UNDERCURRENTS
He played along the beach for years, long past childhood, spending his afternoons watching for sharks and burying secrets along the vast sun-bleached dunes. Late one afternoon, lying among the dune grass, he fantasized about being a shark. How he admired them. Professional survivors, their blank, efficient stare betraying nothing, no hatred, no anger, no remorse. The afternoon wind blew sweet across the Pacific and he dreamt of far away places, places he’d never go. A small tick crawled up his sleeve as he lay in the dune grass dreaming. Lost in another place, he wouldn’t notice until late into the night.
That afternoon, caught up in traffic and stopped on the freeway, he unbundled the collection of letters from his father. Alone in the car, choked up on the freeway, he examined them one at a time, each letter seemingly written in a different tongue. The one letter written in a language he understood, he won’t read. It’s too easy to understand and he needs the separation of confusion and illegibility. A part of him knows how it reads and what it means but that part has no voice. Mute and afraid, he stumbles through a letter containing a message that means many things, or so it seems.
Dear Son,
You may not understand this, very few people do. I will tell you anyway that I don’t like to write letters. I prefer the telephone, the sleek finish, the depth of the shiny black plastic shadows, the short, sharp, efficient ring. I called you last week. You didn’t answer. I worry about you but you don’t answer. I let it wring for a very long time.
Time has taken its toll on me and now the doctors say I have the plague that none dare talk about and I will soon die. I don’t understand how this could have happened to me. I choose my friends carefully and though they had lied to me before, this time they promised they were telling the truth. I don’t know how I could have gotten dread decease. It certainly wasn’t from anyone I’ve conned or sorted with.
Eventually his father died of the plague, after making the impossible declaration that the same inevitable fate would doom his son as well. “My father died of this… …and you will too,” he said. The logic made no sense but the maliciousness did. More than a bit paranoid, the son started to see plague in the shadows that followed him at night, swimming around in the dark currents that flow between his thoughts. Nudged back to the moment by the slight movement of traffic, he saw himself in the rear view mirror, the driver behind waving his hands in baffled wonderment by his erratic behavior behind the wheel. Alone in dark meditation, he’d made jokes about it but the darkness holds no laughter any more, just the sound of moving water from black thoughts swimming in the deep.
In the hospital elevator, his father’s shadow rides with him, like a disconnected voice from a radio broadcast, unseen but coming loud and clear, its deep labored breathing betraying no warmth, no small trace of a giggle. Ding. He left his trance in the elevator and walked down the hospital corridor, past the sterile doctors. There in a small, well-lit room, in the cold shade of his father’s shadow, his pulse staggered. He clenched his fists, his thudding heart turning cold, cold like the memory of his stepmother’s stare as she stood naked near his bedroom door, eyeing his teenage body from the shadows. He always wondered if she liked what she saw. Waltzing around the house in her see-through underwear was certainly a statement of some kind. The things she said, there was never a compliment among them. Who could know what she thought? The shadows knew.
Silent in his chrome and dyspeptic bed, his diagonal stare full of obtuse meaning, his father sat stuffed with chemicals like an over-filled water balloon. Fat minutes rolled by, squeeing the anxiety into beads of sweat on his forehead. From the corner, the son saw it, his stepmother’s pale shadow, quivering in the doorway, then slipping across the room and whispering into his father’s ear. “Is it something about me?” The son wondered, maybe aloud, maybe not. The shadow sill quivered at the door.
“You never liked sports,” his father said, putting down the sports page while he picked up the bedside phone after its first sharp, jolting ring. Holding the receiving, he looked at the grown boy’s, now young man’s muscles and scars, looking for shadows, looking for sores, looking for scores to settle. The son listened from a cold distance, seeing things mostly out the window, lost in a mind in the clouds, lost beyond the shiny roof tops, fleeing from the dancing silhouettes of sea birds fluttering for a faceted moment on noiseless waves. The cartoonish caricature of a dark cloak quivered his father’s eyes.
