Extract from This Soft Incomprehension

Zachary Thompson

He came quailing from the changing rooms as if plucked from the quintessence and held pinched between two fingers. This pale, pearlescent boy. His arms pinned to his sides, his feet slapping against the floor, sliding. The smell of chlorine was sterile and lithe like untanned nakedness, and he stood see-through at the edge of the pool and watched. A half thing, nascent, his hands clutched to his chest. Sunken and unresolved. Imprinted from long before.  The other boys were swimming in the deep end, just themselves, nothing more, fighting with foam tubes and getting told off and carrying on. 

  ‘Tristan!’ Mrs H called from the shallow pool behind him. She was teaching those who couldn’t swim and he turned and dawdled over to her as if spent and bodiless. Her assistant waded across and helped him in, her arms outstretched, velvet smudges underneath. Her piercings caught the light and her hair was piled up in a darksome mass, the back of her neck lush with wisps. A boyfriend's initials were tattooed on her rib, and she lifted him in and smiled, her lips shy, afraid of themselves. The fuzz on her face was dewed, luminous. Her swimsuit didn’t fit her right. 

  Her name was Carter Roe. Miss Roe. She had dropped out of college months before. She wanted nothing, everything, what she desired was incompatible and vague, in places where all is becoming and is not simply done. Her father was the headmaster and had given her the job despite children scaring her. She was tall and lissom like a creature conceived on an eclipse, made somehow as a product of it. Rumours enshrined her life; they veiled it. She was missing bones. She had killed. She had given birth in the woods. They were never true. These rumours were like old solar theories. Desperately limited, unable to encompass. Yet, she had about her the air of deep caves and subterranean lakes, of ashen underworlds and crystal interiors. She belonged to them; she was the last of her kind. This was the one, single truth of her.

  The water ballooned in his shorts. It was cold and it clung and it dredged his breath from him. He became aware of his penis; like a needle slipping in. He choked and went under in a panic as he practised, his legs flailing, his strokes mangled. Carter held him from beneath from time to time, her hands splayed to his chest. The breastbone buckling at the thought of her fingertips.

Blood fell from his nose later; he had taken too much chlorine in, and he watched hypnotised for a moment as each drop unfurled at his waist and bloomed into sentience. This is how, he thought, his finger in the whirls, learning them. The other children turned and stared as it scythed toward them. They looked at him like a thing in a costume and then Carter came and rushed him out, her palm on his spine, neat between two vertebrae. She told him to hold his nose and tilt his head up. Beads of water wept from her and her voice had a gentleness that only pain could have gifted. The signs were left all on her wrists and legs, and his blood lay embraced to them.

  She stood with him in the toilets and gave him tissues. He wrapped them around his nose as a bandage and she undid them and showed him the right way, pinching his nose with one hand and cleaning his face with the other. His eyes full and wide, drying in her breath. She was bent slightly and he could see down her swimsuit. They were covered with bruises. Her wet skin had facets, depth. Her hair smelt of marzipan and she dabbed the blood from his chest. He took her hand and stopped her and held it there. It filled in the space like a great absence and he kissed it. She looked at him as though to say; I knew you; we were the same. He kissed her hand again and she pulled away. Her brows furrowed; her tongue swirled in the corner of her mouth, and Tristan’s heart climbed his throat. She looked over her shoulder and then back to him. She lingered and kissed his cheek, and then looked back and stood up. She turned red and felt her face, the texture of time upon it. He stared up at her and felt himself split into two, one floating beside the other. The last of his blood dripped to their feet, its image an oath, and suddenly the idea of her was like that of a past life who had come to save themselves in him.

 ‘Carter.’ He said.

  A sigh. The sort that preceded the truth. ‘What?’

  The light outside was gold and resolute and it came warped through the glass block walls of the toilets. They are briefly light. Cladded in it. Standing as impossible beings. The pause between them folding into a kind of nowhere. Something had been annihilated. Their lives had changed. They had changed in the slight ways they felt could outlast them. The ways that cannot be moved on from or forgotten or remembered. The ways that had always been, that had always lived, antecedent and waiting. 

*

His first true desire was to swim. His second was to be a fish, to be small in the world, to drift down streams and dart about the lushness, and see in things the little rainbows. The samples of radiance, the spectrums within almost nothing. This infinitesimal realm, this intimacy of detail. It was all more real to him, he inhabited it, its details joined him up inside. 

  He kept Sticklebacks in his room, they made nests and bred. The males turned a silver blue. Sometimes in the evening, the sun would come slanted into the aquarium and through the bodies of plankton like through that of impossibly shaped jewels. He’d watch them hurtle up the light, his face pressed to the glass. He’d long to know their physics, their minute systems. He’d long to press his forehead to the thing, absorb it, comprehend it with such depth he’d drown. The fantasy of the microscopic, of a world beside infinity; an invisible organ in him bloomed toward it.

