When I Lay My Goodness Down
by Harrison Kim
part 1
I ran up the daffodil-covered slope of Beacon Hill, reached the top with Gwen, tall, rangy and quick-moving, with her long black hair, tan skin and unexpected smile. We first met in the workout gym across from the art gallery, lifting weights, and discussing Dr. Seuss; then at the swimming pool, treading water and referencing Hardy and Tess of the d’Ubervilles.
I was an 18-year old college student, always studying. She, six years older and a graduate. Her imagination touched me first. If I stayed awake long enough, I could imagine anything. When we ran up Beacon Hill, I hadn’t slept in twenty-seven hours.
A man wearing a white face mask was holding on to a kite. Gwen and I stood watching. Only three fingers remained on the man’s right hand, yet he gripped that string tightly. The world seemed so wide, like the arc of the kite, time to narrow it down, to the strength of fingers.
Romance filled my thoughts and turned them to impulse. “How did you get that scar?” I asked Gwen.
“My ex-boyfriend did it,” she said, tracing her hand down the side of her cheek. “We were in a Fiat, in Italy, having an argument, speeding too fast. He turned the wheel, my side hit a tree, and my face broke the window.”
“That is ill intent,” I told her and vowed never to be like that, malicious, though perhaps there was some good, the star-shaped scar made her face far more beautiful. How could that be? It was the light, that day on the hill, yes, how she looked up and flipped her hair back over her shoulders, how the scar shone in the light.
The kite flyer walked over. “See the patterns? See the patterns?” he pointed to the clouds. “They’re chemically seeding them again.”
“What sort of seeds?” asked Gwen. She had a voice that became higher, with a laugh at the end. The kite flyer’s lips moved through his mask.
I didn’t know what he said next, I had quickly moved twenty feet away. “Corn in the clouds,” I yelled to everyone. “Dandelion puffs and sunflower pips.” I ran back and circled Gwen and the Kite Man. “What a vista!” I shouted.
The kite man turned, so did his kite, and maybe he gave me the middle finger salute; it was hard to say, but I kept leaping. I lived for movement. In movement, anything could happen, depending on direction.
Gwen moved her arms in wide circles, dancing towards me in huge spirals.
I yelled, “I’m running through,” like her arms were doors to another world.
She echoed, “What a vista!” as I ducked and ran ellipses around her.
The kite man’s comments hadn’t made a bit of mood difference. Gwen had seen a lot of life, been to Europe and Australia, gone fossicking off the Great Barrier Reef. “You have to watch not to step on the poisonous stonefish,” she said.
Earlier, on the way up the hill, she told me she had left home at 17 because her dad was a pharmacist with no sense of humour; she didn’t need drugs and dourness, she wanted to form her own life structure.
We stampeded down the slope, towards the sea, dodging flowers in a field of daffodils that came up to our knees.
“I don’t do drugs, either,” I said as we looked again to the kite flyer atop the hill.
“I went to modelling school in Italy,” she said. “That’s where I met my heroin junkie boyfriend.”
She examined a plaque that stood in a copse of bushes and read it out loud. “Marilyn Bell was the first woman to swim across the Juan de Fuca Strait.”
“What do you do at modelling school?” I asked.
“You learn manners, how to walk, how to talk properly.”
She seemed to do this well; we weren’t touching, yet we moved like mirrors. When she lifted her hand to brush her face, I lifted mine. When she twirled her arms wide, I ran around her. We cast a spell with motion, and it settled in. I read the plaque over her shoulder, standing close and wanting to hug her shoulders. I turned, and a collie dog tore towards me along the narrow path. I stooped down, opened my arms, and the hairy animal flew right into them. I held on for a second before it pushed off, jumped to the ground, and kept going.
“Wow!” I told Gwen. “Such a friendly creature!”
“You were also friendly,” Gwen said. “I don’t know how you did that.”
“Modelling school,” I said. “No joking!”
I watched the dog run back and forth. It was all about movement: grab what comes and, if it’s not what you want, let it go.
The dog’s owners came running. “Have you seen Olivia?” And there she was again, tearing back the other way, red tongue like a flame.
“You have so much energy,” said Gwen. “Nobody else asks me about my scar. I think it’s mostly hidden by my glasses.”
I looked at her and moved my fingers forward. I touched her sunglasses and lifted them off, the lenses shining against the blue sky of spring. In that second it was as if I sprang into the air, outside of myself, observing a young man reaching forth in a curving motion towards an elegant black-haired lady. What did this all mean? Nothing mattered more than what my voice uttered, which was “You look perfect,” as I held her glasses in my hand.
The impulse to speak came from above, from that outside perception, then I stroked my hand lightly over the scar starpoints, then between her eyes and her nose, with the tip of one finger and she asked, “Do you really think so?” but she knew what I thought, there was no fooling around. I gave back her glasses. She didn’t put them back on.
We stepped along the beach, along the sand the glint of sea glass, across the water the shine of ships. I squatted down to swirl my fingers in the water. “Kinda cold,” I said. “The waves never stop.”
Gwen swirled her fingers, too. “Where did all the starfish go?” she asked.
“Yeah, there used to be a lot of starfish,” I said. “They got some kind of disease.”
We stayed there together, looking out to sea. I motioned towards the clay bluff that rose from the beach. “I think the lizards took over.”
I knew that dozens of lizards, multiplied from a pair imported from Italy, splayed themselves against the bluff on sunnier days like this. I stood to look around for these lizards, to show Gwen. I knew that they were hard to see, because they were the same colour as the bluff. Gwen came up behind me.
