In the Belly of theBeast
To be properly expressed a thing must proceed from within,moved by its form.
—Meister Eckhart
Every man takes the limits of his field of vision for thelimits of the world.
—ArthurSchopenhauer
Before the Beginning This is what happens when he stands up, face to face with no, and no the true genius of the world. No, he won't sit on the potty, and so he sits wrapped in his mess for the rest of the day. No, he won't struggle with putting on his galoshes on a rainy school morning, and so he walks to school barefoot, all the other kids laughing. No, he won't stand on the chair and lean among the flowers to kiss the face of someone who loved to playfully cheat him at cards, and torment him in other small delicious ways, and then his frightened face is shoved up against death. No, he won't give the older boys his jacket, and after school is chased all the way home, barely staying ahead of the heavy swinging belt buckles. No, he won't eat his broccoli or spinach, or anything green that looks like the squashed insides of a caterpillar, and he falls asleep at the table, then falls out of the chair. No, he cannot say no, but he does. No, he won't go to the barbarous city of Nineveh, but instead heads for Tarshish across a storm-riddled sea where he draws the short lot and is thrown overboard for God-only-knows-what-reason, and ends up living inside a great fish. Yes, no is the genius of the world.
No-Jon-Ah Noone notices even on days when he stands in the cashier's line at Wal-Martholding a water-filled bag with bright swimming things that he is a man wholives inside a fish. Actually, he lives in a house he carved out of the insideof a living fish. He can't remember how long he has sat at the one table builtfrom a giant fish scale. He rarely opens his eyes anymore, not because thereisn't any light, a fish oil lamp flickers in the middle of the horny-scaledtable, but because he feels better not watching what passes below the invisiblefloor of his rib-roofed house. His eyelids slammed shut when he thought heheard cries for help pass below him, but the guttering flame from his burningblubber, scraped from the walls of his fishy house and poured into the seashelllamp, only cast gurgling shadows, and he could see nothing but the viscouspercolation, the amorphous dissolving of sea into fish.
He is left with only the faint echo of something, theinsidious scratching and scrapping of hermit crabs making homes inside hisears. He can't say if what he thinks he heard was yesterday, last week, oryears ago. But if it was yesterday, the pain is still sharp enough for him tolong for a dust-choked earth. If it was last week, the grief is already beingcarried away in a stream of memories. If it was years ago, then the tide has continuedto rise and he's now awash in a cataclysmic f1ood, and he's on his last gasp,treading water. He's planning to build a submarine to save all the creaturesfloundering at this depth. He knows that it is only those of us who can't swimwho will save ourselves.
Jonahic Dislocations Whenthe great fish had finally slurped up every corner of the ocean down to thelast drops hidden in the crevices of the Great Barrier Reef, down to the poolsbottomed in the Java Trench, draining the vast abyssal hills, turning theYangtze and Yukon alluvial fans into cracked mudflats, baring the submergedroots of the lesser Antilles to the Bahamas and forming a range of mountainswith topical summits, when at last the fish sprawled at the mouth of the Amazonas the last whisper of the longest current slipped between its lips, itsprawled, bug-eyed, gasping, its body bloated and misshapen by the world'soceans and seas; and Jonah in his fishhouse was exhausted from franticallyplugging the leaks, mopping his invisible floor, a one-man bucket brigade, asthe Atlantic and Pacific rushed past, the Black Sea and the Baltic, theMediterranean and lake Superior. He'd been pruned, his skin shriveled, foldafter translucent fold submerging into itself. He began to feel salted and pickled.The great fish lay unmoving except for its archaic gills slowly fanning up adust storm that engulfed Brazil. It looked as if it swam to the end of theearth.
Jonah wading waist Jeer through his rib-roofed house, tryingto keep his table and lamp from floating into a sopping oblivion, was ready tothrow in the towel when the fish arched its continent-long back, slapped downits tectonic plate of a tail and lunged forward, coughing up all that it hadswallowed, making rivers run backward, popping the polar ice caps up likeopened soda bottles, setting the Titanic down on Broadway in New York City,leaving Jonah beached on the boardwalk in Bombay. Jonah turned to face thegaping mouth of the great fish, and as it slithered backwards into the sea it belched,and from its fishy breath he heard the rasping of the one thousand thousandholy names, and dived back into the dark maw.
fish@net.com
Whalular Throbosis Helit his shell lamp and held it outside the window. What was the slow dull throbthat at first he attributed to the onset of a migraine caused by sitting toolong in the blubbery dark? Here in tower of spiraling narwhal tusks, he coulddiscover, delineate, pontificate on the ichthyosaural prime mover. He couldcontemplate the uncreated creating throb, or the creating uncreated throb, thefirst-cause and the final-cause throb, the epistemological throb and theontological throb, the pain-in-the-ass throb and the crotch throb, and stillnot move an inch-throb.
