'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
  The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
  A lane to the land of the dead.'
Auden


I

Sliver-like, he slipped off the boat without making a sound, closing the impossible dance. His memory seeped hastily out of his falling silhouette, and drifted onto a passing airstream. In the water, he drowned the truth. Clarity emerged from his forgetting, on the knife's point of his existence.


He was always hanging on a thread. In his memory, moments followed moments, like a row of identical prison bars. The outline remained with the substance evaporated. Things were equal and unrelated, and as a result he was untethered in the present, cut off from the next moment, the previous one, and the rest of time. He never questioned any of it. One bright blue morning, he had tossed Pearl into the brine. He'd picked her up, carried her to the edge of the beach, waded into the salty blue and dropped her.

The trauma had smeared their lives like a sluggish oil spill, lathering them in a tar-like substance that penetrated into their deepest recesses. The news of what he had done was met with lazy helplessness. His mother had expertly dislocated his shoulder, then expertly relocated it (she was a doctor). "Why," she had asked. The boy could not remember why. This lack seemed to somehow justify things instead of aggravating them, and a strange confidence moved him to believe that his actions were obscurely apt. He couldn't justify or excuse any of it, but had no compunction to do so. Aware of how most things failed to reach human consciousness, he put little stock in truth. Things just happened. When his mother demanded to understand her son, he told her what he could, indifferent to her depth of feeling. Not realizing that truth mattered so much to others, he was easily truthful. He told her that his actions had been impulsive and so very inconsequential. She shook him once, then never touched him again. As time passed, he noticed how her features changed. Things shrivelled, especially her lips and ears. She'd forget to breathe. She began to mask the rot in her bones and in the lining of her stomach with cheap perfume, bought from the little shop down the road. She toyed with ways to go. When her thoughts went to killing herself, her lips would curl inward and upward and her feet would tingle slightly. She imagined herself amber and resplendent, doused in Chanel 5, striking a match and setting herself on fire. Chic. Then charred. His father found grief... indigestible. It poisoned his blood, coated his lungs, blackened his bile. It percolated within, eating its own echo. He had always been very calm (he too was a doctor), but sheltered now a deepened, sharper violence. A sweet stink began to emanate from him, readable in a plastered grin. And for the first time the boy was able to note the slit of blackness separating his father's two front teeth.

Later, other things appeared too. His mother's armpit hair. His father's comma usage. The way a restless silence would insidiously creep through their house. Their smells. Wasn't it absurd, he thought, how his parents jiggled and jangled, four eyeballs bouncing off tin walls and down russet staircases? They had always been body parts of course, but the illusion of warmth and emotion had masked that morbid fact. A tender word here, a caress there, were enough to stave off their disintegration. But he could see nothing else now. Things appeared to be coming undone, and the outlines of reality were beginning to dislodge themselves like puzzle pieces waiting to be rearranged. Panic overtook him as a future sense of the past threatened to cloud his present. Uncertainty was all he knew, yet now appeared a new and unfamiliar feeling that sense might prevail, a monster lurking behind every smile, every question, every silence. Things like truth, connection and causality had begun to whisper from behind his father's black slit, his mother's black hair. The past, his past, was launching an attack on him (or perhaps it was just a gentle jibe). He had expected things to remain as they were. He was happy to accept himself in a wider reality that eluded him, but that seemed to be changing now. There was seepage from the past, coming up thick like tangled hair.

As he remembered it, the disposal of his baby sister had been irresistible. He had crept into her room while she was sleeping. He'd cradled Pearl in his arms, slipped out, approached the shore, and stood there, facing a hungry ocean and staring at her. She had woken up to stare back, with fat glassy eyes. In the haziness of his memory, her weight was metallic, as if he was holding a rusty chain. An awkward hardness kept her liquid sealed in. Tossing her felt like the right gesture. She'd bobbed, quiet and fetching, her mouth oval and endless as gentle waves rolled her out of sight. Some peals of laughter, the possibility of panic, and she was gone. After floating, she sank. After sinking, she lay. After the first impact with water, she still seemed worryingly whole. But as she sank, scattered bubbles indicated how baseless his concerns were, and deep relief washed over him as he realized that she would fully fill, sipped by surrounding streams. He had been certain that it had happened this way, a series of practical events, threaded together by a sense of necessity. Not that he trusted his memory, exactly, now less than ever. It was what it was. Still, his mother's question had gained a life of its own, even as his mother seemed to move on. It bobbed into his consciousness with increasing frequency, like a flat joke that persisted. "Why?"