  He learnt to swim on summer nights with his Dad. They would run into the sea like horses living wild, like men who were starting all over again. The water was moonwrought, seamless, upon them as a vernix. A dark membrane. They felt themselves weightless there. They could swim past the bend where the sky and sea met. On the beach, dunes arched and curved, looming in the beyond as potent mounds. They had a strange allure; they traced a mythology, and Tristan would often stand as if between himself, dazed in the swell and staring to them. She lived like a promise in the world now. 

  A Sunday in July. There had been more arguments at home and his Dad had left with Tristan. The car was parked up on the beach and they swam in the frayed borders of the headlights. Their strokes were long and assiduous, their bodies soft, spectral. His Dad had swam far out, as though there was a thing on the horizon to save. The musculature of his back morphing with the moonlight. Tristan watched in the shallows as he went, standing there to his waist, lorn as if at the black and churning heart of a mind in nightmare. It was a loneliness that resonated, that comprised the universe and dwelled in all inanimate things. 

  Tristan waded in after him. The bottom soon dropped away and the kicked-up sand plumed about his feet. His breath quickened and he left the light. He was swimming in vagueness, in a void and nebulous anti-matter. The tide coming like a grudge, his head tilted back, gasping. The outline of his Dad reappeared, he was swimming back, and through the waves he seemed almost coagulating, mutable. He shouted as Tristan’s face separated from the dark. The fear in his voice warping as Tristan slipped below. 

He sank like a stone that had been skimmed. The surface evolving over him as he went. He could make out the dwindling visage of his father stirring above. The spumes of his breath rising to it, disrupting it. The deep-water was piercing, cold, endless in the ways his bedroom had seemed inside tears. The dross and sand turned like shreds of silver whirling in his turbulence, and for the briefest of time, all was unforbidden, unbound. Depth and darkness mingled in him like an empty house where, amongst the stillness, the settled murk, something is borne, becoming. The shadows are congregating, the curtains are rising in a draft. The unlived and the unsaid is brimming. 

  He erupted to the surface in his Dad's arms moments later and saw in his eyes a childlike terror. A sudden embodiment. Tristan coughed and wiped his eyes. His face glistening, purified. ‘I saw a fish down there.’ He said as though continuing an old conversation. 

  Silence reigned in the car, and his Dad sat dripping in his seat, melting. He seemed haunted through his cigarette smoke and they were sprawled, Tristan’s head upon his Dad’s lap, trying to catch the smoke as it pirouetted out. His Dad laughed under his breath, relieved and at the edge of revelation. His fingers shaping a strand of Tristan’s hair and curling it on his forehead.

  ‘That’s the third time now.’ His Dad chuckled. ‘I ain’t even gotten over the time you fell in that lake yet.’

  ‘There was a Water Scorpion!’

    He smirked. ‘No, I don’t doubt that son.’ Thunder crowned the atmosphere and turned around them. ‘I reckon it’s ’cos we never got you baptised. The world maybe ain’t too happy ’bout it.’

  A storm broke not long after. It was diluvial, the kind that made one believe again. A veil of rain formed down the beach and the sea moiled beyond. Two figures came sprinting from the dunes. Nude, incandescent. Going like spirits bewitched into the blackness. Their laughter, their girlish screams echoing. Tristan knew it was her and he jumped from the car and chased after them. Impelled and flightless. The churn of the tide, the rain, playing like the static of space. He shouted for Carter and her friend, and they turned, hiding themselves, glaring as though shaken from a dream. Her hair was sodden and loose. Vermicular. Her figure incarnate. She was the albino of some legend, the vassal of an opal empire. She kept running and whelmed into the waves. She didn’t look back, she didn’t care. The lights of a near town filled her spine like a rill of gold, and his Dad came running. He apologised, watched them go. He stared for too long.

*

That summer, all things glowed numinous and carnelian in his eyes. Dandelions shone from the concrete; weeds grew gold in the drains. Afterimages trailed cars and people, and he felt something of himself scattered inside other beings, held in awe and made absolute. 

  Home had merely become a house, an invisible fire, an apocalypse concealed and he ran away more and more, hoping his parents would fall in love again trying to find him. He took the passageways between the houses to the forest on the hill. The air was fertile there. It could be drunk. Winged things stitched about in exultation. Lime trees spumed. Pools of light lived. It was like that place we had all come from, the one we were trying to get back to. He built things in the stream that ran through. Each of them with a purpose. Some were satellites, others ley lines. 

