Dance the Rocks Ashore

by Lesley Choyce

  Janine asked Calan to walk down the tiny river to the ocean with her, and Calan agreed. He enjoyed the cool spring air and the wind that grew stronger as they walked southward. At the harbour, the waves lapped nervously against each other and against the sand, distributing foam that drifted off across the salt marsh like diminutive clouds. Calan walked along the rim of the sea, carrying his daughter and watching Janine let her hair float in the sun. His feet followed the very edge of the most shoreward tidal advance, until once, looking up to see some exotic item that Janine had found, he allowed his feet to get soaked. Janine laughed wildly and came down to push Calan even farther out into the tiny breakers. Calan decided that he liked the biting cold of the water and continued to walk along, allowing the waves to lap around his ankles. His daughter slept peacefully in his arms, despite the roar of sea and waves. Calan felt perfectly satisfied to allow his feet to get soaked to the bone. He could thaw them out later. It was only a five-mile walk back to his home on the lake, and that didn’t seem so very far at all.

  COMING UP FOR AIR

  Dan had spent most of the night on the phone talking with a forty-year-old woman who had lived a classically horrible life and was finally getting around to teasing herself into thoughts of suicide. She had just that evening discovered the existence of Halifax’s own twenty-four-hour hotline for the depressed, disturbed, disheartened and disenfranchised, but she waited until two o’clock in the morning to call. She sat down with a fresh cup of Nabob’s and dialled the number she hoped would save her. She kept a half-full bottle of vitamins by the receiver just in case her listener turned out to have a short attention span, so she could rattle the bottle a few times to reassure him things were serious.

  Her name was Gloria, and like most of them, she wasn’t serious at all. But she was, for the most part, crazy, and had trained her neurosis well over those forty years, so that she was reasonably proud of her ability to gain mileage from it. Dan could tell from the tone of her voice that it would be a long one. He was determined to help her see the night through. He would not hang up unless, as he warned her, another call was coming in; then he would have to put his sympathies for Gloria on hold to make sure the other caller was not a rape victim, brutalized wife, overdosing teenager or near-comatose vodka gargler. But unfortunately no such calls came in. So, for Dan, it was a long morning with a truly unfulfilled woman, who confessed that the high point for her during an average week was finding fudge for sale at Kresge’s or more than two available dryers at the Henry Street laundromat.

  Dan was often amazed at his ability to listen and console. Only to himself he confessed that he was good at faking it. And all too often, faking it seemed to work just fine. In three years, he hadn’t lost a caller. None had abruptly hung up in anger, none had actually carried out a death wish (at least none that he knew of), and many had written to the centre to say that that one phone call with a gentle-voiced guy named Dan had changed their lives and put them on the psychological mend.

  But all Dan could think about on his drive east — away from the grey night of Halifax and toward the blue sky, red sun and rising headlands of the Eastern Shore — was surfing. The north wind would make the waves hollow; there was always the chance of getting inside the wave, to angle across a five-foot face of water and fade close enough back into the lip that it would leap out over top of him as he crouched down into the tube at just the critical time. He saw himself immaculately locked in. To make it, even for a second, was to be able to frame the outer world in a watery halo of green and blue, to crystallize at once the immediate business of being alive.

  And to surf the North Atlantic in Nova Scotia in late December was to be alone with a clean, hard blue sky, a stone-cold sea and a relentless, cold, antiseptic wind.

  Dan turned down the gravel road leading out to Power’s Point. The road was thick with potholes, and each one was paved back to surface level with a sheet of white of clear ice that snapped in two and crunched beneath the wheels as he drove over them. He thought again about all the Glorias in the world, all the men and women who became baffled as to exactly why they should keep on living. Maybe that was why he was so good at his job — he had never even once questioned the validity of being alive. He was fearless in his dogmatic belief in Th. insistence of survival to the point of being smug.

  Dan’s success a mock-selflessness in his job was due to his ability to keep a distance; he never allowed himself to fade too far back into the throat of someone else’s despair. A lot of counsellors had cracked doing just that. When you wanted to save someone too badly, you tended to screw up. And Dan refused to wallow in someone else’s dementia. But he never, ever, hung up on anyone, and, as far as he knew, he always left his clients better off, somehow.

