Ostrich: A Novel

by Matt Greene

  At Burnt Oak, Mum asks me why I’m smiling.

  I tell her it’s something I remembered. Then I smile some more, because I am the boy who thought he had impunity but never did, because his parents never were splitting up in the first place.

  However, when we get home, there is luggage on the porch.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In profile, the fine white down on the waitress’s cheeks and nose makes her look like a cactus, which is appropriate because she gets prickly when Dad asks her if she parlays onglay. We are eating outside of a seafood restaurant in the Old Harbor. (In fact, we are eating outside of every seafood restaurant in the Old Harbor, it’s just that the chairs, the table, and the waitress belong to one of them in particular.) According to Google, La Rochelle has a moderate tourist trade and is used to welcoming guests of all nationalities. However, at this time of year it is Not in Season, which means that, like a pineapple, it is much tougher to get into. This is not a problem for me, though, because I am a native.

  Je m’appelle Marcel.

  The sky is a clear, picture-book blue, and both the sun and I have got our hats on but the day is as cold as the dairy aisle. In French we have a phrase for days like today: Le Fond De L’Air, which literally means The Bottom of the Air. Above it, music from the market stalls drifts across the concourse and mingles with the strings twanging inside the café. Where we are seated is the exact point where two rivers of sound flow into an ocean of nonsense, which is precisely what Dad is making in his attempts to order a carafe of low. With his hands he carves an hourglass in the air and then with two fingers taps at his forearm like he’s trying to bring up a vein.

  “War … Tur?” he asks louder, even though Mum and I both speak French.

  The waitress regards him with a mixture of amusement and unease, cocking her head to one side like he’s a monkey in a zoo that’s just done something uncomfortably human.

  “Du l’eau,” says Mum quietly.

  “War tur,” repeats Dad, this time in a deep voice. But the joke, much like his request for The Carpe Diem, falls on a stony silence and fails to take root. In the end he orders with a stab of his finger from the Specials Board. Even though it is a gesture of defeat, the act of him ordering from the board at all forces me to Photoshop him and the waitress into a wild array of compromising positions. (It’s easy to do. It is like every Romantic Comedy I have ever seen. At first they hate each other, but an hour and a half later they’re together in the pushed-back passenger seat of Dad’s car, kissing and space-docking (which is the one where you freeze a turd inside a condom and use it as a dildo).) The nausea rides up in me from my stomach to the penthouse. I swallow a burp and remember that I don’t trust him.

  Here in France, I try to remind myself, we have a far more progressive attitude toward adultery. We also have a word for that feeling you get when you’re on a cliff and you think you might want to throw yourself off it: L’Appel Du Vide, which means The Call of the Empty. This suggests that the French know lots more about The Human Condition than the English, which is why when they say Que Sera, Sera it’s not because they’re going to Wembley. And if cheating en Français is an inevitable part of life (written into our DNA every bit as much as mahogany is written into the penguins’), then there is really no reason for me to think as little of my dad as I do right now. While he salts a slab of baguette and unfolds a map from A’s six to zero I observe him through my new rose-tinted lunettes. With a great effort, I summon up all my vocab, run through as many subjonctif conjugations as I can think of, and pretend we really do live en Français. For a moment, it works. I see myself on the cliff edge, pouring respect into the vide between us, a thick, lavalike substance that will set solid as cement in the afternoon soleil. Next to me is Maman and on the cliff opposite is Papa, his arm draped gracefully over the slender shoulders of his hairy-legged mistress, whose name is almost certainly but not necessarily Elise and who Maman views with no more suspicion than she does the dry cleaner. (Sex is simply another thing in their life together that is just as easily outsourced.) Papa and Elise, I see now, have a cement mixer of their own. Theirs is full of trampled touchlines and shared interests, happy memories of Serge and I playing au foot. Across the soon-to-be-forgotten divide we wave to each other in a Gallic fashion. Ensemble nous sommes une grande famille heureuse.

