by Chris Eaton
One day, as the story went, Chris Eaton fell into the pool, and his sister was there already, as she always was, with her skin softened to terry cloth, her eyes like flaming oil rigs from the chlorine. She felt the displacement of water more than saw him. Something had entered into her space. And the adults watched her circle him several times before she poured him back onto the Wolmanized deck and blew into his mouth.
He inhaled again.
He coughed.
He blinked.
The way his father told the story, they were fishing. His father was one of the first men to have his own fishing show, a local access program that came about after the ice was broken by television angling pioneers like Ron and Al Lindner. With only his wife as a camera operator, the senior Eaton cast his line in all the secret spots he could find around the state, like the tiny pool behind Wolf Point, or the poorly groomed outcropping on Tongue River he named after his son. And when things went no further than that, Chris Eaton’s father cursed the more popular shows for pandering to people, by setting their shows in more exotic locations, or using pre-caught fish, which was more common than you might expect, his knotty hands like singed rope ends in the hood of his windbreaker.
Chris Eaton’s father took him fishing, and he landed a thirty-nine pound carp at the Nelson Reservoir. His father took him fishing and he landed a twenty-six-and-a-half pound channel catfish at Castle Rock. His father took him fishing and he snagged a small parr, through the eye, which he was legally bound to toss back because of its size and there was no way to remove the hook without taking the eye with it. The sun felt like toasted bread against his skin, and he felt sick, and the next thing he knew there was a sting on the back of his hand and across his left cheek, a quick popping in his ears, the muted sounds of movement, bubbles rushing past his ears.
The water was cold.
The current punched him in the chest and spun him sideways.
His shoulder struck a rock.
And he inhaled.
Instead of being instilled with fear, he transformed his bedroom into a water mausoleum, with jars of it collected from every spot they had ever visited (three of the five Great Lakes, Nelson Reservoir, the overly chlorinated habitat of the neighbour’s pool…), most of which had begun to facilitate life and made his mother gag when she came in to change his sheets. He begged his parents almost daily to take a vacation to the ocean. During lightning storms, they had to keep him from going outside to lay down on the lawn. And he spent hours soaking in the bath until his skin began to prune and separate from the layer of fat beneath it. It was only when he hit puberty and began worrying about odour that he gave the jars up. From that point on, he was all but directionless.
When he fell in the water and sank to the bottom, the young boy forgot everything. He forgot his name, forgot who he was, forgot his address, his eye color, his shoe size (not that he’d ever had any), forgot the number of trees inside the walls, the number of trees he could see outside the walls, the beating he’d just been given, his favorite food, and essentially forgot about all the horrible days he’d spent at the Saint Roche orphanage.
Saint Roche (alternately known as Roch, Rochus, Roc, Rocco, Rokku, Roque, Rok, Roko, Rókus, Pókkou and Rollox) was not a proper historical saint, at least as set out by most European hagiographic scholars, and some would even argue (among them, the contemporary Frenchman Pierre Bolle) that he owes his existence as much to a typo as to any real acts of bravery, selflessness or godly miracles, an aphaeresis rather than an apotheosis, a linguistic trick of dropped and/or rearranged letters, when Christians in the South of France in the fifteenth century (in a time of great hardship and conservation of resources, including ink) took a shortcut when translating the capabilities of the Italian Saint Recho – who had, up to that point, been nothing more than a spook people enlisted to ward off storms – and instead of transcribing the entire French word for storm, tempeste, the new entry was abbreviated to the simpler peste, accidentally rooting this new sub-saint in pestilence and disease. Until then, Bolle claims, he never existed. But the nineteenth century Greek academic Phaeron Troetschi documents several records that feature Recho and Roche as separate people, including a list of French prisoners in Vorghera, Italy, in the years and days leading up to Roche’s celebrated death there, as well as journal entries indicating early festivals dedicated to both men, including the main one for Roche in Montpellier, France, his supposed birthplace. According to Troetschi, Roche was the son of the governor of Montpellier, and showed several early signs of sainthood, not least of which was his mother’s prior barrenness and, even as a newborn, never seeking to suckle while she was observing the fasting periods of her renewed faith. Then, when he was in his late teens, the entire population of Montpellier was struck by a horrible disease, bed-ridden and pain-filled, with a momentous thirst that could not be slaked. Many of the town’s citizens threw themselves in the Mediterranean to escape it. Both of his parents died. But Roche was miraculously spared, and he took his entire inheritance and distributed it evenly among the area’s few survivors, setting out on foot to the next town where he had heard of a similar plight. He cured people on the edge of the sea all the way to Rome until he too succumbed to the killer virus; but rather than retiring to bed like everyone else, he booked passage on a boat to help sufferers in Africa, from which he never returned.
The Ursuline nuns founded the Saint Roche orphanage in Natchez, Mississippi in 1729, after a similar flu struck most of the area, with so many of the sick gathering at the banks of the Mississippi to die. This likely spread the disease even faster, but no one could really stop them. They far outnumbered the healthy and simply forced their way to the banks to drink. The official story back in France described an Indian attack, perhaps hoping to bolster nationalism in the face of growing tensions with Great Britain, but the actuality of the plague was indiscriminate, decimating both the French colonial and Natchez Indian populations, particularly adults. And when they arrived and discovered the truth, one of the nuns from Potenza suggested the orphanage be named after San Rocco to protect the children against future outbreaks.
