Deep, Deep Ocean

by Carter Bowman

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said a voice behind us. We turned to face the same woman who just had her neck cut standing in front of the doorway — arms crossed, angry.

  A look of confusion and fear dawned on my father’s face. He turned back to the woman who had been supposedly killed, but it was too late. The crow flew at my father’s vulnerable back, a stream of noxious gas trailing from her neck, talons scraping the air. We saw the form above us, my brain racing to keep up with the understanding that the monster had finally gone from cornered to deadly in the face of losing its prey.

  My father reacted faster than my brain could, his own shoulders swinging around, blocking the view of the descending crow. I could only see his face, his kind eyes that looked down on me each morning in the bath. The eyes that said good morning and good night and made my home a safe place. They were the eyes that, usually so happy, had distorted with pain as the crow’s talons ripped into his back. He did not tear up or even shudder. He only looked down at me, all haze gone from his vision.

  There was crying, though. The crow-woman’s inhumanly high voice was wailing some ways off, and she no longer clawed at my father’s skin. Peeking beneath the canopy of his arm, the crow’s figure had contorted in a mess of unhappiness on the ground. The red of my father’s blood on her contorting talons glistened, the woman’s twisting body a picture of pain.

  The second woman, an imitation of the first, but a poor impersonation of anything human, came flying at us. I was ready though, my eyes following the crease in the fabric created by the puppet’s torso as it struck. My hand darted out, catching the fold in the worlds, and tore. The woman split in two along the crease, without even a cry to acknowledge it had died.

  Dim light poured from the parting in the puppet. Blue veins slithered and squirmed across every surface of the deeper casino through the hole. We had no choice. As the crow-woman wept and sobbed at the toxic blood my father had lost protecting me, the remaining flock of men and women in black swarmed from every side. She would not fall for the same trick again.

  Now standing at eye level with my father’s crouching form, I pulled on his arm, “Trust me.”

  My father was blinking through the scrapes on his back, fighting the surely scorching pain. His eyes found the tear, looking at the dim light pouring through. He was staring at it as though trying to force his grown-up mind to rationalize what he was seeing.

  He breathed once, surrendering. “Okay.”

  Down, through the hole, I pulled my father into a deeper layer of the world. His grip on mine tightened as great blue veins writhed, connecting to heaps of arms and legs that closed around us. Luffy had prepared me to handle the stress with a long empty road, but now my father was being thrown into the darkest corner of what lay just beneath the surface of his four decades on Earth.

  Not the darkest, a voice in my head said softly.

  “You were very foolish to come this far,” said the heaps in unison. Mouths slopped around loose flesh that had once been men and women. Where light had once been drawn from them, green now seeped back into their bodies through veins in greasy globs. The puppets looked sick, the infection having spread out of control.

  “I think it’s time for you to go back,” I said in a loud voice, doing my best to drown out the serenading voices.

  “Very foolish, very foolish to come.” The escas spoke over top of one another. Without the living to lure, they had lost their purpose, left to be roaming speakers for the monster. All except for a single small form, charred and black. It had gone past the deepest, most poisonous greens to a dead looking charcoal. It twitched, sending shards of black up the veins and out of sight.

  It should never have attacked Dad. That wasn’t what it was made to do.

  I couldn’t hear the great footsteps of the monster in the halls. Was it waiting to pounce, to chase us again and turn the world upside down into a funnel with no escape?

  “I’m not going back, not after you ruined my wonderful meal, Silas. You poisoned him, you poisoned my first snack as well. I am sick, Silas. You taint me time after time, and then tell me to go back? I have nowhere to go back to.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. “I saw where you came from. It’s lonely and quiet, but right now I think it’s what you need. Maybe you can try again someday, meet the right sort of people and it won’t hurt so much. I’m sorry about that.”

  The apology reminded me of Luffy’s lopsided face. It seemed to have the same painful effect on the monster as well, the faces of the plastic figures turning downward together. The voice was coming from the entranceway now, singular in its fury.

  “I have… mixed emotions about you, Silas,” said the creature from the black ocean. Its frame filled the entranceway, a bulbous shadow falling across my father and me.

  “Everything is so easy in this world. People want, they desire, and they take. But you… you demand everything of people. You turn everything the same as yourself — too bitter, too complicated. Your father, he wanted to be alone, to have his own dreams. But then you came along — deep down he feared you, you know.” My father’s hand grew tense in mine. The words were spiraling in my head, refusing to make sense. But my father’s suddenly bated breath was casting the last-ditch lies into nervous plausibility.

  “Oh yes, don’t try to pretend, Richard. You’ve been giving yourself to me for a long time now. Anything to get away from your family, even for a moment. And you think I am the hideous one?”

  The creature’s form shuffled towards us. Shadows across its body had given way to dead blackness. The sores had overcome her entirely, becoming splotches of ink trailing patterns across the faces bulging in sharp relief. One of those faces belonged to Luffy, I was sure of it.

