For a long time I stayed away from the ship’s hawsehole. I had a dithery feeling when I looked at it. And the hawser, all that white rope, the threads like shredded skin, wound around itself as though trying to keep organs in place. I would skirt the perimeter of the beached ship, the louche holes in the carbon fibre seeming to widen, iris-like, with every visit. Occasionally I would scale the slanted hull. At the bow of the ship, a pot-sized tiara made of kindling demanded the eye’s full devotion, delicate and child-like in its handiwork. On the other end were the hawser and hawsehole, surrounded by a parade of routine beach debris: half a polyethylene foam noodle, five or so six-pack rings, a huge knot of tangled fishing wire. The debris comforted me. I avoided the hawsehole.
This, of course, was before Mariana left for the northern university. Despite the presence of the beached ship, we were more or less happy, eating figs, pointing out flyspecks on our hammock’s torso, walking to the sea. We still had long conversations then. One summer evening, after Mariana returned from teaching her class at the university and I finished my translations for the day, we opened a bottle of cava and carried it with us to the beach. The in-between state of the sky, with its post-dusk, achromatic blankness, swallowed us into the belly of night. Mariana, on the path, walked a yard in front of me.
“I don’t think moral complexity is as simple as a reversal,” she was saying. Her instructor voice. The moonlight illuminated the back of her head. Something humanoid in a star field; a ripple of dark matter, snipped out of space. “It’s about nuance, it’s about the specific situation, it’s about experience. To think we could ever outline a moral doctrine in some kind of symmetrical chiasmus is to return to structural thinking. It’s an argument for growth, sure, but also an argument for preservation. We must believe in progress through complexity, through specificity, else we fall through some hole. Some binary-thinking hole. The hole of nihilistic generality.”
“Do I sense something regretful?”
“Regret for the hole? Maybe. That’s a good point.”
We were on the incline of a dune now. There were four rows of dunes before the path met the beach; we ascended the second-to-last one. At the top, Mariana stopped, her arms clinched around her stomach, the neck of cava swinging between her fingers. In the moonlight, I could see two brown dimes of nipple staining her white T-shirt.
She was watching me. She reached out and cupped one of my own breasts.
“I’ve never thought about some sort of nostalgia for binary thinking,” she said. She let go and took a long sip of wine. She faced the beach. “But I suppose you’re right, to a degree. To involve ourselves in any sort of moral or ethical quest, we’ll probably steep some of our prior despair in a warm, chamomile memory. We’ll probably, in moments of exhaustion, wish we could think more simply again. Wish we weren’t so bogged down in the details, in the complexity. Maybe that’s what you mean.”
“I think I mean both. Maybe all.”
“Good,” she said. “Keep going.”
“I mean, I think there is a sort of nostalgia for any structure of thinking, once you’re far enough away from it. Once you can idealize the state you were in, maybe because of idyllic external factors, maybe because of something unrelated to the actual thinking. As in, maybe you remember the softness of the sheets in your childhood bed. And there was binary thinking in that bed, and so now, the binary thinking seems inseparable from the memory of the soft sheets, of comfort, of ease. In that case, there’s nostalgia. Nostalgia for an external reality that doesn’t have to do so much with the thinking itself.”
“I like that.”
We moved down the dune and up the last one, descending finally to the beach itself. Mariana sat close to the water. A mammoth oblong shape on our right confirmed the ship’s doxa in my mind, about a mile away. Its dyad was the sky: grey and loose, hugging the hull.
To the left of us, fifty yards away, a gangly female profile was illuminated under the moon. I watched Mariana watch her.
“I think, too, there’s an argument for the third term,” Mariana said. “The anarchist hole. The probably transient, but crucial hole that acts as a transport, bringing us somewhere new. Making change possible. Making love possible. Or, if not physically possible, ideologically fun. Fun for a second.”
She laughed.
I moved in a rising parabola away from her, the whirr of the generator, somewhere close, pacing my steps. It was as though a small fan was attached to my earlobe, the consistent hum. It affected my movements, my thoughts. The ship, far enough away for me to contemplate it peacefully, appeared to be rising out of the sea. An eyeless face. A moot bulk, being born.
At the peak of my arc, I turned back to face Mariana. The cava was nearly sideways in the sand; her head was in her hands, the cropped shards of hair pointing out multidirectionally. It was almost like she heard it too.
§
There was a day, the air poised at the cliff between summer and fall, when I realized the whirring noise was coming from the ship.
