In this story, someone will drown. Yet there will be no apparent reason for this drowning—it will not for example be attributable to suicide, murder, divine retribution—nor even such arcana as current and undertow. It will instead be like so many events of the future: inexplicable, incomprehensible. Nonetheless, it will occur.
There is a girl alone on the beach, a mere inkspot in the white: nothing really, when compared with the massive dunes that loom behind her and the sea, dark and implacable, which stretches before her to Europe and Africa. She is lying there on her back, eyes closed, her body loose, toes pointing straight out to the water. Her skin glistens with oil, tanned deep as a ripe pear. And she wears a white bikini: two strips of cloth as dazzingly white in this sun as the sand itself. She is after an effect, a contrast.
Now she sits up, the taut line of her abdomen bunching in soft creases, and glances slyly around. No one in sight up and down the beach, for miles perhaps—the only sign of life the gull beating overhead, muttering in its prehistoric voice. Her hands reach behind for the strings to the bikini halter—the elbows strain out in sharp triangles and her back arches, throwing her chest forward. She feels a quick pulse of excitement as her breasts fall free and the sea breeze tickles against them. She’s brown here too—a shade lighter than her shoulders and abdomen, but still tanned deeply.
She falls back on her elbows, face to the sun, the hair soft down her back and into the sand. The gull is gone now, and the only sounds are the hiss of the foam and the plangent thunder of the breakers smoothing rock a hundred yards out. She steals another look round—a good long one, over her shoulders and up to the peaks of the dunes. No one. “Why not?” she thinks. “Why not?” And her thumbs ease into the elastic band that girds her hips, working it down, kicking her legs free of it, stretching and spreading herself to the sun. But here she is white, ridiculously white, white as the bikini, white as the breakers.
Then she lets her head fall back again, closes her eyes, points her toes. But she can’t hold it for long—she feels something, a racing inside that makes her breath quick—and she raises her head to look long down her body: the breasts high on her chest, the sharp declivity of the rib cage, the smooth abdomen, the tightly wound hairs. The sun on her body is languid, warm: a massage. At her side: the tanning oil, cooking in the sun. She uncaps the plastic bottle, squeezes, feels the hot spurt of it across her chest. Then her palms are smoothing over the skin in a slow circular motion and she remembers how they’d all studied her with their hot faces while she sat above them, a Greek statue, staring out the window. From their expressions she could tell it wasn’t like sketching a professional model—they’d seen her around campus so many times and so many times had looked up her skirt and down her blouse, undressing her with their eyes. And then suddenly, a shock: there she was. She thinks of those faces, those nervous hands, hairy wrists. And laughs, laughs while her fingers move in the ripening sun—smoothly, thrillingly—over her body.
Five hundred yards down the beach, the man ends his hike and approaches the water’s edge. He kicks about in the sand while the soft foaming fringe shoots over his toes, up to his ankles and on past to retrace a broad ellipse in the sand behind him. He seems satisfied with the spot. Everything pleasantly symmetrical: the dark line of the high tide, the rounded peaks of the dunes, the fanned circular waves riding it on an infinity of waves, each identical to the first. Yes, he is satisfied, and like any other bather he wades in, the water rising gradually up his thin pale legs. But he is an anomaly here—his skin shows no trace of a tan—not the smallest freckle. Is this then his first day on the beach? He looks unhealthy and thin, too white in this flashing sun.
He wades deeper and the water washes level with his groin, the roll of the waves gently floating his genitals. The sensation, after the first shock, is cool and smooth, like the breath of an air conditioner. Is he aware, as he turns his head to look down the beach, that the girl, drowsing now despite herself, is naked and alone—defenseless even? I think not. There is certainly something down there in the distance, obscured by the glare and heat haze. Something dark, a stain in the whiteness. But really, it’s none of his concern. The waves lap at his underarms, splash up into his beard—and then he dives smooth into the next tall one, spearing through like a dolphin. He kicks powerfully and speeds through the incoming peaks until he is a considerable distance from shore. From his performance in the water, it is apparent that this is his element, that the paleness he displayed on the beach has no bearing here. Far from shore, his head is a buoy, tentatively riding up on the distant blinding whitecaps.
