Toshiro Mifune Pays A Visit

He pulled his Subaru Forester into the driveway, put it in park and switched off the ignition. A pause. Then he gripped the steering wheel with both hands. Another pause. The muffled whine of a neighbor’s lawnmower disturbed the weighted silence. He sat still and upright, his clammy palms sticking slightly to the wheel. It was a driveway moment. That’s what Terry Gross calls it during PBS pledge drives. A driveway moment. When the news is so transfixing that you can’t get out of the car until the story cuts to the traffic. But it wasn’t Terry tethering him to his seat. Another bit of news, less produced and with zero cultural relevance, had, in this moment, in this West Hollywood driveway, anchored him so.

“Come in, come in,” said his doctor. “Thanks for taking the time to pop back. Did Kevin validate your parking? Well, be sure to give him your ticket on the way out. Listen, I got your test results back, and…say, are you thirsty? I have some coconut La Croix if you’re interested. I’m hooked. Had to lobby the hospital board to get this mini fridge to hold them. I told the board it was for skin samples. Let’s just keep that between us.

“Now, back to your chart,” said the doctor. “During your last visit, I examined that spot on your back. Spot isn’t exactly a technical term. Let’s call it a growth. As I recall, it bore a striking resemblance to Carson Daly in profile. That handsome asymmetry set off my doctor’s intuition, so I snipped off a bit of Carson’s nose and sent it to the lab. I was certain that the results would come back benign. How could Carson Daly bring anything but joy? Well, the results are in, and I am certain that it is, in fact, late-stage metastatic melanoma. Has quite the alliterative ring, doesn’t it? Metastatic melanoma. Poetics aside, I’m afraid it is both fatal and fast. By my math, you have roughly twelve hours to live.

“Now, I don’t want you to think of this as a death sentence,” said the doctor. “Let’s call it a high-speed opportunity. A chance to really live the life you’ve secretly suppressed, so long as no long-distant travel or skills-building is necessary. This is your time to be you. Catch a movie. Pick up that novel you kept putting off. Hell, throw a pot. Your options are endless. Just not your lifespan. Well, that about covers it. Wait, I have this brochure for you to take home. I suggest you give it a read. There are some swell illustrations that I believe should give you solace. And one last thing. You should know that delivering news like this isn’t easy on the messenger, who is me. You can imagine that it ruins the day. Now, are you sure I can’t send you home with a La Croix? Okay okay, have a pleasant rest of your life.”

He apologized to his doctor on the way out.

“Why do I always do that?” he thought as he sat in his Forester. “So deferential, so wilting, so eager to make myself invisible because I’m embarrassed by my existence. I’m the one with the twelve-hour clock ticking. Eleven hours thanks to the 405.” He wouldn’t miss that. For years, he heard utopian stories about self-driving cars and a future free of time wasted by travel. “Fuck you, Carson Daly,” he said to himself. “Life would have been so livable.” He glanced at the brochure laying on the passenger seat and left it.

It was time. A deep breath in, and on the exhale, he let go of the steering wheel, opened the door and stepped out. Walking up the driveway, he noticed an infant dandelion growing in the lawn and kept on towards the door. The doctor said nothing about weeding, and he followed that advice. A tryst might be good medicine. Even a trip to the waterpark. But not weeding. He slid his key into the front door lock and crossed the threshold.

His wife was laid out on the couch, her head against the armrest, legs scrunched up in a teepee. Her right foot dangled over the cushion, keeping time with the music on the Sonos. LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge. Back and forth it swayed like a pendulum in an old grandfather clock. He looked at his phone. Ten and three-quarters hours.

“Hun,” he said.

“Over here,” she called out. “You gotta see this video. There’re like twenty golden retrievers all jumping into some pool somewhere. They’re losing their brains! I might have peed a little.”

“Sounds like a scream. Say, honey, I was at the doctor’s office today, and…”

“Babe, can you be a prince and grab me a La Croix?” she asked. “I’ve laughed myself dry.

“Sure thing.”

