A Fragment from Nexus, Chapter One

    The key that turned it was the growing conviction that whoever she was, she was real. In his pain, in his loneliness, he'd somehow struck into a magic stream. Connected his heart to hers over all the space between them, just by believing it could happen like that. Just by not being able to quash the ball inside with its hope bleatings no matter how much he drank or despised himself.
    And so Neal trolled the dark, dingy streets of Mohican Bay every night trying desperately to put a physical body to the imagined face, hoping to simply fall over her like she was a rock in the street, haunting the bars, wandering along the beaches, and the more he failed, the more certain he became that she was nonetheless real and it was driving him crazy, adding even more bricks to his burden, and so he staggered on, drinking as he went, ploughing through refuse-strewn gutters and prowling around crowds, looking at the women. Examining the long hair, the untouchable faces, the eyes that didn't so much look through him as over him, like he was a pile of a man impeding their worthwhile vision -- looking for her, looking for her, always looking.
    But never finding. Reduced to mornings like these, but like today, climbing out of bed regardless, or rather, pushed out into the jailor's embrace by the cold, coiled shred inside.
    And that was what the bottle was for. To punch back against the pain hope inflicted, and by sickening himself, to loosen its strangling hold around his neck. He took a drink now to steady himself, then another as he stood up, trying to shake the dream off. This ritual was also the same; he drank to get to sleep, and he drank again to wake up. And then he would wander down to the beach with a hungry belly and poke his toe into the surf until he felt disconsolate enough to eat, or he would skip breakfast entirely in favor of a visit to the great bleak cliffs that overlooked the city, taking along a dog-eared, paperback book to pass the time with and a pint bottle to nurse his wounds over. Or he would not make it that far and just sit down in the disregarded garden outside the house, drinking steadily and waiting for the sun to set, so he could set out again to look for the woman. He didn't feel comfortable in public unless it was dark, unless the night obscured his actions. He didn't feel comfortable even in the garden; but that was all there was. The house itself was too large and empty to be anything but a weight around his neck if he wandered about in it, poking through all the unlived lives that lurked in its empty rooms, listening to it creak and settle gradually into its old age.
    He spun the cap off a bottle and took another drink, and cast his eyes up to the cracked and emptying rafters. The house, too, was a useless entity. No good to him, when a closet would suit him just as well, or even a duffel bag. The things he needed, that meant anything to him, were all wrapped up in his head. And it was no good to anyone else, because now it had a history, the worst kind of history, and would be difficult to even give away. No one wanted to start a new life in such a place, he thought, and took another drink -- because, well, that too was just like Neal.
    He pissed down another flight of stairs, into the dark.
    The house didn't have running water. He pissed down here, when he had to shit, he did it outside and buried the mess with an old pie-bladed shovel he kept out there especially for that purpose. He didn't have gas, or lights, or even a telephone that worked. There was no reason to go on paying those bills; the ends of those particular means had long since lost their persuasiveness. Even before the visions of the woman had begun, he had begun to lose all the substance that didn't matter to someone who was effectively dead anyway -- he had little inclination to eat, much less an appetite to be comfortable.
    Steam rose from the urine stream and Neal's hips sagged a little, he swayed on his feet. These were just moments when the muscles momentarily failed before the shred pulled them up again, like they were attached to a marionette's strings.
    Before heading upstairs, he had one last drink, finishing the bottle, and tossing it away. It clattered down the steps, into the dark with the piss.
    In the kitchen's wan light, he stepped into a pair of red, tattered running sneakers, then banged out the back door.
    It was July, oh terrible month. The hottest of the year. And the light was pooled in the early-morning shadows and dripped off the garden's innumerable gnarled roots and dead, drooping branches. A swaddle of moist heat penetrated by dismal penile tendrils and permeated by fetal light, or worse, lightnessness: the more obscure corners of the garden, many-teethed with blackberry thorns, remained hidden still. A few early birds twittered from somewhere, but that was all. And did they too sing a decaying song, or was it only the thinking that made it so, and the drinking?
    We, with all our meticulously maintained lawns, he thought, and heads full of hair; when the truth was, the world would all someday run to such rot. And all luck and love run out. There had been flowers here once, when Neal's mother was still alive. But the vile weeds had stolen their sunlight and slowly sucked the marrow out of their moisture, and when the pretty petals had finally fallen, his feet had walked heedlessly over them, completing the destructive cycle. Now the only health here was black health: the health of beetles, centipedes, and giant, stinging ants. The health of foxtails and crabgrass. The health that springs inevitably up when big things topple over in their death and become food for the sightless grubs that inhabit all the earth the whole earth over. We, with all our pet vanities, he thought. Mother, bending uselessly over her flowers, her precious goddamned roses, wastefully spinning the days of her life away into the abyss that beckoned her, that beckoned him, that had claimed her, but that the shred would not allow to claim him.
