buddha descendu

The party at the sprawling property in rural Connecticut had been raging since noon. Kegs had rolled onto the patio in the hands of sweaty young men under the summer sun, ten of them in all, and now that the trees were more visible with the same sun setting, three had been emptied and were floating in the pool. He swam among them, their contents gurgling within him. It reminded him of a documentary about Hawaii, lava streaming underwater, incipient peninsulas, buoyant stalactites.

He had had several draughts from each keg. As he tread water he held a plastic cup in the air, a suspended body of alcohol. The underwater lights distorted his dangling legs which moved slowly back and forth and held his head above the chlorinated surface. A shape at the bottom of the pool caught his eye. It was a Buddha. He vaguely remembered someone ceremoniously tossing it in, which seemed the proper thing to do. If you meet Buddha on the road, etc. He edged himself to the tiled rim of the pool and placed his beer next to the slide.

The chlorine burned his eyes but he propelled himself towards the Buddha anyway. His hands closed round its peaceful little body and his ears popped at the depth of the water. A bubble escaped his mouth. He watched it ascend. The Buddha seemed weightless and content. He removed his hands from under it and it slowly sank back to its resting place just next to the grate. His lungs were beginning to burn and he began his own ascension.

The air exploded in and out of his lungs once he had surfaced. His intoxication, mild and pleasant before, was now almost overwhelming. Pleasant still, mild no longer. Someone had thrown a half-eaten hamburger at one of the kegs and it lay bleeding ketchup like white trash shark bait. He had to get out of this pool.

After some jostling he acquired a beer from the newest keg and made his way into the house to dry off and change his clothes. The plastic cup was resting on the sink in the bathroom as he toweled his body. His skin was puckered and overly clean, the dark hairs on his legs like spiders emerging from milk. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror and was reminded of all those photos where the eyes are red because of…he realized he did not know why eyes are sometimes red in photos. Maybe our eyes do that all the time and it takes the quickness of the shutter to capture it, the instant and temporary universal red-eyed demon. He pulled his cotton shorts over his pale legs and left the bathroom.

Outside the party continued. Someone else was in the pool and people were bombarding her with food. The bottom of the pool was visible only in the square that surrounded her body. She was laughing and keeping the debris at arm’s length. Directly under her was the Buddha who seemed to be accumulating whatever couldn't float. He was joined by cutlery, waterlogged food, coins, a wallet, and a couple of heavy black boots.

The lawn sloped drastically away from the patio around the pool and clumps of people stood in small circles, some leaning against others. He heard laughter in all pitches, smooth searching for sex voices, flat mundane recounting of employment, a heated argument in slurred tongue about where someone had been for half an hour, and a game of rock-paper-scissors, with a pretty girl winning with scissors twice and then switching to rock only to be wrapped in imaginary paper. He started down the grass. Skirting each group he felt a part of all of them and suddenly marveled at their beauty. Something in each face touched him. As he passed one cluster a hand reached out and pulled him in.

The air was thick with smoke and it was now very dark. A joint came between his fingers, was raised to his lips and passed on. Three more times he inhaled, the last time on a new joint, longer and thick. The guy on his right was very short and sarcastic and talked loudly and bitterly about his failing car. Everyone laughed, some of them holding their stomachs. A slap on the story teller’s back caused him to spill his beer and with terrible speed the drunken Napoleon threw a flurry of punches at the offender, who crumpled immediately. A sort of scrum ensued and the whole circle moved twenty feet down the lawn leaving him with the joint still in his mouth, solitary. Shaken by the confrontation he drained his beer and smoked the joint by himself.

He turned to look back towards the house. The lights were on and each room was filled with people. The combination of alcohol and pot was intense and he imagined the people floating out of the windows, tearing at their hair and ululating. A replay of the fight flashed through his mind, but this time no one intervened and the Napoleon hammered away, unchecked by the concern of the group. The back slapper was left unconscious and bleeding in the imaginary revisitation which culminated in a back dive into the pool by three bathing beauties wishing to pay tribute to the conquering intoxicant.

He was brought back by the burning of his fingers which still held the joint. He began to stumble up the lawn but the slope was too much so he succumbed and moved further away from the lights. The brush was thick around him as he searched for a place to relieve himself in the undergrowth that ringed the property line. As the beer poured out of him he heard the staccato braying of a horse, not far away. He finished and moved towards the sound. Branches tore at his arms and legs, mosquitoes feasted, and his shoes battled roots, stones, and sticks to maintain their pace. The whinnying grew louder and he imagined the nostrils flaring, the mane twisting in the wind, and the proud hooves lifting off the earth. The horse would be in silhouette on a plain, right next to the moon.

