THE GREYLING © (SHORT STORY)

8/3/2019 THE GREYLING (SHORT STORY)

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THE GREYLING

By Dick Croy

Grey dissolution of the day. He stared transfixed, his gaze a greying itself. His fingertips had

melted holes in the cool glass pane: holes with edges as smooth as the rim of a glass, a

goblet. If he closed his hand suddenly, hed pull away a piece of the window. The rest might

shatter like shards of ice out over the street, six floors below.

No depth in this grey. West was anything past the Atlantic Richfield towers. All day

now their steel skeletons clamored to be born. The shrill lifting cries had the chill of

something dark, predatory, prehistoric about them, beyond memory of the brain but not of

the spine or skin.

Behind him, in all the halls of the building the days clockwork accelerated toward its

end. In the suite of rooms at his back rustled the homing urge. Fluorescented forms and

memos littering the floor drifted into piles of mutant colors against the baseboards. Daylight

emptied through west windows as the afternoon receded; the rooms became electric lakes of

rippling glue-green light, inhospitable.


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Commutation: living cells of the edifice for reverberations in guarded corridors; these

echoes all that kept the marbled and occluded veins from collapsing at night. The grey people

erupting into the evening, with only the bright colors of their clothing to distinguish them

from it. He watched them surge up the hill to their parked carsand then he was among

them, bobbing in the torrent of motion, eddying in vehicular backwaters, trafficking in the

larger stream, finally caught in its current as it became steadily swifter.

The river flowed west to the sea. On clear days he could see the shimmer from a

transition ramp which arched over the confluence of two freeways like a woman sexually

ecstatic. Today, in this time, the ramp swooped up into grey, rolled slightly on its side in a

prolonged curve, then righted itself and descended again into grey.

His steering wheel controlled a rudder which he used to direct the inexorable current

against itself, deflecting his course deftly across stream to the transition channel. Swept to the

top of the arc, he hung upside down momentarily in its centrifugal/centripetal equation. From

this vantage point, before coming back to earth, he could see that the city lay spavined and

crushed beneath him.

The thickest fog since his move to the beach mired the rest of the drive home. It

seemed the first stage in a gradual concretion of space. There were objects and structures,

beings, in space and there was all that was not these things, but there was no space. The hood

of his car had become the prow of a ship by which he was able to cleave his way homeward.

At the beach itself the fog was virtually impenetrable. He was incredulous: within an

hour of arriving he could see no more than five or six feet in front of him. The idea of his

usual run along the beach seemed laughable, yet as he imagined the experience of jogging at

the edge of waves he could hear and smell, feel against his legs but not see, the eerie novelty


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began to lure him. He paced through the small apartment only ostensibly occupied with

distracted gestures toward housecleaning. Each time he strode past the mirror in the darkened

living room he glanced surreptitiously at the enigmatic figure that parodied his displaced

energy. Finally, as he passed it headed for the bedroom, his reflection, face suffused with

excitement, was shedding its shirt.

It took him, he guessed, ten minutes or more to probe stealthily between apartment

buildings, walk one block down the alley and across the narrow street fronting the beach,

then through the small park between street and sand. Usually the walk took perhaps a minute

and a half.

Sounds, even smells were muffled by the oppressively damp and heavy air so that the

hair on his arms and legs began just perceptibly to undulate, like a kelp bed in tranquil seas.

And the heightened sense of touch made his fingertips and the soles of his bare feel seem

almost to crackle with incoming stimuli. Recognizing that his somewhat labored breathing

was the effect more of apprehension than of the walk or humidity, he was surprised and

amused.

When he had crossed the strip of beach, the packed wet sand visited by the tide and

finally, with open mouth, felt the invisible, inquisitive waves themselves about his ankles, he

became aware for the first time of his isolation from the land. As he began to jog just beyond

the reach of all but the most determined of the incoming waves, following the concave curve

of the beach, he realized he no longer knew the direction back to his apartment. Hed have to

retrace his steps to his starting point at the waters edge, then return in a path roughly

perpendicular to the water from there. But how would he know when hed found this spot?

He let the idea of being marooned from familiar surroundings develop as freely as the fog


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had moved in upon the land. It expanded until the image and sensation bore little relation to

his physical circumstances. Surely he could get close enough on the return lap to grope his

way to some familiar landmark.

