The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

by Michael Andreasen

  We acted fast, put on our game faces, worked that time-honored magic that for eons has kept children in dessert and late-night TV. We whined, begged, and tantrummed until we won sighs and shrugs and were spirited away in the back of Mr. Ball’s ancient Chevy Lumina to the place where Andy was kept.

  If not for the square of darkening blue sky visible through a transparent screen above us, the tennis courts could have been the surface of the moon. The rough concrete under our feet was reflected on all sides by the foil walls, making the desolation of the landscape feel infinitely vast. The only sign of life was Andy, who by now was bleeding light from every pore, spitting out rays like a mirror ball. He shone brighter when he saw us. His smile made us squint.

  “You’re it,” someone said.

  We played well past our allotted forty-five minutes, barely noticing as night fell, the combination of Andy’s glow and the reflective walls keeping the courts eternally daylit. Andy gave chase like a rogue comet. He beamed and blurred and froze us in all manner of failed escape. When Mr. Ball and Miss Florentine finally came in to collect us, Andy was half collapsed on the court floor, wheezing but triumphant, more radiant than ever. Mr. Ball stayed behind to take Andy’s readings while Miss Florentine drove us home.

  We were put to bed by shaken but relieved parents. Falling asleep almost instantly, we dreamed the troubled dreams of astronauts, nightmares of drifting free in starry space, slowly suffocating, or else accidentally tearing holes in our spacesuits, causing decompression, rapid expansion, and the sudden outing of insides.

  Hours later, on the Parish Park tennis courts, invisible in his own blinding light, Andrew Leon Wingham closed his eyes, held his breath, and exploded.

  II. The Immolation of Neighborhood Dogs

  The next day, from the plywood observation deck overlooking the tennis courts, Mr. Ball and Miss Florentine contemplated Andy’s metamorphosis.

  He was bigger. Several times his previous boyish size, like a Volkswagen bus stood on end. And he still glowed, though not quite as he had.

  Where Andy the boy had shed a white fluorescence, this Andy burned low and red, like the embers of a dying fire, embers with a vaguely human shape, articulation, and intelligence. His torso was a wall of superheated rock that seemed solid and flexible at the same time, melting and re-forming in turns to maintain its shape. The temperature sensor Mr. Ball had set up inside the court had more or less given up on its reporting, shrugging out only the occasional “E.” Around Andy, steady waves of heat rippled and miraged, the surrounding air straining to hold him. Every few seconds a tongue of copper flame kicked up from his shoulders, or the top of his head, or from his chest, where a fiery heart might still beat.

  Mr. Ball and Miss Florentine stood side by side, sharing a stupefied silence. At long last and far too late, they felt undereducated and ill-informed in matters of the world. Staring at a lava boy in a tinfoil-wrapped tennis court under a Tuesday sky, neither could conjure a confident next step.

  But Andy’s parents were done. For weeks, every tongue around them had gossiped. Every brow pitied. Their refrigerator was wall-to-wall with sympathy casseroles and lasagnas. Befuddled neighbors who hadn’t known what to make of the situation instead made cookies, and brownies, and powdered lemon squares. But Mrs. Wingham’s pantry, like her heart, had no more room for these condoling payloads, and a transformation that might have finally silenced a less exasperated mother helped this one to find her voice. Gifts of food would no longer be accepted. The town could find a new charity case. The Winghams were taking their molten son home.

  There were protests, of course. Town government and public safety officials appeared on local news to make their sweaty, hyperventilating cases for jurisdiction. But Mr. and Mrs. Wingham were Andy’s parents, which in our community still meant something, and soon enough the Wingham family was restored to its modest bi-level on Sondheim Road.

  * * *

  —

  For a time, if you stood at a distance, peering over from next door or across the street, everything seemed fine at the Winghams’. The pool in the backyard had long since been drained, and Andy spent most of his time sitting in the deep end, looking calm and content. Maybe. It was difficult to tell if he had feelings. Andy’s new head was an expressionless, neckless monolith slapped onto his new body, the sheer crag of his nose flanked by two deep-set eyes that burned the same blue we’d first seen in the gym. His movements remained adroit and boy-like, his flexible rock body bending like soft bread, breathing heat the way Andy’s old body had breathed air.

