“I missed you,” he murmured, slurred, unsure of English, as well he might be, having been in my stomach a moment previously. Liar, I thought.
“I’ve been so lonely,” Milo sighed. “I hate it here. Can’t we go home?”
“Yes, of course. Tomorrow.” He was not listening to her. The sailor pulled at her frumpy nightgown, pulling her greyish, threadbare underthings away, pulling his sex from his crisp white trousers, clung with silvery dream-glue. She moaned a little, frightened, half-asleep yet.
“It’s so strange,” he gasped as he thrust awkwardly into her, with all the grace of an elephant falling upon a hapless antelope. “I was in the desert just a moment ago. Everything smelled like oil and sand. There were
men on a raft; they shot at us, and all around them the sea was angry, blue and green, phosphorescent with spilled fuel and algae. It glowed, and the men’s faces were so hollow.”
Milo began to cry silently. Her body lurched with his motion.
“We shot back, we had to. I pulled their bodies out of the glowing water.” He started to laugh roughly, pushing faster against her. “And it was so weird, their skin just came off in my hands, like a coat. So soft, like they were made of nothing, with nothing inside, and all we pulled out was skin and blood, no men at all.”
“Don’t laugh, it scares me,” whispered Milo.
Her husband put his hands against her ears as if to blot out the sound of his laughter, which spiraled up and higher and further and faster, until water came from his mouth and his hands, water pouring into her, the salt-sea scouring her, shells and fish and sand and blood splashing out of him, into her ears, into her womb, into her mouth. She spluttered, coughed—he pushed the sea through her, and her lips became as blue as the waves, her hair streamed like kelp, his fingers left purple anemones on her ribs.
“Aren’t you happy I’m back? Why don’t you kiss me? Don’t you love me?”
And he kissed her, over and over, wet, salty smacks in the dark, and above the sound of them I could hear Rafu crying, huddled like discarded furniture against the concrete wall.
YOU CAN’T LOVE MEAT
The dream-vomit sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting for someone to serve him tea. Milo lay broken by him, her face swollen, water dribbling from her mouth.
“Your name is Kabu. Akakabu,” he said slowly to me. A child might well know its father. “Is my name Lieutenant?”
“No.” I walked out of the shadow of the American television stand and sat on my haunches next to him. “Your name is Gabriel Salas, but you’re not him, not really.”
“No, I know that. If I were Gabriel Salas I would still be in the desert, and the sea would be glowing, and I would be able to see cities in the distance, full of crumbling and canny birds.”
“You’re a dream. Do you understand that?”
“Whose dream?”
“Your wife’s. Look at what she dreams you will do to her, and what you have done in her dreaming.”
The dream-sailor looked down at his wife. His expression was blank. “I loved her.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t love her anymore. You can’t love meat.”
“That’s your business.”
“What do I do now, Akakabu?”
“This is the Paradise of the Pure Land. You might start with Right Thought. This is also Yokosuka. You might start with burying your wife and lighting incense for her.”
“That does not sound like something I would do. Instead, I am hungry.”
“You are hungry because you came out of me, and I am always hungry.”
“I am going to the city, then. To eat things I like.”
“What sort of things do you like?”
Lieutenant Gabriel Salas cocked his head thoughtfully to one side. He picked up his officer’s cap and put it on. “Peacocks. Butterflies. Black sugar. Right Thought.”