  Still, he had paid his dues. Back in university, Dan had taken a course from a fairly well-known American poet, a guy named Barry Walker, who taught creative writing. Dan became very involved in the course and felt a strong personal bond growing with Walker, despite the fact that the other students ostracized him for his loyalty to the somewhat eccentric writer.

  Toward the end of the term, Walker had started drinking before classes. He arrived late and would read three of his own poems, then try to lead directionless discussions. But while he seemed almost affectionate to some and indifferent to others, he became antagonistic to Dan, who tried to share some of his own efforts with the class. Dan rationalized it all as a battle of wits and fought hard to hold his own ground.

  On the last day of class, Barry Walker arrived blitzed out of his gourd and asked Daniel Alger to read two of what he thought were his personal prize accomplishments of the term. Dan read. Walker sat in silence, growing morose, and said finally, “So this is what we have accomplished?” and he promptly dismissed the class. Walker looked pale and something less than alive. Dan, however, had produced a volume of Walker’s that he had just purchased, a National Book Award winner called Inside the Domed Sky. He wanted the poet to sign it for him before he was gone.

  Barry Walker sank into his seat, hastily scratched off something, and tossed the book back across his desk. With a noncommittal voice he said simply, “I’m glad you were in my class.”

  Outside, alone in front of the Student Union, Daniel read the inscription: “You’ll never be much of a human being. Only your mind can save you now.” Then the scrawled signature.

  Three years later, when Dan had read about Barry Walker’s battles with madness, the trips in and out of the New York hospitals, he wondered if the man’s morose behaviour in creative writing had simply been the first signs of a deep-seated malady. Dan became fascinated by the disease of the mind, in fact; and when walker’s tortured creative brain had finally driven him beyond the world of the living. Alger, halfway through an MA in modern poetry at Fordham, decided to write his thesis on the late Barry Walker. He wanted to understand how Walker had translated such an unhappy life into such graceful, sensitive and inspiring poetry. And he wanted to try and understand why Walker had been so antagonistic to him. Daniel hoped for some insight, not only into madness and creativity, but into why Walker saw each of them to be “not much of a human being.”

  Almost anyone that Dan talked to about surfing, about surfing in Nova Scotia in the winter, thought that he was nuts. The cold, brutal Atlantic frightened most of his friends, who preferred civilized, indoor sports. Dan had even been out surfing late on the afternoon before the Ocean Ranger oil rig went down. He had surfed out the daylight alone on ten-foot powerhouse waves until he couldn’t see the rocky shoreline and had to listen for the sound of waves crashing on rocks to lead him back to land. At home he heard on the radio about the fantastic storm farther out at sea that had produced such magnificent waves. Dan was thankful for the storm, glad he’d been able to tap such exuberant energy. The next morning, however, he heard about the oil rig disaster and felt guilty. The storm that had advanced graceful, cold tunnels of sea for him to ride alone had turned brut
al in the night and ruined eighty-four lives.

  Two night later, the mother of one of the men who had been on board the Ocean Ranger called the hotline. The oil company had finally admitted that there was no hope for her son, twenty years old, a cook on the Ranger for only three months. “It was my idea,” she told Dan. “I convinced him he’d make good money on the rigs. I told him to get a trade, to study cooking, so he could work inside. It would be safer.”

  She wanted to blame somebody or something. The sea. The oil company, the rig owners. The government. But in the end, she could only direct the fury of her anger at herself, and it was tearing her apart.

  “I think you should get in touch with your clergyman,” Dan heard himself say to her in his best professional voice — sincere, compassionate.

  “I don’t have one. Why do you think I’m calling you?” She was sobbing uncontrollably, but Dan knew she wouldn’t hang up. He was there for her, to help see the crisis through. It was his job and he was good at it. “They kicked me out of the Catholic Church when I married his father,” she told Dan. “Now his father is gone and my boy is dead. God don’t want to hear from me now.” Daniel listened to her let out a long, frightening scream. Then she threw the receiver at a wall, and it fell to the floor. But the line was still open.