“Hey,” she said, and I turned around.
She placed her hand over my mouth; it felt cold like the seawater and smelt and tasted of salt and brine. Then her hand fell away, and she moved her head forward and kissed me. I put my hand around her waist, and my nose in her hair. I moved down and kissed her mouth and her scar and her throat.
As I did, a shadow passed over us. I looked up and saw a paraglider hovering off the ridge above. I felt taken outside of myself again, in a trance from Gwen’s touch, where I fell away from my body and was carried up towards the sky. Gwen disappeared, completely vanished with that flyer’s passing shadow.
Then she appeared again, under the sunlight. I tasted sea salt on my lips.
The paraglider turned erratically and plunged into the ocean with a splash. His equipment fell on top of him, but he struggled up to float on his back in the sea.
Gwen broke away, ran to the edge of the beach. “Are you okay?”
Paraglider guy gave us two thumbs-up. “It’s a learning curve,” he yelled back, waves bobbing around him. “See, I can stand!” And he did, water up to his chest. He sloshed to the beach, pulling his multicoloured gear behind him. “It takes a lot of mistakes to get things perfect,” he told us. “Don’t give up even after the thousandth time.”
“I felt your shadow go over us, then everything went black,” I said.
The paraglider unbuckled and shucked off his equipment like coming out of a shell and leaving a chrysalis. He stood in a black wetsuit, his beard braided with red ribbons.
“You never know who’s going to walk out of the ocean,” I told Gwen.
I looked behind me. California poppies glared orange bright from the bottom of the bluff, growing between the scattered driftwood. Gwen and I went and sat for a long time among these colours that rose between the logs. We didn’t speak. She put her head against my shoulder.
“This is all I ever wanted from today,” she said, then she began to talk, as she did I felt the sun’s heat on my arms, and her body against mine.
“My brother killed himself,” she told me. “He was a high achiever but not high enough for my dad.” She continued, “That wasn’t reason enough for suicide; he could have mentioned something, but he was quiet, like you.... I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I wanted to say it.”
I understood, for even on this perfect day, I desired to pull all the sadness out of Gwen and hold it in myself.
Gwen pulled her brother’s photo from her wallet.
“He looks like Buddy Holly,” I said. “He also seems very serious.”
“I’m a serious person,” Gwen said. “Just like him.”
I told her that I wanted to take her sadness into myself.
She said, “It’s funny, because I’m very happy right now. When we ran down that hill, after that dog jumped into your arms and you touched my face, I haven’t felt that happy in so long. When I’m laughing, sometimes, I’m actually angry,” and then she laughed. “You remind me of myself when I was your age.”
“I hope you’re not angry now,” I said. “Maybe that’s why you ran so fast.”
“I run because I’m putting everything behind me.” She laughed some more.
I first met Gwen at the transcendental meditation centre. I liked the way her eyebrows arched like black rainbows and, when they did, how the traces of lines on her forehead parted. I said she should come up to Beacon Hill with me and watch the boats go by, like with the song “Dock of the Bay,” and she laughed: “What is ‘Dock of the Bay’?”
She pulled her hair back, making a ponytail while she talked, stroking the ponytail with her elbows facing me. I could see the smooth skin of her lovely arms. Those arms and that ponytail are what hooked me in. Now, I stayed awake because of her, and the more I stayed awake, the more intense I felt.
We walked along the top of the ridge, hand in hand down towards Clover Point, where I hoped the otter family that lived in the storm outflow pipes might come out and put on a show. That might increase Gwen’s happiness.
I felt outside of myself again, thinking about Gwen’s brother, not knowing exactly what to ask but wondering why he would do such a drastic thing like suicide.
Gwen began to talk about her landlord. Apparently, the landlord kept going into her room while she was out.
“I know he’s been in there because stuff is moved around,” she said. “I asked him what he was doing, and he said it was all in my head. But there’s things moved around.”
“I could go and talk with him,” I said. “Maybe he’d listen to me.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “I had twenty bags of clothes in my bedroom and now there’s only nineteen.”
I tried to bring my thoughts into my head. “That’s a lot of clothes,” then I asked, “Didn’t you say your ex-boyfriend was a junkie?”
I don’t know why I mentioned that. She’d only talked about clothes. She let go of my hand. We walked on and then she turned. “What’s the connection?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s some kind of pattern. Maybe the pattern could be like a starfish, follow all the points to the centre.”
“I think we should run,” she said, “along the sea path.”
We began to jog side-by-side, then single file as she picked up speed. We dodged around people. “Excuse us,” I said, as Gwen ran faster and faster ahead, her purse bumping against the side of her blue jeans, I watched her shoulders and elbows move, legs speeding all the way through the path along the cemetery, where deer stood on the graves, heads down, munching on grass and clover. They didn’t look up as we tore by. They weren’t scared and they didn’t care. I cared a lot. And what was it exactly I cared about? Something about making Gwen happy. Can you make someone happy? ran through my head as I ran past the tombstones.
The fact I hadn’t slept in twenty-nine hours gave me some kind of dream strength. She slowed down as we stepped by the cemetery border, passed a group of skateboard kids. “I remember those days,” she said, breathing deeply and laughing again.
“You were a skateboarder?” I asked.
She told me: “You have a soft voice, sometimes it’s a wonder anyone hears you.”
I moved up beside her: “I was thinking about your brother.”
Copyright © 2024 by Harrison Kim
