I hate the faces my mom makes when she's criticizing something. When she hits the key-word of the point she's making, she curls up the corners of her mouth and bugs her eyes out and, well, let me describe a recent scenario. My mom was criticizing a song David Amidon wrote the words to (that I supplied the tune to and can be found on Moot's new album, "Point Pointer Outer"):
"I see. Well it sounds like some... you know, drug-induced..." then she didn't finish her sentence. Because on the word drug-induced she made this face. And her point had been made.
I didn't actually see the video of the man who stood and faced a tsunami by himself on a hotel beach. I was told of it, and I can imagine it vividly. People screaming off the screen but very near the camera-person, a shaky zoom up on the one crazy guy staying behind when all the other tiny people so far away from the lens scatter towards land. It has to get you wondering. And when was the last time you REALLY buckled down and thought about your future death? Sure you've brushed by it in those offtimes where you're just thinking about whatever. But stories like this guy's have to stick to the back of your forehead for just a few moments longer.
The sunlight must've still felt like sunlight--it was no better then than it was just a few moments earlier, when he hadn't been aware of his own imminent death. His conscience was telling him he was going to die just as it would tell him to accomplish any other task:
Grab the towel, use it for warmth. Warmth, then drying.
Look away for right now; she doesn't want to link eyes with you, she just wants to look at your face.
Forward, down, down, up, high punch. High punch? Damn it.
Reposition your weight, it's starting to make the elbows you're leaning on ache.
Stand up or sit down--oh, wait-wait... the waves--death very soon. Drowning.
He remembered visualizing sitting down just before realizing he was going to die, the sand clouding the water for a few moments beneath is weight, some of it getting into his swimming trunks--silt gathering in his crotch to later dry into sandy hell on the drive home--but he didn't sit. No chancing it with the silt. He opted to stand and let the waves come up to his waist instead.
The first one set him off-ba
lance. It left the skin cool and wet where it had washed by; he could practically taste the salt the through his shins.
He braced himself for the second wave. The feeling of the rush was no longer unfamiliar, since the first had already passed and introduced him to the sensation. He moved onto another sensory stimulus: sight. As far out as he could see--that would normally be the edge of the ocean--was the crest of a wave. Blocking his view of the horizon. Bubbling dangerously, angrily, quietly, high above the heads of men. The waves were coming in quickly in a wide, silent parade--tallest in back, shortest in front.
The shortest--knee-high--had past.
Then the next tallest sang its tune to his thighs.
The third sent chills up his sciatic nerve.
The fourth was dark and heavy, forcefully frigid and bonejarring.
He was really going to die. Others, too. But he first. He, most importantly.
"Me? Me."
How? He had seen movies. Had nightmares. The hulking wave, thirty stories tall that consumes entire cities and washes away cars and people like Listerine to the gingivitis gremlins in those mid-nineties computer-rendered commercials. It would plow through cities, crashing against buildings--rising for a moment, pausing in a shimmerying shadowy arch back over itself and then folding down, rolling and tumbling the living and non-living in its belly.
How would he die? The movies never really focused on that. Sure you put yourself in those shoes, imagined the death would be a big whirling bluish-greenish fade to black. Experience a powerful wave, then an all-over internal spasm of realization, with only the watery sound of your drowning heart in your ears. Open your eyes as long as you can--see light but no real surface. The surface is above you, but above you is a challenging concept to pin down when you are experiencing a constant involuntary spin-cycle into death.
Maybe drowning. Letting the oxygen run out till your brain forces you to open your mouth and inhale whatever?s there. Let the water fill your lungs like a sponge soaking up glue.
Maybe shock. Maybe blunt-trauma. Maybe I should have been nicer to my parents. Not just recently, but all the time. No. Nevermind. I was good.
We were good. Everything is fucking fine--at least I might as well say it is because my opinion isn't going to exist in just a few moments. And what the fuck ARE moments? What are they exactly?
You think about soft-serve ice cream and a wafer cone being the last food you ate. Fate?
Had you had a special connection to soft-serve vanilla in a wafer cone--the wafer cones that come in metal towers with children drawn on the outside and have little paper rings around their bases? Their bases a cris-crossing grid of wafer, each compartment filled with cold, cold, ice cream. Ice cream that, after a few minutes, just tastes and feels like flavorless frozen sand-paper. But biting down on that last bit is the best. The grid bit.
But wasn't this the connection everybody had with soft-serve vanilla in a wafer cone? Everybody in America had tried it. Grown up with it. Loved it for what it was. But he supposed, and you suppose, many of them would not die immediately after eating it.
That was the difference between him and them.
Him and every fucking thing. Fuck fuck fuck!
He always kind of thought he wasn't doing it exactly the same--doing it as in living life and exactly the same as in maybe he was just smarter than everybody. Or dumber. Or maybe he was just luckier.
Luck...
Is dying this way luck?
Is dying of old age better?
He'd always wanted to die with Alzheimer's. Like living childhood backwards, growing happier and happier and less and less independent all the way up till, poof, you are unborn.
