Volume 3: "In the Belly of the Beast" by Walter Bargen
1996 Prize in Prose Winner
To be properly expressed a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form.
—Meister Eckhart
Every man takes the limits of his field of vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Before the Beginning This is what happens when he stands up, face to face with no, and no the true genius of the world. No, he won't sit on the potty, and so he sits wrapped in his mess for the rest of the day. No, he won't struggle with putting on his galoshes on a rainy school morning, and so he walks to school barefoot, all the other kids laughing. No, he won't stand on the chair and lean among the flowers to kiss the face of someone who loved to playfully cheat him at cards, and torment him in other small delicious ways, and then his frightened face is shoved up against death. No, he won't give the older boys his jacket, and after school is chased all the way home, barely staying ahead of the heavy swinging belt buckles. No, he won't eat his broccoli or spinach, or anything green that looks like the squashed insides of a caterpillar, and he falls asleep at the table, then falls out of the chair. No, he cannot say no, but he does. No, he won't go to the barbarous city of Nineveh, but instead heads for Tarshish across a storm-riddled sea where he draws the short lot and is thrown overboard for God-only-knows-what-reason, and ends up living inside a great fish. Yes, no is the genius of the world.
No-Jon-Ah No one notices even on days when he stands in the cashier's line at Wal-Mart holding a water-filled bag with bright swimming things that he is a man who lives inside a fish. Actually, he lives in a house he carved out of the inside of a living fish. He can't remember how long he has sat at the one table built from a giant fish scale. He rarely opens his eyes anymore, not because there isn't any light, a fish oil lamp flickers in the middle of the horny-scaled table, but because he feels better not watching what passes below the invisible floor of his rib-roofed house. His eyelids slammed shut when he thought he heard cries for help pass below him, but the guttering flame from his burning blubber, scraped from the walls of his fishy house and poured into the seashell lamp, only cast gurgling shadows, and he could see nothing but the viscous percolation, the amorphous dissolving of sea into fish.
He is left with only the faint echo of something, the insidious scratching and scrapping of hermit crabs making homes inside his ears. He can't say if what he thinks he heard was yesterday, last week, or years ago. But if it was yesterday, the pain is still sharp enough for him to long for a dust-choked earth. If it was last week, the grief is already being carried away in a stream of memories. If it was years ago, then the tide has continued to rise and he's now awash in a cataclysmic f1ood, and he's on his last gasp, treading water. He's planning to build a submarine to save all the creatures floundering at this depth. He knows that it is only those of us who can't swim who will save ourselves.
Jonahic Dislocations When the great fish had finally slurped up every corner of the ocean down to the last drops hidden in the crevices of the Great Barrier Reef, down to the pools bottomed in the Java Trench, draining the vast abyssal hills, turning the Yangtze and Yukon alluvial fans into cracked mudflats, baring the submerged roots of the lesser Antilles to the Bahamas and forming a range of mountains with topical summits, when at last the fish sprawled at the mouth of the Amazon as the last whisper of the longest current slipped between its lips, it sprawled, bug-eyed, gasping, its body bloated and misshapen by the world's oceans and seas; and Jonah in his fishhouse was exhausted from frantically plugging the leaks, mopping his invisible floor, a one-man bucket brigade, as the Atlantic and Pacific rushed past, the Black Sea and the Baltic, the Mediterranean and lake Superior. He'd been pruned, his skin shriveled, fold after translucent fold submerging into itself. He began to feel salted and pickled. The great fish lay unmoving except for its archaic gills slowly fanning up a dust storm that engulfed Brazil. It looked as if it swam to the end of the earth.
Jonah wading waist Jeer through his rib-roofed house, trying to keep his table and lamp from floating into a sopping oblivion, was ready to throw in the towel when the fish arched its continent-long back, slapped down its tectonic plate of a tail and lunged forward, coughing up all that it had swallowed, making rivers run backward, popping the polar ice caps up like opened soda bottles, setting the Titanic down on Broadway in New York City, leaving Jonah beached on the boardwalk in Bombay. Jonah turned to face the gaping mouth of the great fish, and as it slithered backwards into the sea it belched, and from its fishy breath he heard the rasping of the one thousand thousand holy names, and dived back into the dark maw.