  The creature continued, content with our silence. “Yes, Silas. You cause nothing but a loss of hopes and dreams wherever you go. I do suppose we are alike in that way, only I have enough grace to allow those close to me to replenish themselves,” she hiccuped, a cloud of sooty gas escaping her throat, “And yet, everyone says they love you, everyone makes your little life perfect and never even says boo when you get out of line. AND YOU HAVE THE GALL TO TELL ME TO LEAVE?”

  The monster was before us, bellowing a revolting gas of disease and rot that left something like the coppery taste of blood in my mouth.

  Her eyes were hanging black orbs. My tiny body was frozen, too afraid, too broken by her words to move. Everything was heat and fear, rippling up and down, back and forth between my skull and feet.

  Unwanted. Never wanted. You spoil everyone elses' hopes and dreams wherever you go.

  She would know. She knows my father better than anyone.

  The Iron Man tie, crumpled beneath a cap on his bedside table.

  Isn’t it time you started growing up, Silas?

  Every moment I didn’t grow up and move on was another moment my father was forced to wait patiently before he could go live his own life. He would have been happier without me, without the responsibility of his pathetic son who could only drag him further into trouble.

  You were supposed to be the hero, but you only dragged him further into danger.

  My thoughts, lost in the black eyes of the monster were interrupted by the streaks of red cutting through the blue of my father’s shirt blocking my view. It was only as I stood behind my father that I realized how small the monster really was. It had been enlarged by the polluted hopes of the casino’s prisoners, but my father stood taller than it by at least a head. He looked down on her now, fist tensed, crimson blood dripping from the gold wedding ring on his left hand. It glistened, at odds with the dull light.

  The ring rose into the air. I followed its arc as it hesitated for only a moment before my father brought the full weight of his curled fist crashing into the face of the creature. Red speckles scattered in every direction. My father’s spine spasmed through the tears in his clothing as the pain recoiled back into his body from the impact.

  The creature lurched backw
ards, great heaves of black pouring from sizzling holes left by the speckles of my father’s blood. The smell emanating from the wounds reeked of infected sores. I could not imagine what was assaulting into my father’s nostrils as he took the brunt of the miasma.

  It’s gone too far, I thought, watching the pitiful monster writhe. The blood that saved Luffy can only hurt her now.

  The monster was rolling and moaning. Jagged points rose from its body where my father’s blood had not burned. A single shape rose above the rest from the creature’s back as it writhed. Squirming and pushing, the form of a head and bony shoulders emerged from the monster’s skin, a familiar gray and brown against the decomposing black.

  “Luffy!” the name escaped my lips in a rush of realization through the fright and disgust. Undeterred by the rattling gasps of the dying creature, I broke free of my father’s grip and ran towards Luffy’s struggling body.

  My father called out my name behind me, his hand unable to grasp my wet shirt to pull me back. I heard his concern, but had no time to explain my relief.

  Luffy was alive.

  He can come home, too. He’s going to be okay.

  Luffy’s torso was free from the back of the monster. She looked more like a boulder now, melting into herself with trembling shudders.

  “Luffy, Luffy, can you hear me?”

  Luffy’s head nodded, eyes still closed.

  “You’re alright, you’re coming home,” I grabbed Luffy by the shoulders, but his brittle form wouldn’t budge.

  Luffy’s eyes opened. They were sad, full of regret and pain. But he smiled, shaking his head.

  “What do you mean, no?” I said, desperately. “You’ll come home. You get to be free, don’t you? You can read and be a person and stay in my room. You can grow up and be my friend…”

  Luffy shook his head again, the sad smile fixed on his face.

  “You don’t get to do any of those things, do you?”

  Luffy’s hand reached into the crease where the monster met the floor, pulling at something out of sight. With his other hand he took my own, guiding it downward.

  “What is it?” I asked, uncertain.

  His free hand, still cold, still the same skin of a fish out of water, led my hand down to the fabric between the worlds bunched in his clenched palm. The fabric was heavy between his fingers, dense and nearly opaque. Luffy’s hole would go a long, long way down.

  Tears welled in my eyes, the knot in my throat making the words I wanted to say come out in choked spurts.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You were supposed to come and have your own life.”

  Luffy only looked back, his face scrunched in the familiar apology he had learned all on his own.

  “You knew this whole time… Knew that it was going to go this way, or something like it.”

  The creature moaned again, trying to shift its weight away from the folds in the fabric, but Luffy held tightly. His expression became intent now. It was the same look my father had worn, the same look of every brave hero in the final hour. Only, his sadness made it a new kind of real, an acceptance that being good did not mean winning. He held my gaze.

  “I’ll see you again?”

  Luffy’s face broke into a real smile this time — carefree and happy. He nodded, eyes creasing into the lines of a hope finally his own.

  The monster groaned again, trying to lift its body on wilting bones. Our time together was over. Using our combined strength, Luffy and I tore at the parting in the worlds. Our hole opened above the depths of the black ocean, its dark expanse spreading in every direction. For a moment, I thought I was going to lose my balance, but Luffy’s arm found my chest and pushed with the last of his fragile strength. His smile did not change as the great hulking form slid soundlessly into the void, dragging with it the swarm of undulating blue veins.

