The Desert by the Sea: An Anthology

I.

Betty Sue was as far from where Sirhan killed Kennedy as she could get under the circumstances. The crones in the village she came to mumbled on as she listened about the dark riders who haunt Santa Clara. They may have meant it as a warning. From what she could glean, the riders swoop down from both sides, stiff atop their horses. Even were you able to outrun the fearsome steeds, there’d be nowhere to run to. The undertow at Santa Clara is swift and strong, and it is difficult to swim there. The riders on the shore leave the women they catch naked and alone in the late afternoon just before the sun goes down, on the sand the sun beats down on all morning and afternoon.

She saw the first rider in the west. At first he was a dot, indistinct in the far distance. Then he was fury itself fast approaching. The rider from the east who was behind her she heard first as an ominous distant hum. Then soon a tramping roar beat beneath the sand at her feet as he rode closer. How fast they arrive, how suddenly they scoop them up and strip them bare. They straggle back to the village. They are defined as the ones the riders take. The villagers have seen it before just as their parents saw it before, and their parents’ parents. She tried to get out of their way by stepping toward the surf but they circled around her and reversed directions. The one who had been in the east was now in the west, and the one who had been in the west was now in the east.

Since time immemorial the horsemen have swooped down on women walking the shore here alone. Some women are dazed wending their way back naked through the village, barely aware of the dark children following them and staring silently. Some as they walk caress themselves where they were taken. The crones find clothes for them, as they always have. The one from the west corralled her and for a few wild moments her belly hugged the hot horse flanks until he pulled her up. His penis was already unsheathed, and she was fucked quickly with her thighs dangling down against his hips, the trousers belted with hemp. He rode as he fucked driving the horse forward and then as he stopped fucking pulled the horse a herky-jerky full circle until the one riding from the east reached over for her neck and pulled her off his brother’s penis and onto his own which was also unsheathed and ready.

So it goes. Very different was this power from Sirhan Sirhan’s who in his fucking was small and lithe like a moth. The women smell the horseflesh while they’re fucked because the animals are sweating so and, as the riders drive them forward, the sunlight drenches the shore with their heavy sweating flesh. When the rider from the east finishes the woman, he drops her on the sand and gallops away not looking back. The rider from the west continues his way as well. Who knows if and when these two meet again until the next time!

Always, the women are left alone and naked, their clothes lost in the sand or caught by the surf as at last the sun starts going down. The air is thick with the many women who’ve been taken here. A quiet world thick with the fading sun is heavy with their cries. But they don’t actually cry aloud. The sound of their own cries would startle them. The dark riders are so old. They are world weary, cunt weary. They are all the more beautiful because their eyes are like lead. Their big cocks stick up when they ride and, scooping the women, their powerful arms are just like scythes as they come by.

“Please no,” she whispered when the rider from the west came upon her. But he held her up above his loins holding the rein with one arm and pulled down her pants and panties with the other even as he kept her fast with the same arm. It must take many minutes to accomplish their undoing, to strip them cloth by cloth, and tear button by button, but they ride so fast it seems a single ferocious uninterrupted moment. Who knows what distances they cover, sand after sand the same hot sun-drenched terrain, as the rider in the west speeds from west to east and back again to join his brother. Who knows how far they go. Time and space are relative.

She tumbled down at last as the rider having her from the east shot his hot jizz in her. Her cunt was wind-burnt. Sirhan’s jizz was caked there, one of the immortal accretions. Then she was naked and alone on the shore wandering as they’d all wandered from time immemorial. Students from the university on archaeological digs. Ambassadors’ wives. Military wenches. The women Cortez and Pizarro brought and somehow lost in their gold-crazed shuffles. When she came naked to the village, a vague humming noise, like flies, only stronger, stirred the mud huts freshly painted bright turquoise. Like a ritualistic call, the drone was near and far at once, omen that, as the crones said just hours before, another naked woman would stagger the cobbled street as naked women had staggered the cobbled or anciently mud-caked streets when their parents and their parents’ parents were still alive to keep this vigil.

They clothed and fed her, also as their parents and parents’ parents had done in the olden times that will always seem like these times, the blankest stretch of time, and dune after dune on the shore you can’t tell just by looking at if you actually went anywhere on, even though you’ve gone on forever and ever. Everyone in the village was expressionless, somber attendants on the ancient rite of the fucking of the women who came from far away by the dark and nameless riders who came from no one knows where. The silence on the shore was immense, yet if you go there, you see such great inscrutable corridors. Amid these most immense silences, year after endless year with nothing there to hear, because there is nothing there to hear, even the turf is caught up in the terrific silence, yet you have no choice but to see and to see and to see.

