Sea Monkeys

by Kris Saknussemm

  In the blinding benediction of noon he’d start—splashing water down his trunks, behind his neck, underneath his arms. Then he’d dive and shiver in a body-wide spasm and begin the slow pilgrimage with his precise scissors kick. Incantatory Swimmer. He swam like a man Released.

  I kept pace with him through the liquid ice, wondering all the while what he was thinking of as he swam away from himself, deep into Rhythm. Was it hymns like “Oh Beautiful Upon the Mountains?” The girls he might’ve married? The sons he might’ve had?

  I think now it was raw youth for the losing he pursued—the soul cinnamon of childhood, his dead war buddies—his young animal grace turned to flab and angina. He would will it all back, or swim to where it still existed . . . and I would follow him straight up the waterfall if need be—in my silver ark of frogs.

  Then he decided that having me row beside him was cheating. There was no rescue boat on that morning in Minnesota. So he made me wait with binoculars while he went the distance alone.

  Despite everything I knew to be true, I always believed that somehow, this time I would peer through the field glasses and find my father churning back, transformed by the Distance. He’d rise from the water a young man, fresh with the supernatural blessing of second-strength and virility.

  I’m here to tell you that magic is cruel. The last time he attempted the crossing, I barely got to him in time. His body was blue. He had trouble getting in the boat. His lips were swollen—heart palpitating, limbs leaden, speech incoherent. We took him to the hospital. He caught pneumonia a week later and the antibiotics mixed badly with his booze.

  Wait ’til next year, I tried to reassure him. But the last three horrific years passed and he died in his chair watching a rerun of Bonanza.

  He never returned to that lake of time and spirits. But I did, and through him, to the earlier lake of his youth.

  I became acquainted with the friends who stood on the freezing shore that Easter. I became familiar with my own fierce impotence—the death grip that begins in childhood, the hunger of love and instinct that creates substance by the strength of its longing.

  Now I find, I too need to swim across cold water alone. In my mind I must be swimming to meet him—swimming to be him. You see, we do return—by son, by ghost, by God—you have returned to me in all your swimming strength of love for what must never be lost, and yet is lost—lake by lake.

  Let the blood of my heart be as pure as water fresh from the fields of snow, you wrote in your Easter Sermon. I say, You are here and Alive in me. I hold out an oar. Just hold out your hand.

  RUST NEEDS SOME SLEEP

  Welcome to the Ivy League. Even Mr. Very Late Night finally succumbed.

  Bob had passed out beneath a Navajo blanket on the kitchen table, his face buried in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (I’ll say this for the people I hung out with then, they passed out in front of interesting books.) Caitlin and I had whatever sex the thin raft of my single bed allowed. I don’t know if Pete heard or not. The rule had always been if anybody got lucky, all the rules went out the window. I had the feeling that a lot of things were about to go out the window. The small-town school grapevine being what it was, everyone would know about Caitlin and me by noon at the very latest. Jim Briggs would probably know much sooner.

  Caitlin didn’t seem at all perturbed. She woke up blandly, kissed me and wandered out to make coffee, finding Bob pretzeled into a yoga shape. Not knowing a female was onboard, Bob almost tore a hamstring, especially since Caitlin was only wearing one of my T-shirts. I can’t remember if anyone took any special interest in us that day. I was too excited and strung out to pay attention. Besides, Caitlin and I cut classes and took off on an adventure picnic, discovering a giant turkey farm and a lake covered in a little village of shacks where men were ice fishing.

  Maybe that’s why the news didn’t upset me more. Or the fact that it was news to me. She wasn’t living at Number 1 anymore, their name for their communal house. She’d left Jim a couple of weeks before. She’d moved in with Brian DeWit, who was renting a house in the neighboring village. But only temporarily. She and another girl named Andrea were going to rent a place across the river. Andy had already moved in.

  But it got worse. Not only had she run off with Brian (of course “run off” was the last way she’d have described it—that was too old-fashioned and chauvinistic), she’d fucked him backwards and forwards and then decided he wasn’t quite right. The funny thing is that he and Andy had hit it off. Well, sort of. It seems (and I wasn’t to know this) that Brian and Andy were the perfect match (both snide, eat-the-wounded types)—but Brian was having trouble sexually. He hadn’t had any trouble with her, Caitlin smiled, but apparently getting it up with Andy was a different matter (I don’t know if the fact that her nickname was Andy was a factor or not).

