The beach was empty, because it wasn’t a pleasant place to be. Clouds covered everything, but there were bigger ones like rolls of lead that hung off the coast, pushed back that far by some sun that was invisible but big enough to turn this world gray, to halfway dissolve the pitch that was the norm, the zero — for now. In a few hours the sun would move on, the lead would roll in and the beach would drown in the pitch again, and there would be noise and cold and wet but nothing more. Zero is always there to swallow us.
For now, though, there was enough gray — you couldn’t even call it “light” — to at least be on the beach, if you didn’t dress stupidly and had a plan to get away before the lead rolled in.
The water was viciously cold. The tide was trying to violate the dunes with waves that rolled in staggers like shark teeth, smashing and tearing, like if you were dumb enough to try to swim, they would just beat the shit out of you and you wouldn’t even drown. You wouldn’t have time to drown. They would just beat you, freeze you, eat you.
It was strangely peaceful in a way.
It was the violence at the edge of chaos, but it had been there since the land had formed and would be there for so long into the future that it had a kind of stasis.
Continuity.
Consistency.
Peace.
It was a place to go to see the eternal frayed edges of the world, the place where everything has always fallen apart. You could go watch it happen. You could count on it.
You could participate.
That’s why Janie was there.
The school had dropped her, on the whim of the director who graded like he was the agent of the great God of Art, like he alone had the antenna that could receive aesthetic truth, like he was merely the pencil recording the grades but it was the God who was writing. She would get the certificate but not the degree. The next two years were suddenly voids; her career was fog.
She was here at the beach because it was reality.
She pulled her coat around her and snugged her hat around her ears. The waves were a noise that disintegrated noise. She could feel her breath, but she couldn’t hear it. She tried to simply focus on the rise and fall of it. Let it continue. Keep it going.
She let her eyes try to float on the water beyond the breakers, the zone where the peaks and valleys were slow and ambiguous. There was movement there but no shape. Nothing had to break yet. Just flow. It was gentle and intoxicating. Time subsided.
Janie gradually felt a little better. Her eyes swam in the salt and the boundaries between her body and the world dissolved in the spray.
She felt her eyes returning to something.
In the vague swells beyond the breakers, sometimes there, sometimes not, something was gathering her focus, then letting go, then gathering again to hold on a little longer. Her eyes stopped floating and started searching. She had to look. And when she thought her eyes had a handle on it, when it seemed to coalesce into something almost solid, she had the feeling that, whatever it was, it was looking back at her.
The wind lapped some spray onto the base of her throat, and she wrapped her scarf around her collar. Tighter.
The thing was clearer now; she didn’t think the sun was any brighter, but the thing had simply condensed into a pattern within the waves that she could follow. It formed itself, perceptibly perceptible. A dark spot, resolving.
It was a head.
And though she couldn’t see its eyes, she knew it was looking at her.
A sharp intake of breath broke her mind away from the dance of the waves, and she stepped backward, stumbling in the sand. Her heel backed against a piece of driftwood and she halted, unable to take her eyes off of the head in the water. The trance of the water was now the trance of this thing, this creature that was seemingly life where life was impossible. Impossible, but there it was. She couldn’t tell how close or far.
She fought off all the tropes of movies and pop culture that invaded her. They weren’t real; she felt insulted by them. She stared angrily back at the thing, as if she could ward it off with her eyes. But it didn’t seem to be getting any closer. It was just hanging out there in the water, fading out behind a swell before fading back in, and watching.
Her breath sharpened, and she turned to break the spell. She started walking along the dunes. She didn’t want to go back to her car and leave; she needed to be here today. She needed the beach to be hers, today. So she walked to claim another part of it.
The wind was in her face now, sloppily misting her cheeks. The sand was in lumpy waves itself, and she broke them with her legs, which felt like the wooden legs of a marionette as she rocked over the sand. It felt good to move. She slowly made her way up the shore, though there were no landmarks to tell her how far she’d gone. Just dunes on one side and water on the other. She enjoyed the lost feeling. She raised her gaze from the sand to the dunes, her eyelids batting the mist away, to the northern horizon that she was heading for but would never reach, and felt the eternal again, and the rough peace of her breath returned, in time with her steps.
A glance to the left, to the ocean, to the chaos, the teeth of the water. An opening, a flash of darkness between the waves. The head was still there. It was following her.
