Jeffrey Skinner

These three pieces are from a larger project I recently completed titled Dreamboat.  It is, I guess, a hybrid form of sorts, mixing poetry, memoir, fiction, dream, and essay, all arranged around a single journey up the Rhine river.  

John Shows Up, Unexpectedly

John shows up for a visit, unexpectedly.  We sit with coffee on the upper deck under an umbrella in the morning sun.  There is a delicate breeze that occasionally shifts the petals of flowers placed in small vases on each table.  Tulips, I think.  After talking for a few minutes about his trip he pushes a piece of paper to me across the breakfast table.  The paper is covered in handwriting.  John is silent as I read.  It is a letter of sorts, very hard to read because he has crammed script into every nook and cranny of the page.  Also, the handwriting keeps changing—cursive abruptly becomes all capital letters, the letters themselves different sizes and shapes.  The thing as a whole appears to be the work of many different people, though John’s voice, his swagger, is consistent throughout.   

The mentor-mentee relationship, we are instructed by the ancient Greeks, combines “shared liking of a skill or subject (epithumia), a ‘stranger’ expert-protégés relationship (xenia), who becomes like parent and child (storge), a degree of mutual friendship (philia), and a sense of serving a higher purpose (agape).”  In other words, a whole lotta different kinds of love, a portable feast. 

After struggling I am eventually able to read.  But then the problem is I do not understand what he is trying to say.  I keep looking for the bottom line—he was leaving his wife, or he was leaving his job.  Or, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.  Or, he’d gotten fired or had a fatal disease—something, anything to justify his coming all the way from the states to Europe, after which he’d had to somehow pinpoint the ship’s location, to track down Sarah and me.

But there was nothing like that.  The letter was filled with generalized, almost aphoristic statements, like “I am nothing, but I am my own nothing,” and “If a man is a woman, he is.  And if a woman is also, who am I to say?”  As far as I could decipher, none of what he had written could justify his sudden appearance, nor did it even make any particular sense.  I put the paper down and pushed it back across the table. 

Thirty years ago, John had been in an Advanced Creative Writing class of mine.  He was one of the three most talented students I’ve ever had, before or since.  In class he was working on a kind of autobiographical novel, a blend of Huckleberry Finn and One Hundred Years of Solitude.  It was a new kind of brash, seamless, American magical-realism, and brought to life a lower socioeconomic class, endemic to Kentucky, that had never been as well or as innovatively rendered.  In fact, it had barely been rendered at all.  I was immensely sanguine about the book’s publication and success.  But then, after the class, in the years when John went on to get his MFA in writing, and then a Ph.D., and then a tenured teaching position in a university, I heard less and less about the novel.  When asked, he would say only that he had moved on to other things.  These things, I discovered, were less concerned with outmoded ideas and forms of fiction/autobiography, and more tuned to the current academic climate.   And, in fact, he was awarded tenure, right on time.

As gently as I could I said, “John, what are you saying?”  

Just as he was about to reply there came an announcement on the ship’s PA system:   Those people who were signed up to disembark for the tour of the Burg Rheinfels castle were to assemble in the lobby on the first floor.

“Do you have to go?” John said. 

“No.  Well, actually, yes—not on the excursion, but I’ve signed up to do something else, and,” I looked at my watch, “I do have to get going.  But I should be back in about an hour.  You can just hang out here if you like, and we can talk more.” 

“What do you have to do?” John asked, following me down the stairs to the ship’s gangway. 

“Oh, I’m driving a van of church people to the local hospital for treatment.”

“How kind,” said John, “But then, you were always that kind of kind.” 

I stopped on the stairs and turned to face him. 

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

“You know,” John said, “the impersonal kind of kind.” 

“Thanks,” I said, for I did not know what to say.

It can be difficult, or at least fraught—the continuing relationship one has with a former student.  I was myself a student who became good friends with two mentors for many years after our formal, academic relationship had ended.  One friendship remained beautiful and supportive until the mentor’s death.  The other went bad, for reasons that remained obscure to me, and we ended up estranged for the last ten years of his life.   I still feel grateful for the first, and guilty about the second.  In my career also I have kept in touch with a number of former students, and have a good relationship with most. 

But, what do I know?  My own consciousness is a mystery, to science as well as to myself.   And still, I take the self as essence.  I take it for granted.  It is there first thing when I wake in the morning, the most immovable, consistent emblem of my existence.  But I have no idea where it comes from, or what it means.  Thoughts flash and dissolve, images appear, and are quickly replaced by others.  I have no control over their transit.  Of course, my thoughts may lie; they often have in the past.  So how could I possibly guess what intention or desire animates the mind of another?

In the lobby we passed the milling Burg Rheinfels tourists and began to walk the gangway to land.  The gangway was long, unnaturally long, and after around three minutes of walking we were still only halfway to the boardwalk of Sankt Goar.  I paused for a breath, and to take in the fresh sky and water.  I heard John whisper in my ear, Goodbye.   

When I looked back, he was climbing the gangway rails and before I could speak he had leaped into the water and started swimming.  I ran to the end of the gangway and then, on land, continued running toward the small v of John’s wake in the river.   He was doing the backstroke, parallel to the shore.   When I drew even, I slowed to a walk, keeping pace with his languid strokes.   I yelled out, “John, come back!  What are you doing?!”   “It’s all right.  I’m going to visit my mom,” he said, “I’m staying with her.”  “That’s crazy!” I said, “Come back!  Come back!”  But he said nothing.  Finally, I stopped walking and watched him swimming away, becoming smaller and smaller, a watery dot.  I did not understand what was taking place.  I called out, loud, once more—just his name.  But John kept silent, and kept on swimming.

