tempest miller – destruction at the beach for the nemesis of order

       
        Part 1: Well, he’s a prowler. He stands there in the mirror of the window taking his shirt on and off, and his fleshy white body hangs over the street. The gold chain on his neck, he thinks is all too pathetic in contrast to his skin. Now he sits back on the bed and returns to his dream episodes. He is dreaming of the picture of the high school ex-boyfriend he saw this morning. His shirt half-unbuttoned as he lay back on a blanket. Remembering the photo, he is unnerved. 
        The normal of the digital creates the horrors of the real world. He cannot walk down the street without thinking he will be recognised. Every time he is out, he checks over his shoulder. Hidden creeps are tenacious, and will track him all the way to his home. Even at home, on bed right now, he cannot help but worry. Someone clanging on the glass of the door on the front porch. He goes downstairs. Only a pigeon, hanging in the suspension of the blue night light. 
        He thinks of himself as a prowler, but he is frigid and frozen. He is too emotional for those duties, however much he would like his Wikipedia entry to have him stood there – mysterious, cast in black and white, wearing no shirt and with his arms tensed in bicep pose. Strangely, he thinks there is something literary in that pose. But even if he made it on the outside, and all he does is workout obsessively from morning to night, he is too slushy and inferior in the internal. His heart is weak. 
        He lies on the bed and tries to sleep. He cannot sleep. He jerks off. Still nothing. Now he gets up belatedly, turns the bedroom light back on, lies on the bed drenched in the light. He picks a solitary zit on his chin. Then he writes in a notebook, for as long as his concentration will allow. Sprawling, degenerate handwriting. He shuts the book. Puts it away. He gets up and switches the light off again. Lying on his side, he resolves to go out and do something tomorrow. This is England, green and pleasant country – he can find something to do. Something to do for the morning, when on the other side of turbulent dreams.
        Part 2: He takes the train to the beach. It’s a hot day and the sun makes him woozy. When he arrives on the promenade beside the sand, he opts first to go into the pub. Cooler in the pub, dark and shadowy. He orders a beer and gets asked for ID. It’s no trouble, he supposes. Bar pumps are pulled and he goes outside into the beer garden where he can admire the beach. It swarms with bodies, clothed and unclothed. There are only small pockets of yellow, unimpeded space. It gives him great anxiety looking at it. Anyone could be in there. Someone dangerous almost for sure. 
        He sits on the clumsy table, drinking. He feels his pint snake down his long neck, a neck almost in hyperextension. A young girl behind him has her plate of chips bombarded by seagulls. He feels grateful it’s not him being bombarded. Halfway through his pint, with foam gripped to the inside of the glass, he admires – looking out with particular detail – the sailboats. Shining sea boomeranging off white sails. There are no big boats out here – liners, cruise ships. There aren’t even that many sailboats. But they look very peaceful and they concentrate his mind. He feels ashamed that he cannot just be like everyone else. No one else feels like this. Why does he need the sailboats? Everyone else just relies on what they’re made of, in their core. He supposes everyone here did not grow up with such phony idealism, looking inward. They do not harbour such disgust for humanity, culture. Very likely they have feelings of belonging – in an office, a family, social club – and feel their lives will go on forever. They don’t fetishise socks and fruit stuffed in mouths, apples, pears, oranges. They don’t fetishise ripped tights and sex in cars. 
        He finishes his pint in thirsty gulps, puts the glass down. Then he goes to the beach house changing rooms, carrying a bag with him. He gets changed. He emerges, the bag now locked away, a blanket tucked under his arm. Naked now, except for blue beach shorts. He stands and looks at the beach. Where to go? He sees ugly men, uglier than him, almost naked. They are faun-like. He wonders what would happen if he told them they were ugly. Often, he wonders how he can cut apart and destroy goodwill. The pleasant social etiquette of the public beach with unspoken rules. It hangs from a thread in perpetuity. It reminds him of cricket, which he enjoyed one time, where the rules are gentlemanly. He sees this unspoken framework as something barbaric and awful. A product of digital annihilation. Perhaps there was a time, he doesn’t know when, when you would say hello to strangers on a beach, or would ask what they were comfortable with. No longer. He is mortified by it and will not accept it. 
        Onto the beach he goes, walking. The beach is a beauty and he knows it. Walking in from the station, he saw a sandwich parlour and hung briefly at the window. He thinks he will enjoy a sandwich lay down here. Chicken perhaps. But he's got to find somewhere to lay down first. He must integrate himself into the thick of the beach. Eventually he finds a spot by the cliffs of the headland, beside a cave that is hollowed out only slightly. He lays down his blanket and rests, legs extended. The inside of the cave is dripping with black water. He puts his hand underneath and catches the droplets. The cave is spooky, as caves are, and he could imagine Freemason ceremonies going on in there. Pirates rolling onto the beach, smugglers. Secret societies of dangerous intellectuals. He thinks about it and lies down.
        Part 2.5: He leaves his blanket and walks to the ocean. The ocean which hisses louder upon approach. The waves are violent which is perhaps untypical of a sunny day. Few people are enjoying the ocean, are not buried in it up to their necks like soil. Instead, they run in and out, watch it with trepidation. He resolves clearly in his mind, that he will go after it. He reaches the ocean. 
