Cormac's Coast

Please Be Aware of Sensitive Themes: Apocalyptic Imagery, Murder, Mass Death, Self Harm.

The predatory and numbing winds fly cold and apathetic over the roiling waves of the ocean. They eat into defenseless skin, leaching out its warmth and vitality in a siege of microbial knives that sink deep in their apoplectic embrace. Within this mandate resides cracked knuckles opened raw, eyes yellowed and slow, and a numbness of spirit. It is a hateful wind that whispers rumors there never was a God. That or God had left out of disgust and taken the worthy things with Him.

Underneath it, waters mercurial and miasmic in their depth flow that waste no time on things like oxygen and balance and life but only playing with systems of biology that dragged along in loping dysfunction like a wicked child prodding a three-legged dog down cracked pavement. Beneath it all, pockmarked undercurrents carry the detritus of humanity in the circulatory system of the world. Nodules of scarcity in the dying bloodstream of a hateful body.

Water mirrors the observer and on its endless surface the man reflected the venom and apathy therein. Before the world was not the world and God had left and not been the man was already on the oceans. He was not a sailor or a mariner but only a man. A man done with life and its trappings. Once had a job, once a family, had things but no reason to stay so one day he left the plastic dock that burned his feet under a sun that still shone warmth, and got on his boat and sailed.

He knew how to tack, knot, and handle a line. He stayed simple and afraid of nature. Moved about close to the coast. He avoided people mostly and might have forgotten how to talk right.

He was alone but for a radio and looked from afar. Knew of the world and that it was starting to change. First were voices over the airwaves. Talking moderately but in a hyperbolic and desperate rapidity. Hard living. Things always getting worse. Hunger. Asking for better days. This was the longest period he could remember. It was plaintive and annoyed him. He fished and ate and looked up at the night and down in the day.

At some point the voices became concussive and beyond the radio. Carried over the water in violent frequencies. Gunshots and flashes of light in the night. First small, then big. The coast lit up like an oil painting of blacks and grays, an artistic rendition of scud on the water. In the end stabbed at by a painter angry with her creation.

Man had owned paradise but found it unpalatable. He could not match its beauty or purity and so had tethered and bound it to himself and pulled it down to match his gaze. He now suffocated in its company but enjoyed a death amongst equals. It was after that the squalls of cold came. Big and blustering like invaders on the plains with a new and evil technology. The man shivered under its wrath.

Sometimes at night, far and away in the water he could hear clear as day a voice that cried. Not for any one thing but in recognition of an immense and unremitting absence of all things in this desert. Hungry and alone and cold and sick. Knew it was not one voice but all of them and they were indeed alone. The word damned shuffled like a vagrant to his mind, crawled to his throat but got confused at his lips.

He continued along the coast. Trash migrated about him in great herds. Early on some others would spot him. Sometimes they wanted to trade. Sometimes they wanted to take. Traders he ignored. Takers he shot. He ate them unblinking like a dumb animal because they moved and so were meat like him and everything else.

The currents slowed but continued to carry him. He angled and trapped. Consumed slick-backed things that might have once been eels or tuna and shat runny with coagulates of blood interspersed.

Water was fine but it came strange. In the knife winds of ice he found himself scrambling through his flotsam treasures for something warm before being drenched in hot wonderful showers. Sometimes it was sickly ash from some midden cloud that had circled the cities. Sometimes it was water, but it came down thick and globular and left his boat dyed a strange pink afterwards.

Soon the quiet and the wind told him he was now truly alone and alone, the last and the only one left to keep vigil over what came next. The world continued to speak in the cold waters. Along the coast, some errant storm had caused a subducting tide that brought what was left of coastal towns out to sea in congregation.

In the night he would listen as the hull bumped against men and women drifting and frozen prone in the waters like cords of wood.

In the early morning on the deck he looked out at the bobbing multitudes around him, some turning lazily over in pantomime dance while others looked skyward in contemplation. A redolent mass circulating an aimless pulpit.

A woman amongst their number crawled out of the waters in grasping motions and perched upon his bow, her legs kicked out at strange angles. She was contorted and her face was horrible and wrong but the sun showed behind her like a halo and she was beautiful in a way. She spoke to him for a long time. Said she had been a mother with a child, had a husband and a life on the shore and lived in the sun before things changed. Said she had seen him sail along the coast and knew his face and his place was with them now.

He simply looked at her perched silhouette with mixed hated with an emotion he could not identify and after a time she said nothing more and slid back into the waters without looking back.

He pissed over the side and keeled the boat, the water-logged ropes snapping as the wind caught the sails. The masses were left behind with their gape-mouthed pleading unheard and unfulfilled.

The sun gave out. At some point it hid over the horizon and refused to come back. Not ready to leave yet without the strength to remain. From its redoubt the last rays cut across the twilight stars like a fresh and bright wound.

Only the man remained, a homunculus participle in a greater sum of parts now extinct.

Casting grasping shadows across the water, the vessels mast and his profile making tar black fingers reaching across the world. He sailed away from the dying light.

The current continued to take him down the coast. The sandbars and meandering estuaries gave way to rocky mountain cliffs of chalk that inferred a divine and terrible radiance. On their peaks bipedal figures followed his progress like savages along the parapet. Their descriptions could not be distilled through the distance, and in the apophatic quiet of the cold air the man knew the coast was leaving the world behind as well.

Peaking over the curve of the ocean along the escarpment of cliff face a jagged islet rose from the stilled waters. The man cracked his eyes through his parka of trash and from afar saw it move slightly, an oblong shape circulating from an anterior position. A face looking over a massive shoulder, great and giant upon the water. A Monster. But the world left to all was but for monsters he supposed. One amongst them, he let sails catch wind that was not there and keeled for the figure.