  My father’s hands found me, pulling me back as first one, then another of the escas were dragged into the gloom. The last heap, charred and black, looked at my small body wrapped in my father’s strong arms with something like jealously before it too was pulled into the deepest world.

  Somewhere far, far below, she hit the water of the black ocean with a quiet splash.

  Chapter Ten

  Things began moving a lot more slowly. My father, still shaking and nursing his deep cuts, followed me back through a parting in the worlds and into the now empty casino.

  “The real casino,” he had said aloud. It was impressive how quickly he’d picked up on even the most surreal realities, grasping details I was still struggling to work out myself. Only, I didn’t think he was quite right about it being a more real place — any more than the top floor of a building was the real floor. That would have made Luffy, would have made the past day I had survived, less real somehow.

  We ended up sitting together on the beach. At first, we sat with his arm around me, looking out at the ocean, watching the waves reflect moonlight back to us with each rhythmic rise and fall. Eventually, his weight around my shoulders grew uncomfortable, and we ended up sitting side by side.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, breaking the silence as a wave slid up the sand to touch our feet. I’d taken my soggy shoes off, letting my toes flex in the wet sand.

  “He’s not gone. It’s okay,” I responded. “He promised he would come back. Luffy’s smart, smarter than I am. He’ll keep his promise.”

  “Not about that. Though I’m sure that was hard, too. You’ll have to tell me about him sometime. I meant about not being there, about what that thing said at the end.”

  “Oh.” The words had managed to rattle around in my head every time I allowed them to. I had kept them mostly sedated until my father brought them back to life.

  On our walk to the shore, I’d decided to concentrate on what I could visualize. Luffy’s last smile. The feeling of his hand in mine. The feeling of my hand in my father’s. They were real things, hard things. Everything else was complicated and heavy. I studied the water. Even under the crescent moon it was still a deep, deep black. The mysteries that lived at the bottom didn’t know any difference. They didn’t know if it was night or day. They had no idea if they were wanted or not, or if they’d made the right decisions along the way to where they were now.

  “What that thing said wasn’t the whole truth. It’s hard to explain, but you’ll be a parent someday yourself. It can be a lot. Your mother and I love each other, and we love all of you, but it can be hard, Silas. It can be hard to keep up, and then unplanned things happen, and we start scrambling.”

  The words were not connecting. I didn’t know what I needed to hear at this moment, but this wasn’t it. My father twitched, trying to test the scrapes on his back with his free hand. He couldn’t reach, though. The blood was no longer flowing, but the lines through the tears in his shirt had become congealed and angry.

  “Do you want to tell me about what happened? Where did you come from? How did you find me?” he asked.

  I shrugged. The story was long, and I would have to dredge Luffy’s face to the surface again. The memory of him filled me with that familiar melancholy. I’d told my father he would come back, but I wasn’t so sure of that. The ocean was a deep place after all. He may not be able to swim back to the surface until I was an old man, if he wasn’t too late all together.

  “I ran away,” said my father. His voice was not directed towards me.

  I looked up. Tears stood out against his pale skin, tiny tide pools that caught the moon on their way down his face. His shoulders were shuddering, both hands raised to cover his emotions. I wished he wouldn’t. They were more real than his apology, more real than anything I had seen in any of the worlds I had visited today. They caused a knot in my stomach at the sight of them — I wanted to see every one of them individually and wanted them to stop at the same time.

  “After Christopher was born, everything got so heavy, and nothing prepared me for that weight. I felt like I was being dragged away from your mother and the easy times we�
�d had. I let go of a lot of things, Silas, and that’s okay. That’s part of being a parent. But every moment of you and your sister growing up, I was still myself. I had to fight to keep that every day this past year — I started slipping. I started breaking promises, and in the end, I started losing faith in myself as a father and a husband. That’s an awful feeling and something I never wanted you to see.”

  The Iron Man tie, mangled under my bed. It wouldn’t look the same. Ties didn’t go through the washing machine the same way t-shirts did.

  “You didn’t break all of your promises,” I said, leaning into him. The breeze from the late-night ocean was turning cool. “You did end up taking me to the ocean.”

  The following week was an uncomfortable one, though not without its benefits. My father and I arrived home just past three o’clock in the morning to a fury from Mom like I had never seen before. A startled looking Maggie peeked through the curtains as Mom shouted at Dad with words that garbled together in a way that the creature from the black sea would have cowered at.

  My father’s hand pushed me past the two of them, away from the noise. It was a wasted effort, though. I could hear Mom’s voice all the way up the stairs and through my locked bedroom door.

  “What do you mean ‘it’s all okay?’ You don’t call, you don’t respond? Oh! You were somewhere with bad reception, naturally. Well doesn’t that make it all better, Richard? And do you want to tell me why you came home with our son, who I thought had been abducted?”

  This was potentially the bravest stand my father had taken yet. He did not raise his voice to match Mom’s angry tone. Only one pair of footsteps paced back and forth in the hallway.

  “I called the police, Richard. I thought he’d been taken. THEY picked up on the first ring, but did you? Noooo… Would you care to tell me where you have been? Where you’ve been going at night? Because I know you haven’t been working. And I swear to God, if you mention Anthony one more time…”