I worked on fixing up the banks of the canal that the men and their horses had trodden over. I cleared ashes and leaves out of the water, reestablishing the flow. Then I went across the meadow and tended to the hedgerows that bordered our plot and had been neglected for days. I marveled at the speed with whichthey had turned unruly. I had spent all spring tucking their woody tendrils inward, weaving a wall of branches that didn’t follow any formal pattern, and now I regretted it. A summer explosion of offshoots and leaves cluttered the whole hedge, threatening to strangle itself. I needed a saw but we didn’t have a saw. I needed a hatchet but our hatchet needed sharpening. What I needed was a motorized hedge trimmer. What I needed was a phone with an app I could use to hire someone with a hedge trimmer to come take care of the hedgerow.
I tossed aside the blunt hatchet and instead went and got the heavy sword I had taken from the dead soldier. It was still coated with tentacles of melted rubbish from the dragon, but I knew a sharp blade was still underneath. I swung it at the hedgerow blindly. I swung hard, not like a baseball bat or a golf club, but like a sword, whacking at branches while making a note in my mind that this was something I would need to be able to do—I needed to train these muscles. I needed to accept that this was a reality that required holding swords, gripping and slicing, feeling the strain across my back. This was my world and this was where I would be. Stay, George, stay.
Why was I so beelike and distracted, even out here in man’s most natural state? Look how easily I could be swayed by modernity, by fine clothes, clean bodies, logos on bottles. I had let one week with a dumb, horny prince distort so much of what I had held dear. I had let self-consciousness—a relic of another age—still be the driving force of my inner compass, even when I had everything I could ever want and nowhere I would rather be.
I have everything I want, I said to myself, as limbs of the hedge went flying. I said it again. I knew I wanted Simon. I wanted our land, our life together. If anything,Iwas the onetailing Simon, clinging to him for my own advantage, not the other way around. But the arrival of the prince and his men, the dragon and its force-fed memories of the future, had discombobulated me once again into a shame I didn’t know what to do with. I hadn’t been paying attention.
As I butchered the hedgerow, bits of charred debris broke off the sword. Rocky gray chunks fell apart, revealing rubbery veins more stubbornly adhered to the metal. I went and got a knife from the house—ignoring Simon and Simon ignoring me—came back to the hedge and carefully sliced and unpeeled the remains of what appeared to be a long white extension cord wrapped around the sword. Jesus Christ. The white rubber had melted and hardened into a flat smear across the blade and on the underside were glimmers of hairlike copper wires like the bones of a fish—all it was missing was the nubby head of a USB or a charging plug, ugly and incongruent with the greenery of the hedgerow. Someone, somewhere, was looking for their charger. Hah. I choked on a sad laugh that stung with vomit in the back of my throat. This triggered a coughing attack and I hacked up a clot of wet gray ash across the goldenrod ground. Tears pulsed behind my eyes as I held the extension cord aloft, my brazen serpent, so despicably easy, so antithetical to how the world was supposed to work. Who needs the oath-like balance of exertion and reward when all you need is a charger, free Wi-Fi, free refills, annual leave. What chance does the miracle of a hedgerow have against the splendor of an EasyJet flight to Spain, an arrow shooting across the sky chock-full of manchildren plugged in and streaming—airplane not just an airplane but a flying phone charger. Did anyone give a flying fuck? That right there was obliteration. That was blue hands grasping across dirty sand.Pure magma. Pink and orange lights cutting across sandy divots of shadow. Nightclub wails muffled by crumbling stucco walls.
Back in Sitges, in Spain, on that boys trip from hell, on the beach outside the club that awful night decades and centuries ago, I smoked a cigarette and wished I was drunker, wished I was more numb and on my way to forgetting the whole city existed at all. I felt the filth of it—the litter across the sand, clubgoers stumbling along, every drink just a warm dreg or a broken bottle, a crushed can. I sat on the beach alone. I assumed the ocean was out there somewhere, but probably with its back turned, just as embarrassed of everyone as I was. I felt shame. I felt internalized homophobia, which actually felt good and self-soothing in a way. Then I felt shame for being ashamed of things I wasn’t supposed to be ashamed of anymore. Some imaginary voice in my head saying, “Umm that’s internalized homophobia, you should get that sorted out.”
My boyfriend and our friends were still back at the club with the strippers. They had seen me leave and probably assumed I was just stepping outside to smoke a cigarette, which I was doing, but through bewildering tears and with no intention of going back inside, no intention of anything but sitting in the middle of the beach and waiting for the ocean to come crawling back, pull me in, and pummel me to its depths.
