by Nick Lake
“No reading.”
I thought of Dr. Lewis. I thought: I have nothing to lose here. “Or what?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
“If I read my book, what are you going to do about it?”
The voice thought for a moment—this sounded different from when it went away. I can’t explain it. I mean, I could still feel it there. “I will make you cut off one of your toes.”
My toes curled. “How?”
“What?”
“How will you make me do that?”
“I will force you to.”
“No.”
Then the voice screamed at me. That was new. I mean, it was always saying horrible things. But the screaming was different. “Don’t push me! ” it screamed.
“I’m not pushing you. I’m just saying no.”
“Go to the kitchen this instant. Tell your dad you’re getting a glass of water. Take a bread knife, and come back up here. Then cut off your pinky toe on your left foot. Do it right now.”
“Or what?”
“What do you mean, or what?”
“I mean, if I don’t cut off my toe, what are you going to do about it?”
The voice thought. “I’m going to kill your father. No more injuries. No more minor ****. You don’t cut off your toe, your dad dies. Okay?”
You can’t imagine how scared I was. My eyes were filling with tears. It was dark out; my room was gloomy with shadows. I flicked on my bedside lamp. But that only made it worse. Now my clothes hanging on the door handle, my posters, my shelves, cast weird shapes on the walls and floor.
“I won’t do it,” I said.
“Then you will wake up in the morning and your father will be dead.”
I said nothing.
“He will die. Do you understand? I will kill him in his sleep. I will smother him until he stops breathing and his body is cold and dead.”
I said nothing.
“Get the bread knife. Now.”
“No.”
“Last chance, Cass.”
“No.”
The voice sighed. “He dies, then,” it said.
And then it did go. I felt it withdraw from the room.
From my head.
The voice didn’t speak then, but my mind was unquiet. You get that word in old gothic novels, don’t you? Unquiet ghosts and so on.
That was my mind that night. My thoughts just raced around, like ghosts in a haunted house, unstoppable.
What if your dad dies because of you?
How selfish are you?
You really want to kill another parent?
Sometimes they were words, like that, and sometimes they were images. Scenes, flashing in and out of my consciousness.
Tiles.
Blood.
The house was mostly wood and I could hear it expanding or contracting or whatever houses do at night when they cool down. Outside, there was a strong wind coming from the ocean. I could smell it through the cracks of my windows, salty and holding the promise of distance and forgetting—a promise I wished it would make good on. I wished that wind would sweep into my head and rinse it clean, whistle through the cavities of my skull until there was nothing there but emptiness, and silence.
But the wind didn’t do that, and the voice was still in my head. “He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die like a dog on the ground, like your mother. It’s going to be your fault.”
The voice was everywhere. It was speaking, in my ears, as a voice, but it was merging with everything else too. The creaking and clicking and ticking of the house were all consonants, the wind outside was all vowels, and together the house and the wind were saying,
Your dad is going to die.
In the end I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I got some old headphones out of my nightstand—I had to dig under the piles of medication that I hadn’t been taking; archaeology. I plugged them into my radio and tuned it to a dead channel again, the way I used to block out the voice.
I filled my head with white noise.
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I must have fallen asleep at some point because when I opened my eyes there was sunlight flooding the room and the white noise was still blasting in my ears,
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I pulled off the headphones and vaulted off the bed. I ran out my door and just down the hallway to Dad’s.
I banged on it, hard.
No answer.
I hammered again on the door with my fist.
BANG, BANG, BANG.
Oh please oh please oh—
“Cass? What the hell?”
Relief snapped open and expanded inside me, like a parachute. “Dad?”
“Uh, yeah. It’s five thirty ********* a.m., Cass. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong, Dad. Nothing’s wrong.”
I heard him roll over in bed. “Then go back to ******* bed.”
But I didn’t. I bounced down the hall, elastic with happiness. I had challenged the voice and I had won. I had taken on step five for the second time, and I had come out victorious.
“You there?” I asked the voice.
No answer.
“Figures,” I said.
I didn’t know how I was going to wait till one o’clock for the Toy Story matinee with Paris. I was buzzing. I had 220 volts of electricity running through me, fizzing in my veins and nerves. I was wired. I went to my room and tried to read some of the Murakami—the voice said not one thing about it—but I couldn’t concentrate on the words.
A little later I heard Dad go downstairs and have his breakfast; then he left. He didn’t make me anything to eat, or call up, or anything. I went downstairs and tried to watch some TV for an hour or so, but I still couldn’t concentrate. I went back upstairs, still in my pajamas.