He walked to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Leftover Thai. Half-n-half. Sad lettuce. “Where are the La Croix?” he grumbled. He found them in the last drawer, the meat drawer. He pulled one off a pack of hotdogs, rinsed it under the faucet and returned to the living room.

“You’re a lifesaver,” she said.

He was about to settle into his favorite chair, a knockoff Eames lounger they found at the Rose Bowl flea market, but he changed his mind. Seemed too relaxed for the situation. He sat down on the loveseat instead.

“So I went back to see the doctor today,” he said. “The biopsy results were in.”

“That spot that looks like Toshiro Mifune?” she asked.

“Like who?”

“Toshiro Mifune. Japan’s John Wayne. We watched Yojimbo together, don’t you remember?”

“No. And no, not Toshiro Mifune. The doctor said the spot is shaped like Carson Daly. And apparently it’s not a spot but a growth.”

“Carson Daly is a prick,” she said and sipped her La Croix.

“I don’t disagree, but that’s not the point,” he said. The lab report came back. And…can you put down the phone for a sec?

“Jeeze, so serious,” she said. “Okay. It’s down. Upside down even. You have my undying attention.”

“It is serious. The doctor said the spot, sorry, the growth is metastatic melanoma. Late-stage metastatic melanoma.”

His wife paused. He could see she was searching her internal Wikipedia for the article. He knew because her right eye flickered faintly, probably in unison with some brainwave function. Synapses blinking like fireflies. That’s what he liked to imagine at lease. Trillions of fireflies choreographed in a Boolean ballet — off, on, off, on. And on. And on.

“I can’t recall what a metastatic melanoma is,” she said at last. “It can’t be that bad, I’m sure. It’s so rhythmic. Me-ta-sta-tic me-la-no-ma. Could be Byron.”

“Nothing romantic about it I’m afraid. It’s at a point of no return, strangling me from the inside out. Outside in I should say. I don’t know what to say.”

“Oh, honey,” she said. “We’ll get through this. You’re a gladiator. A survivor. Remember when you caught mono? Laid you up for months. But did you lose faith? No. You persevered. You bounced back. And you atrophied. By the end your legs looked scrawnier than cotton candy cones without the cotton candy.”

“The doc said I have twelve hours of life left in me. That was an hour and a half ago. So ten hours and thirty minutes.”

Her right eye flicked on again. The dance of the fireflies. It reminded him of a story he heard on the radio about these immense swarms of fireflies in Thailand that, without direction or orchestration, synch up, turning vast tree groves into perfectly timed Christmas lights. A pair of scientists, husband and wife, captured a few bags full of them and set them loose them in their hotel room. Laying on the floor, they watched as the fireflies coupled up in duets of light. More found the rhythm, then clusters merged with other clusters until every last firefly was flashing to one beat. Emergence, they called it. From chaos to order. I couldn’t help wonder what the cleaning person thought as he swept up all the burned-out bugs the next morning. A real driveway moment.

 His wife was quiet for nearly a minute. In that time she sipper her La Croix twice and glanced at her phone once. Her eye never stopped moving.

“We should have a party,” she proclaimed.

“To celebrate my immanent death at the hand of the prick, Carson Daly?”

“Precisely,” she said, and the final syllable gave her a Cheshire grin. “We’ll, almost. It would be a celebration of your big achievement. Your lasting this long in life — I didn’t think you’d make it this far, truth be told. I am so proud of you, and so lucky to be your widow. Let me text the girls. I’m sure they’d love to see you this last time.”

Swinging her legs over the edge of the couch, she sprang up, phone in hand, and walked off to the kitchen. He followed her with his eyes. The tights she wore hugged her toned legs, and he could imagine every muscle underneath moving in unison. She had always had more physical intelligence than him, knew her body and how to move it through space with precision.

