Narcissus and Narcissa
“Narcissus and Narcissa”
Narcissus stood on a sloped beach bordered on one side by the shoreline and on the other by a row of palms with sighing fronds. To this part of the island he often came to clear his mind. Its remoteness allowed the waves to crash in soothing melodies, untouched by even whispers of society. His nose and tongue could taste the salt that carried on the air. The skies above were momentarily clear, though brooding clouds loomed on the horizon and lay between him and the wind. He decided to end his visit.
Turning homeward, he retraced the footprints stretching past his sight. With his mind free of its usual yammering, every hundred steps flew by like only one.
Suddenly, a glimmer caught his eye. He came upon a bottle that had washed up on the shore; within was a scroll that withstood his gaze. Curiosity piqued, he uncorked the bottle and unfurled its contents.
My dear to be,
In this strange and loveless world, may you have a heart as a cornucopia to whom the waves, my briny heralds, consign this. And may they too relay your swift requital to the love I do declare herein.
Yours to be,
Narcissa
A vicarious sense of shame pricked his guts as he imagined longing after such fairy tales, but on reflection, he sympathized. My romantic imagination too has been a hearth for foolish flames. Though, waves as messengers? It’s like she would challenge the sun to a game of cosmic billiards and expect no stars to cross. Well, though this will never reach her, I’ll have honed my wooing, he smirked. Finding a pen within, he added this to the parchment:
Dearest Narcissa,
May this harvest of my heart attest to its exhaustless giving. Your epistle in this scroll, the intermediary of our eyes, tells me she must be fair, of so fair a hand. Not strangers but lovers would we be if only we could meet in this strange and loveless world.
My requital,
Narcissus
He refurled and reinserted the scroll, throwing the bottle into the waves without expecting Narcissa to receive it.
Serenity once again enveloped him as he continued his journey. Before he knew it, he had stolen onto his street, now shrouded in darkness. Fiery lamplight wafting through closed windows guided his way, though this couldn’t detract from the majesty of the heavens, whose spheres with natural light outshone the artificial.
At last he arrived at his bungalow’s veranda. He smiled and waved a brief ‘good night’ to a passing group of chatty kids on scooters, then unlocked his front door and flung it open. He went straight to bed, whereinto flopping, he slept till morning.
As Saturday dawned, he awoke with a yawn and a shoulder‐popping stretch, then whirred through the morning like an automaton: he set coffee brewing, showered, brushed his teeth, then sat at the kitchen table with the brew in his hands for a reflective lull. Wonder if Narcissa got my seaborne DM, he chuckled to himself. With each sip a warmth suffused him. How would this Juliet respond? O Narcissus, wherefore art thou untold leagues away? Tell me thy whereabouts, that we may determine a suitable trysting‐place. Yeah, something like that, he chuckled again.
Despite his realism about the improbability of hearing back from her, he realized he would be disappointed in that event. Though these cool expectations seemed poised to temper his potential disappointment enough to justify his return to that fated shore, given the exhilaration he would feel upon unlikely success. So he downed his coffee but for its sluggish dregs, then departed love‐ward.
He exchanged cheery greetings with his fellows as he passed through the neighborhood. Eventually, he reached the beach, whose plenty of goers dwindled as he strode on. The landmark of a fallen palm announced his arrival. He watched the waves curl, hurl their thunder at the shore, advance and recede cyclically, though there was no sign of the bottle from the day before. Well, you knew tidal postage was unreliable. Why let disappointment gnaw? So he sighed his drooping spirits from mind and was just settling himself beneath the shade of a happier palm when a glassy glint a wave beyond the breaking point caught his eye. Goaded by sudden excitement, he ran into the water and waded up to the sparkle, where he rejoiced to find the bottle.
He turned for shore, leaving the sea dripping. If not for the sun’s penetrating gaze, the breeze would have chilled him as he replanted himself within the palmy bower. Uncorking the bottle, he unfurled the scroll to find fresh writing below what he had penned yesterday. It read,
Beloved Narcissus,
I see now that your heart alone could feed a famished world. Then what right have I to feast upon its eloquence if but to scribble pap in turn? Tell me whence of the wide world you are that I may thither head and truly settle my debts.
