Astronomical Dusk
moored outside the inlet to Menemsha Harbor
Now I am wind-parched and iron-deficient from the sudden visitation of my period, so after a glass and a half of prosecco I am soft in the head and in the heart. Ariane shuffles cards for a game and the channel marker tips back and forth on the waves. It seems to reverberate through my whole body. I remember: running through the house, the dull crack of the bookshelf shuddering through me, apple juice routing a painkiller down my throat. Funny how these things arise. I toss my head. “Oh, that last swallow tasted just like apple juice!” I announce. Perhaps David is unsure if I mean this as a slight (I do not) when he launches into an explanation of his decision-making process when faced with three options in the liquor and spirits section of a little market near the Whaling Museum back on Nantucket, of the price jump between this middling sparkling and the next tier up, something about it being suspiciously high (blah-blah-blah, the channel marker clangs and clangs), and how the most expensive option probably wasn’t even real champagne at all, as if I care when I already feel so sweetly tired—“No, dude,” Paul chimes in, “it was definitely champagne; it was Veuve Clicquot”—“Oh, Veuve Clicquot!” I intone, ready for whatever comes next. “I bet that wouldn’t have tasted like apple juice!” David huffs a little nose-crinkle smile but doesn’t continue. Everyone’s faces seem lit from within. Andrew looks delicious in this dark blue light. God, wouldn’t that be great—boat sex. Too bad we are sleeping in the saloon with no privacy. Also, I’m on my period, I remember again. Ariane fans out the cards and we each pick one. Now I wonder which of these is the real limiting factor. If I wasn’t currently menstruating, could we risk engaging in sexual congress in the one shared space of our relatively small monohull; if we had our own cabin, would we have period sex? In this state I’d consider either, but both? Too many variables, I think. No, that would be too much, the same way I used to happily get naked in front of my sophomore year roommate in our cramped double on Margaret Morrison Street, and happily get naked in front of Andrew in his room on Wightman, but I never would entertain changing in front of both at the same time, no matter how late we were for the movie. The idea of them realizing, in tandem, We have both already seen this girl’s ass, however disparate the contexts, was always just a little too gauche for me. But God, this last light is so glorious on the water. I never love my body more than when I’ve knocked back a couple, a smile ready to split my skin open. It is an ill-advised joy, to be sure. I remember: college in late fall, headed to a party in a fraternity basement. One quick shot of rum and I am on the dance floor in my fuckyeahjeans, buzzed enough to suspect I am made of light but not so soused I don’t notice two fraternity brothers
Janet Biehl, Fisherman
all things within it. I describe to a therapist how for years I felt like a stranger to myself, separate from my body somehow. “How interesting,” she says, “we normally hear that from survivors of trauma.” I laugh. Yes, how interesting, I croon to that last swallow of apple juice. In the west, the water is finally becoming one with the sky. I remember: 18 years old, I attend a Reiki seminar on a lark over winter break. The teacher, who also sells me cold pasta between classes from a counter in the basement of Baker Hall, explains to us that blocked energy is the source of all disease—which he pronounces dis-ease. How lovely, to think that simply being more at ease would assuage my somatic ills. He will attune us to this energy tonight (remotely, to save class time), so we can finally clear all of those blockages from our energy fields. He warns us: dis-ease has to work its way up, like a corpse bobbing to the surface of the ocean. There’s no telling what will emerge, how long it will take to clear. Right. Right. But that night I wake with my left arm on fire, and then I develop uveitis in both eyes, and lose my virginity to a guy from Vermont, and lie in the dark for three weeks with mononucleosis, whispering to my spleen while it swells; and then I fall in love, and break my toe, and then my finger, and then—goddamnit—my heart; bloom rashes all over my stomach and thighs, pee blood, dry heave; achieve a fever of 104◦, achieve my first orgasm, get inadvertently high on Mucinex D; vomit rice and water into the bathroom sink at a restaurant on Lincoln Road; fail a project, fail a job, soak a bunion, supply a stool sample; pine stupidly after a coworker almost a decade my senior, pine stupidly after my adolescence; purposely bruise my face, purposefully bruise my self-esteem, purposively bruise more than a few friendships; lose hair, lose thirteen pounds, bleed through my clothes; cut open my hand on a toilet, wrench my back so severely Andrew has to help me use the toilet, and—will that channel marker stop clanging? We will never fall asleep like this. I’m not saying it’s not coincidence, or more than a consecution of living. I mean, a consecration of living. I mean consumption. I mean—oh, I’m drunk. I’m tired. Night is coming. Night is here. Night is another body, projected above my own, examining the consequences of its living.
making a slow circle around me. One of my friends steps up to me and grabs my hand, facing the boys and swinging her head in an exaggerated NO. I laugh at her seriousness but let her lead me away. I can hardly believe my own naiveté, thinking back on this now. Did I think those boys would applaud my laughter and offer me a glass of water? How terrifying, to be in this body: the boy on my soccer team who used our juvenile camaraderie as an excuse to dig his fingers into the crease of my hip; the young teacher who rested his knuckles against my thigh the entire bus-ride home after prom; the friend-of-a-friend at a bar in Metairie who wouldn’t let go of my hand no matter how sweetly I smiled; the man under neon on Washington Avenue who, after I, finally wise to how these things go, held up both my hands like a shove and snarled Don’t touch me, shadowed me for half a block yelling, “You ain’t even worth touching! You ain’t even worth touching!” The channel marker bell drones on and on. It is a quiet sort of brutality. It is a question of authorship. The salt wind lifts and drops my hair. Cards on the table. Cards in my hand. We each place a card face down in front of us. This is a game about lying, which I relish. Paul accuses Andrew, Ariane accuses Paul, Andrew can’t stop grinning in his perennial mortification. I titter at David’s logic, which he unfolds before us like a blueprint to the Paris sewer system. You know what, man under neon, I don’t need you to tell me I’m worthless. Jesus Christ, I don’t want these thoughts to become disinterred. This is what it is to sit deeply inside myself, finally, inside my own body, which cannot tell lies at all. I remember: early summer, back against the lower cabinets, my hand is sizzling and out of control. I’ve hurt myself, I finally utter to a friend. I don’t mean it was an accident. These are not the kinds of marks I wanted to leave on my body; my teeth on my hands, my hands on my jaw. That is not a metaphor. It is a body articulating decades of chaos. Is it trite to comment upon how much lives below the surface? Well, then. Even the sea exposes itself before obliterating the shore; the sea calls attention to itself all the time. The channel marker mourns the last of the prosecco as I tip the bottle into my glass. That body about to explode on the floor of the kitchen is never as remote as I would like her to be. We may have come 47 nautical miles from one harbor to the next, but we’ve never really left this one, large swell of water. Perhaps there is a comfort in this, the persistence of the body, its inexorable will to carry