    He looked at the weather-warped fence that marked the edge of the property, and how real life, green life, sprang up again on the other side of it, healthy trees and trim shrubs, but it would only be for a short while. First the love goes and then the luck follows, it was all a transitory thing; and what is healthy today will be sick tomorrow, and the only point of it lay somewhere in its finality. And that was why his own little rotten trees and decomposing bushes pleased him; at least they had given up the lie of trying to hold back the tide. At least they were beyond being troubled.
    Neal had found another bottle by this time and taken another another pull. He was never far or long from another bottle; often, he didn't know himself from where he had produced them, or if he had produced them at all, and suffered from the delusion that they'd been given. He had nothing to do with it. But this last pull caused the garden's hard features to soften somewhat, so that the old energy began to creep up Neal's legs again, and the need to look again for the woman led him directly down into the tangle, and to the fence, where the ocean breathed a great, shivering gust into his flushed face, and he found the strength to climb over, confronting all the health on the other side.
    There was a sort-of path here that led a winding way down to the beach, and there were palm trees, and sand dunes, and little crab-like creatures pinching about in glittering green patches of grass, and monolith like boulders striking up at the sun, defiant-looking things. And there was limitless blue sky glimpsed in tattered veins and shreds between swollen, drooping leaves, and things that darted artfully through the air, and butterflies, and white and pink flowers, and the smell and the sound of the surf from below. And there were benches along the way that the city had mandated be put here long ago, but that were mostly forgotten now, as was the trail itself. Mohican Bay was not that city anymore, where people walked on trails, where people sat by themselves on benches far, very far from the nearest unnatural light; it was falling into disuse and ruin, like Neal's garden. Its buildings were becoming Neal's buildings. His disease was its disease, and he was so very like just another of its streets. But the ocean shoved back all that ill with its great will and continued to erect these trees and other pillars of beauty, right down to its very cheeks, and it neither regarded nor disregarded anyone's appreciation or mistreatment of it. A lazy fly bumbled through the air in front of Neal's face and landed on a fat green creeper.
    This was where things started, but it was not where they would finish. He uttered a wry little laugh that immediately became a painful cough. Oh, his lungs, his wounded lungs. He felt he could hardly walk, he always felt it was amazing he was still standing anywhere, and yet here he was, standing, walking (a little unsteadily now) down the path, between the green, pleated trees. Passing those now functionless wooden benches with all the silly little names and inane profanities carved into their surfaces.
    And then the ocean itself swelled into view, the immensity of it all. The heaving emotion of it, this conscience of the earth, this gray grave of countless millions. Eagerly it sucked at the wet sand, and hissingly it drew away again, as powerless to stop its tumult as Neal was his own. He watched it approach his feet, but not touch them, drawing away again just before. And all along the beach, it was more than the most majestic sight in view, it was another world all in itself, full of more mysteries than even the earth held -- until far ahead, rocks began to intrude on its skirts, and the cliff began to rise into it, patiently absorbing the blue, battering waters, until finally a great black spur like the back of a big boot jutted out into it, the summit of which was encircled by a crown of barbed wire intended to dissuade the suicides.
    And the sunrise bled over Neal's face from the surface of the sea, and ran gleaming along the curling froth up to the cliff, and raced up it again like a liquid, and sat in spangles and gems at the top, so that it was too bright to look directly at. And a cold shiver passed over skin as he reflected on all that limitlessness, and all the hungers it had stilled over the eons. Neal didn't know if that was why he came here, or if it was only because, well, he had to go somewhere, didn't he? This painfully fat body was still somehow in motion and protested whenever he tried to keep it shut up; the shred would not let him rest.
    But he felt a kind of communion with this place, and especially the cliff, which took all the abuse the ocean's depths could summon with sullen defiance -- giving way eventually, perhaps, but grudging every lost grain.
    So he plodded along, drinking as he went, and stopping frequently to gauge the time. His shoes grew wet, and his toes became cold. He sniffled and spat into the sand. Tonight, he thought, he would revisit some old places, maybe the corner where all the junkies hung out. Mohican Bay didn't have much of a drug culture, but what junkies there were congregated in a a dingy three-block area near the western edge of the city, where there was an abandoned factory. And maybe she was there, Neal thought, much closer by then to the suicide cliff, and he had just missed her. There were a thousand dark doorways there, and a million places to look.
    That she might not be in Mohican Bay at all was a thought that had lost all its reasonableness long before, just like the idea that she was not real, could not be real, with which it was connected. Because she must be real, if he could not get shut of her, and if she was, she would not be in his mind, but entangled in the hair of someone else's. That Neal himself lived in Mohican Bay was enough; she must be here somewhere, she had to be.
    She could be anywhere. She could be at the cliff, even. She could be there right now.
