Letter from Point Pleasant

by Jason Kane

All my nails are bitten ragged. Warm salt air tumbles in the tail of my jacket.

I am standing on the beach in New Jersey— or, rather, the shoreline in New Jersey. There are no beaches. There is litter and a thick stripe of gritty sand separating the sea from the parking lot.

You may be familiar with it. You, I imagine, have been here before.

I didn't pick you for any reason other than the phone book that I opened up happened to open up to page 237. The name I pointed to was yours.

If I knew more, there might be coincidences, so I will not bother to explain myself. I am confident the ideas behind why I am writing to you will, after some time, tumble down through your conscious, intact and perilous, and connect.

Edward: here is a memory I have of being younger. Picture it: being lost in Death Valley.

If you've never been to Death Valley, understand this: five steps too far in any direction and you are lost. Even if the family or tour group was just with you. The desert is like a friend who leads you gently by the elbow and then vanishes with all hope.

There was a moment that was both terrifying and thrilling. It was the type of moment that sends that rare fear into you, fear that shoots straight up your asshole like cold steel. Would I live in the desert from now on? For how long? How would I eat?

I was six years old, maybe seven.

It wasn't for long; before I could answer any of these questions— before I ever got to consider that I probably wouldn't survive the night— I had the sense to at least stop wandering. My Uncle Jerry caught up with me ten minutes later; his faced cracked and dry like somebody had put out a fire with tequila. It was only ten minutes, but I had already aged years.

Uncle Jerry led me back to the group to my sisters' distress. They had hoped— aloud— that I might have disappeared for good. I'd thrown Jennifer's ice cream cone over the railing at the dam the day before.

The thought crossed my mind: maybe I hadn't gotten lost. Maybe they'd left me. In that sense, half of me was gone: their half.

They laughed to each other. Snickered at me. Pointed. I don't know why they hated me, Edward; I guess kids do those things to each other. They pair up. I forgive them for hoping that I got lost in the desert, just like Jennifer forgave me for throwing away her ice cream, but do you know that I still hear them from time to time? That laughter?

Metaphorically. I'm not nuts.

You get the idea. You know what I mean. If you're honest with yourself, Edward, you would tell an identical story.

Now, I'm staring into the ocean, but it's the desert that is on my mind. Maybe it's the way the sand looks here. It's not playful, or exciting. The sand is rugged—exploded, in a way—as if eternally fighting to maintain a façade of calm against hidden roots.

Seven hours ago I was in Farrell, Pennsylvania, dusting a bookshelf with lemon-scented aerosol spray and a pair of underwear— my underwear, an old pair from a few years ago, now mockingly small. Edward. It's happened to you, I know. My wife designated this pair of underwear my dust rag. They used to be the last resort pair whenever the dirty laundry had piled up too far. Now, strands of elastic have sprung from the waistband the last time I tried to put them on— but you know how it is.

Picture me, dusting with a sense of shame, the way a pacifist might clean an automatic weapon.

The bookshelves in my house, Edward—student of literature as I hope you might be—have been compromised. The columns of books I'd been gathering since college have been breached by small pewter hoboes and ceramic bears dressed like the Amish.

Scented candles and figurines of frogs wearing aprons. I dust around them. I lift them, clean beneath, and replace them. It's my wife's bookshelf now. My wife's underwear.

The power went out in my house. An autumn storm came violently but, no doubt, has since tired out into a gentle, droning rain. It does that.

After the lights went out, I dusted by candlelight the way I imagine the pioneers might have—that early, long-starched American underwear balled up in their fists. This has been happening for a long time: this transfer of ownership.

I am on vacation from work, Edward.  And seven hours ago, I was drinking and dusting.

I am a fucking maniac.

When the lights went out, it wasn't long before I snagged the plastic ring at the bottom of the fridge and carried what was left of the six-pack outside onto the porch to enjoy the rain. I leaned against the railing and smoked a cigarette and ashed over the railing, listening. When the cigarette was finished I flung it toward the street, but it didn't carry and landed in the yard. So I went down the stairs into the rain, picked up the butt and threw it in the street.

