Nicoyana
The Beryl Stairs ©ped
3c
The night continued around the campfire. For Carey and David, it had transitioned from a calm and warm serenade of stars over the beach to a sustained decompression of grievances from the three slaves of letters who engendered climates of words for a living. Brandon and the water paired well during the night—however—as he played with a rod and reel against the surf. A long comb of secondary growth forest absorbed the light wind and the cacophony of the battle stand, leaving the crescent of sand and rock immune from all audiences in the world. The night, the natural amphitheater, bolstered an emerging madness.
____“It’s all right to feel blue about our purpose, Emeline,” pleaded David—an interloper. “But we’re all here, and only here, to warmly persuade you to come home. From what I’m seeing and hearing, this night has perverted itself. It shouldn’t turn to this trench battle over creative processes.”
____“It’s apparent that we’ve struck the crux, here, however, David, with our apologies,” confessed Ingrid.
____“Yes, indeed. Rinn has determined that we must all become educated,” seethed Emeline.
____Rinn laughed in welcome of the injury. “I’m only suggesting that your lifestyle of deprivation and depravation here may be inhibiting you. That, if you include healing into your method, the way we encouraged you before you left us in Beryl, you would find a more reliable and comprehensive framework behind your compassionate narrative verse. You can’t always and perpetually draw from the well of bitterness and resentment. You need complete form. You need wellness and forgiveness in your daily life.”
____“Depraved? You’re calling your sister depraved?!” snapped Carey. “I think that term is only definable by one’s self.”
____Ingrid nodded in agreement.
____David also nodded. “It does ring imperious, and perhaps a note incestuous, Rinn.”
____“Fine,” acknowledged Rinn. “My sister is deprived of depravity. In any case, I have a suspicion that your process has bottomed out. Yes, while it may have become fiery and sincere and filled with elaborate vitriol, I suspect that your heart has run away from it, and in your heart’s place there sits a pool of poison. Am I close?”
____Emeline stilled. “It has…found a plateau,” she relented. “But that plateau reflects my health and reality. I am surrounded by cliffs and depths, and I plan to jump. Do you understand the concept of leaping, brother? It involves complete surrender to all horrors and eventualities and it witnesses the colors on the tapestry of the descent.” Emeline gazed at her onlookers and smiled. “When I splatter across the low rock, I shall cook to vapor, which, in its form and function, dear teacher, must rise.”
____“That’s fucking rich,” laughed Ingrid. “Listen, Rinn. Your sister is in the very midst of her hermitage. Why must you pull her from it?”
____“Because she’s done this before,” said Rinn. “She’s done this since we were children, and it always leaves her in retrograde. The sulking, the complacent resignation, the defensive daggering…it’s all her way to impede any truer growth.”
____“Growth on your terms, Brother. You’d like nothing more than I should rise to your ranks, your echelon, your strata of presumed accomplishment. You’d love to have me at your right hand in the firmament of commercial schmaltz, but you forget, all too simply and to your pacification, that your audience…is a fattened pen of trough-gobbling swine, a mass of fearful property owners who love to be lulled to sleep each night by your prosaic salves. You, my brother, are a soothsayer, not an artist.”
____“Cheap shot, and effective, Emeline,” chimed Ingrid, now relishing the role of referee. “Although you know your brother didn’t start out that way.”
____Rinn meditated on the long-withheld accusation. He understood that now would be the time to unveil the indictment, and that he would know what to say in return, for he had mulled the stain for years and had found pithy ways around the conversation, all which mattered as rejoinders of wealth and influence, and held no bearing on the razor’s edge of process. He continued to wonder at his sister’s sharpest salvo and how he would respond to it in voice and not in written form. He felt a rare surge of bile in his throat. He decided to wait, and to allow for the rest of her wrath. He knew, now, the root of her exodus—she left his company and aid in Beryl for this singular issue and reason. He asked her to continue. “Am I a source of shame to you?” he said.
____“You are who you are,” said his sister. “You are comfortable. You are predictable. You’re caring. You’re welcoming.” She turned gray and pallid. “You are pedantic. You are platitudinous. You are misguided. You’re oblivious. You’re ignorant to the suffering of others. You’re a self-made martyr. You’re engulfed by your renown. You do NOT know how to connect to the live wire again.”
____Ingrid raised her hand to Emeline. “He stopped, you know,” she said. “He doesn’t even write anymore, which is something I’ve never seen. I think he deserves no reverence here, to be certain, neither do we, for that matter, but I think he deserves a turn with the blade. You need to separate the figurative impression of your brother from the availability of your present brother. He’s here from love and concern, and he’s reaching for all inroads into your psyche to help open your condition. Rinn’s come a long way. It’s my estimation, however, that you both could benefit from a thorough airing of cruelty.”