I had been sitting at my desk translating for most of the morning. The poem I was working on, “Aural Pariahs,” was about a very different beach, one far away from here: black sand, an elbowed cove, three mysterious sounds that were found buried underneath engorged lichen. The first stanza was immediately strange and difficult for me:
The sounds we have found: clook, pessisadie, debider
O Earth, can you claim, tis mine?
Tellurian noise, by definition unlunar:
You have caught the cosmic sigh.
I spent most of the morning consulting texts to come up with appropriate translations for the discovered sounds. The first, “clook,” was the simplest of the three; the “c” sound was important to complete the alliteration in lines two and four. The remaining two sounds were problematic. There were multiple possible pronunciations in English: was it peh-si-sah-dee? Or peh-si-sayde-ee? De-byde-er? De-bid-er?
At noon, I made a pot of coffee. When I returned to my desk, the whirring swelled into a massive crescendo. I observed the ship. Engraved into the sky, it was the focal point of a single window panel.
The beach was windy. Wrapped in my white bathrobe, I quickly climbed the dunes, their tenuous spines bending as my feet crawled along their backs. The ocean was smooth, a transparent splinter underneath the nail of sun. As I approached the ship, the acoustics of the wind funneling through the hull created a monotonous binary dialogue between “flu” and “flee.” The whirring of the generator sat atop these organic words. Artificial. Regal.
I climbed the part of the skewed deck that intersected with the sand.
The twig-tiara was still at the bow, whitening in the sun, freckly and galvanized. I orbited this upright part of the ship, looking out at the sea. A single gull was moving in the opposite direction of its flock. The stretching of substance between connected objects. Glittering sangfroid.
When I finally did turn around, the hawsehole was there, staring seaward, an uncanny double, whirring at me.
Back towards the house, behind the hole, a dark-haired woman disappeared and reemerged as she climbed the dunes.
§
That evening, Mariana and I went to the boardwalk café for tapas, about two miles north of the beach house. We walked along the dunes, our sandal straps looped through thumbs, Mariana’s conversation soft and withdrawn. There was no moon.
At the restaurant, we sat on the patio, facing the strip of beach we’d walked along. Strings of cheap holiday lights. Polypropylene chairs and placemats boasting tricolored palm trees. The locals were wearing terry cloth. There was a group of tourists in matching fútbol jerseys; every ten minutes or so, they’d break out into an elated, red-faced chant.
“Why isn’t there a superior academic interest in acoustics?” Mariana asked.
“What?”
She tilted the beer bottle to read the label. The waiter brought the chips and olives.
“Where is the ivory tower of all this noise?”
Somewhere behind us, someone was stacking plates. Out on the beach, I watched a lone man in a fishing hat approach the water.
“I’ve been thinking about this too,” I said. “Acoustics. My translation. It’s about discovered sounds.”
“And?”
“They’re reasonable sounds to discover. But the narrator seems to think they’re alien. That they weren’t made here, that they signify some kind of divine conversation. That because of them, the narrator is now different. Or the Earth is now different. Some kind of hybrid auditory experience.”
I pushed a toothpick through an olive.
“Alien sounds,” Mariana said.
The chant ceased and the tourists ordered another round. On the beach, the fishing hat was standing ankle-deep, rubbernecking the sea.
“It’s strange,” I said. “I feel something paranoid. Something defensive. As though the narrator is pleading, maybe demanding, that the reader agree that the Earth has wronged humanity by hiding the sounds.”
“The idea of the ‘other,’” she said. “The defensive mechanism against strangeness. A betrayal of sight and sound.”
“A sort of reliance on the binary. An obsessive commitment to the idea that there must be a bifurcation between old and new. Antiquity and progress. Earth and alien.”
“A reaction to the cycles of life,” Mariana said. “A wish that all of this could somehow have a logic to it, even an alien logic.”
“That’s the thing. It’s like the alien logic is preferable. Preferable to any sort of rational explanation.”
She was pensive, a toothpick lingering in her mouth.
“What other logic is there?” she said. “When something doesn’t make sense?”
We picked at the chips, ate all of the olives. The moon appeared behind a swath of cloud, a faceless baby. The waiter dropped a tray of empty glasses; the tourists clapped and cheered at him. Down on the beach, the fishing hat was further away, a small, stationary dot. A pale grain of sand flanked by darker, organized sand.