Here was his unbirth:
A sudden--god he hoped it'd be sudden--blast to the psychology and biology keeping him alive, and then he'd just stop being alive. Like not being able to relive a moment lost in the catacombs of drunkenness, he would simply stop remembering the infinitely immediate past, (he grew up thinking of it as The Present). It would be difficult. But there's no wrong way to do it.
Everyone's died before--and if they haven't, they're going to. It's the one skill everybody's got whether or not they try or even practice.
He thought of that being on a poster.
So as 100% mysterious it is... no it's not mysterious. We know exactly how it happens. We even know why it happens--hence the struggle with watching something die for the first time when he was a kid. When everybody was a kid. The bug had its own agenda, sure: get from this tile to that one over there. And maybe it was meandering. But we all do that. And then one crunch later, fuck that agenda. Another roly-poly bites the dust. No tiny, multi-legged victim's soul floats up to Heaven. The struggle was in convincing himself that it's different for humanity. Hell, that roly-poly is probably the reason he's standing where he is right now. Everybody else ran... didn't they squish their bugs? Or did they and simply manage to win that internal debate that, it would seem, he'd lost? He fell for the belief that humans are just wonderful science, capable of not existing prior to birth.
Jesus Christ, enter my heart. Quick.
And if you're really just dead from 2000 years ago and I'm going to simply turn off and be buried in the sand to rot away in the water... then I'm no worse off believing. I won't mind. At least I didn't mind not existing before I was born. Did I?
The fifth wave
threw him onto his back, somersaulting him once.
Stand back up.
Grab the towel for warmth. Warmth first, then drying.
High punch. Fuck.
The last Holiday he celebrated was Easter. Just a couple weeks ago. Studying for a Monday morning squick at school the next morning.
School was far away, now.
Monday mornings, too.
The sixth wave--the last WAVE he'd ever see in his entire life, the second to last THING he'd ever see--was not nearly as far away as those things from what he used to think was the real world.
Was it the real world?
Death seems far more immediate, far more important and intimate than going to social events, listening to music, hell, even getting it on. Be she hot or not.
Then again, Jesus he had found a beautiful girl.
Jesus, God damn you, you better exist.
No wait--fuck Heaven. Fuck Hell. Fuck any living where you never ever die again.
Thank God for death. Death is always the ultimatum. The one thing you can ALWAYS look forward and see on the timeline. Always on your list of things to do. Maybe it's really far off. But it's certainly not written in pencil. And it always comes hand in hand with the word "always."
He was set to live a certain number of hours during his life. A certain number of minutes. A certain--relatively large--number of seconds. An even grander number of nanoseconds. And a countless, probably infinite, number of--would that just make it one? Or maybe even zero?--moments.
Moments can be movements of roly-poly legs across a bathroom floor-tile from one instant into the next. Or moments can be entire week-long vacations being wholly recalled in brief packages of emotional-intravisual-intrasensory rushes summoned and experienced by electricity in your brain. Or high school: a quick, fast-paced, hormone-filled moment. Or life.
Life as a moment.
Life as an immediate memory.
Death as an immediate memory forgotten.
The sixth wave was just inches way now.
Thousands of inches.
Thousands.
Pretty soon, hundreds.
Was anyone watching?
Was he alone right now?
Yes, he thought. This is me. My time. No more thinking of others. It's all about me and always was. That's life. That's it to life. You spend every bloody moment of it IN your head, perched behind your eyeballs and watching, perched above your mouth and speaking, perched between your ears and listening, riding on top of your body down sidewalks and roadsides and across mall parking lots and down long hallways and to your bedside from the bedroom door and out to where the water meets the sand.
Out to where you will walk no more. Not one more time.
Out to where you will stand and stop focusing on your body.
You are still perched in your head.
Will you always be? In the afterlife will you still be a brain between two ears, behind two eyes--all that--again?
Grab the towel for warmth.
Look at the boy's shirt across the room, not at her eyes. She just wants to see your face without having to make eye contact.
Look behind you.
A beach.
Look up.
The sky.
Listen.
Listen.
Listen.
La-listen.
La-listen.
Just a heartbeat and some heavy wind vibrating your ear drums, but not much else. The water is being deathly quiet.
Other people had run away by the third or fourth wave.
Am I all alone out here in the water?
Where the beach used to be?
Standing like a good friend welcoming the wet, shadowy wall charging at me.
I hope so.
I hope I can die by myself.
I don't want to cheapen it.
I hope there is no afterlife. I'm sick of being inside a head all day.
High punch, this time. Forward, down, down, up. High punch. Yes. Sweet.
Reposition your weight; your elbows, damn it. They hurt more with
every passing
moment.
Sunlight was just as warm as usual. No better. No worse. No more comforting than it ought to be. In fact he could still very much feel the heat on the back of his neck, hugging his shoulders like a blanket he can't shove off.
Look away; let her see you without having her see you see her seeing you.
Grab the towel; warmth, then drying.
Close my eyes. Just before the wave.
The wave is the second to last thing I saw.
And the last thing? I forgot.
