Pirate Island

O’s Story, Continued

DREAMING REALITY

The whole rotten world

come down and break

and I’m crawling

through these cracks

I’ve never had a lover (poem by Ange,
not in the world that exists ‘cause poetry is what
I’ve never wanted one fucks up this world)
piss on my teeth, shit and piss.

I wanted to die . . .

I’m a girl,

night is my eyes,

die for a while.

While the world cracks open

and all the rich men die,

and all the fucks who’ve sat on my face,

those sniveling shites.

We come crawling through these cracks, orphans, lobotomies;

if you ask me what I want I’ll tell

you I want everything.

Whole rotten world come down and break.

Let me spread my legs.

Three seats away from us on a Northern tube line, three children argued about which passengers they should mug. The fattest of the two boys spoke in a high feminine voice. Outside the train, the pickpockets waited by ticket booths. As we walked on the garbage, I kicked a turkey bone spotted with blood.

Dogs were sitting everywhere.

“I don’t want to ever be here again,” I said as we were leaving London.

It was then that we met this other girl. She was one of the strangest things anyone’d want to see. Tiny with hairs so stiff with muck that every disease in the world seemed to have been celebrating her birthday.

Later I would learn that every day was this brat’s birthday.

We followed her down to a section which seemed to me to be a place where I had already lived.

Ange reminded me that we didn’t live anywhere. “There are more dead men here than where we just were.”

“That’s what I’m looking for.”

So we chose a hotel like the brat’s hair. Somewhere between dirt and scum.

The brat explained to us that there weren’t any dogs in this town, but there had been pirates. She herself lived above this pub where there were a lot of girls like her. That is, as grimy. Almost. Knives were sitting in the walls ‘cause most of the girls owned knives and, when they had hair, whether above or below, kept them in there. Some didn’t have any teeth and some plucked their teeth right out of their mouths.

They hung with a few boys known as punk boys.

Now, the pub was a block from the mucky hotel. These two wooden buildings, each two stories in height, were the only things that stood up in this part of town. Empty lots, sand, and countryside remained.

I dreamt that this section was city and country because, here, one was the other.

The hotel was a hut because, inside, metal was being changed. The components of computer electromagnetic disease were being transformed into something else. Something like dream.

“You have to go down.” That was what the brat had said the first time we met her.

To forget is to transform or transmute. I had thought that the practices of alchemy were forgotten. But St. Barbara had said in one of her letters, “When history goes to sleep, we shall walk around the hut.”

Now I further understood, but I didn’t know, that any metal object, such as a brake lever nut, in itself holds traces of its owner’s past. Of all the activities that composed that personal past. T o the extent that personal means anything. In the hut, the traces of history were removed from each piece of metal.

My father had left me before I was born.

Suddenly I realized that the gimp was explaining to Ange and me that she owned the pub. Though she didn’t look like she owned anything.

“I don’t want to own,” she whispered. “Much less be a landlord. Even of a building that isn’t a building ‘cause some of its walls are missing and rats live there even though most rats wouldn’t go near it even if you paid them.

“This situation’s making me so sick that I’m becoming physically sick.

“I wanna go back and be a sailor.”

I had the idea that I should hire her to find some real mariners who could get Ange and me to the island on the map.

The gimp or whatever she was couldn’t find the island by herself ‘cause she didn’t have a college diploma and she was a female. A good-for-nothing like Ange and me.

But she wasn’t there to ask. Only a silver strand to remind me of her.

That night I dreamt that I left the hut to search for the silver-haired girl. The mist a few feet in front of the edifice was so thick, I could barely make out what lay ahead. As I stepped into that white, I could no longer see.

I turned around and headed for the only place I knew had lights.

There were many people there. The metal-changers. The ones who changed motorcycle nuts.

“They take all their preoccupations out,” I said out loud.

The next day, Silver explained things more carefully to me. The reason she was so dirty was that her girls were dirty, being orphans and refugees and other kinds of rejects, even from rich families. They were the kind of girls who have nowhere to go but to a pub. Of course she didn’t want to offend these customers by taking a bath or washing her hair in the kitchen sink.

It was then that I perceived how really dirty she was. ‘Cause of rats, ‘cause I actually saw a rat, there, matting up her hair. In there, in the mat, were also used latex gloves, a knife or two, a broken comb.