We walked back, this time on the beach itself, my bare feet making copies of themselves at the tide line. When we reached the ship, I avoided looking at it directly. Mariana didn’t seem to notice, her face to the sky, her hands underneath her shirt, one palm thumbing at a shuck of scar tissue.
“I bought fresh shrimp,” she said, as we climbed the steps to the house.
She made paella. Planted on the top step of the deck, our cheeks raw with heat from the stove, we drank straight from the tumbler of ice water, ate straight from the pan.
I heard the generator whirring close by.
“The students, they’re always sleepier in the summer,” she said. Mariana’s students: featureless ovals of flesh. Their nuances, their problems: they were so far removed from my everyday solitude on the beach. The Mariana I imagined engaged with them was less defined, more pastel, perhaps. A grey-scale form.
“Softer brains.”
“Hotter brains, probably,” she said. “The heat, cooking our brains for a few months, making us sleepy, dreamy, desirous. Preparing us for the coming refrigeration.”
She was eating very quietly, her fork never scraping the bottom of the pan that rested between us. She sat cross-legged, facing the beach.
“I wonder about your students,” I said. “I wonder if they make you have adulterous thoughts. I wonder if they have adulterous thoughts about you.”
She laughed.
“Adulterous thoughts,” she said. “Aren’t all thoughts adulterous in some way? All thoughts outside of the shared brain of a relationship?”
After we cleaned the pan and refilled the tumbler with white wine, Mariana changed into a silk nightgown. I put on my white bathrobe. We lay on the living room floor, the lights off, the ceiling shadowy. A mephitic smell traipsed through the open windows: vegetables and seawater. Miscreant air moving through a conduit. Air giving clearance to air.
I faced her, balanced on my side, my head nestled into an L’d arm. Through the sheer gauze of her nightgown, I could see her vermillion tattoo, stamped on to the left side of her stomach. I knew the shape was an oval, although the way the fabric was pressed lightly against her skin, in tandem with the casual moonlight, I could only perceive a half-moon.
The generator, a low hum.
“I think it’s happening again,” I said.
“Where?”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“Where?”
“The ship.”
“A noise?”
“A whirr.”
“What?”
“Some sort of machine. A generator, maybe.”
She was silent.
Some time passed. We drank from the tumbler of wine. My organs slowly electrified, the wine sliding down my body, pushing up my hair follicles. Eventually Mariana came to me, her breasts sinking into my thighs, her mouth warm and syrupy.
The night went on like this, slow and stirring, interrupted singularly by the soft cries of inevitable biology. We fell asleep on the floor, tasting iron, my thumb on her shuck of scar tissue, her hand maternally stroking my long hair, our mouths separated by the mechanical laugh of the generator.
§
A week later, I sat at my desk, translating the next two stanzas of “Aural Pariahs.” There was an ontological shift in the third stanza, a first-person point of view asserting itself:
Your sand was black, with dropsical lichen for a mouth
and straightforwardly, we raped here.
Our shovels to the ground, our hardhats facing south-
ward, an elbowed cove appeared.
I don’t much care that we’ve discovered something novel.
It’s more that –you’ve lied to us.
We put our trust in earthly logic, your brute aural:
What now? Three new noisy lusts?
Discovery as rape. Discoverer becoming perpetrator. And then when the perpetrator dislikes what they’ve done, dislikes what they’ve found: anger. A human response to something unchangeable. Fear. Sadness. Resentment.
As I worked, I looked up every so often to assess the ship’s position, confident that it hadn’t shifted since last week. I hadn’t heard the generator in a few days. I was hopeful.
§
At the restaurant that weekend, a group of university students joined us on the patio. Mariana knew three of them from previous classes; one young woman named Camila was currently in Mariana’s class on the Catalan novel. They all called Mariana “Profe.” The waiter brought out three pitchers of sangria.
It was still late afternoon; the air was humid. We shielded our eyes with upturned palms, fanned ourselves with the laminated place mats.
One of Mariana’s prior students told a long, comical story about a translation mishap that happened on a trip to California. I watched Camila, gangly and wide-faced, her dark hair obscuring her cheeks. Her smile emerged at irregular moments in the story; her glance suggested a restrained sparkle. Sui generis.
As I watched her, the generator began to whirr.
“You’re from there too,” the story-telling student, Mateo, said to me. The sangria had engaged everyone in several distracted conversations. Mariana had an ear to Camila’s mouth; the young girl was speaking seriously into it.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where?”
“New York.”
