(If there’s anything left at all, it’s out there.)
They are out there. They are out there diving and bubbling under clapping white waves, the sun beating bare-fisted and brilliant through the blank blue.
Their sporadic titters mingle with the subtle din of the swaying seascape, travel across the rolling water as James struggles to catch them in his ears as if they were something precious and fleeting.
He cannot let them get away. He will not.
He must swim out to these sirens, out to their rocks. The firmament has failed him, or he it, but there beckons different, some final escape.
Like the gull who knows its time is up and on weary wings flies out to sea until it can no longer and plunges into the dark depth to rest.
Scott’s left hand is down Angela’s swimsuit bottom and planted on the cool skin of her ass. She shuffles left, clears her throat and tilts her head, away from Scott. She stares off with Scott stuck in the peripheral, tanned swimmers stroll past and her gaze follows them. She digs in her purse and produces a cigarette, places it between her lips, swings her hair from her face before lighting it. She slumps forward a bit, exhaling her first drag (James notes the telltale signs throughout her body of the rush of endorphins). Scott’s eyes wander to the peeking tan lines of the young women kicking up sand as they walk past. He hunches forward and places his folded arms over his knees. James watches with a certain cynical interest at the sun glistening through Angela’s diamond engagement ring. He digs out his own cigarette.
James thinks to himself that falling in love is not entirely unlike falling off a cliff. You can’t choose to stop falling, and once you hit, you might well be broken. And you’re surely then more careful around cliffs. The sirens on the rock have the type of beauty that can destroy. The type Scott and Angela saw in each other back at the beginning when they both locked themselves together in an elated assimilation. Separate from the bitching and resentful Scott and Angela of today, the Scott and Angela of years ago elevated each other too high and thought they could keep things how they were. But you can’t fight change. You can’t beat entropy.
Angela stands up and brushes the sand from her body, and walking towards the waves says that she’ll go for a swim. She walks out until the waves are above her head and then treads water and swims out along the beach. Scott looks after her and sighs. “Why are you marrying her, Scott?”
“Because I love her.”
“Love’s a shitty reason to get married. I’ve been in love, and I’ve fallen out, and now the whole thing’s ruined. If you fall out of love, you might as well be dead. That whole part of you is just tainted. But it’s sure better to not have to look at the woman you don’t love anymore, every day.”
“Well I can’t see myself with anyone else.”
“See? You’ve ruined each other. You’re like a pair of walking corpses together. It’s like a slow suicide. Shit, I’m going for a swim.”
(If there’s anything left at all, it’s out there.)
James lifts his body up from its elbows and strode from firm ground past the breakers and swelling rollers to the pull and suck of the fluctuating sea surface. The void beneath his feet shoots surges of adrenaline all through him and his swimming becomes desperate, jerky. Head submerged, everything is the rumbling and bubbling noise of his hands and feet pushing him through the water, back and forth with sharp crashes as he emerges for blind breath, stroke by stroke.
When he is close enough to begin to see detail in rising rock cluster (the variegated black-gray-brown texture), he can hear clearly the laughing sirens; he is elated to be among them. The ominous pounding pump of his overexerted heart suddenly feels strong and capable of completing the swim. He swims, he laughs out along with the playful sirens as they sun their sheet-white torsos on the wave-breaking rocks and slip towards the sea floor, disappearing.
The rocks grow closer still, his pace steady, strong through the cramps and swallowed salt water; depth-obscured shadow-shapes crisscross his path and his widening wake. The ebbs of their motion tangible on his goose-pimpled skin, he is able to, as he strokes, momentarily lock eyes with the amber-maned amphibians and they share a desperate, joyful laugh.
An easily measurable number of body-lengths away, only, and they skim smoothly across his skin with their skin and silken manes and crocodile lower halves. His chest burning, acid refluxing up towards his screwed-up mouth and the sea-salty foam making him retch as he snaps his head back for a breath of the sharp air. A siren pops up with a crash in front of him and presses her mouth over his, keeping him afloat with her fish tail. James, eyes closed, grinning, breaks free and laughs harshly, taking in lungfulls of air. As he catches his first up close glimpse of the siren’s green-blue eyes, she presses her mouth again over his, wrapping her hominid arms around his head, pulls back and they jackknife together, locked in a disappearing shadow beneath the sea surface. James laughs as his lungs fill with water and he sinks to the floor of the sea.
