by Karen Rivers
I want to reach up and peel off my ears so that the silence inside me and the silence around me can find each other. I make a show of leaning back in the seat and sighing deeply, like I’m about to nod off. The office is closed, Dad. God, would you shut up already?
The King’s dad had an office that took up a whole floor of their apartment, which wasn’t even one apartment, it was four that had been ingeniously attached together to make one massive space. He did not have the kind of office with blinds. His office had push-button everything, shades that opened and closed with a muffled hush like a footfall in thick carpet. Everything in his rooms was like that. Even the bathroom had air as soft and fresh as golf-course grass. In fact, there was actually a real flat square of grass on the counter that he trimmed with nail scissors. He could tell if one blade was out of place. He hated it when we touched it, but it was impossible not to do it. Impossible not to lay your hand flat there and see the outline of your fingers pressed into that rich man’s golf green.
The grass didn’t fit him. Not at all. A bathroom that would fit The King’s dad would be made of jagged rock and broken things, ice, and steel blades.
The King’s dad was neither fresh nor hushed.
The grass was another test that we failed again and again so he could hate us more. There was probably a reason for that, right? Like maybe he was locked in the attic when he was a kid. Maybe he was beaten with snakes. Or maybe he’s just the worst person who ever lived.
I’m guessing it’s the latter, but what do I know?
It’s not like he ever discussed his past.
The stuff he said was either a criticism or a decree. Every time he talked, it sounded like he was hurtling down a slope, a pile of something inevitable crashing down, smashing the listener to smithereens. He’d had so much plastic surgery that his face moved wrong with his voice, making him seem even less real, both ancient and ageless. Like a being rather than a person. Like something you couldn’t quite put into a category. Feelingless, but alive.
A monster.
Zen, baby, that’s what The King would say to him, in this singsong voice that wasn’t his, either. Find your Zen, Big Daddy.
His dad would yell, spittle flying, and The King would smile his own version of that small, slow smile. The power smile. They would smile at each other, in slow-motion like that, seeing who would win, teeth against teeth. It made me think of the goblin shark, the ugliest shark in the world, the shark that can actually throw its own mouth outward from its body, surprising its prey. The shark whose smile is pretty much always fatal.
Zen, baby.
The King had his own philosophy. One day, he was going to write it down. It was like Buddhism, basically, he said. But better. Buddhism without the hippie angle, the flowing rivers and things people couldn’t relate to anymore, living in New York City. It was about how you could skim along the surface of life or you could really live it, but you could do it without letting other people get to you because you would not attach to other people. Wrap yourself in a veneer that disguised you and confused other people. Save the inner warmth of your true spirit for a chosen two. His Buddhism had sidewalks with rivers running underneath, you just had to believe they were there. Cold, clear rivers that led to the sea.
Daff and I were his two.
Daff and The King were mine.
I can’t explain it like he did. It sounded right when he said it. Ideal. Perfect. And most of all, correct. Save your humanity for the humans, he said. Give everyone else an automaton who meets their expectations. Never let anyone down. Remember the river is there, even when you can’t see it.
His dad thought he was ridiculous. A fucking idiot. And he didn’t hesitate to say it. Hey, have you met my fucking idiot son? he’d say to his cronies and then he’d laugh, and they’d laugh, because that’s what he was like. They’d be uncomfortable because, seriously, who says that about your own kid, in front of your own kid. But they’d laugh because he was a guy whose laugh commanded your own laugh out of you, even when nothing was funny.
Especially when nothing was funny.
I’d say that his dad was the fucking idiot but no one asked me and no one would dare say that about that man, even though they all probably privately thought it.
Fucking idiot, he’d say, and The King would cringe down inside his cool veneer and smile slower and slower and slower, his feet feeling through the ground for that river that wasn’t even there.
I run my finger along a vinyl seam on the seat. My nails are too long.
I think about The King’s nails, growing, in his marble box.
Was there anything left of his fingers?
He used to get manicures. Mom laughed when I told her, offered to buff my nails, but I said no. Embarrassed that I’d told her. Embarrassed for The King. Embarrassed for how different it all was, a bus and two trains away.
On the first day of school, me all pressed in my new white shirt, blue pants, plaid tie, blazer, feeling like a freak in a costume, the teacher said, “So we have a new kid. This new kid’s name is John. John, come on up here and talk a whole bunch of bullshit lies about yourself or even the truth, if you’re that way inclined.”
The teachers at the Royal Pricks’ Academy always swore. They thought it made them cutting edge. Different. Radical. When really, I wanted to tell them, the “Academy” was no different from Red Hook High. The only difference was the way the kids oozed the kind of laconic cool confidence that slid across the floor like oil and kept me slipping, never sure when I was okay, when I was safe to stand. They were all always playing a game, something with complicated rules that no one really understood but also would never admit to not understanding. A game that was more-than-slightly dangerous.