“Yes,” he said excitedly. “The other pole.”
Mariana was laughing, her mouth a rectangle, the creases of her lips sangria-stained.
“OK,” Mateo said. “What is the light like in New York?”
“Well,” I said.
“Do the buildings hide the sun?”
I took a long sip of my drink. I closed my eyes, tilting my face skyward.
“It’s more that you don’t think about the sun,” I said. “The sun doesn’t have the same metaphysical weight to it.”
The student thought about this.
“I like that,” he said. “I understand you now.”
“Oh?”
“Well,” he said. He was smiling. “I see why Profe likes you.”
The sun began its descent into the water. The waiter kept refilling the pitchers, flirting with the young female students, asking their names and then pretending to forget them. One student felt sick and went home. When the sun was a half-star, perfectly bisected by the horizon, a group of them decided to take a walk on the beach, their young bodies graceful in their drunkenness, in their attempted gymnastics. A gull pecked at their leftover chips, shameless.
“You are also a profe?” Camila asked me, when they were gone.
Mariana and Mateo were engaged in a solemn conversation next to us, their bodies stretched towards each other over the table.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“But once?”
“Once,” I said. “Maybe again someday. Something got in the way, but I always liked it.”
Camila licked her lips and pressed them together. Then she smiled shyly.
“You do translations,” she said. “Profe told me. But I thought I’d ask you anyway.”
It was difficult for me to make eye contact with her.
The students on the beach were screaming with delight. One of the female students had stripped completely naked and was sprinting towards the water. Camila and I watched this in silence. A waiter aggressively flapped a rag and the gull took flight, rocking the table slightly.
“Mateo!” the female student called, her body meeting the water, her breasts sinking into the waves, out of view.
Mariana leaned back in her chair. Mateo grinned down at the beach. “Señora,” he said ceremoniously to Mariana. He smiled at me. He jogged through the restaurant and out to the beach.
The three of us, Mariana, Camila, and I, sat watching Mateo’s zigzagged jog, the kaleidoscope sunset. The students shrieked. The cheap, holiday lights made little blots on the sky, worlds of their own.
At some point, the tourists left.
“Camila lives nearby,” Mariana said eventually, her face pointed toward the sea. It wasn’t entirely clear if she was speaking to me, or to Camila, or to herself.
§
That night, in the shower, Mariana’s fingernails scrubbed shampoo into my scalp, her breath on my neck.
“When?” I said.
“What?”
“When did it start?”
Mariana retracted her hands. I turned to face her. She was rinsing her own head, her eyes closed, her face to the shower stream.
“The hole of moral complexity,” I said.
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Nostalgia for binary thinking?” I said. “Is that really what you think?”
She stepped out of the shower. I watched her, the curtain pulled open, the water deflecting off my hip and spraying out onto the bathroom tile.
“Is that how you describe me to her?” I said, louder. “Binary? Adolescent? Crazy? Seeing and hearing things that aren’t there?”
She was wrapping her short hair into a towel, her lithe body turned towards the door, away from me. I stood like this for a few moments, the shower water making awkward vectors on the tile, her toweled head rising towards the ceiling like a white, warped finger.
“I think you need a break from the poem,” she said.
“The poem?” I said. My voice sounded shrill and juvenile. “Are you serious? Are you kidding me, Mariana?”
“It’s strange. It’s triggering. The auditory stuff. It’s paranoid. It can’t be good for you.”
“You’re fucking a twenty-year-old and we’re talking about a poem?”
She left the bathroom. I turned off the shower. I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and followed her out to the kitchen.
“Do you really think I’m incapable of understanding the complexities of these things? Of love? Of lust?” I said.
Mariana stood at the sink, filling a mug with water.
“Jesus,” she said.
“You think I’m stuck in some traditional view of relationships? You think because of the paranoia, I’m incapable of understanding love outside of a single lover? That I can’t handle it?”
“I would never say that.”
“What, I’m suddenly some pathetic, love-drunk child, sitting at home, waiting for you to get back? Waiting for you to come home and protect me from my hallucinations?”
Mariana slammed the mug on the countertop. “Stop.”
“I’m the refrigeration,” I said. “And Camila is the hot, sexy, sleepy brain.”
“Listen,” Mariana said. “Listen.” She approached me slowly. She pressed a single finger into the crook of her closed eye. A signal. “Can we sit down and talk about this?”
