After Ilium

by D. W. White

The year her father died, Emily went to the beach. She had never been in the habit of going, not here, not in the miniature summer squeezed between winters, long days hiding the short gasp of light huddled in the middle of the year, sweat running down sunscreen leaving thin dull tan lines. It was too much. She had liked to go in California, where she was from and where she was supposed to still be, when it felt real, the beach, felt like something you could hold onto, believe in, something you could trust would be there for you, when you needed it. Like a lover graduated to a friend. But here, in the Midwest, it was like an affair, something done quickly and with too much thought, our o’er hasty love, it was like kids behind a strip mall in a borrowed car, it was like a midafternoon rendez vous, getting it over with because you could, because it was there, taking what was offered before someone came home. It felt dirty and cheap and thin, going to the beach in the shallow midwestern summer. But it was there. And so, one day, she went.

On the hot sand were bodies laid out in roughhewn rows, like the aftermath of war. Emily pulled her own body around the tanning, exposed forms, towards the lick of the waves at the edge of the world. She laid her towel out like V would, very neat and precise. V, taking a meeting in Emily’s living room, standing watch over Emily’s mind, holding together the disparate disintegrating threads of Emily’s life for the weekend while Emily, ostensibly a philosopher, pantomimed writing her prelim essay and set up camp on the beach. V was really too much. Too good too nice too much. Her very best and most emphatic friend. Laying on her towel on the sand, Emily’s feet fell within the outermost purview of the farthestmost waves. It felt pretty good. Cold, but not bad. Emily was ostensibly a philosopher, a semilearned scholar midway through a doctorate in an outmoded field, someone who had learned and acquired knowledge and thus knew things she could then sense-ably and reason-ably and cap-ably articulate; Emily was, however, ostensively a beachbound madwoman, drowning in words and lapped by the waves from a very-much-not-the-ocean Midwestern lake.

It was always tricky to keep those straight.

In the air were the screams of fighter planes. There was some event, downtown, involving the air and the water and the noise. The planes, ostensibly, were showing off for the people downtown but, ostensively, were here, right above Emily on the towel on the sand on the beach, because they were so very fast (not vite but rapide) or they moved so very fast (not rapide but vite), and could cover all that ground in no time at all.

It was always tricky to keep those straight.

Emily had brought books and papers and pens. She was going to read. She was going to read and be productive and inspired and prepared. She had like a day and a half left to finish the monumentally important essay she had not yet started. The other students of her “cohort,” whom Emily ostensibly knew, were definitely totally like halfway through their diligently preplanned papers based on V-esq outlines and copious highlights. Emily, conversely, had words.

Her own words, at that.

Emily, meanwhile, was on the beach.

L’Em, sur la plage.

Along the shore were women and men and especially women. Children frolicked cautiously in the distempered water. It was too cold, by all rights, to be on the beach, even if it was unseasonably warm. Too cold unless, that is, you were a sunstarved, selfdiluted Midwesterner or a procrastinating, prelapsarian “philosopher” prone to contemplation and dreams.

Emily, romantic.

On the beach along the lake the women stepped cautiously into the water. Emily, prone on the towel, could see their proximate female forms. They were like illusions, like temptations of fate, like shadows across the Acheron singing songs of love.

Emily buried her eyes in her book. Mon dieu, Em.

Emily, like Dionysius, was down here all alone.

It was the first weekend of “summer,” a yawning chasm of possibility, a utopian city just beyond the void, a waiting place awaiting Emily’s timely and sufficient completion of her goddamn prelim essay.

Which, again, she hadn’t started.

There was an old man, tanned and wrinkled beyond all reason, lying like Tiresias behind dark glasses, wearing a single gold chain around his neck and doing battle with the sun. A thin scar ran from his ankle toward his knee, on the leg facing Emily. He had seen some shit.

She rearranged her bag under head. If she was going to indulge in this asinine, irresponsible, even troubling, waste of time, she really at least should’ve brought a book about philosophy. Wittgenstein or something. Instead she had a memoir by a madwoman about losing her mind. It was pretty good.

The planes screamed above her head, preventing untimely sleep. Perchance to dream, and all that. Her open eyes saw flashes of skin and hair, moving past her along the shore, not looking not stopping not seeing her.

Emily.

From watchtowers came lifeguards pulling out boats. Charon rows slowly across sleeping waves. There was, from where Emily had like Polynices fallen, no other side. There was no far shore towards which to aim, no destination amongst the dead. In California, beyond the ocean, it was the same. Except this time, here, it wasn’t real.

Emily on the beach was unadorned. She wore a swimsuit that was black, adhering to the pertinent sections of her female form. She did have on her bracelet. But there was no makeup, no jewels, no coins on her eyes nor rites for a passage. She hadn’t even really done her hair. There was no memento, no offering. No shroud or ceremony. Only the sun, and the bodies, and the spirits she could see, out there amongst the cold approaching waves.