Thereby let me unify our loves,
Narcissa
After reading this and smirking at his pen‐partner’s dedication to an Elizabethan tone, Narcissus decided to write her a sonnet. He fished out the pen and versified thus:
Sweetest Narcissa, to whom in truest praise
A very Muse were loath to sing a postlude,
Demurring then or fearing that her lays
Were media too summary or crude.
I write to you from mild Amberjaune Caye,
A pearl isle in the atoll crown
Of Haitian waters. Yet these seas would see
On your arrival loss in jeweled renown
Since you would seem to steal from the clime
Its luster, shadowed by your radiance.
Yet even with your sun eclipse my rhyme:
Prove it pale prophecy: hitherward advance.
Grace us insular jewelers with your sight,
Who’ve ever known the lit but not the light.
I do be poetical, he thought as he reinserted the parchment. He corked the bottle, walked into the shallows, and hurled it as far as he could. Its arcing out of sight seemed slower than the sun’s progress through the sky that day. Though his legs bore his body back to town for an uneventful afternoon and evening, his mind lingered behind. Friends were struck by his anomalous behavior, especially his neighbors Jean, Marie, and their daughter, Anne. They greeted him with hopeful smiles and an ‘evening, Narcissus!’ upon his return home from dinner, but received only a chilly echo in response.
Long into the night, his thoughts ran to and from the bottle; at some point though, their endurance must have waned as he drifted off.
Unlike his dreamless sleep of the night before, Narcissus recalled a curious phantasmagoria as he awoke in the morning.
At what seemed to be midnight, he uncovered his blanketed self and arose from bed. The sheen of the moon filtering through the leftward window shutters was illumination enough for his dilated pupils. He somnambulated out of the house and into the middle of the street, barefooted and clad in only underwear. In his hypnagogic state, the houses to his left and right were like ghostly cargo containers, each colored more psychedelically and contoured more wispily than the last.
Narcissus’ recollection skipped ahead in time, and he found himself, under the light of the stars and moon, standing beneath the same palm he had frequented in his bottle‐message exchanges with Narcissa. Yet something was different. He recalled the contents of his mind:
O chaotic seas, that with order you’d again defy yourselves! Neptune, forgo the shaking of the earth! Again convey my to‐be lover’s letter! I’ll imperiously stand me here—feet apart, arms akimbo, brow redoubtable—and cow you to compliance, you and your finny legions all!
Despite the vehemence of this declaration, it seems he dozed off at that point since, once more, Narcissus’ memory leapt onward. The tide was lower now, the moon less vertical in the sky. Suddenly, he sighted the twinkle of the bottle and excitement surged within him. He hastened down the sandy decline and into the shallows, retrieved the bottle, then settled on higher drier sand. He feverishly uncorked it and removed the message inside. To the remembering Narcissus’ dawning horror, the lines of his very sonnet appeared not before his own eyes, but what must have been Narcissa’s. His words set their single heart aflutter.
If the poem were a flacon of Narcissus’ love, Narcissa’s fervor spritzed it through her mind. And to think that he and I were nearly neighbors! Flooded with infatuation, her thoughts took a lustful turn: Would that he were here to know me now! Ah—but that rather, though I would offer myself freely, I were the creditor of his faith. Therefore I’ll not let this quill ink my desire:
Precisely Platonic Narcissus,
Allow me to forewarn your eyes that they shall not read here the least innuendo of a sexual overture. Be at ease, for you have not stirred even a hint of my (thoroughly dormant, ladylike) lust. However, in the light of your essentially prosaic, non‐lust‐inspiring latest post, an intriguing revelation blossomed. It appears we share this island, and I have devised a proposal that may pique your interest.
Let us arrange—to employ a colloquialism of today’s youth—a ‘hookup.’ Nay, allow me to correct myself, for perhaps the term ‘hook‐down’ would better characterize our sinless rendezvous, knowing, I presume we both, how slippery and wet (and warm) a slope decadence is.
We shall meet at our cay’s southeastern cape beneath the sheltering fronds of a palm tree, as the sun bids the day adieu.
Anticipating our chaste encounter,
Narcissa
In memory, Narcissus continued to see through Narcissa’s eyes as she plugged the bottle, walked to the shoreline, and hucked it. The last things he recalled were the sound of the bottle plopping into the tranquil sea and a path of moonlight inclining to the horizon which Jesus may have trod to heaven.
