Swimming in the Volcano (53 page)

“What about you? What time is it?”

“Past two.”

“I think I'd rather not.”

Johanna didn't answer but made an ambiguous gesture, spreading her hands out toward the sides of the bed—was she offering benediction or practicing being crucified?—and Adrian told her she had to pee and was going outside.

Something had happened to the planet while she had been inside, it had come closer to a magnificent threshold that she only now saw and only now acknowledged, rather than slip past with the pretense of acknowledgment as she had done so many times in the past, being a person overdefined by the city, a woman who thrived on citylife and resonated to cityscape, someone trained to believe the true home of myths were media—paint, words, plastic, image—that progress was the only natural dynamic worth one's undivided attention, that only
art was without boundaries and therefore the only entity capable of mythic dimension, and she was not at all prepared for the elevated, olympian world she found on the other side of the door, startling in its precious stillness, newborn to her consciousness, undebauched and marvelous. Its expanse shimmered under a dome of honest stars, the harvest doubled or tripled beyond any sky's she had known in the past, and outward, sharing her plane, the placid ocean like endless freedom, the most precarious of bounties, Lord deliver us from freedom, amen. She could hear fish come to the surface, tails slapping the interface. Tonight,
here
, she felt she was encountering the apotheosis of the physical world, passion purged of exotic relativity, its magic foundational, its purity undefiled, so that it made her wonder if another kind of life was possible, or perhaps even preferable. It was hers, all hers, she was alone in it, this exalted kingdom, Gaia, this miraculous earth. The hyperbolic sense of solitude was what crazy, desperate, psychically injured people felt in the city but here, no, here it was—Was this all the drug? she countered in a flash of cynicism. Chemically induced transcendence?—but it wasn't, she knew that, the drug she took loved itself only and had no use for insights. She could attribute it to luck, being in the right place, your gates opened, the wild horses set free.

She removed her clothes and waded out into the water, stopping to urinate when she was waist-deep, unable to distinguish a difference in temperature between her fluid and the ocean. The water danced with sparks when she moved, delighting her, as if the sea carried within itself a dust of latent, beautiful fire. The air was resined with salty aridness, and wherever she looked the world was only itself, no other buildings in sight but Coddy's place, not a telephone pole or highway or electric splash of light to be seen although up north, across the moon-scraped channel, a blue-white mass of storm turtled toward the jagged silhouette of St. Catherine, its gorgon thunderheads blushed with roses of lightning. Aegean was the word she wanted to say, ancient and pagan, but she had never been there, never been anywhere like this, and the pantheon of gods was wrong. A place deserved its proper gods. Who could tell about the gods here?—she wouldn't presume to know them. Some variation of Neptune certainly. She had forgotten whether Caliban was deity or devil. This night changed nothing but it added volumes, Adrian thought, genuflecting until the water reached her chin, afraid to go deeper. Tiny fish groomed her legs; the bottom felt like granulated silk, plush against her feet. The screen door banged and she pulled her knees into her stomach, floating, and rotated shoreward to observe Johanna, ghostly
in her nakedness, at the water's edge. Venus, as in The Birth of—the updated version, resubmerging, wearied by the mortal price of love.

“Come on in,” Adrian coaxed. “It's divine.” She let herself sink down into a sightless antinomous space opposite infinity, hearing her own blood, its delicious throb, and in the background just that, the rasping scrape of infinity the ocean produced in her ears, its clicks and creaks, the static of its own weight and the pulsing comfort of her own weightlessness, and then back up to the air again, and again infinity, so close at hand, the whole boggling theater of the universe opened wide, the black expanding expanse and its spill of stars. “We want Big God,” she joked to herself, happy for this moment to celebrate this life. “Where's Big God?” Without making any noise, Johanna had breaststroked out to her, coming to rest by her side.

Neither of them spoke, as if they knew their words would disappoint. After a while Johanna said, “There's something going on here with nature.”

“It's Big God,” said Adrian, giddily. She put her face into the water, giggling bubbles, but then grew serious. “What do you mean?”

“Something mystical. Something spiritual.”

