Cinders and Ash

The sun had disappeared behind the horizon, but still twilight lingered.  Purples too velvet for countryside night kissed the lake ripples white as we slowly made way through the center of the deserted lake.  Jimmy, a middle-aged Albanian man who used to be my boss, dozed quietly on his back, his sandaled feet hanging limply over the edge of the long seat.  His wife sat beside him, absentmindedly twirling a lock of his coarse black hair with one manicured finger.  What is it, I wondered, that can transplant a scene so pleasantly domestic and intimate from the Balkans to rural Wisconsin?  Customs almost never checks your bags for love.  Her gaze watched the shoreline rock and the lakeside vacation homes bob like buoys.  Micah and his girlfriend, Genevieve, talked in the captain’s chairs, their conversation muted by the dull roar of the motor.  They had packed the fishing poles away, covered the nightcrawlers and eels, and Micah had found a hand rest on her bare thigh.  Billy played helmsman, and the silhouette of his head rested in the curve of the crescent moon.  Sean, as bereft of action and words as I, softly muttered a matter-of-fact statement that barely breathed before the night air killed it.  "Fucking beautiful."

And it was.  A palette come alive.  The bottle of pilfered wine hung, half-empty and cockeyed, from my loose grip.  I had a vision, then, of a streetlamp bursting in a sudden surge of electricity, sparks tumbling down as if the curtains of a play.  A vision of a strange man in a hat and jacket, made visible for a brief moment, before the sparks snuffed out and the whole scene scattered as if it was a handful of ash.  I took a swig of wine; I’d refused the idea of cups, if only so we might be more pirate-like.  Even pirates take naps, dreaming of Tirana in summer.  Even pirates take solace in the warm presence of the girl in the next seat.  Even pirates, in their gentler moments, take stock in the surrounding beauty and find a peaceful silence.  Pirates don’t trade grog for wine; that I ignore.

Micah’s grandfather had been a self-made millionaire, and so he did the thing that millionaire’s do: buy things that I’ll never own.  This includes a vacation house.  But Micah had invited me here, declared open season upon the wine cellar, and evicted everyone out of the house and on to the boat.  It was a bit embarrassing, really, to be a housecat in the lap of luxury.  A nonsensical speck in the periphery of a very wealthy man.  Drinking his wine, enjoying his boat, sleeping in his bed.  Floating around in a little bit of no where, a place he bought, happy when he didn’t have to be somewhere.

I smelled like a lake.  That earthy, living, loving smell, and I can’t think of anything more summery.  My arms ached from water-skiing and tubing, from clumsily propelling my goggled body through the water as I explored the man-made depths.  My shoulders burned from the hottest sun of the season.  My heart ached.  If love is like a fire–and what cliche could be more appropriate?–it’s wisest to keep it a controlled burn, lest you reduce the whole damned thing to a pile of cinder and ash.  A blight in the center of a gleaming metropolis.  I might take a tour group through, and point to where it once stood, and describe the current plans for rebuilding.  But I won’t mention that first all of the rubble before them had to be cleared away.  And I certainly won’t mention the history that burned with it, or that when you build something sturdier, it’s almost never as pretty.  That I keep to myself.

My hand smarted from its brush with a deceptively innocent-looking eel.  We had attempted to capture dinner the old-fashioned way, bringing the eels for northern pike and the worms for perch.  The results were disappointing–sometimes I figure that the only way to justify being carnivorous is to catch what I eat.  The teeny fish we did catch gasped pitiably in our hands; I was shamed by their honesty. We threw them back.  After having several eels whip by my unprotected face due to some careless casts, I had retired from fishing.  Sean and I had conversed, first about Eastern Europe and history with Jimmy, and then about environmental issues in the American West with each other.  I figured it was that that convinced Jimmy to take a nap.  We opened the first bottle of wine, then; initially to have fun, and then to toast my encroaching departure to ports-of-call unknown, and then simply because it was there.  Perhaps it was only to pull down the hesitating sun.  The constant sight of life-jackets and water-skis and way too many iron anchors for one little boat had started to make me feel a little uneasy about excess–darkness had brought a reprieve.

It’s easy to forget in the midst of a conversation, but now that the beauty of the twilight scene had killed all talk–beauty kills, you know–I had all sorts of time to think.  About finally graduating, about teaching overseas.  About all the things to leave behind–the monuments of successes and the skeletons of failures.  I don’t know if I want to leave, but I know I have to.  I have to let the hacksaw’s teeth kiss the hawsers, put my boots against the quay, and shove off.  The destination no longer matters.  But I’ve done too much here, I know, to start over in the same damn place in the same damn way.

As we arrived at the nondescript little quay down the steep hill from the house, Micah leapt out and deftly tied the hawsers home.  The engine was cut, and Jimmy stirred.  The bottle in my right hand was empty.  As the purples deepened and the moon brightened on the water, I felt a bit like crying.  I felt a lot like sobbing, the ones so hard that it’s all you can do to muster the breath to say "thank you," and rally the courage to really mean it.  I stood up, and the bottle clattered across the deck of the boat.  I could see the murky outlines of my reflection on the water.  I could see it rub a helpless hand through its hair.  When I saw its chest ripple, I thought it must be its lungs encouraging its heart forward.  And I wanted to jump in and sink, and hold my breath until the filmy veils overhead parted, and, new gills glittering, I might leap from the surface for a brief moment in a strange and smiling sun.

The boat was empty then except for me.  Sean asked, "Are you coming?" as he walked away, backwards down the dock.  I smiled, and waited for him to turn before I wiped the unspent tears from my eyes.  No.  No, I’m always going.   "I’ll be back."  And I stepped off the seaward side of the little pontoon craft.  The water had faithfully stored the warmth of the day, and now life felt incredibly generous.  And as I turned lazy circles in the middle of a man made lake, a little bit of nowhere in the midst of a larger nowhere, utterly and ineffably alone, I swept away some cinders and ash.

Sean in the water, Jimmy and his wife Marinela on the quay, and Micah’s giant fucking head.<br />