Weird Gelatinous Things
Baby, let’s not go to the place where you and your other lover go. That place is ugly. Let me take you to the reservoir instead. We’ll go in the middle of the week, in the middle of a drought, the worst one in decades. When we get there we will be alone.
The water will be low, and you’ll barely be able to see it, coiled shallowly in the mountains’ crease. From the empty parking lot, we will be able to see the trucks and boat trailers turning around, defeated. A big white man will pass us, going the opposite direction, carrying a tiny red cooler. We will have to walk down the deserted, thunderstruck boat ramp, and in the noon sun it will feel like miles. I will carry the ice chest, fretting it from one hand to the other. It will be so worth it.
The long, high banks of the reservoir will look like a crater, a scar. They will be a quarter mile of dried, deeply cracked clay stretching from the tree line to the water’s edge. We will never have seen anything so fractured, so broken before. Because the reservoir is manmade, the grey skeletons of trees killed during the initial flooding will be visible; will surround us as we walk toward the beach. This drought is no joke, we will say, approving of the dramatic evidence. California is so fucked, we will say, laughing and crazed. You will see how excited we are, you and I, to be surrounded by this place of aftermath, this landscape that we fantasize about, post-apocalyptic, charming, and strange. Like us, like us, we’ll say.
At first we will feel the fears: What if we are found out? What if someone comes and they know we are gay and alone? But in the silence of the mid-afternoon, these fears will fade, I will take off my shirt and you will grow to love the abnormal glamor of the landscape. We will be animals then, wallowing in mud, stretched out, lazy. We will feel beautiful in this forsaken place. I’ll make us a shade structure from branches, and it will delight you. You will pee in the water, and the thought of Californians from Fresno to Monterey unwittingly drinking the piss of transexuals will delight me to no end.
I will notice something that looks like a plastic bag draped over a sunken branch. I won’t mention it to you. When we go swimming, our feet, our legs will be swallowed by twenty inches of wet clay and muck. The water will be perfect and deep enough to swim. It will be an aquamarine color, but slightly off, slightly grey. As we begin to swim you will see the thing too and ask,
“What is that?”
We will tread water beside the half submerged tree, poking gently at a clear mass of solid, gelatinous matter. Jellyfish-like, it will be motionless, something scarcely zoological, arguably botanical, covered in a leopard’s spots. We will begin to notice that the queer gelatinous sacks are everywhere, hanging from trees and rock outcroppings. You will say, that hanging there, they look like lingerie. You will brush against one underwater and ask,
“Was that you?”
We will laugh.
“This would be the perfect opening to a horror movie,” you will say, “But then I guess we would have to die.”
I will be sitting much lower in the water than you, and will have to lift my chin to say,
“Can it turn out that we are the monsters in the end?”
It will seem especially unearthly then, the place, the emptiness, the temperateness against our skin. You’ll want to race me across the water. Lithe and muscled in your flowered suit, you will swim much faster than me.
The breeze will dry us while we eat cold figs, and we’ll see wildlife, an eagle, a heron. We will hear the occasional blip of fishes, and every once in a while an army helicopter will fly by heavily, a sick bee. You will lift an empty Coors can to my ear like a seashell, and I will hear the lisp of wind in pines. I’ll point out the footprints of birds, children, and coyotes hardened into the clay. The grass will be the color of bread and the mud will be the color of ash. We will rub this mud on ourselves because, really, it’s as if we’re at a spa. We will make sculptures. Over and over, we will marvel at being the only two people there, and, secretly, I will relish this more so than you. You will be my scarcity. And I will squirm with the desire to possess, like other Californians, the little that remains.
In the afternoon it will be in the high 90’s but an elephantine cloud will pass overhead and giant droplets will fall for about five minutes. I will practice questions:
What if this squall—
What if this drought—
What if we—
What if weird gelatinous things—
The wind will change direction. The sun will not.
