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Adrift

David J. Tabak

For Garry Cooper, too.

    Rathead is up to something. I can tell by the way he twists the bone in his nose. He always twists it when he is up to no good. He’s been waiting for this moment for a long time. He was the big cheese, el grand enchilada, the Great Kahuna who was just waiting for me to fail. And now the moment has arrived.
    Rathead was the tops until yours truly washed up on shore after drinking too much on the lido deck, trying to convince the blasted co-eds that I was far more handsome and talented than I appeared. Fortunately, I expropriated a life jacket before doing a feeble imitation of some flabby aquatic mammal on the narrow railing three decks above a roiling ocean. The last thing I heard before I succumbed to the waves was mindless giggling and a suggestion that they check out the disco.
    I managed to catch the deck lights of the Polynesian Princess slipping over the horizon, blithely ignorant that it was one late-middle-aged-Jewish-therapist-whose-best-years-were-behind-him lighter. If I was the captain, I wouldn’t bother to circle back for a cursory search; what would be the point? Whatever meager contribution I would be expected to make was as mushy and indistinct as the playbill from the mediocre musical revue I had been subjected to earlier that evening.
    A bellyful of Mai Tais lulled me to sleep and I awoke blinking madly in the morning sun while seagulls soared overhead, debating with myself whether their becoming vultures would be evolution or devolution. The sea was the temperature of urine and it smelled as nice. My mind fumbled through a deck of cause and effect as it tried to come up with a reasonable explanation of how and why I would meet my maker in the middle of the South Pacific. When I finally washed up on St. Peter’s doorstep, would he look down at me with ponderous eyebrows and cumulous beard and christen me “asshole”?
    Despite probability and personal inclination, I survived the day. Neither sharks nor dehydration claimed me. I bobbed like a brightly colored lobster trap buoy. I tried to find some sort of Zen-like detachment as I was truly one with nature. It didn’t work; I was, however, wiser, vowing never again to delude myself that young women find me the least bit attractive. Whatever aquatic animal would eventually consume my flesh could thank me for the wisdom.
    The sun set and as darkness fell, so did the temperature. I looked past the pitiless moon, wondering if God expected me to reconcile. Was he standing at some kitchen counter in heaven, tapping a sandaled foot and sighing like my first ex-wife when she discovered my afternoon exertions with my second ex-wife? I offered no different explanation to him than I did to her. It was His hideous narcissism that drove me away. Not into the arms of another God, but to simple and unapologetic atheism.
    I crossed my arms in a final attempt to keep myself warm and was disappointed that a prayer escaped my chapped lips. I hoped I could die with a modicum of self-respect, completely bereft of bargaining and acceptance. I came into this world pissed off; I hoped I would leave it the same way. I closed my eyes for what I assumed would be the final time and firmly extended my middle fingers for whoever would find whatever was left of my body.
    My atheism was seriously challenged when I opened my eyes. If there was a heaven, this would be how I would design it. The first thing I saw when I pried open my salt-crusted eyelids was a perfectly formed medium-roast coffee-colored breast with an eraser rigid nipple surrounded by a Werther’s Original Caramel areola. To my utter delight and amazement it was accompanied by an exact twin five inches to the left. I puckered my mouth open and whispered “nice bazooms, Lord.”
    A voice as light as a butterfly’s wing echoed “nye s ‘bazoomzlahd?” Heaven got better, because the perfect breasts were below a heart-shaped face, with fig-full lips, a button nose, and two almond-shaped eyes with irises of pure ebony. A newly whelped baby could not be as innocent as the face staring down at me. I tried to raise my head, but my brain had calcified in the ocean and now weighed more than my Wednesday night bowling ball. I howled in pain and the lovely child rocked me in her long lithe arms and hushed me. “Nye s ‘bazoomzlahd,” she whispered, “nye s ‘bazoomzlahd.” To add gravy to the icing, she pressed my face into her commodious bosom. If I had known the afterlife would be this nice, I would have been a far more religious younger dead man a long time ago.