Day and Night and Day

One morning I woke up and could not remember any dreams.  I was tempted to go back to sleep.  I lay there staring at my hand, lit by a shaft of sun, in a half-daze.  Sarah had gone down to breakfast so the cabin was empty and there was only the distant sound of engine churn and the occasional shuffle of feet on the carpeted hallway outside our suite.  The sun continued to fill the room, pouring through floor to ceiling windows on two sides, and I thought of getting my ass out of bed, grabbing a cup of coffee, and sitting out on our little balcony to watch the ruins of 15th century castles roll slowly by.  But I decided instead to turn over.

When Sarah finally woke me, with a tiny flick on my cheek, the windows were dark and I was tremendously thirsty.  “Well, aren’t we the little sleepyhead,” she said.  “Is it night?”   I said.  “Why didn’t you wake me?” “Yes, it’s night,” she said, “and you’ve wasted an entire day in bed.”  I ignored her accusation and cleared my throat, which took several strenuous, hydraulic attempts, then went to the bathroom to pee.  After peeing I brushed my teeth—as usual, five strokes for each quadrant, then dipped my face in three handfuls of water and wet and combed my hair.  I filled a glass with tap water and drank it down without ceremony.  Then another, and another.  As I put the glass back in its caddy above the sink, I noticed a piece of tape I’d not seen before stuck to the wall.  When I tried to remove it, it kept pulling out, longer and longer, until it came off entirely, attached to a large, square-shaped piece of Formica.  Under that was a kind of hook and eye latch, which I lifted out.  

At this point I felt fully committed, so I entered, squeezing my body through the opening.  Inside was a suite, exactly like ours, except reversed—a mirror image.  And here, instead of being night, the sun was still shining through the tall windows, such that I had to shield my eyes from the sudden brightness.  I heard what seemed to be soft animal noises issuing from somewhere in the suite, and tiptoed carefully through the living room to the bedroom, where, it became clearer and clearer, the noises originated.    The bedroom door was ajar and I opened it carefully, ready at any moment to step back and run. 

Inside, on the bed, two people were fucking.  I use that word because the room was a riot of tossed clothing and bedsheets and pillows, and the man and woman were going at it with abandon.  The construction “making love” sounds too gentle.  In fact, when you are confronted with the thing itself, and you are not yourself involved, making love is in no way descriptive.  Brutality mixed with tenderness is neither; both are transformed.  The people on the bed were fucking.  They would hardly have noticed even if I had walked in and stood over them.  So, I watched from the door, shamelessly.  Finally, as they changed positions, I could see their faces, first the man and then the woman.  I was a little surprised to see that it was Sarah and me, at about the age when we first met—late twenties for her, early thirties for me.  How fresh they looked, how newly hatched! 

In the end it was surprising to me how unsurprised I was at this, this revelation of faces.  I closed the bedroom door softly and retraced my steps, all the way through the square into the bathroom in our suite.  I replaced the Formica and the tape as best I could.  By the time I came out of the bathroom, hair combed, thirst slaked, I had decided not to tell Sarah about my discovery.  I knew she would think it was just another of my usual confabulations, and wrong, in some obscure sense—this implication that our previous selves still exist, and so close to the people we have become. 

The Closed Circle

We were cooped up in an office behind a machine shop for hours.  We’d come to ride the gigantic Ferris wheel that towered over the river city, but it was broken.  Technicians scurried in and out of the shop, getting and replacing tools.  Sarah sat on a lumpy, tattered sofa, playing solitaire on her phone.  The material covering the sofa was a magnified herringbone pattern, which I’m sure was very handsome in its day. 

At the same time, I’d taken to playing with a glass jar full of nuts and bolts and washers of various sizes, plus a few magnets I found stuck to the metal frame of a drafting table.  Out of these materials I’d been able to construct two tiny “Bolt Racers” that could chase each other around the bottom of the jar.   As always, nothing was more pleasing to me than bringing something new into the world.

But, once I had set my creation into motion, furiously circling the jar, I had nothing to do.  I could have tried to make something else, I suppose.  The raw materials lay all around me.  And my mind, as far as I knew, was still honed and alert.   It’s true: no one really cared whether I made another new thing or just stared at my hands for the rest of my life.  But that had always been the case, and had not stopped me in the past.  I think the difference was I had become aware, suddenly, that even making was a form of contention, a part of the repetition of outer existence.  The only thing that could disrupt the cycle was an invisible, interior change, of the most radical kind.  So, there remained things to do.  In other words, I was retired.

It was increasingly clear the Ferris wheel technicians would not be able to fix the wheel in time for us to ride.  We’d have to come back another day.  But the ship was scheduled to sail again tonight, after dark, and in the morning would arrive at a new port in another city.  Soon we would have to make our way back to the ship, Ferris wheel ride or not.  It was unlikely we would return. 

I looked at Sarah, still playing her game in the dusky light pouring down through clerestory windows.  How happy I was that we met, that we were still together!   I continued to watch her face, the air thickening around us.  For a moment, it was enough.  I was content.  Then, the thought that we would soon leave this place, as we had left so many places in the past, rose up like a sheet of fire in my mind, and I was filled with longing.