I don't remember when I started caring if there was a stray cigarette butt in the yard. I can't decide if I even care now or if it's dull routine, driven into me like a nail being pressed down slowly under unimaginable weight.

Autumn is my time. Was my time—leaves tumbling in the slipstream of speeding cars. Apples in season. Edward! How long have you lived in New Jersey? Do you know what I'm talking about? Even the listless gray of overcast mornings held some kind of significance on in autumn; it was cloudy, but it was okay.

That was all in the country, though, before I was married. Now I live in a city. Downtown, as much as you can call it that.

Anymore, the leaves just look like more garbage in the street; the neighborhood we live in makes it vulgar. The houses are jammed so closely together, tiny yards, tiny windows, everything looking the same, peeling and rotting and warping—and even as I'm writing this I can picture them: floating out there in the water, somehow, like it doesn't matter where I go, you know?

Our neighborhood looks like something insects had built and on second thought abandoned. And the houses, they lean—I'm sure it's not an illusion—at such a subtle angle that I can't help but tilt my head slightly when looking at them to restore equilibrium, restore faith in the level.

Standing in the yard, the rain falling on my head, six-pack dangling in my hooked finger, I decided to go for a drive.

The drive ended here. In New Jersey. Your beach.

This is a lateral move.

She's probably home now. She's been shopping with her mother. She's walked into the living room of that empty house and found a pair of grimy underpants lit by candlelight like some kind of weird shrine.

An offering.

In case you were wondering, Edward, we have no children. I haven't left anyone in the house alone, no one sleeping in a bed with cartoon sheets and footy pajamas. The upstairs of our house is full of antiques looted from the houses of the dead—aunts, uncles, grandmothers, grandfathers. Rockers, dressers, curios and rugs.

And I'm not impotent, either. I have never had my sperm examined beneath a microscope, never had a headcount taken, but I feel vital and young and though I realize sperm have no way to communicate, still: should their numbers have been lessened over the years so as to make sure our upstairs stayed empty, it would be a change so minimal and yet noticeable—wouldn't you think?—as to compare it to going through an entire day feeling just strangely odd, as if everything was off somehow, and only realizing later in the day that it was some subtle change, hormonal, a delicate absence—like the birds, maybe; noticing that there were no birds. No chirps. No songs of any kind, as is the case here, in the dark, the ocean drowning out the possibility.

It would be like that. I would know.

The sex with my wife is working. It's working. It's hot. It's sweaty. So is lifting a piano. No—it does what it is supposed to do, Edward—I don't feel embarrassed talking this way—the sex I mean, it's functional, I know that, but staring into the ocean now I don't know what that even means. The words are pathetic and silly. There is no shelter here. I am an organism that has abandoned its burrow and she is back home wondering where I am—was I abducted? In trouble?

There's a phone booth nearby. Where I met you. Where we became brief friends. But instead of calling to tell her it's okay all I do is go through the phonebook and look at all the strangers, names I don't know. Thousands of people with no ties. I have displaced myself. I'm drunk, yes; when I finished the six-pack I stopped at a convenient store and got some cheap wine. I drank the bottle as I drove and each sip I could feel bloom into an orchid of hot vinegar before dissolving, trickling down beyond my stomach into ephemeral, impossible, metaphorical heat.

My breath against my palm smells like rotten fruit.

Maybe she is already cleaning out my dresser. Tearing my work shirts into strips for the wicks of oil lamps, hand-washing the bed sheets, humming silently to herself.

The ocean tosses in the dark. Nothing smells familiar; I have seen none of this before. I can identify nothing, except the sound of it. The ocean. It's the only noise for a thousand miles but it is encompassing. I don't know exactly where to go.

One question. Consider it. No need to reply. No way to.

Edward: how do you sleep?
 
© Jason Kane 2006

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Jason Kane is a graduate of Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. He has been published in the Northridge Review and Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and has completed work on his first novel, Undergod.