which rose like a dry wind from the shifting plates of the immense and mysterious land.
Slightly to the east of the sea is a small, well-manicured cemetery – a rectangle of earth no more than a few hundred yards from the broad beach and Highway 1 and the first exit into the town of Cayucos. Protected from the sea by large grassy dunes and the freeway running north and south, as well as a slight incline toward the eastern hills, its silent residents, though apparently within dangerously close proximity – and with an unobstructed view – of the unrelenting waves, have never had anything to fear from the ocean waters, and hence lay peacefully, one would hope, with nothing to fear from the elements.
Predictably the days are foggy and cool, but on this day the late afternoon sun shone brightly and the still air gave off fragrances of licorice, eucalyptus and rosemary. Hector dragged his paraphernalia to a certain plot and sat down, facing the sun, and cast an approving eye upon the gravestones.
To the rollicking insanity of Cocktails for Two, he popped open the first beer of the day, with his whiskey chaser, and watched the white foam roil over his fingers as he saluted in military fashion, his friend, Death, and brought the taste to his lips. He turned up the music, took a long draw, and only then looked upon the stone before him. Scrawled recklessly, with a black permanent marker, were the words:
What’s Her Name
Wife & Liar
Good Riddance
“Anybody home?” he muttered in a gravelly voice, and then broke into hysterical laughter. “What’s that you say?” he answered himself, laughing with such violence that he seriously began to question his sanity. He tapped the stone with his thick knuckles as one would knock on a door.
“Hey!” he shouted, “I’m talking to you!” The whiskey burned pleasantly throughout his body and a golden light shone through his half-closed eyelids, as he slid to the ground beside the grave, stretching himself to his full height and finishing the bottle. While he dozed, a translucent half-moon climbed over the eastern hills and the sun at last disappeared in a pool of color on the ocean’s horizon. After some time the calm waters sparkled in the faint moonlight. In the distance a fog bank was forming and slowly beginning to creep toward shore like a phantom.
“All alone, it appears,” he mumbled sarcastically, staggering to his feet. As he left the cemetery, Morro Rock was being consumed by the fog – the view slowly vanishing in the spectral dark. Hector, blind drunk, saw nothing.
These ‘parties’ had gone on for some time and he had begun to look forward to each Saturday with a sense of morbid glee. On the following Sunday morning, as he sat reading the sports page, his sister, Martha, as yet unaware of the extremity of his madness, confronted him for the first time.
“You’re only keeping the sadness alive!” she said, clearly frustrated. He jumped to his feet and turned to face her, his intense face flushed with conflicting emotions, overcome by a murderous rage. He had predicted and dreaded her participation in this, his solitary fever.
“Damn this world!” he cried, biting off the words like a man spitting from his mouth the worm in the apple. “I’m holding onto her in the only way I can – through hate!” And he banged his fists upon the table, turning toward the window and looking out upon the gray fog-enshrouded sea. “Because–God help me–I still love her!” He clinched his fists and held them in front of him, trembling, as a man holding for too long a great weight. Then he turned like an automaton and marched out the door, and kept walking, all the way through town, to the dunes and the faithful sea. But he would inevitably end up at the cemetery, ruminating on a death that had yet to happen. These stolen moments at the edge of the immense waters somehow helped to put his recent strange behavior into perspective.
The salty sea air and the pulse of the sea’s great mystery soothed his nerves. He sat down beside a patch of sharp high grasses and listened. No more thinking, he thought with just enough intensity to make himself believe he was in control. Just listen . . . His thoughts poured out in a mad rush. The more he tried to still them the more complex and stubborn they became, as if intent on writing a novel. They went something like this:
Since we have separated all things in our hearts, words have replaced song, each syllable asking why existence? Why anything at all? And never enough words to touch something real or hear the marvelous silence where music begins, as if all things have simply fallen through nothing, while we search desperately for a place to stand. Our intelligence speaks in fragments of a world reaching forever toward perfection along the nameless road of desires, until life seems illusory, dark, lost in the confused interstices of the veiled heart. Lost! Lost! My son, so much the reflection of his mother, is a mirror to my shame, my illusions, my endless stupidity. . . I have transubstantiated her living ghost in stone, making of her life a greater death! And I celebrate her! I celebrate us all!
Although Hector would indeed return to the cemetery for another graveyard binge, Martha’s point had hit home. However, he refused to investigate the unpleasant sensations her ‘truth’ had made. It simply fueled his rage, and focused the dark side of his nature. He wasn’t ready for these kinds of thoughts. Later, however, he was sad with guilt, and in trying to allay this feeling he found himself observing cruel nature – the voracious illusion of beauty and time, time’s bastard children eating one another. In spite of his bitterness, he marveled at the mystery behind creation. And in spite of everything life had taught him, he felt a core benevolence, something divine struggling within things with a creative impulse in which love played the central role, the sad redeemer.
He recalled how he had hefted the stone to the foot of his future grave, and, after making sure he was alone, and with a deep sigh, took a long, satisfying piss on the cool, smooth marble. “You’ll set better now,” he’d laughed, somewhat nervously.
Martha sat on her bed, thinking. Her life had been one of reflection, but now there was an urgency that threatened to overwhelm them; her love, her dreams. She wanted to know what Hector planned to tell the boy when the time came. But most of all she wanted to ease the pain of her sad brother and bring him closer to his son. She had more than once broached the subject with him and received only silence. But the situation was impossible! Since the war he had closed off to life completely, the years piling up like snowfall over a grave. She knew how hard it must have been to allow that unconscionable woman into his heart. Only to have it end like this! But something had to be done! Hector had to be awakened to the love for which he was still responsible. The morning of their recent confrontation was the worst day of her life. For on that day she realized the depths of his feelings and the dangers implicit within them.
The awful truth stood starkly against the day: a headstone for a nonexistent grave, and her lost brother sitting before it – a grim devotee. The town wrote him off as unhinged. Between her sorrow and shame Martha’s efforts were focused on bringing father and son together.
David was beginning to show signs of vague and fearful understanding, for, like every child, he loved his distant and mournful father. Small children know more than they can express – but they know . . . And the knowing, often, as time’s brutality marches forward, becomes a bewildering, hurtful thing...
“You have to get over it, brother.” She cast a soulful, earnest gaze upon him, determined to breach the wall that separated him from himself; then she looked away toward the window, her eyes moist. Hector stood at the other end of the room. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he lowered himself to the floor.
“When I came back from that damn jungle,” he said, as if utterly weary of life. His voice sounded strange in the silent room. Like a cry from deep within a cave, distant and faint in its futility. “When I left there,” he continued with a sigh, “I knew I would
