Threnody for the Wounded Man
by Adrien Guttman
PROLOGUE
He washed up and subsequently awakened on the beach, pinstriped suit drenched with swamp water, and small blossoms of blood burgeoned from where unforgiving stones had dug through the fabric into thick pink flesh. A mean purple bruise decorated his left temple, the source of nails-along-a-chalkboard pain. He coughed up a stomach full of gin and brackish water, and in the bull's eye of the wet pile, a goldfish he'd unknowingly swallowed flopped about violently, as if electrocuted, before succumbing to its fate and dying. Watching the fish perish triggered some response inside the fragile man and he likewise surrendered, allowing himself to tumble back into the serene darkness of unconsciousness.
ACT ONE
i.
He had drunkenly smashed through the invisible, thousand-foot-tall walls of her kingdom. She monitored him from the safety of her kitchen, her face resting so near to the cool window her heated breath fogged up the otherwise meticulous glass. She nervously snacked on dandelions previously placed in a jar on her windowsill, the flowers her popcorn, and the still
man a captivating film.
She identified him immediately, inducing a sequence of troubling memories to sweep through the winding hallways of her nervous system. These memories stemmed not from the odd angle she could see of him but from the cry of energy released into nature by his body on the beach, pleading with the primarily barren landscape, moaning ohpleasegodrescueme and I will be your loyal servant! She knew better. God stopped watching this place ages ago, having offered it up as a consolation to Mother Nature.
ii.
Later, she embarked on a journey down the stony shore to collect fragments of sea glass nestled between stones, a piece of white cloth held between two long honeyed fingers. She walked with poise, a cigarette bound between two pressed lips. She approached the sprawled-out man and kicked his ribs in an attempt to rouse him from his slumber. He stayed completely still and she resolved to let nature determine his fate, opting instead to take a long spiraling paddle.
iii.
When he woke a second time, an evening downpour instantly spilled over the lake. The only sounds were rhythmic harsh slaps of rain beating down against the stones. His clothing, dried stiff during his extended slumber, began to soften concurrent with his awakening. He sat up, twisting his head towards the only light source, the golden glow emanating from her beach house, and saw her silhouette posed with one hand running through the hair on the crown of her head and a long cigarette extending out from her mouth.
She was some angelic spirit, the light exuding from her halo drew him towards her like they were charged with opposite magnetic forces. It numbed his pain, allowing him to muster up the strength to stand and stumble towards the house. In dreamland, where he primarily lived, the woman with the golden glow had his arm draped across her shoulders, bracing him against her as they limped forward over the stones.
From her perch, she watched him travel awkwardly, limbs bent in unconventional walking positions, slowly nearing the entrance to her citadel. She opened the kitchen drawer and selected a boning knife with a hand-carved alabaster handle for protection. Clutching it confidently in a pale, blue-tinged hand, she stood by the door, awaiting his entrance.
iv.
His trembling fist tapped a string of seven quick knocks against the door, the wood stinging the cuts on his knuckles, his previous euphoric trance swapped for the twisting wrench of anxiety. He called out HELP repeatedly, but the thick rasp in his voice turned his shouts to whispers. When she finally opened the door, all he could do was weakly mumble help before collapsing face-first onto her sheepskin rug.
v.
As she rocked back and forth in her living room rocking-chair, she considered dragging his heavy body into the lake, praying that nature would eventually forget or at least forgive her cruelty. (I cannot forget for I have no unconscious and I cannot forgive for I am not God but Nature.) Unable to sleep, she settled for chain-smoking, as greying water dripped from her eyes, nose, and mouth, soaking the cigarettes faster than she could smoke them.
The water spoke to her in the familiar stings of her native tongue. (Don’t bring him to me. I didn't want him. He's your problem now.) The language was home, speaking from remote senses no human could discern: gusts of wind, distorted shadows, mirrored reflections. It hurt her while simultaneously empowering her, nature’s imposing dominance over her existence, her personal solitary burden. (Well, nothing digs under your skin quite like family.)
ACT TWO
He had been hoping there was some maternal, feminine nature buried within her, but this fantasy was supported by minimal evidence.
He wanted her to have come and rescued him, letting him lean on her as she lead him into her beach house. The inside of her house would conjure up his infancy, the kitchen suspiciously similar to the one in his childhood home. She would sit him down on the cloudlike carpet, propped up against a heavy silk pillow, and tie up his wounds with bandages soaked with mysterious natural remedies that would cause the tears in his skin to heal immediately. His hypothermic condition would diminish over time as she served him remedial tonics out of a hand-sculpted clay mug, the color blossoming on his pallid face in time with their burgeoning romance. They would set up home in her little cottage and spend the day gleefully gallivanting across the beach or paddling out into the middle of the lake to share a particularly aesthetically minded kiss. He would help her do chores she found too difficult, chopping wood and the like, and she would cook and clean for him.