It wasn’t any closer; it was just there, and she felt its stare. She stopped for a moment, then kept walking, a little faster, though the wind and the sand fought her. She bitterly noted the irony that she was not in the city, not walking home from a bar late at night. She had tried to get as far as possible from all of that, to this place in the middle of nowhere. But the feeling was the same. Her breath hardened.
She kept walking, trying to just focus on the dunes and the wind. Now and again she would glance out of the corner of her eye to the water, and of course the head was still there, keeping pace. She tried to ignore it, but you know how that goes. The bitterness rose in her, caught in a dryness at the back of her mouth. She had come here to escape. Now it was a chore.
But the thing still didn’t seem to be getting closer. It simply paralleled her movement up the beach, staying out beyond the breakers. She started to think that the breakers were not this creature’s teeth, after all, but a zone that was somehow dividing them, protecting her. The head stayed away.
She walked for what was probably two miles, but she didn’t really know. The sand had come to a point where the dunes fell away, and there was water in front of her now: the mouth of the river, finally washing away into the ocean. The shoreline and the riverbank converged to a soft point, a sandbar where the land finally dissolved under the intentions of the two waters. Janie could walk no further. She stopped before the sand was so wet that it threatened her shoes. She turned to the ocean; the head was still there. The afternoon was starting to weaken; the pitch was beginning its advance. She met the creature’s stare, though she still couldn’t really see its eyes.
For a long moment — she didn’t know how long — they simply stared at each other, the head bobbing in the waves, and Janie on the sand. She started to feel herself going up and down, too, in a counterrhythm whose count was lost, but still in sync with the whole ocean. It was all too relentless. All of it. She was here at the end of the land and the end of everything. She exhaled, bereft. She gazed at the invisible eyes of the head — where the eyes would be, she thought. She exhaled again.
And though it wasn’t moving, wasn’t doing anything but looking, she imagined she felt something from the head, and her eyebrows knit because it didn’t make sense. A vague affinity. Some kind of rapport. But she gave up trying to understand.
She inhaled, and began to shake. Something swelled inside her as she looked to where the eyes of the thing would be, and she wanted to talk to them, to hold them with her eyes, and she desperately wanted to tell them… something. Before she even knew what she wanted to say, at the top of her breath and in spite of the shaking that threatened to choke her, she let her voice open on to a big, long note that sounded like metal to her, then water, an aaooooooooo that came from the back of her gut and rang in her head before washing away in the wind over the sand, before being beaten into silence by the crashing of the breakers. Her vision disappeared. She exhausted that note, then inhaled and summoned another, tuneless, quavering, and another, and the beach dropped away as her voice pierced the salt air and dispersed, as the sound dropped amongst the grains of the dunes and disappeared there, as the whole Pacific ocean lapped at her song, let it hang in the air for a moment, then vanished it. She raised note after note until the wind carried them all away, and she was spent. Her knees wavered and she almost fell. Her vision resolved again, over the dark gray of the water, over the thing that was still there, still watching her. And she breathed out again.
The head in the water seemed to tilt, a little, as if cocking its ear. And though a swell rose before it, it looked to Janie like it had turned slightly away from her, and in a moment where maybe the sun pushed through the clouds for a moment, and provided a tiny bit of contrast, the triangular shape of a muzzle seemed to emerge from the formless round of the head; the muzzle opened and a hoarse bark escaped, metallic and penetrating though short, before the muzzle disappeared and the head was gazing at her face-on again. And for a while, they just looked at each other. She didn’t know how long.
Janie was done here.
The light was failing and she had two miles to go to get back to her car, over the sand that fought her with its weakness, so she began the long, spent stomp back to the parking lot. She headed south and let the sound of the breakers play her along. The dunes rolled past to her left, now, and the wind, at least, was finally at her back. She walked.
The head stayed with her. She no longer felt like she had to stare at it; it never got any closer, clearly never had that intention. It just paralleled her. Continuous, if fading between swells. Consistent.
Darkness was winning as she found the driftwood that landmarked the trail between the dunes, and she turned inland finally, more than ready to go. The pitch was swelling itself in the dark clouds off the coast, which now were much closer to the shore, much thicker, much more effective at blanketing away the sun. She stopped and turned to the water; the head was still there, though maybe a little farther out, now, and the water was darkening. It was hidden more by the swells, the rhythm of the water, folding it back into the vagueness. Janie was losing its eyes, but she tried to hold on for a bit. Her lips made a tiny wave.
She turned and went home.
©2020 by Nick Trotter. All rights reserved.