  But then Dad knocks over the vinegar and says Oopsie Daisy, which is not exactly meeting me halfway. If someone chokes, I will now have no option but to volunteer his services as a doctor.

  (“Vite! Est-il un médecin dans le restaurant?!”

  “Oui! Mon pere, l’adultère!”)

  Otherwise, he could be lost to me forever.

  “Le Rosh Hell?” Dad had echoed when I’d told him the place I would hypothetically go if I could go anywhere I wanted. “Above anyplace else in the entire world? Above Disney?”

  “Yes,” I had replied.

  “What if it wasn’t hypothetical?” he’d continued, after a few more chevrons had disappeared beneath us.

  “What if hypothetically it wasn’t hypothetical?”

  “Right.”

  So, sat in the passenger seat of my father’s dual-control mobile office on the way back from a hospital appointment that had it been an airplane we would’ve missed by the length of a film, I had tried to conjure up a hypothetical scenario in which I was being asked where I would go given the nonhypothetical situation that I could go anyplace in the world.

  “La Rochelle,” I had repeated.

  “Why Le Rosh Hell?” Dad had asked.

  “Pourquoi pas?” I had replied, enigmatically.

  “Okay, then,” Dad had said eventually. And then, after another mile, “Where even is that?”

  La Rochelle is a small city on the west coast of France with a population of about 75,000 people (which makes it France’s answer to Weston-super-Mare). After lunch I ask one of these people for directions to the library as revision for my French Oral, only to discover that there isn’t one (unless you count the one in the university (which neither of us do)). Although I’m too proud to admit this to Dad, La Rochelle is not exactly how I imagined it. For example, so far the only swimming pool I have encountered is the one outside my hotel room window. Along with the boulangerie and the discotheque I was expecting the bibliotheque and piscine to be La Rochelle’s central landmarks. If my textbooks are to be believed (which I’m starting to doubt they are), then these ought to be the North, South, East, and West on the townspeople’s mental maps. (In French classes, you need only take the second left after one or continue all straight past another to arrive at any known destination.)

  In the end, it doesn’t matter so much what the town of La Rochelle does or doesn’t have to offer, because as soon as Dad finds our location on his map (which is of the whole Charente-Maritime region) I get tired and a headache and have to go back to the hotel. In my room I try to do some Geography revision, but the Central Asian capitals get stuck on the tip of my tongue, and the East Asian ones further back still, so I put on my boxing helmet (because the room isn’t seizure-proof) and shut my eyes.

  I wake up to a kind of gulping sound, the sort of noise an embarrassed cartoon character would make while tugging its collar. The room is dark, the hotel is quiet (except for Dad snoring through the wall (which means he’s been drinking)), and the clock reads 06:27, which has no special significance that I know of, apart from being at least fifteen hours after I shut my eyes. My headache is gone, but in its place is a surface of dust thick enough to leave footprints in. Moreover, my tongue is dry and furry, and when I try to swallow it clacks against my teeth like a typewriter, which is how I know that the second gulp isn’t from me, either. It’s not until the third one that I locate the source. They’re coming from outside my window. I get to it in time to see a mysterious figure standing at the side of the swimming pool. He is encased from head to toe in a Samurai-black wetsuit and stooped under the weight of a heavy-looking oxygen tank, the flippers on his feet p
ointing ahead of him like misshapen shadows. I press my nose against the window and my breath fogs the glass and by the time I’ve wiped it clear the man has lowered himself down onto the concrete, his legs dangling into the water, his palms clamped together and his head bowed over the pool. He stays like this awhile in what looks from four stories up like prayer. And then he falls forward.

  “Gulp,” says the water, tugging at its collar a fourth time like it hopes no one’s seen. (And no one has. Except for me.)