He was running now with the aid of some sort of inner gyroscopic sense. Although

his awakened body touch was substituting skillfully for vision in enabling him to move

through space, his sense of equilibrium was faltering without its normal input of visual cues.

Deliberately to aggravate the diminished faculty, he ran faster. The fog became even more

opaque. He felt that somehow the arc of his curvilinear path was significant in his being able

to remain upright at all.

His legs chopped through air and water and the heavy mixture that united them.

When his feet splayed water instead of sand the splashed droplets thrown up against his legs

were like tiny eyes pressed into his skin for guidancediminutive socketed bulbsand

although each flashed on for but a fraction of a second, it relayed vital information for a

message made up of thousands of such data bits. Remarkably, these eyes were clearly a part

of something other than himself, they were for his use. Down or up or somewhere at his side,

he saw the waves he splashed through though his hand extended at arms length before his

face was invisible.

His mind had begun to compose a rhythm from his stride based on the footsteps that

landed in water as opposed to those which left imprints, themselves vanishing as quickly

under the tide as he did from them in the fog. At first abrasive and staccato, the beat soon

softened, liquefied. The rigid, reciprocal swing of his arms was phased into a single spiraling

pulsation which seemed to converge in his chest or solar plexus and then to radiate from all

part of his bodyonly to reverse, or invert, itself somewhere beyond him and return. Then


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his attention shifted to the churning legs, which he suddenly intuited would be subject to the

same orgasmic pulsation, this one directed lower, to the groin. Yet no sooner had he mentally

separated the two centers than they converged. The base of his spine was now the focal point

of a rocking, lulling, tumbling motion through the viscous amniotic medium around him.

Then suddenly his right foot came down on matted feathers neck and back of bird

washed inhe sprang as if bitten by its lifeless beak and bolted into full stride. And though

his foot came down again in hard, packed sand, he still felt the gulls wet body clinging to his

instep. The grains of sand on the sole of his foot saw the impression of the bird there. They

relayed the picture each time his foot bit into the ground. Though it was fading he saw it

clearly, saw how the limp neck had been twisted by the impact, how one wing had been

folded beneath it. Then as he ran on into the endless bank of fog, he thought he saw the bird,

exhausted, plummeting into the sea; saw the waterbird helplessly drowning, saw, before that,

the dead seagull hed stepped on wheeling among others above the bay. And then he too

looked down from that soaring height, felt himself escalated smooth and sudden on the wind,

flash of instinct, the drop, the beginning of his dive.

He had little difficulty locating his bearings. He hadnt tried and the way had

seemingly made itself known. As he walked, blowing into his chilled hands, rubbing his

fingers, it occurred to him that he remembered, or thought that he did, another seagull, this

one at work.

It had been a rare clear bright day. Something had darted in front of the sun as he sat

in ornamental utility at his desk. He looked up abstractedly and saw the gull spiraling down

between tall buildings on Wilshire Boulevard, sunlight glinting with the fluid pulse of its

wings. Gulls frequently came in as far as MacArthur Park but he couldnt remember seeing


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one above the noise and traffic of downtown before. As he watchedhe thought he

remembered having seen itthe bird executed a sort of half-pirouette on its down-pointed

wing, then folded both wings and dropped toward his building. It began to pick up speed and

he saw with alarm that its arc, if it didnt pull up, would bring it right into the side of the

building, very close to the window in front of his desk. He stared transfixed and horrified;

there was no way it could stop in time, it was going to come right through the window. The

bird seemed to fill his whole field of vision; it hung in its trajectory as though motionless

while its whole body screamed of flight. He could see its face, its eyes glaring intently ahead,

seeming almost to seek him out behind the window and his desk, neck tautly arched.

One hand on the doorknob, he brushed damp hair away from his eyes with the other

and looked off into the depths of the fog. Then he turned and entered his apartment, to which

the sunless twilight had given an almost underwater quality. He tossed his keys onto the

coffee table, his distracted gaze flicking across the opposite wall, across the mirror there. The

reflected image was standing in sweatshirt and trunks here he indeed stood. But it was not he.

THE GREYLING © (SHORT STORY)

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