F A M I L I A R S T R A N G E R S

By C.W. Smith

(appeared in The Southwest Review)

I woke up here a while ago. I look into the cupboards for things I expect to find, so I'm guessing I live here. I've got other evidence, too: the table I'm writing on now is a square plate of steel propped atop four tree stumps buried in white sand, and I know without looking that the underside is coated with layers of peeling paint. Maybe in the past I made a decision about which side to place up.

I can't figure out why I know some things and don't know others. Looking out the door to this hut, I see birds pecking at dead fish washed up on the beach. "Sandpipers," I think, but I don't know for sure. I know without opening the door to the chest hanging on the wall that it contains fish line, three rusty hooks, a broken transistor radio, and a bottle of iodine with the label obscured by spillage.... But I don't know who I am and how I came to be here.

I spent most of the morning learning what I seem to have known already. For instance, when I got tired of standing while I was thinking, I eased down on an old car seat positioned against the seaside wall of the hut, and I was careful not to sit on the sunken end because I knew the springs were broken there and a loose end would stick through the stuffing if I put my weight on it. I learned that I knew that when I'm hungry I can dig canned goods out of the cardboard box that's covered with a piece of torn canvas.... After I had gone through most of the boxes and looked through drawers and cupboards, I felt a little better. I can say I sort of belong here. At least I know enough now to stay alive, but not what for.

Around twilight last night I was starting to feel comfortable. I tidied up the room, dug out some candles from the toolbox under the table, and was wondering where I kept the matches. Suddenly a man was standing in the door! I jumped behind the table and grabbed my ax for protection. Who are you and what do you want? I yelled at him. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but he had a familiar presence - I might have known him a long time ago, but hadn't thought of him in years. He was holding something in his hands. Here, he said. Have a naked breast. He dropped it to the sand and disappeared. The thing formed a dim hump on the sand by the door. I found the matches where I imagined I had left them, in an old tobacco can, lit a candle, and inspected the hump. It was a butt of uncooked ham, its flat, sawed surface bleeding. It was repulsive. I kicked it out the door.

All that really upset me. Unless I just imagined the man, other people live around here, and I'm not sure I'd like them if I got to know them. Just when I had started to feel... positioned, he showed up and disturbed the flow between information received and information analyzed. His visit put me too heavy on the input side. Kept me awake most of the night worrying.

I did sleep for a while, though. I had dreams. I remember an apartment in a large city. Luxurious, tasteful, civilized. Through a balcony window you can watch the lights work their way up through a mist. In the living room, the decor is modern. Having a drink. A woman is beside me on the white sofa; she seems familiar enough that I don't look at her when she speaks, although I know she's attractive. Our host and his wife sit across from us in chairs with chartreuse and tangerine leather covers. They seem at ease. They're laughing at something I've said; I'm laughing, too, then I add, "You have to admit that's pretty good for a man who makes a living lying about ice cream," and they laugh again, but differently. It's as if I've said something they agree with but wouldn't have said themselves because it wouldn't have been polite.

Other hazy images are disconnected. It's funny how I'm in the habit of saying to myself, "I had a lot of dreams last night," thinking of separate images as individual dreams. But wouldn't it make just as much sense to say that from the time I fall asleep to the time I wake up that any dreaming I do is all of a piece? Or that the dreams I have on separate nights are really one dream unified by me the dreamer? After all, I don't think of my waking life in daily segments, I don't say "I lived on Monday and again on Tuesday." I can feel a continuity there, so why not in my dream life? Just as I can say, "I've been having a conscious life ever since I was born," I can say I've been having a dream for just as long, and not mean a recurring dream. A continuous dream.

I'm getting scared in this place. I hope that's because I don't understand it, know my own place in it, how I got here, how long I've been here, how long it'll last. I keep shivering and sweating when I think about it. This place is like some territory out in the ocean where nothing happens and you're always lost - the Horse Latitudes - and you can't sail out of it because there's no wind. Only this is dry land.

Maybe if I can find some answers I'll feel better. This morning I remembered Robinson Crusoe's joy when he found a footprint in the sand. I'm not sure there's a comparison between us. I know this island (how do I know it's an island?) is inhabited. I mean I think it is. Right after I woke up this morning I went to the door of the hut and the ham was gone, but I don't know if the man returned for it, or an animal carried it off, or whether I just dreamed it up. I feel better thinking maybe it hadn't happened.

