Passing Through

A photo of the author, Ethan Knowles.

Passing Through*

Things started to come together when, after months spent writhing around in bed with Despair, I snuck away one night to sleep with a tourist on Paradise Island. It was not a difficult thing to do. In fact, I was able to do it again and again. Multiple times a week even, and without very much hassle. It was almost mechanical, the manner in which I proceeded. I crossed every hotel lobby on the island, slipped through untold elevator doors. Not once was I stopped. My presence, never questioned. I thought of myself, on more than one occasion and in more than one way, as the vending machine on every floor of the resort. I moaned and I moaned, but you never did manage to find me. After all, I too looked to be passing through. And was I not?

Beside the requisite bridge toll (Paradise is not lived in but travelled to), these trips did not cost me very much. A pack of condoms, a bottle of water-based lubricant: these were my tickets to the heart of the island. No more expensive than an SPF 15 sunscreen. By their grace - and graceful they were - I could walk into a wicker-filled waiting room like I furnished it myself. This was a burlesque I believed in, I told myself. A veritable meritable performance.

It was not until my third affair (the wrench in my relationship with Despair), that I began souveniring. In some ways the habit snuck up on me and in some ways it did not. In some ways it was entirely haphazard, wild and almost beyond my control. In some ways, I was totally in control. In some ways I had not been in control for a very long time and in this way, in the doing of this upside-down inside-out act, I finally began to be.

I found my inaugural trinket staring up at me from a bone-white bathroom sink. I had just ejaculated and I did not know it to be the start of an institution, activity, or period of office** then but I find that is exactly how it should be described now. It was right there, tucked between travel-sized beauty supplies, staring up at me like an embalmed relative. It was a lightly used bamboo toothbrush with jet-black bristles. I was surprised at how easy the choice had been. It was almost as if there had been no choice at all. I knew the object should be missed, but nevertheless replaceable. I knew my lover should consider that I was the one to lift it, but that reason would persuade him otherwise. Finally, I knew no matter what, and with this rule I was resolute, that I should have absolutely no use for it.

And so the bamboo toothbrush was chosen, ostensibly by me but not impossibly by someone through me. I slipped it without hesitation into my dark wash jeans just as the ghostly silhouette of Julian, a not entirely unlikable resort finance tycoon (his words) with soft pillowy lips (my words), beckoned me out the bathroom for a kiss. We hung in the doorway while his soft pillowy lips pushed against mine like forgiving weather fronts. They tasted like licorice. He said it was a new lip balm. I could tell by his tone he did not want me to leave yet. But he knew that in the end I would never leave. Even when I made it clear my time had come and I could stay no longer. Even when I left the hotel - even then, he knew that he would have me for a very long time.

I did not think about the souvenir and then I did. I really did think about it. I thought about it when I reached my carefully concealed Suzuki Swift - parked within reach of the hotel entrance so as to avoid a towing but not so near as to invite an unwanted interaction. I felt the pocket-sized object (it would always be a small thing, if not in size then significance) and I began to wonder what Julian himself would steal. What he would steal from the hotel room, yes, but more importantly what he would steal from this place. Whether his souvenirs would be edible or magnetic or whether they could be touched at all. I wondered what he would say when he finally left Paradise Island. What he would choose to reveal and what, inevitably, he would withhold. Because that too is a theft.

What I do not wonder is what he has stolen from me. This, I decide, will be another rule. What his harsh nails, hungry like whetted surf, have scraped off the walls of this body and eaten, I do not dare examine. I know I am losing things on Paradise Island. But at least, I maintain, I am no longer losing my mind. At least, I am making my way to a destination. This is what I tell myself, though I am always lying.

To be clear, what I find myself walking into on these night trips is no destination at all. Only a place of somewhere escaped, a place of passing - a purgatory. For me, each resort is a new opportunity to steal and to be stolen from. I cannot get enough of either of these things, it’s true, but what I can get enough of are the things I cannot help but notice. The things that are small enough to be big and common enough to be uncanny. The things that separate those who are passing through and those who, in one way or another, are passed through.

*The following story has been reprinted without the permission of its author. Its date is unknown. Originally discovered by well-known hotelieir Oscar Robinson on the floor of his personal elevator, Passing Through is a scandalous work of what can only be considered speculative fiction. Its vulgar narrator recounts a story that is so morally offensive and far-removed from the realities of our sacred island nation that it is only being reprinted in this Journal of Contemporary Religious Indoctrination as a warning of what a lost soul may become. The views expressed, it must be stated, in no way represent those of the publisher. Readers are not advised to consume in one sitting.

**Oxford Dictionary definition of the word “inaugural”.