Carver’s Dog

He had expected Elysian Fields, the abode of the blessed after death. He had anticipated golden rays of sunlight embracing him and enlightenment washing over him like a cresting wave. Satori and a meeting with the Buddha, wrapped in silk golden robes, drinking milk laced with honey from vessels contrived from the horns of mythical, magical beasts.

Instead of this, in place of the beauty anticipated, Jack found himself poised on the banks of the River Styx with no coins for the boatman.

Thinking hard about her, he got onto the bus and paid the thirty cents fare and asked the driver for a transfer before discovering that he was alone.

The bus let him off at Bolinas Beach. The great ball of orange had made it’s daily plunge into the western sea. Darkness settled on the beach like a warm comforter. He walked to the edge of the shore, black-green kelp and foaming sea water swirling about the legs of his faded bell-bottoms, and lit a cigarette.

“Fuck it,” he said, exhaling a plume of blue smoke into the reassuring cool sea breeze. “Fuck it all.”

It was a wonder to behold, the world’s most isolated sea, connected to the brooding Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosphorus, Dardenalle and Gibraltar Straits.

In spite of the vast beauty to behold before his eyes, Kafka felt a migraine emerging. He had tried to counteract these miserable attacks through a regimen of naturopathic treatments: a strict vegetarian diet and consuming vast quantitities of unpasteurized milk. But still the spells and the tormenting pain persisted.

Kafka stretched an old checkerboard quilt over the moist soil and knelt into it among the tall reeds and sea grass without a care for the cold wetness seeping through the knees of his trousers. He appeared as a penitent before an altar, eyes cast in solemn and holy reflection upon the sea. He blindly fumbled in the picnic basket — the one that Helga had packed for him — and wrestled free a sandwich wrapped in the front page of that morning’s Prague Post. He bit into the sandwich that had been haphazardly constructed over two slices of arid and thick brown bread. Tart liverwurst. Lifeless lettuce with the distinct taste of mold.  A few scab-encrusted scrapings of hot mustard from the bottom of the jar he bought last year in Berlin. And there was pickled cucumber, also carefully encased in a page from the morning paper, the crisp vegetable dry and stripped of all vitality by the suffocating ink of the newsprint that brought a foul chemical smell to his red and inflamed nostrils.

Kafka closed his dry eyes, made a feeble attempt at meditating upon the waves as they embraced the shore, and bit into the sandwich with utmost caution. As his cavity-ravaged teeth chewed and gnawed at the repulsive item delivered for their mastication, forcing the contents down his dry throat and into his troubled stomach for no other reason than to sustain his life another intolerable day, a feeling of dread swept over him. A dark, creeping dread, the kind of primal fear that every quivering child acquires of The Thing most certainly lurking under the bed at night.

Someone, Kafka knew, was watching him. They were watching his every move.

And Helga was trying to poison him.

He had more faith in biology than spirituality. Oblivion after the fact, he wrote his doctor shortly before his candle flickered and dimmed, an intuition “deep in his bones” that he, perhaps all living things, would not survive physical death.

He noted once in the Saturday Review that a reader, incensed at something the author committed to print, ended an excoriating letter with the warning: “Beware. You will never get out of this world alive.”

When his own final state arrived, December 20, 1968, from occlusion of the main coronary arteries, John Ernst Steinbeck’s physical remains were incinerated. The modest urn containing his ashes was interred at the family plot in Salinas Cemetery. He rests between the dark and brooding Santa Lucia mountain range and the Monterey Bay that he loved so much eight miles west. In the winter the high-gray flannel fog from the deep and mysterious bay closes off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from the rest of the world.

In the sequence of sensations that pass through her sleeping mind every night, Emily Dickinson is standing on a wide cliff above a furious ocean. Angry waves crash upon the rocks at the base of the cliff and send fists of foamy gray water into the sky. Every so often a menacing rogue wave threatens to reach up and pull her into the sea.

The bitter cold is gnawing into her bones, biting and crunching, because she is completely nude, shorn of her customary white dress. She is small, like a wren, and her hair is bold, like the chestnut bur, and her eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.

Emily looks hard into the watery abyss below and asks, “Is my verse … alive?”