The hair smelled like a mixture of rat waste and fish. “The ocean, that repository of our bodies including our shit and piss,” further explained Silver, “is where the dead pirates live. Using their eyeballs as money, they buy the goods they need, for while they were alive, they never bothered to purchase anything.

“Dead pirates are sailors’ mates, ‘cause to those who don’t own homes, death’s as common as life.”

I realized that she knew human things like angst and loneliness so I started to confide in her. I even showed her the map. Which I shouldn’t have, but I’m too trusting.

She coughed a few times to remind me she was sick. “So you’ll need a ship and crew.”

“I want to go here.” And pointed again to the paper.

“You’ll have to give me a copy of that map.”

“No.”

She coughed so violently that I began to feel sorry for her ‘cause she took so little care of herself. She even looked like a rat.

“This is what being a landlord does to you,” Silver explained further. “COUGH. COUGH. Work all day work all night. Until nothing’s left of the world but work. Nothing left in this endlessly lightless reality that can be called life. COUGH. COUGH. Owning a pub—it’s a dog’s life. I’m an old hound dog who’s sniffing his way through a world that’s dying. COUGH. COUGH.”

For a second, her words were making me see what it is to grow old.

“No one cares about an old dog. COUGH. COUGH. And this is why I care for orphaned brats.”

“Me and Ange aren’t brats.”

With this, her voice changed and became a little girl’s. “Only thing an old female dog like me can do these days, these nights,” though she didn’t look so old to me, “is help other little girls find what they’re looking for. She shook her silvery hair. Which would have been silvery if she had ever taken a shower.

I was going down farther than I thought possible.

“Take me with you on your search for buried treasure,” she begged.

I went back to the hotel and told Ange everything. That Silver was an old sailor but now kept a public house, and she knew all the girls in Brighton. That she was beginning to take me down.

Ange asked me what I meant by “down,” so I told her to fuck off.

Ange took my head down and bashed it.

The next day, Silver brought me to her pub. The Bald Head. This time we weren’t going down, for, though from the outside this shelter for drunks looked as if rats were using it for their gym, to my surprise, its insides were clean. Dainty red curtains hung across small windows. The floor, though its surface was sawdust, sparkled.

On the other hand, grimy girls were lying all over the floor except when they were lying on top of each other. At least half of the ones who were still conscious—it was about ten in the morning—were smoking cigars and viler protuberances. Through smoke thick enough to blind a Seeing Eye dog, I thought I was seeing glimpses of gold and silver, not over but inside those delicate bodies, jewelry at the most unlikely places disappearing into skin. Those who were the most drunk were so heavily tattooed I thought I was in a museum of girls lit, no longer by unnatural light, but by the sun that, lighting up the waters at the end of the day, reveals the roads that lead to buried treasure.

I turned to Silver.

“Here are the girls I told you about. The ones for whom you and what’s-her-name have been looking. They even have a captain named Pussy.”

I must have been looking a bit disapproving ‘cause then she said that, though girls might look like alcoholics, I had to learn that when it comes to the sea, appearances are deceptive. Actually they were the toughest old salts she had ever met. They even had an available ship whose name was Mary and they had rigged it as well as any vessel, even in the past, has been prepared for the roughest and the most treacherous seas.

“Best of all, it’s a rowboat.”

“What?”

“Your fucking Pirate Island or whatever you call that dump . . .”

“It’s not a dump. This pub is a dump!”

“. . . is only ninety miles from here. It’s not as if you and your green-eyed companion are going halfway around the world.”

“Where’s the captain?” I demanded.

“She’s not here ‘cause she’s off seeing visions.”

“Oh.”

“But look down here.”

I peered below me to where I saw a tall, narrow girl lying between two gigantic wolfhounds.

“She can kill a man at forty yards. While chewing tobacco.”

So I sort of saw the point of taking these repulsive girls with us on our search for buried treasure.

Then the silver-haired girl informed me that MD—that was dog-girl’s name—could not only shoot, but also took baths. One of the dogs and the female skeleton now had their tongues entwined around each other’s.

Something must have been happening to me, or inside me, I guess one’s the other, ‘cause I could no longer remember how I had felt when I was a whore.

Outside one of the windows, part of the sky was gray.

The gimp was almost licking my shoulder when I informed her that Ange and me would hire her and several of these girls to take us to the island on Ange’s mother’s map.

“All of us or nothing,” she replied as soon as her tongue was free.

She wore red lipstick the next time that I saw her, though her hair was more voluminous with dirt than before. Owing, like everything else about these girls, to the fertility of rats.

Ange was with me, and the three of us went all the way down, down those Brighton streets that seem so narrow that they fall down. Until, on our right, several piers, each longer than any tampon string I had ever yet seen.

Past pier after pier until we came to one shaped like a crescent.

As if born out of the quartered moon, a boat.

A boat as long and as lean as a wolfhound, and twice as odoriferous. Distorted without the help of sun, for there wasn’t much of that in this town of rotting men.

Obviously a number of animals were still living in its hold: in addition to the usual feces, there were many webs, nests, and chewed-up socks. Two colorful fish heads.

All sorts of fungi, mosses, and the beginning of a mussel family were growing over the wood. Ange was so hungry that she wanted to call this ship Crawling Into My Mouth.

I told her no, that was a bad idea. A rat slithered out of Silver’s hair, so I said, “We don’t have to give it a name . . .”

“We don’t?”

“Do we know who wrote the map that we’re following? Do we know the rubrics of those dead pirates, living in the ruby oceans, who’ll guide our steps?” The metal has been changed, I thought: metal tracings or memories overthrown. “No.”

And so I turned to Silver. “Tell me, girl, when do we sail?”

“I’m not always a girl.” One of her fingers was dipping into the scalp at the spot where the rat had crawled out.

“Oh.”

For a second, I remembered a dream that Ange and I once had. But memory was overthrown.

“We sail tomorrow.”

INTO THE STRANGE

“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” Silver’s voice rang out . . .

and all that’s old has turned to scum

for this world’s begun to burn.

Two girls lost on a dead man’s chest

doing what they like to best,

pecking at unknown alphabets,

alphabets that lead to gold

across seas made up of stars,

dreams glittering under dead men’s bones.

Ten filthy girls on a dead man’s chest

doing what they like to best,

girls who spit right up your ass,

girls who’ll take all that you own,

knife you in your turned-up breast:

All that you own will turn to scum

and the world begin to burn . . .

And so we set sail.

Just before leaving, MD had brought her two wolfhounds on board with her. Nobody seemed to think this unusual. They were as tall and as lean as her: all seemed to be continually swaying. Ange said she could smell the booze crawling out of all three of the mouths.

I confided to the silver-haired girl that I had had an affair with a decayed alcoholic back in China that had so devastated me that I can never be close to anyone.

She replied that MD never touched a drop of the stuff. She would swear, as would every girl, that there was no drink on this board.

Rats come out from broken eggs,

eating all the nights and days,

then crawl inside our unwashed hairs,

drinking down the fluids there.

Pussy, the captain, wore a bandage around her eyes because, she explained, a dream had wounded her.

So it was Silver, a few days into the journey, who ordered Bad Dog to be second in command.

This sailor was so ugly that the gulls and more vulturous birds, in fear, flew away from her. One of these birds became so disconcerted that it flew right through our sail. From then on, we had to use the small motor found in the back of the boat.

This was just one of the ways in which Pussy commanded.

What I remember aren’t the details of that which happened between girl and girl. After all is gone, what I remember are the colors of Silver’s hairs. How the smell of it was the same as its colors.

Smell and color were the stars that sat on my head every night. Layers sat over layers of stars until there appeared that fabric which the girls named night.

Girls passed out on the deck below.

A few of them had vomited into the shreds of the sail. In memory of all childhoods.

Then Silver chose me to be her confidante. She whispered to me that Bad Dog was first mate because, besides being ugly, she had all the characteristics of a horny mongrel with rabies. A rare character in a girl. This mariner was so mean that whenever any part of a girl’s body happened to rove within four or so inches of her mouth, she bit it. That is, the girl. Dog-face sharpened her teeth about once a month. So it wasn’t that the new mate didn’t know how to give orders: it was that she barked before thinking.

The girls liked her being in command because none of them wanted that position. Or any position. Moreover, Bad Dog kept the deck clean as a result of her diet. She ate rats. In fact, there was something in Bad Dog that was as emotionless, or nonhuman, as mean cold deceptive and smart, as a rat. In the late afternoon, when the sun was turning the color of blood, after the dog-puss had munched down a score or so of rats—she disdained mice—she’d clean the remnants of their bones off her teeth with drink. So did the rest of the girls who hadn’t champed on rodent fur. Though Silver had said that the ship was clean of such evil.

But Bad Dog became drunker than any other girl because she’d never pass out.

The drunker this square-shaped mate turned, the more sexually attractive. She was so vile, physically, that she was highly attractive to begin with to all but the most confirmed old farts such as Pussycat and Silver. Whenever a young girl, hovering around Bad Dog, became so drunk that she made a direct move for Bad Dog’s body, Bad Dog chewed on her.

As the stars sat upon our heads and disappeared and reappeared from our heads, until Ange and I felt that we were being carried into wonder, Bad Dog grew fonder of booze. Soon she was drinking everyone’s scotch and beer. Her motor functions, her perceptual faculties, slowed down to such an extent that she was no longer aware of all that was taking place around her.

As all the drunken girls lay there in the stars which were night’s flames.

One night, Bad Dog fell onto the deck and cut herself. She lay in her own blood. Another night she turned more violent than usual and cut a child who, probably because she didn’t yet know what sex was, thought she was Dog’s girlfriend.

It was then that Ange said that Bad Dog really was a dog.

The fonder of drink the mangy sailor became, the more, out of pure viciousness, she encouraged fights among the other girls. Fights often caused by her lies. None of us minded when, one dark night, she disappeared.

Wherever bad girls go.

Pussy didn’t notice that anything had happened.

It was as if all this was leading up to something, and when that something happened, it was the last thing that I expected.

TO ALL THE DEAD DOGS OF THIS WORLD

A few days later, I saw Bad Dog chewing on a rat. I thought, it must be dinnertime. At the same time, because mutt-girl was no longer available to clean our deck, a three-foot-long rat stepped over my foot.

Almost all of the crew happened to be vegetarians.

My vision of Bad Dog munching on a rat, for an unknown reason, had made me hungry. I ran over to the barrel in which most of our perishable food had been stored. As I peered into that darkness, I realized that there were only apples left and that most of them had been chewed by vermin.

I must have dealt with the hunger by falling asleep, because the next thing I knew, the silver-haired girl was whispering in my ear.

Actually she was talking to another girl in front of the barrel behind which I had fallen asleep.

“ . . . the ships I’ve seen, amuck with blood and fit to sink with precious stones . . .”

“Where are all those criminal hearts now?”

“Dead, and swimming between the bones of other dead criminals. White bones on white bones.”

Where are all those dogs tonight?

For dead dogs cannot bite.

Silver again answered, “To all the dead dogs of this world: You were the roughest the world’s ever known and the devil himself was afeared to go to sea with you.”

“But what are we going to do about getting our hands on the map?”

I could hear voices all around me. There were two of them. I was back in the hall in which I couldn’t see. In the threshold of my parents’ bedroom. They were discussing my character in words I could barely hear. For the first time, I knew that I didn’t belong in this human world.

“Let’s kill ‘em,” answered Silver.

“I can’t kill girls.”

“You haven’t yet. But they’ve got the map.”

Crouched on the deck slimy with all sorts of mucus, I was missing childhood, or all that I had never known.

Crouched in that dark, in that human and rat spit, I was a child because I was in a world of animosity. My mother was a monster because human mothers always love their daughters and because she wanted to kill me. Since I knew that monsters are born from the imagination, I had to get rid of my imagination.

I had to find out who my mother really was.

“Once we get hold of the map, we won’t have to murder ‘em,” remarked the other girl.

“Who bites? I’ll tell you who bites. Dead dogs don’t bite.”

“You mean even if we get the map and the treasure, they can hurt us in some way?”

I was beginning to recognize this voice.

“Yeah. They’ll rat on us to the authorities so they can get their treasure back, or, if not that, so they can ask for justice and then we’ll be hung from the highest yardarm without any clothes on. Dead dogs don’t bite.

Now I knew what I knew when I was a child. That they were coming for me . . .

If they found me . . . My heart sat in my mouth. And filled it with blood.

This must have been what it was like when I was a child.

All that I could no longer remember.

Girls.

Pussycat—now I could clearly recognize her voice—said she was hungry. She started to walk toward the barrel of vermin and apple. I heard her footsteps.

The winds were blowing through patches of fog so thick with gray that no more objects could be seen. Neither birds nor whatever clouds were moving fast through that sky. Perhaps there was a break in all the gray of the world, for suddenly a separate voice cried out, “Land!”

Then the fog belt lifted and the moon appeared. Through an opening not of but into the sky, I saw that the differences of the world had become visible. In front of my eyes, there was a horizontal line. It was as if the sky had separated itself into two sections. Each area was a different color black.

The stars were opening, and lighting up more and more of the deck. Most of the girls were there, standing and lying below those stars. So much I saw, almost in a dream, for I had not yet recovered from my fear.

I didn’t realize that for the time being my life was safe.

“Have any of you,” asked the captain whose eyes were bandaged, “have any of you ever seen that land before?”

“Aye, Sir,” answered the girl whose golden hairs were trying to fly away, “when I used to ship out with Captain Bonny.”

“And what’s it called?”

“Pas Sang Rouge. Or Pirate Island. It was a place for mutinied sailors once, thus its rubric, and a hand on board Bonny’s boat knew all their names. That hill there . . .”

“I can’t see it,” said Pussy.

“It’s where the pirates cleaned the worms out of their booty and drew up false maps showing where booty was to be found,” explained Silver.

“So now we know where we are. All of you, do what you have to do, and so, we’ll reach this land!” Pussy walked out, stumbling only slightly, and the rest of the girls, except for those who had passed out on that star-drenched deck, followed her.

I was waiting for them all to go away so I could run to Ange. Who was sleeping, so she was still seeing the splendor of the world. Run to her and tell her all that had just happened and that we still had the chart.

I had to explain to her that these girls didn’t mean us any good.

And we should plan our escape.

I saw Silver drawing near to me. I knew that, for the moment, she couldn’t harm me because there were too many girls around, even if they were drunk, and because she still didn’t know where the map was, so I just stood up thinking that she would think that I had come out on the deck with the other girls as soon as we had heard the cry “Land!”

But before I could, with all those other girls, find my way below deck to the hold, she laid her hand on my shoulder.

I didn’t want her to know that I was aware what her plans really were, her real intentions toward me and Ange. That I knew the crew was a crew of criminals, so I let that hand sit on my shoulder.

I didn’t say one word.

Under the still opening stars.

“Look,” says the silver-haired girl, “and I’ll tell you where we’re going to go.” Her hand was no longer sitting on my shoulder. “I’ve been there before: I can show you the ways and the byways and the paths and its labyrinths so you won’t become completely lost, utterly scared.”

I didn’t say a word.

“You’re scared.”

Now I could feel her hand again.

“Close your eyes.” Her voice was in and inside my ear. At this moment, I parted from childhood.

Her other hand closed my eyes. “Where do you want to go most?”

I knew that she was duplicitous, cruel, and powerful and that I shouldn’t trust her but, at the same time, I knew that I did trust her, though I didn’t know why. I trusted her because I had to because that’s how I was.

Her hand had moved deeper, as if pirates were exploring and I was their explored. “I’ll take you somewhere you don’t know about and then you’ll be able to open your eyes.”

The stars were still shining, or maybe they weren’t, because everything was becoming everything else while the inside, through skin or through the disappearance of difference, turned into outside.

My body took over consciousness. Fell asleep as if in a faint. All was pleasant where I now was, and quiet. Lilac and gray, the water mirrored the air.

I was truly seeing land.

Long, tall trees equaled shadows.

Finally the boat again set sail. Beneath it, the water resembled the air as long as there was no possibility of coming so the coming was more violent. Kept on going because the water and air, mirroring each other, were boundless.

Deeper in there, the animals came out. Fur then fur. There were lots of little animals so I couldn’t stop.

“Beep beep,” cried the little animals, “beep beep.”

“I’m going to find somewhere where the gray is going on there,” I said. There was no one to hear me. “I’ll go there over again.”

I went there over again so green painted the landscape. So intense it could barely be handled.

By the time I could speak again, though I had lost all meaning, Silver was gone.

I couldn’t tell Ange what had happened, though I did.

PISSING IN THE SUN

I know that we change continually when we’re alive, but I don’t know whether that’s true in dreams. And all that’s past lives in the realm of dreams.

After I had talked to Ange and cried and she had cried, I must have fallen asleep.

For I was back in China.

