Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  “Wait. Don’t just walk away. I want to hold you.”

  “No. I said no. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I’m starting not to care who sees us.”

  “Well, I do. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She stood up. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Lori…”

  “Today meant a lot to me.”

  “Me too.”

  “Okay. Good. I’ll see you.”

  She took about three steps toward the dive shop and then she turned. I was already on my feet. She came into my arms and kissed me in a way that turned my brain to white light. There was nothing held back. She was completely there, her breath, her mouth, her tongue, her body, her hands, her arms.

  Then, just as suddenly, I was alone in the dark.

  Columbia Shallows is a maze of coral walls. The reefs come almost to the surface and the bottom is only at thirty or forty feet. I dove a tank in the morning and snorkeled in the afternoon. In between we had a picnic lunch on the beach: fried chicken, potato salad, beer for those that wanted it. Eventually I relaxed enough to enjoy Lori’s presence, even if I couldn’t touch her, or ask her anything more than to pass the salt.

  The shallow water made for long, easy dives. The sponges were huge, all shades of incandescent reds and yellows, and starfish sunned themselves on top of the coral walls. Everybody was relaxed and joking—except for Tom, who circled Lori like a shark.

  When we got back, just before sundown, he announced that everybody was on their own for dinner, then he and Lori disappeared inside the shop. Dr. Steve asked me to join him and Allyson, which I thought was pretty sensitive of him, given what I’d seen so far. He knew a place with Texas-style enchiladas, a rarity on the island.

  Halfway through dinner he asked me, “Made any progress?”

  I was thinking of Lori, so the remark threw me. “What?”

  “On this father business.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m really getting any answers down here.”

  “Of course not. This is where you have to look.” He tapped the side of his head. He leaned way over his plate to fork up another bite of enchilada, and dribbled cheese into his beard. “Do you know the questions you want answers to?”

  “Some of them. Part of it is purely selfish, I guess. I want to know if he was thinking of me when he died. I want to know if he killed himself, I mean, deliberately decided to die. If I could just know what he was thinking, it would tell me so much. When he died, that was the first time death was ever real to me. It’s like his brain was a camera, and it took a picture of death. If I could get inside his brain, I could see what death looked like.”

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Allyson said. Her dinner was a fruit plate, a daiquiri, and a stack of corn tortillas. “Why do men worry about death all the time? I mean, the point is like to live. Live until you die, and then it’s over. Am I right?”

  Once I thought about it, it did seem that most of the people who rail against death and struggle for immortality are male. My mother says she’s ready, whenever her time is up. “It’s hard to argue with,” I said.

  Dr. Steve belched loudly and excused himself to go to the bathroom. He seemed lost as he wandered off through the restaurant. The conversation had lapsed without him, so I said, “Do you and your dad travel a lot?”

  “My dad? You mean Steve?”

  “It’s okay. Lori told me he was your father.”

  “She told you that?” She laughed a jaded, forty-year-old laugh. “She probably believes it.”

  “You mean he’s not…” My face felt hot.

  “Actually I’m hurt that you could even imagine a resemblance.” She grinned and rolled up another tortilla. I looked down at my plate and concentrated on my food. We were sitting that way when Dr. Steve came back.

  He poured the rest of his beer into his glass and said, “You know, the Buddhists say that all unhappiness springs from desire. I don’t know what made me think of that except I just had my penis in my hand. Anyway, Lacan said that desire springs from loss. The loss of your father leads to desires you can’t fulfill, for knowledge maybe, or for some transformative experience. The lack of fulfillment of our desires leads to unhappiness, hmmmm? Loss is inevitable, you know, you can’t change that. So maybe you should work on the desire.”

  It was more sense than he’d made in the entire time I’d known him and it took me by surprise. Besides which, the word “desire” only made me think about Lori more. “I’ll have to mull that over.”

