Blood Pith Crux
Kelly Hale

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The inspiration for this story is embarrassing, tawdry, and kind of pathetic. Thus, me cleverly draping it in universal themes of loneliness and isolation, using characters from myth who insist they bear only a passing resemblence to their namesakes. The result is very pretty, though. I think. 

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I LICKED THE SALT OF OCEANS from his skin. Tongue and flesh. I remember that. I think I remember that. He tasted of home--a home I knew the name of once. World remembered. World gone. Sketched into the sand and washed away by morning.

My hair is so long now. I can scarcely tell where it ends and the seaweed begins.

But this is not the story of Calypso. Not really.

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Washed upon the shore is a man, his body rocking in the surf. The waves are the hands of Nereids. They pull him to safety now, but if he doesn't wake soon, they will drag him into the sea again. 

A woman watches from the top of the dunes. She comes to the beach every day to see what has fallen from the sky, what the oceans have cast upon her shore. She's seen the bodies of many creatures, some of them men, swollen with water, very dead. Sometimes the sea washes them away; other times it takes an age for their bones to be picked clean by the crabs and gulls. But this man is different for the simple fact that he isn't dead. And that is something she doesn't want to think about, both hope and the fear of hoping, for if this living man has been washed upon her shore then-- 

Hope is a curse. A trick. Still, she goes down to the beach and drags the man back to the warmth of her cave. Pours fresh water between his lips. 