fish@net.com There must have been a great battle, or else his great fish was on fire. Perhaps it had been torpedoed and was soon to sink. Smoke billowed from the maw of its throat. His ribbed cavern blackened. He thought he could hear the blare of trumpets, the irregular thunder of explosions, the gnash and scrape of immense machines grinding together. His rib-roofed house began to choke with acrid odors of burning diesel and flesh. He Jay down on his invisible floor, hoping not to die in spasms of coughing. Staring down, he saw sputter and fly through the air, the silhouettes of men running at each other across a stark landscape, hysterical men shouting and waving bayonets, then falling into each other's arms and then to their knees, then falling even lower, row after row crushed into the raw, mothering dirt. He shook in amazement, quaked in fear, clung to the sides of his beloved fish, but he couldn't take his eyes off the erupting streaks of light tracing the twisting miles of barbed wire like the nerves of a monstrous dying animal÷the mother of all battles. Then the room filled with static. The invisible floor darkened. The battery that he'd salvaged from a crate of floating debris died. The laptop screen glowed a solid gray then blackened. He flipped the switch, the mouse with its wire tail sinking into the sea÷the interface complete. Now he knew for certain: no news is good news. The great fish's stomach rumbled on devouring history, headed for Omaha Beach and Agincourt
Whalular Throbosis He lit his shell lamp and held it outside the window. What was the slow dull throb that at first he attributed to the onset of a migraine caused by sitting too long in the blubbery dark? Here in tower of spiraling narwhal tusks, he could discover, delineate, pontificate on the ichthyosaural prime mover. He could contemplate the uncreated creating throb, or the creating uncreated throb, the first-cause and the final-cause throb, the epistemological throb and the ontological throb, the pain-in-the-ass throb and the crotch throb, and still not move an inch-throb.
But standing at the window, he was amazed to see a seething red wall where a dishwasher was throwing white plates, declaring the new Last Supper, the shards flying in all directions. Then he remembered to open his eyelids. What he saw before him filling the inside of his great fish was no less startling; it was the heart of a city in need of angioplasty: all its arteries clotted with traffic, its gleaming headlighted blood at a near standstill, its lungs black and exhausted, rivers discolored and syrupy, the park trees leafless, though it could be autumn. He swore not to chug another bottle of his brewed fermenting fish.
But it was no delirium tremor. From this height, high in the belly, where the ribs curved up into the studded stars, sparkling with the remnants of the last backwash of cosmic debris, up the many rickety rungs of ladders, frayed ropes and tow-rope-thick varicose veins, along greasy precipitous ledges, that all lead to his bone-roofed hermitage, he could see the present claiming a broken-down past, struggling toward a whimsical, consummate future, and then the lights begin to fade in one section after another of the city, a massive power blackout, a heart attack, the light clots, and then he realized he was staring down at the last gulp of phosphorescent red tide and a night of throbbing indigestion.
Keeping Whale Hours It really could be. Yes, it really could, and that's what he keeps repeating to himself in admiration of the grand conception. It is the first time in days he has stepped out of his house balanced on its blubbery edge. He descends the kelp and bone ladders. He is whistling the latest pop ditty he's heard on the radio before the batteries weakened and the acid bubbled forth, corroding the transistors. Yes, he is on his way, carrying a sheaf of shark fins under his left arm, gripping an air-bladder briefcase stuffed with air, swinging his shell lamp so his shadow leaps forward and back as if he is in a hurry and bounces up and down, as if he swells in importance with each step. He stops in front of each rib and knocks, more than half-expecting it to swing open, his pale knuckles hanging in midair in a gesture of authority. When no one answers, he posts the fin on the calcium-white door and moves on. In fact, for the full effect he hangs from each bony arc a deet1-sea fish, the one that lights its own way with exaggerated, glowing, needle-thin teeth and carries its own flesh-waggling neon lure attached to its head. When he was done, he saw banks of fin-slapping fluorescent lights stretching down a whale of a hallway. When he reached the last door that would never open and posted the cartilage that would never be read, he realized that for a moment it was something to do, something stupid. He turned around and forced himself slowly back up the tiers of swinging ladders and sat down in his rib-roofed house, headquarters for cetacean world tours.
Orpheus Fishlove For hours he could hear someone wandering far below,
kicking at the debris of civilizations: elegant, cracked clay urns, twisted steamship paddle wheels, eye-white bleach bottles, clouded miles of tangled fish nets, Ionic columns, heavy stone calendars stained with sacrifices, arm- and legless marble statues, chariots, tireless Edsels, windowless Studebakers÷the overwrought fever of centuries and the overwrought digestion of a fish's galactic hunger.