  A glade lay at the centre of the forest. It was a shallow crater, a lush portal mapped to a star above. No wind fell upon it and white orchids blanketed. The grass grew wild and purple, and it lay as if beneath the world, where innocence was tossed and left waiting. It was his secret. His shrine. It was shaped like the pit of his chest, and he thought up the strangest stories there. The world in its beginning, marriages, the end of his own life.

  Carter and her boyfriend were at the edge of the crater one evening. Tristan laid down and hid when he saw them. She was bent over. Her shorts around her ankles, her head bowed as though awaiting execution. How strange it was to see her felled, fragile, within a thing. Her presence there like a perfect corpse, serene, a synchronicity. Her hair reined back in his fist. They banished and spurned themselves as they fucked. His hands fathoming, groping. She called out his name. She arched herself. The shadow between her legs seemed iridescent, and their rhythm imbued the air and formed the locus of his childhood. The very core of it, the schematics. 

  He grew embarrassed as he watched and grinded against the earth as if skewed to a prong from below. He thought again of kissing her, of turning in her gravity and his blood sprang and pleaded. The sound of it rushing in his head like a dark rift growing out.

  Afterwards they stood severed, sealed to one another. His head in her chest. Their legs entwined. She gazed, she whispered to him. A slow and wicked realisation came to know itself in her face. Tristan stood up and stared and wanted to scream. Ants crawled over him; he wanted a kind of closeness that was impossible. 

  ‘Get lost!’ The boyfriend yelled when he saw. Tristan didn’t move and the boyfriend walked over and pushed him. He smelt of ash, he looked like fumes. 

  ‘Stop.’ Carter said, stepping into her clothes and coming over as if from out of grace. Her neck raw with bites. ‘Leave him. He’s in my class.’

  ‘Were you watching us?’ The boyfriend's jaw tensed. Grass stains blotted his jeans.

  ‘No—’

  ‘Just move.’ She sighed, getting between them. ‘I’ll take him home.’ He went to speak. His hands pricking by her hip. ‘Just do it.’ She turned her back and took Tristan’s hand, pulling him along like a teddy. 

  That night was blue and sylphlike and they walked back in silence. Dim rings hung under her eyes like aftermaths and she darent look at Tristan and he was brilliantly afraid. Her hand was tight around his and her bruises seemed to watch, to have about them the consciousness of stone circles and monoliths. 

  ‘What were you doing?’ Tristan asked later.

  ‘We were fucking.’ She said without remorse, letting go of his hand. The word felt its way through him and left a heat. He didn’t know, but he understood. She looked down to him afterwards. She felt guilty and placed her hand on his head as one would a grave. She moved his hair from his eyes and rearranged it.

  At the end of the path, they came to a blackbird lying strewn and struggling, dispossessed of dimension in the gloom. It had crashed, it’s wings had snapped. Blood lay in voids upon it and it scuffled about the dust as Tristan crouched to stroke it. Carter caught it in the rank ferns as he did, and had it folded and cradled in her arms, her finger going tenderly along it. It had the look of some old friend who had returned to say sorry. Warped reflections in its eyes. 

  ‘I know, I know.’ Tristan repeated under his breath, staring into it, something like sorrow linking them. Everything seemed laced and linked with Carter there. The togetherness of all things was revealed. She was like dew on a cobweb.

She looked the bird over for a while and calmed it and kissed it deeply. 

  ‘Turn around.’ She said, her eyes passing through him like grand music. ‘I need to kill it.’

  ‘Why?’ He trembled.

  ‘It’s in pain my love.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head, his hands cupping around it.

Shadows sharped the contours of her face and he watched as she did it. She was like an alchemist bestowed secrets. Her fingers poised around its neck. The bird was still. She pressed and twisted. It fell motionless and something off far in the breaches of the world broke. She placed it in his hands afterwards and he folded its limp wings. It was perfect there. It was like a wedding dress at sea. It went on. 

*

  Weeks of eternity, and desire lines formed in the grass between her house and his. Carter did taxidermy. She had taught herself as she had for everything else. In the evenings he’d go down to her shed and help her on the Blackbird as if in some pact. She skinned it first, and he passed her the tools and watched. Her scalpel glided through and unfurled it. Her eyes narrowed, ruinous like the pause before a downpour. They wired it after and she stood behind him, her hands guiding his, her hair enshrouded on his shoulders. He could feel the heat of her breath, smell the earthen sweetness of it. The zip of her jeans would be pressed on his back and the pouch of her stomach loomed there potent, ripe. This light touch, this lust. It was like the encroaching of a maleficent star in his fate.

