Link to the following paragraph (p. 59, 1st Vintage Internation Edition): “Anyway, talking to you like this, I get the feeling I’ve become the Egyptian Sandman myself. And whatever I touch, it’s sand sand sand.”In every handful, you’re sure to see a dozen or more tiny cubes, perfect and translucent, like table salt. But of course it’s hard to extricate them with cocoa-butter-slick fingers, and everything tastes salty at the beach, anyway. So who knows? At any rate, it’s not so much that kind of sand we’re talking about, here.
I mean, sand is sand, right? And at some point, it was all a beach, but – and never having been there, I’m only conjecturing – surely
that sand had lost some of it’s zing.
When you finish hearing what we all have to say, you’ll probably think I’m a liar. It’s not really true, though. It’s just that this mouth was the easiest to inhabit, for our first volley, and if I say some things that sound like HIM, that’s just me trying to make it all go down more smoothly. Less grainy and gritty and salty and sour, if you know what I mean. So yeah, maybe I lied – but I think it was more like a stretcher, as another man once wrote, and if technically I
have been there (born and raised!), you probably ought to forgive me and just go with it for a while.
It’s not as if it can hurt.
So anyway, you could get technical and say the skin is, and of course my esteemed colleague might insist on pride of place as the intestines are pretty
long (if you stretch them out and don’t squish them up instead, although that’s not Hawk’s fault), but for all intents and purposes the liver really is the largest organ in the body. So there’s another reason for me to go first! But he never really thought about his liver. I think that’s because it’s generally pretty unobtrusive, unless it happens to kill you. I mean, it’s not like your stomach, always growling at inappropriate times, or the rest of your guts, which can do even more inappropriate things. Or your lungs – his lungs in particular, poor guy! Always seizing up from all the sand.
Sand, sand, sand.
I’m just here to get you ready to hear it, the whats and hows and the big old why.
But first, you have to imagine the sand. What does it feel like, hot and dry and so old it’s lost its salt? Forget the suntan lotion smell, and the give of it when it’s ocean-wet beneath your feet. There’s no ocean here for miles and miles, but the wind whips it up like sea-swells and wears it down again. Pouring into you is bad enough, you know, when you try to breathe, or blink it out of your eyes, or shake it out of your shoes, your underwear. But pouring
out of you! A horror.