Sudden Lockdown

by Amos Talshir

  5.

  “Why are you smiling?” Charlie asked Simon. “We’re stuck!”

  “Stuck, but in a stadium, Dad. It’s a dream come true,” the boy called out, his giant grin flooding Charlie’s body with a pleasant warmth.

  The visiting fans around them, who had arrived from the sunny Mediterranean country, began to take action to warm themselves and overcome the chill, which was becoming a hassle. The crowd of local fans, who had returned from the locked gates, filled the stands anew, bursting out in one of the cheers of their soccer club, Sportive. They displayed the kind of enthusiasm reserved for the rabid fans of the larger team, despite the fact that the team had lost to the smaller Athletic Club, which had arrived at the game from the Mediterranean States Coalition. The loss was a crucial one, as it would conclusively preclude Sportive from winning the Continent Cup after four consecutive wins. As it turned out, they still loved their club, despite the defeat and despite the malfunction in opening the exit gates.

  “Maybe there’ll be another game,” the father said.

  The son reacted with a look of amusement, continuing to film what was going around him using the digital camera he had produced from his backpack. He towered above those standing next to him despite his slightly bent back, somewhat compromising his athletic appearance. For some years, his mother had thought this defect needed to be addressed.

  “The boy’s hunched over,” she’d said, trying to convey the gravity of the situation to the father.

  “You keep looking for and finding defects in the boy. Leave him alone for a bit; he’s gone through enough hospitals,” he’d argued in response.

  Charlie attributed the hunched back to the form of sleep their baby had been forced to endure after it had been decided not to operate on him, giving the vertebra a chance to keep developing. The results of the CT imaging clearly showed the cracked vertebra. The baby had a congenital crack in the “Scottie dog” vertebra at the bottom of his spine, the doctors explained to the parents, adding that this was a rare but familiar phenomenon. At first, Charlie was amused by that name, the Scottie dog vertebra. He gazed at the baby’s face and thought back on all the stupid jokes he knew about Scots being stingy. The baby laughed back at him. Then the parents were told that there was a high probability of permanent disability. Charlie asked what kind of disability, and the surgeon said it was still early days and that there was no point in talking about it now.

  After several months, Charlie and Clara were permitted to take the baby home, subject to the unequivocal demand that his sleeping position in his crib would approximate sitting. It was actually sitting, the doctors explained, that would produce the pressure needed to encourage the vertebra to continue its development. For months, the baby Simon grew used to sleeping in a seated position.

  “His recuperation is slow but nearly complete,” the neurosurgeon and the orthopedic surgeon decreed. “There’s still a minute crack, but it shouldn’t impede his functioning. Swimming, lots of swimming, will help accelerate the vertebra’s development. See you in first grade. He might grow up to be a swimmer,” the doctors concluded.

  Charlie tried to thrust this entire Scottie dog kennel out of his mind, along with the months of hospitalization, catching others’ illnesses and the long needles inserted in the baby’s small back. He also deleted the faces of the saintly doctors who had saved his son from disability from his memory; he did not remember that the option of a wheelchair had been brought up. He even managed to muddle that vertebra’s name. He remembered it was named that way because it had a doglike profile but could not remember if the dog was German, Afghan, Scottish or a Husky. He repressed and forgot everything other than the child’s odd sleeping pose. Not a moment went by, day or night, when he did not envision or dream about his baby being tortured for long months in a sitting position.

  ***

  Simon continued to sleep sitting up. Those first months created a kind of habit that at first was the lesser of two evils and later could no longer be altered. He fell asleep while sitting up. He did so when he was a baby and later as a child, and even now in his adolescence, he slept sitting up in a bed that was a recliner. Charlie took on the doctors’ edict that the baby must swim as a commandment from above. From the moment he and his wife were sitting across from the doctors telling them that swimming would enhance the vertebra’s development, Charlie realized that there was something he could do better than anyone else.