A few years back, she invited him to one of her hot yoga classes. He came prepared for heat, but walking into the studio was like stepping off a plane into Myanmar in August. There was weight to the air from too much humidity pumped into too confined a space. Every pore opened up and wept tears of sweat. Breathing was more like drinking an oxygenated stew. A nagging nausea came over him before the routine even began. First, they did standing postures. He wrapped his body up like a caduceus, hinged forward on one leg like a floppy T and slipped on the perspiration puddle forming at his feet. Then came the floor set. By this time, his disorientation overcame his modest coordination. When he should have lifted his right leg, the left arm leapt up. Instead of pulling his knees to his chest, he curled into a roly-poly ball. After a labored breathing exercise, he laid back in corpse pose, his arms and legs out to the side like a steamed gingerbread man. He closed his eyes, and a film of static lit up behind both lids. Slowly, the amorphous noise transformed into a defined scene. He was in a jungle. Myanmar probably. Dense foliage surrounded him, and he began hacking at the sinewy vines to create a path forward. But his machete was a Denny’s butter knife. All he could do was pull the vines down from their anchors in the trees. The vines coiled around his feet with every impotent whack of the butter knife. Soon, they had wrapped around his calves, and he could feel their tendrils anchoring to his body. Consumed with fear, he flailed and shrieked as the seemingly sentient vines climbed higher and higher and higher — to his waist, to his chest, around his arms, finally constricting his airway. Then he felt something new, his wife’s hands shaking him by the shoulders. Myanmar receded, and the studio came back into focus. She had a look of concern and embarrassment on her face. As the vision wore off, he rolled his head to the side and saw that the other yogis were also looking at him, concerned and embarrassed. While his alter body was being ingested by the jungle, his actual body had been spasming on his soaking mat and moaning in terror. On the way out, the teacher suggested he try yin next time. There was no next time.

He got up from the love seat and walked to the kitchen.

“Honey,” he said. “I think a party is too much. All we have to serve is leftovers and hotdogs. Besides, everyone will want to see my growth, get right up close for an inspection of Carson Daly or Toshiro Mifune or whoever’s face they see in it. And what are they going to say? ‘Geeze, how could something so small cause such a fuss?’ Or maybe they won’t say anything at all, and we’ll just stand around talking about the new season of The Crown. And then we’ll all go silent realizing that I will never know what happens next for poor Charles. Please, no party.”

“Fine,” she said. “Fine. I thought you’d like to go out with some gas. What would like to do then?”

The question stopped him. What indeed? He glanced at his phone and did some math. Getting close to ten hours give or take. At a loss, he paced around the kitchen, one hand tracing the outline of his jaw, tugging at the wispy ends of his beard. Perhaps a prostitute? It’s still early, but some professionals must work the day shift. Where are they, though? Sunset? Santa Monica? Christ, he’d probably run out of time and interest before finding someone. Someone should make that an app — Tinder for the terminal. He let the idea go. Maybe Palm Springs? If they gunned it, they could reach The Ace Hotel with enough time for a drink or two in the pool, some pancakes at King’s Highway and records in the room the rest of the night. Like old times. But by morning, I’d be a lifeless lump of luggage and cause a whole scene. No, better stay local.

“How about a museum?” he asked.

“Capital!” she said. “We can go up to the Huntington Library. It’s been forever.”

“Pasadena at this hour? I’d rather die.”

A pause.

“What about LACMA?” she asked. “We can walk there and skip traffic entirely.”

“I’ll grab my hat.”

It was an easy stroll down Fairfax, and they took their time. They made a stop at Canter’s for cookies and did more chewing than talking as they made their way. The kids call this part of Fairfax between Melrose and Beverly The Block, where you can wait all day for Supreme’s latest socks or duck into The Dime for a stiff drink and ‘90s hip-hop. He didn’t much mind their silence. He was in his head as usual, picking at recent conversations like bits of old wallpaper refusing to leave the comfort of their wall. Why had he apologized to the doctor? He wasn’t the one with a fatal growth on his back. Even on death’s door he couldn’t embraced life. “No wonder Toshiro Mifune is able to strike me down with a single blow,” he thought.

