Inside the Surface

I awoke with my feet in the lake, the mud tickling my toes, as I do most mornings. I clambered into my skiff and set out across the water. It is a nearly daily ritual in which I cast useless or distracting objects, ideas which I find frightening, and substances which appear dangerous or attractive, into these depths. I often dream or imagine that they have, in the atemporal depths, evolved in time into more frightening phenomena. This morning, I set out on the waters to find them and put an end to them; my wife waves to me from the shore, where she sits beneath a sycamore, eats a peach, and sings to me. I toss a weighted net through the patina of the lake, over which the centuries have skated without leaving traces.

The shards of the lake’s surface flutter as they tumble beyond the refracted rays of the rising sun into the aphotic zone. Whatever protection that veneer might have provided me is now gone. Fantasies about the scent of my mother-in-law’s lingerie, memories of the body of my childhood cat Mephisto, found nine days gone under the house, my past life as a clerk, flashbacks of the half-buried megaliths to which we children were strapped for three days and nights at the turning points of the year, in order to awaken our pineal glands—all of these, along with shattered sundials, broken compasses, the pips from discarded dice, fragments of prisms, shredded maps and travel guides, were hidden beneath its surface and race towards me. I have heard them in my dreams; they sound like a coin on dry ice, like toes being cracked, like a fragment of the basement’s ceiling falling to the floor.

Dozing as my skiff drifts, I dream that I cut out my very tongue and hands, that I cast them to the bottom of the lake that they may no longer tell lies, but find that the world goes on around me despite this, unfolding in waves. Bacchus has joined my wife on the shore, and both have grape leaves in their hair. She hands him her half-eaten peach. These rocks surrounding me date back to the Miocene, and their fossils—the hell pig, the bone crusher, the terror bird, the nanosiren—shake the dust off their bones and stand before me in mute testimony. A portly man in a dinner jacket, gripping the body of an Archaeopteryx in his right hand and a walking stick in his left, strides across the waters of the lake to the shore. Bacchus laughs as the mortal flails him with his extinct bird, stopping only when a Cyprinus carpio noisily suckles the edge of my skiff. His assailant has vanished, but Bacchus is still there, his bare white buttocks flashing in the sun as he bagpipes my wife.

I work the oars, to get close enough to watch, but for every stroke, I move further and further from the shore until they are invisible. I pull up the plankton trap I had been hauling, and it is full of kewpie dolls, who fade like dew in the sunlight.

My skiff is frozen on the waters, which have become a plain of broken slate. I walk on tiptoe to the shore, where my wife, Bacchus feeding her grapes, hands me a detumescent wineskin and pushes me back into the lake. I sink to the bottom, the sun light fading as the currents pull me downward.