I did not go join Maggie in the hallway, but closed the door behind me, not letting the doorknob click shut. I came back to sit on my bed, avoiding Luffy’s gaze as he walked from the windowsill to sit beside me.
“That sounded bad,” he said.
The words lit a wet heat in my chest — tears I had wanted to cry, but had been unable to until his words made them a reality.
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t live here, doesn’t know how it’s supposed to be, said the older voice in my head.
It’s his fault anyways, said the younger voice.
“You said he would be alright!” I felt betrayed. Luffy was supposed to be my friend, but had lied about my Dad getting better. “You said he would go back to normal after sleeping, that he’d be my Dad again, but he’s worse than ever. You promised you wouldn’t drink…”
The tears were welling, hot and itchy on my cheeks.
“I… I didn’t!” said Luffy over my blubbering. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, hesitant to actually touch my shaking shoulders. “I promise! And he is supposed to be back to his normal self. I stayed here all night.”
“Well maybe you suck up people’s happiness just by being near them,” I spouted. Luffy’s face became withdrawn at this, the red rings around his eyes turning a deep, bruise-like color. My words had hurt his feelings, but I was so sick that I needed to get everything out of my stomach, even if it all landed on his scrawny shoulders in the process.
“I don’t want to be that way,” he said, voice small.
My sister hiccuped outside. I thought about her shivering under my father’s loveless words.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know if I meant it, not with the anger still squirming like so many worms, but I knew that making Luffy feel what was happening to me wasn’t going to make the pain go away. “I didn’t mean it. You spent the night and I am still the same. I don’t think you’re bad. I shouldn’t have said that.”
Luffy’s face relaxed. “Are we still friends?”
I forced a smile. “Still friends.”
“Good,” he said, a note of strength returning to his voice, “because I think I figured out how to reach the ocean.”
Luffy refused to tell me the plan, saying that I would give it away to the other members of the household if I tried to pretend as though we were not plotting something.
“Just wait for my signal,” he had said, a curious expression on his face. It was the first natural expression I had seen, the creation of something truly his own.
“What’s the signal going to be?” I asked, trying to keep up with him.
“You can’t know. You’ll give the whole thing away!” Luffy said, excited. He looked more like a child than ever.
I’d gone downstairs fully dressed, making an effort to avoid eye contact with Mom or Maggie upon entering the kitchen. I thought that my stiffness would give me away, but no one even said good morning as I rummaged for my cereal bowl. Maggie pushed fruit loops around the white surface of her milk. Mom stared into the sink, two dirty bowls sitting unwashed in the basin. Dad had already left for the day. I’d heard the car engine outside followed by the trembling of the garage door.
The three of us sat in silence. Even Christopher was quiet, staring absently into the whirling gyre of the fan. There wasn’t enough milk in the carton to completely fill my bowl, and the shredded wheat crunched loudly between my teeth.
“What are we doing today?” I asked Mom, trying to break the silence.
“I’m sure you can figure something out,” said Mom, not turning her attention from the window above the sink. She had left her phone on the countertop. It didn’t buzz once during breakfast.
Tires ground to a stop outside, and a short honk beeped through the window, interrupting the heavy silence. I didn’t respond at first, but then it beeped again, longer this time.
The signal.
“I’ll get it!” I said, running to the front door. To my surprise, no one responded, and I escaped the house without a question from Mom or Maggie.
Parked in front of my mailbox, Luffy had propped himself on the driver’s seat of an unfamiliar car, his odd face poking from the rolled down window.
“What… how?” I could not wrap my mind around what I was seeing. “Where did you get a car?”
Luffy smiled, the big grin coming naturally now. “I borrowed it. We’ll give it back when we’re done, so we won’t be doing anything wrong.”
A brief flash of my dream came back. I sailed away from my house, the front yard fading into the distance.
“Do you know how to drive?”
“I think we can figure it out.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Only one problem remained.
“I can’t just leave, Mom will realize in a few minutes that I’m gone. Kidnapping is a thing here, Luffy. She’ll call the police, and they’ll come looking for us.”
“Which is why you’re going to tell her that someone’s come to pick you up and you’ll be back this evening.”
It was brilliant. I ran back inside, scrambling to put socks and sneakers on the right feet. No one asked who had been beeping the horn.
“Trevor’s mom came by,” I said into the silence. “I’m going over to their house today.”
No response.
“Mom?”
“Fine,” her voice said from the kitchen. It sounded throaty, like she was trying to swallow something bitter.
It’s going to be okay when you come back, I promised myself.
Closing the door behind me, I realized that for the first time in my life I had escaped the eyes of my parents. The realization cast the world outside my house in a new light — making everything a little larger, a little stranger. Luffy was calling me over with his open hand. The rush of excitement at his call pushed down the nervousness. I scrambled into the passenger seat and clicked the seatbelt around my waist.
“Do you know where we’re going?” I asked, needing to lean on the hand rest to see out the car’s window. There was always something exciting about sitting in the front seat of a car.
Luffy pointed out the front window into the distance, just a hair left of the morning sun. “That way.”