They cut left at 6th and walked to the museum’s outside installation called Levitated Mass — a massive boulder sitting astride a cement channel cut out of the earth. Entering at one side, they descended down until the ground leveled out and they were under the enormous rock. He used to get edgy underneath, fretting that shoddy construction or some engineer’s miscalculation would send the stone plummeting straight down on his head like a Wile E Coyote cartoon. Now, he almost longed for it. A far more romantic way to make an exit. Messier, sure. But the rock just sat there, immutable, and they strolled on and up to the other side.

Their first stop at the museum was always the Stark Bar. He ordered a Gibson and she a vodka Red Bull. He took a sip, handed her his skewered cocktail onions and glanced up at the televisions behind the bar. They were airing some kind of performance piece. An old, naked man stood in a black cube, surrounded by piles of cardboard boxes. With caricatured gestures and great grunts, he tried to piece together something like a chifforobe. His movements grew wilder and his noisemaking rose steadily until, reaching a crescendo of frustration, he tore the furniture apart and cast aside the pieces with manic animalism. Once all the planks and parts had been tossed asunder, he looked dead into the camera, dead into my eyes, and screamed. Then a pause, and he shuffled about the space, gathering all that he had thrown and began the cycle again. He watched the film for two more rotations. A curious clock. Then he returned to his Gibson.

“Honey, over here,” said his wife.

He turned and faced her. She had her phone out and was framing him for a photo.

“Give me happy,” she said like some pretentious photographer. “No, serious. No, timeless.”

He took another drink and set the glass down. Looking right into the camera, he wanted to scream. But he didn’t want to disturb the couple behind them while they shared a steak and a bottle of wine. Instead, he wiped his right thumb across his upper lip, then mirrored the movement across the bottom in his best Jean-Paul Belmondo from Breathless.

“Ha!” she laughed. “Forget my story, that’s going straight to the feed.”

He smiled, gave her a wink and finished off his Gibson in one long pull. Setting the glass back on the bar, he closed his eyes and hoped that they could somehow shift to a parallel dimension where cigarettes were still standard fixtures in bars. He kept them closed for a good ten seconds. When he opened them, no ashtray or pack of Parliament Lights appeared next to his still-frosted glass, and a hollow sensation formed in the core of his being like a balloon between his guts. He could feel the warmth of Toshiro Mifune again — the alcohol must have reached him and made him red in the face.

His wife nursed her drink, and by the time she finished he had talked himself into and out of another. So they settled up, slipped out of their stools and went in to buy their tickets.

They always tried to start in a different wing or walk in the opposite flow of the sightseers or skip their favorite pieces until the very end. This time, they made for the German Expressionists. It was a narrow, shallow hall filled with angular nightmares sketched and printed with the kind of vividness that makes you think the artists were working in the trenches at The Somme. He paused at a print by Otto Dix simply called Skull. And that’s what it was, a skull still being picked over by writhing clots of ravenous worms. It had a large tuff of hair for a crown and thin whiskers under a mostly devoured nose. Yet, because of the position of the jaw, he couldn’t help but think the skull was smiling. Maybe the worms tickled? Maybe the skull knows a secret? Either way, he smiled back and kept on.

He could feel the warmth of the Gibson running laps in his veins as they meandered through the Islamic art wing. Flowing calligraphy on thick tiles. Miniatures from Ferdowsi’s epic Book Of Kings. A round metal tray inlaid with word-like flourishes. He imagined the tray placed before important guests, overflowing with dried apricots, fresh pistachios still in their husk, sanak bread with goat-milk cheeses and piles of pickles. Empty of its offerings, the tray seemed stripped of its purpose, an animal alone in a zoo without a mate to seed its genetic prerogative.

The drink had touched his wife, so they found their way to the bathroom. It wasn’t the usual bathroom they used, and as he waited he realized they had entered a part of the museum they’d never explored. “Untouched territory,” he said to himself. He strolled down a corridor lined with photos of the museum’s construction. Little notecards on the wall detailed the development, from when they first broke ground to the grand opening.