I didn't realize how afraid I was until it occurred to me that since waking up here I hadn't left the hut. I'd been feeling like a prisoner with nonexistent jailers. That ambivalence - the security of a cell, that tiny piece of territory assigned to me.

The sea seemed safe, so in the middle of the afternoon I left the hut and walked out to the beach. I'm not sure of the season, but it feels like summer - a sky the color of acetylene flame, flat clouds swimming like puffy cartoon bubbles in a hot blue milk; a thick, wet onshore breeze, and a sun so strong it numbs my mind and blinds me. On the beach I found a beer can. So there are people around! That didn't mean the man with the ham had been real, necessarily. But it did get me to thinking that maybe somebody around here could answer my questions. On the other hand, if they're like the man who came to my hut, I'm not sure I want to ask. Maybe I was a member of their community and they put me on this "reservation." Maybe I broke a law. Maybe they're watching me from the fringes of the dunes behind the hut. Many possibilities. Maybe I'm a madman experiencing periodic sanity; maybe when I wake up tomorrow I won't remember today, just as when I woke up the day before yesterday I didn't remember my previous life here but did see evidence that I had lived it. If that's the case, then maybe my best shot would be to contact them for help. I can see them shouting, "The fever has broken!" when I stumble into their camp.

On the other hand, maybe they'd shoot me.

I went back to the hut where I sat facing the door with the ax in my lap. All afternoon and into the night.

This morning I worked up the nerve to go swimming. I stood in knee-high surf, looking out to sea, then I turned around to keep my eyes on the hut and started wading backward into deeper water until I couldn't touch bottom. The water felt cool and relaxing, so I began swimming on my back with my head out to sea so I could watch the hut. When I got tired I started treading water, watching the swells in front of me roll into the beach. All at once an undertow grabbed by hips. Something like kelp twined around my legs, a cold snout poked at my back, a jellyfish brushed my shoulder. I started to fight, got a raw mouthful of salty water, rolled over on my stomach, and thrashed my way toward shore, flailing at the water, panicky, and when I reached the point where I could stand, I struggled through the surf and fell onto the beach to catch my breath, digging my fingers into the wet sand.

A little later - maybe I dozed - I saw two girls wading in the surf about a hundred yards to my right. They moved up onto the beach and stooped to collect something. Beachcombing, maybe. They looked harmless enough, so I got up and walked toward them. As I got closer I could hear them chattering, but the breeze carried their words away before I could tell what language they were speaking. They were wearing bikinis. One half-turned toward me and I saw a slim profile with small breasts. When she saw me, she spoke to the other, and they both turned their heads and skipped away. I yelled for them to wait, but they broke into a run, so I came to a stop. They might be lures. An ambush might be waiting around the next bend.

The dream goes on. I've started searching it for clues to my name, age, place of birth, marital status, social security number, occupation - anything definite. The stuff here in the hut could belong to anybody - I've searched everything for identifying marks. I had thought that maybe among all the containers in the hut one might have held something to help me. I discovered a small metal box in the bottom of one of the three footlockers. Its lid had a built-in lock. Because it looked like soemthing used for keeping documents safe, I tried for several minutes to pry it open with a knife, getting all excited about it. I had to take a screwdriver and a ballpeen hammer and whack away at the lock to get the box open. It held only a sliver of a broken mirror, like something left behind when the other contents were removed. It's possible, I guess, that the sliver was placed there for safekeeping - I mean, I can't be too careful about what I presume - but it doesn't seem likely. My point is that I've exhausted all possibility of these tangibles giving me any idea about myself.

In the dream, I'd guess my host to be about forty. If I think hard maybe I can recall somebody calling me by name. Does the hostess say, "Can I get you another drink, ____________?" I seem to be getting my own drinks. Quite a few of them. It's all hazy. I've decided, though, that the woman beside me on the couch is my wife. Call it an educated guess: (1) I'm not nervous or self-conscious with her; I don't get tense when our thighs touch; (2) our host and hostess seem to know us both equally well, or hardly at all; (3) as I said before, I don't feel I have to turn toward her when she talks, I don't have to convince her of my attention or disguise my inattention; (4) at one point she whispers something indistinguishable in my ear. I wonder if we have children. Of course, we could be old friends, brother and sister.

