s really there. You manifest it, you womanifest it, you festival it, you fester it. You walk into a bar as a broken vase, acting like you own the place, acting like a whole vase, acting like Miss United States, I am beauty I am grace, and they’re going to see your Face with a capital F. They’re going to see your face and your hair, going to see flower that ain’t there. It’s the opposite of the emperor with no clothes.

I’ve never told anybody about that but the waves, though.

Now she’s laughing asking me what kind of flowers I’d be and I can’t say I know much about plants, only that the person I was in another life loved chrysanthemums. And she says who were you in another life? And I say some airy words that I mean in the moment but they’re not anything worth writing home about. I forget that we make our own futures and in exchange our futures make our own pasts. I forget that the bubble gum kid becomes the leg painter and the leg painter becomes the agonizer and the agonizer starts abbreviating James and selling coconuts thousands of miles away. Hey man, hey man, you don’t talk right man. I forget that in another life, I was split down the middle by a mirror, I was admiring corvids, I was scientific. I’m not allowed to be like that. I could’ve been born in the seventies. Splash of color here, splash of color there, splash it all like Jackson Fraud Pollock, Michael Jackson Pollock, Michael the Archangel in the Sistine Chapel. Jackson Pollock in the Sistine Chapel just splashing the hell out of it, saying he wants his temple to look a different way than they wanted their temple to look, and nobody can stop him—god, won’t someone please stop him? Somebody’s turned on rap music.

I take her hand and we walk barefoot onto the sand. My feet are calloused enough now that they don’t feel the shells and the little rocks and, for some reason, the unwound paperclip. Bright orange. There isn’t even an Office Depot around here. We’re going to dance to rap music. Ignore the ding-dong of the client coming in the front of the shop. I wonder what that could’ve-been client found with her metal detector, wonder if she dragged in something from the past up to the future. Like someone’s engagement ring they lost while snorkeling on their luxury honeymoon only it was decades and decades ago when the reefs were unimaginably lush. So we’re dancing and I’m telling her about how I took dance lessons once and it’s autobiographical from my parallel universe and possibly a lie for this universe, which she smells. Only I never tell lies. I step on the paperclip. I pick it up and think about the Iron Age and wonder if I got reincarnated enough times can I go back to a time when I wasn’t a human, when I was something a lot simpler, something with four paws on the ground and a nose that sees miles and a lust for something like raw red meat that keeps me going against the brutality of nature. And I pray that her gray fur stays gray and stays away from the iron of the Iron Age. We haven’t gotten to the Silicon Age yet but I’m praying, I’m praying, I’m praying in my Sistine Chapel, somehow we’ll make it on through.

#

I’m crying on my hands and knees. The waves are crashing, blue pickup trucks slamming endlessly against the sand that’s whiteboard-hard. Slam, slam, everything’s plastic and jammed, everything stings like jellyfish, everything’s defiled, Delilah, crude pictures drawn with sharpie just to educate us, sharpie eyeliner that won’t go away even if you cry. Crying’s for the real boys, crying’s for the real girls. Hey man, don’t cry. But I lost the ring, and if I could swear loud enough for the parallels to hear me, I’d do it. I didn’t really lose the ring. I threw it away as hard as I could, which was as hard as gravity would take it. I lop the head off a coconut and drink its inner tears. It’s not a good bath. It tastes green-brown, but sweet ones taste yellow-white.

#

I’m not going to tell him where I come from. That I shoved myself into a machine that looks an awful lot like a fridge, but it doesn’t cool you down, it educates you. I’m not going to tell him how your soul does the yin instead of the yang, how your soul always rolls the dice. I found him by the tattoo parlor and I wanted to talk but I couldn’t bring myself to break him. I won’t beg for his forgiveness. I won’t give back the ring, either. I didn’t really need the metal detector. I didn’t really need the ring either.

They say that there are many copies of us: the animals, from the past; the early humans who know hunger; the late humans who know the end of the sun; and everyone in between. We are men, we are women, we are both, we are neither. But what they don’t say, which is also true, is that there are copies of us reflecting all the way through, there are copies of us even now, walking among us, walking among us like zombies, like spies, like the CIA, like a character in a play, like we’re the audience and the character and the god looking down on creation, all at once, all the same. Somewhere there’s a universe where the man with the machetes is the woman with the manacles, and the manacles go all the way up her arms, and she unlocks the secrets of time and space. She makes her space blue, she makes her space yellow, she makes her space red, and she takes her secrets and goes all the way to where he’s been, to where he is, to where he’s surfing his last wave, and she knows there’s a scar on his leg from the time he tried to cut the paint off, back before he got real paint, the kind of paint that goes skin deep.

She takes a picture of him and she tucks it in her suit pocket like the agent of time and space that she is. He’s not wearing a shirt and hasn’t worn a suit in years because the wings sprouted from his shoulder blades, the only place he doesn’t have tattoos. And she knows the kindred spirit who runs the tattoo parlor, and she knows that the only place that spirit has a tattoo is her shoulder blade, that blade she wields like a ninja, with a shrug and a smile and the storytelling that won the queen her freedom. That’s the other half, the missing piece, the ancient Roman coin that fits right in the center of the ring, and the ring that fits right in the fridge-that’s-not-a-fridge, the time machine. I curl up in the fetal position in the amniotic fluid of illegal coolant, and I fall through my own ozone hole, rattled like a hangover. Well rattle me like a rattlesnake, rattle me like a rattle-snack, a baby’s snack, snack a bottle. Rock-a-bye baby, Jack, because red touches yellow and you’re a dead fellow. Rock me Jackie like a wagon wheel, rock-a-bye me any way you feel, hey, man, wind’s a-blowin’. Hey man, wind’s a-blowin’, red sky at morning, take warning, take warning. Take your ship and your surfboard, searching for the promised land, searching for the promised bird, searching for the absurd. Go searching for the treasure at the end of the road, the treasure of El Dorado, the treasured toad who turns you into a prince. Even if you’re roadkill or wolf-kill or the wolf at the end of the iron at the end of the Iron Age, hush-a-bye, don’t you cry—you’ll come back as the wind, or the rain, or as me again. And I’ll let you go, darling Jack, floating off atop the straw mat that broke the camel’s back, riding a surfboard, winning your turf war. I don’t even give a damn. I never have.

[Featured image by Alex Green on Unsplash]