It had stood by the time the vessel arrived. Like the bipedal things on the cliff-face it followed a roughly hominid outline but with limbs proportioned in aversion to common humanity. It loomed over him and looked down with a strangely cherubim face that reminded the man of a feeling he could not articulate.

It spoke in a voice he knew to be his own.

End of the line.

The word murderer ran naked across his mind and he knew he had never been to the ocean. The man looked up. The thing’s eyes stared at him and he could not hide himself from their gaze.

Let’s go.

Giant hands washed themselves out of the surface and grabbed the bow of the vessel. The shore pivoted from sight and they faced out to the glass-dead waters. Like a shepherd the figure dragged the boat out to the stillness leaving the shore behind.

Time passed. The waters barely broke past the waste of the beast as it trudged them out to open sea. No wake was left behind either of them. Finally it spoke to him.

How long have you been out here?

He knew he did not need to but he spoke. A long time. His throat cracked as a fishbone long developed broke in his larynx.

Yes. But how long?

He considered. Years.

An empty cardboard box on the table. Blue and white striping, a bright red triangle with a centered grinning skull.

Running?

I can’t remember.

Spilled bowls of tomato soup mixed with puddles of milk frothing into a globular pinkish thickness. He tasted copper in his mouth.

His throat must be bleeding from the effort of the words.

Lies.

The radio which had been long silent cracked to life and the man jumped. Voices came over that had been heard before, words well used and sustaining an ecosystem of plaintive desperation. Hard living. Things always getting worse. Hunger. Asking for better days.

A woman terrible with beautify and a boy with a cherubim face. The words had annoyed him. Twisted on the floor feet still kicked out, like they could push away the agony.

He had a family. Not now.

The man said nothing. They continued in silence.

After a time they came out to a structure in the expanse. Black pillars of rock that did not so much reach skyward as pierce the earth like a violent rejection of heaven. Beyond the porphyry threshold there was nothing at all, only a blackness devoid of light and meaning and existence. The man was not sure if he felt fear.

Can we go back to the coast?

The giant figure shook his head. Dionysius the Areopagite said that divinity was absolute nothingness. Same as man. A bit of an Eastern take, I suppose.

The coast.

That ship has sailed. A smile hidden in his voice. Gone and long gone as the world and as you. We are here now and forward is the only option.

The man blinked. The world didn’t end did it?

The world always ends. It just happens to be for you in the now.

He looked up at the distended shepherd that carried the face of his murdered son and spoke in his voice and opened his mouth to protest but no words escaped.

Only the sharp crack of brittle wood met by a hardier and more unyielding force escaped his breath. The monstrous thing looked down upon him with his sad child’s face as heavy boots broke the doorframe of the hotel room.

The titan’s face became cracked and brittle like porcelain or rotten plastic. Lines like cheap linoleum stretched in malformed vertices along the youth’s face and blooms of shattered siding born of bullet holes matured along its visage. A convincing facsimile of the gunfire that had shattered through the thin walls.

The man looked towards the pillars’ threshold once more before the police entered with guns drawn into the cheap ensuite that was his last kingdom on Earth.

He stepped to the portside egress of the vessel and leading into the water he saw the plastic dock which had burnt his feet the last association with life before the waters and the coastal tides. Now it was stripped of its functional dignity shrunken to a green molded bathroom stool baked hot through the window under an Arizona sun.

One last glance to upward to the shepherd the Death-as-in-Life colossus but now saw only a uniform with a face obscured behind a beam of light. Sir we had a call of a disturbance.

He stepped down into the water, and rather than sink he became weightless and ethereal, floating above and walking on the surface as if in the Sea of Galilee. Around the ocean the obscured savages from the cliffs faded in and out as they looked through the window of the motel room. Gawkers and rubberneckers to another of life’s violent tragedies.

Yes he was done. Done and done.

As he walked towards the pillars he heard the lonely cry reverberate across the waters once more. The officer shot through the chest and screaming as someone called for the damned ambulance. He knew the word was not a request but a judgement and summation of his life.

A last cold wind blew across that still watered place drained of purpose. It whispered rumors that there was no God or that He had left with all the other worthy things. Worthy things bereft of life and meaning and vibrancy things he had used up and wasted through decisions made stupidly and gone wrong. His violence spent he walked through the pillars into the void.

*

It was after a time that the older officer walked through the doorframe into the motel room. Broken sheetrock and glass crunched between the heavy rubber soles of his boot and the cheap carpeting. He looked at the man hanging from the threaded cord. Legs kicked out in pantomime dance and a thin line of blood escaping his mouth. A green stool sat ambivalently to the side. On the bed lay an open Bible and a gun. The firearm’s slide was locked back in a last scream of the destruction it shot out. Past the bed pinkish frothing material spread across the carpet and gave off a sour milk smell. A leg stuck out from behind the corner of the bed.

He looked back at the suicide hung limply before him.

End of the line, you sack of shit. The eyes were bulbous and yellow and dumb like an animal.

You had to make the world around you as ugly as you were.

He followed his gaze to the wall opposite and noticed the painting they were fixed on. It was not a true painting but one of those prints that passes muster only on first glance. In the frame a lone boat rode the dark waves of an ocean while a man sat at the keel with his face turned away. The entire palette of the piece was in dark blues and muted greys, with a violent spray of red dusk across the fading skyline. Along a distant coastline, where the sailor’s view was fixed, splashes of distant color lighted and blurred into obscurity but hinted at either fire, blooming trees, or the reflection of the setting sun.

To the rightmost of the horizon, where the ship was pointed, a dark islet curved from the ocean’s surface in weirdly anthropomorphic angles. It was titled, Cormac’s Coast.

The officer didn’t like it. It was pretentious and ugly, like all motel art. He stood there with his back to the dead man and wondered what his wife was making for dinner.