I'm confused about the condition of the room. Sometimes I see empty trays whose bottoms are littered with peanut skins and empty cocktail glasses standing on damp napkins, ashtrays stuffed with butts. Then the room is clean, everything put away. Maybe the woman and I were the first to arrive and the last to leave. Maybe a maid straightened up after the party. A maid suggests money. Our friend, the host, must have money. Maybe I do too, being his friend. Now that I think of it, my clothes are expensive, they fit well, even though I'm uncomfortable in them -- it's as though I'm accustomed to feeling uncomfortable in them. They seem to restrain me. From what, I don't know.

I'm pleased with the dream. I've got it worked out so that I can use a kind of valve in my head to let a bit of the dream flow into consciousness where I can take a look at it, and when the content threatens to overwhelm my ability to sort out the information, the valve shuts off, like the float in a toilet tank. At first, a couple days ago I tried to recall as much of the dream in one sitting as I could, but that just got me racing from one thought to the next. Taking it a little at a time is teaching me patience; it's as if the details of my life are a murder mystery I'm reading and I'm not going to flip over to the end to find out who done it before I get there.

I made contact with the people on the island! I have to back up a bit to describe it, though. Along toward noon I had gotten bored with my dream. That I could be bored in the middle of this mystery about myself really scared me. What if I give up the search? What if this business about the "valve" is only a clever way of deceiving myself so that I can't get at the truth? What if I'm becoming so adjusted here that I don't care how I got here or who I am? I don't know how long I'll be "awake"; I could lapse into another spell of "amnesia" at any time and have to start all over again. Maybe before that morning four days ago I knew all about who I was and what I am; or maybe I only knew as much as I know now, and I've been starting over endlessly for a number of years. And getting only so far before "forgetting." I thought at first that this journal would help, so that if things get foggy again, at least when I "woke" I'd have something solid to hang onto. But it's also possible - I was thinking - that I've made records in the past that "they" take away from me when I "sleep."

It's no mystery why I left the hut.

As soon as I stepped out the door, I saw an old man in faded bathing trunks hunkering on the beach. He was looking out to sea. One arm was wrapped around his knees, the other positioned so that his hand held a conch shell to his ear. He rocked back and forth, from side to side, more like a steady swaying, really. I wanted to yell at him, but I decided to be careful. I didn't want to get caught in an ambush, even though I didn't have any evidence that anybody was out to do me harm, any evidence except my fear, that is, which I think is reason enough. So I waited a few minutes at the door to the hut, watching him sway. Then I walked toward him, slowly, ready to run, keeping an eye on the line of vegetation behind the dunes. When I got to within a few yards, I called out as politely as I could. Hey there! I said. He didn't seem to hear me.

I walked up to him from the rear and stood for a second clearing my throat. I thought the conch kept him from hearing me, so I reached down and touched him lightly on the shoulder. This wasn't something I ordinarily would've done, but I thought the situation called for it. He didn't even look around; he simply passed his arm across his shoulder and grasped my hand in his. His skin was dry and cool, like silk. I was embarrassed - he thought I was someone else. I tried tugging my hand away, but he held on tightly, not looking at me. Excuse me! I shouted.

He turned his face toward mine. He'd been crying. I guessed that I'd stumbled onto another man's private grief, so I began apologizing, but the more I explained, the more I saw he didn't understand me. He smiled back at me like a child, his withered skin sliding and folding along his face.

Where do you come from? I asked slowly. I pointed in three different directions away from the sea. There? There? Or there?

Smiling, nodding, he held out the conch for me to take as though it were a telephone and somebody on the other end would give me the answer.

What's your name? No response. Only that moronic smile. I'd have to get him to leave, then follow. I straightened up and made shooing motions with my hands. Go on! I said. Go home now!

He looked bewildered, then frightened. I really didn't want to scare him, but I had to get him to go. I grimaced and cocked my fist. He scrambled up and began trotting off down the beach, looking over his shoulder. When I followed, he broke into a trot out of fear, so I slowed down to give him a little lead.

He disappeared into the undergrowth behind the dunes and I trailed him, trying to keep out of sight so he wouldn't panic. I followed his tracks for about a mile until I saw him go over a dune whose seaward side led down to the beach. As I got near the top of the dune I could hear voices, so I dropped down onto the sand. Had I been trapped?

I crept up the side of the dune and peeked over its crest.