“Something reconciling,” Adrian added, though she wasn't sure what she meant. “I feel it too. I adore this place.”

Only their heads were above water, their bodies outlined in the shallows by aqueous, smearing flecks of light, like fireflies. Johanna looked so lovely and in her element out here, Adrian thought, her hair poured straight into the water like something metallic, her face shadowed and tender, her teeth so white, her lips and eyes glistening. She wore a puka-shell choker around her throat; it looked ritualistic and it also seemed to cut her off, with the water's help, below her neck, making of her head a bust, disembodied, a marble face trapped in time, something Adrian might have seen on a pedestal in the Uffizi.

“What I feel,” Johanna said, “is more like anger everywhere, something spiritual but angry. It's okay though, it's not scary. The anger keeps the lid on chaos.”

What she was really talking about, Adrian soon realized, was Hawaii, up in the mountains on Oahu, clandestine trails burrowing through the undergrowth to hidden valleys and canyons where she and her friends had cultivated cannabis. It was there she learned about the anger, she said. You had to educate yourself about taboos, leave offerings in front of secret pools and carvings, never tell the wrong people about these places, because those places were sacred, those places would harm you if your heart was bad. Usually such talk
made Adrian chary, she wasn't the right type for the cosmic cheer-leading squad, the steam coming out of the subway grates was sufficiently fabulous for her, but Johanna was being earnest, and this was not the setting for being unreceptive. On forbidden ground she had done forbidden work, Johanna said. Her nostalgia for whatever meaning she found in that was so evident that Adrian wondered out loud why she had ever left the Pacific.

The dark sea lapped against their lips. Johanna seemed lost in thought or just gone but she said, finally, that the scene back there had gotten out of control.

“Scenes come apart, don't they,” said Adrian. “I think it's a commandment.”

They bobbed in the water, like children imagining they were dreaming. This was heroin's platonic cousin. Adrian pretended she was waiting for a signal from Big God. Jung came to mind, because the northern perception of the tropics was feminine, and that struck her now as fallacy. The visual softness, the aesthetics of sensuality, these were illusion; behind the illusion, animus, a devastating virility. My God, she thought, I've just argued the psychology of Johanna's anger principle.

“What I meant was, I wanted to use drugs as a positive thing,” said Johanna, reviving the conversation. “They have a role to play, in society I mean. I think they're like an evolutionary agent. I think the future will bear that out. I don't mean heroin. I don't mean heroin at all.”

“They're everywhere,” Adrian sighed, “but I don't know.”

“But my husband,” Johanna continued, “had a different idea about what drugs were for. A very different idea. I don't even understand it.”

“Wait, you have a husband?”

“He's got this attitude. He hates America.”

Only a body's length away, a school of baitfish sprayed through the surface, arcing through the air like a rain of cartoon bullets. Adrian flinched and put her feet gently on the sand. The fish jumped again, twice, each time farther out into the darkness, and then a larger shape came skipping behind them with murderous speed. A chill rippled down the sides of Adrian's backbone.

“Something's chasing them,” she said. “Let's go in.”

“Ex-husband,” said Johanna. “I left him.” Adrian bounced with featherweight lightness on her toes, edging toward shore, stopped by the incredulity of Johanna's accusation that this guy was responsible for the death of her best friend. “Her name was Katherine, like where
we are, like where they've made her a saint, except with a K. Isn't that weird?”

“You mean, accidentally?”

“That's not what I mean. No. It's all very very sick. I'm sleepy. Do you want to go back in?”

There was an emerging bathos, a sense of having dropped too far away from the magic, and Adrian didn't want Johanna to say anything more, she didn't trust herself to be sympathetic.
Is this for real?
she wanted to ask yet she couldn't dare gamble with Johanna's suffering, if that's what it was. But if that's what it was, where was grief? Her revelation was alien and troubling but not poignant, her tone something less than stricken. Tomorrow, Adrian vowed to herself, let's keep our senses.