  That night we drove over to Brian DeWit’s house to grab what few things she had there and then we went to the new place she was renting with Andy. Brian wasn’t at his place; he was over talking critical theory with Andy. When they weren’t saying things like, “For Derrida, the destruction of metaphysics means that every word becomes a found object,” they were happily cutting each other’s throats. You could tell that with a bit more alcohol their conversation would turn into something out of No Exit or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Brian offered me a Scotch and I accepted. When he offered me another I told him no thanks, I’d felt the click.

  “The click!” he shouted. “Wait! I know that one. It’s from a play. Tennessee Williams. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, right?”

  “Maybe I will have another one,” I said. No wonder Brian was having trouble sticking it to Andy. He was so tightly wound I thought he might have a seizure. After dinner and a “debate” that erupted into a gender brawl (surprise!), Caitlin’s mother telephoned to check if Caitlin had moved in, obviously a little concerned about the musical beds her daughter was playing. As the conversation appeared destined to last a while, and with Brian and Andy trucking off to see a Godard film, Caitlin chucked me the keys to her car and told me to go for a drive. After all, not having a car, I was probably “itching” to. I hated to admit it, but she was right. I’d sold my old bomb back in California to try to meet the costs the scholarship and the student loans didn’t cover. I’d been hoofing it, hitching or busing ever since, and it felt fantastic to be vehicular again. If nothing else, I’d scored a babe with a car. But something about the situation reminded me of being in the student loan office with Mr. Quinty, signing another promissory note.

  Naturally I had to assert my free will and God-given ability to screw things up by driving Caitlin’s car onto the snowbound golf course. Maybe I was looking for Captain Galaxy. I almost rolled a couple of times and then I slid down an embankment. When I tried to power back up the rise, I lost traction and spun out onto a pond, which served as a very wicked water hazard between two fairways. Another baptism. I couldn’t get any traction on the sheer ice, and a shuddering bubble sound gave me the fear.

  I got out quickly. No one was around. The clouded surface of the pond hid a blue-black depth of reed and walleye. Gingerly I tried pushing the car but I slipped and fell. The pond ice trembled.

  To make a long and embarrassing story short, I stood there for a while, wondering what in the hell to do and then realized that I only had one choice. I had to hike all the way to the old apartment and roust Bob and Pete to come help me—hoping to hell they’d both be home and that the car hadn’t fallen through the ice by the time we got back. With their help I was able to roll the Honda safely off the pond. Of course I never told Caitlin what happened—or almost happened. I drove back to her place with my tail between my legs and we had a hot bath together and read some Yeats. Then we had sex.

  We started having a lot of sex. At least I think it was sex. It seems now, in memory, more like the insatiable making of monsters—building them together then losing track of where the creatures slipped off. All they left behind were mo
isture stains and trails of slime, the scent of salt and fern. Somewhere in the midst of it all (about a week later) I moved in with her (at her suggestion, of course). From Bob and Pete’s point of view I just up and left. I don’t remember what I said but I remember Bob saying that I didn’t have to say anything.

  One night I went back to have dinner with Bob and Pete and settle the accounts. My sudden departure had upset the economics of their little world and, I was both pleased and saddened to realize, the emotional balance too. I found Bob chopping onions with his ski goggles on. He’d taken a break from his kabalistic studies to create a large multimedia art piece based on the Krebs cycle. For a moment I felt the old joy again, the warmth and energy of the collective intelligence. We were always on the verge of some immense breakthrough in those days. That was our binding certainty. “We’re going off-road,” Pete would say when a new line of questioning emerged. The answer could be hiding anywhere—in a Yaqui deer dance song or Boolean algebra. “You have to be ready to retool at a moment’s notice,” he proclaimed. “Jettison all assumptions—reconfigure the belief systems. The next secret you learn could be the Secret.”

