Theme Park at its Darkest

The End

1.

‘Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.’

– Yukio Mishima.

You imagine certain things when you see a beach like this.

A deserted stretch of unblemished sand with a scattered enfilade of palm trees balanced between the water and the horizon that relates a comparison with nothing, thereby making an unequivocal statement of emptiness.

When photographed, this is a semaphore for paradise. And it follows that naturally, hell is what you make it. In a landscape this empty, the phantoms you travel with take on an almost physical form.

The hotel looked nothing like the photos on booking.com. It was a dump. And I was the only person there. No matter how idyllic the surrounds, my mind continued to spin like a turbine. I had to execute the publisher’s copy edit on the book I’d written and, most importantly, I had a letter to write.

Letters for me are almost always about what James Ellroy refers to as ‘reckless verisimilitude:’

‘Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.’

This letter was about trying to turn grief into a groove that I could move along. To process the various details and events in order – preferably chronological – in the belief that I could fashion a key of understanding so that the cage of pain springs open and I can move away into the future.

And that’s what I spent most of those isolated, idyllic days trying to do. That and taking peptides to try and heal my shoulder. Years of training had frayed the tendons holding it together, especially the right one, to the point where it felt as if my arm was almost ready to fall out of the socket.    

I’d lie in the scorching sun, listen to podcasts and swim in the ocean, waiting for my brain to recharge so I could work on that last, definitive letter. I had drafts of it but I was so distracted by the grief, even I knew they sounded crazy. I was waiting for the calm to arrive so I could distil it into something sane.    

I think I’d been there for three nights when the hotelier explained there wouldn’t be any dinner that evening because he and his wife were going out. The best place for me to eat would be the restaurant at the grand hotel, some distance along the beach.

‘Which one is it?’ I asked.

‘The one up there with all the lights on,’ he explained. ‘You can’t miss it.’ 

So, at nightfall, around six pm, I walked up the sand wearing shorts and a singlet because it was still so damned hot, with my oblong travel wallet hanging out of my hip pocket. I kept a hand on it so it wouldn’t fall out and be lost.

The ball of light that I assumed was the hotel was blazing along the beach, its radiance baffled through the scrub. There were no streetlights, and the light from the moon – as I remember – was minimal. This is not especially important, but there’s a difference between what you remember, or imagine, and what actually happened. I’m reminding you of this, because it will become important later.

High up on the soft sand was a fishing boat, which had obviously been dragged there by the group of fishermen gathered around it in a circle. I counted them; five men that sat facing in.

The restaurant at the grand hotel was deserted, except for its full complement of staff. All of them wore long pants, long-sleeved white shirts and waistcoats, none with a hair out of place or even the tiniest bead of perspiration anywhere to be seen.

I sat down at a table in the centre and when I knocked the knife onto the ground, there was a race to retrieve it. I ordered biryani rice, ate and paid the bill.

There was nothing else to do, so I walked back. As I remember, the moon was higher, and the men at the fishing boat now sat facing out. One of them jumped up and sprinted down the sand toward me.

As he closed in, I slowed my walk so he could draw level. When he got within arm’s distance, he veered off and fell into a walk. The rest of the group had begun to stroll down the beach.

I walked down to where the waves broke into foam along the beach and the sand was at its hardest. I turned my back to the water, in order that they couldn’t get behind me. My left hand was on my wallet, and my right hand hung loose. I shook it gently, trying to get a sense of whether or not the tendons in my shoulder could be relied on.

About the time the first guy had circled back, the rest of the group had come to stand around me in a semicircle.

This entry was posted on November 9, 2024 at 11:54 pm and is filed under The Duel with tags James Ellroy, Yukio Mishima. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.