THE BROKEN TOWER by Kaden Griggs
The hulk of the Orizaba lulled hugely in the calm spring water as if the waves were tongues tasting the air in broad gulps like old hounds lapping water from ground puddles. Not much moved. The poet was drinking and avoiding his beloved. His father had died and he was very sad tonight. He had never felt emptier within. Lust enters when the hollowness leaves nothing else behind. He makes the mistake of believing again that the drinking will bury the lust and set things aright but it only invigorates the lust. Lust for all things. Lust for the remembrance of those moments of past that once made life seem worthwhile, as if one’s existence were some abstract word on the tip of the tongue never recalled.He drank some more. He stared at the bartender and mumbled for another and he saw the uneasiness in the bartender’s gaze returning his dim, dead one. The poet’s face was straight and his eyes were stones in their sockets. The drunkenness was failing to save him like it had before. The poet got his drink and stood at the railing overlooking the water and the faraway lights beyond glittering like the wavering of dirty gems in torchlight. His thoughts grew tangled and dissolved like salt. They used to dissolve like sugar. He didn’t know what happened.He turned around with his back against the railing, against the water, and looked at the people mingling, the people coming and going, the people wandering about in confidence, the people smiling and the people whose eyes glowed as they forged a good memory. His expression never altered.A crewman came by. The poet’s eyes followed him as the crewman, dressed in a white shirt and brown pants, went to the bar and got a beer and took a swig and looked about. The crewman didn’t seem to recognize anyone in the crowd. He wandered over the poet’s way and leaned on the railing beside him. The poet stared at him. You would never think the poet drunk. If he were lying down you’d check his pulse. “Nice night here,” the crewman said.The poet did not comment. The crewman swigged his beer. “Where you headed to?” The crewman said.The poet did not comment. The crewman swigged his beer.“Not a talker, huh? That’s alright. Some are talkers and some are thinkers, I suppose.”The poet had been staring at the crewman’s pants. He could weep at every crevasse unironed, the silver of his zipper like a tear in the moonlight, the brown pigment of the fabric like his wife’s skin. Transfusing love from one thing to another. Perhaps that would solve things. The old desperation lurched within like a sick person’s soul escaping. He licked his lips and reached out in a jerk and grabbed the crewman’s crotch. He did not even look the man in the eye. He studied his own groping hand instead.“Hey! What are you doing?”“Love.”The crewman punched him twice. The poet fell. The crewman kept hitting, kicking, hitting. Someone finally pulled him off. The poet retained the same expression throughout, even as he picked himself up and stumbled back to his cabin as the onlookers gazed upon him with curiosity and mild disgust.When he got back to his cabin, his wife raped him. The same expression.The next morning he awoke with the same dread. By lunch he was drunk. When he leapt overboard, no one noticed until hours afterward. They couldn’t find his body. They looked and it was not there. It was a bright wide day. A tall, commodious, decorous sky unsealed.