____David and Carey nodded in outward agreement, bewildered from their open voyeurism.
____Ingrid continued. “Now, since I’ve been elected default shrink here, Rinn, would you like to offer up your naked and savage judgments of your sister to the panel?”
____Rinn drew up his head. He knew he couldn’t spare his sister, since doing so would anoint him as the martyr and fulfill his figurative role. He stood and troublingly churned forward his indictment in proclamation, “Here sits my Emeline. She is the one who never understood the rules of tribe and community. She stole desserts from the kitchen and ate them under the table. She threw board games across the room when she lost, she never learned to drive, never accepted an invitation to a school dance, never publicly spoke from a position of weakness lest she be judged, never offered compassion to her suffering mates, never caroled on the solstice…but this is only the Seussian prelude to her isolation. Emm became something odd after her education; she decided the universe was evil, and she returned her participation ribbon to God. Now these gentle revelations would not surprise anybody who’s read her work, for her work is filled with absurd contrivances designed to evoke justifiable alienation from authority, society, family, obligation and compassion. Her narrative arcs are vaingloriously simple—a heroine is betrayed and exiles herself to a primitive and natural void to bide her time before death. What could be more natural than that? Why dither over growth, transition, or common causes when smoking in an old growth forest takes the cake of cool? Why comfort or ease a reader’s pain when you can scat out a sleek tragedy and make them do all the work to figure out your genius? Why plant an idea of common good when the forces of entropy and despotic tyranny are the low-hanging fruit? Indeed. No, the who we see here is a gift of a generation—we are in the company of a reluctant genius, a rebel, a watermark in the legacy of self-imposed reclusion. Emmy’s oeuvre is the hallmark of aggressive mediocrity, however, and only her life choices and locales color her life interestingly. Sure, she could grow, but that would require an interest in living. In fact, I see she’s determined to plow eyeballs-deep into the lane she’s sought, and I see the avant garde buckling in surrender in her eyes right now, which is enough for me to pack it in and fly home tomorrow.”
____“Thank you,” Emeline cursorily dribbled. “Tell your friends.”
____“Emeline, your brother unveiled a handful of incisive blows to your character and core,” said Ingrid. “Do you believe him to be speaking from a position of hurt or from one of deeper aid?”
____“Christ, Ingrid,” interrupted Carey. “He called her work ‘aggressively mediocre.’ I think that’s like telling someone on the guillotine that their breath stinks.”
____David nodded. “Hurt. I would go with…hurt.”
____“I would agree,” said Ingrid. “Although, in my estimation, I believe Rinn is attempting to put a rise in your blood to force you to extemporaneously defend your life. I could be wrong…hmm, I’ve been wrong before.”
____Emeline shook the roiling poison from her ears. “I don’t give a shit what process he’s employing to attempt to reach me. If it’s coming from him, it’s stillborn and caked in denial. My method is a simple one. I keep things clear. There are enough distractions in our society to delay the formulation of a single poem, Ingrid. You know that much. In my brother’s case, however, he has embraced every caprice in our transitory culture and manipulated it for his popular benefit. I think he’s hobbling me with fundamental slings because he’s fearful of a greater chrysalis—a different suffering. Rinn’s greatest fear is that he harms a loved one out of his own inadequacies and misgivings. Rinn has led a preordained, predestined, fruitful life of social appeasement on a grand scale, and he has the temerity to claim he had to fight through the stages of meritocracy to claim it. When I hear a man like him assert that I’m average, complacent, that I don’t dig deep and put forth any effort to his satisfaction, then I become filled and nourished. I know I am taking a dedicated and harmonious line with the act of life. He’s only impugning me to provide relief for his own cowardice and spoiled puerile comforts. The man’s endemic to the sham of his ancestry. He believes his forebears strained and surrendered all gratification so that he could whisk his cotton candy fiction and elevate the blood of the common folk with his pulp suspense and circular problem solving. I believe, Ingrid, that he flew thousands of miles to the tropics to command me to buckle and become his subservient handmaiden, and to never approach or endanger his unique position as the scribe of the family. Simple Austrian head-shrinking—one-ohhh-one.”
____“Mr. Finn?” said Ingrid.
____“You can’t become well until you acknowledge you’re on the wrong path, Sister. You are a great instructor, a fine lecturer, and an ingenious social surgeon. But the world of literary fiction will never let you into her circle. You lack the humanity to bear the culture of fiction on your own. You can’t go a month without eviscerating an editor or a reviewer. You don’t write to live or to foster life. You’re on a death trajectory with your novels—you wish to die with a garland of epic tragedies around your neck.”