    Heaven got even better with a twittering of giggles from the other side of the palm fronds. Two equally beautiful and equally naked naiads slithered across the sugar sands to where the ocean belched me up. They pressed their breasts into my face by way of greeting and I reciprocated by gurgling with delight.
    As was God’s modus operandi, my joy was finite and short lived. The palm fronds parted again to the sound that reminded me of the time I accidentally dropped a spoon in the garbage disposal while it was in full spin. Scruffy men with the outline of their ribs painted on their cocoa bodies appeared with bows loaded with arrows pointed directly at my crotch.
    Judging by their angry looks, it would have been prudent to politely ask the girls to desist in their ministrations, but I could not. While lechery urged me to enjoy it to the last drop, I was incapable of pushing a flea away let alone nubile women whose fingers were wandering in my beard and hair. Over the sounds of their giggles, I could hear the whine of the bowstrings as they were drawn back almost to the point of no return.
    The men parted to reveal what I could only call an antique animated mannequin with bangles dangling from scrawny legs and arms. He wore a bone through his prominent nose and his scalp was festooned with the skull of some enormous rodent that was perched jauntily in a nest of pigeon feathers. He also carried a small wooden stick with a smaller animal skull on top as if he were doing the world’s worst Polynesian ventriloquist act.
    He stamped up to me, threatening to crush me with his child-sized feet. While his sandals were made from coconut husks, I was sure that, if he bought them from a department store, they would either light up or have some brightly colored depiction of an animal on the soles.
    His eyes were beady and needed a good pair of glasses. Perhaps if he could see better, he would be less of a prick. He grasped the plastic buckles securing the life preserver to me. Even he was surprised when the whole rig snapped open to reveal my pasty pruned skin under an impossibly wrinkled Hawaiian shirt.
    The villagers fell onto the sand burying their heads as if they wanted to disappear. Rathead looked bewildered. He resembled the incumbent in a mayoral campaign who had been coasting to victory but had just been photographed kissing an underage intern. This was not a happy development. He raised the phallic symbol over his head and I wondered who had the harder head—me or the rat?
    Just then, my cellphone that had been protected in utero in the pocket of my shirt, fell onto a rock and began to play “Go Cubs Go,” which I always considered to be ironic but which the natives considered apocalyptic.
    Rathead tried to convince his followers that they should not be afraid like him. His hand was trembling as he tried to poke at the phone that had been cha-cha-ing along a flat rock. He did nothing to reassure his flock and knew it. Unfortunately, he learned the same lesson that had been plowed into me the year I graduated with my Master’s degree in Social Work—-being an asshole isn’t particularly effective in reassuring people.
    Mustering whatever energy I had left in my sodden body, I reached to shut off the ringer. Unfortunately, my fingers had been in the sea water for so long that a lady finger soaked in espresso overnight would have had more substance. All I managed to do was knock the phone off of the rock to a smaller rock upon which it split open, revealing a portrait of Alice, my curly haired retriever, looking dopey as ever.
    The murmurs of those gathered could come from fear, amazement, or urine dribbling down quivering legs. They had never seen a dog, especially one with creepy yellow eyes and a tongue so long that you could legibly write the Magna Carta on it. At any minute, this Hell Hound might break the bonds that had been confining it to my postage-stamp-sized cell-phone screen and tear them to shreds. Of course, all the actual Alice could do was excessively lick them and perhaps happy-pee on their feet.
    Rathead narrowed his eyes and straightened his head dress. With a look of utter distain, he gargled some curt phrases. I was surrounded and hoisted by a band of moist and sour-smelling warriors. They bore me up on their shoulders, daring not to make eye contact nor mention the fecund aroma of the brine-cured feces in my pants.
    Rathead lifted his rodent stick to the heavens and headed towards the palm fronds, pausing when he arrived. The maidens danced their way forward and spread the bushes so we might pass.