  “It’s highly symbolic, you know. To lose your father to the Abyss. It’s a potent symbol, like the crossroad in African mythology, the place where the spiritual and physical worlds cross. I think of Nietzsche, the business of the Abyss staring back into you. Jung had something about it also, which I can’t bring to mind.”

  “Jesus,” Allyson said. “Nietzsche and Jung. I think the poor guy just needs to get laid.”

  We got back to the dive shop around nine. I turned the corner of the yellow cinder block building and saw that Lori wasn’t at the tables. My heart sank. I said good-night to Allyson and Dr. Steve and spent five minutes in my room for the sake of appearances. Then I went outside and sat at the Tecate table.

  The light went out in Tom and Lori’s room at nine-thirty. Waves breaking in the distance sounded like voices. I thought of them having sex there in the dark. Lori had said every forty-eight hours, and tonight was the night. It knotted me up all inside.

  Maybe she would tell him no. Maybe even now they were arguing, she was telling him she would leave.

  Yeah, right.

  I heard the tick of a slowing bicycle. I turned and saw a white shirt, starlight glinting off chrome, a face: Walker, from the commune. He propped the bike against one of the tables and sat down next to me.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “An early night,” I said.

  “You seen Lori?”

  “She and Tom are holed up in there.”

  “Ah.” He stretched his blue-jeaned legs, folded his hands behind his head, wiggled his bare toes in the sand.

  “So what’s happening down at the commune?”

  “Everybody’s having sex down there too.”

  “But not you.”

  “No, man, it’s sad. I lost my taste for earnest, unwashed college girls. One of those things, I guess.”

  “Maybe you’re a romantic.”

  “I see you been talking to Lori.” When I didn’t answer right away he said, “I had a flirtation or something with her, I guess it was last fall. Didn’t come to anything. She stuck with Tom because Tom doesn’t really give a shit about her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she gets what she needs from him. In her case, that means she gets knocked around a little. No way I’m going to play that shit. Is there any beer around?”

  I was falling down toward Palancar Reef with too many weights and no buoyancy vest. “There’s a bar over there but I think it’s locked.”

  “Screw it, I don’t need one.”

  “He really hits her?”

  “I’ve seen the bruises, man. Gave her a black eye once. Guy’s got a temper, gets wound up tighter and tighter and then boom. About once a month you see some busted up piece of furniture out by the dumpster, you know Tom’s on the warpath again.”

  “I can’t believe she’d be the type to put up with that.”

  “Type? There’s no ‘type,’ man. You never know what somebody else is going to bring out in you. That’s why people don’t just give up on sex entirely, stay home and practice self-touch. Like my daddy used to say about poker, never two hands the same. Always that thrill of the unknown.”

  “So,” I said. “You came down to see her?”

  Walker shrugged. “Okay. Maybe I am a romantic.”

  We were quiet for a while, just a couple of guys, sitting around the tropics, looking at the stars.

  After a while I said, �
��Lori called you the local shaman. Is that for real?” I was thinking of Doors songs: “Shaman’s Blues,” “The WASP,” and of course “Celebration.”

  “I guess. I don’t want to get into a whole ‘what is reality’ thing. Calling me a shaman is as good as anything else. Every society’s got to have somebody in that slot. Weddings and divorces. Help the sick. Pray for rain. Raise the dead.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not talking zombies or anything. I’ve been known to conjure up a departed spirit, if somebody really needs to talk to them. Plus I’m sort of the bandleader for the all-night drumming sessions.”

  The thought had sprung up against my will. “Could you raise my father?”

  “I could give it a shot. You want me to?”

  “What, right now?”

  “No, it’s a pretty involved thing. You have to fast and meditate, we have to do a lot of ceremonial shit. It pretty much takes all day. I can put it together for you if you want.”

  “No,” I said. “No, that’s okay.”

