Eternal Returns
Beside him, a shovel that a child’s abandoned stands crooked in the sand; and he feels nothing, nothing for the reams of stories that won’t sell, nothing for Emily. He sits amid millions of pebbles, tossed and pushed and pressed and buried as others step all over them.
All communication is dead, and even the rats scurry far out of sight. Thoughts—thoughts are pure and whole.)
He last came here as a boy, used to hide here before the war. He had no friends then, and he has no real friends now.
He wishes he could bottle the air here and take it under, savor the fresh feeling it gives him. But he knows he has to return to the choking haze down below, down where he gasps for air with emotional emphysema.
He rises and throws the canvas bag over his shoulder. He sighs before he grabs the shovel. He never realized she was so heavy.
High tide, and the water clasps his ankles like a stockade. Beside him, a shovel that a child’s abandoned stands crooked in the sand; and he feels nothing, nothing for the reams of stories that won’t sell, nothing for Emily. He sits amid millions of pebbles, each evoking a moment of his life, tossed and pushed and pressed and buried as others step all over them. Glinting idly, almost winking at him, the sea here effects a fraudulent calm; it’s the sort of sea you should meet only halfway, the sort that reels you past the pier as soon as your knees are in and swallows you whole before you can utter a prayer.
A pier rises from the sea—rises just barely: Old and decaying, half-eaten by the waves, its tripod legs are all rust and barnacles. Even the “Keep Off” signs are dying out, uprooted by anonymous vandals on anonymous nights, on nights as anonymous as the days he came here with his mother and brother. For he came to this pier as a boy, to this pier where the gulls once circled and will circle again when he goes to meet the sea half way.
Walking up, eyeing him, she stops near enough to smell his breath. He hardly notices her.
“Lovely day isn’t it? Looks like summer’s here.” He stares at her blankly, says nothing.
“Me and my sister come here every June,” she says; “we love the air. Don’t you? I mean, of course; but— Do you live around here, or are you on holiday, too?”
He looks into her eyes, looks straight through the back of her head and at the sea, speaks for the first time in days.
“Me? No… No, I’ve come here to die.”
Yesterday, through a window on his train out of London, he took several last glances at the city he’s called home and couldn’t remember if he’d lived there. The window curtains drew closer with every stop on his trip south, inched tighter until no sun could squeeze through. All the while people stared at him, and he got off when he couldn’t take it anymore. He quit the journey here and found the gulls circling.
The woman’s walked away, and a man collecting money for the beach’s deckchairs stands in her place.
