An Endless Hunger [SAMPLE]

III

The memory of Anna's taste and smell and wildness seared my insides. These distant memories always came at the last minute, before daybreak, only to disperse and become unattainable as the day's nightmares replaced her mischievous smile. I looked forward to the time right before sunrise, when I looked up into nothingness. I yearned to find myself marooned in some imaginary place where everything was possible and I could lie motionless in the expanse of Anna's loving arms. My breathing came in short gasps as that glorious orb rose above the trees and the buildings, illuminating the waking world—a world that, for countless years, I had only seen in the blue of night. I thought of her, my Anna, before sinking into the moist patch of earth that accepted me. Indigo shadows danced beyond the promenades. As my lids closed, the twisted world faded. My mind, filled with a thousand screams and lamentations, knew no sleep.

⁂

I was a sailor, marinero, just off the spice ships that docked along the island coast. I had left my country the day of my mother's death. She was buried in a borrowed dress, her stiff fingers clutching a wooden rosary. I should have killed him, the priest, God's servant who raped her, but I was a coward. Long months of watered rum, picked fish and the stench of salt tied her memory into a knot at the pit of my belly. The sea and those leathery, cracked faces had hardened my will. I had become a man, or so I thought.

When my wobbly sea legs stepped into the taverna, I was seduced by the whirlwind of a worn red skirt and sparkling laughter. Anna! She ignited life in every pair of rum-reddened, sleepless eyes. Soft and luxuriant, her body carried with it the knowledge of Man's short and most vulnerable eternity.

She was a whore in the most beautiful sense of the word. Anna's every move provoked desire. She loved all and accepted all, carried them from that bug-infested bed to a place where their spirit could climb, soar and finally rest upon her loving breast. She was the sun itself, and I the moth seeking to end my days in her radiance.

I recalled vividly the first time my hands wrapped around her slender waist. I inhaled her spicy island skin like a starved man, quaffing deep until the ocean was a distant memory. Along the length of her glorious curves I found my home and in her pleasured cries—my death. As surely as a sailor lured by the fabled sirens, I drowned in Anna's liquid grave of love.

⁂

I lay awake soaked in my own blood—others' blood-as my eyes cried their secret guilt and my hands clawed the earth in anger. I drowned beneath the earth each day, suffocating without choice, with the knowledge that I would awaken yet again to repeat the routine of hundreds of nights past. I could not rest. I would not die. I could not stop my mind from thinking, or my soul from burning. Eternity was my punishment, and every night I cursed God out loud. No one heard.

Sometimes I thought I heard the Earth, or things stirring in the earth. It terrified me. My body became excruciatingly frigid as I returned to death. I was a bloated corpse—rotting. I questioned! I questioned everything, and had no answers. I had tried to rationalize my existence. I had gone to great lengths to educate myself, to seek comfort in philosophy, in poetry, in cynicism, but I had found nothing that could provide me with even a minute's peace.

Yes, I spoke Latin and Hebrew and at least a dozen other languages. I could quote a thousand visionaries of our time. I was able to recite, without error, the Canterbury Tales and the Iliad. I played Beethoven, Vivaldi, Chopin and Smetana as if it were my own music. I had attempted to paint like the great Impressionists and Romantics. I collected and studied original works by Rodin, Edison, Braque, Rousseau, Bosch, Pirandello, and many others including Goya, Dali and Confucius.

I had met many of these prolific people. I had laughed and pretended to share wine with them. I listened closely, hanging on each and every word that came from their prolific mouths, hoping for that miracle called inspiration, that divine something which forms at the pit of your stomach, and then rises into your chest with such great feeling that you can hardly breathe. I tried to embrace, from the very beginning, the flair of the times. I socialized with both the rich and the poor and they taught me nothing. These interactions only served to augment the repugnance I felt towards Man.

I lived through times of peace, of war, of sickness, and death. I saw. I heard. I learned nothing! Nothing that could quench my pain. Nothing that could reverse my spiritual decay. Nothing was, is, will be all there is. I had seen women who looked like animals and known animal women. I had heard men speak who you would swear sounded like horses. I had met dog people who barked at others and butterfly children who soared above the noise. Then there were the larvae, those that ate each other until there were no more flies. Occasionally, I experienced earthly brilliance. I passionately envied those who blinded me and made my eyes bleed like fountains. In those rare moments I recoiled back into my grotto sick with envy, yet burning inside, as if stung by a million morning suns.

I was wretched, and in my wretchedness I was needy. All my earthly possessions, as if they mattered, were stockpiled in my subterranean hole. Beauty both eased and intensified my pain and I needed it so that I could feel something, or imagine that I could. I preferred some dismal scrap of feeling, whether grief or warmth or envy, over nothing. Nothing, being the furthest thing from everything, meant madness—something that I had vowed never to succumb to.

The few mementos that had belonged to the loves of my life no longer existed. I imagined these tokens buried at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, undisturbed in their watery graves. It was a lie, of course, but it fit my sense of the dramatic. It was very possible that I had crushed the things dear to me in a senseless fit of rage.

The day went by sluggishly, and my dreams dragged out maliciously, like weeds. I dreamed of the city, of Anna, and the homeless girl bubbling in the acid bath. I saw the nimble fingers gliding along the clavichord. Juliet walked off her pedestal in a flash of shocking blue. As my golden women condemned me, I remembered Shakespeare. One fire burns out another's burning; One pain is lessen'd by another's anguish.

In the midst of my dream, I awoke, screaming.

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