Which is why, I wean, paintings like Faraway would be forgotten if they were books and painters like Wyeth would be forgotten (painters like Wyeth; sketch makers are another matter) if they were writers. Painters stand a good chance to parlay momentary celebrity into enduring reputation because you’ve got no choice but to see such things as and where they’re hung. But it’s easy for anyone not to read, which thus mandates a mighty willful act if writers are to compel generations to pry open such quaint portraits of consciousness as they’d bequeath. Then too the generations must also be captured there, in the pages. By contrast, a sky can merely be and shorelines just meander.

II.

When it was finally night time on the shore, Irena came to crouch on the rocks as she had for many nights past. Often, on those nights, and on the past nights, she heard a faint murmur out by the outlying rocks, which, though not quite fifty yards away, was a jagged path to get to in the shallow water, abrasive even wearing slippers. It was not a stretch she’d traverse however much she might want to explore the dim site in the moonlight the hum seemed to come from. From where she sat, she could listen with curiosity, and she was curious indeed, and rather captivated, by what seemed an altogether different sound from what the waves made, or from what the night birds sang, or from what her own girlish breaths sounded like in the great darkness that was settling on Santa Clara.

Each night the hum grew a little more insistent. Each night she couldn’t wait to slip away and listen. It was, she knew, something fabulous. Finally, that night, the wind off the water gathered the sound up as if from out a burial place on the shoals. The imponderable hum became a voice then speaking as it must have for centuries whenever the right wind stirred and lifted it strong enough to be heard over the surf. When she heard it, it delighted her, it was a lovely flat voice, a low voice, but a woman’s voice or, if not a woman’s voice, a voice that was womanly like an old person’s yet also sweet like a lover’s.

She sat on the rock listening hard to hear it. “I see you every night,” it called at last, a lilting affable voice, not at all jarring even in the stark surf-swept night.

“I come here every night,” she giggled. This was a great mystery, for there was a spirit in the rocks and it knew her. She drew up her legs against her chest showing the bottom of her thighs to the sea, innocently, in the same way she might have shown her stuck-out tongue or bare feet or naked armpits with their cute clumps of hair to the little boys in the village who shouted out naughty things at her, but they were just little boys. They loved her like everybody else.

She listened hard but heard nothing more. She kept listening, still heard nothing. “Are you there?” she called out. Her girlish voice was like a little tern’s quavering in the air above the waves. The next night she went back to the same spot, all alone as always in the warm night, to tempt back the spirit like a friendly woman’s. The moon was blood orange at first and then chalky white as it rose higher, and she waited. If she closed her eyes, maybe she’d hear it.

“You’re so beautiful,” it finally said. She was thrilled to be adored by a fantastic spirit in the moonlit sea. “I adore dreaming about how you dream.”

“You dream about me?” she giggled.

“I dream about you dreaming.”

“I don’t understand.”

“At night when you touch yourself, I see you.”

“Oh my Jesus!” she said, shocked by that, and startled further to hear nothing more, for it was so preemptory, to have that said in the night like that, and then, in a second, for nothing more to be said. She opened her eyes. “Are you there?” she called out. “Come back!” But the shore was silent. She was unsettled and for the first time afraid. “My sweet Jesus,” she said. She was afraid, yet her secrets were all the sweeter for no longer being quite hers alone. .

The next night from her perch as the surf pounded the outlying rocks she resolved to walk toward them over the jagged stones so numerous and sharp they could cut right through your slippers. But she stopped midway as the water swirled to her thighs because the sea spray as it creased her pretty black hair blew in her eyes and confused her in the dark. “Are you there?” she called.

“Of course I’m here,” it answered.

“Can I see you?” she called.

“I love you,” it said, like a mother would.

“You do?” She made her way a further few yards toward the outlying rocks but now, when the tide pounded down in fuller force, on the outlying rocks and on the ones just beyond them, the fierce spray blinded her completely. The undertow shifted beneath and, frightened, she struggled to keep balance. Retreating back toward the shore, she called out again, over her shoulder, “Are you still there?”

She heard a woman’s voice call out “Yes” but then fade away as if it were being drowned or was en route back to some vast thing too strange and mysterious to describe and from which it had first come a long time ago. But for all that it was a friend’s voice she could still long for. It was someone to hold hands with in the water. They’d touch each other, a little naughty in secret, and share dreams no one else must know. The next night she left her bed and put on a soft orange robe she loved to wear, it was the one she often wore when she dreamed secret dreams, to go there without anybody knowing it, because this spirit, which could have been the Holy Mother, or it could have been a pretty girl just like herself to dream dreams with, could not have drowned the night before, it was immortal, and, since it sees everything, she wasn’t going to be ashamed, she would tell it all, for, whatever it was, she was loved despite or even because of everything secret it saw of her when she was alone and full of dreams.

