“Maybe,” I say, deep in thought.
“Yes, maybe,” he says, and we look for a long time out over the water where the eiders rise and sink on the undercurrent in a gentle rhythm like a single soul in many bodies.
It’s become dark. The lights on the island across the bay glitter in the distance, and the beam from the lighthouse cuts through the darkness with a lazy pulse. I’ve made a little fire in front of my hollow because I want to sit here a little longer. A moment ago, I thought he was gone. Then I stood up and gathered some pieces of wood and made a small pile. But when I sat by the fire and looked into the flames, it felt like he was still sitting on the red rock over there. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a handful of warm light fall on his face.
“Do you think Jesus really existed?” I ask without taking my eyes off the flames.
“I guess so,” he says.
“But do you think he really did perform all those miracles that are in the Bible?”
“Maybe,” he says.
“But, I mean, how did he walk on water, huh? It’s impossible.”
“Anybody can do that,” he says, like there’s nothing to it.
“Not me.”
“Sure you can,” he says. “If you think a little, then you understand you can.”
I think for a long while, rack my brain, and try to come up with all kinds of methods, but I’m no closer to a solution.
“Think harder.”
“Did he use a float?” I ask hesitantly.
“Of course not.”
“I don’t know how he did it, then,” I say. “Are you telling me that you’ve walked on water?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, yeah? When?”
“Do you have any idea how much effort it is to learn to walk on your own two feet and keep balance?”
“No.”
“Well, that was my miracle,” he says. “And to learn to talk and read. And not least to think. Don’t you understand? Walking on water is conquering what seems impossible. Turning water into wine is changing what you have into something better.”
“But these were miracles. I can’t do any miracles.”
“It’s up to you. Have it your way. But if you’re going to mature at all, you’d better start doing some miracles on yourself.”
“But I don’t believe in Jesus. He’s either a lamb or a shepherd, a god or a man. And I’m bored in church.”
“You don’t have to believe in anything if you don’t want to. But if you’re going to walk on water, you have to believe in yourself at least. Or else you sink.”
There’s a thin mist over the bay now, and the lights on the island have disappeared. Everything is dark and black, the rocks around me, the sky above me, the sea below me. And it’s cold. Only the small fire warms my face and hands and throws a red glow on the rocks. The embers light up and fade in the wood with a low crackle. Tiny tongues of flame lick the gray wood until they turn black, shrink, and break and crumble down between the rocks.
“Mom believes in the Bible and God and all that,” I say.
“That’s her choice, the thing she clings to,” he says. “But it doesn’t matter. You can believe in one thing today and something else tomorrow, but it has nothing to do with life. The only thing that matters is knowing what you’re going to do, and then doing it.”
The flames lower and the light subsides until the tongues of fire become as small as candle flames. Finally, only the embers are left in the black darkness.
The sea is lapping under the rocks, and the undercurrent has become heavier. The black water gleams as a wave rises and then falls with a tired sigh on the rocks, trickling under them and in between them. It takes a long time to trickle away, thick and slow like tar, and when the ocean has dragged it back, it’s like it hesitates for a while, holding its breath for a moment, before it breathes the wave out again, slowly, sleepily, and the wave falls in, embracing the rocks below me.
“I miss Dad,” he says in a low voice.
Then I feel how lonely he is and scared, despite his courage and wisdom, and I want to embrace him, encourage him, and show him that whatever happens, he’ll always have me. I wish I could take him in my arms and be his friend and comforter. But he’s gone, and there’s nobody here by the burned-out embers except me.
I’m a twinkling star, far away in space, on a billion-light-year search for another star so the two of us can twinkle together, side by side, rotating around each other. But stars only seem to be close to each other; in fact, there’s a vast, unbridgeable gap between them. They travel at different speeds in different directions, and each one is on its own path. I will never ever get close enough to any of them so I can twinkle with it for a while. That happens very seldom, maybe only every million years or so.
I wake up to the tinkling of bracelets and whispering in the hall, and at once I realize that the starry space is just the darkness behind my eyelids and I watch my star twinkle and sparkle and grow smaller and smaller until it disappears. There’s a noisy crackle of leather on the other side of my door and a strange smell that seeps in by the door frame; a strong smell of gasoline and sweat. Then the blood-red face of Gertrude appears in the doorway.
“I need to ask you a favor,” she says, and her slithering body twitches in the doorway. “Can you stand guard for us and let us know when your mom comes home?”
“Us?” I ask at the same moment that marvelous Mike appears behind her with a wolfish grin under his long hair.
“What are you going to do?” I ask, although such a question is a bit stupid.
“Oh, please,” Gertrude says, irritated, and points Mike to go into her room.
He drags himself over the floor, points a finger at the falcon, and says, “Cool,” and then swings with rubber legs into her room, and a loud creaking is heard as he throws himself on her bed.
“This is the least you can do for me,” Gertrude says, and the bracelets tinkle with impatience.
“Am I supposed to stay awake all night while you two are . . . ?”
“Haven’t I done lots of things for you?” she hisses in my face. “I’ve given you money and everything. God, you’re petty.”