But standing at the window, he was amazed to see a seething red wall where a dishwasher wasthrowing white plates, declaring the new Last Supper, the shards flying in alldirections. Then he remembered to open his eyelids. What he saw before himfilling the inside of his great fish was no less startling; it was the heart ofa city in need of angioplasty: all its arteries clotted with traffic, itsgleaming headlighted blood at a near standstill, its lungs black and exhausted,rivers discolored and syrupy, the park trees leafless, though it could be autumn.He swore not to chug another bottle of his brewed fermenting fish.
But it was no delirium tremor. From this height, high in thebelly, where the ribs curved up into the studded stars, sparkling with theremnants of the last backwash of cosmic debris, up the many rickety rungs ofladders, frayed ropes and tow-rope-thick varicose veins, along greasyprecipitous ledges, that all lead to his bone-roofed hermitage, he could seethe present claiming a broken-down past, struggling toward a whimsical, consummatefuture, and then the lights begin to fade in one section after another of thecity, a massive power blackout, a heart attack, the light clots, and then herealized he was staring down at the last gulp of phosphorescent red tide and anight of throbbing indigestion.
Keeping Whale Hours Itreally could be. Yes, it really could, and that's what he keeps repeating tohimself in admiration of the grand conception. It is the first time in days hehas stepped out of his house balanced on its blubbery edge. He descends thekelp and bone ladders. He is whistling the latest pop ditty he's heard on theradio before the batteries weakened and the acid bubbled forth, corroding thetransistors. Yes, he is on his way, carrying a sheaf of shark fins under hisleft arm, gripping an air-bladder briefcase stuffed with air, swinging hisshell lamp so his shadow leaps forward and back as if he is in a hurry andbounces up and down, as if he swells in importance with each step. He stops infront of each rib and knocks, more than half-expecting it to swing open, hispale knuckles hanging in midair in a gesture of authority. When no one answers,he posts the fin on the calcium-white door and moves on. In fact, for the fulleffect he hangs from each bony arc a deet1-sea fish, the one that lights itsown way with exaggerated, glowing, needle-thin teeth and carries its ownflesh-waggling neon lure attached to its head. When he was done, he saw banksof fin-slapping fluorescent lights stretching down a whale of a hallway. Whenhe reached the last door that would never open and posted the cartilage thatwould never be read, he realized that for a moment it was something to do,something stupid. He turned around and forced himself slowly back up the tiersof swinging ladders and sat down in his rib-roofed house, headquarters forcetacean world tours.
Orpheus Fishlove Forhours he could hear someone wandering far below,
kicking at the debris of civilizations: elegant, crackedclay urns, twisted steamship paddle wheels, eye-white bleach bottles, cloudedmiles of tangled fish nets, Ionic columns, heavy stone calendars stained withsacrifices, arm- and legless marble statues, chariots, tireless Edsels,windowless Studebakers—the overwrought fever of centuries and the overwroughtdigestion of a fish’s galactic hunger.
It was a man, he was certain of that, the heavy clank andclang, the scrape and rasp, moving immovable objects, searching for something,shoving aside granite griffins and defaced sphinxes, the entire edifice ofreligions and astrological projections, Hammurabi's Code and the Magna Carta.But it was the words" the first he had heard in years, maybe minutes, hedidn't know, time lost and forgotten inthis cavernous gut, and the phrases so ethereal, he began to swoon. He coweredbelow his window sill, shaking his head in disbelief, now that the hallways ofhis ears were suddenly scooped out, dust and bats fuming from the fleshy,long-abandoned corridors, his head emptying to a paramecium, then threateningto explode with the melodies that entered and would not leave. The strangernever stopped singing of what he'd lost, the endless search, the repeatedfailure. Every inch of his pale, flaccid skin ached to be wrapped in thethigh’s curve, the arm's heated embrace, the hand’s delicate probing and firmstroke.
