(from my very long short-story work in progress untitled)... Like a platoon from a tunnel, scrambling to find North. The interior lights were still on, spilling onto the gravel, but he hardly knew where he was, even though he’d been there that morning and the afternoon before. There were no trees, there were no hills or banks, there wasn’t even a lake. He could smell it – the algae and seaweed, or whatever it was grew in a lake, but he could see only the night, a night darker than he knew of, darker than any of his dreams, even the most frightening of which had a few street lamps in them. The only sure thing he could make out was Selene. Right outside the passenger door of the Volkswagen, her arms were casting about her, her white skin getting whiter. Before he could say anything—which was all he was good at at times like these—before he could open his mouth to say a word, the dome light and the moon showed him her long white thighs, with no lines going across them. Her long arms reached behind her, grabbed at her back, and came forward again, flinging lace onto the car seat. She was all white. Without a farewell, she was gone. On a mad dash for the sea. She was out in the water, alone, even before Will could take his socks off. He had just seen her undress, frantically, as if in the middle of a mad costume change – and she had just run the fifty feet to the lake with everything hanging out there. He’d caught only a hint of her nakedness before she was gone. He saw what had to be her breasts, but they were taken away from him so quickly that he was allowed no sense of them – their shape, their bounce. He’d gotten nothing, and had been in a state of agitation since the trip began in hopes that he might know them, even from a distance. Before this moment, he’d never seen someone so unconcerned with awkwardness, or anticipation, or of any of the things good or bad that humans bring each other. She didn’t look at anyone else or at herself. Her goal was the water, to be in it unclothed, and to get there her every stitch had to come off in a flash.
She had gotten naked like a shot and had run off into the night. It was not something that happened in front of him everyday. The rest of them were still puttering around the car, turning their heads back and forth to see who else had started. No one had. They had been left behind, and thus the game had begun. Will was going to have to take his clothes off very soon, and pitch black as it was, it still didn’t feel dark enough.
He began with his jeans, with those stupid trendy holes the manufacturer had put in. He slid them off and put them on the backseat. Now he was in his shirt and briefs, the snug American Apparel boxer-briefs, the ones he liked. No one would see them. They’d be skipping that part. He felt naked, in anticipation of his nakedness, and was afraid of himself. He felt the soft flapping of his upper thighs and became terrified of what lay between and behind them. They were sure to let him down, these waggling parts of his. They would bounce around like a lot of unsure choices. He longed for the swagger he’d had while knocking around the dorms or in the practice rooms. That biting humor of his that always won the day, it wasn’t available to him now, nor were any of the parts of his body he liked. The push-up arms, which he wrapped around his torso to accentuate their thickness and to play down his pointy shoulders. Once he got naked he would have only a penis; he’d be one long penis, and perhaps an ass – his most humorless parts, the most crass and silly and not bright. He would get naked and would want his brain back. He already felt brainless. It didn’t help matters that he was getting naked with girls he had, in other circumstances, wanted to get naked with, not in these.
He did his best not to look over at Adrianna on the other side of the car. He didn’t want to. That rare treat of a body, now that the game was really on, it didn’t seem right to peep. At least not until he was out there too, and then it would still have to be done very carefully, secretly, because anything more would be, well, far from sexy.
Out there. In moments, he would be out there. Unless he decided not to. Who said he had to go through with this? Just because he was there? He began to lift his shirt. His ankles turned over a large stone. He steadied himself against the roof of the car. He heard Selene, from the lake, cooing like a Siren. “Oh my God it is so good, you guys!” There was no mistaking her ecstasy. She was far away now, body and soul, and spoke the language of the blissful, a tongue that didn’t exist where the rest of them were. They were speaking the language of stalling. “Did she go in already? Oh my God, she amazing. She’s in there. She just went right for it! Oh my gosh, this is crazy. She is so awesome.”
Time had started. The longer Will listened to or added to the bystanders’ chatter, the nervous prattling and praising, the longer he might stay out of the water with his clothes on. Shirt is easy, he thought, you’ve done that millions of times, just do it now. He did it. It was as humid and still as the city up here, but an imaginary breeze bit at his back. He turned a few times, as if to make sure which way the lake was, even though it was unmistakable which direction Selene’s honey cooing was coming from. She was the lake mother. She was all things nature and sex. She cried to the hills, to the lake and to herself. If none of them ran out to join her, he thought, she might be disappointed, but would still stay submerged for hours, oohing and ahhing until morning.