  Dan had only asked the phone company to trace calls perhaps a dozen times. His supervisor had admonished him for at least eight of the efforts. But four of them had paid off. This was not a clear suicide attempt. Life wasn’t in danger, and he had no clear imperative to instruct the phone company to trace her down. But something felt different about the call. He took a chance, asked her to hold the line as he put a call through to the MT&T switchboard.

  The operator refused to begin the search, even though it would have been so simple with the woman still on the line. Dan insisted, but the operator refused the request, said the phone company had to protect the privacy of its customers.

  Dan tried his caller to come back to the phone, but there was nothing to hear except a desperate woman sobbing alone in a hollow, empty kitchen. There was nothing further that he could do. No real reason to conclude that she would attempt suicide. But he couldn’t let it be. He felt responsible. He had been surfing, out having fun, tapping his source of private ecstasy, while he boy was about to go down in his ocean, killed by his hungry waves.

  Dan called up Mobil in St. John’s, where they had set up an information line for media people and relatives of the dead rig crew. A harried woman on the other end had little trouble pinning down who the boy’s mother was. She was more than willing to give her Halifax address.

  Later, when the Halifax police arrived at Alger’s request, they received no answer to their knocking. The door was locked and bolted and had to be almost fully smashed off its frame before they could get in. What they found was a middle-aged woman, scared out of her wits, sitting up in bed with a baseball bat. Grief and fear gave way to outrage, and later that night an ambulance took her to the Victoria General, where she had to be heavily sedated. Two days later, she filed a lawsuit for the violation of her privacy for no good reason. The story had become every journalist’s favourite sidebar to the Ocean Ranger story, and the city police had taken a black eye for it all.

  Daniel parked two feet away from where the road gave out, where it had been washed away by the sea that had been pounding the glacial land for centuries. Once there had been railroad trestles here across an inlet too shallow and unpredictable for most fishermen to pass safely to sea. Now the tracks were gone, stolen by a storm fifty years ago, and the rail line had been rebuilt inland to avoid more trouble. Two rusty steel rails still jutted out into mid-air from the abbreviated headland. Dan walked to the end of one rail, poised himself in the gentle, frigid offshore wind as gulls silently skimmed past him to catch the updraft along the upper edges of the ragged hill.

  The sea was a bright blue. Six-foot-high waves were peeling perfectly, left to right, away from the peninsula and into the finicky inlet. It would be easy to forget about the Glorias, the mothers of drowned sons on a morning like this. He ran back to his car, grabbed his gear. Still standing outside in a deepfreeze wind, he stripped off his clothes and began to put on his wetsuit.

  The wetsuit was his second skin — quarter-inch neoprene, black, warm, slightly stiff until it got wet, but secure. If the men on the Ocean Ranger had each been issued one of these, some at least would have made it to daylight and salvation. His body cocooned in the black suit, Dan pulled on the boots and gloves and then snapped the hood down over his head. With the tightness of the wetsuit hood over his skull, his ears pinched in tight against his head, he felt a special kind of privacy. Even though the morning was a bright explosion of colours and sounds of bursting waves around him, he grew more absorbed in himself, fading back to the inside place beneath the neoprene. When he surfed the waves, it would be his vital, inner self creating on the moving canvas of the sea. He unhitched the board from the rack on top of his car. It was a seven-foot contraption of foam and fibreglass, made by hand by some dedicated surfboard designer in Australia, on the other side of the planet from here. Like automobiles, surfboard designs had names. This model was called simply Alibi.

  Fordham never allowed Daniel Alger to finish his master’s degree in English as intended. He had started the thesis on Walker but grew restless, spending all of his time locked up with the twenty-odd volumes of the poet’s work and one blatantly harsh critical biography.