She strolled into the classroom in a short white smock. The hem of the smock defined a sharp line across the rise of her buttocks. It lifted and fell with each deliberate step. The art students, the ones who’d absently sketched a dozen models before her, now practically leaped from their chairs. She recognized nearly all of them from around campus, had ignored their slick hungry looks on countless occasions. She knew the girls too—they colored a bit when she entered, shifted in their seats from buttock to buttock. A few glared. But she just strolled, calmly, confidently, her chest thrust forward, just strolled right to the center of the room, yawned a brief yawn and then unbuttoned the smock, and let it fall to the floor.
In the broad expanse of the dunes a pair of wide feet wanders, kicking channels in the hot sand, becoming buried and unburied alternately as they are lifted from one spot to the next. Bobbing along, just ahead of the shuffling feet, is a circular shadow. Its unwitting creator is an obese young man, dressed in T-shirt and bathing trunks—the baggy boxer type with a broad red stripe on each side. Clenched in his left hand is a towel. Every few moments the towel rises to his face and flaps about in an effort to mop up the perspiration. Brackish creeks and streams and rivulets wash over the globe of his torso and down his legs to dot the sand. He apparently has come a good distance, but why through the harsh dunes? If, as I suspect, he is looking for a secluded stretch of sea for bathing, why doesn’t he walk along the beach, where temperatures are cooler and footing easier?
He approaches the crest of the final dune blocking his way to the beach, the sea breeze stiff in his nostrils and cool against his face. Feet splayed, his legs attack the slope—the band of ocean visible over the lip of the dune grows wider, opening like an eye, with each plodding step upward. Finally, with a great wet heave of breath, he reaches the summit. Ah! The wind in his hair, the sea, the lone gull coasting overhead, solitude! But no, there below him is … a female! Nude and asleep! He starts back, vanishes. And then, on his belly in the sand, takes a lingering look. Her breasts, flattened with gravity, nipples pointing heavenward, her black-haired pubes! Beneath him, another part of the body, just a small appendage, adds itself to the general tumescence.
One hour. They had one hour to leer to their hearts’ content—she wasn’t even watching—her gaze was fixed on the bell tower out the window and across the campus. They were crowding in, faces blank, scholars. Scholars operating under the premise that she was just a specimen, headless and mindless, a physique, a painted beetle fixed beneath a microscope.
She knew better.
Tomorrow they wouldn’t dare approach her, yet they’d stare even harder, straining to see up her skirt and down her blouse, grinning like jackals. They’d leer and joke as if she were some kind of freak. And she would be distant, haughty. They’d had their hour, and that was that. The closest any of them would ever come to her. In bed in the dark they would fitfully strain to summon her image, but like all mental pictures it would come in flashes, a film out of frame. She knew all this, and as she posed that day the faintest trace of a smile rounded her lips: inscrutably.
All his life he’d been forced to contend with sniggers, grinning faces, pointed fingers. People looked on him as a bad joke—a caricature of themselves, some sort of cosmic admonition to keep their noses clean. They laughed to cover their horror, laughed, imagining their own eyes pinched behind those sagging cheeks and chins. And often as not they resorted to violent pranks. He had for instance been obliged to discontinue regular attendance at the high school when he found he couldn’t walk the halls without having his head slapped from behind by some invisible hand or having the books pushed from his arms to spray beneath hundreds of trampling feet. On one occasion eight or nine lean toughs had lined the wall outside his chemistry class, and when he emerged had enthusiastically decorated his physiognomy with lemon chiffon, coconut custard and Boston cream. After that, his parents decided that perhaps home tutoring would be more viable.
Since the time of these experiences he had very rarely entertained the company of others, had very rarely in fact left his parents’ home. In the winter it was the apartment, in the summer the beach house. His social phobia was so overwhelming that he refused to show himself in public under any circumstance, not even in so trivial a role as picking up half a pound of pastrami at the delicatessen around the corner or taking the wash to the laundromat. He was a hermit, a monk, a solipsist. In the summer he would walk for miles through the dunes so he could swim alone without fear of exposing himself to ridicule, the preponderance of his flesh displayed in a swimsuit.
The upshot of all this is that he had, at the time of this story, reached the age of twenty-one years without ever having been laid. He had never been on a date, had never brushed a cheek against his own, had never squeezed a sweating palm or tit.
He stands, decides to have a closer look. But what if she should wake? The thought attenuates his resolve and he freezes there at the dune’s crest, staring, obsessed. Just like in the nudist magazines. Masturbatory fantasies recur, charge through his head like rams—this is just the situation he had always pictured alone in his room, pulling furiously at his pud.
