Guzunder

In the morning we packed up to head north. While Sylvie showered I walked down to the beach for a quick wake-up swim, the water clear and not too cold. When I got back to the bungalow there was Cagetan’s van parked at the neighbor’s place to the east of us, the one the college kids had nested in for a weekend of hokey-pokey. Apparently they had failed to get their deposits back, and Cagetan, gobsmacked but happy to see me, explained he and Sot had gone in together and started a business cleaning beach pads after short term rentals. All the kids returning to school created peak business. C&S Cleaners also did small repairs, touch up painting, installed new door handles and locks when necessary, and yard clean-up. Cagetan asked of any news of Minerva or the Hotel Julian crowd. No, but Sylvie and I might stop by there on our way up north. Sylvie drove so I could make some notes in my diary as we departed, when I might feel something, she said, as we often do when we take leave of a place we’ve lived in for a time. But I felt nothing. The little pocket notebook had dried out, the pages crinkly and water stained, gritty from the dried salt, but the book was useable, not that it mattered, since I still seemed to have nothing to say. Do the 5 W’s Sylvie again suggested, as we pulled away from the bungalow and I waved goodbye to Cagetan and Sot. I inventoried Sylvie’s 5 W’s: Who, no one; what, nothing; when, in no time at all; why, not a clue; where, past present and future, where all things happen at once like in dreams and when we awake we struggle to call to mind and tell, but the mind has emptied, and isn’t it just as well, the guzunder full of dreams tossed out with the night, emptied with a royal flush, the better to awake to the moment, not to temper or dilute, but to expel and terminate, no need to qualify or quantify, no desire to count or appraise anything.

“Guzunder” is episode 66 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.