Some years after he had killed his sister, his parents suggested a cruise. They didn't like cruises, and their spiel on reconnection rang hollow to his ears. But that mattered little because he was used to their dishonesty and anyway liked the sea. It flowed. On Tuesday, they had driven down rural roads and through quaint villages to arrive at the harbour in the early sun. The ship loomed over them, tiered and frosted like cake for a glut. It glinted with oafish glee, squat upon the flattened waves. Seaside excitement circulated around it, and it appeared to ascend without moving. There was something primal about it, as if it held a strange promise, ready at any moment to open up and collapse into the waves. Not even wind could warp its stillness.

It marked a turning point, though he had come to that point some time ago. It had never been a choice but rather a genetic feature, an inner sting that had never faded. Life had become difficult, to the point where death seemed the only viable alternative. And now the past was intruding fast in order to tell him something he wanted nothing to do with. It was soft and diluted, pulsating on the surface of book bindings and window ledges. Early on, even before the incident with his sister, it had been lurking, a painless and unseen beast. Gradually, and with growing speed, it began to bore down on his freedom from every side, a responsibility that constrained his effortlessness. Time seemed to thickening, and an effective opportunity to fight the encroachment presented itself. To the boy, death seemed a small step for such a big concept. He didn't want to die, but who wanted to die? He had gone from freefalling in suspension to a state of perpetual asphyxiation. All death did was return the world, and everyone and everything in it, to the surface. All death did was make things wafer-thin again. His mother's armpit and his father's slit would fade back into the present. Death would narrow back the walls and restore silence. He had granted his sister that reprieve, and was willing to pay the price as well. It was unclear to him whether his actions toward his sister had inflected his resolve. Perhaps he felt an overwhelming sense of guilt that he was unable to process, but he didn't think so. He had always seen death as a sidestep to life, an unremarkable friend. It was the jellyfish sting people had forgotten. They arranged, and rearranged, their furniture instead. For the boy, life in its bid for depth and substance had grown increasingly forgettable. So why not die?

II

The boy is in the belly of the ship, on the deck, in the lounge, in the engine room, in the anchor-windlass room. He's everywhere and nowhere, soft and diluted. His thoughts are more rhythmic than reflective, more evasive than contrite, traversed by murky water and prismatic light. The parents are on the 7th floor, sleeping, always sleeping. Mom is splayed on her back, symmetrical, palms upward, feet to the east. Blonde wisps fan out behind her head like a drowning sun. Father's sleeping body is a scythe. Thumb in mouth. Toes inward. Teeth intact.


The ship passed craggy coastal ledges like some creature heaving itself up a reef. The boy decided to visit Cadiz. Shapely cobblestones heaved under subterranean pulsations. Wing shards jutted out from tar, and smiling bodies rolled out of windows like bags of flour, smashing down below. Blue skies grovelled above him, and he casually lost himself, trailing sharp knuckles against 14th century walls and shadowed by footsteps and roaring mindlessness. His mind, ensnared in blood, reached up before collapsing just a grass-width from the ground. He returned just as evening sank its dying into the carcass ship.

Actually, his parents hated cruise ships. They were competent and in love, so it came as a genuine shock when they realized that their defining tragedy was also a triviality. This was peculiar, given that they were aware they had shaped their lives around a series of lies (The cruise ship was only the latest). Avoiding the truth was remarkably simple, like pressing a toddler's head underwater. It only hurt the first time. Initially, they had wanted the clarity of a future to coexist with the unpredictability of the present, and the children brought them closer to that inner sting of lost possibility. After some struggle, the future won out, and the children became a source of frustration and grief. At first, they settled into a respectable feeling of guilt, which seemed more bearable than the alternative. To make up for her absence (her profession prevented her from spending time with him), or to ease her conscience (she wished she loved him more), she showered him with gifts and attention whenever she could. Yet something of her eyes remained rushed and hesitant, unable to deny that in some way he was an irritant to her. Even before Pearl died, the father had vanished, thinning as he slipped into work. Inch by inch, he withdrew, until his love for the boy had the thickness of a blade of grass. The parents wanted to believe that rearing and caring would expand and thicken into a focused future. But children are disinterested in such plans, and, like jellyfish, their suspended states are a reminder of how easy it is to forget. They bear a heartlessness where affection equals disdain, and where one situation equals another. It had then come to a simple rationale: neither wanted children, so why were the children there? Nobody they knew really put their children first. With the spiral of guilt came a fuzzy and familiar feeling, but the truth was that there was no guilt. Only impatience and resentment, ticking like a time bomb. The boy had obscurely sensed all of this, just as the parents had tasted his secrecy. And together, all three had entered an unspoken contract, a dissolution that would begin with the youngest daughter. He had done the necessary, as if solving an equation or following a lifeline. The parents had learned, beyond hope, that one situation did equal another. There was simply before and after. But after, less clutter remained, and more options. After her death, the spectre of guilt persisted. Their grief, all mixed up with spite and hope, now turned against their remaining son. The cruise was a chance to pulverize and eat him.