  I may have realized that I would never know people like that again. Maybe that’s why I felt so torn to be back eating with them. Bob had made Mexican-style spaghetti. It looked like a traffic accident but tasted great, a far cry from the Moroccan spiced calamari and fig tagine with mint and thyme-buttered couscous that Caitlin had introduced me to.

  Already they’d tried to secure an alternate rent-payer but the experience had been a disaster. The guy had taken what he thought was some drug like Ecstasy (but which was probably PCP) and freaked out following a midnight showing of Eraserhead. He stayed awake all night playing the empty hangers in my closet with a butcher knife and then wandered outside in the morning stark naked singing “White Christmas.” Shades of cousin Dennis (who never did become a cold-blooded killer, just a small-town historian and permanent bachelor-closeted gay with anger management issues).

  “Remember,” Bob said as I was leaving, “hyenas are matriarchal.”

  “Stay off the ice,” Pete waved.

  A week later I found myself back at the apartment again, staying over. It was in repayment for them helping me move the car off the ice. Bob and Pete had gone to Sugarbush to go skiing with these twin sisters from Holyoke, and my task was to babysit Bob’s new puppy, Aquinas (who of course was totally outside the terms of the lease). I had a bag of dirty clothes and a hit of mescaline and I thought I’d swing by Koin-Kleen, do my laundry, have a bit of head time and repay the favor all at once. I made myself a burger and read for a couple of hours, played with the pup a while, took him outside and then stowed him in his box by Bob’s bed, popped my mescaline and headed for the laundromat.

  As the drug started taking effect, I began to feel waves of guilt and anxiety about Jim Briggs, Caitlin’s ex. Why was I going to Koin-Kleen, which was right beside their old house—where Jim still lived? We’re always playing tricks on ourselves, that was Freud’s whole point, and making my way through the winter streets that night I started to see that I was walking into a snare I’d set for myself. I must’ve wanted to see Jim.

  There was no one else in the laundromat. I could’ve just started the wash and gone in the other direction, but now I was consciously curious about the goings-on next door. The downstairs curtains were open and he was sitting in the living area. All the lights were out but he had a massive fire roaring. Through the window, I could see that he’d actually stoked the fireplace with the house’s chopping block, complete with the hickory handled wood-splitting maul still embedded in it.

  He had on Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps and was plopped in his reading chair clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels. At his feet were scattered books and what looked like the shredded remains of his honors thesis, while strewn over the floor were the remnants of a Halloween party—miniature Snickers bars, string-pull skeletons and cheap plastic masks. Made me think of my sister . . . at the time lost to Christianity, urinary tract infections and New Jersey.

  Every once in a while, Jim would take a slug of Jack and fumble down for another of the Halloween masks or a fistful of pages and toss them in the fire. One of the masks blew back out of the fire and fell smoldering on the floor. My brain festered with the mescaline—and then the burning witch’s mask fluttered out of the flames and I thought—Holy shit, the place is going to catch on fire.

  Knowing I had to act and yet knowing I was almost paralyzed, I thrust out my arm too hard and burst the fragile membrane between us. But it was only because I busted the windowpane that Jim heard me over the music. He turned, spilled his whiskey, rose from his chair and stumbled all in one motion, releasing a monstrous cyclone of shadows in the room. My hand was bleeding. Hypnotized by the sight of it, I held it up to what light there was coming from the Koin-Kleen sign. Hey, hey, Neil Young was singing.

  “Fuck, man,” Jim mumbled and I almost lost what slippery hold I had on the moment because he had a set of those glow-in-the-dark green fangs in his mouth. Then I shot past him and began stamping wildly on the floor, where the mask had set fire to a section of throw rug. As liquid as the room appeared, I could tell Jim was too drunk to have known about the fire. Even the fumes didn’t seem to worry him. The fat-boy woodstove was empty and cold—all the available wood had been piled into the fireplace, heat soaring up the chimney.

  “Wan beer?” he hollered over the music, gumming the phosphorescent wax fangs out of his mouth and flinging them into the fireplace. The visual information was becoming too intense for me to process. I had to sit down, and thankfully, I found a stained old hassock, like an older version of the one I had climbed on top of to peer inside Alicia Sandringham’s cuckoo clock.