That’s when I did my speech about the sharks and how they matter.
When I cried.
Fucking idiot, The King’s dad would have said. Look at you, blubbering up there, you fucking idiot faggot. (He threw in faggot when he was feeling extra cruel.)
Afterward, I walked alone down the empty echoing hall to the bathroom. I remember feeling really tired, and not only because it took an hour and a half to get to the school and I’d come early, just to make sure. It was a different kind of tired. The kind of tired that you feel in the part of you that’s nothing to do with your body, more like the universe had recently become too heavy to move around in. I held my hands under the cold tap and stared at myself, wondering how I came to be here and why, exactly, I was such a loser and what my old friends were doing at Red Hook and why I’d let my mom talk me into this weird alternate universe where I didn’t belong.
Who cries?
I looked younger in a tie, like a kid playing dress up. I tightened the knot in the mirror so hard that I nearly choked.
Then The King came in. I jumped, not going to lie. He startled me. He let out a short laugh and then he lit a cigarette and drew on it in one long breath, let it out slowly in a twirling shape. He sat down next to me on the floor, the smoke ringing his head. He looked like a cartoon genie emerging from a bottle.
He said, “I think you take that movie a little too seriously, bro. I mean, it was a good film but everything is a lie. Everyone has an agenda. And no one’s gonna die.”
Well, eff you, you liar, I think now.
Someone did die, after all.
He did.
I swallow hard, carsickness and sadness congealing in my throat like sour milk. Cough into my hand.
Dad talks and talks. His voice isn’t boulders, it’s just annoying, like sand being flicked repeatedly in your face. He grinds on, grating on my last nerve.
I keep my eyes closed. I do what I’ve done since I was little and feeling anxious, do what was prescribed by some shrink in a completely nonhelpful “support group for anxious kids.” What I do is I imagine my happy place. Which is underwater. In the sea.
I picture the sharks sliding through the blue depths.
I count the shark species, naming them all in my head.
“OH MAN,” says Dad. “WANT ME TO PULL OVER? ARE YOU GONNA PUKE?”
I shake my head no.
I breathe slowly.
I take out my phone and I text The King. Dude, I type. I am so freaking sorry. I love you. I hope you found the river. Don’t let anyone piss on your pants. Then I delete it without sending it because even though he’s dead, I don’t want him to read that and I don’t know why I don’t and I don’t know what I’m sorry for and the things that I don’t know that I should are so big they are crushing me into the seat like too much gravity and for a minute I let myself sink, finless, drowning and …
“THE BOOG IS GOIG SO WELL! YOU HAB DO READ ID!” Dad suddenly shouts, snorting loudly to clear his nose. “IT HAS TIME TRAVEL. YOU CAN BE MY BETA READER! THAT’S THE GUY WHO READS IT FIRST. I’M IN ONE OF THOSE READING GROUPS ON THE INTERNET BUT I DON’T LET THEM SEE IT IN CASE THEY STEAL MY IDEA. MAYBE YOU CAN MAKE SOME NOTES FOR ME, LIKE ABOUT WHAT YOU KIDS SAY NOW, LIKE … NOOB.” I stare at him in the mirror and shake my head at him but he isn’t looking, he’s watching the road. I like looking at his face when he isn’t looking back. I feel like he’s a mystery and if I solve him then I’ll understand me. The mystery is how much of a buffoon he is, how round-edged and slow-witted. His face is mine, but older and softer. His beard and eyebrows are threaded with gray. The skin flakes around his nose. He rolls down the window and pays the woman in a booth. We’re here. The ferry.
“Hey,” he says out the window. “We make it?”
She nods, bored. “Lane thirty-two,” she says flatly, like she’s actually putting effort into layering each single syllable with ennui.
“Have a great day,” Dad says, oblivious, turning his eyes to me in the mirror. “I know the kids say ‘noob,’ the kids at the beach say it all the time. You’re going to have the best summer of your whole life. You love the ocean, right? Well, this island is … It’s amazing. You’ll die. I mean—” He hesitates. “Not, like, die. Bad choice of words, eh. God, I’m sorry, kid. That must have been…” He does look sorry, his eyes crinkling up until his face looks as puckered and weathered as a piece of fruit that’s been left in the bowl for months too long. “I’m really sorry,” he says again. I nod, to let him off the hook.
He looks a little too relieved.
“Anyway, maybe you can have some adventures for me to write about,” he says. Then he laughs too hard—he’s been eating potato chips like a starving man—and oily crumbs glisten around his mouth and are stuck between his teeth, like some kind of chip apocalypse.
“Chip?” he asks.
My stomach contracts. I shake my head no.
TIME TRAVEL, I type on my phone.
The phone accepts it.
The phone accepts everything.
Swoop, swoop.
15
Somehow when something happens and you can’t photograph it and send it somewhere, anywhere, it’s the worst kind of loneliness.
