emulation in machines. Every possible you that ever could have existed will.”
“Will you—”
“You’re carrying a virus. A contagion. You can feel it. You know it’s there. That’s why you write. You have the silver. You write about things from pasts and presents and futures that you shouldn’t be able to see.”
Paul was silent.
Benton squeezed his hand. “There are holes all over this When. You’re making it all fall apart. You’re ending so many worlds with each breath, and you have no idea. We’re here to take you out of this. We need you.”
“You aren’t real.”
“We are now.”
He took out a cigarette. West smiled.
“Let’s go out to the pier.”
I’d gone to the edge of the world and thrown myself against all that I knew: safety and solidity and the past. Life became a fluid somewhere out there in the thousands of miles between the stagnation of home and the brilliant, beautiful uncertainty of the edge. Life became metaphor: I walked wearily to the ocean after the long and dangerous station wagon journey across the country, just standing there in the sunshine and the gulf breeze, feeling the cleansing grit of sand beneath me, working its way into every pocket of my clothing, every hair-covered limb, underneath contacts and between toes and fingers and scouring the gold sheen from my Zippo. The sand worked its way into me, making me feel at once totally alien to that place and an integral part of the landscape. The sand would eventually blister my feet, itch my scalp, grit every last exposed bit of flesh with its silicon scour, but not before I’d simply stood there for a while to appreciate its exotic warmth.
Many tens of thousands of my generation had gone to that city of sand and sunrise. Few of them shared the reason that I had for being there…We all went to escape from life for a while. We all went to be the bad people that we were told not to be the other fifty-one weeks of the year: we drank and smoked and smoked and fucked and otherwise debauched on the beach at the edge of the world. We gathered in groups of thousands and flailed the primordial dance of existence to overplayed rap songs and paid too much for beer in plastic cups and smoked cowboy killers and bummed cowboy killers from a stranger with long hair and dark eyes that looked at and through you with his intricate, recording gaze.
By the hundreds, by the thousands, I watched them. I detached. I separated myself from the organism that was humanity. Hovering over the crowd, poised against a wooden railing that had seen the sun set into the emerald coast too many times to count, carved a palimpsest with the initials of the past spring breakers who thought themselves cool enough to brand their love forever on the treated wooden logs of the upstairs bar of Harpoon Harry’s before moving on to the Fountainbleau or the Reef or the Chateau for a night of refrigerator beer cans and horny sorority girls free for the week from the confines of relationships and morality. I peered over the edge down into the beast of raw abandon, people by the thousands engaged in grinding, undulating, dripping sexual frenzy, arms in the air supporting beer in plastic cups and beads ripe for the swapping of bare breasts or muff shots, sometimes even supporting smoked-to-the-filter cowboy killers bummed from the dark stranger watching from above, ashes poised eerily outward, defying gravity to the beat of the music.
I could have made an army of them.
Jolted from that realization, a weakness, a thin nosebleed and a smile. I smiled once. I bled more than once.
I watched from above. That frenzy. Detached. Not a part of it. My generation. Not a part of it. At all. I was the cigarette man. I had the Cobra long-sleeved t-shirt. I made people smile. People told me to “Smile! It’s Spring Break!” I watched from above. And felt alone in a crowd of thousands. It was not for me…none of it. It never was for me. I was a voyeur. I thought too much. About. Things. There. In the midst of thousands. I was. Lost.
But I could use them. Stir them.
Walking. Along Front Beach Road. Sand grinding between pinkie and second toes on left foot. Grinding away flesh. Walking along the road because it was good for us. Walking faster than traffic, slow enough to be witness to any and all displays of flesh that we could find. Beads for tits, tits for beads. Instant cameras and Daddy’s hi-8s by the dozens. An experiment in humanity:
Sitting before that inescapable wall of water…Burning tobacco and burning flesh and thoughts of She and thoughts of the blank void that was the future burning away the Paul that I once was. A limit experience in the liminal zone: fire and water, humanity and the great impossibility of the edge of the world. Sitting on the sometimes-wet sand, grit in my eyes, staring blankly off into the world that we can never have, inasmuch as we think that we’ve conquered it with small wooden and metal constructs with which we can skim along and just under its surface. Place cigarette in mouth, extract golden Zippo from right pocket, flip open lighter, flick flick flick until the stubborn flame finally licks the delicious tip of the Marlboro 100. Smoldering. Deadly. Inhale, exhale. Pause. Inhale, exhale. Pause. Wind howling from the gulf, internal wind painting my respiratory tract blacker with my divine purpose of living up to the ouija board’s predictions.
Flood of thought, sunrise, sunset…Sitting in that place of beauty and edge and impossibility. That was the place that I had so yearned for…That was the place that embodies everything that I’d felt since the loss of. Of. Dark skies in the daytime: impending storm, impending downfall, impending torrent. Sleeves pulled up around tanned but not burned arms, left still exhibiting the eleven lines that had so defined the last five years of my life, eleven lines of scar tissue now barely discernible from the surrounding scarred tissue, except for the fact that the lines were a lighter shade of tanned. Barefoot, toes buried in the sand, absorbing warmth and grounding me in that world, as the fingertips of Sakyamuni called the earth to witness not his divinity but his enlightenment. Hand outstretched, fingertips touching the earth as the armies of Devadatta raged around him, hand outstretched to call the earth, all of existence, to be witness to his enlightenment. Toes dug into the sand as seagulls raged around me, wind blew through seabreeze-knotted hair, not brushed since November, sky above growing darker in defiance of any human definition of Spring Break.
Moments of lucidity: the screams of the interior fell silent as the rage of the exterior filled me. Struggle for peace; struggle for silence. I’d gone to the edge of the world to do what every good metaphorical struggling author does: find himself. I sat before the kingdom and the power and the glory; I looked into the face of the closest thing I’d seen to god. I sat until the doubt and the rage and the mourning were replaced. I sat until I was filled up again. Beauty. Sitting before that amorphous canvas and watching the power of existence paint itself in waterspouts illuminated from behind by divine lightning. There was such a peace in submission to that divinity…Take me, destroy me, tear me apart so that I won’t have to return to the places I fear. Standing out on the pier, hundreds of feet out into the surf, wishing for the overhead lamps to extinguish into black…Waves crashing into the pier, swaying the massive construct, waves illuminated orange and pink by the garish strip of humanity stippling the beach with light. All of mankind behind me, alone in that journey out into nothingness…Perfection in that black. Perfection in the relentless cycle of waves crashing against the pier. Crash into me, through me. Destroy me in your wake.
I needed that. I needed to approach the edge of the world, to abandon everything behind me, to leave everything that mattered in the sand and walk out into the surf. On that last night, I spent a moment of solitude alone on the beach. Harpoon Harry’s raging behind me, thousands of generation enjoying the meat market that was the drunken bliss distilled in Panama City. I walked out into the ocean, took a final drag from my cigarette, launched it out with a flick of my fingers into the great black gulf until it hit the water and extinguished. How appropriate that gesture: the extinction of the spark. For years, I’d struggled with the knowledge that I’d once had a spark, and had lost it somewhere out there. What a symbolic move: killing that spark with the world screaming behind me, the noise of tens of thousands being slowly supplanted by the rage of the waves and the flood of voices that roared from within. I walked out into the waves without bothering to roll up the legs of my pants, without bothering to care about the couples swapping their own waves of fluid on the beach behind me, thinking only of that limit experience. Merging with the unknown, feeling it caress my skin, enveloping all that I’d given to it. Sound became nothing but heartbeat and voice and voice and