I pulled on my swimsuit and then faded jeans and a T-shirt with my old Converses and went outside. My phone went into my back pocket. I was going to walk to the beach, do some drawing, maybe swim in the ocean. If the voice wanted to say anything about it, well, what was it going to do? I grabbed my sketch pad and my pencil.
Thin mist hung over the town. I followed our street to where the asphalt began to break up, sand pushing through the cracks. The road just became the shore at a certain point. Then I stepped from the sidewalk down onto the scrub and dunes of the beach.
I walked the beach until I found something I wanted to draw—an old Coke can, it looked like it might have been seventies even; the font was weird, and it had washed up, faded out, on the sand. Trash. I loved to draw trash—that was m
y thing, remember? Neglected things. Ugly things.
I took my pencil and pressed it to the paper and—
Nothing. I couldn’t draw it. I couldn’t draw the ugly old squashed Coke can. It held no interest at all for me, its folds, its little holes, its faded lettering. It was just a dead, broken object, and the pencil wouldn’t move.
It was like … like it was something I used to like to do, but now it was just gone. Like a switch had been turned off. It wasn’t even the voice saying no, it was just me. Losing interest.
I shrugged and put the sketch pad and pencil in my back pocket. Then I went to the spot where Dad taught me to swim, south of Pier One. I slid off my jeans and took off my T-shirt. The late morning air was cold on my legs and arms.
For a second I thought, Really?
But then I smiled to myself. Yes, really.
I ran straight at the ocean, my legs crashing through the low waves, the salt water freezing, and then I dived down; my face and hands scraped the bottom and I surged up, grabbed the water in my hands and pulled myself out, stroke after stroke. I swam the crawl, only occasionally lifting my head to breathe.
Silky water embraced me, held me up, the feeling like a promise. A promise of buoyancy, of not letting me fall. A promise you never get from the air. If you lose your balance in the air, you always fall.
The taste of the ocean was in my mouth: salt, sand, small creatures. Water was all around me, containing me, shaping itself to my contours.
What I mean to say is:
It was amazing.
I swam all the way up to the first pier, then turned and swam back to the little pile my clothes made on the sand. My movements were stiff at first, forced, but got smoother as I swam, the feeling coming back to me. I felt free and I thought about nothing except the waves and timing my breathing and my strokes.
As I neared my clothes, I saw your truck. You were driving onto the sand where the road merged with the beach. The way you took me, that time. You drove a little way down the long, wide stretch of beach, toward the shore, and then you turned in the direction of Pier One.
I swung my legs down, planted my feet in the hard wet sand; it compacted around my toes. I stood and waved with both arms.
The white pickup slowed, then turned and drove toward me. You parked up by my jeans and T-shirt.
I walked slowly out of the water as you stood by the pickup, your arm on the open door. You raised a hand as I got close.
“Venus exiting the sea,” you said with a smile. You were wearing Ray-Bans.
“You’re letting him see your body,” said the voice, because you were too far away to mute it. “You’re letting him see your disgusting—”
“Yeah?” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Kidding,” you said, thinking I was speaking to you, raising your hands in mock defense as I neared you. “I’m not looking.”
The voice disappeared. I was too close to you now; I was in your force field.
“What do you mean, you’re not looking?” I asked.
You raised your sunglasses. Your eyes were closed. “See?”
I laughed. “Okay, keep them closed. I’m going to get dressed.”
“You didn’t bring a towel.”
I looked around. “Oh.”
“I have one in the truck. Hang on.” You turned, put up a hand to shield your eyes, and felt around in the cab of the truck. Then you were facing me again, eyes closed, holding out a towel.
I hesitated.
“It’s clean. I always have one. So I can swim after work.”
“Thanks.” I reached out and took it. “You swim?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” You paused. “You looked good out there.” You flushed. “I mean, your stroke. ****. I keep doing that. Your stroke looked good.”
He thinks I look good? So maybe he does like me.
But how am I supposed to know?
“Dad taught me,” I said, trying to ignore the thoughts racing in my head. This was true. When I was a kid, I was always in the ocean with my dad. I mean always. Every evening, every weekend. I loved it, sharing his passion with him, learning from him. My mom called me her water baby—she would come too, swim with us, though she was never as fast, would get left behind, joke-cursing us.
So many of my memories of my dad have the texture of water. And they evaporated, too, like water. Dried out, leaving the ocean behind, and him washed up in front of his bugs, and me left stranded in my room, alone.
“Oh yeah,” you said. “He was a SEAL, right? That’s hard-core.”
“Was,” I said. “He’s not so hard-core these days.”
