*

To fight the savage tribe he fashioned spears. He painted all his body and his face with dyes obtained from various petals and fruits. He ran (against the wind), and quite before he'd made it to the shoreline, he began to see, between the spindly tree trunks and the wispy foliage and the clusters of great hanging vines, a ship. Its sails puffed mightily. "Good Lord it's here!" He ran down to the water, waded in and swam a little distance out to meet a small boat with two sailors, each unknown to him (although familiar in that they were sailors), and he uttered, upon entering that small boat, a few words strung together in, apparently, a kind of order, for they rowed him out without a snag, although on board that ship he did collapse. The voyage home passed safely (or so he was told); returning home was jubilant; a high-up job (he would discover this) awaited him, the life that followed good and long, his life in that large city prosperous: a house that had a garden next to other houses. All had gardens. Pretty fences. In no time at all a letter came. "An interview?" The island life. "With me?" The shipwrecked state of mind. Months passed. Another letter came. "Just one short interview?" More months (alas, he could not be of help). "I'm terribly sorry, I—" (He'd dashed off his refusal just as hastily as he could and posted it with much regret.) You see, he had no recollection, even in his later life (when men are oftentimes reminded, in a quiet corner, sipping from a ruby-tinted snifter, looking out through moonlit windowpanes), of being helped into the boat. No recollection of the sailors or exactly of those few words uttered, nor of his awakening beneath the headlight of a ship's physician (see, a terrible fever got a hold of him, and he was told that he had nearly died on board that ship, and that, without the little pouch of horn-shaped, dried-up contents—so the story went—that hung around his neck, he would have never lasted through that perilous journey home). In truth, his only recollections of that time were of a kind of foliage that creeps in; of cries throughout the middle of the night; of fluttering of flapping plumage; of the slithering of incandescent snakes; of women, nipples each a color of a plum skin stretched across the tips of long dark breasts; of stones cut into pretty good-sized spear tips; of the chattering of parakeets; of nipples hard and shriveled-looking; of the scampering of mice that's often heard at night; and of the look on water of a ship that sits as if to wait for as long as it must wait.

This man would wander, nothing more, as if just walking in a dream about a shoreline that, around each sharply winding curve, may hold in store a boat that's washed up on the sand, with, in the boat, a little basket and inside the basket underneath a linen cloth, a fluffy hen. He walked, though legs grew tired and eyes grew tired, until he had become too weak from walking. He lay in the sand. He stayed there for the night. This man. The times when he had strength enough to use a spear for food had long since passed; these days he used the spears to make a kind of wall surrounding him instead: a square the size that could accommodate the body of a man, and with the largest nearby leaves extended over them he made his roof. And this, like many others, he supposed, was, simply put, the kind of home that's fashioned out of what's convenient, tied together with some vines found nearby too. And yes, it happened in that very room (of course it's meager, but it's still a room) that he would sleep and dream of things that seemed so very real (in waking life his faith in what awaited him around each curve had faded; whereas there within the spears and leaves, the sights were true-to-life, more vivid, more believable). The boats were truly there; the baskets truly there; the linen cloths had stitched-in periods between initials; and the hens said, "Please, sir, give my egg back.") Then, to take this story deeper (into where eventually it needs so desperately to go), it happened that on these same nights when, after stepping in the boat to find his oars right where he'd left them, he would paddle, slowly, by the grayglow of a greenish-looking moonshape, far away from any baskets left on shore, out toward a ship that looked so dry and steady, and so strong.

There rose the rustlings of the breezes on the leaves, the whistling through the spears, the sound within the shaky structure he had built—all sounds suggestive of the greatest spiral of all spirals—of the waves against the shore, the buzzing of those biting little bastards all about, the shifting of his body on the itchy nighttime sand…until a ladder made of glow worms strung together had been lowered, and he'd climbed with little effort up until he'd gone aboard where time would pass so furtively until he had awakened in a bed, where, looking over, he would find a woman, barely visible, if not for moonlight silvering the lines and contours of the face and body. He'd awaken, spears and leaves a heap on top of him. He'd swear he hadn't really seen that woman, although nothing ever smelled as sweetly of a body bathed in lavender (besides there was that silver outline of her face and body still apparent on the trees and on the waves and even on his hand extended, every time the moon emerged from back behind the shifting, autumn clouds). He'd push up on the leaves, look out at colors of the dawn that would no doubt—yes, even in these most extravagant of times—have been considered garish by most people he could think of who lived anywhere he'd ever lived.