People! Maybe thirty or forty gathered on the beach. On spreadout blankets I saw hunks of beef and pork and loaves of bread and bottles of wine and cheeses and cakes as big as basketballs! Nobody seemed interested in me. A volleyball game was in progress; the two girls I had seen alone on the beach were supervising the construction of an immense sand castle being built by a half-dozen younger children; the old man I had tracked to this spot now hunkered at the edge of the sea with the conch to his ear - I watched a young woman get up from an ice chest, walk down to the old man, and drape a towel across his shoulders. Three other children were burying a man up to his neck in the sand while a woman held a newspaper over his head to shade him and offered him sips from a bottle of wine. At the edge of the crowd, a young couple lay face to face on a blanket, noses touching. The volleyball players - all young men - postured and flexed for an audience of young women who lay preening and baking on the sand where the surf touched once in ten waves or so, running in rivulets between their legs, tickling them and making them giggle.

A man in undershirt and slacks with the legs rolled up to his knees lay on his back in the sand. He bounced a little girl in a red bathing suit on his belly. When he lifted her, she laughed and her gold hair flashed in the light. A woman lay beside them, propped on an elbow, her feet bare, her dress tangled about her thighs. She was talking to the man. They laughed, then the child laughed, and then they laughed at the child's laughing at their laughter. The woman's hair was light brown and it swirled around her shoulders as she stroked the man's hair back from his forehead. Her right foot idly pushed the sand at her feet into a mound, and her toes scooped out a hollow, steadily, absently, like a cow chewing its cud.

I jumped up and ran back to the hut as fast as I could.

I wish I knew what it was about the man and his wife and the child that shook me up so much. The reel in my memory of that scene keeps hanging on frozen frames - the man with his trouseers rolled to his knees, the woman's hair moving over her shoulders, the child's hair flashing in the light. Over and over. I can't make any sense out of my obsession with them. Where do they live? What are their names? Where does he work? Why aren't they wearing bathing suits? How long have they been married? No matter how much I try to study them, their private lives are as remote to me as the lives of a trio of musicians playing a concert. I see them laugh, their hair, their limbs, the way their limbs cross over and touch each other. I play the man, feel the wet, sandy bottom of the girl's bathing suit across my stomach, her weight on my ribs, her tiny hands grabbing my fingers for support, the woman's palm caressing my forehead, her hair blowing gently against my cheek, the soft curve of her breast against my arm - there, now, I am the man: what's my name? Nothing. Then I'm the woman - I feel the man's brow under my hand, the sand between my toes, the hem of my skirt shifting against my thigh in the breeze, my breast against his arm, my own laughter in my chest. But no name.

Watching them seems like a dream now. I remember a spasm in my body urging me across the dune and into the party. It scared me. I think that's why I ran. When I got back to the hut I found sand crusted on my cheeks, proving to me that I had cried, but I don't know for sure. Or why. It could have been sweat.

Why would I have cried? These things worry me; I'm afraid I won't get out of here before I fall asleep again. The distance between us is agonizing - why are they there and I here? What rules govern us? I feel very... bitter now, my eyes threaten to betray me again. A small boy, lost someplace - where was it? A clue? No, all I remember is feeling abandoned, as though I had gotten lost at a carnival or a supermarket, and I feel that sudden rush of hopelessness, loss, and separation.

I've decided that I might be lonely. Deciding that gave me an insight. Looking back through the journal, I found this sentence: "I didn't realize how afraid I was until it occurred to me that I hadn't left the hut since waking up." Although I don't know my name or social security number or how I got here or what my life means or when I'll die, I do know this, now - I seem to have a hard time recognizing it when I feel things. I seem to figure out I felt a certain way based on how I acted, then sort of deduce how I was feeling. I seem to be blind to it while it's happening. That's why I "decide" that "maybe I might" be lonely. I guess I am.

I am.

The cocktail party is in progress. Maybe fifty people are milling around my friends' apartment. Hands. Seem to be thousands of hands everywhere. As I go from person to person I see long, short, stubby, wide, narrow, weak, pale, dark. Many more thousands of fingers with rings of assorted colors weights widths. Hands and fingers closed around cylinders, hands to display lighted cigarettes, gesturing. Over in a corner a woman brushes red fingertips across a man's forearm as she talks; a man on the sofa massages the back of his neck, his hand broad, freckled with reddish blond hair sprouting on the knuckles; a woman opposite him lets her fingers fly to her cheek, to her breasts, then back to her cheek, as though pointing out her features; near the kitchen doorway a man talking to a woman crosses his arms and presses his hand into his armpits, hiding them, restraining them, while the woman's left hand grips a small glass and her right hand is knotted at her waistline and held in place by the pressure of her left elbow. A man near me pinches his nose, another tugs at his moustache, and another surreptitiously rearranges his balls. The women's hands grow more exotic, more surreal, like birds captured at the ends of wrists - hummingbirds with plumage marked by a small gold band rushing to tips of plum; a common sparrow, a chicken, a pheasant. Nails curved, hooked, broken, split, painted, rounded, torn, pointed. And the hands grow until they are as large as trashcan lids and everyone finds them cumbersome as they use them for shields.