  Charlie had grown up by the sea. He was a sea kid. He spent his childhood swimming, waiting for his father’s fishing boat to return from the Mediterranean Mara, the large sea after which the Mediterranean States Coalition was named. As a child, he would swim along the water’s edge, toward his father’s ship as it returned from distant waters. As he grew a bit older, he began to swim beyond the breakwater, and when he became a teenager, would swim further, into the heart of the sea, in order to greet his father. Charlie would compete with the fishing boat to see who would make it to the pier first. He always won, but he suspected his father was slowing down the boat’s engine.

  The father was a seafarer who owned fishing boats in the Mediterranean coastal country in which Charlie was born. Later, when the Mediterranean countries unified, a revolutionary sect seized control of the coalition, confiscating all fishing boats from their private owners. The new regime claimed the fish belonged to the entire unified people on the coast of the Mediterranean Mara. The coalition’s economy required the fish to be owned by the people and the state. It was clear to everyone that the new rulers had seized the fishing boats for themselves, to build their palaces and the casino halls they established for the tourists on the exotic beaches.

  Like all the coastal residents in the Mediterranean fishing countries, Charlie’s father lost not only his fishing boat but also his love of the sea, and since that time, he had not left his home on the bluff by the sea. For whole days and nights, he sat staring at the sea that had drifted away from him. His white curls cascaded from his head to his gray beard, as limp as the exhausted waves of the sea. His eyebrows, still black, highlighted his black eyes in his graying face, like dark bottomless pits within his enormous head. At first, he still believed that such evil could not persist and that his boats would be returned to him, whether because the rulers could not figure out how to operate them or due to one of the three wishes granted to him on that stormy night when he had gone out to sea in order to save a rival fisherman.

  As a child, Charlie would hide on the terrace, tracking his father’s strange arm gestures. Charlie’s father would slowly raise a limp arm toward the sea, in a motion whose purpose was inexplicable. Suddenly, the raised arm would remain suspended in the air across from the father’s face, the fingers of his hand stretched out into the breeze coming from the sea, stuck aimlessly.

  Charlie heard the entire story of the wishes from his mother, only after his father had grown dumb and speechless across from the window overlooking the sea from the bluff. She sat him down next to his silent father, who did not avert his gaze from the horizon where the sea caressed the sky, and told twelve-year-old Charlie about the rivalry between his father and the neighboring fisherman, nicknamed “the African” due to his dark skin and his country of origin in the southern part of the Mediterranean Basin. The two were bitter rivals. The mother had never understood the feud. Both of them had efficient fishing boats, and both of them would return with an impressive catch after every run. However, their mutual animosity resulted in a total prohibition on any relationship between the two families, already isolated on the bluff across from the sea. The mother tried to convince Charlie’s father to sort out the division of fishing zones between the two men, but he angrily claimed that this was not a dispute over fishing zones. Charlie’s mother suspected that he was uncomfortable with suddenly having a black African as a neighbor, arriving like others of his countrymen along with the grand unification of the Mediterranean countries. Apparently, Charli
e’s father did not much like this union…

  On that night of the terrible storm, the neighbor was out on a fishing run, while Charlie’s father did not go out fishing because he sensed the storm approaching. He was tormented in the house on the bluff, gazing out to the sea for half the night, full of anger and concern for the fate of his bitter rival, who had not returned from the sea. In the middle of the night, he decided to take his boat out in order to seek the neighbor in the ravaging waves. He summoned his crew of sailors and went out into the storm with them. His wife didn’t even try to stop him; she had never dared interfere in matters concerning Charlie’s father and the sea. She stood on the terrace in the house on the bluff, holding on to little Charlie’s shoulders, forcing the child to see his father for what might be the last time, her gaze trailing the stern of the ship as it disappeared into the darkness.