It was a man, he was certain of that, the heavy clank and clang, the scrape and rasp, moving immovable objects, searching for something, shoving aside granite griffins and defaced sphinxes, the entire edifice of religions and astrological projections, Hammurabi's Code and the Magna Carta. But it was the words" the first he had heard in years, maybe minutes, he didn't know, time lost and forgotten in this cavernous gut, and the phrases so ethereal, he began to swoon. He cowered below his window sill, shaking his head in disbelief, now that the hallways of his ears were suddenly scooped out, dust and bats fuming from the fleshy, long-abandoned corridors, his head emptying to a paramecium, then threatening to explode with the melodies that entered and would not leave. The stranger never stopped singing of what he'd lost, the endless search, the repeated failure. Every inch of his pale, flaccid skin ached to be wrapped in the thigh's curve, the arm's heated embrace, the hand's delicate probing and firm stroke.
Listening from his high-house perch, he heard songs blending the murmur of the
sea and the murmur of the dead, and he grew afraid. He could see the flicker of the torch that the man held high and the lyre he carried in his other hand. His back was turned as he walked further away, past pyramids and earthen mounds. The stranger was searching for something else, for an uncivilized love, one with the power to tame the three-headed dogs, boil away rivers of forgetfulness, stand an rmy of spirits at attention against the will of the wind. He wanted to tell the stranger he hadn't gone far enough; he needed to go deeper than this junkyard, beyond where cven great fish swim, but his voice had drifted off in a corked bottle. When the torch flickered its last spark and the man was out of sight, continuing his journey toward an immense if not infinite loss, he sat safely behind his dripping blubber walls and again swore devotion to his mute fish, and wept.
Sun Screen He desperately shields his eyes from the sun. The shade of four fingers isn't enough. Too new out of the flickering dark, he can't see a thing. Placing his palms over his eyes, he stares at X-rays, the surf-jumbled bones of his hands clearly visible to him, delicate as the wings of flying fish, but hardly looking strong enough to hold up the net of his sagging skin. Not to be dragged back by the undertow, he claws at the waves. The gentle rocking of each swell threatens to topple him, as he half walks, half scuttles toward the shore.
The light spintering on the green surface spears every exposed inch of his skin. He's an exotic specimen waiting to be collected.. He staggers under the glaring blue magnitudes of sky. A shred of tattered decency, kelp, is wrapped around his waist, but what has shriveled beyond recognition barely needs to be covered. He passed through hours of the sea's churning labor, the great fish's slow dilation, and the final moment when its throat clamped down and then spewed him forth÷his ladders and house finally reaching beyond mere irritant.
His translucent soles shot the searing heat of the sand up into his knees. He's dazzled by the bright shards of colored towels spread over the beach. He quickly stumbles into the shade of an umbrella where a woman lies, every inch of her exposed, every inch tanned. He sits down confused, ready to speak the prophecy of her doom, asking if this is Ninevah, but feeling the primal throb taking over.
Speechless, she starts at this thing that's come from the sea and belongs back under the waves. It's a talking page ripped from an anatomy book: blue and red veins pulsing under the skin, the shadows of bones rising from the fleshy depths of arms and legs, lips unable to hide the bald grin of teeth. Startled, she answers no, this beach is just north of Miami. She introduces herself, Jessabelle, says she sells Mary Kay Cosmetics, and knows just the product for his condition, and if he agrees to let her use before and after photographs for her sales promotion, she'd help him for free. The sea casting up its pastels, the scattered clouds powder puffs, a blush of sky marking the sun, they leave the beach in her pink Cadillac.
Psalm 61 He didn't have to swim a thousand miles÷he dove, and now he simply pushes open the building's double doors, steps out onto the cinder-ridden sidewalk, and inhales the decomposing odors of flotsam and jetsam. At this rise in elevation, lined with century oaks, punctuated with an intersection where cars feign stops before speeding on, all the sea would run downhill, unless the hill itself is a slow welling up of the sea.
Before crossing the street, he searches for the flash of scales, the flip of a fin, the turbulence of a school of tuna roiling the sunstruck surface. The morning-wet, whale- back asphalt glistens. Standing on the curb, he has nothing to say. He has listened to the doomsayers and the prodigal sons, the assessors and the hedonists, the elected and the lost, and he casts his lot into the depths, crosses through a storm of traffic, and is coughed up into another day of work, a fishy odor lingering in his clothes. In a small driftwood frame, sitting near a corner of his, desk, written in watery letters:
From the ends of the oceans will I cry unto thee,
when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the fish
that is higher than I.
Walter Bargen has published five books of poems. His latest book is The Vertical River (Timberline Press, 1995). His chapbook At The Dead Center of Day was published by BkMk Press, UMKC, 1997. His fiction has appeared in American Letter, Letters & Commentary, Georgia Review, International Quarterly, Furious Fictions, and New Novel Review. He is the 1997 winner of the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize.