Knife cleaves flesh. White, crisp, the floury texture visible like pores in the unforgiving light of the kitchen. Brown mars its core. The sickness spreads, weaving veins of ochre into the flesh of the other white cheek.
Turning back to the fruit bowl, she selects a new option, squeezing it to test for ripeness or bruises. This candidate is hard, stiff and glossy as though draped in a lick of varnish. The knife squeals as it pushes through one side to the other, relishing in the crisp cut. The interior is whiter than teeth.
She has always felt guilty for liking the sprayed-silken-waxed apples over the expensive organic ones her father brings home from the Saturday market.
She has driven with him there in the truck and she would hoist herself up from the shin-high step and push forward the passenger seat and clamber into the back as it bends for her. She always sits in the back when her father drives, even though she’s twenty. She’s not sure why. Her denim skirt and the underside of her thighs cling desperately to the plasticky seats.
But on the way home, while the truck trundles over the loose gravel and the skin of her cheek shivers as it rests on the window, she would bite into an organic apple and wonder why it tasted so bland, so floury, why its shine is so dull, its surface spotted and marred.
“I love those organic ones. Don’t you, Mary?”
She’d nod in agreement. To agree with her father is a rule she feels not in her chest but in her skin: unvoiced, but it shrouds her completely.
“Very nice. Thank you, dad.”
She’d wonder if he could even hear her over the raspy pottering of the truck, lurching over the the unsealed road.
As juice runs between the cracks of her trembling knuckles like thawing rivulets, she thinks the pesticides and the wax are not all that bad. She feels proud. Lucky us: we have learned to treat ourselves so well. Lucky us: we can have our apples polished.
She’s been having this dream recently where she’s climbing down a ladder, like one propped up against a tree in an orchard or a farm, and she’s looking up at the glimpses of blue between the clusters of leaves and the swollen fruit, because if she looks down she knows she’ll focus too much on her footing and her arches will slip from the rungs like drooping skin like wrinkles like string once pulled taut. She’s been having this dream for a while, where, despite that knowing sense that dreams robe themselves in, she looks down and sees her arches sliding and her toes releasing and her feet meeting air, thick and sweet with the heady fumes of the cider-heap (the one she thinks she’ll soon be meat for, which doesn’t make sense, of course, but the notion is enrobed with that sense of sense that dreams are insensibly clothed in). She’s been having this dream for as long as she can remember: it always has that same ending where she falls to her death, to her brokenness, to the flesh-for-cider-fate, but the strings catch her, snagging, twine pulling taut and tortured at her elbows and knees and neck, which is fitting because she is a marionette, wooden and stiff, dangling before an audience of apples with their splitting sides and grinning teeth, laughing and laughing. She doesn’t know what the play is about, but her mouth’s moving and she’s delivering the lines that come to her hinged jaw with mechanical ease. Easy dramatics amongst the sweeping curves of the amphitheatre ripe with Pink Ladies and Granny Smiths alike. She wonders if they feel the fingerprints of the playwright on the glossy surface, hollow and bruised beneath.
The surface of the ocean is sandpaper, the waves brittle and harshly ruffling. As a collective, they are a series of wrinkles down the underbelly of a lizard, leathered and sundried and peeling.
He is standing on the deck, fleshy palms on metal, all salt-bitten and wind-sprayed. Although, no, it’s less of a stance, more a lean, from starboard to port in a flash of an upsurge. A puppet, he sways from moment to inextricable moment until he’s lying prostrate on the glistening deck.
He feels the brunt of labour beneath him, supporting him: polished hard plastic and varnished timber nailed together, running stitch at the seams, and then between his bronzed shoulder-blades was the fine weave of his Ralph Lauren, polo all soggy and wrinkled and ruined.
If only the wind was calmer. If only the tide was lower. Perhaps if the currents hadn’t tilted this way or that. He was only just getting into sailing. He knows he should have checked the weather, the wind, the sunrise. Red sky in morning, sailor’s warning. Why does he think he can read sense into the senseless?
A wave pins him to the deck, and he thinks about the fish that should have been his. He thinks about wire, invisible and taut. Gills. He wishes he had gills. Fins, scales and … a satellite phone, a message in a bottle.
A wave crests and crashes, sizzling out and swashing with delirium. He hooks his elbow around the rail and breathes out.
What if he fights? The water batters him and it pulls at his cheeks stretches them merciless and cruel but pure of intention, purity in the most absent sense of the word. Sadistic, inhumane, vicious, the whitecaps harness and push his legs beneath the eddies and rifts of the current, and the salt skin of the boxer he’s facing weighs him down to a mere pendulum: plankton, passing through.
What if he gives up? The gulf between the base of his presence and the sea floor shortens until it is gone in a mottled mess of blooming sand, a cirrus exploding in a firework around him, a knotted entanglement of gunpowder and oxidisers in a kaleidoscopic display.
What if, just like he wished in vain, he does grow fins and gills, and his clothes are torn from him by the lustful ocean and he becomes himself as he was always intended to be: raw, visceral, opened up and sloughing off the skin of creation, of pretence?
The best path for him is to submit. He should let the current acquire him. He will not survive either way. His egoism has convinced him that the continuation of his human life is the most important thing. But perhaps it is less suffering, for the sea and for him, to succumb.
To concede is to show humility and to thank nature for letting him witness it. Thank you, he should say in a stream of bubbles, for allowing me glimpse the depths of the sea, to see the angler fish and the giant squid, without having to worry about the bends.
Weightlessness is a strange thing. It is difficult, I think, to make a human feel inconsequential. Gravity’s absence does exactly that. This is odd, because how does letting us free, rendering us buoyant and effervescent and afloat, manage to make us feel entirely insubstantial?
All of existence, and I’m selfish enough to press all of mine right up to it, until it’s mere layers of fogged-up glass away. Gossamer stars lurk just beyond the fishbowl of my face, mirrored in the periphery of my vision. The cosmic scale of it all is nauseating. I have never experienced vertigo before this place, this sickeningly liminal world that lives just outside the confines of this aluminium box.
I have to stop the thoughts to stop the queasiness, so all I’m thinking about is keeping myself tipped horizontally to the window, keeping my limbs at bay, and the lab report I have to draw up after lunch.
“You’re quiet,” says Ross.
“Mm.”
I tear off the aluminium wrapper with my thumb and take a slurp, vacuuming the contents with mechanical ease. It’s the apple-pie-flavoured oatmeal. The saccharine goo wraps my tongue, floury and clingy.
Ross smiles. His face is lean; it is not difficult to picture the bones beneath. It is gruelling staying here for so long. Ross is braver than most.
“I hate that flavour,” he announces. He’s turned his frown upside down, I think to myself, stupidly, with a sing-songy cadence; Ross has begun cartwheeling absentmindedly around the cabin.
“Same.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Home. Always home.”
By habit, both gazes drift to the window. The sight feels my throat drop to the pit of my stomach. It turns you inside out, just a little. Cirrus crosshatches the Earth’s surface lily-white, metallic and arcing and unfurling in a distinctive felt-like grain. Beneath is an impossible amethyst, pale and matte.
“How’s Lara doing?”
“Oh, she’s good. Third trimester. The big one. All going smoothly.”
Ross pauses. We sit (or float) with the unvoiced implications of what awaits us: the remaining four months of our journey.
“Do you ever think that we did this to ourselves?” he asks me. His voice is lowered, barely audible over the thrum of the engines.
I look back at the window, bordered and reinforced, fusing us in, and glimpse the supernatural splendour beyond: “Actually, I think it’s all we have to show for ourselves.”
If we played a game, would you play along at all?
I was here with you from the beginning. I left my fingerprints on the brown rot and the white varnish of the apples. How do you know the first was clean, the second ridden with fruit flies? I showed you what I thought I saw, what I thought Mary saw.
Then you showed me trust and I showed you ignorance in the reflection on the ocean’s unsettled surface: a recreational sailor in his polo shirt drowning on the deck of his yacht. You scorn his ignorance of nature’s unpredictability, but you don’t know if the sky really was red in the morning, and what he was doing alone on that boat, and even if he’s wearing a lifejacket. Perhaps you even root for him, but it is up to me if he lives or dies.
I left you with an astronaut. Let me define that word for you: a human at the mercy of the universe, protected by the flimsy work of human hands. They are isolated and detached and they also witness a dizzying outlook that must put it all in perspective. Maybe you, the earthbound, might even relish in glimpsing over their shoulder at the constellations and the clouds and the jewel beneath. But you don’t even know this astronaut’s name. Only I do. I’ve never been in a spaceship. I’ve only looked at satellite photographs. What do I know? More mimicry. What could be more unnatural?
We really can have nothing untouched. Even the most objective glances through a window of experience are tainted by my clammy hands. I pull at your eyes and your strings like tendons in casual motion. Maybe you briefly forget my presence, and that’s exactly what you really want. All you want is all-encompassing, to be encompassed, to encompass: to be held by the embrace of empathy, knowing someone (even fictional, contrived) is living at the same time as you. You want to be assured of naturalness, of objectivity, of truth, but even stories are synthetic.
Submit to the artificial. Submit to the natural. Submit to all we’ve made. Submit to all that outlasts us. Lose yourself. Become translucent. Yield. Become plasticine in the hands of existence.