  The storm lasted for a week. Charlie and his mother sat by the window in the house on the bluff for whole days and nights. Charlie learned the meaning of the seamen’s loyalty to one another. Even if they were sworn, intractable enemies due to the color of their skin, and brutal rivals over fishing areas, or living in coerced proximity since the coalition had been established, they would never betray each other when faced with the cruelty of the storm.

  Charlie and his mother gazed out on the sea, battling their eyes as they threatened to shut in exhaustion and worry, until one morning they woke to the father’s familiar hand shaking the two of them while they lay together in each other’s arms on the wooden floor of the house. Charlie’s mother assaulted his father with an outburst of reprimands before Charlie even realized it was indeed his father who had returned. She raised her hand to strike him for the suffering he’d caused her and her son, and the sight of her raised hand was even more frightening than his father’s derelict appearance. He was filthy, covered with stubble on which crystals of sea salt had dried, but his white teeth glowed from his smiling mouth, illuminating the house. He easily brushed off his wife’s attempts to pummel him and hugged her to him, kissing her in front of Charlie’s eyes. This made a grand impression on Charlie. He loved to see his father kissing his mother, although he felt that his mother was very embarrassed by his presence.

  Charlie’s father laughed and declared loudly, I saved that black guy. He had indeed managed to save his bitter rival from the storm after the man’s boat had sunk. Charlie’s mother grew even angrier and began to curse her husband like a sailor for putting himself in danger and abandoning his family solely for the fishermen’s games of honor. “How great to beat your rival by saving him,” she accused her husband in manic fury. “I’ll never allow you to abandon my child,” she screamed, and the sound of her shouting, heard from the top of the bluff, was swallowed by the dark night covering the sea. The echo of her scream shocked her husband, who hurried to muffle her cries with words of consolation. Charlie, banished to his room, heard his mother’s harsh words and liked what he heard. His father tried to flatter and appease her, telling her the story Charlie heard through the wooden walls of the house on the bluff.

  His father told his mother that during that stormy night at the heart of the sea, among the wreckage of his bitter rival’s boat, he heard a voice promising him three wishes as a reward for his generosity toward his rival. Charlie was certain this was nonsense his father had fabricated, intended to calm his mother, whose worry had unhinged her. He was surprised to hear his mother’s conciliatory reaction through the wooden walls. He then thought he heard fawning voices rising gradually from her great anger and finally fell asleep listening to his parents’ murmurs and giggles.

  Before falling asleep, little Charlie mentally reviewed the seafarer legend of the three wishes, marveling over the fact that his mother, of all people, had chosen to accept the story without challenging it. Later, Charlie told his mother that he was angry at his father and would not forgive him for worrying his mother so much. She urged Charlie to believe that from now on, the family would be safer whenever his father set out to sea, since the father had been granted three wishes. Surprised, Charlie tried to ask his father whether he believed in all these tales of sea wishes. His father gave him one of those looks stating you’ll get it when you grow up, and Charlie decided his father wasn’t very bright. He was surprised when his mother declared that he, Charlie, would inherit those wishes, as his father had not dared to use them himself.

  Charlie had tried to forget all about this folly, until his mother brought it up again when his father’s boats were seized. He was sitting in his room and heard his mother addressing his father, who was sitting across from the window looking out on the sea, and asking him to use one of the wishes to regain possession of the boats.

  “Just one wish,” she begged. The father did not reply, continuing to stare out into the sea. “Just one wish,” the mother continued to implore him, until he deigned to raise his head toward her and told her he would never abandon his family again, and therefore he bequeathed the three wishes to her and Charlie, to secure their lives against any danger in the world.

  As a child, this matter made Charlie feel contempt for his parents. In his opinion, it all began as a conciliatory game between an angry mother and an irresponsible father, turned into giggles beyond the thin wooden walls, and settled into a mysterious family story. Quite a while passed before Charlie dared inquire with his mother whether she believed the story of the promised wishes. His mother shot him a terrifying look and said she would never allow Charlie to doubt his father. Charlie was already at an age where he knew enough to keep his mouth shut due to his respect for his parents, although he did not agree with them. He decided to reserve the right to look into the matter on some other occasion.

