In Compliance With the Existence of Pleasures

            His skull was propped over the steaming pot. Marsha had given him the herbs and warned of “thin blood,” but at this point he couldn’t be bothered with it. He was swallowing heavy gulps of nettle and sage, thyme and elderberry, thick swallows down to what he imagined were damaged hives in his chest. It can’t matter. To breathe, so much more the matter. To once again breathe without unique incident - more important, more urgent than this surging froth of a question: am I hurting myself?

            He pulled up, yanked the towel back off his head and looked at the counter like a sweating madman. He reached for the jar of hyssop, unscrewed it, pinched indiscriminate amounts into the pot, flicked it and reached for the pouch of coltsfoot.  He scooped a handful and dumped. Effortlessly, he repositioned the towel and bent back in.

            If he opened his eyes at all it was only a flash: a hot bitter instant in which the black, boiling liquid beneath him seemed to whisper hissy-fit commands; the steam singeing his lips and gums. In the darkness scenes from the song he was writing materialized: an unkempt lawn leading toward the desolate sea-house, the back porch stairs caved in, a hanging net of buoys amidst barnacle art, the fragments of pulled shades fluttering in the breeze upstairs. The narrator, a child having a dream, looked down at a pillowcase full of clear glass bottles. She pulled one out. Inside, a grasshopper. She put the bottle in the grass, the waves sizzling to her left. Watching the grasshopper flit about, only the clear wall keeping it from leaping into the air, she imagined what confusion was in the body of a grasshopper. Turning to look at her own body, she focused on the legs and gave in to the possibility that they were planting themselves in that very spot.

            He lifted his head, coughed a yellowing film into the towel; each attempt at a breath felt like a presentation. Even as the scenes from the song vanished and emerged, they were often immediately affixed to another sensation: the hard, intuitive sense that intelligence was an attic in which only he belonged, a familiar negativity with the power to dislocate somehow, or so it felt, his mind from the earth.

            The kitchen around him bathed in a frozen paste.  A cold weight locked along his back. The hot mixture brought perspiration sliding down from the disheveled hair across the long slope of the nose, the shapeless cheekbones, into the nostrils and mouth.  The hung lips motionless as islands while damp air gathered in the cavities and seeped into the lungs like a child’s spoonful of hot mud.

            Gasping, he pulled up again, fingered through the jars and pouches until he located the eucalyptus. He emptied the entire sack into the mixture. For a moment he looked around the room wildly. The appliances would have infuriated him if he’d been able to breathe. He went back down in a frantic lurch. The need for air pulled his face closer and closer to the boiling tonic as though to touch it might finally open him.

            Again, eyes closed, the wet heat and again visions from the song. Damp brick sidewalks at night walking with Leonard, the wet peels of their shoes clopping away from the center of town toward the silent harbor with the power plant lights unblinking up the building’s tower.  She heard him say “what do you think you would do if you found a dead body?” He still didn’t know if he agreed with the narrator’s reaction: a vacant compassion that, though it appeared available to the perpetual ramifications of what that question might imply, was really just excited to be near Leonard again.

            Having seen nothing but dark, pulsing water, they circled around back toward the town with its warped, brick streets and history of witchcraft.  The narrator offered next to nothing about how she felt and all she focused on was Leonard’s flights of imaginative language. He wanted to stop the narrator before they got back to town and her car and redirect her, but how? Gasping before the herbal tonic, he began to speak to Leonard himself, recognizing the true weight of what their relationship meant. He saw himself holding back his arm for a moment, stopping him. The city silver glow brighter now, indicating the presence of night life, even as the streets remained mostly empty and silent.  “Leonard.”

“Yes?”

“Don’t.” He brings himself, the narrator, closer to Leonard’s body. For the first time, after years away, feels it press against him. “I need to know.” The boiling tincture bubbled against his lips and he jerked back away from the pot into the bright kitchen.  His face and hair sloppy.  As his sight cleared, he saw his sister, Margaret.  She was a maniac in the doorway. She was infused with a hectic agitation and yet her body curled motionless against the doorframe.

            When she saw him begin to gag, gripping the stove, coughing, she pulled out her cell-phone and took a picture. The snapshot sound the phone made popped in his head as an animal trap snapping down on a beast.  He wondered if he’d done it, committed the grievous error, thinned his blood and would shortly pass out, a shape on the floor with only Margaret there to snap photos of his soaked, bent head.  Positioning the phone before her, at him, looking at the picture, she assessed his condition. “You look, you look…”

“Where’s mother?” He shot back with his head already back down. “In her room.” “Is she coming out this week?” “This week?” “I don’t know. Yes.” “I saw her on Tuesday.” “Jesus, it’s been four months.” “No shit. She just needs to let it settle, you ass.” He pulled his head back up, soaked. “Four! It's over! Their damn relationship, it’s done.” "Look at you," she said. "Look at yourself and think of her," she said.

            With the briefest of glances over to the counter and its sprawl of herbs, he repositioned the towel so that he might go back down.  In the darkness, he allowed for a moment of clarity. He remembered breathing, a time when it was freely available to him. They had come down through a path in the dunes each carrying a side of the cooler. The gusts off the ocean staggered him several times and actually caused shortness of breath.  She stared down the curved wing of beach and said, “My mother says walking barefoot on the beach can cure flat-footedness. ”He could hear the melody of the song like a wind chime in the distance.

            The snapping down of the trap again.

“What are you looking at?” He demanded, his head jerking up. She grimaced in a blend of amusement and disgust. He soaked the towel in the mixture, squeezed it out and wrapped his head in it.  He staggered over to the sliding glass door. Outside the tiny yard and the broken down Le Sabre seemed like something in a photo dissolving in overexposed light. He opened the door. Rods of icy air pressed against him.  “Where are you going?” she said, snapping pictures. He tucked the towel into his t-shirt and stumbled down the wooden stairs into the driveway. His bare feet meeting the warps in the pavement instantaneously chilled. He tried opening the back seat to the door of the car, but it was locked. He stared at his guitar through his reflection. He saw a man sucking on a towel, he stared at the window, he saw his guitar. He saw a window and he didn't know how to breathe.