  An aureate evening like any other. Hollyhocks teemed in the passageways and snails clung in clusters to the walls. He climbed again through the gap in her fence and the shed door was ajar. Smoke stirred out and two voices mingled inside like uttered spells. Tristan went carefully and lingered at the door. She was there with his Dad, in his lap, and kissing, their hands quivering over each other. A cigarette smouldering in her hand held above. They were oblivious, enraptured. Tristan could only stare as his father took out her breasts and tonged them. She sighed and the world pulsated. A possessiveness evolved, creased, and Tristan took a cane from the side and ran at them and hit them apart. He bruised her arm before his father caught him, not knowing who it was in the blur. His face darkened when he realised. His son had seen the worst of him and he held him there like a cushion used to smother. Watching as the idea of himself withered and dulled in Tristan’s eyes. 

  He left in the night. He packed a bag and said nothing and Tristan never told his mother why. He feared that Carter would know, that she’d find out, that something would close. 

*

Tragedy was the smell of Buddleia in the garden. It was the gothic ticking of all his mother’s clocks. It was the moon visible in the day. A piano playing down the road. The house was like an oblivion after rain, its emptiness bloomed, gained colour, seemed to grieve itself. Tristan spent most of his time in the forest, hitting things and shouting and making portals in the stream. He hoped Carter would appear through them. He wore his Dad’s clothes in case. He learnt later that she had moved out and was staying with her friends in the city. He didn’t know if he missed her. Her absence was as natural as empty space. It was what all things came from, reverted too. He knew that somehow.

  He had taken to leaving as well. On some nights, after his mother had gone to bed, he’d go out again and wander the passageways between the houses, looking over the walls into other people’s rooms and watching the living. In the lounge of one house a large aquarium shone out, bathing the back garden in the silhouettes of ripples. An Arowana circled alone inside it, lingering beneath the surface. The fish was scarlet and faultless, beyond him as if shackled in form. Its true place elsewhere, in fields of gravity or time. The bizarre terror and liminality of it stayed with him as a harbinger of deep space and calamity. He imagined the aquarium cracking at random moments, the water spilling out, the fish flailing at his feet like a vexed curse. He had nightmares of it all his life. This aquarium at the dark end of his mind. 

  He first masturbated down there, in those fecund straights, somewhere in the corner. He thought of Carter and the weight of her on his back, ignorantly tugging and twisting until it burned, or until he was spooked by some gangling Harvestmen in the avens. One night though, he ejaculated weakly onto the ground and sensed for the first time the spinning of the globe. He went from then digging and whacking through thickets and pushing at fence. His hands grew scratched and black with soil, as though he had collected up the night and cradled it home so that he might set it upon his pillows and sink forever in that Arcadia. And when he tiptoed back into the house he was dirty and earthbound, and he climbed into bed as though he knew things that no one could. The hours left, the coming herald. 

  He first dreamt of television static that night. It formed just before he vanished from himself in that hypnagogic state between. It was a vast teeming plane, tactile, almost there. Black and white. A febrile dimension, fizzing and rough like sandpaper against the inside of his eyes, morphing like matter at the beginning. Becoming, flowering, withering at light speed and in a loop until his eyes rolled back, sank, dissolved. 

Before dawn, deep water and voile. He woke, and the night spilled through his window and billowed in the lace. The air was cold and nascent as if born from behind the moon and streetlight travelled tremulous across the curtains. His mother’s crying had woken him and the sound of slammed doors seemed to linger still, settling like silt throughout the house. He sat up in bed and gazed. The darkness granular, pullulating. He looked at his hands, the soils lustre reacting in the dimness. He climbed down from his bed and turned on the television opposite the window. He rewound his VHS of Blue Planet again and watched. He had done so whenever he couldn’t sleep. It reminded of him drowning, of the peace of it. He’d fall back to sleep to it; he’d dream of a flooded world. He flies, there he flies. 

  He lay there in awe of the television, longing for the ocean floor, strewn as though forbidden to it. His face flooded turquoise, a vastness trembling over it. A submarine voyages down and those inside seem atomic as aberrations and failed reincarnations drift blind along the bottom. A choir brims, and an awareness unfurls through Tristan as though each of his cells were held to a point of light and allowed to widen, to crystallise. Layers of silence, dissected. Opened. The self rose in plumes, and he felt slivers of himself gently sliding into the zones where music is architecture, is spirals and steeples. 

  The drapery over the window swells and falls like a baldachin over him and the breeze is suddenly warm, full. He stands as if asked and presses his face to the lace. Jellyfish lay in quivering chatoyance to it. One fits perfectly into his chest, completes it. Siphonophores too are lain and mangled, arranged there like asterisms, like the zodiacs of inner skies. They are wet, monumental, the sensation of them echoes as last words do, and in a sense with no translation, they are angels. Ophanim’s of glass and starlight. He knows this. He knows as only an animal knows, as only matter remembers its shape. It is a thing rediscovered. Unearthed from the ether. They say to him in opaqueness; ‘We know you. We are the same.’ And the dark then tumbles in, pines in waves, washes him out.