Of course the orphanage – and the nuns – had a much darker secret history, carried in whispers on both sides of its walls. The sisters had arranged the passage to America for hundreds of eligible young French women (orphans themselves, or prisoners, or anyone else without a real identity of their own), to allegedly help them find husbands to repopulate the State. But each girl was also supplied, for the ship, with a small, locked box, shaped like a casket, said to contain the elements of her dowry from the King himself, to be opened only when a satisfactory suitor was found, and before the ships even landed, rumours were already circulating that something more insidious and occult was afoot. There was talk of mutiny, with many of the sailors just looking to make a fast buck by dumping the future brides in the drink and filching the dowries for themselves. Others feared the boxes were caskets, with vampires or worse inside them, wanting to dump both the girls and their charges. Luckily for the girls, most of the main troublemakers took ill and died, supposedly after a group of them snatched a box and broke it open for themselves. After that, the young women were left alone.
The rumours, though, did not stop. On their safe landing, all the young passengers and their caskets–each box now dripping wet, from what appeared to be an inside source–were brought to the orphanage. While many of them did eventually find husbands, each and every box remained locked in the attic. The orphans described demons (horrible sea creatures that could turn you to water with their touch, which the nuns had been charged by the Pope himself with guarding and perhaps, more insidiously, they even worshipped them), and these theories were backed by hard evidence. Several key boys had been disappearing, the real troublemakers, whom the nuns had threatened with things they could only whisper. One boy had helped carry a box of nails he claimed came from Italy, blessed by the Pope himself, in order to trap whatever was up there. And on the outside of the building n
ear one of the attic windows, there was a suspiciously expanding ochre stain.
***
The young boy had never been liked. Born in 1756, at the outbreak of the Seven Years War, he was always looked on, by the other children and even the nuns themselves, with a certain degree of distrust. Bad luck, even. He was regularly beaten. Again, by both the children and the nuns. And his assailants were not even bad people, just superstitious, suspecting somehow that the war would last as long as he did, especially among the other children, who had already forgotten how horrible their lives had been before that, too. When he was only two, the other children tried to smother him. During his first seven years, in fact, he narrowly escaped death at their hands a remarkable eight times. They had begun to call him El Gato, because even though most of the orphans were either French or Indian (mostly of the Yazoo and Cherokee tribes, who had moved in after the earlier epidemic), many of the words from the predominantly Spanish inhabitants (who had also moved in around the same time, when the French were weak) continued to plague them like a virus of language.
They had also begun to suspect that he was enjoying his beatings, that he liked to fight. So the other boys decided instead that he should explore the attic alone, and find out once and for all what was really in there. When he came back to say he’d found nothing, they called him a liar and tried to drown him. Because that’s what you do with cats who have one life left to live.
Chris Eaton’s name was actually Christophe Valentin. His mother was a mermaid and his father was a dragon. Or they might as well have been, since he never met them, just woke up one day in an orphanage in Mississippi and felt the first pillow against his face. He never knew why the other children hated him, because he was still too young to understand what war was, or hatred, but he went to the attic because they said so. And when they subsequently ordered him down to the pond, he did that too. And when he first hit the water, all he felt was the sting on the back of his hand and across his left cheek, there was a quick popping in his ears, and then nothing but the muted sounds of movement, the sound of bubbles rushing past his ears. The water was cold. Someone punched him in the chest and spun him sideways. And he began to forget. In fact, he forgot so hard that he lost things he’d never even known, or things that hadn’t yet happened, his first kiss, his first love, the feel of lightning entering his side, forgot the way he would eventually die.
When they discovered he was enjoying being held under water, too, the other boys gave up, leaving him alone with his peculiar aqueous obsession. Even after he escaped the orphanage, with nothing to his name but a pilfered blanket and canteen, he gathered it from any place that was important to him, starting with the drops he scooped from the pond where they’d tried to drown him but eventually adding water from the Mississippi, on which he floated south to Baton Rouge and into the Gulf of Mexico; the first rainfall of his freedom; the hurricane he survived in Pensacola, West Florida; the first alcohol he tasted, at nine years of age, from a man on horseback near Mobile, who then tried to bugger him so he stuck the man with a sharpened stick and stole his knife; the last tears he ever shed; another swig of rum, this time some he made himself in St. Augustine, East Florida, at fourteen, with pocketed sugarcane from the plantation on which he’d been hired. He went thirsty most days he was on the lam so he could save all of it in the canteen, mixed like the days of his life into one inseparable sludge.
When he heard the horses coming in North Carolina (where he’d heard there was easy money robbing newcomers), he immediately went into the river to hide. Beneath the surface, he was always safe. His life was his own and the current washed away all remnants of the nuns, the Spanish and Indian boys. He was nothing. He was everything. Free to do and be whatever he chose. The catfish and bream butted up against his ankles and legs, and he hugged them close to his body and once thought he might even take a bite. He went deeper, resting his cheek against the riverbed, and he suddenly heard the words, the fateful words, as if they were whispered to him by the water itself: Chris Eaton.