You smiled, your eyes still closed. “Yeah, he showed me his bugs. Creepy. Like, literally.”
I had finished drying myself now and quickly pulled on my clothes. “You can open your eyes now,” I said.
You did. “Truth is, I’ve had them open a crack the whole time.”
“You—”
“Kidding! Kidding.”
He is. He’s totally flirting.
“You swim a lot?” I asked, to change the subject.
You shrugged. “I was on the school team.”
“Oh! You told me. Sorry. You must be good.”
You shrugged again.
“But you left the team?”
“Huh?”
“You said you were on the school team.”
“Oh. No. I’m going to college. In the fall. On a swim scholarship actually.” You looked a little embarrassed.
“Then you must be really good.”
“Hmm,” you said. “Anyway, I’d better get going. These Angry Birds are not going to deliver themselves.”
“Okay. Thanks for the towel.”
“You’re welcome,” you said. Then, “Oh!” you added, as you put the towel away. “Hey, I forgot.” You pulled a pile of books from the footwell of the truck. “I got these for you. From the library.”
“But I never cleaned the apartment.”
“Well, no, but still. I got them. Vonnegut, Carver, Austen. Kind of a random selection. I didn’t know what you liked.”
I looked at the pile. He brought you books. Still think he likes Paris? Idiot. That wasn’t the voice, that was just me. “Thanks,” I said. “Really.”
“You don’t have to take them now. If you don’t want to carry them. I can bring them to your—”
“No,” I said. “Better not. That’s kind of why I never cleaned the apartment. My dad doesn’t want me … um, hanging out with you.” I reached out and took the books.
Looked away.
A long moment.
Looked back and you were watching me. A small smile on your face. Like: intrigued, and amused. “Star-crossed!” you said. “A dramatic turn.” In my defense it was not always obvious that you liked me. You had a habit of making everything into a joke, if it turned too serious. I know it’s hypocritical of me to say that.
“It’s not funny,” I said, and it came out harder than I meant.
Your face sank. “Oh. Yeah, of course. Your dad’s strict?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah.”
Silence.
“Um, well, then. I guess, ’bye,” you said.
“Um, yeah, ’bye.”
→ OUR ROMANCE, STILL SCRIPTED BY SHAKESPEARE ←
You pulled yourself easily into the cab, kind of swung yourself. I …
Okay, I’ve been sitting here at Dad’s PC in the study trying to think of how to describe you, the way you moved then, the way you always move. And I think I have it, finally. It’s …
So, you have to start by thinking of the word “fitness.” I mean, thinking of what it really means. We use it all the time—that person is fit, that person isn’t fit, he’s doing fitness training, whatever. But think about the root word. Fit. To fit. To be fit or apt for a purpose.
That’s you.
You’re fit, yeah, in the obvious sense that you’re healthy and have a slow resting heart rate, and all that stuff. From all the swimming. But you also fit, your movements fit with the world, you interlock elegantly with it.
You fit into the world like a key in a lock.
Anyway.
So you swung yourself into the cab like your body was meant to fit into that sweep of air, that motion, at precisely that moment, and then you started the engine and drove off, waving.
I thought: I wonder if life gets any better than this. The voice has no power over me and he moves like that and …
I don’t know. I was happy. I reached into my pocket and took out my phone to check the time; I had left my watch at home. That was when I saw that I had a missed call, and a message. I hadn’t looked at my phone in the morning. I mean, I know people do that, but I’m not people; I’m someone used to having no friends. All of which is to say that I had not looked at the thing until I saw on the screen:
Paris. MISSED. 1:24 a.m.
I dialed the number for my messages, and put the phone to my ear. There was a beep, then a click, then a hiss.
“Kccccchhhhhhh … Kccccchhhhhhh …—” And then a scream.
And then:
Click.
I held out the phone, held it far from my body, like it was contaminated.
Fear flooded through me; freezing water. I had been in the ocean and now the ocean was in me; rushing, merciless.
Cold.
2.
THE PART AFTER
As I walked home I dialed Paris’s number.
No answer.
I dialed again.
No answer.
Come on Paris, come on Paris. Answer your phone.
But nothing.
It was eleven thirty. I paced up and down in the kitchen until twelve thirty, and then I nearly ran to the theater where Toy Story was showing. There were a few people waiting outside—a handful of hipsters, some parents with young kids. The theater was old, art deco, like the motels. There were old posters pasted on the walls—Back to the Future; American Gigolo. The facade was dirty, the posters peeling. It was fading, rotting, in need of investment—but with beautiful architectural lines underneath. A microcosm of the town.