There was, for Emily, no burial.

The children were incredibly loud. Like, what the hell? Emily rolled onto her stomach, did not bother with the straps at her back. Whatever. V, very sensibly and carefully, would have shielded herself from tan lines. On the beach, in California, where they once had lived, V had been very diligent with tanning. Not too much and not too little. Like her mother, baking cookies, in the faraway windows of Emily’s youth. Donnes-moi, maman, svp. Of course the cookies never worked.

V was currently Not Tanning, however. V was, in Emily’s apartment, Doing Work. V, from California, was professionally and responsibly tucked away with her legs no doubt under her on the couch of the apartment of her best and oldest friend, Emily, a madwoman seeing ghosts on the beach. Upon my life, this sprit, dumb to us, will speak to him. V, who had come out here to Help Emily, was left behind while the woman in question disintegrated on the sand. The planes came roaring back, with their disembodied sound and fractures of the sky.

Emily, looking up, could see women everywhere.

She had duties to perform. She had, as Emily stood up, flipped the corner of her towel back into place, glanced at Tiresias sunning in hell, and made boldly for the water, expectations. She was to elucidate her meaning, make clear her intent, distill her thoughts, articulate her beliefs, explain her philosophy. She was to mourn her father while living a life. She was to write this damn essay by tomorrow at ten o’clock. The water slithered all over her skin. It was clear as glass, and below the softly rolling tides tread the unpainted feet of one Emily Dujardin, madwoman for hire. V was really great. Should appreciate her more, probably. The sand lay in ripples like the delicacies of a mouth, like Venetian blinds holding fast against blinding summer sun.

The type of sun that had not quite arrived, on the bodies of the women and the men and especially the women.

She ventured on, farther and farther on, the shock of the cold giving way to resignation of knowledge, to some pantomime of comfort, to normality. The chairs and tents were transforming into abstract patches of color, the clouds were paying no mind. The more she paddled, keeping her hair carefully free of the water, the more the waves splashed in her face. It wasn’t great. She was like Persephone, consuming this foreign place, making it a part of her, and she of it. She was moving towards the depths, carrying no stones. She was not really super thrilled about being no longer able to stand. But still, the feeling was good, the suspension, the weightlessness. The view was interesting, from out here. Emily stopped, looked around, sustaining herself by continued effort. From here the buildings looked pointless, the lighthouse more secure. From here the women looked like memories she could only half perceive.

Above her mendacious birds circled in gaps made by the absence of planes, waiting.

Emily allowed herself to be slowly consumed by the water. She had left all her stuff in a bag from Monoprix she’d bought in Paris. Not exactly the height of security. But then, Tiresias was there, all-knowing. She had left all the stuff she was supposed to do in her apartment with V. Unfulfilled tasks, unrealized potential. She was once-divorced and twice-abandoned. By women and men and especially women. Her father was down there, under the ground in her faroff California homeland, ce terroir ma chérie, back where she’d left him. It was impossible, to keep up with it all. The water was over her chest, her arms, her neck. It was much colder than she’d been promised. It was not at all what she’d been promised.

Her father was dead and V was staying with her, to help her fulfill her philosophy. There was more in heaven and earth than anything she could say.

She began to walk parallel to shore, this way and that. No one else was anywhere near as far out as she. The exam she was not writing and had not started asked her questions that Emily, as a “philosopher,” was supposed to know. It used, for this asking, language; the English language, devoid of any French or even Dujardin patois, expecting an answer in kind. Emily spread her hands out in front of her just under the waves. On the softly eroded sand she was disbalanced, sinking as she thought. How could she assign it a coherent meaning? Her father would never read any of the things she wrote, or hear what she said. How, then, did it matter? Her ontology was left strewn all across the coming waves. The buildings pushed the sunlight back towards the lake, families came in happy groups to display their content. Emily kept walking, slowly, nowhere. None of it made any sense. How could she live a philosophy while being obligated to put it into words?

She stopped, and caught her breath, and turned back to land. V, of course, hadn’t brought up Emily’s dating life in months.

The year her father died, Emily went to the beach. In the sun, it wasn’t so bad, like the sun coming up over quiet, emptied Troy. Emily made sure she had her things, over her shoulder. There were thin crowds moving against her now. Children and couples and old paired-off men, subtly holding each other for balance. They were headed to the water, the grass, the sand and the sun. They had skipped out of work a little early, they had been pulled from school, they had abandoned the apple sauce congealing slowly on a tray. They did not look at Emily, these spirits of life, because they could not see her. She was another, l’étranger, au-delà. They felt her, perhaps, as a cool wind flowing swiftly through this open spring day. Moving against them, the other way, towards the apartment with the papers and the books and the words and the time. Towards the loyal friend, getting worried, wondering where in the hell she had gone, that woman who called herself philosopher, and who was going to have to prove it, one of these days.

D. W. White writes consciousness-forward fiction and criticism.