____“So, by your logic,” Emeline puzzled, “the mere fact that I breathe before you tonight is proof that I haven’t come close to producing anything worthy of tragic merit, and, therefore, I should inventory my saving graces and tuck tail with you back to a desert retreat where I will be hugged and thrown to the fissures of forgetful time?”
____“Take a year with me,” said Rinn. “See what we find. Open your eyes!”
____Emeline drew the tonic of the salt air into her chest. “You merry, fattened clown. This, here, what you’re doing as some half-assed missionary, is an act of surrender. I am taking on what you never opted to combat. I am within a forge to produce the ageless allegories. I am not the one to teach the myths of our fathers or the one to defend the childlike graces of our civilization. I have reconciled the classical world with the momentary clouds of our common delusions. The passages in my home, the bastardized essays, the laments, the three act plays, the magnum O-PIE—they’re symptoms of my disease, as you label my condition. But I have discovered my current, here. I have happened upon the delirium of the splitting chariot. I have never needed a trip in a cave to see conflicts within social biology. I know my art is to exalt how our universe ceaselessly pits the forces of power against the will for understanding. I see my expression tempering the steel rift between achievement and awareness. I believe my living role is to separate dominion from enlightenment, and that occurs, most humanely, through narrative. I have the skill, the talent, and the outlets to develop my tacks and bents to my liking and to the wonder of worldwide seekers. I don’t need immersion therapy or a saccharine mentor to guide me back into some pseudo-medicated collective. Unlike you, I am not giving out. Unlike you, I am not beaming with a message of denial. And, unlike you, I am not transferring my inadequacies to others.”
____“Why did you leave me when my family died?”
____“I came to see you in Beryl and you were blind drunk and lashing out at everyone. All you could speak about was the cruel injustice foisted upon you, how it all served as the twisting hook in your heart—you never shared with us the memories you carried of Alison and Drew. It was a time for us to remember them and all you could do was wallow in your extravagant grief. You were selfish. You were a complete and total pussy.”
____Rinn’s face contorted into lines of disgust. “Is that how you manage loss? With songs of remembrance and a totem or two? You believe we’re all warriors who can save our tears for Valhalla? I needed your comfort and understanding, and you blew out of my home like I was a leper on his last breath.”
____“You were practically groping me, like you were about to lay me down and fuck me. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever experienced.”
____Given the two turns of seasons since, Robert Finn had enough distance to weigh his sister’s words. In a moment of synergistic clarity, he halted and collapsed into the sand. “You…you’re right! I was a selfish riot of need. You knew I wasn’t a danger to myself, but only a projection of my basest needs. You left because I was reveling in chaos. I was consummating the ecstasy of my loss.” Rinn walked a slow circle around the group. “This whole mystic grudge, this buzz saw methodology of mine…it’s been a desperate leap to save face.” He faltered a step backward and, feeling the effects of his sister’s stores of port, fell onto the berm of coarse sand, reeling. “I’m your standard egotist,” he claimed to the ribbon of Milky Way above his bloodshot eyes. “I’m a baby.”
____“You’re a born martyr,” asserted Emeline.
____“Good golly, Emm,” said Ingrid. “Your brother loves to black out.”
____“Transparency switches him off like one of those narcoleptic lambs, Ingrid,” said Emeline. “I think he got what he wanted, though.”
____“What could that be? You clobbered him,” said David.
____“Hardly,” figured Emeline. “I only tapped his reset button. He’ll come to and try again, especially if it promises your attention.”
____The vast planetarium above Ingrid’s head played at her balance and wonder. The port rolled through her limbs and the embers of a dying fire pulsed through the obsidian night with ruby purity. A climbing wind framed her shoulders with the chill of immediacy and spectacle. “Emeline, do you have any cigarettes?” she said.
____Emeline turned to Carey, who turned to David, and David shook his head. Cruelly, Cabo Morado was cigarette-free. “Sorry, no go on the sticks,” she said.
____“Christ, it would have bridged a moment for me,” said Ingrid.
____“Search Rinn’s body,” offered Emeline. “He’ll think you’re an angel, prepping him for his long-awaited ascension.”
____Ingrid leaned back and exhaled on the starlight. “This night swept me back into the sweet sickness of college, for a flicker. It’s a simple time traveling recipe—paper, fire, and tobacco.”
____Smiling, Emeline watched her guest pull a pose and posture from her long-ago past. She imagined Ingrid a budding young woman. “What’s it like for you in Iowa, telling kids how to imagine a thousand worlds…and then tucking them in?”