    Being borne headfirst made me uncomfortable; my subconscious convinced me there was the bilious maw of an active volcano awaiting me. I twisted my head around and noticed that the entire island was no more than five feet above sea level. It was less an island and more a pimple in the middle of the ocean. Clearly, the ancestors of this Neolithic tribe were duped by an unscrupulous real estate agent who waxed rhapsodic about the easy access to the water. Of course, easy access is a two-way street. I would have to stake out a tall tree during monsoon season.
    As we approached a semicircle of disheveled huts, which would present no challenge for an asthmatic wolf, I noticed to my chagrin a large iron pot on a fire. I didn’t know what bothered me more, the fact that I would soon be boiled alive or how utterly unimaginative my captors were. They circled the pot three times, giving me a chance to inspect the surface of the steaming water. Apparently I would be a bland dish as there was nothing in the pot by way of a flavor enhancement. Perhaps that would be my final “fuck you” to the primitives. I imagined them chewing through my flavorless sinews.
    My natural inclination was to struggle and beg, but I was simply too tired to protest. Being in the water for so long and in the ridiculous situation that would be my end wore me pile of ambivalence. Whatever comes next could be no worse than whatever came before.
    The men lowered me to the hard, sharp ground. Before I knew it, finger centipedes removed the salt-crusted clothes from my body and tossed them into the fire beneath the iron pot. The flames roiled up great clouds of thick black smoke, which I assumed was a harbinger of something unpleasant.
    I let out my last sigh, as the hands lifted me up again. Goodbye, cruel world. Fuck you and your perpetual inconvenience. I was going to a better place—away from you. Up I went into the air and I could feel the steam rising through my fungus-crusted toes; I was indeed to be a most inedible potage.
    I assumed the pain would be a bit delayed until my feet were fully submerged, but at first the pot seemed to contain water slightly warmer than bath water. I was sure I would soon be screaming agony, but so far, all I wanted to do was to sigh contently. My shins and thick thighs didn’t seem to mind either. Perhaps I was getting old and my pain receptors were so crippled by indifference that they would even phone in the agony. My genitals registered no complaint either as I contentedly urinated into the water—consider it seasoning. My chest, with its forest of gray hair and size A breasts also contently marinated sous-vide.
    It was only when the lithe fingers of the lovely ladies scrubbed me with bricks of pumice that I realized it wasn’t a stew; it was a hot tub. Even my penis woke from its Cymbalta-induced Rip Van Winkey slumber and rose from the surface like some sort of sea serpent, much to the delight of those circling the pot. I suppose it was a fertility symbol.
    I was lifted out of the warm water like an enormous matzo ball. The maidens pressed their flesh against mine to both dry and warm me. Every single boyhood fantasy was realized—and then some. God was either off his game or really on it.
    I was placed on my feet, but supported under each armpit, so I would not have to bear the full gravity of my weight. The maidens wrapped a belt of leaves around my loins and I was amazed I wasn’t allergic. The least insect-infested woven mat was placed in front of me and I was lowered on top.
    A wooden bowl of twigs, fish entrails and God-knows-what-else appeared in front of me. I had gone without food for at least thirty-six hours and my stomach could have digested concrete. They gave me a limp grey-like substance that I supposed was their version of flatbread, but it made a paper napkin seem tasty. It was down my gullet before my brain had time to be repulsed.
    While I could not say it was in the pantheon of best things I had ever tasted, it was not revolting. It was warm, filling, and the twigs provided ample opportunity to chew. A hollowed-out coconut shell was handed to me. It had the bouquet of fermented urine after a meal of asparagus in an asparagus cream sauce. I was most likely severely dehydrated and most likely marooned, so a good stiff one would do me good. I held my nose with one hand and downed the beverage, which was disconcertedly body temperature and could strip off three layers of paint. My body went limp, except for my penis, which peaked out from among the fronds like Livingston beating a path through the jungle. The maidens laughed with delight, each trying to get my attention. For the first time ever, beautiful women were interested in my genetic code.