It called her name with a tender longing this night that she hadn’t quite heard the other nights.

“I love you too,” she cried back to the outlying rocks as the tide ebbed and the moon bore down on the stiller waters.

“You are so beautiful,” it said.

“So are you!” she answered.

“You dream of love, but love is not always kind,” it said.

“I know,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be.” Her heart was leaping inside her.

“I know your deepest dreams,” it said.

“You do?”

“I know everything.”

“Can I see you?”

“Sit on the rock tomorrow night, be still tomorrow night and wait. Be as beautiful as you are right now, and wait, say nothing. Tell no one.”

“I don’t.”

The next night there was no moon at all and just a scattering of stars. The sands shone with a gold crystalline light that frightened her a little to gaze on, so luminous they seemed in the pitch-black night. “I’m waiting,” she whispered, but only whispered because she remembered the previous night’s command to say nothing.

“Close your eyes,” she heard the soft mother’s voice.

She felt a presence, a stirring in the warm night air. Without being told to, she opened her eyes. A beautiful young man was standing there. He was naked and his penis was erect. She had never seen a man like that before. She was startled. “You tricked me,” she said.

His broad smile was luminous and kind. “Yes,” he said. He put both hands on his hips.

“You tricked me,” she said again. Remembering her dreams, she quivered to know he knew them too. She wondered who he was, and where he came from, and how he could possibly have known her. How had he spied, ridden down on her so? Because he knew, she relinquished all hope of escape. What point was there in trying to escape? She could not escape his knowing. She tasted her fingers each time she touched herself, and he knew it. She crouched to make soft animal sounds when she was all alone, and he knew that too. She could not escape, unless she killed him, or herself.

He came near then and did all she ever dreamed. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, not to her surprise, he was gone. Naked at the edge of the surf, there was nowhere for her to go. She had gambled and lost as all children lose when they hear voices in the nighttime. The darkness on the shore was immense. All you saw was the night, and you saw it everywhere.

One understands, as Shaw might have understood, and as I myself said long ago, or will eventually get around to saying, that Verdi’s Iago is a lesson in craft for Englishmen and Americans to heed well, guts up, for this Iago has no motive whatsoever, nor needs one, save his Act I Credo juxtaposed baldly to the love duet. He is plain darkness, he believes in darkness, he implements darkness. That said, note Shaw’s myopic, “Shakespeare plunged through [the play] so impetuously that he had it finished before he had made up his mind as to the character and motives of a single person in it.” Quite to the contrary, the characters, especially Iago, are if anything over-determined. Shaw, being sexless, probably underestimates by half Iago’s cuckold frenzy, that Othello and Cassio and half the Mediterranean have humped Emelia. Nor is the racial dread merely our own latter day imputation but a visionary exercise on the part of the author. Centuries before colonialism made it one of life’s dispositive facts, how could Shakespeare have known or cared that white men fear black cock? He gleaned it. No words to such effect are found in the play, nor could they be. You cannot hear this darkness. You can only see it.

III.

By next morning Michael couldn’t walk anymore, he’d been walking so long, but he couldn’t sleep either for the ache in him was like a feral baby bursting to be born. The bonfires behind him on the shore were all gone out and the sun would now be drenching the sands as it had the day before and the day before that. Soon he’d refresh himself in the surf but not go too far out as he’d been warned the undertow here was treacherous. It was just a bit past dawn, yet already the sands were burning his bare feet, and his face and arms were already sticky from the sun shining down in a cloudless sky. He’d been wanting to jump out of his body for a long time.

Maybe it was a mirage, but he thought he saw a crouched form like a bug on the sand further down the shore, who knew how far down. Like a buoy, it anchored his sight as he watched the fixed point grow clearer in the hazy light ahead. As he walked, he saw finally it was human. Then he saw it was two humans, and then that a young man and a young woman were huddled on the sand having slept there perhaps last night and now waking up together.

They sat close to the surf so that when he passed he passed close by. They were naked. When the woman saw him, she lay down on her stomach in order to hide her tits and cunt. But she kept her eyes raised up toward him and smiled coyly holding the man’s hand as she lay there. Normally he’d have nodded a brief courtesy and then averted his eyes, but their expressions were bold enough in their way so that he kept a gaze on them and even turned his head back a little so they’d stay in sight as he walked past.