But this imagery was no solace to his harrowing discovery, whose unbelievable validity he resolved to test against experience. He straight arose and dressed and left for the cape uncaffeinated. He was so preoccupied that being teleported to his destination would not have appetized reflection.
Upon his arrival, the sun had risen fully above the horizon, casting its golden light upon the restless surf, now even choppier than yesterday. The waves had already spit the bottle out: each surge sent it rolling up the sandy incline where it reached the limit of its momentum only to roll back down and be walloped by another angry breaker. Narcissus stooped to pick it up, found shelter once again beneath the shade of the palm, and shook its contents out. It seemed some water must have seeped into the bottle, as, to his dismay, all of the parchment’s characters were bleeding, rendering Narcissa’s message illegible.
Thereby failing to validate his dream within a daydream, dare he plumb his psyche to confront this—why, this barely thinkable, wholly unutterable—alter ego? There’s so little to it: just find the anima and accept your madness. Ha, Never! To share the throne of mind!?
Ooh! Maybe this game isn’t zero‐sum: if I rise with the sun and she with the moon, one’s well‐being doesn’t turn on the other’s ill‐being; as joint rulers we can both be happy!
Narcissus ignored his churning stomach as he paced the shore. Each trip up and down seemed instantaneous, sucked as he was into this wormhole of inner thought.
Regrettably, we share this flesh, Narcissa. (If only my body wasn’t yours!) How then to bugle your reveille? The sodden parchment's useless, but maybe I could write in the sand—yes! Symbolic: just as with whatever features I would mark it in the day, come night would be defaced or effaced, so things under the sun must wither all away; so might our love die painlessly.
Amid these thoughts, the hourglass of day in constant flow, the sun had drifted slowly to the west, yet still he could not decide how to articulate these tidings.
Where’s my inner Nietzsche, who said in sentences what others couldn’t in books? An example: ‘he who cannot obey himself will be commanded.’ Whatever possessed him to write that, be my demon—er, maybe my cherub, actually: help me strike a tender tone.
The sun was setting now, its residual swath of saffron mingling with the occasional cloud to tender cotton candy to the gods. With the grace of a ballerina, Narcissus would trace the start of letters into the sand with his tiptoes, only to think better of the words that would follow and to end their beginning with his sole.
Dear—no, pointless. Narcis—no, no need to address her; to whom else could it be addressed?
That the day had nearly dusked escaped his notice, and still he failed to lyricize his feelings. I am Sisyphus. And so is every poet, who can only ever approach that peak of verbal expression before the boulder of congealed emotion slips from consciousness to newly settle in its subliminal vale: muses don’t inspire tenants of Tartarus. Perhaps a simple ‘I cannot love—
This stream of consciousness lost its spring as, seamlessly, Narcissus became Narcissa. She regarded her right foot in front of her en pointe with puzzlement, as though she had intended to write something in the sand. She turned around to see the darkly twilit sky and blushed to think of what it might foreshadow.
To bide the time until Narcissus’ arrival, she sat prissily erect against the base of her and Narcissus’ favorite palm, regarding her manicure‐less hands with scorn. Her back began to spasm with the strain of maintaining her posture, yet she daren’t drop her Victorian airs lest Narcissus should show.
But he never did. All night she awaited his arrival and would at any moment have been entirely unfazed (Quixote having been robbed) to see him approach on the back of Rosinante—it caparisoned and he panoplied—along with a retinue of brass to dignify their meeting with fanfare.
Yet still he didn’t show. Though she felt as though Narcissus were needling her pincushion of a heart, she let the man in the moon wear her sorrow. For men madden to see their women sadden; you wouldn’t see me sad; nay, I’d sooner you gladden by my happy seeming than madden by my saddened being. Do show, lovely Narcissus, do!
Yet all her hopes had breathed their last. Despite herself, she succumbed to welling tears. O Janus! I see now your two faces: you would invite love but not admit it!
With shoulders slumped and eyes downcast, she arose and walked to the hem of the sea. Wading in gradually, the water reached her waist, her midriff, and eventually her neck. Her head was taken by unfeeling waves. Trudging along the floor of the silent ocean, she held no intention of surfacing; all around her darkness mirrored mind. The fire in her lungs was gently roaring. After a lingering while, the orient blushed on high and, able to be one because divided, Narcissus and Narcissa embraced in endless dawn.