    Behind me was the sound of grunting from both weight and anger. I sloshed my sodden head around to see Rathead carrying an assortment of charms, feathers, and plastic rings from a six-pack out of a hut. He looked at me, suddenly wishing his teeth were as sharp as they were brown. He was being evicted from the prime hovel in the village.
    I was sure every god goes through this at some time. All those Sumerian idols with their Little Eva eyes grown wider as Abraham’s hammer swung towards their faces. Abraham’s God, après schtupping Mary, wondered where everybody had gone. No god goes to their oblivion quietly, but the problem is that no one cares. Once the luster is off the divine rose, you might as well complain to Zoltan, the Babylonian God of Disenchantment.
    I tried not to gloat, but Rathead was such an inveterate asshole that I couldn’t hide my satisfaction. No one seemed happier than the maidens, who apparently had to minister to his every perversity, which, judging by the fact that they all desired a long shower, were legion. They danced around me like gnats, as who I assumed was the chief, judging by the number of feathers stuck in his gray hair and the length of his sagging breasts, pointed towards a hut.
    Four nubiles accompanied me into a dark hut, which smelled of old gym socks. It was impossible to complain when one maiden offered me her breasts for a pillow, two others flanked me on either side, and the lithest of the cadre laid on top of me as a blanket. There is nothing better than waking up and, for once, realizing your reality was better than any gin-induced dream.
    What amazed me was how little it took to impress my people. They had such an inordinately low standard for a deity. During the first week, I noticed them drinking water from a stagnant pool into which they multitasked by also urinating and defecating. All the while there was a perfectly clean fresh water spring, not fifty yards away. They knew nothing of sanitation, but they had a healthy dose of skepticism and assumed the spring was too good to be true. Why risk it when there is a perfectly good pond from which to get a lukewarm drink of cholera? They watched me dip my coconut shell into the spring and make happy num noises to show they had nothing to be afraid of.
    The chief assigned the least promising of his five sons (and I can assure you the competition to the bottom was fierce) to test the water. He trembled as he reached to take the coconut out of my hand and scoop up a quarter-cup of water, which he paused at his lips while locking his gaze on me. Maybe this is what Isaac looked like watching Abraham’s knife glint in the sunlight, praying like mad that a ram with no depth perception decided to take a stroll in the underbrush. I suddenly understood why Gods turn vengeful. “Trust me” means “Trust me, God damn it!”
    I kept reminding myself to be a patient and benevolent god. These were simple folk who were cut off from civilization and its gifts of basic common sense. Although it has never been my strong suit, I would just need to be more understanding. But as I watched Nimrod Jr. sip barely a thimble-full of water and swallow it as if he was a teenager walking down a dark hallway in a slasher movie, it was all I could do to restrain myself from slapping him. He was surprised that he didn’t fall dead immediately and was simply waiting for a more painful and prolonged death. The islanders stood around with a look of concern and relief that at least they weren’t the ones who had been poisoned by fresh clean water. What didn’t they understand about num num?
    I suddenly felt like a fraud. Not because I was pretending to be a god to a tribe of Neolithic idiots, but because of all the people who could possibly worship me, I had been chosen by a tribe of Neolithic idiots. Other gods were worshiped by ascetic monks or sex-crazed suburbanites. Why couldn’t I be their God? What did it mean that I was worshiped by people who proved Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest was clearly wrong? If a god was known by the company who worshiped him, I was pretty sure I would be the laughing stock of the Deities Conference as the other gods read my name badge and said “Oh, you are that god worshipped on the island of Neolithic idiots.”
    As the week progressed and no one was doubled over in either direction, my stature grew. Not a moment went by without some father offering the sexual favors of his daughters, wives, or acquaintances. For the first time in my life, I could be choosey. As was par for the course, the right message was not received and I was soon offered a coterie of sons, husbands, or uncles. I was forced to have sex with any woman who parted the beaded door of my hut, just to get some peace.
