Simply put? The plane: it crashed.
And after clinging to bits of raft-shrapnel for several weeks, feeding off seagull droppings and the occasional uncooked crustacean, after losing my mind several times drinking piss-warm seawater, my sleeping body finally beached off the coast of a seemingly uninhabited island. When I came to the next morning, I was sure I was dreaming, or dead, or both, but my hands were too swollen to pinch. So I threw handfuls of sulfurous sand into the air and waited for the gritty sting on my eyeballs, certain it wouldn't come. Sadly, I was mistaken. Once I had cleaned the blinding grains from my eyes, and slept the sleep of a wounded animal by a warm fire, I set about exploring my new home.
I scaled dinosaur-necked trees and scanned the horizon for signs of life and watercraft, with no luck. I discovered odd testicular fruits and tiny boneless birds the size of insects, and feasted on them with fervor, until my stomach turned itself inside out and showed me the exact size and shape of my gluttony. I built hard-won fires of twigs and grass that went out seconds after they started, and wept inconsolably, and then dug a hole in the sand and lay down in it, shivering, waiting for the end.
When I awakened I found a circle of women peering down at me from above. Gorgeous caramel women, short and plump and festooned in bright turquoise bead-necklaces, and little else. They eyed me quizzically, chittering back and forth in an untraceable dialect, and then they bore me away to their mountaintop enclave, where they fed me the most bizarre assortment of flesh and flora I had ever seen—great bright pink grapes and golden eggplants, foot-long shrimps and piglets with vestigial wings. They must have put something in my drink as well, because as I drained the viscous black liquid my head began to swim, my speech began to slow, and I started hungering for a round brown breast in my chap-lipped mouth. When they discovered me hours before, I had acknowledged the fact of their nudity, but at the time it didn't seem sexual or even out of the ordinary. After all, I was naked myself, except for the few rags that clung to my shoulders. But now all of a sudden my loins began to stir, watching these beautiful women tell stories in their rhythmic tongue, their ripe bodies shaking gently beneath girlish laughter.
I do not know how long I stayed awake, swimming through the neverending tide of bodies. It could have been weeks, or months. One thing I do know—this was no special occasion for them. They had no plans to bear my seed, or pass me around like a playtoy, or raise me up as some sort of white god. No, they merely wanted me to join their writhing mass on the grass floor, taking fingers and toes and elbows and earlobes into my mouth and nostrils and armpits and anus, until we were all one body that never slept, that only drank viscous liquid and groped toward the god we found there in our intertwining flesh.
I would still be there now if I hadn't heard a guttural squeal one day that resembled my Christian name—if I hadn't recalled the fact of language, the delight I had once taken in words falling off of my tongue and fingertips. As I lay there, half-blind beneath a sizable rump, and let the tide move me for a while, and ran a Yeats poem through my head line by line, I realized that I could no longer be happy as this body alone, this sated, golden body I had become.
I separated myself from the mass and set to work building a craft. I would take a break from time to time and slip back into the writhing pile, but it never held me like it had before, and I would inevitably pull away again and return to my labors. On the day I was to complete my boat, I awakened in my shoreside lean-to and stepped out into the sunlight. To my surprise, I spotted a group of pale conquistadors there, disembarking in full regalia from a decidedly modern-looking pontoon boat. They eyed me quizzically as I approached, and then a dull roar of laughter started to rise, and I heard familiar phrases jump out at me in unfamiliar accents. "Check out Robin Crusoe, boys!" "Looks like he beat us to it, innit?"
Once I regained my tongue and learned the plans of these self-proclaimed adventure sex tourists, I felt an urgent need to warn the women about these brutes who'd come to spoil their Eden. But how would I do it? I had only learned a few simple words during my stay, and most of them were names of body parts. Perhaps I could distract the Brits somehow, mislead them, throw them off the scent, and find a way to lead them off a precipice or into a staked pit? I was becoming increasingly frantic when I noticed the caramel women filtering in all around us, taking the splotchy bastards into their arms as tenderly as they had taken me that first night. And I realized that all was fine, that this dance had been going on for decades, and I had no place trying to stop it. I would simply gather a few keepsakes from my stay and hitch a pontoon ride back to the mainland in the morning.
And why not—I thought—while I'm still here, why not just one more tumble through the glorious pile?
It would be another three months before I set foot on my native shore.