He remained where he was.
Christopher Eaton?
And after a brief moment to consider, he came back to the surface and said: Yes.
The rebel soldier snatched his canteen, took a long drink, spat it out, and then poured the rest back into the river.
From that point on, that’s who he was.
PART 4
After that, everything went from You could do this or You can be anything you want to You have to do this and You really need this, like all teenagers were the same, which was bullshit, and he couldn’t even sit down at the mall any more without some security guard telling him to keep moving, like it was against the law to sit down. Once you became a teenager, everyone treated you the same, like you were liable to vandalize something at any moment, or like they were trying to teach you and help you become an upstanding citizen. But none of them had any idea. And none of them were terribly upstanding either, if you really wanted to know. Hypocrites. His Math teacher had been an English major. The guy who taught Sociology once massaged his friend’s boobs after she passed out at an assembly. These people were going to guide them into the future? The specifics of each teenager’s life didn’t even matter. You could have a 23-and-3 wrestling record. You might have won $100 on KGON for correctly giving Joni Mitchell’s real name. Perhaps your father was the Mayor, lucky shit, because then you probably wouldn’t even go to jail for burning down the waterfront. Maybe you were some kind of nerdy tenor-sax prodigy, and were possibly also a kicker on the football team, just to confuse things, or a guard, in either Massachusetts or New Hampshire, or some other State with a city called Dayton. It was like everyone was the same person, and only the details were different; and the details, which were really what distinguished them, were unimportant. You couldn’t drink in public. Or smoke. You had to pay more for car insurance, even if your personal record was clean. And you already had to know exactly what you wanted to do with the rest of your life. This was what you were taught in school. Don’t dream any more. Apply yourself! Be a doctor, be a scientist, be a senior process engineer, be some other bullshit job that cemented your position in society. Why not work for a gas company? Or play cricket? Or manage a plant and bust some unions? Or join the bullshit army? For Chris Eaton, this was where the momentum was lost. Because the only real difference between being a child genius and a genius of the older variety is that, as a teenager, you had to prove yourself more often. And there were so many goals inside him that he sometimes became confused, and faltered, he might have done so many things, if he’d been born somewhere else, under different circumstances, if he’d been born a girl, born sooner, born later. He would have kicked out the stars. But as soon as he became a teenager, his dreams held him back.
He wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten there. It was like the key moments of his life were completely unconnected, quantum particles that appeared on the other side of a wall without having passed through it, following his father’s jobs around the country, so that one moment he was in Illinois, or Maine, as a Boy Scout, where his Kub Kars won almost every award for design but crept across finish lines like reticent worms; and the next, he was in Oregon, or Indiana, skipping the rest of the two-dimensional map by virtue of air travel, while their furniture traveled in a Newtonian moving truck below. He was a teenager in California, where they held weekend bonfires on the beach, hugging under their sweaters without copping direct feels, and where they started a blog site so they could all stay in touch online when they eventually left for college. And then he was on the other side of the country, at his first summer job at the waterfowl park in Rose Bay, the only thing he’d ever done that really made him feel good about life, tending to the environment, part of a team of students responsible for tours and maintenance, but more often than not cutting the grass and fishing dead waterfowl out of the reeds where they’d been beaten to death by other bullshit teens.
In grade 10, they read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and his teac
her thought this was a good opportunity to talk about Greek mythology, just because it was a story about guys in togas, even though Caesar was Roman, not Greek, and there was barely any mention of gods in there at all. She got out a list of gods and assigned one to each of them, and Chris Eaton’s was Anchorites, the Greek god of disguise and indecision. One day, Zeus came upon a prism, falling in love with his own repeated image, and in their frantic coupling, the prism was chipped. Thus Anchorites was born distorted, with a seemingly infinite number of shapes and form, looking different from every angle, so it was impossible to ever truly know him. He appears as a secondary character in dozens of other myths, although never recognizable from one to the next.
His own myth, however, was one of great tragedy. Because no one could ever truly know him, women saw what they wanted, and fell in love with him at the drop of a hat. Even Aphrodite could not help throwing herself at him. And although she was equally, undeniably perfect in every way, Anchorites still woke the next morning with doubt and regret, unable to shake the possibility that there might be someone even better for him, someone even more perfect, more beautiful, somewhere in the world. So he snuck away before she roused, and refused to answer her messengers. Aphrodite, in her wrath, destroyed Thebes.
Anchorites left a string of broken hearts behind him, which unfortunately included the sea nymph Theacronis, who helped her father Poseidon control the tides, and who cried so much at losing Anchorites that she flooded several coastal communities near Crete. Poseidon requested an audience with Anchorites, and demanded answers for what he saw as the scorn of one of his most beautiful daughters. Anchorites claimed innocence. Poseidon said: I am sorry, Anchorites. Perhaps my ears are growing old. Or perhaps it is the sound of the ocean. But I could not hear what you said. Could you repeat it?