Shirt was off now. He was in his underwear. He started moving. He had to, or else he would be standing near a car in his underwear, and that was a stupid thing to be caught doing. It wasn’t a thing to do at all. There had been a point to coming to Lake Mansfield at midnight with his castmates. It was to do something, preferably something he hadn’t done before. He’d been in bad plays before, and he’d stood by cars many times.
The moon reflected back on the lake a million times, a spotlight on the water. Selene’s hair was the centerpiece, her curls fanning out endlessly like a mermaid’s. He couldn’t see her body or her face, maybe just the crowns of her teeth and the line of her shoulders. She dipped down, twirling underwater, coming up again. Why she did this was beyond him. What she could hope to find, or what sensations she might like to feel way down in the water, these were things no one ever taught him.
He was first in line now. Adrianna and Mangesh were still much closer to the car. He had ventured out. He stood a few feet back from the water’s edge, his hips cocked, elbows up, hands gripping behind him – still searching for some way to look cool, even though little to nothing of him could be seen. His whole exterior life was occupied with looking acceptable – spurred on by a persistent feeling that he wasn’t. He was stalling like a tourist, some fearful gawker gearing up for safari in the jungle, packing and repacking his kit.
Adrianna was second in line, working her crutches over the pebbles. He didn’t know how close she was, because he didn’t dare look behind. What if she was buck naked already, hobbling on her crutch? Not a great way to enhance the mystery of the night. But really, and this was what he couldn’t get over, you couldn’t see anything. At least he couldn’t. He could only see the faintest outlines. The moon was too pointed, like a Klieg on the water, and the stars were so far away.
His fear of forever standing there like brought the whole thing rushing to an end. He let out a “Hey!” and started toward the bank, jogging, reckoning courage through speed. He paused a foot before the shore and in a grand gesture whipped off his boxer briefs and flung them into the air behind him. It was a gesture, a wave at the camera, but still it was a step. He soldiered on, pushing through, until he felt the water on his ankles, and his feet touched the tarp at the bottom, that hard sheet the township had laid there for purposes none of them knew. It stretched only over certain parts, and he pushed against it, slipping and sliding, flipping and flopping, on the brink of trauma, but still pushing on. There was no choice. He had two, maybe three seconds to find deeper water, to get into a position where he might look almost normal—though no one was looking—where it might as well be an ordinary day for a guy at the beach, at night. He shoved his gangly body in, in quickly until he was all the way in, until his naked dick was in the water with the rest of him, and Selene, his muse, was there just a few inches away, her naked everything warming the water like a bath. His teeth chattered. Now what do they do? He babbled to her, some wispy words about it being his first time, and she babbled back, about it being her trillionth. He ducked and wet his hair, which did nothing to warm him up as he had hoped. And he moved closer to the center, toward deeper water, where he could stand with only his shoulders showing.
There was little place to look but up. Once he turned his face skyward the situation changed. He changed. He was no longer a naked city Jew trying to pass himself off as a nature child. Now he was a naked man under a hundred thousand stars, under a sky that really did go on forever, seriously look at that, it went on and on. He’d had no idea. He was a child seeing the universe for the first time. You could get lost up there, like Major Tom, and end up at the end of nowhere, maybe in some other time period, like in ancient Greece where they first gave these stars their names. The heavy water nudged him on his tiny ankles, and he changed stance again and again. He turned around and around, looking to see the furthest stars, whichever they were. Selene had named them the night before while they stood elbow to elbow in the campus parking lot dodging straight looks. He didn’t need their names now, and he didn’t need to see anybody on Earth. Yes, he was having a Siddhartha moment – the stars were all him. And the sensations of his body grew fainter, the shrinking of his parts continued on in silence.
A howl came from the shore.
“Oh! Ow! Will, you threw your underwear in my face!”
His eyes came down. Adrianna was still on the shore in her bra. “What? Are you serious? No.”
“Yes!”
“Oh God, Jesus. I had no idea you were there, I’m sorry!”
Selene laughed as she hadn’t laughed yet.
“You wear white?” Adrianna said in horror.
“What?” He thought for a moment. “No no no, those are not white! They’re gray! Those are gray!”
