Free Death, Sleep & the Traveler by John Hawkes Page B

pool. The first seed must have lodged in my eye. Or was the rash sexual in nature and intended to affect the organs of the loins, and had it somehow become displaced instead to my receptive belly? What began as a pimple or two has flowered into a large circular field with the navel as the undamaged hub. Soon it will become a constant and faintly breathing girdle of wet contagion.

     
    The two small naked figures were crawling and squirming in the palm of my hand. Though the photograph wasin fact safely concealed in my jacket pocket, still the two white figures were clearly there, small and fiercely wriggling on the smooth glossy skin of the palm of my right hand, as if the pink living skin of my palm had become a little bed of photographic emulsion developed and hardened and translucent.
    But when I reminded myself of the similar plight of Macbeth’s poor queen, and then rubbed the offending palm against the fruit of my own genitalia, the little image of the old-fashioned naked lovers faded and fled completely away for once and for all.

     
    Her cabin door was wide. She was at her ironing. Wearing only her frayed tight denim pants so that her feet and torso were quite bare, thus she stood with her back to me and her hair pinned up and her iron traveling down a crease in the white pants. I hardly paused but it was enough for me to see the finger marks down the length of her spine, the shadows moving at the edges of the little shoulder blades and in the nape of her neck, the red teeth marks where the elastic band of her underpants had been, the new skin of the upper buttocks shining against the tightness of the leather belt, the fleeting impression of one small naked breast flung partially into view in the exertion of her girlish labor. And my accidental passing was enough to reveal to me that the large and hairy shank of the man stretched out on her unmade bed and reading, waiting for the return of his trousers with his face concealed behind an open magazine and one brutal and hairy leg raised and bent at the knee, belonged not at all to the wirelessoperator as I had expected but instead to some other ship’s officer newly favored with my young friend’s generosity.
    I forced myself to continue on to the ship’s pool where immediately I dove to the bottom and competed for breath, for time, for anguish, for peace, with the other shadows I found lurking there.

     
    In my dream the night is as pure and dark as a blackened negative, and yet I am well aware of the field at the edge of which I stand and of the chatcau which is somehow silhouetted on the opposite side of the field, though the horizon itself is not visible. I stand there, realizing that nothing whatsoever exists in the world except the night, the stone chateau, the waiting field, myself. The chateau and field are thick with significance, though I have seen neither in my past life.
    As I cross the field, taking slow careful steps but determined to reach the ominous yet familiar stone building at any cost, I become aware that the entire sloping field has been blanketed with enormous soft round pads of cow manure. They are round as flagstones, thick as the width of a man’s hand on edge, spongy within and thickly encrusted without, soft and resilient and yet able to bear the full weight of a heavy man, though there is always the possibility of piercing the crust and sinking into the slime within. I am picking my way with care and yet also treading on the uncertain field with excitement because no one has ever crossed this field before. But suddenly I know that the shapes lying like dark and spongy land mines beneathmy feet are composed not of cow dung, as I had thought, but of congealed blood. With awe and a certain elation I realize that I am walking across a field of blood. And I know too that though I am proceeding toward the chateau, I am also walking somehow backward in time.
    I step carefully. I do not want to pierce the crusts and sink to my ankles in