  We were once again forbidden from visiting Andy by our parents, who feared for our safety, and by Andy’s parents, who feared further attention. We spied from a comfortable distance. The Hallisters’ tree house a few lots away offered the best view, and with birding binoculars stolen from our mothers, we watched Andy pass the time. He did next to nothing, sitting in the deep end of the pool for hours with no outward sign of boredom or interest. Sometimes, and for no apparent reason, he would stand up, stomp over to the shallow end in a few great, thudding strides, pound his foot (Was it still a foot? Did Andy still have feet?) into the chlorine-green concrete until it cracked, then march slowly back to the deep end, his footprints smoldering behind him. Once or twice a day, Mrs. Wingham came onto the patio with a ham sandwich and potato chips on a plate in one hand and a glass of milk in the other, barely looking at Andy before setting them next to the diving board and retreating back into the house. Andy took them in his hands (hands?) and stared at them for a minute or two while the plate melted and the chips and sandwich caught fire and the glass shattered and milk spilled all over him, hissing like a skillet. He never once reacted. He didn’t appear to suffer hunger or thirst. He never looked tired. If he slept or laughed or cried or spoke, we never saw it. Mrs. Wingham never returned for the dishes. Before long she was bringing the sandwiches out on paper napkins and pouring the milk straight into the ground.

  After weeks of watching from a distance, and deep under the influence of a spring so close to summer that our only thoughts were of escape, we became staunch advocates for a free and independent Andy. The plan was to covertly remove planks from the Winghams’ fence until we had cleared a large enough gap for him to walk through. We borrowed the tools we needed, and several we didn’t: a dozen assorted hammers and screwdrivers, an irresponsibly sharp hacksaw, two cordless drills with whirring triggers, a half-full can of WD-40 with attached drooping red proboscis for easy spot-spraying, a complete set of socket wrenches, and a miraculously unattended oxyacetylene welding torch that none of us knew how to use. When he heard us at the base of the fence, scratching at our first picket like raccoons, Andy climbed out of the pool and came at us, plowing through the barrier almost before we could roll out of the way.

  His skin crackled and fumed. Standing amid blackened slivers of fence, Andy looked to the patio door for signs of his mother, and we suddenly realized how wrong we were to think that he no longer had feelings, or that they couldn’t be read. The blue flames of his eyes stared for minutes at the patio door, and in their low burn we could see Andy’s caution, his concern, his hope that an adult might appear to rescue him from his rescuers, but nothing. Not even a face in the window.

  * * *

  —

  Everything we had known about Andy was now obsolete. Gone was the grade-schooler who struggled with fractions and pop-tops, the playground vigilante who knew how to punch from the hips and not feel bad after, the boy teetering on the edge of goodness and badness in a childhood that seemed to him, as it did to all of us, like a never-ending negotiation of greater and lesser evils. That Andy had been obliterated, and with him any limits that had held his will to destroy in check. Now nothing was beyond his subjugation. All burned and boiled at his touch, as torments once reserved for smaller creatures, insects, worms, and the occasional bird, now found their way up the food chain. We watched as Andy cornered rabbits and squirre
ls against property walls, setting legs and heads and little tails aflame with barely a touch. The first frog Andy caught by the creek burst with a plorp, and in minutes we were lobbing frogs at him, onto his shoulders or his chest, where they would hop off on burning legs, or else stick to him, their skin going runny and splitting wide like microwaved franks until they were just more smoldering Andy, or more of the burned nothing he left behind. The strongest things we could find, steel shovels and concrete blocks and the unbendable frames of our bicycles, all melted in the brazier that was our friend. We weren’t prepared for any of it, and when he trapped the Andersons’ once terrifying Rottweiler in the oven of his palm, holding it against the grass as it burned and bayed like a distressed damsel, we knew there was nothing left he couldn’t do, and that we could never again invite him over to play with our dogs, or spend the night at our houses, because we liked our dogs, and we liked our houses, and no amount of watching lizards cook in Andy’s mouth was going to change that. Months earlier, we had all looked on in gleeful horror as Sunflower, the class guinea pig, ate two of her five wormy new offspring right in front of us. She was the hero of our hearts for months, her gruesome deed immortalized repeatedly in short, horrifying essays and crayoned caricatures. But no one played with her again after that, and eventually they took her away.