And after clinging to bits of raft-shrapnel for several weeks, feeding off seagull droppings and the occasional uncooked crustacean, after losing my mind several times drinking piss-warm seawater, my sleeping body finally beached off the coast of a seemingly uninhabited island. When I came to the next morning, I was sure I was dreaming, or dead, or both, but my hands were too swollen to pinch. So I threw handfuls of sulfurous sand into the air and waited for the gritty sting on my eyeballs, certain it wouldn't come. Sadly, I was mistaken. Once I had cleaned the blinding grains from my eyes, and slept the sleep of a wounded animal by a warm fire, I set about exploring my new home.
I scaled dinosaur-necked trees and scanned the horizon for signs of life and watercraft, with no luck. I discovered odd testicular fruits and tiny boneless birds the size of insects, and feasted on them with fervor, until my stomach turned itself inside out and showed me the exact size and shape of my gluttony. I built hard-won fires of twigs and grass that went out seconds after they started, and wept inconsolably, and then dug a hole in the sand and lay down in it, shivering, waiting for the end.
When I awakened I found a circle of women peering down at me from above. Gorgeous caramel women, short and plump and festooned in bright turquoise bead-necklaces, and little else. They eyed me quizzically, chittering back and forth in an untraceable dialect, and then they bore me away to their mountaintop enclave, where they fed me the most bizarre assortment of flesh and flora I had ever seen—great bright pink grapes and golden eggplants, foot-long shrimps and piglets with vestigial wings. They must have put something in my drink as well, because as I drained the viscous black liquid my head began to swim, my speech began to slow, and I started hungering for a round brown breast in my chap-lipped mouth. When they discovered me hours before, I had acknowledged the fact of their nudity, but at the time it didn't seem sexual or even out of the ordinary. After all, I was naked myself, except for the few rags that clung to my shoulders. But now all of a sudden my loins began to stir, watching these beautiful women tell stories in their rhythmic tongue, their ripe bodies shaking gently beneath girlish laughter.
I do not know how long I stayed awake, swimming through the neverending tide of bodies. It could have been weeks, or months. One thing I do know—this was no special occasion for them. They had no plans to bear my seed, or pass me around like a playtoy, or raise me up as some sort of white god. No, they merely wanted me to join their writhing mass on the grass floor, taking fingers and toes and elbows and earlobes into my mouth and nostrils and armpits and anus, until we were all one body that never slept, that only drank viscous liquid and groped toward the god we found there in our intertwining flesh.
I would still be there now if I hadn't heard a guttural squeal one day that resembled my Christian name—if I hadn't recalled the fact of language, the delight I had once taken in words falling off of my tongue and fingertips. As I lay there, half-blind beneath a sizable rump, and let the tide move me for a while, and ran a Yeats poem through my head line by line, I realized that I could no longer be happy as this body alone, this sated, golden body I had become.
I separated myself from the mass and set to work building a craft. I would take a break from time to time and slip back into the writhing pile, but it never held me like it had before, and I would inevitably pull away again and return to my labors. On the day I was to complete my boat, I awakened in my shoreside lean-to and stepped out into the sunlight. To my surprise, I spotted a group of pale conquistadors there, disembarking in full regalia from a decidedly modern-looking pontoon boat. They eyed me quizzically as I approached, and then a dull roar of laughter started to rise, and I heard familiar phrases jump out at me in unfamiliar accents. "Check out Robin Crusoe, boys!" "Looks like he beat us to it, innit?"
Once I regained my tongue and learned the plans of these self-proclaimed adventure sex tourists, I felt an urgent need to warn the women about these brutes who'd come to spoil their Eden. But how would I do it? I had only learned a few simple words during my stay, and most of them were names of body parts. Perhaps I could distract the Brits somehow, mislead them, throw them off the scent, and find a way to lead them off a precipice or into a staked pit? I was becoming increasingly frantic when I noticed the caramel women filtering in all around us, taking the splotchy bastards into their arms as tenderly as they had taken me that first night. And I realized that all was fine, that this dance had been going on for decades, and I had no place trying to stop it. I would simply gather a few keepsakes from my stay and hitch a pontoon ride back to the mainland in the morning.
And why not—I thought—while I'm still here, why not just one more tumble through the glorious pile?
It would be another three months before I set foot on my native shore.
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