He coughs then swallows a little of it. His swollen eyelids break open, ripping out some of his lashes as he blinks. He forces words out and over a thick tongue. He says, "Thank you." 
She had expected questions. The questions anyone would have asked. "Where am I? What happened? How did I get here?" Questions she would have answered with soothing assurances that he need not worry about where he is or why, or who she is or why. He doesn't ask the questions he should. 
"The fire feels good," he says. "It's a good fire." Then he shudders, and she leans across, tucking the blanket round him again. He reaches out to touch her hair as it falls across him. Rubs it between his thumb and forefinger. Is it real or am I touching seaweed? Is this a dream I'm dreaming on my way to death? She knows the feeling. She's been there herself. Only there was no one's hair to touch.
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"Do you remember your name?" he asks. Not the question I expect. He never asks the expected questions. If he'd asked, "What is your name?" I would have no answer. I am Myself and Me. The only names I need on this island with no one to answer to. But I can't answer this question either. Do I remember my name? I could remember it. But no good would come of that. And now I ask questions of myself I haven't asked in ages. I feel my eyes screw up and maybe a tear will slip through. I turn my head away.
"May I call you Calypso?" he asks. "She was also beautiful and she lived on a wave-ringed island much like this." I'm beautiful then. Only because he's looking at me. "Oh, but that would make me Ulysses, I'm afraid."
I ask, "Who is that?" He tells me some of the story. A great hero. A wanderer. Ulysses rescued by Calypso after losing his ship and all his crew. How Ulysses and Calypso lived together on her island in bliss for a time.
"It ends badly then." I laugh. The laugh doesn't come out the way I hope.
"She was better off without him." His eyelids flutter down and shut me out for a time.
I tend him. He recovers. Seems in no hurry to leave. And his love, when it comes, is out of obligation, duty, good form. He thinks he owes me comfort in kind. I know this. I'm not a fool.
It happens like this. I have handed him the bowl brimming with our supper, fat shrimp and lotus blossoms. He takes it and sets it aside. Looks at me. I don't like it. I have no such tender regard for myself as I see in his eyes. It's not mercy, the way he looks at me. I start to rise. He catches my hand, and there I am, caught.
"Do you know what a body memory is?" he asks. "When you remember something in your blood, your pith, the very crux of you?"
I know it. Of course I know it. Why else am I?
"I know you in here." He jabs at his solar plexus. Then smiles, wistful, melancholy, and taps his temple. "But not in here."
"I don't think I ever set eyes on you before I rescued you." I put subtle stress on the word 'rescued' and I'm ashamed of it. But it is his cue. He leans into me, kisses me--there, just at the edge of my mouth, then our lips together, and our tongues and teeth. My thighs open to his not so humble sacrifice.
The night comes and goes, and comes again. He turns me over and over, and around and around, loving me from every direction possible, until I feel myself floating weightless in the womb of night, and there is no endless prison, Time, no forever that can outlast his love, no terrible thing I have forgotten, nothing but friction, saliva, sweat, mucous, and fire.
One morning I find him building a raft on the beach.
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The man is singing. He is naked, brown from the sun, hair streaked with gold, eyes as blue as the sky. The song he sings is wild and gusty. Even an ugly man would seem beautiful using all his muscles like that, building something full of promise that will get him nowhere. 
He sees the woman standing at the top of the dunes, watching him. There is a corona of light behind her. She eclipses the sun. He can't make out her face and so can't read her expression. In this she is like a goddess--that naked, unknowable Divine. 
"You take the breath from me, Calypso," he says. She says nothing, just stares. He is suddenly uncomfortable, too vulnerable in his nudity. He turns and gestures to the raft. "What do you think?" Silence. "I know it doesn't look very seaworthy at the moment, but it will be. We'll have to take enough water for eight or nine days. But if I'm as clever a sailor as I think, we should reach the Rock in less than that and then my ship will come." 
"I thought your ship was lost," she says. 
"No," he laughs. "My ship is eternal. It is I who am lost." 
"I saved you." 
"Yes. I can't thank you enough, apparently." Not bitter yet. But he will be--in a week, a month, another few years. He looks upon his handiwork. "I'm trying to return the favor." 
"Are you unhappy here?" 
"No. But if I stay I will become a fat hedonist, eating figs from your hand all day, and drunk on your body all night. You would soon grow bored with me." 
She is walking down from the dunes, bare feet sinking in the white sand. He can see her face now and turns his own away in shame, for she has seen the truth of who will be bored with whom. He explains, justifies. "I can't stay here. I have friends who will be worried." 
The woman has no friends, no people left. Once she commanded vast armies. They marched a long road built from the bones of their enemies. But at the end of the road they found only a mirror. 
She doesn't tell him this. Her memories are secrets in the blood, the pith, the crux. She says, "I can never leave. This island is my prison." 
"Who dares imprison the mighty Calypso?" It is only half a joke. His body is tensed for war, the battle stance of a smiter of infidels, righter of wrongs and liberator of the oppressed. Naked as he is, it's almost ridiculous. 
"Does it matter?" she says. 
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Two days he works on the raft, and at night, such hunger. I feed him oysters and tamarinds. I sleep and dream of storms, strange storms without wind or rain. Without sound, though I feel the roll and clatter of thunder. I awaken to his, "hush, hush now," and his arms around me, rocking me like a baby--comforting at first, but then I'm angry, as if he is the cause of my exile and has returned only to remind me of it. Outside, rain starts to fall, and farther out upon the sea, the wind churns up a hurricane. My grief and my anger distract him long enough to mean the difference between escape and another month with me.
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Twice Ulysses builds his raft and twice the wind and rain destroy it. He returns to her half drowned, ripped and splintered, pitched and torn. He does not blame her for the first storm, but after the second storm, he knows, and in the calm that often follows storms, with mists rising from the ground and glittering droplets on the leaves, a storm begins to gather in him. 
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"Let me go. If you won't come with me, then let me go."
"I don't control the weather!" Even as I say it, I realize it isn't the truth. But I can't control how I feel.
"Come with me!"
"If I leave I will die."
"Why? How do you know? Have you even tried?"
I may have tried long ago. I don't remember. Besides, the warder has no need to escape.
He looks past me, watching the gulls swoop and dive. "If I stay here I will die."
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His love is no longer love so much as a fierce and desperate tunneling to freedom through her body. He hurts her and she lets him. And after, remorse. And after remorse comes hate. 
Ulysses makes camp on the beach, and begins to build again, working through the days and nights without rest, eating his catch raw from the ocean, taking nothing from the hand of fair Calypso, not even water. Sometimes she watches him from atop the dunes, and sometimes he glances her direction. The hollow place that she filled with him begins to empty out again, bled off, swallowed by the sand, washed out with the tide. 
He will leave, even if he dies in the trying. 
The third raft is finished. It's better than the other two. Stronger. And when the final rope is bound and knotted and coated with pitch, he sits beside it, one hand on the raft, the other shading his eyes as the ocean swallows the sun. He is waiting for the storm. 
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I pick up a handful of sand, let it slip between the bars of my fingers. Someday, when I am sand, a woman will sit on the dunes, watching a man leaving her, and she will pour me through her fingers like this.
He looks over his shoulder at me, a hard look. A somber invitation. A glowering challenge.
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"Go," she says and gets slowly to her feet. White sand clings to her body in mottled patches. 
"Come with me," he cries. "I will show you wonders!" 
She shows him her true face. "I have tortured more wonders than you will ever see, Ulysses. This is my prison. I am its only guard. And here I will keep myself until I have been punished long enough." 
"Even the gods do not judge as harshly as we judge ourselves. How will you know when your sentence is up? How can you know?" 
"I will know," she says, "when you return to me." 
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In the blood. Tongue and flesh. I can still taste him. Salty, bitter, sweet. Bound hand and foot, mouth and eye, face turned forever to the sea.
My hair is so long now. A winding sheet for dead things washed ashore.