The throbbing music behind me grew louder—a side door opened. A shadow cut across the orange streetlight-stained sand and I watched it grow longer, nearer. Smoke joined mine. Vapor, actually. Fruity flavored. I turned around. It was the same stripper I had just seen come onstage. He wore a pink thong now, and took a long drag from a disposable vape. A dire peach-vanilla scent washed over me, which he made no intention of blowingin any other direction. I raised my eyebrows but nothing else. I had seen all there was to possibly see of this stranger, and I had nothing to say.
“You didn’t like my show?” he asked. He remembered me. We had locked eyes back there but surely I was just another lost soul in the crowd, just as empty-eyed and vacant as he had looked to me.
“You got cum on my shoe,” I said.
He smirked. “Workplace hazard.”
This eked out a smile in me. I wiped my teary eyes as he stepped closer and sat down beside me. Up close his body lost its stagecraft splendor. There were razor bumps on his thighs. His muscles were impressive, but like rocks in a plastic bag, like they weren’t quite adhered to his body properly. A few stray wrinkles near his eyes betrayed the whole act. I stopped myself when I realized the same critiques could be made of me. I hated myself.
“Sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“I don’t know. For walking out on your grand finale. It’s been a weird week.”
The dancer shrugged. “It’s all right. It’s probably not fun to watch something like that on your own.”
“I wasn’t alone. I was with people there, they were just on the other side of the stage.”
“You’re just lonely then.”
“Sure.” I flicked my cigarette into the sand in front of us. It landed filter-side down so the fading ember kept burning. It looked like the beach itself was smoking. The dancer finished his disposable vape and tossed it into the sand as well. I thought nothing of this. What was one more vape tossed into this litterbox of a beach, where the sand itself was litter, imported from some foreign quarry. The dancer stood up and brushed sand off his butt cheeks. He stretched, knowingly, and made to leave but I suddenly wanted him to stay.
“Do you do that every night?” I asked. He must have sensed the tone of desperation in my voice because he smiled and spun around. He stepped back so he was standing right in front of me, looking down at me. I watched the tight bundle between his legs.
“Just sometimes,” he said. “I usually get a littleassistance, if you know what I mean. But tonight was all natural, if you can believe it.” He looked down and adjusted himself, revealing for a moment the smooth base of what I had already seen. “That’s probably how it was able to hit your shoe. The jet propulsion of willpower.”
We stared at each other in silence. He knew my words were all backed up in my throat. Words that had been sliced up and held in reserve, from days and years of conversations cut short or mis-said. He possessed a conniving kind of patience, that smirk on his face, the tilt of his head, when I looked him in the eyes and asked, “What does it feel like?”
“It. Feels. Like...” His voice held on to every syllable, making each one last as long as each slow step he took toward me. When he was right at my feet, between my legs, he knelt down. “It feels like the very edge. It’s the brink.” He placed his hands on my knees and ran them slowly up my thighs. “Everybody’s watching you but you’re up there alone, practically anonymous. You could be anyone, really—even though every part of you is on display. Your very DNA is up for grabs. And maybe that’s what it is: hell. You get that horrible shame feeling, but it’s a curtain that comes and goes and before you know it, you’re through it and:ahh, bliss.” He grabbed me, up through my shorts. “You were in heaven all along and nobody bothered to tell you.”
“But that’s what makes me so sad,” I said through a moan. “That nobody bothered to tell me. I’m out the other side but I’ve brought all the muck with me. I can’t push through it and pretend it’s not there—like it was never there to begin with.” The tears were back in my eyes, pulsing in rhythm with his moving hands.
“Oh, but you can push through it,” he said. “You must.” He pulled my shorts off, lifted my shirt, lifted my legs. His thong was off and tossed away into the sand.
“I can’t.”
“You must.”
He tasted repugnant. The hint of peach-vanilla on his breath was like a chalk drawing on the wall of a cave, a horrid representation of beauty. His body was just fists under slippery seal skin. Both he and the music throbbed inside me, growing louder. Shadows crossed the beach and he was lost in me and my vicious loneliness. I knew a crowd was gathering and it made the thrill of it all the more intense, the shame all the more heavy, the curtain whipping me left and right. My boyfriend’s voice. Laughter and cheers. Then applause as I came onto stinging, sand-rubbed flesh and I can confirm that what the dancer said was all wrong. We were always and still in hell.
Interstitial
SECOND EPISTLE, concerning the contents of a foreigner’s wardrobe