The wooden fence bounced him to the ground. He had been running. The fence was white, two round horizontal logs stretching to meet one vertical one. It curled away on both sides and disappeared into the night. It reappeared across a small clearing and he pictured the area to look like an infinity sign that doesn’t cross in the middle. He was where it should have crossed.

Now he could hear the dull sound of the hooves pounding the dirt quietly off to his left. His hands rested on the chipped paint of the fence and he breathed heavily from his jaunt. The sound of the canter diminished and he knew the horse was moving away from him. He fought the urge to yell, he didn’t want to frighten him. Her. Whatever. He laid his forehead on his wrists and spat through the fence into the sawdust. He passed out that way, standing, like a horse, but drunk and expectant.

Sometime later he awoke when a mosquito flew into his mouth. He made a sputtering noise, looked up, and spat the mosquito right into the horse’s face. The horse receded into the clearing, but remained in sight. It had investigated the sleeping human, sniffed his hair, bent down between the rails to sniff his feet, then stood and looked at him in the dark.

The horse was beautiful, large and majestic, much as he had pictured as he ran through the woods.

He was back at the pool and the noise of the throng was almost unbearable. Had the horse been real? In light of where he now stood, beside a grill with charred hot dogs that caused a shudder in his groin, the curved rails of infinity itself seemed more probable. The journey from the corral back to the pool had disappeared and his blood pulsed violently with the alcohol that was eating his memory. And yet he drank more. He was standing in line.

Two hands came from behind him and thrust themselves deep into his pockets. A wet frame pressed against his shirtless back, breasts and cold hair causing a second, not altogether dissimilar shudder. Lips against the scapula, pelvis to buttocks, her voice slid up and over his shoulder. He seemed to hear her in his chest. She said hello or something, and no sooner had she adhered herself to him than she had begun to peel away. Her wet hands wormed back out of his shorts with effort and she made her way around him, brushing his left arm across the front of her white cotton soaking wet t-shirt. She was one of three people at the house that he knew and he hadn’t known she was there. He would not have approached her at all, let alone in that manner. He was still standing in line.

Two beers later. Impossible intoxication. Music is difficult, people grotesque. Mouths gaping, dribbling overflow onto each other, noise intolerably tolerable. Soggy second joint, Castro size and potent. Drunken everything separated from portion of high mind that is just that, a hovering, trembling unstable thought, then another, what was the last one, blood is so heavy, arms are so light, pupils are rolling, there’s a shoulder or a mouth in his ear, there’s more beer, three since the vaguely disgusting erotic one happened to put her hands in his pants, there she’s again, “light my smoke”, “hold my shirt”, as she strips to her bra for a dip in a pool filled with chlorine and cow meat, more breast on his back and more beer in his cup, and his brow is all beady and flushed up with drink and she is deceptively cool. He stumbles without taking a step.

Is this a room around him now or just onset of deepest night? It's extreme now, the dark, and the party seems muffled and far. Is this on his penis a mouth? Busy and hungry and wrong?

Disgust and excitement pass over his body, wrestling each other. The excitement is a tremendously guilty one and so it loses the match quickly. But the body doesn’t have the winner yet so it keeps fighting. There is no bell. His hands make their way to the top of her head and down her flank, she takes it for exhortation and her fervor intensifies. The body housing the decided match is now divided into sections of angry fight fans, turning their glory or anguish into bile. A tightened coil of misguided celebration and bitter restraint. The shades glow a strange blue from the pool, giving the room a seedy over a strip bar feel, or maybe he just felt dirty.

Air on his penis finally, all that wetness gone, his strange relief and it's quiet. The neon chlorine disappears, with the silhouette licking its lips, he’s disarmed. The wetness returns and the air is swept aside. There she is. That’s not her mouth. A loud noise at the pool and then a splash.

Excitement gets a standing eight count and disgust takes advantage. His brain has caught up with his body and he reaches up and takes her by each of her shoulders and flings her away. She bounces on the mattress awkwardly, left shoulder and cheek leading with her body arrested in midair behind her, ass up. His head is up and his feet are on the floor, his back still on the bed, his arms slightly away from his body, his palms turned upwards, suppliant and questioning, his shorts around his ankles. His shoes on.

She was now in the corner of the room, next to the window, in shadow, naked, bending to pick up a pile of her clothes. Her own. Her silhouette again, half-dressed, crossed the blue squares, pile clutched to her breast, shoulders slightly hunched. She looked like a previously well respected man being arrested on TV, only she wasn’t covering herself with her jacket. And there were no cameras. But that’s what she looked like.

Then he was in a bathroom washing his penis in the sink. The light over the mirror was bright and he didn’t look at himself. Although the bathroom window looked over the empty front yard he drew the shade. His dark seed sat in their tainted vessel.

The water didn’t seem to be cleaning him, it was spreading her around and he thought of all the water around that sunken Buddha. They’d have to clean that pool.