We began driving. Luffy jerked the car with tentative stops and starts as he nudged the pedal with his right, uninjured foot. I had played racing games at the arcade before, sat in the plastic driver’s seat and pushed the pedal straight to the ground to rocket the video game car forward. In the video game world, though, the car only made a silly animation when it collided with the wall or other cars. I didn’t think it would be so easy in real life. A hot bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck as Luffy picked up speed towards the end of the block.
“I don’t know about this,” I said, fidgeting with hem of my shirt. A car passed by the oncoming intersection, followed by a second. The traffic of the main road was rising to meet us, and my imagination was spinning anxious circles around what would happen when Luffy drove too fast, or too slow, or didn’t know that a red light meant to stop. He’d only read or seen driving in my Dad’s memories — second hand experience that didn’t mean he knew how to take us all the way to the ocean.
“Luffy, stop!” The main road was rising before us. I could make out the face of a driver passing our view. She looked like Mom, but older, with shorter hair. It may have been the fear sweeping down through my vision, but the woman seemed to grow hazy around the edges, as though a smudgy pane of glass had been laid in between us. We were going to hit her, and it was going to hurt.
“Luffy!”
And then the woman and her car were gone. The stream of traffic vanished all in a moment, along with the world as I knew it.
Everything faded into the distant blues of the horizon’s line. The road turned gently as Luffy guided the wheels of the car onto its new path. This was a new road, an older one, made of stone etched deeply with runic lines that caused the car to bump and trundle on its journey. The road felt deeply ol
d, ancient even. More ancient than a world with cars, maybe more ancient than a world with people if that was possible.
Luffy pushed the car forward, catching every sweep and turn of the cragged path. In the distance, outlines of shapes took form for only a moment before whipping out of view. I made out the shape of my school in the distance, drawing itself into greater detail before crumbling in the rearview mirror. Occasional, abstract shapes kept their form as we passed. Tall pillars and vague outlines jutted from the simple blues of the ground and sky, only differentiated by their changing shades. Something small and black darted behind one of the few opaque shapes as we passed. If this desolate place had been my world I would have guessed it was a cat. I did not know what to guess now.
“Where are we?”
The world passing me by from seat of the borrowed car did not make me uncomfortable or afraid, only a bit lonely, like I could travel as far as I wanted into the blue and never really find a place worth stopping.
Luffy did not answer immediately. He sat, puzzling over the answer, the bumping of the car tossing his small body up and down on the seat.
“We’ve gone a couple layers down,” he said. Outside, the path split in two. Luffy took the right fork, the left dropping away into nothingness, succumbing to the pull of gravity after all this time. “Not all the way to the bottom, but pretty far.”
Lights danced in a circle around our car, stars all clustered close to the ground. They took shape for only a moment — the outlines of people wrapped around the twirling specks burst to life, intertwining before vanishing in the rear view mirror.
“This is where you’re from,” I said, softly. The quietness of the outside place was seeping into the car.
“Sort of,” said Luffy. “I’m from a little deeper down.”
“How deep does it go?”
“Very.”
We drove on. The road stretched until it began to narrow ever so gradually. A mossy green grew at the point where sky met earth, muddling the horizon’s line. When the road finally came to its end, it simply vanished into the nothing.
Luffy pulled the car to a stop. “We’ll walk from here.”
I followed him out of the car. The last few steps of the ancient road faded before us, and with a small hop, Luffy dropped onto the blue space. I had not realized it was solid, but the space beneath the road caught his weight soundlessly.
I followed his lead, stepping off the bricks onto what felt like soft glass. There did not appear to be anything under my feet, but the pressure beneath my sneakers felt sturdy enough. We walked, following the green until it began fading into a soft obsidian. The blackness lapped back and forth, growing and then shrinking from some source beyond our view. Colors washed over one another, as though a liquid nighttime was slowly staining the horizon. After a few minutes, Luffy came to a halt, holding one arm to stop my progress.
“We’re here,” he said, peering into the ink. The darkness was no longer a color. It was the complete absence, a statement of nothing to everything past this point forever and ever. At my feet, the night swished and swirled, washing out the last touches of deepest greens.
Luffy took my hand, it was the first time since yesterday we had touched. His fingers, wrapping around my palm, had taken on the precise temperature of the muted world around us. With his free hand, Luffy began picking at something in the air. He seemed to be digging a coin from an invisible pocket as his finger toyed with the void until it vanished between a small rippling fold in the blank space. With a swift gesture, he pulled his finger across the horizon, creating a tear where the small fold had once been.
My watering eyes were blinded by a deluge of color and sound. The quiet of that lower place was broken as the sight of white-foamed waves crested before us. Luffy pulled me through the tear he had created, and the quiet place vanished. The sand gave as my shoes sank into the textures of my old world. I fell to a sitting position on the beach, looking out at the ocean I could see so clearly now was not blue, but every shade of greens, browns, and deepest navy. It was a real ocean — teeming with as many colors as it had living creatures. It was too full of life life to ever be considered lonely.