____“Oh, they’re all imagined out by the time I get them,” said Ingrid. “It’s my job to tell them all the ways they’re fucking up. And then they’re too thoughtful to defy me.” She took a long drag from the imagined cigarette between her fingers and blew outward with the wind. “I mean, kids condemning themselves to a writer’s college? These shiny sprites should be drinking, dancing, and fucking their way through painful experience, not honing an elder’s skill and curling into wallflower vines in some block architecture downwind of the infinite pasture. I want to tell them to hitch a logging truck or join the Merchant Marines. I want them to start bands and tour. I want them to wake up one odd morning in jail. But if I did order these things of my young, I’d lose my meal ticket. Sooo…I teach them how to fail. Fail correctly, that is.”
____“How do you manage their divine indignation?” asked Emeline. “Y’know, paired with their beauty and boundless health. How do you grapple with their vanity and proper causes?”
____Ingrid laughed. “I don’t deny them a thing. Nothing I say or do for them will stand in their way. I figure any resentment or spite on my part is only a reflection on me. Besides, most of them are aware of their looming conflicts. Hell, most of them are kindly masking their savage appetites as a form of asceticism. It makes me wonder, still, how I could’ve been such an unruly kitten during my day.”
____“Kitten? Elaborate,” begged David, as he grimaced through Carey’s rib-spearing elbow.
____Ingrid pulled life from the night and confessed. “There was a Sunday night back at Wisconsin. On the lake. I was a sophomore in Madison, living in this beautiful limestone dormitory, top floor corner, overlooking the water…overhearing the throbbing drumbeats and brass of the practicing marching band—all of that nonsense. It was a peculiar year, a fine arrangement, because my roommate and I had started dating two boys who lived in the dormitory the year before. By this next year, they’d moved out to an apartment together, and, by Darwin’s hand, we all had choreographed every night of the week. My roommate and I rarely saw each other as one of us would sleep over at the apartment as the other one would host her boyfriend in the dormitory. Once a week, we would meet at the supermarket to restock our communal pantries. In any case, it became Easter break, and my boy and my roommate were already hours away, visiting their hometowns and reconnecting in their parents’ homesteads. That Sunday night, my roommate’s boyfriend came by to pick up two books and a shaving kit he’d forgotten before heading out. I was seized with fulfilling a long-harbored need. I slipped behind him and locked the aged bolt on the door. I faced him, this boy, and told him I still remembered the look on his face from the year before. I remembered how he knocked on our door and I replied for him to enter. He was there to ask my roommate, the same girl, the one he dated throughout, out on a first date. The thing of it, and the sick ring to it, was that, upon opening our door, upon completing hours and days of might, resolve, and strength just to ask the question, he pushed open the door and beheld my face instead of hers. His face had flushed red and I swear, from ten feet away, I could see his pupils dilate from natural surrender. He promptly turned his face away, found her, the other, and asked her out. I told him that Sunday night, a year later, that I knew of his natural weakness for me. I fanned my hands across his chest and felt his will shudder and collapse. He pulled a mattress off the loft and we spent six and a half hours together alone in a practically abandoned lakeside dormitory. To this day, I remember every pass, every scent, every absorption, lunge and twist. It was the single most consummate and privileged moment of my younger life, and possibly the only night I outright dictated every fancy of my sexuality. He and I…joined in a way that was both permanent and transitory—he and I ambushed a rare moment passing. That night was the beginning and end of my life. Six and a half hours. He sneaked out before dawn, but not before we pledged our secrecy and dedication to the memory. We also pledged to keep innocent tabs on each other’s lives for perpetuity.”
____“And?” said Carey.
____“Oh, he’s dead. Throat cancer, or some such. Forty.”
____Brandon hopped up the sand with a string of small skates on troll hooks. “Hey, what happened to Rinn?” he said.
____“Simply spent from caring too much,” said Emeline.
____“Figures,” replied Brandon. “He does care too much. Anyone want to poke these suckers with sticks and fire ‘em up?”
____Everyone passed. Brandon shook off the brush off and set to firing his fish for his private benefit. The last rushes of night held in the sky.
____“Okay, here’s how I see it,” said Emeline. “Carey and David, you’re taking my bed. Rinn’s happy here, dead on the sand. Ingrid, I don’t trust you around young Brandon, so you’re sleeping on Carey’s side of my bed, and I will keep watch over Brandon in the hammock. Got your orders? Good, now let’s break. With any luck we’ll be plucky and bright by noon.”
____The party dissolved into states of sleep as the sunrise cleaved the hidden eastern horizon, giving the angled blaze of cyan to the morning dome above Rinn’s head. Rinn came to for a moment, and was soon caroled back to sleep by a throng of singing frigate birds on the foam-strewn surge of rocks beyond the beach and beneath his next dream.
Jarno’s kayak sat under a wild jade canopy, its shell rapping as the seedpods fell.