  Sometime later, he asked his mother why he didn’t have a brother or sister, like everyone else. She said it hadn’t worked out, allowing him to understand that his father was to blame. Charlie asked why they hadn’t sacrificed one wish out of the three for another child, and she told him angrily that he should always have faith in his father, because when it truly counted, that faith was more important than the truth.

  One morning, Charlie found his father lifeless, staring with wide-open eyes at the window looking out on the sea.

  “Your father died of sorrow over daring to abandon us on the night of the storm,” the mother said. Seven days later, she drowned herself, leaping from the breakwater into the dark waves. And so the story of the wishes turned from a stormy night’s legend to the doomed parents’ will and testament to their only son.

  The teenaged Charlie continued to live on his own in the house on the bluff, angry at his parents for leaving him. He continued to swim in the sea as if greeting his father’s boat, which no longer existed. Every time, he swam further, to the point of exhaustion, to the very limit of his abilities, then returned to the house on the bluff. As he grew up, his reputation spread throughout the coastal district as someone who could not only fix the engine on any boat but also reach it by swimming and carry out the repairs in the heart of the sea. He stopped attending school and repaired the engines of boats stuck in the shallow waters near the breakwater. Until the times changed, and boat owners and fishing boats started to stay away from Charlie’s coast, which had become a refuge for bathers seeking solitude and peace. However, this turned out to be the very place where Charlie met the young tourist who gave birth to Simon, long before Charlie had time to ask himself whether he wanted to be a father.

  In accordance with the doctors’ orders, Charlie took baby Simon along with him on his swimming forays into the sea. From the day he had put him in the sea and witnessed the baby moving his arms and legs in the water with the native skill of a dog, he invested his all in enhancing Simon’s swimming abilities. At first, they swam parallel to the coastline, gradually venturing deeper into the sea. Simon’s tiny body practiced the various styles with an infant wildness. He made progress, swimming impressive distances with his father and returning with him from
the depths of the sea to the shore, observed by the marveling eyes of the bathers who were stunned to see the small boy and his father suddenly emerging from the waves. Charlie wanted to be convinced that the cracked vertebra in the child’s spine had healed thanks to the swimming recommended by the doctors. He tormented himself with the question of whether he, Charlie, who had never done anything significant in his life other than swimming in the sea and fixing boat and ship engines, was even capable of doing something more meaningful and complex, like saving his son’s spinal cord.

  During the long hours when he swam beside his son, crossing great distances through the waves, with only the two of them within the deep cerulean and under the distant light blue, cut off from everyone, Charlie knew he had to have faith in his ability to save Simon’s back. “Faith,” his mother had taught him, “is stronger than ability.” He swam next to little Simon, and through the splashes of saltwater enflaming his open eyes, he saw his son’s curved back and tried to fix with a gaze what he did not know how to repair. If only he could dismantle it, insert a skilled hand and screw in and replace and grease and seal, he would give up all the engines in the world. If only he could fix that messed-up vertebra himself.

  One night, swimming next to the child and seeing his smile reaching out to him from the foamy waves, he dove into the salty water, certain that no one could see him at this moment, inserted himself under the child’s body, and screamed his one wish out of the three bequeathed to him by his father into the black depths. He asked that the Scottie dog vertebra in Simon’s back be fully healed.

  6.

  Charlie had a tendency to ignore danger, to deny complications. He knew how to provide himself with a million excuses for the closing of the stadium gates. In his imagination, he envisioned a terrorist attack—Al-Qaeda, extremist Basques, a group of Chechens, anyone at all. However, since he remained uncertain about all of these options, he waited for his son’s explanations. He then found out that all around him, interpretations similar to his own were unfolding, which actually soothed him.