“What was that?” I asked, still staring, trying to remember the exact shade of darkness the other ocean had been. My mind created images of sea creatures that dwelled in its deepest recesses.
How much deeper still did those waters go?
“It was the end of that world,” said Luffy, letting the foam wash over his bare feet.
We had arrived on an empty part of the beach. Towels and umbrellas were scattered about the sand, but without any children or parents to occupy them.
“I didn’t know there were empty beaches,” I said, turning my feet in the sand.
“I didn’t take us all the way back,” said Luffy. “It wouldn’t look too normal for a car and a human to appear out of nowhere.”
“They wouldn’t see you?” I asked.
Luffy shrugged, “Most people don’t. Grown-ups especially. I think they’re a little more stuck in their own heads, at least from the memories I’ve tasted. It causes them to miss things.”
I thought about my Mom buried in her phone, a concern crossing my mind about the inevitability of sharing her same fate. Surely children were not so doomed as to end up like their parents.
“Which way do we go now?”
Luffy turned his head this way and that, leaning in a few different directions experimentally. It was as he gained his bearings that I noticed the orange hue, a dull glow growing from the parting where ocean met sky — a promise that evening was coming. It was not supposed to be evening though, I had only eaten breakfast an hour or so ago. My clothes had not yet developed that wrinkled look that only came at the end of the day either.
How long were we gone? Counting backwards only blurred my sense of space and memory, winding back from the black ocean, to the road, and to the shapes that had flown by. Without any markers to separate them, the past had diverged from difference and meaning.
If I could lose a day in the course of a car ride, what would have happened if we’d become lost?
Turning back to Luffy, I asked, “Did we come to the right place?”
“I think so. The place is right, and the flavor is familiar. I think… this way?” said Luffy, still uncertain. His face cocked in something like worry. I wondered what he was using as a compass to guide our adventure.
We crossed the empty expanse of beach. I took one last look at the ocean, wondering about its deeper counterpart, the one that I might be too old to find again one day.
The other place, the space a few layers below, had left me melancholy. I wanted to see other people, to hear voices and return to the regular flow of movement. It had been too quiet for too long — a different kind of quiet, the kind that kitchens made late at night when I arrived uninvited.
Luffy led the way off the beach and into the deserted street. The itching loneliness was growing, clattering for attention inside me. The increasing need for noise, for someone to break the quiet was becoming too loud in my ears.
“I know it’s hard getting used to,” said Luffy over his shoulder. “Come behind here.” Luffy pointed down an alleyway nestled between a restaurant and a motel. It was the kind of place I knew kids weren’t supposed to go, but without other people, the shadows of the alleyway could not hold their sinister edge.
The silence funneled into a point of total darkness in the narrow parting. Luffy fiddled with another small knot in the shadows, pulling back the rippling curtain to uncover the sounds and smells of the real world that filled my lungs and ears with rushing relief. I sucked the familiar air into my lungs, breathing deep sighs as the pressure released from my body. Luffy continued walking beside me, looking no more bothered by the change than he had driving into the quiet world.
The busy street was a different kind of noisy than my neighborhood or even the school playground, and it did not take me long for the legs bustling around me to set of
f a fresh wave of nervousness. I’d never noticed how quickly everyone moved, how many feet could trample me into the pavement. Before, I had depended on the hand of Mom or Dad to buffer me from the bustling legs. They never failed to carve out a safe path in the flow that now pushed us like two sticks in an unrelenting current.
“Take my hand. They’ll move out of the way,” said Luffy, pushing into the thicket. I wondered how much of the fear Luffy was reading on my face and how much he was experiencing himself.
As we pushed through the sea of legs, occasional faces at eye level popped out of the crowd. Kids in strollers would stare at me, watching my lonesome progress with as much confusion as they would show a car without a driver. Once, a toddler stopped to look directly at Luffy. She pulled the sleeve of her Mom’s shirt, but the mother was too engrossed in conversation to follow her child’s lead.
On we walked, the sea of legs always bending out of the way just in time for us to find a clear passage. I had lost all sense of direction, following Luffy’s lead as he pulled me closer to whatever had guided him into this world.
A break in the crowd, and the two of us popped into a clearing lit by neon. Alternating oranges and blues spelled out Waterside Casino in massive letters, lights trickling through the massive windows. The doors opened as a squat woman ambled onto the pavement. She smelled of cigarettes and held a hand over her eyes, cringing at the soft evening’s light. From inside the casino, sounds and smells drifted over the two of us. The deluge reminded me of play places I’d visited for birthday parties — full of arcade games and jungle gyms. Songs poured over each other, shrill bells and whistles fighting to be the loudest, but their notes were all wrong somehow.
Luffy’s face crinkled. “Why in there?” he asked, taking in the strange new setting. I knew what casinos were of course. I had never been in one before, but I knew people gambled in places like this. Unlike the play palaces though, the people inside did not possess the same giddy exuberance. They looked like the squat woman smelled — ragged.
“Maybe she got lost like you did,” I said, trying to sound reassuring. Luffy looked afraid for the first time in our adventure.
Deep, Deep Ocean Page 7