At the end of the corridor, he passed through an arched doorway into a small rotunda. Around the center stood nine sculptures on black pillars in a ring — eight busts and one figure of a woman sitting like a buddha. Being the odd art out, that’s where he started. It was Gertrude Stein, according to the inscription. She looked both at peace and exhausted. Atlas of her age, he thought. Next to her was Charles Lindberg, but he didn’t linger. After him came Chaim Weizmann, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and Aldus Huxley, each noble in their own quiet way. Stopping then at James Joyce, he tried to look him square in the eyes, but the sculpture’s stare eluded him. Alienated even in metal. He moved on. At the final bust, he thought it looked like a sullen, dyspeptic Ulysses S. Grant, but the inscription read Walt Whitman. “Whitman?” he thought. “Where’s the vitality? The booming poetics born from the wild vegetation of a primordial America?” His vision of Whitman was of a man in his prime, equally prepared to fell a tree, jump a horse, harangue an astronomer or suck a sailor’s cock. This old Whitman looked resigned, nervous almost — not ready to become the uncut hair of graves. No, he thought, Whitman wouldn’t abandon his ideals in the face of something as unremarkable as old age. He looked again, scanning each detail for a clue to its meaning. Then a thought came to him — there’s no sound. The first original voice of the New World is rendered forever mute, his purpose just as lost as that Arabesque plater. He closed his eyes and wished he were in the Catskills, laying under a chestnut tree with a fistful of grass in his hand, where death brings life instead of eternal confinement. He kept them closed for a few seconds before opening them and seeing that he was still in the rotunda, encircled by the death masks.

“There you are,” said his wife from the doorway. “I thought you wandered off to see the Magritte, but you’ve been hiding out here with your new friends.”

“Old acquaintances,” he said. “Not much for conversation, I’m afraid. Hey, can we get out of here? I’ve misplaced my buzz.”

“Of course. It’s your special night.”

He looked at his phone. Six hours and fifteen minutes, thereabouts.

“Don’t you want to see the Magritte?” she asked.

“Nah. It’s not even a pipe.”

The walk back was uneventful. With the sun now set, the neighborhood came to life with neon and storefronts and apartments bleeding light. He preferred Los Angeles after dusk. The decay and iniquity was washed over in darkness, and only the healthy bits shined. It made the story that brings so many here more believable. Light and magic.

At home, his wife grabbed the leftovers, divided them evenly into bowls and set them in the microwave. The machine whirled to life like a music box and set the bowls spinning in a slow dance. I opened the top cabinet, took out a bottle of bourbon and fixed us old-fashioneds. We toasted like Germans, a hard stare into each other’s eyes and an exaggerated PROST!

“We don’t want seven years of bad sex,” she said.

He chuckled. He always chuckled. It was an expected part of the tradition. He privately thought that any bad sex from a toast came from following too many traditions, not breaking them. Conventions and erections don’t mix. But he always kept those troublesome thoughts to himself. Even now, with nothing left to lose, he couldn’t visualize what there was to gain. Too late for Cheers! or Kampai! or Skål! Too late for bondage or orgies or fifty-year-old French socialites. Too late to speak up.

“Dinner is served,” she announced.

They sat at the kitchen nook across from each other, sipping their drinks, waiting for the Thai to cool. His wife had turned on her Spotify, but he didn’t recognize the music. Something electronic, indistinct and perfect for the moment.

“Honey,” he said, breaking their silence. “I think we need to talk about something. Better to get it out of the way before we eat. It’s about my body. When the time finally comes, I’m not sure what to expect of it, whether I’ll spaz out in a death throw or expel all my fluids or just flip off like the Rumba at home base. I’d hate to give you a black eye or ruin the mattress. So I was thinking I might sleep in the bathtub. For dignity’s sake.”

“You want to talk about your oozing corpse before dinner?” she asked. “Baby, don’t overthink this. Death is as natural as a sneeze. Your body knows the steps. Just lean into it. You’re made of star stuff, remember? And you’ll return to the cosmos with loads of dignity.”