Listening from his high-house perch, he heard songs blendingthe murmur of the
sea and the murmur of the dead, and he grew afraid. He couldsee the flicker of the torch that the man held high and the lyre he carried inhis other hand. His back was turned as he walked further away, past pyramidsand earthen mounds. The stranger was searching for something else, for anuncivilized love, one with the power totame the three-headed dogs, boil awayrivers of forgetfulness, stand an rmy of spirits at attention against the willof the wind. He wanted to tell the stranger he hadn’t gone far enough; heneeded to go deeper than this junkyard, beyond where cven great fish swim, buthis voice had drifted off in a corked bottle. When the torch flickered its lastspark and the man was out of sight, continuing his journey toward an immense ifnot infinite loss, he sat safely behind his dripping blubber walls and againswore devotion to his mute fish, andwept.
Sun Screen Hedesperately shields his eyes from the sun. The shade of four fingers isn'tenough. Too new out of the flickering dark, he can't see a thing. Placing hispalms over his eyes, he stares at X-rays, the surf-jumbled bones of his handsclearly visible to him, delicate as the wings of flying fish, but hardlylooking strong enough to hold up the net of his sagging skin. Not to be draggedback by the undertow, he claws at the waves. The gentle rocking of each swellthreatens to topple him, as he halfwalks, half scuttles toward the shore.
The light spintering on the green surface spears everyexposed inch of his skin. He's an exotic specimen waiting to be collected.. Hestaggers under the glaring blue magnitudes of sky. A shred of tattered decency,kelp, is wrapped around his waist, but what has shriveled beyond recognition barely needs to be covered. Hepassed through hours of the sea's churning labor, the great fish's slowdilation, and the final moment when its throat clamped down and then spewed himforth—his ladders and house finally reaching beyond mere irritant.
His translucent soles shot the searing heat of the sand upinto his knees. He's dazzled by the bright shards of colored towels spread overthe beach. He quickly stumbles into the shade of an umbrella where a woman lies,every inch of her exposed, every inch tanned. He sits down confused, ready tospeak the prophecy of her doom, asking if this is Ninevah, but feeling theprimal throb taking over.
Speechless, she starts at this thing that's come from thesea and belongs back under the waves. It's a talking page ripped from ananatomy book: blue and red veins pulsing under the skin, the shadows of bonesrising from the fleshy depths of arms and legs, lips unable to hide the baldgrin of teeth. Startled, she answers no, this beach is just north of Miami. Sheintroduces herself, Jessabelle, says she sells Mary Kay Cosmetics, and knowsjust the product for his condition, and if he agrees to let her use before andafter photographs for her sales promotion, she'd help him for free. The seacasting up its pastels, the scattered clouds powder puffs, a blush of skymarking the sun, they leave the beach in her pink Cadillac .
Psalm 61 Hedidn't have to swim a thousand miles—he dove, and now he simply pushes open thebuilding’s double doors, steps out onto the cinder-ridden sidewalk, and inhalesthe decomposing odors of flotsam and jetsam. At this rise in elevation, linedwith century oaks, punctuated with an intersection where cars feign stopsbefore speeding on, all the sea would run downhill, unless the hill itself is aslow welling up of the sea.
Before crossing the street, he searches for the flash ofscales, the flip of a fin, the turbulence of a school of tuna roiling thesunstruck surface. The morning-wet, whale- back asphalt glistens. Standing onthe curb, he has nothing to say. He has listened to the doomsayers and theprodigal sons, the assessors and the hedonists, the elected and the lost, andhe casts his lot into the depths, crosses through a storm of traffic, and iscoughed up into another day of work, a fishy odor lingering in his clothes. Ina small driftwood frame, sitting near a corner of his, desk, written in wateryletters:
From the ends of the oceans will Icry unto thee,
when my heart is overwhelmed: leadme to the fish
that is higher than I.
Walter Bargen has published fivebooks of poems. His latest book is The Vertical River (Timberline Press,1995). His chapbook At The Dead Center of Day was published by BkMkPress, UMKC, 1997. His fiction has appeared in American Letter, Letters& Commentary, Georgia Review, International Quarterly, FuriousFictions, and New Novel Review. He is the 1997 winner of the ChesterH. Jones Foundation prize.