  * * *

  —

  It was around lunchtime that we first noticed Mr. Ball and his sign. We were playing mouse baseball with Andy in the sandlot behind Lyman’s pharmacy. A good-size mouse could be hurled from the pitcher’s mound straight over the plate, where Andy would squat like a catcher, waiting for batterless strikes that shrieked and sizzled when he caught them. After a few innings, someone noticed Mr. Ball standing in the Lyman’s parking lot, unshaven and hollow-faced, holding a sign. The science teacher was not daunted in his belief in Andy’s inevitable dissolution, nor had he retreated from his apocalyptic warnings, which were now scrawled protest-style across a sign he was holding high. “MAKE NO MISTAKE,” it read in bold capitals, “THE BOY WILL EXPLODE.” Andy saw it, sprang from his catcher’s squat, and ran.

  We relocated a dozen or more times that afternoon, settling in whatever new parking lot or field or yard Andy chose until Mr. Ball found us in the Lumina, upon which he’d graffitied “ENTROPY IS A UNIVERSAL CONSTANT” on one side and “THIS COHESION IS FLEETING” on the other. He never spoke or acknowledged anyone but Andy, whose jerky escapes and unsteady flaring made it clear that Mr. Ball represented some kind of threat. We thought about engaging, about hurling insults and dirt clods and the grilled mice we’d saved as souvenirs, but Mr. Ball was still a teacher, and that still meant something.

  Eventually we returned Andy to the Winghams’ backyard. Beside the pool, a happy line of ants marched toward a puddle of sour milk and a graying tuna sandwich. Mr. Ball parked the Lumina in front of the house and stationed himself just outside the backyard fence, where he stayed the entire night, his sign looming high just over Andy’s head, which is what we think eventually drove Andy out of the concrete pool that night, and into his parents’ home.

  * * *

  —

  Those who, prohibited by distance or deep sleep, weren’t initially drawn to the scene at the sound of crumbling walls and fire engines, might still have been able to assemble the evening’s events by peering through what had once been the Winghams’ patio door and tracing an unobstructed path of curled linoleum and charred original wood flooring all the way back to the boy’s former bedroom, where Andy could still be found (because who could have moved him?) huddled in fear, possibly of Mr. Ball, or the firemen’s hoses, or the hoarse wailing of his mother, who was finally shedding all of her illusions on the Winghams’ front lawn.

  Once again, the issue of Andy’s custody arose, but this time no one wanted him. The municipal government refused to accept responsibility for him, but admitted that his parents were hardly in a position to care for him either. Word of the proceedings also unsilenced several neighbors, who had been keeping their peace for the Winghams’ sake, but now reported a number of pets who had gone, if not entirely, then at least partially missing, the cauterized remains of those few who’d hobbled home leaving little doubt as to the identity of the culprit.

  The judge deciding the case, in either a stroke of genius or a desperate attempt to buy herself more time, ruled that Andy be temporarily left in the custody of the fire department, which would be charged with his safekeeping until a more appropriate home could be found.

  III. The Firehouse

  What more appropriate home could there possibly be?

  We did not know the firemen, but we knew of them. They were our friends’ fathers and our fathers’ friends. During the period of Andy’s confinement, we were forced to deploy a covert network to gather intelligence. We eavesdropped on Friday night poker games and sat invisibly in the corners of barber shops. Our agents heard quiet confidences across the whitewashed pickets of good neighbors not normally prone to gossip. It’s really not my place, grown men whispered as mowers idled, and I feel for the kid, I do. But does this strike you as an appropriate use of our tax dollars? We met regularly in the Hallister tree house to piece together what we could.