“Your stepmother wants to visit me but she won’t come to visit as long as you’re here,” the father explained, hanging up the phone. The son talked about his job, his wife, various sports and offered up innocuous, unconnected words that fill space, wandering through a disjointed script written in considerate benign intent. His father watch TV football.
The tick from the dunes crawled out from his armpit, crept up his cheek and settled in just below the eyelid, burying its head in the shadow of his vision. The father droned on about sports and local politics, dragging the minutes through a long agenda that flowed in and out of reality, choosing each word carefully for maximum effect and likely hoping for maximum damage. While he talked, he sat pale, swollen with chemicals, struggling with his messages. The tick twitched. The son twitched. The evening wind blew the drapes into shadows that swept the walls and floor like black search lights. The matrix met in vertigo beneath the broken folds of his fathers crippled intent.
The son sat, feeling the phlegmatic darkness pressing down and congealing like malevolent black jello, maybe a leftover special effect from some mid-fifties monster movie, wriggling beneath the bed, sliding from corner to corner, always on the periphery of vision. Like a snail, it left slimy tracks across the floor, which he stared at while captivated by the pounding rhythm of his heart. He thought it only a hallucination, a morbid black fantasy, until it swam across the covers of his father’s bed and swallowed him whole. He slipped silently, as he had years ago, without struggle, into its black depths, eyes wide, saying nothing, alive but dead, awaiting death. The tick twitched. The son twitched, the spectacle too unsettling to witness but stopping it didn’t interest him. In his heart ran the cold currents of indifference. He thought of swimming in cool water, soothing his burnt and tender skin, naked and raw. He just stared and later left, car keys in hand.
As he walked down the hallway, he trapped the parasite between his fingernails, pulling the tick from within its fleshy refuge. He squeezed it until the legs stopped wiggled but his eyelid still twitched just the same. Walking numbly down the hall, he dropped the dead tick in the trash can as he passed the shiny doctors, instructed not to talk to him about their tests. He drove the midnight highway alone, the unread letters taut, rigid and out of sight.
Days later, he stood in a roadside phone booth near the beach, calling the hospital long distance. Standing there waiting, waiting there at the phone, playing with the coin return, looking into its empty shadow. He pushed sand around with his toes. “Will you answer?” The son asked to the empty buzz of the receiver. His father picked up the phone and was clearly expecting someone else on the other end. After a few brief words, his father coughed loudly and saying, “I’ll call you back when I feel better,” hung up the phone. He never heard from his father again.
As he had done many times before, the son went back to the dunes and the waves, contemplating his undulating dance of mystery with the predatory sharks. Simple and capricious, their approach whispered death without revenge or guilt, an admirable trait.
After his father’s cremation, the stepmother spoke from the plastic shadows of the telephone. The shadow whispered the truth to him in one ear, while she spoke to the other, rambling through her long agenda, ticking off a list of misplaced insights, slights and grudges.
In one brief moment of consideration, she said, “Don’t do to yourself what he did,” without offering any details.
“I’m not like that,” the shadow said for him, its cartoonish cloak fluttering in the afternoon light. He had slipped beneath its cloud into a sluggish world he couldn’t remember and couldn’t forget, full of malicious words and frightful thoughts. The shadow grew larger, filling the phone booth with it suffocating blackness, shutting out the remaining sunlight and swallowing him whole that afternoon. He could hear the beach, with its waves, somewhere beyond him. Black memory wrapped up an infant’s tortured morning, making him sick, dizzy and angry. There in his room, through his crib, he remembered the light of early morning on the flowered wall paper and the stinking shadow of his father and he could hear the words, all the words crammed together in the dark corners and out of reach. In those unexplainable moments, the son’s young world shattered, fracturing his heart into a thousand pieces that floated forever in the dawn’s thin light. Trapped in that despair and betrayal, within that blackness, a burning red hatred welled up from inside of him, burning through his heart, melting the blackened phone. From the burning hatred came a light, then a clarity, then a cold sense of emotionless and inevitable purpose, like the dark blank stare of the sharks he admired.
He left the phone booth, walking through into the late afternoon shadows, walking back to the beach, the sun’s last rays stretching long over the orange dunes.