Time slows down, motion becomes sluggish as though this is all happening underwater, and the strange elephantiasis which struck first in their hands now moves on to their mouths. Faces become merely the frame for exhibiting mouths, tongues, lips and teeth; their voices rise as their mouths balloon into swollen shapes, wet and sucking, then recede...

Later I'm on the balcony overlooking the city and a woman is with me, very drunk, muttering to herself. Not exactly with me. Adjacent to me. I don't exactly recognize her, but she might be "Janet," the wife of a guy I know slightly, but I'm wondering if she isn't another woman who bears a similarity to "Janet." I'm drunk, too, but I think I'm more sober than she. I speak to her. I call her "Janet." She turns to me and... simpers, but she's not responding to the name, just to the voice. I'm not even sure if the wife of the acquaintance is named "Janet," and I'm less sure whether this is the "Janet" I'm thinking of. She's very attractive, voluptuous, breasts shifting loosely about in a lowcut gown. Her eyes are glazed; she runs the tip of her tongue across her upper lip. George! she whispers, as if to say at last we meet again! The name seems remote to me. I'm pretty sure that she thinks at heart I'm really not "George." I kiss her mouth, my left hand strokes her breast, she presses against my leg. I'm almost overwhelmed by wanting her - she's a river of warm oil I want to sink and drown in. In the middle of the kiss, she almost loses her balance and throws her foot out suddenly to right herself. That awkward motion brings me back to the fact that I'm kissing a stranger who I'm pretending to myself is the wife of a man I slightly know, while she's kissing someone she's pretending is "George"; so there is who I am and who I am pretending to be ("George") and who she is pretending me to be ("Maybe George") - all three of me kissing who she is and who she is pretending to be ("Janet") and who I'm pretending her to be ("Maybe Janet"). The embrace grows so complicated, so sad, really, that I break off and hold her in my arms, pitying us both, whoever we are, and she says, in my ear, not surprised or shocked, but as though she is just voicing a motion of her mind: you're not George!

I'm not George!

A clue. While I stand dumbfounded, she slips out of my embrace and eases away, not in anger, more like drifting while I stand thinking over and over, I am not George! It's almost something I could wear on a name tag.

When I come off the balcony I'm a different man. A changed man. I stand at the threshhold looking on the party, sneering at the guests: I am not George! It's as though a god has stooped to touch my brow. The empty chatter. People are putting things into their mouths, stuffing, drooling - cigarettes, glasses, sandwiches, toothpicks, pipes, crackers, olives, cigars, their own fingers, other people's fingers, pickles, tiny fish, pieces of pig, chunks of unborn chicken - what a monstrous and pitiful hunger!

Then the room is empty except for the woman who was beside me on the couch much earlier (my "wife"), and the host and hostess are putting on their coats and leaving (?), and the host drunkenly leans toward me, shakes my hand, and says, great party, thanks for.... Then I'm in a dark room, a bedroom, and I'm in the bed longing for a woman's touch, feeling sad for all those people at the party, the woman on the balcony; in my not-Georgeness I feel guilty at my own contempt so I bathe them in my compassion as recompense. Then all at once I feel the same bitterness I felt when I watched the people on the beach. I feel the bed dip slightly as the woman who had been beside me on the couch sits on it, smelling of soap and sweat and half-washed perfume, and, remembering the woman on the balcony, I want to sink into that river again, but I feel my hands shrinking, my lips shrinking, and the more I try to reach out for her the more my hands grow smaller by the second, my lips draw up, and my voice contracts into a tiny peep deep inside my gut even though I'm trying to cry out as loud as I can. The bed quivers and the woman's shoulders jerk; I can tell she is crying, and I know it's for me, but not for the tragic hero that I feel is me, but for the child she thinks is me - she's weeping in pity, and she says, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, apologizing not for something done, but something she cannot do; and I know she means you must touch to be touched.