She could beat me up, but that wouldn’t change anything, I’m not going to sit here like an idiot while they’re going at it next door. Gertrude can do whatever she wants; that’s her responsibility and I’m not going to have any part in it.
“You can stand guard yourself. Maybe you could even take turns,” I say, and grin, because that’s obviously not what they intend to be doing. I stand up from my bed and sit triumphantly at my desk. The falcon stands erect by my side, and both of us look, gloating, at my poor cousin, who doesn’t know what to do. But then she suddenly bends down toward the bed, slides her hand under the mattress, and snatches the magazine from under it with two fingers. I freeze in fright, jump to my feet, and try to get it from her, but she retreats, laughing, into her room.
“Maybe you want your mom to find this by accident?” she says, leafing through the magazine.
“Give it back,” I sneer, but I’m in shock and I don’t really know what to say.
“Must be quite exciting licking the paper . . .” she says, giggling.
She has everything, and I have nothing. She calls the shots.
“I’ll keep this while you stand guard. If you spill the beans, I’ll do the same,” she says with cruel gentleness in her face, and closes the door.
Then they start to whisper and giggle on the other side of the door, and now and then they laugh out loud. They’re leafing through the magazine and laughing because they know what I’ve been doing with it. My sins are public now, and I’ll never be able to look anyone in the face again; I’m damned.
And the game starts behind the door.
“Ouch, Mike; stop, Mike; don’t, Mike,” she squeals, but she doesn’t mean a word she says. The only thing that can be heard from him is snarling and growling.
Little by little, the sounds of her voice sub
side, the bed creaks like somebody is constantly sitting down and standing up, sitting down and standing up, and I can’t pretend that this isn’t interesting anymore. I go to the door, stand close, and listen. But I’m not going to stoop so low as to peek through the keyhole, just listen.
The human being is the only creature on the planet that is controlled by the hunger for sex alone. It’s not like people are necessarily thinking about having babies — quite the contrary. The sexes use each other to fulfill their lust. The female puts on perfume and dresses so that most of her flesh is visible so the male gets water in his mouth and becomes mad with lust. The only thing humans have in common with other animals is the fact that it is the female who decides where and when this game takes place. And they never seem to get enough.
A long sigh comes through the door and is followed by some sort of neighing from Mike. Then I bend down to look through the keyhole. They are, however, still fully clothed, mostly anyway, but my cousin is lying under him and has her long legs hooked together behind his back.
“Do it,” he hisses.
“No,” she hisses back. “Not now. Not here.”
Then I hear the rattle of keys by the front door. I bang the door vigorously.
“She’s coming,” I call, and keep looking through the keyhole.
Mike flies up from the bed, puts on his jacket and his shoes, opens the window, and carefully climbs out. I run to my window and see him jump from the drainpipe, sit on his bike, start it, and roar away.
Mom comes up the stairs and appears in the doorway, looking at me with astonishment.
“Are you awake?”
“I was just finishing doing math for school tomorrow,” I say, and yawn. “But now I’m going to bed.”
She says good night, turns off the light, and closes the door.
I sneak up to Gertrude’s door and peek through the keyhole and watch her undress with a dreamy look on her face. She moves as if her head is shrouded in some strange fog. It takes her a long time to take off her leggings, stroking her hands down her legs, and finally she crawls under her comforter with a sigh of pleasure.
The mind is a strange labyrinth, full of mysterious rooms with many pictures hanging on the walls, pictures of forests and castles, cities and mountains, oceans and dark, deep waters. And before you know it, you have disappeared into one of those pictures, into another world. And there is another time, different rules apply, and there are lots of people you’ve never seen, but still you know them well. And you talk to these people or walk silently by their side through green forest paths. And maybe there’s a brook there and birds are singing in the trees. Before you know it, you have stepped out of the picture, back into the labyrinth, but then you’re suddenly in another room with different kinds of pictures on the walls. And I’m not sure if all these rooms and these strange pictures are in my mind or if my life and my world are just another picture on a wall in somebody else’s mind. Maybe there’s a boy sitting somewhere, right at this moment, on a beach in Japan and another one high up in the mountains in India or in a forest in Italy. And I can meet them all in the rooms of my mind and sit by their side and talk to them and we understand each other because in the mind everybody speaks the same language. There, everybody is free.
I sit in my hollow for a long time, looking over the water, and time stands still. I’m waiting for my brother, the boy who used to be me, but he doesn’t appear. Although I’m thinking about him, though I’m calling for him in my mind, I can’t find him. I lack his courage. I still don’t believe in miracles. And I still don’t have enough faith in myself to walk on water.
I stand up and walk westward, jumping from rock to rock until I reach the sandy beach farther along the shore. The surf rolls up the sand, stretching its foaming fingers toward my feet. Above the beach is the road west, and I can hear the cars go by behind the bank. Once this beach was called the Money Beach, and Peter and I came here to find old coins that some bank had dumped on the beach, a long time ago, when the coins were out of use. We had to hack them free out of rusty clumps of iron that lay here and there on the sand. Some were made decades ago. Then we went to Peter’s and sat there with some metal polish and cloths in our hands and rubbed them vigorously until they were as good as new. Those were the good days when life was simple.