    The sand hissed and spat, hissed and spat. The wind picked up. Somewhere a dog barked, then fell silent. A gull swept soundlessly overhead, dipped down, and disappeared behind the rising bulk of the cliff. The rocks began to poke up through the surf, seething and sucking. Then the first boulders began to intrude, forcing Neal's path first away from the water, and then almost down into it, until finally a particularly rollicksome wave crashed into a monolith ahead, and the spray that resulted was tossed up into a cloud of miniscule white droplets that recalled the dream from earlier, all that snow, all the frozen crystals seemingly floating in mid-air. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, followed the surf around, and then he was there, in the shadow of the monster, shut away from sun's red lamp and looking at a tumultuous bed of craggy, waveworn rocks through which the ocean leapt and brayed and threw back saliva-like strings of salty froth.
    He sat down here by the edge, a customary spot. Here it was relatively dry, but still violent, and very cold. Wisps of foam drifted down from the sky whenever a wave broke. And the cliff thrust its defiant face forward into the endlessly repeating blows almost directly above Neal, up and up and up, like a black giant crouched over the whole world. He might have dozed; later, when trying to recall this period of time, he was never quite sure about those first moments of sitting beneath the cliff, only that when he came back to himself, he was raising the pint bottle to his lips again, and the sun seen to have come up a little more.
    And gradually, Neal became aware that there was something wrong in this. His brow furrowed. He took his wet shoes off and held them, staring at the sun. There was something wrong in it. The color. Yes. It was well above the horizon by now; it shouldn't be that same shade of sickly red any longer. And yet it was. It continued to look like a boil in the sky that was about to burst. And there was more -- something of a haze settling down from it onto the surface of the sea, and where the sea met the haze, a kind of silver line like a patch of quicksilver.
    His shoes were dripping into his lap. It was a mirage of some kind, he guessed. He was putting his shoes down on the rock next to him to dry. And the water looked red out that way, too, like blood. And the waves continued to boom against the cliff. And it was glistening, winking back the light, producing a thousand little dazzles ... And Neal was putting the bottle back to his lips, and it was slipping out of his grasp; he was drunk, had drunk too much.
    And that was when it happened.
    He saw her for an instant only, and not like a person, as she fell from the sky and into the ocean in front of him, but like an object, like something dropped there. And when she struck the surface of the water, the red dress she was wearing billowed and enfolded the waves, and the rest of her body, pulled down by the weight of all that wet fabric, quickly disappeared. Then was a splash, a heaving of white, gleaming arms, and then nothing. The sea curled on and broke against the cliff as before.
    And because it did not happen like this in real life, because the things that we want most in this world are never simply dropped into our lap, but must be earned, Neal didn't do anything, at first. He doubted his eyes. He stared at the spot with frozen lips and a rapidly paling face, but he didn't move. Worlds spun as the seconds ticked by, whole worlds. He even began to imagine that what he had seen had been something else -- rocks toppling off the cliff's precipice, for example, before the shred in his stomach roared again, and his knees stiffened.
    It didn't happen like this. Not to anybody. And yet it had; it had happened to him.
    The moment broke, and he charged violently into the waves, heedless of their strength. They knocked him over, and when Neal rose up, spluttering, they did it again. Beneath the surface, he swam out a little way but was dragged back again, perilously close to the rocks at the base of the cliff. His lungs filled with water. And above, the sky's sphere almost looked peaceful as it first bobbed into view then vanished in a roaring whirl of watery foam. His feet caught at nothing, and his chest was banging his heartbeat painfully back into his ears. Panic slipped its hangman's noose around his neck, and soon he was flailing blindly in the void, and his consciousness was fading.
    In the end, it was the mysterious woman's dress that saved them both. Somehow, down in the dark, down in the tumbling tumult, Neal caught a fistful of that rich, red fabric, and when he pulled, he felt the woman's hair in his face, and the solidity of her body in his hands.
    An actuality. The dream, or fantasy, or whatever it was, now rendered real and put kissing close to Neal. And the shred was pulsing now in his chest, competing with his heart, then racing ahead of it, forcing his legs to kick, kick, kick.
    And was there a part of Neal that wanted to resign at this point in the story, to just have this consummate moment and then retire from the stage, its rage and pain finally at an end? Only to have that same merciless shred stamp out its glass, bauble-like head? There was, but it didn't matter. They were going up, up now. It was too late to die. Neal had his arm around the woman's neck and was dragging her back up into the light, heedless of everything else, up, up. He needed breath, but the shred did not -- around his heart, it began to unfold like a banner. The more Neal died, the more powerfully that heroic element lived.
    When they finally broke the surface, the saturated dress sucked against Neal and threatened to pull them under again, and the woman struggled in his grip like trapped moth beating its wings frantically against an unmoved pane of glass.
    They fought each other even as Neal saved her, and the outcome was never a certain thing until they had finally staggered out into the shallows farther down the strand and collapsed in the wet sand together, the little tongues of the lesser waves that struck there mingling her hair with hair with his, and her long, elegant fingers with his strong, but decidedly snub-nosed ones.