The alcoholic’s profession was rat-killer. ‘Cause we were together in China, he took me out to a Chinese restaurant, where he ate rats. Crunched them up good between his teeth.

I refused to kiss him.

I’m not into guns and he took me to a Chinese shooting gallery where they shot rats and I looked at this object that was in my hands and decided I’d try to use it once. Because I’ll try anything. Once.

That was how I began being punished for rat-killing.

I was in back in my room, which is long, far in its back. A tiny mouse scooted across the carpet on which I was kneeling. It walked up to me. As it was trotting across my right arm, I became conscious, for the first time in my life, and saw that it was playing too hard with me. It used its claws and teeth.

I began to wonder about what it might be.

It was walking over the carpet next to the right side of my body, so I put my hand over that bit of cloth and trapped what was under it. Tiny gray popped out between my fingers. But my boyfriend was helping me. I knew this really was a rat, so I put a knife right through its body.

Then I felt guilty, and guilt made me miserable.

Now I started to dream about Silver and not just about pirate girls. I was rising out of a bathtub, while Silver was sitting on its side. For she was the masseuse. I snapped my towel at her and said, “It’s wet.” For some reason, my action reminded me that there was sexual tension between us. I thought that she wanted me to kiss her, but since I wasn’t sure how to kiss a girl I did nothing.

Now this brat and I were having sex on a narrow cot mattress almost the size of a bathroom in a room the same size as the bathroom so it could have been a bathroom. If bathrooms can change. They can. In front of my head, there rose or I saw this wood door through which I could hear the noises from the girl next door. I hadn’t heard anything before, not from over there. She must lead a boring life, I used to think, for she never does anything.

I was hearing myself.

The door opened, even though it was the door to all that lay outside and so, I knew, should be locked. But then I forgot to tell Silver, who happened to be under me, that the front door was open, because I was so interested in fucking.

When all of our fucking was over, I crawled down to between the walls and the bed. To the floor down there. Through a letter slot in the back wall, wetness was coming through. It must have been dribbling down for a while ‘cause all of the floor was damp.

Plastic bags had been put on the floor to protect it from all that wetness, but all they did was hide the floor.

Then, the tip of a shovel’s head as full of dirt as if it had been digging a grave appeared through the slot. Like a tongue. A tongue’s a letter. I knew it was a tongue because I felt it up.

Something under the bed which I couldn’t see began tugging at, and holding on to, my bathrobe’s hem.

For it was morning and dreams had ended.

While Ange and I had been dreaming, as if we had been dreaming pirate girls, the boat had made a great deal of way. It was now lying about half a mile southeast of earth.

It was the beginning of a world.

Caught in whatever dreams boats dream, dreams of being pursued by bloodthirsty pirates, yet less and less able to move, for the waters around the boat grow thicker and thicker. Caught in a mixture of mud and water, our boat sat.

We had to dig away the slime to free the bottom ribs of the rowboat. As we parted mud from mud, that which looked solid and behaved like liquid from scum, or that which will not allow itself to be separated, strange vapors rose and insects, those who swim in the air, moved in front of our eyes. As if we were seeing pop art. Their colors were that brilliant. The thin wings and protruding eyeballs, hovering still in our minds, diseased whatever they touched there. Slugs were alive in the brown, and those long worms whose numerous white protuberances had something to do with our sexuality. Or that from which we had come.

In this manner, we were able to approach the shore about which Ange and I had dreamt back in another world.

This was a shore caught between dream and visibility.

I was working my butt off because all of the other pirates except for Ange and Silver, or so I thought, had either passed out due to a bottle of mescal now empty and lying by a rat who must have died from the same thing, or they had no intention of doing anything anymore.

Mud and semiliquid substances so disgusting I didn’t want to know what they were, covered me, just as God must have been covered when he made His world.

The ship touched something that felt like earth.

I didn’t give a shit ‘cause I was staring at Silver. She might be a murderer, but she was beautiful, with her silver hairs thrown all over the winds of the world.

“A bad sign of what’s to come,” said this girl.

Probably she was talking about the smells that were rising up from me. I knew that she didn’t care about me, for she didn’t have any feelings like most girls have feelings.

This thing whose hair was gold, who was standing right behind Silver, put her arms around the brat.

The birds were wheeling and shrieking, and I knew their beaks were sharp as razors, and then they saw us, me and Silver and Gold, these soaring beings who had preceded the insects and worms, and not understanding what they saw, again started to shriek.