  Jim had what looked like the remains of several day-old Hawaiian pizzas spread out on the kitchen table and the floor—one slice stuck to the bottom of his waffle-stomper hiking boot. Swigging Black Jack and gnawing at a hunk of dough, he kicked his way through the debris on the floor and collapsed back into his chair. Then he squeezed the bottle between his knees and rummaged beneath the chair, producing a large green rubber mask of Yoda from Star Wars. He crammed the rest of the pizza into his mouth and then wrenched the mask over his skull.

  “There was a fire!” I yelled over Neil Young.

  “There’s the fire,” Yoda answered, pointing to the red molten mountain. “Wanna shot?”

  I intended to decline the whiskey but I needed something to cut the hallucinations. Although mescaline is more of a surface drug than acid or mushrooms, the colors and the mood were overloading my brain. I kept turning around to see what I was missing out of the corner of my eye and then I’d find Yoda trying to drink Jack Daniels and debating whether or not to sacrifice The Portable Nietzsche.

  “I have . . . to go,” I said. Or tried to say. Maybe I just thought it. Something about laundry—and screwing up Jim’s wife. His life.

  How long I sat there I can’t be sure. The shadows changed so the fire must’ve burned down. The music was long over. In fact another album had come on. The Clash? I couldn’t remember what we’d listened to. Time had just been sucked out of the room like the heat up the chimney. Jim was gone too. There was just Yoda, trampled Snickers bars and shreds of Nietzsche.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  How many times had I said that? I remembered my laundry. I was worried that it would freeze in the washing machine. Why would it freeze? Maybe I should throw it all onto the fire. Save me the cost of the dryer. Maybe I was only imagining that I had a load of laundry next door. What about the pup?

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “The worsht enemy yoo can-encounner will always be yoo, yersself. Yoo lie in wait for yersself in caves an’ woods,” Yoda quoted.

  Shit, I thought. No wonder I’m paranoid.

  The voice spoke again. It was Jim’s voice. Behind the green latex-smelling face, I thought he’d blacked out. But he stirred and took another slurp.
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  Finally I managed to say. “I’m sorry, Jim. About Caitlin.”

  An immense labor to talk. I noticed that he’d dragged himself out of his chair and baited what looked like a very large and malicious rat trap beside the refrigerator with a piece of the Hawaiian pizza. He could barely walk but he managed to arm the spring-jawed device without snapping a finger off.

  “Be of good chair, Luke Skywalker,” he giggled and then made a sound like he was vomiting inside the mask, but he was only hawking up some phlegm. He grabbed a long-necked beer out of the fridge, lit another Camel and returned to his chair. The fire burned down. He threw some pieces of chopped-up stool on. The embers gleamed up into flames. I drank another beer. He told me he was actually glad she was gone—that it was over. Then he started crying.

  It was a dreadful sound, coming from inside the Yoda mask. Gus Gus revisited. Then when I realized he was sobbing his guts out, I wanted to put my arm around his shoulder. But it seemed so pathetic. Of course I felt a sharp wire of guilt prodding me. I’d benefited from his misery. Or so I thought at the time. More fool me.

  The sun was coming up. It looked like one of those remorseful alcoholic mornings. A day of frost-coated branches and treacherous black-ice sidewalks.

  Jim yanked the Yoda mask over his head and flung it into the kitchen. It struck the rat trap when it hit the floor and the steel spring almost barked, it sounded so loud. Like one of my father’s burps. Jim paid no attention. His eyes were bleary with rheum and tears but his voice was sober now—that creepy lock-up-the-knives sober you get to when you’ve been on the hooch or crank too long.

  “Wan some breakfast?” he asked, opening another beer.

  “I have to go,” I said. This time I kept my promise.

  I started walking home down the slick, dark street, examining the dried blood on my hand. Then I remembered my laundry. When I got back to Koin-Kleen I could hear that Jim had on some band I’d never heard before at peak volume. It was so loud it vibrated out of the mouths of the empty washing machines. As quick as I could, I shoved my damp clothes into a dryer, fed it with change and headed back to check on the pup. I didn’t want to be in there when the cops arrived to get him to turn down the stereo.