  We talked for another half hour. I told him about the stereo repair business. He told me about growing up middle class in Harlem: poetry, theater, card tricks, then the step from stage magic to the real thing. “They’re closer than you think. Ask anybody who does sleight of hand. When it really cooks you can feel it, the mechanics disappear and you’re making it all happen through the force of your will. Which is exactly what capital-M Magick is about. The guys that do the best sleight-of-hand stuff—I’m not talking about disappearing elephants, I’m talking like Harry Lorayne—they can do a card trick that will change the way you see the world.”

  “And that’s what you do?”

  “That’s what I aspire to. Shamanism’s really the same, a few tricks to change your perspective. Get you back in touch with the world.”

  “The Gaia thing.”

  “Yeah. If you can make people experience the planet as a living thing, man, that’s deep. You can turn them around.”

  “I’d like to see the act,” I said.

  “Saturday night. Day after tomorrow. We’re going to do a drum thing, out on the beach.”

  “Perfect. Because I am out of here early Sunday morning.”

  “Cool.” He stood up, put a hand on my shoulder. “Come by as early as you can. Skip breakfast and lunch if you really want to get into it. That way if you want to work on your father, we can do that too. Either way, the drums start a little before sunset.”

  He walked his bike out to the highway and the clink of his pedals faded into the darkness.

  I looked at my watch. It was 10:30. Everything I thought I knew was slipping away. I thought about Lori and Tom fucking, Tom hitting her and breaking up the furniture. It was another tough one to get my mind around. Then I thought about Lori flirting with Walker and Lori flirting with me and wondered what the difference was, if any. After that I thought about a bunch of hippie types dancing on a big circle on the beach. In the middle of the circle was supposed to be a big fire, but instead it was a pile of smoking ashes, like the ones my mother brought home to Dallas. The smoke turned into a wavering cartoon ghost with my father’s head, with bushy cartoon hairs coming out of his nose and ears.

  My watch said it was 10:32. It looked to be a long night.

  I walked up to the highway. It was stark black against the lesser darkness of the sky. There weren’t any cars. I kicked off my moccasins and started to run. I ran at the night as hard as I could, on and on, until fire crawled up my side and left me gasping on my hands and knees.

  The morning was cloudy and cool. I couldn’t seem to get my blood moving. The boat ride took an hour. The whole time I had the sensation that Lori was trying to meet my eyes. I would look at her and she would be staring off in another direction. I told myself she hadn’t really had a chance. I thought about the way she kissed me Wednesday night and told myself to be patient.

  I couldn’t get it out of my head that in less than two days I was supposed to be on a plane back to Texas.

  Images danced in my head, some of them the same as the night before. I skipped the part about my father. My father wasn’t much on my mind. It was Tom and Lori, Lori and Walker. Lori and me at the beach, which already seemed as distant as a dream.

  We anchored off the south end of the island. To the east were the shallows where we’d been the day before. The sun slid in and out of the clouds. Every time it went under I got a chill. I was the last one to suit up, hoping in vain that Tom would leave me alone with Lori and Hector’s father, if only for a moment.

  I hit the water in an explosion of bubbles. I blew air into my vest and waited for Tom, then we turned and swam together down to the reef. The sun broke through for a moment and the milky water turned clear. The towers of coral below us lit up in shades of yellow and purple and green.

  I’d slept badly. I was jittery and the water felt cold. I had to consciously make myself slow down and go easy on the air. It was hard to pay attention, even to myself. It was like I wasn’t entirely there, like the water flowed through me. Like I was a ghost.

  We pulled up at the top of the reef and I checked my depth gauge. Seventy feet. Tom pointed at something and it took me a second to understand. It was a sponge, the biggest I’d ever seen. It must have been five feet tall, neon yellow, shaped like a Greek jar. A queen angelfish hid behind it. It fluttered away from Tom’s hand and shook its tail at him. I could see him get a real charge out of it.

  We drifted for an hour, Tom pointing at things, me nodding. When he swam off to herd the other couples into line, he was never out of my sight. I would look up now and then and see the boat far above us, following the trail of our bubbles.