From the vantage of the water, Coddy's place was the epitome of welcome, insular and secure. They gathered their clothes and hurried across the slope of the beach, slapping at no-see-ums that had discovered here were the only two people that had survived the night. On the steps they tried to brush the sand from their feet, quickly, their breasts hopping in the air, leaning on one another for balance, then dashed inside to towel off. The lamplight puddled in the troughs of the bamboo.
Gorgeous
, thought Adrian, but she was grateful when Johanna extinguished the flame. No matter how many towels she used, she couldn't get to the point where she felt dry. After the water, being inside the house was unpleasant, the air sticky as glue, and her skin prickled with salt itch, even more so when she slipped on the tee shirt she liked sleeping in. And maybe they had always been there and she hadn't noticed, but the room was filled with the whine of mosquitoes and they were torturing her.

She groped her way across the room to the bed, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. Johanna lay atop the sheets, nude, her arms wrapped graceless over her face, her wet hair scattered, her breasts stretched and dispersed, boyish except for the nipples, the string of a tampon hanging out of her like a fuse. Even obscured, her nakedness made an imperishable vision, graphically framed and emphasized by the bed, but this was a night when everything was dissembling, and she didn't trust Johanna's body to cling to its identity. It had the power, she knew, to become anonymous, and then what she didn't want to think about.

Adrian slid in between the scratchy sheets on her side of the mattress, sagging down into a furnace, the sheets like woolen membranes, the mosquitoes shrill in her ears with their shrunken voices. The air refused to move. She pulled the outer sheet up over her,
sprinkling sand, buried her head in the foam pillow but the pillow was rank, the sheet suffocating, every evil grain of sand intolerable. While Johanna lay perfectly still, virtually catatonic, she fidgeted and tossed in misery, finally rolling out to peel off her shirt and then she lay back down on the top sheet, gasping, but that was no good either and after a moment she sprang up again to rub aloe lotion on her body and then climbed back into bed, turned away from Johanna, lying on her side, her mind nattering ad nauseam about her penance of discomfort, the bed a crucible slowly devitalizing her, cooking her down with its steam-slick heat into a languorous soup. She was cognizant only of the fact that dawn would soon come and wreck her. Johanna said her name.

“Let me kiss you. Please.”

Adrian's eyes were open, watching the false, lifeless eyes of the moth, still where it was on the screen, watching her through the phantom mask of its wings. When she didn't respond, Johanna rolled over next to her, and Adrian felt the broiling heat of her skin near hers, the candescent touch of Johanna's hand on her shoulder, the sultry imprint of her lips at the base of her neck, chaining her with kisses. Adrian strained to rouse herself out of her sudden immobility and rebuke her, but Johanna's arm angled over her ribs to cup a breast—
Don't
, she whispered feebly—and the kissing continued, passionless but needy, until she felt Johanna's tears lacerating her spine, the mattress jerked by her mute sobs.

“What's wrong?”

“I love Mitchell.”

“You love everybody,” Adrian mumbled, in spite of herself, now aware that this was Johanna's curse, because Johanna was unpossessable. She turned on her back, conflicted by greed for distraction, anything to get her mind off the heat. Everything was simplified by the sexual flux, the only infinity humans might claim being the infinite ambition of desire, and she submitted to a dream that in the morning would be nothing more than a memory of forgetting; private, incorporeal yearning, a dream that would perhaps be stored as the memory of a painting, astral or animal spirits in a flame-tossed void, the enduring images of the magnificence of everything that burns. Her forehead creased as she felt the pressure of Johanna's hands, easing open her legs. She couldn't even name a man she wanted there, really, any man would do, anyone, any mouth was every mouth when it was between your legs and your eyes were closed and it was this hot and, you were this restless and your body lay swollen and battered by the sea and moon.

It's myself
, she thought, beginning to writhe, her hands twisted in Johanna's hair.
It's me
, and she opened her eyes, sensing the presence of another being nearby, and looked again at the moth, staring back at her, but it wasn't the moth, and it wasn't Big God, and she screamed.

Johanna had to calm her down. She got up, looked through the screens, got back in bed. “There's nothing there,” she said. “There's nothing there,” but now they were both trembling.