This is how his mind worked. A down-on-his-luck writer in search of his muse, romanticizing gritty reality with fantasy. The reality, however, was far less serene. His cuts weren’t healing, his whole body numb and tinted seafoam with malady. She left him there in the middle of her living room, neither ousting him nor validating his presence.
He became the expert on the subject of her, watching her whenever his field of view allowed it. Bodily imprisonment of this kind came with extreme power, like a sniper confined to a bell tower. In the morning, wrapped in a white towel, she walked out to the water and swam, returning with that omnipresent glow that originally drew him in. That glow! That iridescence! Each colored beam could bring tears to his eyes. She unwillingly ensnared him with her nymphal charms and there he would remain, caged and thwarted and alone.
He wished she were more feminine, more domestic, more like the woman he saw through the rose-tinted lenses of romantic obsession. He underestimated her femininity. Mother Nature ruled Earth with a gentle, nurturing breast before God came in with his iron will. Isolated in nature, she had harnessed its power.
ACT THREE
She couldn't stop his wandering eyes. She hadn't noticed how many mirrors bounced light around the cottage until she looked up and saw the reflected image of his decaying body from rooms away. Even when she could escape his limited view, his thoughts pervaded her existence. She could feel him considering each of her actions, asking himself: Why is she doing this? What is the point? What has she come here to gain? His constant analysis became pervasive enough to modify her behavior.
The peak of her frustration hit on the fifth night since his mysterious appearance. Locked in the bathroom with the white cloth holding shards of sea glass, she placed one in her mouth and bit down hard, the sound so overwhelming to the silent atmosphere, it might as well have been a gunshot. Using only small and weakened teeth, she ground it into spiky green dust, fragments of dentine swirling around the cave of her mouth, mixing it into a homogenous powder of glass, teeth, blood, and saliva. The act of swallowing the first mouthful nourished her the way food fed people.
The world worked in foils. Euphoria came alongside its sister pain. After eating six shards, her lips, throat, and tongue stung with cuts. This pain was not hers. He put up his own walls in her kingdom, blocking her from her needs. The wind blew the door open a crack and a thin vertical strip of the mirror revealed to her a slice of his being along with a cacophony of frustrated emotions. It should be him in pain, he who brings nothing but calculated judgement.
Foolishly believing himself alone, he reached up to the cigarettes and matches that sat on the tall three-legged stool. The stool had been carved by her from one of the many junipers that died in the great storm of the year before. Realizing the smokes were out of his reach, his addictive personality kicked in, destructive first before all else. Using his arm, he knocked the stool over, the dry softwood splintering on impact with the hardwood elm floors.
His act, in all its brutish selfishness, had unlocked her secrets. The impact of the fallen stool was a dislodging of one of the planks on the floor, one looser than all the others. A surge of adrenaline kicked in and he was finally able to move his weak body. Pouncing, he ripped the wooden slab off, nails no match for a curious frenzy. Underneath lay a myriad of glass jars with various ingredients: fish bones, pebbles, sea glass, seashells, soil so dark he wrongfully assumed it to be coal. Her relationship with nature was reciprocal, they kept each other prisoner while offering each other escalating power over the small land they had left. He had no clue what he just unleashed.
Jars opened seemingly of their own accord; black salt, quartz, and gasoline forming a pile in front of his very eyes. An individual match fell from a small box, daring him to light it. His entire concept of reality shattered under the considerable weight of the moment—him as the softwood stool, and reality as the hardwood floor—his complete bewilderment rendering him once again immobile.
She emerged from the bathroom, suddenly in complete control, blood dripping from her mouth and eyes evil like a deadly hurricane. With a quick bat of black eyelashes, pain soared through him. In a split-second, his wounds that had begun to heal over tore themselves back apart like a million tiny hands mutilating his flesh. Blood poured out of him from a million different exit points, pools of crimson forming in the depressions of the sheepskin rug below him.
In the moments before presumed death, he finally took the time to consider the rest of the world. Was anyone looking for him? Where even was he? Earth? Some funhouse mirror of reality? A dream?
EPILOGUE
His eyes opened and all he saw was the same uniform grey. It seemed to move, but there was no way of knowing for sure. Grey is grey, still or in motion. The grey seemed to materialize into images. Her. Cursed bitch. Wooden boat. Black lake. Hunks of obsidian tied to his arms and legs.
Don’t worry, she said simply, soon you will return whence you came.
He was destined for naiveté. There was no recovering from that now.
Albuquerque?
For the first time since his arrival, she seemed amused by him, while he fantasized about a massive rock falling from the sky and crushing her skull. The pairing that could never be.
Goodbye.
The water rose on the left and fell on the right. The world flipped.
Fuck.