They haunted him as he made his way further down the barren shore. Their flesh on the sand was so ponderous, so real and eerily unreal suspended on the terrain. It didn’t seem a place for human beings at all, yet there they were, incongruously human in this empty place. Their smiles, which he continued to conjure up in his mind’s eye, increasingly lascivious with each quick memorial flash, tore like zippers into the inhuman white light that hung everywhere as far as you could see. He turned around. They were holding each other again as they had when first he came upon them. But they saw him returning almost at once and when they did, the woman draped herself around the man with her back to the surf, and hid herself that way.

The man smiled. It was a confiding smile that implied complicity. He knew he’d seem ridiculous were he to just walk past them again, as if just wanting another chance to peep on their nudity. He didn’t want to seem lecherous. “Lascivious,” with its associations with Roman emperors or dissolute artists, implied power. It was willful, active debauchery. But “lecherous” is an old man’s nature, impotent and absurd. No, he was too close to impotence to tolerate the thought of himself as “lecherous” or the thought of others thinking him so. Having turned back, he would now have to say something. He’d have to offer something. He’d committed himself.

Not that there was anything in particular he wanted to offer. The feel of strange bodies against his own was a hollow unwanted pleasure as he grew older. Not loving anyone, he had not made love in many years. Yet he must have turned back for a reason, their stark presence on the worldless shore had lured him somehow. They were only a few yards away now and, as he struggled to find and speak the thing to offer, or at least find something not wholly ignoble or absurd to say, he saw himself as altogether small, anonymous, an ancillary part of their lust just as the sand they lay on this day, or the bed they’d tumble in on another, were mere fact patterns.

“I can narrate for you,” he said. It surprised him to say it but the sound of it, the intent of it, reverberated the second he said it. In fact, he had stumbled on the very nub of his desire in this matter. He wanted to be a part of their coupling like the foam forking in on them from the sea, but no more than that. He’d narrate, and when he was done, he’d be done.

“Huh?” asked the man. The woman, still holding tight to his chest, turned her head a bit when she heard the strange suggestion.

He felt as naked as they, what with this strange suggestion of his, this oddest of expostulations they might not possibly begin to understand. “Pardon me, I’m not trying to intrude on you,” he said, but the man nodded at him almost jovially, in a way that was at least encouraging. “I only mean that you might enjoy having someone describe the two of you together. It could be pleasant.”

“You mean while we screw?” asked the man.

“Well…” he started.

“That’s wild,” said the man, with a sympathetic guffaw.

“That’s crazy,” said the woman, more suspiciously.

He heard his voice tremble a little for fear he might be making himself ridiculous. He didn’t want that at all, he couldn’t stand that. “I intend it to be respectful,” he said.

“Okay,” said the man, chortling again.

“I mean ‘respectful’ because I’d try to be poetic, and don’t you think all poetry is kind of respectful?” he asked. He was losing a sense of place as he stood there. The moment, and its potential, whatever it might be, drove him forward. “I might start by saying something like, ‘Her breasts were full and sweet against his chest as they embraced.’” He slipped down to his knees on the sand some discreet yardage away, turning his body a little toward the west so as not to face them quite so directly.

“‘Full and sweet,’” quoted the woman, ironically.

“Yeah, ‘full and sweet,’” said the man, with a little twinkle.

He continued, “As they kissed, he remembered the other taste of her between her legs, and thrilled at the thought of all their secret kisses.” The language was coming on him strangely fast, fast and importunate in the thick morning heat, as if something at last was prying loose. The couple was moved by the language, they liked it a lot. The woman smiled for the first time. “His hand groped for her between her legs,” he went on, “and she touched his big balls with the tips of her fingers, exalting at the power concentrate and tight there for her.” How he loved this special language! It was the first time he ever shared it with anyone.

Again the woman exclaimed, “This is crazy,” but not so sharply this time. “You really going to fuck me in front of this guy?”

He wouldn’t let the man answer but took over the voice, the man’s very volition, answering, “Kid, I’ll topple you for all the world to see.” The man laughed once more and murmured delightedly at the rhythm of the apparent game, aping its narrative as he pinned the woman’s knees to the sand. Going on, the ache in him found voice, exultant as if this was their first time and the very birth of things vouchsafed him to describe. “She felt the hard head of the cock she adored probe her and she cried out gratefully, in gleeful counterpoint.”

