Yaquina, 2/7/12

Got up a little after 5:00 this morning to write, and ended up working on my 098 course instead. Bleh. That’s journal stuff. What I need to focus on is the Yaquina story. It involves two young people who share a certain immediate destiny.  They are moving toward a point of no return, but this place is ambiguous. It offers both freedom and futility, a way forward and a way backward. The story is about this progress they need to make toward this place. They are drawn necessarily to it as if their being depended upon it. Yes, their boat is floating out in the bay, just beyond reach. Yes, they realize they must confront some necessary evil together. I have in mind a boyman, a character both repugnant and beautiful in his slacker-likeness. This is the fiction.

They enter the cinderblock building to find the boyman at the end of a long and dark hallway. They follow the sound of buzzing, a sound of static, loud and abrasive. As they reach the end of the hall, it is so loud they cannot hear themselves think. It is so loud they begin to forget why they have come. Every step forward brings them closer to oblivion. The girl begins to turn away, but the narrator hold her fast. They embrace there in the dark buzzing hallway for the first time. It is a fearful and timid embrace. The narrator and the girl advance, arm in arm, toward the sound that is now around the corner at the end of the hall. The narrator see that the only light is coming from the high rectangular windows and this is not enough to illuminate the interior. They are intruding. He understands this, but this sound, the truck outside, adds up to the single person who may be able to help them reach their boat. 

When then they turn the corner, the room from which the buzzing is pulsating the air so that they feel it now on the tiny hairs of their skin, the door to this room is open, and they see it is a television set, widescreen, set to a non-channel. The whiteness of the screen and the teaming particles of light in it make the room appear nightmarish. The narrator spots off to the side, upon entering the room, a recliner that is directed away from the tv, partially. He sees over one arm of the recliner bare skin showing through a hole in the knee of Levis. He cleared his throat and asked of the recliner: hello? 

He said it again, louder: Hallo? The chair jerked and rocked for a few seconds and a hand raised a remote to the tv.  The narrator thinks the fingers on the remote will turn the tv off; instead the volume increases. The channel does not change. The recliner becomes still again.  

“Excuse me, we don’t mean to bother you but we need some help.” The narrator is shouting over the electronic barrage of noise.  

The chair jerks again and the boyman leaps from it, leaving it rocking violently. He is shirtless and his flesh appears dead blue in the light of the tv. The three people stand in the noisy room and for a few seconds do not move. He is a boyman. His chest is concave and his jawline sharp and jutting. There is a look of fear in the sockets of his eyes but this quickly recedes. He is a boyman, and the bigger nature in him begins to take stock. What the fuck? he says. But he does not say it in a threatening manner.  

There is an overriding innocence in the expression, as if he’d only now been giving the script and was only now trying the words out. “What the fuck?” he said, again. The inflection was more convincing this time, and it occurred to the narrator that boyman was waking up from some world made of pixels and white noise; they had brought him away from a place in which he existed timelessly, and now he must deal with these strange faces in his room. The confusion in his eyebrows was unmistakeable.