  He started wandering the moonscapes and ravaged streets of the Bronx at all hours of the day, feeling perfectly at ease among the street people of the night, as if he was protected by some invisible armour, some second skin that kept everything else away, all the danger, all the pain of this city at war with itself. He sat in bars and greasy spoons and listened. It felt like a newly discovered drug, just to hang around this sort of life and absorb it all, to live through every night like this and arrive at dawn unscathed, untouched and always cleansed. In literary terms it was quite simple to explain: catharsis. And it worked greater miracles for him than writing endless pages of wasted words over a dead poet named Barry Walker, who had, his work suggested, spent all his life cultivating a private agony created solely for the purpose of creativity. Walker had convince himself that he had to suffer in order to create. He believed the psychic pain was essential to be a good writer.

  Dan’s thesis advisor — a dapper, pin-in-the-tie, mid-career professor named Larry Cagney — had been away on a sabbatical, researching in the labyrinthine libraries at the University of Texas while Dan Alger was losing touch with academia and learning about life outside the gates at Fordham. Cagney returned, positively charged with intellectual energy from his research. Dan couldn’t see how seven months inside a library could possibly bring out the best in a man.

  “Walker’s widow gave me this,” Cagney told Dan, setting down a pile of dog-eared typed pages thick as a Sears and Roebuck catalogue. “It’s yours to work on if you want. I haven’t touched it. Barry Walker is your baby. Let’s screw that bloody sotfaced biographer, Turkle, to the wall. Go prove that he never even began to scratch the surface of Barry Walker.”

  It was a hodgepodge collection of notes, a randomly compiled journal kept by Walker of the final eight years of his life. Loose ends, notes, fragments of poems, bits and pieces of everything, jotted down and saved, then donated to a library as a tax write-off; now, somehow, they had found their way around to him. Daniel pretended to be interested, but he knew it would probably take more than this to pull him back to literary criticism.

  On his way back to his apartment, for the first time during his tenure in the Bronx, someone grabbed him at a street corner and pulled a knife. A scared teenage kid in sunglasses and a fedora hat said, “Give it to me, sucker.” Dan handed over his wallet. “Give me the box, too.” The kid grabbed it from under Dan’s arm and then plunged off toward the subway stairs. What fascinated Dan was that he hadn’t
felt frightened in the least. And now he had a good excuse for forgetting about the Walker thesis altogether. Cagney would be disgusted. Walker’s widow would probably be livid. The papers would undoubtedly be thrown away. Lost. It wasn’t exactly his fault. People just kept walking by. No one had reacted while the drama took place. If anybody had seen the incident they weren’t about to ask any questions.

  Out of curiosity more than anything, Daniel followed in the direction of the thief’s retreat. He walked slowly toward the subway. He took his time going down, not really wanting to meet up with his assailant or pressing his luck. Damn, there it was. Discarded in a pile of trash by a water fountain that hadn’t worked in years. The box was torn open and the papers scattered around. But it was all there. The kid had been hoping for anything he could pawn. An expensive jacket, something electrical, a cake even. Instead he found a pile of worthless papers poorly typed and reworked by hand in the scrawl of a maniac. Dan’s wallet was, of course, nowhere to be found. He gathered up the pages and walked home.

  It would be next to impossible to put the pages back in order, but it was all there, like Walker’s genius itself: inspired, inventive, insightful, but also cynical, uncontrolled, cluttered and confused. Words and images spiralled in a round, ruthless vigour, choking real life with the work of the imagination. Just from commuting through the disorganized fragments, Daniel had concluded that he poet could not see himself as anything but his work, and his work was so intensely private that it wanted to shut out all compassion for anyone or anything. It was about eleven at night when Dan came across the passage:

  And I never knew exactly what the problem was until this smart young punk in my class started showing off his own poems. Namesake of the late Horatio, Alger picks up his crooked little pen at night and writes stuff as worthless as mine was at his age. Kindred spirits of the examined life. His poems stink but so did mine. I want to make sure he gets a job as a bank clerk; his soul is already lost. Maybe his mind can save him. I’ve seen people before with miniature souls and large brains get by in life and cause only minimal damage. There’s a little hope left...for him. I shall discourage him from ever trying to be creative, for ever trying to do the world any sort of “good.”