“When did everyone start leaning into things,” he wondered? Lay back had been his motto. Observe the action from outside the arena. How can you be an attentive note taker if your hands are tied up with grappling? To bruise or peruse, that is the question. And he had his answer, known it since adolescence. Which isn’t to say that the scraps of thoughts he had scribbled down in his head over the years stacked up to much. At least Joyce had the courtesy to set his loose to live on in the minds of college kids, if only for a fleeting semester. The names of my Dubliners will only be known by the dirt and the stars.

For the rest of dinner, they kept the conversation light. Chit-chat about episodes of the Cosmos reboot, construction along La Cienega that had been snarling traffic for weeks, music that he might want played at the memorial service. “Nothing especially poignant,” he said. He didn’t want the day to be a downer, especially since they decided to splurge on a caterer. Tacos over tears. Not that he expected a grand outpouring of emotion. His mom would probably cry, and his wife during the eulogy. But his ties to their friends were superficial. He was a moon orbiting around them, a secondary celestial body to their social solar system, something apart that, when the evenings went late, helped tug everyone towards the door like a receding tide.

After dinner, he did the dishes while his wife drew a bath. She said she was saving a special bath bomb for just such an occasion. When he finished in the kitchen and stepped into the bathroom, the tub was a swirling sea of color. Electric fuchsia, tangerine orange, turquois blue and highlighter yellow all circling each other like a Humble photograph of some gaseous galaxy lightyears from Los Angeles. The smell was sweet and floral like Persian rose cake, and slick on his skin as he dipped into the technicolor brew. His wife tip-toed in and did a little dance as her feet adjusted to the hot water. Comfortable at this stage, she eased down in a squat like a salary man waiting for the midnight bus back home. She let out a deep, satisfied sigh.

“What do you want to listen to?” she asked, still only half committed to the tub.

“How about the Ramones?”

She stuck her tongue out in protest.

“Fair enough. How about Elliott Smith’s Either/Or one last time?”

“I’d drowned myself if I have to hear that album again. Let me see…”

She scanned through her playlist and made a selection. Led Zeppelin IV. Their most listenable album, he thought, though he insisted she skip Black Dog. She settled fully into the bath by the time Rock and Roll wrapped up and leaned back against his chest. He rubbed her neck and shoulders through The Battle Of Evermore. Then they switched positions and she worked on his muscles while Stairway droned on. It was a song he once attempted to learn on guitar. For weeks he fumbled with the fingering of the opening bars, following along with a tablature book from Sam Goody. On the twenty-first day of failed noodling, he threw the book away and went back to punch out punk tracks as fast as he could play, which was never fast enough. This was the start of his scorn for virtuosos with all their fucking dexterity and discipline.

By the time Going To California came on, she had moved her hands down his back to where Toshiro Mifune had moved in. He could feel her tracing Mifune’s outline with her fingers, round and around until the growth radiated heat. She leaned forward for what he thought was a closer look, but she brought her lips to the mass for a gentle, long kiss. Her lips parted and the tip of her tongue drew one last circle around the oblong mass. She drew her head back up and curled her body around his in a tight hug.

“You’re lucky you know,” she said softly in his ear. “You know your fate, how it’s all going to shake out. I’ll be left here in the dark about my own…transition. A rock could fall on my head or I could choke on some leftover curry or anything. Maybe a Jared Leto-shaped growth will sprout up from within me like a mushroom and I’ll have half-a-day’s time to come to terms. Do you think I’ll have someone to draw a bath for me, to massage my expiring muscles and kiss Jared Leto goodbye?”

He found her hand in the water and held it tight through the end of When The Levee Breaks. The bath had grown tepid, so they pulled the drain plug, toweled off and headed to bed. With the lights out, they made love one last time, languid and tender, barely moving at times, simply experiencing each other’s weight and gravity until, like a rose closing on itself at dusk, they came to their end.