  We were low on air. Tom had led us to the top of a coral tower at fifty feet. My heart was beating strangely, hard but not very fast. I could feel it shake my chest. Tom looked at Allyson and Dr. Steve’s air gauges and sent them up. Then Pam and Richard waved him over.

  I was on the edge of the drop-off. The Abyss, Dr. Steve called it. There were terraces, with white patches of sand between the coral heads, as it fell away into darkness. After a while I started to swim down.

  It felt good to be moving. My heart beat faster and I was warm and comfortable. My air gave out and I reached back to flip the reserve lever. It was noticeably darker as I got deeper. I closed my eyes.

  Something grabbed me. Shark? I thought, suddenly afraid. I turned around and a huge shadowy thing took hold of me shook me. It was Tom. His face was inches away, rage in his eyes. He had me by the straps of my backpack. Shaking me. Shaking me.

  I thought, where the hell am I?

  We were ascending, keeping pace with the cloud of bubbles from our regulators. I looked up. Pam and Richard were alongside the boat. They looked like insects, skimming the surface of an upside-down ocean.

  I tried to push Tom away, nodding and signaling that I was okay. He shook me again and didn’t let go. His eyes, inside his mask, looked like he was going to hit me.

  Holy Christ, I thought. I went over the edge.

  In an instant the water leeched all the heat from my body. I couldn’t look at Tom any longer. Pam and Richard, please, God, had already started up and hadn’t seen it. If Tom said anything to Lori…

  We were almost up. I had to suck hard to get any air. Tom stopped at ten feet and let me go with one hand long enough to reel in his depth gauge. It said we’d hit a maximum depth of 103 feet, not far enough to worry about decompression.

  My air was gone. I touched my mouthpiece with two fingers to show I was out. Tom looked like he was trying to decide. I threw my mouthpiece over my shoulder to let him know I was serious. He waited another second or two, then gave me his. It was a hard pull. I saw he’d already tripped his reserve too. I gave it back and pushed his hand away and swam for the boat.

  When I broke the surface I saw Lori by the ladder. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” I said, trying not to gasp. I heard Tom come up behind me. I handed her my fins, then undid
the straps and let her pull the tank up and off. I climbed into the boat and sat down.

  I didn’t look at Tom. I unclamped my regulator from the tank, following routine, not letting my brain kick in. My hands shook and I had to take it slow, elbows on my thighs. You’re supposed to blow air out of the tank to dry out the seals on the regulator. There wasn’t enough in mine to hiss.

  Pam and Richard were raving about some monster piece of staghorn coral they’d seen. Tom sat down on the opposite side of the boat to strip off his vest and T-shirt and knife. The clouds had burned away. Everything was so bright it stung my eyes. I felt drunk and detached, and at the same time I felt sick and scared, mostly over what Tom would do next. I got my gear sorted out and then sat aft, arms wrapped around my knees, trying to look casual.

  “Can we go back to the shallows and snorkel for a while?” Allyson said. “That was cool yesterday.”

  Tom looked up. I didn’t like his eyes. They were flat and cold and dark. “We didn’t bring lunch,” he said. He sounded almost normal, but not quite. Allyson got very quiet. Lori turned around from the wheel to look at him. Hector’s father gathered up the empty tanks, his head down, and racked them.

  It was a long ride back. Long enough for the sun to finally warm me up, though my brain was still in shock. Lori parked the boat and we all carried our tanks into the shed for refills and hosed down our personal gear on the dock. I barely had the strength to carry my tank. I wanted to lie down and sleep for a million years. Mostly I wanted Tom to go on acting like nothing had happened. But as I walked away I heard him behind me. “Your room,” he said.

  We went in and Tom closed the door. I got a fresh towel and dried off, then sat on the edge of the bed. I ached to stretch out and close my eyes.

  “So what the fuck happened?” There was no way to pretend he wasn’t mad.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Another ten feet and we could both be dead. Bent, embolized, drowned, anything. What the hell was going on in your head?”

  “That’s just it,” I said.