Soon he becomes increasingly conscious of the heat and removes his T-shirt, dropping it carelessly beside him, his attention fixed on the browned peaks below. He starts stealthily down the slope: a sly beast stalking its prey. But in a moment he’s sliding down out of control, a truckload of sand following him. The seat of his trunks fills with it. At the base of the dune he recovers himself, jumps up, afraid to breathe, his rear abraded and an uncomfortable projection straining against the zipper of his trunks. The trunks begin to annoy him: he removes them.
A course of action is not entirely clear to him, but he moves closer anyhow, now as naked as she. The breasts swell gently with her sleep, the legs stir, the tongue peeps out to moisten her lips. And then suddenly the feathery warmth of the sun becomes a hot oppressive burden and she wakes to a huge childish face in her own and an insistent poking between her thighs. She shrieks, pushes wildly at that fat face. But she’s pinned beneath a truck, she’s been involved in an accident, that’s it, a mountain has fallen and she’s trapped beneath it. (Sure he’s embarrassed but how can he stop now, the blood swelling up in him as it is?)
Cheeks clawed and gashed, eardrums aching, sweating like a frosted goblet, he drives relentlessly on. He inserts a massive fist in her mouth to quiet the wailing, and inadvertently, as he stiffens toward his moment of truth, he shoves increasingly harder, her head smoothing a depression in the sand—a basin for the blood that seeps from her mashed lips, loosened teeth. She gasps, croaks for air. Below, the white triangle is smothered beneath a sea of convulsively heaving flesh, and furtively, deep within, it too begins to bleed.
“Hey!” yell the fishermen. (They’d been poking around up the shore, drinking beer from a cooler, hunting in a half-assed way for stripers or porgies or blues.) “Hey!” And then they begin running toward what looks like a giant sea turtle digging frantically to bury its eggs.
His head rears up in surprise. With a grunt he disengages himself from her body and his fist from her mouth. An enamel cap, embedded between the second and third knuckles of his left hand, comes with it. He stands there for a blind moment, naked, dripping blood, caught in the act of committing an atrocity. He feels shame, mortification, guilt, remorse, self-denigration—and a rabid animal impulse to escape at any cost. He lumbers in a panic toward the sea, his only possible refuge. The fishermen reach the girl just as he is parting the waves, a colossal preterrestrial creature more at home in the sea than on land. “Hey!” the fishermen shout. But he is gone, paddling furiously, smashing the waves like an icebreaker. Deeper and deeper, farther and farther from his pursuers and his own fat life.
The fishermen are standing in the surf, their shoes and pants wet. They bellow a few drunken imprecations but he is already too distant to care. He drifts off on the waves, a great lump of sperm seeking to impregnate the sea. The fishermen turn back to the whimpering girl. One gently cups his hand under her chin while the other removes his trousers and sets to her.
Far out to sea, far beyond the churning fat boy and the rapacious fishermen, that strange pale creature floats, peacefully drowsing. His beard and long hair fan out in the water, become masses of seaweed. A chance wave, peaking higher than the others, rolls over him and he swallows a quantity of water. The next buries him. He has had no warning, no chance to cry for help, no hope that help would be available. Quite simply then, he drowns. A random event, one that I imagine, considering the world as a whole, is quite common.
The fat boy creeps home naked through the dark dunes, miles from where he had first encountered the girl. His feet and lower legs are lacerated from the stiff dune grass which bites into each blind step. In all, he feels a vague sense of shame, but also a certain exhilaration. After all, he’s finally made the first palpable step in overcoming his social inadequacy.
The fishermen are at home, watching color TV. They feel a deep and abiding sense of accomplishment, of fulfillment—though they returned home this afternoon with an empty porgy basket.
The girl sleeps a heavy drugged sleep, enfolded in the astringently white hospital sheets. Her tan contrasts nicely with them. The breath passes gently through her parted lips, lips battered and brown with dried blood. A gray-haired man (her father?) sits beside her, patting her sleeping hand.
The thin man, the pale one, is jerked spasmodically by the underwater currents, tangled in a bed of weed. The crabs have long since discovered him and are rattling their ancient horny shells about his flesh, delighted with the unexpected treat. The tide is washing in, and the drowned man with it. Eventually, I suspect, what is left of him will come to rest on the beach, a few yards away from a curious red-brown stain in the bleached sand. The half-cleaned skeletons and carapaces of other strange creatures lie there too, waiting for the morning’s