the ghost ship
The ghost ship appears off the coast of Miami Beach on a Wednesday. I hear about it that afternoon, but don't get around to seeing it until Friday. My pants are bunched up around my knees and I wade through broken bottles and barnacles and prophylactics, and stand at the very edge of the heaping ocean. What do you think it is? Alexis asks and I shrug.
Both tourists and locals have assembled themselves along the beach. They stand in bundles of two or three, sharing testimony amongst themselves. They had come expecting to be astonished, expecting to collapse into massed prayer. By the time I get there, they are growing bored, looking up the beach, wondering if there is something they've forgotten to do. When I try to question them, they avert their eyes, embarrassed. Someone is cooking hot dogs on a charcoal grill. The vendors have already installed wide kiosks across the boardwalk. They are selling snocones and t-shirts with well-known apocalyptic slogans. They are cheaply made, hardly more than red spray paint on white cloth, but the statements have profound authority.
It's a miracle, it's a miracle, a woman tells me. She has a voice like an air-raid siren. There is a drunken man, shirtless and raving, charging at children on the beach. There are prophecies not yet fulfilled.
The ghost ship bobs over the high tide, open to full mast. It is noon, but the ship is swaddled in darkness. The sails form grotesque shadows, jointed and moving like the silhouette of human limbs. Can you read a name? Alexis says. Where do you think it came from?
I can only shake my head. My shoulders have seized. I feel neither whole enough nor real enough to accept these terms. The waves are moving quietly and with intention and they are listening, and I don't want to talk about it here.
Alexis has her hair cut short, wears androgynous slacks and blazers, and chain-smokes little brown cigarettes. Her eyes are mild and beautiful, like those on the cheap prints of Jesus Christ they sell at hispanic convenience stores. She speaks mostly by refusing to speak at all, and I am never sure if she has said something aloud or if I have heard her think it. I have an excessive preoccupation with her life, but only because there is nothing else to which I feel attached. The possibility of living my own is absolutely terrifying.
Last year, she was on a billboard over Miami in a lace dress with an antique rhinestone pin in her hair. She lives with her boyfriend Carter in an apartment on Collins Avenue. I hate Carter, but he always has good drugs - the kind that make me feel like my body is awakening, wobbly, cell by cell. This outweighs all his other qualities by far.
Carter has an aquarium in his living room. At night, he turns on lights that wash across it carelessly. It is hopeless for me to try and express the impact of those lights - sinister and ecstatic and painful and redemptive. I watch the lights and the fish piloting across the tank, and I feel Alexis's fingers in my hair. I feel Carter press against me, feel his erection against my thigh, and taste the last cigarette on his mouth. I have a moment of panic as he pushes me back; I have forgotten there is a floor to break my fall.
They say the world is ending, Alexis says, directly into my brain. Her hipbones feel like bird skulls. I am afraid I might break them. My hair is so red against her stomach. We know with a clarity beyond thought that we are sharing something vast and changeless.
Carter says, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.
He laughs and laughs.
On Monday, the ship is still there.
It's closer, Alexis says. I definitely think it's closer.
I try to judge the distance, measuring against the place where the sky overhead wears out. The crowd has abandoned the beach, leaving behind bottle caps and unpaired rubber sandals. The police have not yet removed the orange traffic cones from the street. If this really was the end of the world, it was unable to hold anyone's attention.
We take off our shoes and sit where the water breaks, feeding our leftovers to the herring gulls. The ghost ship stands off in the distance. We squint until the corners of our eyes hurt, but we can't see anyone onboard. A bird pirouettes on an updraft and passes through the mast like it isn't even there.
Fucking hell, I tell Alexis.
At night, the darkness in the streets in primitive and uncivilized. We go to a hotel room to play cards, and on the public phone in the lobby there is a man shouting "Tell them, tell them." At his side, his wife weeps unselfconsciously. They have bags at their feet and the woman wears every piece of jewelry she owns. They look like refugees forced to leave their homes with only what they can carry.
Alexis holds on to my sleeve.
We play with a teenage boy in a hunting cap who loses all his money in the first ten minutes. Another one whose pupils are great yawning gulfs. There is a hideous Yoruba man with scars across his cheekbones, who wears black and red beads wrapped around his neck. He smiles and his teeth are white and sharp, and he knows things nobody can ever know.
Those are Elegua's colors, Alexis whispers to me. He is a trickster. Be careful.
Carter is high on coke, which makes him talk. He goes on about how we're eating vegetables with fucked-up DNA. About radiation. About babies with parasitic twin fetuses growing out of their abdomens. He picks at the scabs on his knuckles and then scratches the place where the blood begins to pool.
I win a few hands in a row and he catches me by the wrist. Get out of my head, you fucking bitch.
I can feel my pulse hampered by the pressure of his hand. With every labored beat, something essential is transfered from myself into him. I don't want this transaction. I lose my ability to tell where I am or why I am there.
On Wednesday, I go to see the ghost ship.
It is closer.
I buy myself some fried bananas and walk north along the beach, all the way up to where the condos end and are replaced by coastal forests. The flowers there are red and as big as my open hand. For a moment, I understand. I turn to tell someone, but I am alone, and the waves are too powerful and possibly malevolent for me to try and explain it to them.
Does it matter is any of this is the truth?
Alexis is real. Carter is real. I, sixteen and vulgar, am real. But these memories do not depend on that sort of fact. The ghost ship is never really there. Yet adding it, brings me closer to a truth that waits dormant beneath names and dates and locations. It is not a moral declaration. It is not a widespread pattern in history.
It is a clipper ship, tall and magnificent, miles from the shoreline.
And now, if you ever walk out unto the sands of Miami Beach and look eastward, you will see it too. Flying colors. Tattered sails heaving in the wind.
Approaching slowly.