We sat on the sofa in the living room, the lights off, our hair dripping onto the cheap upholstery. She sat cross-legged, facing me. I sat facing forward.
“This isn’t because of your hallucinations,” she said.
“Oh, please,” I said, childishly. “It’s a burden. It’s a thing you have to deal with.”
“It’s not a burden.”
“It’s the parasite inside of our relationship.”
“Look,” Mariana said. “It’s not. You know that.”
“I’m a child to you,” I said. “Something delicate. Breakable. A thing to take care of.
A burden.”
Mariana exhaled forcefully.
“OK,” I said. I untied my robe. “It’s not about me at all, it’s about the hot, sleepy sex.”
“Well, yes, in one way.”
“One way?”
“I mean initially I thought it was about the sex,” Mariana said.
Her forehead was in her hands.
We sat there for a long time. Outside the window, the porch light cloaked the black backdrop of sky, synthetic fuzz. The generator was loud and anxious. I tried not to cry.
“It wasn’t about the sex,” Mariana said again, eventually.
Our breathing seemed to match, quick and lopsided.
“I’m realizing it’s not that simple,” she said, her voice muffled. “It’s not about you, or Camila. It’s just me.”
She was crying.
The generator, truncated, yet very much alive.
“I want something else,” she said finally.
We stayed like that for a long time, crying separately, then eventually crying together, our grief and love conspiring to produce a wave of ardent, terrible desire. Our tongues, scared and ceremonious, atrophied our limbs. The sex took on a life of its own: unstable, selfish.
That would be the last time.
I slept outside that night in the hammock, my face pressed against the flyspecks we’d once examined so ridiculously, so lovingly. When I woke up the next morning, a glass of fig juice was waiting for me on the deck, sweaty and alone.
The whirring was gone.
§
A month later, weeks after Mariana had decided to accept the professorship at the northern university for the fall, I walked out to the ship. I hadn’t been back since those days before the argument. The intrigue of the whirring, the generator, the hawsehole: it no longer existed.
Before I walked to the beach, I reread the poem, letting it pace my steps as I climbed the dunes:
Aural Pariahs
The sounds we have found: clook, pessisadie, debider
O Earth, can you claim, tis mine?
Tellurian noise, by definition unlunar:
You have caught the cosmic sigh.
Your sand was black, with dropsical lichen for a mouth
and straightforwardly, we raped here.
Our shovels to the ground, our hardhats facing south-
ward, an elbowed cove appeared.
I don’t much care that we’ve discovered something novel.
It’s more that –you’ve lied to us.
We put our trust in earthly logic, your brute aural:
What now? Three new noisy lusts?
It’s true. We will never be the same as we once were.
New mores call for uproars.
But I have found that something draws me towards “debider”:
Love? Thirst? A sound to care for?
The familiar camelbacks of the dunes; the mouth of the ocean, wide and greedy. The beached ship, as I approached, seemed smaller than it had before. I spent a while circumnavigating; I stared up at the hawsehole from the ground. The hawser flowed down through the hole, pooling on the beach below in a casual spiral.
Scaling the side of the ship, I heard unusual noises. A woman’s laughter, followed by another woman’s chiding. At the top, I observed Camila, accompanied by the female student who had bathed naked in the ocean that afternoon.
We didn’t speak at first. They were sprawled out at the bow of the ship, sunbathing. The friend was wearing the twig-tiara; their swimsuit tops were crumpled underneath their heads. I walked to center of the ship, then to the hawsehole, putting my face close to it, looking through it down to the ground below. I kicked the polyurethane noodle, making it dance a little in the wind.
“What’s up?” Camila said, her head upside-down, her dark hair piled below, her entire face revealed to me.
I put a hand on the hawser, right where it was wedged through the hawsehole. I let go and moved towards them.
“Did you make that?” I asked Camila’s friend.
She was laughing. She sat up, her breasts bobbing. She took off the tiara.
“Do you like it?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Then yes, I made it.”
They were both laughing. Camila’s friend held out the tiara; I took it from her. I put it on.
“Very good,” Camila complimented.
I smiled. The friend laughed again.
I went and stood at the front the ship, looking out to sea. Some time passed. The sun went behind a cloud, then reemerged. Eventually the friend left, and Camila joined me at the bow.
We watched the whitecaps, snags in a smooth blue rug. The wind passing through the hull sounded like TV static. The smell of saltwater. Camila’s sweat. A fishing boat hovered at the foot of the horizon, UFO-like, motionless.