It wasn’t earth but a rock that had torn through the ship’s side. Nevertheless, here lay the beginning of the world. The moment just before it began. Because I could see that which I couldn’t yet touch. I saw ponds in the earth, gray and lilac and green, then birds feeding at them. Grass was growing, here and there, in huge tufts and clumps, then not at all. Howsoever it pleased. For the rocks lay in order and then, not: whatever was in front of my eyes seemed to be doing whatsoever it wanted.

Most of the pirates were drunk enough to be as good as dead.

But Silver wanted to explore.

I did too.

Ange reminded me about the past. “The map my dead mother gave us.”

“Don’t get sentimental.”

“Don’t you want to find buried treasure?”

“Of course I do.” I paused. “That map might have come from your mother’s body, but it’s dead men’s talk. Pirates’ tales. Men who cut off women’s fingers so they could do worse.”

“Ate eyeballs,” suggested Ange.

That sounded pretty good. Now this is when I made a really bad mistake, and my first one. Because of this mistake, I would find out who Silver really was.

I was pulling the map, ruined as it was, out of my pocket when I knew that I just had to explore.

Ange called out after me.

Then, Silver. When I saw that she saw that I was following her, I went the other way.

Alone, I reached the forest which I had just seen.

SILVER’S HAIRS

I saw snakes. I couldn’t tell one from the other. They sat on these small rocks in the sun.

One raised his head at me and made a noise like a top when it’s spinning. But not really like that. Each sound here was strange to my ears.

I wanted to talk to the snakes, but then I saw a marsh. Up close.

All yellow, it seemed to be in the ground, and, at the same time, it seemed to be growing along the sand like a bramble on steroids.

I followed it to the edge of another body of filthy water. I saw that the marshes were the streets in this nonhuman town. I walked through one, and the next, until so much liquid sploshed into my shoes that my footsteps were that of an Abominable Snowman’s.

For Nature was metamorphosing me.

Then, as soon as I reached a piece of dry sand, I stuck my butt on it and took off the drowned shoes. Now my feet, when I walked, were going to get all foul and smelly and even bloody from torn skin. The sun was mature the way a piece of fruit gets overripe. Even this air was smellier. A fowl, I think it was a mallard or a duck, I don’t know what the difference is, was rising out of a clump of reeds behind me. Soon a great cloud of gulls began to honk.

Through their language, which I didn’t understand, I heard, for the first time since I had been alone, what was human.

“Maybe you’re only capable of loving one girl and giving her the kind of devotion I’d do anything for. The kind of love a girl dies for. I know that it isn’t me you love. And so you don’t give a shit about me, and I do you, and I know that you know I love you. That’s how you are about everyone: you’d see us dead if it suited you and you wouldn’t blink an eyelid.”

“That’s how I am.”

“I still love you and you know that. And I know you don’t me. My mother didn’t love me and I loved her.” Now I recognized the speaker. It was the prettiest girl in the crew, Gold. We called her Virgin because her father had raped her. “So I have to do whatever I have to do because I like myself . . .”

“What’re you laying on me?” The colder Silver appeared, the angrier she was.

“You were wrong, Silver, about Bad Dog, and you’re wrong about these two dumb girls.”

“I do what I have to do,” replied Silver, “for me and for all pirates.”

“I’m going to go against you, Silver. I’m not going to get involved in your murderous plans, even if they involve digging up lots of buried treasure, and when we get back to town, I’m going to tell the authorities all the treacherous things that you’ve done.”

“If you do such a thing as that, you’d better watch out that you possess a memory, ‘cause you need a head to possess a memory.”

“Do you think I’m scared of you?” and the girl whose hair was the colors of the sun picked up a stone and threw it at the pirate.

Silver, who knew how to throw, immediately grabbed a rock, which happened to be the largest one around, and slammed it at the other’s head.

Blood flowed out of the red dent where the object had hit. As she fell, I saw Silver jump on top of her, then, with a strange expression on her face, leap up and run off.

I felt that I was seeing what I had seen before. Only now I was really seeing it:

A face whose features couldn’t yet be seen. Whose silver hairs were thrown all over the winds of the world.

Only I didn’t know how to see what I was seeing.

When I looked for the golden-haired girl, she wasn’t there.