Her corpse lay somewhere within the ship, in the engine room or in one of the cabins. Under a mattress or inside a closet. Diluted into alcohol or ground into coal. She had re-emerged from the depths, lustrous and bold, unfleshed and remade. The ship's siren call beckoned to the engulfing depths, which gently licked its sides. It slowly gave in to the sea's prismatic diffractions, and the ocean slid through the metal, into the ship's cabined sanctum. Since boarding, the boy had been spinning into an uneventful ecstasy. He was part of an irresistible equation thrown out from the sea. Weight, water, warmth. Over the past weeks, the ship's particles had aligned to point in his direction. The ship moved him. He identified with its helplessness. It felt large, too large, and he'd felt the same his whole life. He was happily warped and stunted, a sea-soaked shipwreck. He had absorbed his parents' resentment from the moment he was born, and their tacit implorations flowed in his veins. It was an immutable fact that long before the incident, they wanted him to forfeit something. A hand would do. Or his talents. Maybe his sight. His mouth. His skin would eventually break, but this suited him fine. He was casually catastrophic.

Everyone on the ship is floating in mid-air, ghostlier than the marrow ensconced within metallic walls. He can feel their expansions, congealed in a cadaverous ship. The ship sings its incantations, breaking its human cargo apart. Torsos lie in random corners. Hair clumps on dinner tables. Tongues float in the outdoor swimming pool. He sees arms and heads dangling through doorways. Voices wander the ship. They multiply and split into offshoots that echo, thirsting for air and sea. Body slime slinks through drains and seeps down vents, while body parts tremble, piercing the dull grey with splatters of red, brown, white and beige. People do not want to heal. They want to melt.


Didn't his father tell him, "I wish you were dead."? His mother's voice echoed in his ear. "Why?" Or was it his father who had asked him why. And his mother who had wanted him dead. The questions scattered and regrouped, nebulous and dynamic like a shoal of fish. Did he dislike his sister? Had he not loved her? Was it appropriate to kill her? What else could he have done? All of these unknowns seemed to matter suddenly, and their pull was irresistible. It was as if his parents had yanked him into their funhouse of mirrors, where an endless display of stultifying options offered absolutely nothing. Everywhere he turned, he recognized himself. He was connecting with his past, constituting a future, and losing his mind. He was beginning to make sense. He had always preferred the world as water. Did any of it matter, if it was done for love? Family needed to be cracked open and spilt. Its mess wanted to ooze out.

He went to the lounge. The air was scented with vomit, juice and ethanol. In the dim light, he scanned a vagrant cocktail menu. Liquid had seeped in between the laminations, blurring the colors. He was on his own now, angular on an aquamarine sofa. The boat's sway was soothing, though jagged, the muted and artificial sun-tones lighting every corner of the beast's belly, all across its 150 meters of corridors, lounges and garish piano bars. Mute lighting ensconced him in a swirl of alcoholic vapors and garish tones. His seaside home. The coast, a quiet quaint village. Silent winds rattling the old green shutters. And his navy-blue night lamp. His lids drooped. His breathing was shallow and regular. His legs twitched. The engine's sluggish rumble coursed through him. He heard its monotonous call as it radiated across his insides, prowling through his quietly calm veins and arteries. A pink house, reddened by the day's dawn. At dusk it becomes grey, before disappearing entirely. The ship's innards spoke to him. A secret love affair. And the sea. Red child's blood. And he remembered how his father had spoken from inside Pearl, and how his mother had spoken from inside the sea. He remembered their voices. He had led himself back home on an invisible string, fighting invisible currents, to where his parents dutifully protected him, all-knowing yet oblivious. He'd only wanted to please. The family was an enmeshment, whose heart was a secret desire for entropy. The mother and father were sleeping a deeper sleep than ever, gloved hands wringing wet cloths. They had squeezed him into a ball of blood and rolled him into the ocean.

The blood rushed to his groin as he gripped the cold railing, raw-red knuckles, bone-white nails. Shipbelly muttered to him, so nice and gentle. Cold air drank his face, an untroubled surface. The wind tousled his hair. He expanded. The ship smiled and creaked into position, balanced between currents of air. A shark nudged his delicate flank. Moonlight swung into his eyes, and his little frame dug into watery corners, finding a makeshift bed in naked currents. His parents, two milky jellyfish, swam away.

And he, of air, ascending to the surface.