  From where I’m looking, only one of the four divers is distinguishable from the others. Three of them are dressed identically in black, with their faces framed tightly in rubber, but a yellow vine runs up the spine of the fourth’s wetsuit and blooms at the neck into a jungle of blond hair. I take this as a sign that he is in charge, a suspicion that is confirmed when the others congregate around him and he lectures them. Then he assumes the role of Baptist, plunging each of them through the water like he’s converting Muslims. Only once they’re all saved does he attach his own tank and join them underwater.

  The bottom of the pool is checkered like a chess board, and for almost an hour, directed by the blond man (who stops them every other length to offer instructions), the divers comb it in straight lines rook-style. First they sweep horizontally, then vertically, and before they’re done no square is left unexamined. However, when the sun begins to rise and the hotel starts to stir the unit emerges from the water empty-handed. Which can mean one of only two things:

  1) Whatever it is they were looking for wasn’t there to begin with.

  2) It’s still there now.

  That day, we visit both the Maritime Museum and the Aquarium, and even though both are quite interesting (Mum buys me books from both), I find myself unengaged. According to the plaque in the lobby, the La Rochelle Aquarium contains 3,000,000 liters of sea water, which is why 800,000 tourists flock to it each year to explore The Mysteries of the Deep. However, none of these mysteries can fully distract me from the one outside my hotel room window.

  “So what’s the deal with you and the Gower girl?” asks Dad in the lift after dinner.

  “We don’t have a deal,” I say, putting the clitoris bet to the back of my mind. “I just thought she’d want to look after Jaws 2 if we were away.”

  “She’s very pretty,” says Mum.

  “I tell you what”—Dad winks—“you must’ve learned a trick or two from your old man after all …”

  Before bed I set my alarm for 06:28 (two perfect numbers). Of all of the mysteries in my life right now, this seems like the one I’m best equipped to solve.

  I’m awake ten minutes before my alarm like I always am so I can turn it off before it wakes up Mum or Dad, which would spell the end of my mission before it’s even begun. The rain outside is hard enough to sound like a single note, which is also (it seems when I rip open the curtains) hard enough to discourage yesterday’s divers. With my whole body beating like my heart is a one-man band, I pull the shower cap from under my pillow and stamp off my pajama bottoms. Beneath them, because I don’t own swimming trunks, is a pair of black boxers with a yellow trim. Swimming is not something I’m an expert at. However, I do not anticipate this being a problem, as the main skill required of me during this enterprise is sinking, something I expect to come naturally.

  The rain falls on the pool as a million different species, cats and dogs just two among them. Sitting on the side with my feet dangling and the downpour driving my head into a bow, I set the stopwatch on my Casio SGW100 to fourteen minutes and two seconds (which is exactly five minutes less than the world record (because I am Erring on the Side of Caution)) and make myself brave by saying my name twenty-two times. When it no longer sounds like my own, I fall forward.

  If the water swallows, I don’t hear because beneath it the whole world is on mute.

  Chapter Eighteen

  There are five stages to drowning. The first thing the boy in the year below who didn’t know about Pressure would have experienced is Surprise, which occurs when the victim recognizes that he is in danger and becomes afraid. In all likelihood, at this point the boy would not actually have been far below the surface. What is most probable, in fact, is that his head was tilted back and his face and arms were above water. He would not have cried out, which could have saved him, because all of his energy would have gone into the desperate clasping for handfuls of air that would have eventually driven him under. This is when stage two would have begun. Stage two is Involuntary Breath Holding, which is the body trying to go into Safe Mode. This is when the boy’s epiglottis would have closed over his airway to prevent water from going down the wrong hole, which is what would have deprived him of oxygen. The lack of oxygen ushers in stage three, Unconsciousness or Respiratory Arrest, during which he would have sunk peacefully to the bottom of Letchmore Pond at a speed determined by the amount of air still trapped in his lungs. Once there the absence of oxygen from his brain would have triggered a violent seizure, which is called Hypoxic Convulsion and explains why when they found him the look cast across the swollen blue puppy fat of his face was one of blind terror. This is stage four.