I slap my phone against my leg, like that will revive the dead battery for long enough that I can take a picture. I want to show someone (Daff). I want to say, Look at this. I want someone (Daff) to say, Wow.
Because, seriously, this place. This is not what I was expecting. Not even a bit.
Mrs. S. would die. It puts the Keys to shame. It’s freaking breathtaking.
“You can plug it in when we get to the cabin,” says Dad. “The car charger thing is broken but I’ve hooked up batteries to solar panels up there and you can plug in anything. We’re completely off the grid.”
I give him a look that he misses entirely. I’m lucky my dad is not a genius. It’s kind of like being parented by a cartoon. Everything about him is two-dimensional. There, but not there.
“Cool, eh?” he says. He gestures with his arm, a sweeping circle, like Mrs. S. waving down passersby to look at her display of fresh cod.
Yeah, I nod. I don’t know who I’d want to see this more: Mrs. S.? Or Daff. (Daff, Daff, always Daff.)
It looks like a scene from a jigsaw puzzle or a postcard of somewhere that no longer exists, as though it really is TIME TRAVEL. The ferry weaves through islands that are dark-green-thick with forests, like cakes with too much icing, top-heavy. So many trees. The islands should sink into the sea from the weight of all that forest. I’ve never seen trees like this.
Or islands.
I’ve got to be honest. I didn’t know places like this existed. You hear about deforestation and the raping of the rain forest and clear-cutting and how everything is wrecked, so I guess I just went ahead and believed it was too late. I guess I thought everything had been cut down and destroyed. Everything like this, that is.
When you live in a city, it can be hard to even know that other realities are out there.
Reality that’s like this.
Nature in abundance.
I feel stupid even thinking that, but …
I reach for my phone to type nature in abundance before I remember that it’s dead. And so is he.
Sailboats dot the waters with huge ballooning sails full of wind. We pass an island with colorful tents splayed out down a hillside. Kayakers paddle near the shore in bright yellow and red boats that look like bathtub toys.
It’s almost ridiculous, how pretty it is. It’s pretend. It can’t be real. But I know that it is because the air smells green and alive and salty and like forever would smell if it had a scent.
Then suddenly, amazingly (or not), I have an attack of feelings that are the opposite of what I should be feeling. I mean, shouldn’t this kind of thing make you feel joy? If nothing else in the world makes you feel joy, this should. All this greenness. Well, this scene just suddenly and totally pisses me off. Like how dare it be so beautiful? The King is dead. I am so angry and sad and empty. I kick my foot against a huge bin labeled Life Preservers and my toes crunch in a satisfyingly painful way. Then my eyes tear up again and I put my sunglasses on and stare into the black reflection on my phone, keeping my eyes off everything that is alive and diamond-sparkling on the horizon against the backdrop of the too-blue summer sky.
16
The car pulls to a stop at the top of a public dock. The road has narro
wed and gravel crunches under the tires. Dad swings the car up into a patch of dirt and grass that isn’t quite a parking spot. I have a feeling that parking lots aren’t really a thing here. You just … stop. The dock itself is a long, long, long ramp leading to a small landing down a steep plank. It has a railing painted bright red. At the distant end of it, an aluminum boat is bobbing in the swell.
“Well,” says Dad, “you might not talk, but you gotta work. We have to carry this stuff”—he points—“down there.” He unlocks the back door and then has to use his whole body weight to pull it open. The hinges groan reluctantly. “This car.” He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t have one if I didn’t need to move so much food. They’re so terrible for the whole world. Environment. Everything. And this one, well. Piece of crap, really.”
I nod. Can’t disagree there. A hunk of rusty metal falls on the gravel from somewhere in the vicinity of the back door. “Yeah,” he says. “Rusty.”
I look at the boxes and bags that look like enough to last three summers: crates and cases and overflowing sacks of food. It takes an hour to drag it all down to the boat, the last part so alarmingly steep that my ankle remembers its injury and starts to throb. “Low tide,” Dad says cryptically. Our bodies are aching and our skin is weeping sweat into our stinging eyes. The boat itself sinks lower and lower into the sea with each load. Up close, it looks questionably safe at best. Patches of rust splay out along its sides like it’s been paintballed with the stuff. I don’t know much about boats, but nothing about this one screams seaworthy. I wonder where Dad purchases his vehicles. The junkyard?
When we finally get going though, it seems okay. The cooler air off the water is such a relief that I’m not even sure I’d care if we sank. The motor vibrates noise around me. The ocean itself looks cold and clear and welcoming. My scalp prickles with sunburn.
The noise drowns out any possibility of talking, thank god, which means even Dad shuts up for a change. The life jacket Dad has forced me to put on is stretching my head away from my body, like those African tribesmen who use rings to lengthen their necks. The boat charges forward, slamming up and down on the waves, whap whap whap. Dad is smiling at the horizon. I stare at his profile in the mist of the spray that the boat is creating, pounding into the water like it is.