Abashed a little, he was, to hear himself well-night pant the words, but the couple, not at all laughing as he might have feared they would, kissed as if in love they fucked. “Only the plashing combs of the incoming surf,” he continued, “and nothing else, not the hot timeless sun, nor the vast borderless sands, shared the four-cornered frame of their palpable world. Only the fringes of the surf insinuating themselves against the edges of their flesh returned in soft power reminders of who they were and how they loved. As she felt him probe, words she wanted to utter in raw gratitude came as animal grunts instead. Then it was he knew he had her, really had her, he knew he’d formed her into the pure sweet fuckmeat she was born to be.”

“Oh gee!” the woman gasped. “This is crazy,” she said once more. But her eyes were narrow and intent, her tone irrevocable and acquiescent. The man in his sudden throes thrust his muscular young butt as if part of the tidal landscape, taking and giving, drawing back and pressing in. The sun kept rising and rising over the bland and endless landscape pouring down its thick, thick heat.

“It was the very man who selfless had sought her through time and tide, he whom her soul loveth was this very man,” he intoned. “She felt her soul’s surrender as it were pure gladness. The power took her and became her and all she knew was that she was fuckmeat, she had become fuckmeat, that she was made to be fuckmeat, and on the shore where the sun rose ever higher in order to beat down ever hotter, that this hard cock that was…”

He broke off allowing his mind to clear and closed his eyes in the strange and windless, worldless hot place they dwelt in then. When he opened them again, her soles were raised aloft on the windless shore. “The cock immense inside her knocked her up, the hot jizz was turned into a child,” he continued, “and each day she was pregnant, she kissed his tool and his big, big balls in tribute because it was that tool and those big, big balls that had done her so.” The man was growling now, to hear him, and she was tearful as she grunted, so far so fast had he taken them from the casual adventure they’d consented to, and as he watched the man strain on top of the naked sweating female flesh, he felt his power as he hadn’t maybe for years or maybe ever, and he continued, “‘I’m fuckmeat for you, fuckmeat!’ she called out. She felt the gun in her cunt like to fire and when it did, she grabbed his neck and held his face to hers, and said, ‘Sweetie, sweetie, I love you so!’”

She grabbed him by the neck and held his face to hers, and said, “Sweetie, sweetie, I love you so!” She was meat, by word and deed happily the text he empowered. He fell backward, off his knees and onto the sand, continuing, “She never loved him more than when after such a fucking his cock softened inside her and, no longer the creature who made her fuckmeat, he was the man again she’d sleep with and wake to through the endless cycles of time.”

He closed his eyes and lying there heard nothing more of the couple stirring. Time went by as the sun rose higher. The surf distantly humming was monstrously devoid of human voice. There was only his own voice broken out of him again like a long buried ache. “When she came to see him,” he said, “she said she could not give herself again. She was so full of rage and sorrow. She needed to pluck beauty, not have it plucked. The small tight cunt between her legs he remembered was the most beautiful thing he ever saw she could not stand plucked or played, not in this world, its maw, the terror, the terror…”

The narrative line he groped for now was so distant it seemed the narrowest ungraspable thread of a fading consciousness. But he groped still. “‘I brought a girl to my room,’ she told him, ‘and I sucked all the sugar from her young crotch, and I turned her over and I spread her cheeks and tasted her there too. The whimpering sounds, such music, you only hear it when you hear it, it fades away, it’s evanescent, it’s gone. You can’t hear anything. I loved her…’ She loved her, and she held his hand when she told him, and asked, ‘Are you sorry I came to see you and tell you this? Are you sorry you ever knew me?’ And he said, ‘even I, I you can’t stand to have strip you naked, and lavish love on your still small spread, and kiss that cunt of yours as beautiful as anything I ever saw?’ And she said…”

He stopped trying. Such a somber tide, the wanting and never getting, the getting and never having, and so forth and so on. He opened his eyes and not to his surprise found he was alone. The couple was just a dot. Away off down the shore they’d gone, steadily westward over the immense tracts of sand. He searched for more ideas and found none. He was bone dry.

©  2009 Larry Smith

Larry Smith’s “The Desert by the Sea” is from a collection of fiction in progress called A Shield of Paris. His story “Tight Like That” appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (print edition), #27. “The Shield of Paris” (near-title story of A Shield of Paris) is in Low Rent and currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Other recent stories were published in Exquisite Corpse as well as Knock, Sliptongue, PANK, and Juked. Earlier fiction appeared in Hambone and spork. His poetry was in Descant (Canada), among others, and his articles and essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Social Text, The Boston Phoenix, and others. Mr. Smith lives in New Jersey.