  Then he would have died, thus concluding The Five Stages of Drowning, which is when The Five Stages of Grieving would have begun. (When the boy’s parents attended the memorial assembly as guests of the school, I would estimate that they were still at Denial, because the way they smiled up at Mr. Clifford when they shook his hand made it look like they were accepting a sports-day prize on their son’s behalf.)

  I am at stage two (Involuntary Breath Holding) when I feel myself lighten. I rise through the water like a bubble of oxygen but when I get to the surface I don’t pop. Instead, I keep on floating, weightless and dry, up into the air and through the rain, until I’m where I was yesterday, looking down on a figure suspended below the water. In every way he looks like me, except chlorine has painted his eyes red. From four stories high, where my parents are sleeping, I watch myself in the third person. Miss Farthingdale was wrong, because there I am, a Photographic Memory waiting to be taken. Beneath the water, I look calm and at peace as though the fear has passed straight through me without me noticing it, which is how I know that my soul has left my body. In seconds I will fall unconscious and out of sight, but for now, with no one in the world awake to observe me, I am a subatomic particle in Copenhagen. I am in two places at once.

  Across the courtyard from my room, a light comes on.

  I return to myself in the flutter of involuntary leg spasms, which saves my life. My head punches through the water with a greedy gasp. Desperately, I flail my arms in the direction of land until my palm slaps against concrete, and only then do I recognize the sound of the rain drumming on my shower cap. It is the sound of the present. Which means I’m still here.

  Slumped over the poolside, I spew a slug of spit down my chin and, waiting for the fire in my lungs to burn out, assess my options before realizing that I don’t have any, because if you have only one option, then it isn’t an option at all.

  I need to know.

  I reset my stopwatch for three minutes. Then I screw shut my eyes and breathe out until I feel myself empty.

  This time I sink like a stone.

  I open my eyes with my feet on a white square. Time feels stodgy, like in a dream (and my synaptic fluids nonconductive), but with the sun just moments from rising it is doubly of the essence, so as quickly as I can I decide on a bold Spanish Opening and stride ahead two squares as if to free the King’s Bishop. However, as I lunge forward I lose balance. My left foot starts to drift away toward the surface, and turning to watch it go, I see that dawn has already broken. Overhead, the first beams of sunlight have broken through the clouds and flit across the uneven water like they’re skim-reading Braille, which means soon the whole world will stir, which means this might be the only chance I get. In which case there is no time for strategy. I scan the board frantically, hopping illegally this way and that. I don’t know what I’m looking for (only
that I’ll know when I find it), but for a slow second there’s a part of me that believes all the answers I seek are hidden somewhere in this pool, from the mysteries of my parents’ marriage to the capital of Mongolia. The question is only what form they will take. However, when my alarm blinks and my throat screams for air they’ve yet to take any, and still nothing especially makes sense. I am just about to admit defeat when the sun makes its move. Darting through a hole in the storm, it strikes the water and lands on the floor in front of me in a perfect Caro-Kann defense. And there, illuminated at the border of the occupied square, is my sunken treasure. I reach out to clasp it with the white, wrinkled fingers of a suddenly old man (as though the sight of it alone has granted me wisdom beyond my years), but no sooner has my hand closed around the doubloon than a force beyond my control straps an arm around my chest, causing me to breathe in a lungful of water.

  The next thing I know I’m on the side of the pool. I recognize my assailant from the dripping shards of blond mane that anoint my head. I am laid flat on my back, the lion man on top of me, pumping furiously at my chest like he’s trying to crush my ribs to dust. “Qu’est-ce que tu fait?!” he demands over and over, and then for punctuation pinches my nose, because on his patch the punishment for trespassing is death by suffocation. His bearded jaw yawns open like the pizza box at David Driscoll’s house, and in it, for a second time, I see oblivion. But before he can plug shut my mouth, my torso erupts and a flume of watery sick darts down his open throat. Now it is his turn to retch, which gives me time to tighten my fist around the bounty. (If he wants it, he’ll have to prize it from my cold, dead hand.)