  Andy was being kept in the firehouse’s training yard in a structure that the firemen called the Cinderblock, four stories of concrete walls and windows and little else that the firemen sometimes set ablaze to practice ladder climbs, search-and-rescues, and long-range spray-downs. Inside, the Cinderblock looked like a burned-out elevator shaft. Windows let in a patchwork of focused sun and wind at the higher levels, but Andy required only shelter from Mr. Ball, who waited just outside the firehouse grounds, the letters of his newest apocalyptic decree still wet on the raised plywood.

  The firemen naturally regarded Andy with cautious apprehension. They understood why responsibility for his care should fall to them above all others, but even so, his presence in the training yard made them constantly nervous. Always that campfire smell in the air, the alarms in their heads never going completely silent. At night, they woke at odd hours, and would have to spend a cigarette or two staring out the window at the dull, hearthy glow of the Cinderblock before their nerves settled enough to sleep.

  The chief of the firehouse, a grizzled old hose jockey, was quick to spot this disquiet, and didn’t care for it. He had seen hundreds of fires in his tenure, and if there was one thing he knew, it was that you couldn’t beat a fire by standing across the street pointing at it. You had to get your cheeks sooty. That’s how you got rid of fear.

  The chief developed a new series of advanced training exercises, and recruited Andy as a key player. Andy’s job was to use his burning limbs to start new fires on different faces and levels of the Cinderblock without warning. Just as the squad would gain the upper hand on one floor, a window on the opposite side of the structure would start spouting flames, demanding the redeployment of ladders and manpower. For the first time in their careers, the firemen were forced to combat an intelligent enemy, one that could learn their strategies, adapt to their tactics, and constantly test the limits of their skill.

  Simply put: They were in fireman heaven.

  At the end of the first day of exercises, Andy emerged from the Cinderblock to find the entire company applauding and saluting their worthy foe. As the week of training went on, Andy’s participation led to a dramatic increase in the squad’s overall communication, efficiency, and teamwork. At night, some of the firemen found themselves inexplicably drawn to the Cinderblock, lingering for a few moments outside its blackened walls before finally wading into the soft light of Andy’s corona to contemplate his heat and the blue flicker of his eyes.

  At the firemen’s weekly barbecue, Andy was again the center of attention. With Andy, grilling took minutes. Bratwurst and Polish sausages sizzled instantly in his hand. The firehouse chef, a great advocate of chilies and bran, used overlong tongs to flip sirloin on Andy’s lap. Those who pr
eferred meat rare had merely to wave a fillet in his general direction. That night, drunk on beer and beef, the firemen sat around Andy in a circle to sweat off the day’s calories. Under the quiet watch of moon and stars and Mr. Ball, they smoked cigarettes and cigars, sang songs, and swayed their arms in manly jubilee.

  The next morning they met in the chapel for mass. The firehouse chaplain was a large man who refused to suffer the indignity of the fire pole. His sermon that day warned against the veneration of false idols. “For ours is a jealous God,” he explained, “and you would be too if it was written that there was no power in the universe greater than your almighty power, and yet were forced to watch as those who had been your loyal friends and creations suddenly turned their backs on you, choosing instead, and who knows why, the Fiery Pit, which burns men totally, and without mercy.”

  A handful of the firemen weren’t sure what to make of this sermon, which summoned a conflict that irritated the very core of their firemanly natures. But most simply knelt, still a little hungover, fingers crawling over rosary beads as they prayed to never know what it was to burn.

  IV. Andy’s Daughters

  The Fourth of July we run amok.

  The Fourth is a beer in the hand and a burger in the lap of every grown man and woman from sea to shining sea. We love it so much we light the sky on fire. We throw it a parade.

  We always broke into our bags early, snatching from their gunpowdery bottoms the smoke bombs, ladyfingers, and bottle rockets that had no place beside the nighttime majesty of Roman candles, sparklers, and bombs bursting in air. Once the daylight items were burned lifeless, we begged snow cones off our parents on Prince Edward Street and waited for the parade to start.