    Every morning as I escorted my latest mat mate out, I caught a glimpse of Rathead, who stuck around, because, on a small island, there isn’t anywhere to go. Eventually and sadly, you always end up where you started or start where you ended. He was the only one who did not curry favor with me because there was no point to it. No god gives up his place just because he is a nice guy. His time had come, just as had the time of whatever schmuck he replaced. He probably suspected this moment would arrive, he just didn’t expect it to arrive so soon.
    The only thing Rathead had left was an overwhelming and all-consuming desire to see me fail. I showed the tribal knuckle scrapers how to make a primitive sundial by inserting a stick in the sand and tracking the sun’s shadow. At first they just stood there like chickens staring up at rain. I tried to explain the certain immutable facts about the sun. It rose in the east and in the morning and set at night in the west. With slight variations, its path was essentially the same every day. A clock would tell them when it was time to work and when it was time to stop working. They could actually schedule their day and not simply do things as they thought of them. This was the beginning of civilization, but they could only think of it as just another fantastic gift that I brought down from heaven, completely missing the point that there was a distinct difference between eight o’clock in the morning and three in the afternoon.
    Rathead waited until the last villager turned in for the night before he struck, stealing the stick. I was awakened from my bed of the luxurious bosom of one of the chief’s oldest wives—who was probably in her thirties but looked sixty—by a hubbub outside my hut. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw nearly the whole village knelling in a semi-circle where my sundial had been. Their faces were sand covered and tear streaked as if they were keening ostriches.
    They all pointed at the hole where the time stick had been and at the footprints leading to Rathead’s hut. The only face not sandy or moist was Rathead’s, who, twisting the bone in his nose, looked like a cat that finally put a mouse out of its misery. What a schmuck.
    I found a small, relatively straight twig by the entrance to my hut. With the triumph of Iwo Jima Marines, I shoved it back in the hole and time was restored miraculously. From the way the tribe carried on, you would have thought I just squeezed the Christ child from between my hairy, freckled thighs. There was genuflecting, there was waving of hands madly in the air and tears and snot flowing freely, enough to embarrass a Pentecostal.
    Even Rathead seemed impressed. He nodded and said something that would have probably been loosely translated as “touché, asshole.” I tried to look vengeful, or at least spiteful, just to see him flinch. But he didn’t; he just stood there with his tattooed arms crossed and eyes narrowed, while something crawled in his right eyebrow.
    He was daring me to do my worst. Perhaps he knew I was as powerful as he was and that divinity depended on the self-delusion of the adherents. He knew I didn’t dare try anything for fear of appearing impotent and vulnerable to the wrath of the disappointed.
    Maybe it wasn’t defiance, but desire? He had been in on the secret that only gods knew. While it made them powerful, it wasn’t particularly comforting. Whatever afterlife mythology he told the masses to prevent them from going mad from staring into the void, it didn’t work for him. Perhaps it would be a relief if, for once, he was punished by a genuinely powerful and vengeful god instead of dressing up every natural disaster or minor inconvenience as an indistinct indication of an immortal’s displeasure.
    I looked at Rathead again and noticed a crooked smile. He was looking over my left shoulder where a scruffy little Gen Xer whom I dubbed “Shithead” was trying to get my attention. On this little island paradise, one showed appreciation by standing very close and breathing heavily into your companion’s nostrils. Given that the diet of most of these people was enough to revolt the least picky mongrel and their oral hygiene was limited to spitting out rotten teeth, it was best not to excel at anything.
    Shithead wandered up with his face pocked with pimples, placed both hands on my shoulders and exhaled with all the force of a fire hose. I would be washing that flotsam and jetsam from his three previous meals out of my beard for days. He slobbered in the international language of sycophancy; I’m sure complimenting me on my power, my brilliance, my benevolence and my virility. If he truly wanted to know my mind, he should have also complimented me on my enormous restraint of not kneeing him in the groin.