She fell asleep first. He knew by the change in her breathing, deep and coarse with the faintest, cutest little snore. One last glance at his phone told him he had a couple hours left. Though drowsy, sleep seemed like a waste. There was plenty of living he could still muster with the moments left on the ledger. Albums he could play one last time. Perhaps page through Lyrical Ballads and leave with Wordsworth in his head. He could even make a last batch of cookies, a little so sorry gift for his wife who might be throwing out their mattress in the morning. But thinking about it only made him more tired. Getting up, getting dressed, creaming butter and sugar — his motivation disappeared like the bath water. He accepted that he didn’t want to do, but to be done. He just didn’t want it to be here in West Hollywood with scraps of thoughts stuck inside him, never to be born into reality. He closed his eyes and hoped that he would open them again and be far, far away. Away from this bed, this failing body, this walled-off mind. He pressed his lids tighter and tighter until he could feel his facial muscles ache from the strain. Bright flashes of light streaked across the darkness, then everything became nothing.

When he opened his eyes, he was in an unfamiliar bed. The space was small and pointed like the tip of a fountain pen. The walls were trimmed in teak wood with brass fixtures. A salted scent lingered in the air, and he sensed his body was rising and falling to an irregular rhythm. He was on a boat, a sailboat most likely from the layout of the birth. It reminded him of a sailboat his father once owned, a jalopy by all practical measures but a boat nonetheless. This ship, however, looked well-appointed and stately inside. A real cruiser, he thought.

He heard a knock overhead. The forward hatch opened up and a spotlight of daylight streamed into the room, making him squint. He could make out a woman’s head hoovering above. She must have been in her early forties by the shocks of gray in her chestnut hair, which was tied up in an Hermès scarf. She smiled.

“You’re needed topside,” she said. “We’ve hit a slight snag.”

She closed the hatch, and the berth grew darker again. “Who is she?” he wondered. “And where are we?” He wouldn’t find answers below, so he stood up, walked through the unfamiliar cabin and up the companionway. The brightness was almost unbearable, so he made a visor with his hand and took in the scene with eyes half closed. The world around him looked distorted and askew. The sky was an oversaturated azure blue, scattered with immense clouds billowing and floating by in double time. He had never seen clouds act this way, like the record player of time switched from 45 to 78. Turning towards the front hatch, he looked for the woman with the Hermès scarf, but she wasn’t there. The bow of the boat heaved up with the oncoming swell and, as the crest past, thrust down into the ocean, spitting a fine spray as proof of its mastery over the sea. Scanning the horizon, he saw no land, only the endless expanse of ocean undulating all around.

“Glad to see you’re alive,” came a voice from behind.

He turned and sighted her. She was in the cockpit, sitting on a teak plank, steering a wheel that could have stood nearly her height. She wore high-waisted jeans, a white and blue striped shirt, no shoes and her scarf. Effortless and elegant in equal measures. She glanced at her compass and turned the wheel a few degrees starboard.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“On vacation, silly.”

Hardly an answer.

“Vacation where?” he pressed.

“Does it really matter where if you’re having a good time? Or are you going to ask me next if you’re having a good time?” She winked and looked back down at the compass to confirm her course correction.

“Fine, we’re on vacation having fun someplace, and where doesn’t matter. But what about who? Who are you?”

She looked at him and said nothing. Her eyes were the color of red wine held up to a lightbulb, flecked with flashes of gold around the edges.

“Who I am matters even less than where we are,” she said. “Out here, we get to be exactly who we want. I am I, you are you, the sea is the sea and the ship is the ship. Beyond that, meaning loses meaning. Words won’t help you here, friend.”

Wherever here is, he thought. The rolling ocean made it difficult to stand, let alone ponder meaninglessness. Rather than tilt at the immoveable force, he accepted what he could not and held fast to what he could — I am I, she is she, here is here, then was then.

“Can I ask just one more question?” he said.

“Can I stop you?” she asked, looking past him to the course ahead.

“What’s all this about a snag?”

This time she looked at him and smiled.

“Nothing major,” she said. You don’t need to bail out the bilge or anything so romantic. We caught a gust of wind a few miles back, and the jib sheet got tangled in the spreader.