That was the life that he led. The he who once was me.
And remembering this inspires me to look around for something exciting. There are lots of different shells glittering in the froth at my feet, shoes made of rubber with no soles underneath and boots buried halfway in the sand, floats from old nets, plastic cans, and shards of glass in all the colors of the rainbow, smooth and polished by the surf. The foam from the wave weaves around my feet, and when it subsides, I see something glisten in the sand. I reach down and push the sand away as a large truck drives by on the road behind and honks its horn like a foghorn. It’s a lock on a bag. It is the lock on my schoolbag. I dig my fingers in the sand, find the handle, and pull it out. The books are a chunk of wet mass, the ink has disappeared from the sheets of my notebooks, and the pages have turned to slime that drips from my fingers. I throw the books down in the hole that the bag has left, push the sand over, and pack it down with my foot. I thought that I had gained freedom by throwing my bag in the ocean and saying good-bye to everything. But I’m more a prisoner than anyone. I live in a lie, and I’m constantly on the run.
“To run away is not freedom. To fight, that’s being free,” says the voice in my head, and I know it’s him. He led me here to the beach, exactly to the spot where my schoolbag had washed ashore.
“To fight,” I say aloud, and sit in the sand with my schoolbag in my arms, looking at the surf tumbling onto the shore.
I take the back streets with the bag in my arms to avoid meeting anybody on their way home from school. Before I know it, I’m in Peter’s neighborhood, behind the church. His dad’s gray Chevrolet appears around the corner, and I’m forced to sneak into the yard and hide behind some bushes. Then I move slowly toward the dovecote and hide behind it, watching the car glide into the parking space.
Peter sits in the front seat, and when he steps out, it seems like he’s looking toward the dovecote, like he knows I’m here. Did he see me run and hide? Jonathan strokes the paint on the hood of the car and says something to Peter that I don’t quite hear.
But I hear Peter say, “No, it wasn’t me.”
“Well, somebody has been scratching the paint,” Jonathan says angrily.
“It wasn’t me,” Peter says.
“Look at that,” Jonathan says, and points at the hood.
Peter comes closer and looks at the hood and then at his father.
“Cleaning the car is your responsibility,” Jonathan says forcefully, but Peter just looks down. “Are you telling me the girls did this?”
Peter doesn’t answer.
“Right, that says everything, doesn’t it? This is not like you, Peter. It costs money to fix these things. Well, it will be your job to polish this, young man,” his father says, raising a finger. “I’ll have to get the whole hood painted again now, and I don’t have money for that. How long has it been like this? You better start at once before the rust sets in.”
Jonathan goes into the house, cursing, and slams the door behind him. Peter fetches the car polish and some rags from the basement, and he’s out again before I can sneak away. I watch him dip a rag into the polish and smear the thick substance onto the hood, but every once in a while, he looks in the direction of me and the dovecote. His father appears in the window, knocking on the glass, pointing, and Peter bends close over the hood, polishing as thoroughly as he can. When his father has disappeared from the window, Peter jolts and runs half-bent to the dovecote. I crouch down to the ground, making myself as small as possible, and stop breathing. I hear him come closer, panting and puffing.
“Are you there?” he whispers.
I’m silent as a mouse, determined not to be found out.
�
��Are you there, you fool?” Peter hisses on the other side of the dovecote. “You have to come out. Dad’s home.”
I’m trying to figure out why it should be of any concern to me that his dad is home; after all, it wasn’t me who scratched the paint on the hood. But then I hear a hoarse voice drawling from within the dovecote.
“Leave me alone.”
I realize Alice, Peter’s older sister, is inside the cote.
“Are you drunk?” Peter whispers, obviously very upset.
“Oh, shut up,” says the voice. “Let me sleep.”
These words are followed by moaning and sighing like she’s making herself more comfortable, rolling around in her den.
“Why did you have to scratch the car?” Peter whispers, reprimanding. “You know he loves that damn car. And now I have to polish it and probably pay for the damage as well.”
“Can you please leave me alone?” the tired voice from inside the dovecote answers back.
“Hurry to the basement and take a shower there,” he orders in a whisper. “Alice, please! Supper’s in half an hour. If you’re not there, I’ll —” But he is cut off by Jonathan’s voice from the balcony.
“What are you doing there, Peter?”
“Nothing,” Peter says innocently, and his voice suddenly becomes childish. “I thought I saw a loose board here,” he says, and pretends he’s fixing the cote.
“Have you finished polishing?”
“Nearly.”
“Well, hurry up,” Jonathan says, and disappears from the balcony into the house.
Peter kicks the dovecote and curses in a low voice, then runs to the car and starts to polish again as fast as he can, circle after circle on the hood, so that sweat pours from his brow.
A long, tired sigh comes from the dovecote. And after a little while, I hear low snoring.
Finally Peter finishes polishing the hood and runs into the basement, and I use the opportunity to back hurriedly out of the tangled bushes, crawl over a stone wall, and then run down the street.
Fish in the Sky Page 14