    Like any self-respecting ass-kisser, he was a weather vane for the winds of change. Once he figured out that Rathead was out and I was in, he dumped all semblances of loyalty to the old regime and began to follow me around like a hungry dog. Although we did not speak a single common word, we understood each other perfectly. He was willing to do anything I wanted so long as I was willing to acknowledge him as my presumed successor. Of course, he was merely biding his time until when he could put me out on the tropical island equivalent of an ice flow. I suppose he thought he was being clever. But I had been denied tenure enough times by former grad students to know not to turn my back on anyone. Even an idiot can effectively wield a knife.
    At first, having an assistant god had some benefits, such as performing minor miracles, including splinter and other objects-stuck-in-nostrils removal. My devotees required constant adult supervision. But even in these small matters, Shithead could not be trusted not to tear me down. Even after the simplest miracle, I could tell he was whispering sedition into my people’s ears. They would look initially shocked, unwilling to believe what they were being told, and then would stare at me indignantly as if I was the one who suggested that they should worship me in the first place.
    When I took him aside and tried to nonverbally explain I knew what he was up to, he would smile like a child who was about to be given a lollipop as an appetizer. The more I yelled at him, the more he nodded sympathetically as if I was complaining about someone else.
    I would walk away from Shithead, and he would explain to the concerned islanders that I was pissed at them and the road to redemption ran through his tollbooth.
    Contemplating my impotence under the mantle of omnipotence, I shuffled back to my hut while Shithead was soliciting sexual favors from virgins. That’s okay, I doubt I could convince my member to stand at attention. I shuffled the palm fronds into something like the shape of another human being and fell asleep with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. I was the alien in the land where I was considered to be a God. Was the Judeo-Christian God that I was raised with laughing at me, or was it simply Shithead banging the virgins in the undergrowth?
    I woke up in the morning, sucking on a palm frond as if it were my mother’s teat. There was commotion outside my door. Even though I had been on this island for nearly a year, I barely spoke enough words to impress a newborn. I heard a bunch of gibberish peppered with the words “baha grom.” Baha was their word for any liquid. It could be water, rain, or piss. Grom was some verb that meant to get bigger. So something wet was getting bigger. Baha Grom. It sounded like a pep rally cheer at a perennial loser. Baha grom—don’t beat us up. Baha grom—we wished we went to another school. Baha grom—it is just as embarrassing for you as it is for us.
    I dragged a filthy arm across my nose and pushed through the door. The island’s population was milling outside my hut. Obviously they had wanted me to be disturbed earlier, but were prevented by Shithead, who saw this as his chance to push me aside, and by Rathead, who wanted the situation to get so dire that I would fail and fall.
    Something was clearly going wrong and I was either its author or their savior. They would just have to see which way the wind was blowing. I acknowledged their annoying supplications as the chief pointed excitedly towards the ocean. I stepped over at least five bodies, whose owners refused to remove their faces from the sand.
    By the time we snaked our way through the prone islanders to the sound of monkey howls, it was clear what was causing the commotion. The beach, as it were, wasn’t. Where yesterday had been sugar-white sands, now was ocean.
    These were simple folk with no written language, less imagination, and nothing else to do all day but fish, screw, and worry about whether I was in a good mood or not. But the one thing they did know was when the ocean didn’t look right. When you live on an island one Justin Bieber above sea level, you pay attention to what the ocean is doing. And right now, the ocean was rising. Baha was groming like it meant business; some of the trunks of the palms that held the hammocks were now serving as yard sticks for our imminent destruction. Somewhere in the Arctic or Antarctic, an island-size piece of glacier calved off and fell into the ocean.
    The sand between my toes feels moist and insecure. The chief, with pupils as wide as his lip plates, points at the ocean, begging me to do something. Rathead and Shithead have forgiven each other’s trespasses and look to me for salvation. Rathead has pulled the bone from his nose, while Shithead shuffles like he was a kid who just realized his parents forgot to pick him up.
    The only thing worse than impotence is the inability to abdicate. I look up at the cloudless sky while the sun plashes in the rising tides. The gulls lazily circle overhead; their chortles, a substitute for an indifferent God who can’t even be bothered to laugh.

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