        At first, he stands at its edge and merely lets it wash over his feet. It’s not cold – that is perhaps the worst thing about the sea. Sometimes, as a kid and standing in the blast of the ocean, he could understand, even formatively, how people died of hypothermia. All these people who spill from boats all around the world and are swallowed by the ocean. Human remains picked at at the bottom of grimy shipwrecks. He remembers it very vividly. That first time he felt the cold ocean blast him as a boy, he had one of those moments where he thought he had all the knowledge of the world. 
        Now he walks into the sea with the waves at his shorts, trucks. He is knocked back briefly in the tide. The sea attempts to return him to shore, but he muscles his way through, steals ground. He pursues the sea in a man vs. nature ebb and flow. Eventually, he stops at neck height in the water, some of the sea pushing into his mouth. He halts here, knowing there is perhaps danger in swimming out any further. The sun is still out, out more than before actually. It burns his neck. He sweats unpleasantly. Looking around, he can see no sailboats now. Or maybe he can but they are on the horizon of the horizon. They are dragged, draped behind a misty curtain of sea and sky. Scanning around, he notices a seal. Brown-black head poking out of the water and looking right at him. Wet whiskers. It makes him smile. He has always had an affinity for animals and sees them as very precious. The seal dips from his sight. 
        Now he looks at the beach. No one having dared come as far as him. He looks at them, the great ugly swarms of a great many people – none of them with any balls, nothing macho between their legs. And yet, he bets they are not at all silent about their struggles. They are alarmed at dying without the whole world knowing that they really are in turbulence. He is disgusted by it, resting in the salty foam. All his life, he has maintained dignified silence, even when there are monsters digging their claws out of the walls. He is not a conservative, he wishes to make that clear. His macho qualities are not foundationed on hatred, preservation – in fact they are founded on something quite radical, and yet difficult to place. Right now he feels rather proud. 
        He drifts back slightly in the water, just momentarily. Then he tries to claw back to what might be described as the edges, where there is still a chain of black, rocky islands for seabirds. He moves gradually, is not hurried. He wishes there was pier on the beach, hanging over the sea with its rolling current – that way more people could see him. Then he thinks about all the alternatives he had planned out for today. A day at the zoo to see flamingos, a day at a breakfast joint – hitting the buffet all day. He thought of boarding a plane and flying somewhere, remote, short-haul. Somewhere in Scotland was his thought. He had all kinds of ideas, but had come out with the best one – riding the waves this far out. 
        An abnormal wave rises and hits him, he is swept back. He drifts. His grounded masculinity breaks, is replaced by untethered panic. He flops onto his stomach in the waves and tries to swim to the closest island of rock. It looms as a place of rest. Another wave hits him as he goes. He swallows a lot of water. Then he emerges for air and is hit again. His eyes are blinded and he half leaves his swimming position to try and float perpendicular. Hit again, dashed. He is forced to continue swimming. It is important he maintains momentum. He doesn’t come up for air, not for a long time. When he resurfaces, he hears the seagulls and knows he is near the death-like rock. He saw it when upright and calm. A rock of majesty. Now he dreams of it under the currents, like he dreams of deranged love affairs and inherited pain. But those dreams are corrupt and this one is pure. The rock is heaven, the rock is divine. Surfacing again, he spots it, very close. In his swimming dreams, he sees himself sitting on the rock, there in nothing but his shorts – a kind of damsel in distress. A fall from where he once was, just a short while ago. Perhaps it would be better to drown in the waves, or be swept out and swept out and ran over by a boat – destroyed in propellers, sucked up into the engine room in a thousand pieces. That would be a truthful kind of death, he thinks. But then again, he doesn’t really know what that word means – truthful – and what use it really has. Dying is dying. Death is death. All that counts for anything is being alive because being alive is the only way you can be free. He wonders if he has been spotted back on the beach. Is that a helicopter he can hear? It doesn’t matter. 
        He reaches the rock. Hands of vulnerability, scratched and white, land on the darkened surface. Lifting himself, he gets his knees on the rock. There is, for a second, seemingly total balance and stability. Then another wave crashes over the rock and hits him. He flops down and strikes his face on the rock down where his hand had been only seconds before. There is blood in his mouth, blood in the water. His tongue flops from his mouth. The waves become bigger and thrash beneath the hot and bulging sun.
        Part 3: He is found weeks later by a fishing trawler. His body is in multiple pieces. Before he was brought up in his most significant piece, his arm was found caught in a crab net. These fishermen are hardened and bitter. It is not uncommon they see a dead body and do not report it. But he had been carved up by the sea – the sea had taken revenge on him. It made the news – there was a media frenzy. But people move on, as he himself would have as someone so desensitised. His memory remains for only very few. Those who dug him from the ocean in a green neat, and the police and coroners who handled all of the gory registry, investigative details. A handful of conspiracy theorists as well, who latched onto the gruesome aspects of his death, to forward theories of murder. He is remembered by the people for whom he held the least respect. Those who filled jobs in the great engine of the state, which kicked in the moment he was reported missing, and those who only speculate and waste their lives. Sometimes perhaps there is more glory in the long-lived hermit who has a handle of himself.


TEMPEST MILLER (he/him) is a writer from the UK. His work has appeared in Swamp Pink, Boats Against the Current, The Argyle, The Gorko Gazette, Revolution John, MiniMag and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. He releases a monthly chapbook on Amazon. His instagram is @tempestm1ller.


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