She pointed to a space above his head. He turned and looked up the mast to the spars and saw the guilty bit of rope knotted around itself.

“I need to you climb up and untangle that mess,” she said.

“Now? Here? That’s got to be thirty feet up, and we’re not exactly on placid waters.”

He looked up again and felt a hole open in his stomach swallowing all of his strength.

“Well I can’t go up there,” she said. “I’m busy steering us. That’s my job. Yours is to fix that sheet.”

“Do we have a boatswain’s chair at least?”

“Left it at port,” she said, as though it were some disposable luxury like canned peaches. “There are steps on the mast. You know how to climb, don’t you?”

“Stairwells, sure,” he thought. “A ladder while painting, yes. But a mast in a swell as it thrusts and falls like a slow-motion sewing needle?” The hole inside him opened into a chasm, then a canyon. He couldn’t just slink down into the cabin and hide in the V-berth for the rest of the vacation, however long that might be. He couldn’t look into her wine-colored eyes and say screw the jib. This was his job.

Ducking under the boom, he climbed onto the deck under the mast and looked up. It stood like a slender Greek column supporting the sky. He tried counting the rungs that ran up the sides but lost count, and lost some of his fragile edge. The sea seemed to sniff out his fear like a shark drawn to blood, and it began bullying him with an ever deeper, more irregular swell that made standing all but impossible. He hugged the mast for support.

“I know you have it in you,” she shouted over the roiling noise. “But you have to do it now. Now!”

Her words washed away enough of the daze for him to, by reflex not courage, grab the first rung and start his ascent. The second step came easier, then the third and the fourth.

“You’re a natural!” she hollered with a laugh. “A regular Starbuck!”

By the tenth step, the canyon of fear inside collapsed back down to a mere hole — still real but more manageable. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. He found a rhythm now, his arms and legs working in unison, full of strength and confidence. Convinced he couldn’t be far off now, he looked up. The spreader seemed just as far off as when he was standing safely on the deck. A feverish terror washed over him. Sweat seeped from his under his arms, and he could feel his hands starting to slip as they were betrayed by the moisture gathering in his palms. He was frozen, unable to continue, incapable of going back. He had become an absurd koala bear trapped on the trunk of a eucalyptus tree with a dingo circling the base and a python coiled in the canopy. All he could do was cling.

“Looks like you got a little stuck,” she yelled over the tumult of the sea. “I understand, I do. I really do. Just remember you are your own story. It’s your story written with your words — you even wrote the dictionary. Every last word, they’re all yours, each a miniature metaphor for an experience you lived or fantasized or saw through someone else’s eyes. You have the words to change this story. You just have to use them!”

He felt his grip would slip at any minute. There’s no way he’d survive the fall, at least not intact. His bones began turning to aspic, and it was becoming harder to support his own weight as his legs lost their structure. He closed his eyes as tight as he could and wished that we were anywhere else but this vacation, on this boat, inside this body.

“Change the words,” she said.

Her voice came like a breeze. She could have been hoovering right behind him, lips close to his ear, speaking directly into his mind. The words landed like a fist of food pellets tossed on a koi pond, nourishing his resolve. Bones that had become jelly took back their sturdy form, his arms and legs felt vital again and he opened his eyes. The horizon stretched on in an endless expanse of lapis lazuli, its sameness uninterrupted, its beauty undisturbed.

Never looking up, he started climbing again. One rung, then another, and another. With each new height, the horizon stretched out to reveal more uniformity of color and structure.

“You found your bearings,” she said into his mind. “Don’t look, but you’re almost there. It’s right in reach. You’ll be back on deck before you know it. We can have canned peaches to celebrate. And you can tell me a story, a new story with new words in your new dictionary.”

It was the wind again speaking to him, a different him, a him setting fire to the ragged scraps of paper stacked up in his mind, that heap of dead fictions he once grasped at as truths. He climbed. Thirty one, thirty two, thirty three. One rung and then another. Up and up and up and up.