La Playa, continued

My mind was working hard trying to see some graceful way through the night. I knew I couldn’t hitch, I was wrecked tired. I looked over my surroundings again and again; Beach, road, waves, cars, wind, cold…me. Slowly a feeling I can best describe as an agitated lethargy started to grip me. I’d felt it before too, other times when I’d pushed my mind and body with too little sleep, very little food, and plenty of whatever there was to get high on, the sort of thing it takes days to arrive at. It was that same shaman feeling only this time it wasn’t kind, this time it wasn’t a gift, not like that time in Texas.

My body wasn’t heavy as much as it was dead weight; muscles corded wire slackly strung on hollow bones so cold. I could feel it all; my guts boiling in my belly, my scalp crawling on my scull, chaffed cracked hands opening and closing on nothing while I swallowed something that wasn’t there again and again…vision black bordered bright so narrow so fine, I could see the moonlights texture on the low dunes at my feet, I watched the salted wind carve off a layer of grit and throw it into my face, I was anxious, I was waiting, I saw…nothing, nothing but the beach, heard nothing but that damn wind and the waves and there was nothing...

Then he was there, not there, see through solid silent I heard voices in my head, heard words pouring out in more than one stream like a radio getting two or three stations at once but I could still hear the beach because it wasn’t a real sound I was hearing, but it was plainly getting louder even though he wasn’t saying anything but nothing and “this is us” and “you and me” and all the other voices were pushing and pushing...they were all the sounds in my head and he was the “not sound” so much louder than them all…and I could still hear the beach.

I didn’t understand except that whatever the hell it was I saw was more pain itself than in pain, I saw it and I knew he was not there I knew it wasn’t there but I saw him clearly; small, clubbed right foot shambling plainly longer left foot turned out and stiff, it was baby sized he was, with a grossly misshapen face, twisted features thrown higgledy piggledy onto a head too big for the body it topped, a face under wispy patches of grey brown hair that looked glued on and the whole mess bobbling over twisted limbs and a gaunt fleshy grey pink torso. I could count ribs on a parchment skinned chest over his slack flabby belly and his hideous boney pelvis. He was walking unsteadily like a toddler his pasty flaccid right arm stretched out to me, its hand had two long fat writhing sausage fingers each ending in a ghastly curled over inches long yellow never-been-cut fingernail, he was chubby and pink except where he was grey and withered…his scalp and face and limbs splattered with open sores oozing lazy white pus and watery blood, one eye bigger than the other his slack mouth hung open drooling tongue working at two or three lonely split picket fence teeth he was coming to me, coming across the sand bit by agonizing bit and the light shined right through him. He was coming to tell me something that would unmake me, coming to give me the bill, coming to rip the wonder out of me forever, coming to break my bottle, to pour me out on the sand like bad wine and I was shit scared. I knew that nothing was there I knew it. I knew I was all alone on that beach with only the cold wet wind to touch me and I was horrified and paralyzed and frightened like a child alone too long…..afraid to be there and not to be alone any longer.

To be continued...and by the way, that's just how it happened