The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  Have you ever looked at your child with so much love you felt like you’d split in two, and it would be okay to die because you’d only be a soul then, and a soul is made of pure love? I pick up my baby girl, hold her before me in my outstretched arms. She looks right at me with those dark, astonished eyes. “Please, take me to you, Coco.”

  The coconut on my baby’s body nods, just once, slowly. Then it tilts back on my baby’s neck, looks up. Farther back, further up, farther and further, back and up, until the coconut rolls down my baby’s back and strikes the floor.

  “Ah!” screams Prudencia.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her.

  But is it? The coconut starts rolling away.

  My baby’s body wriggles in my outstretched arms. I study her; her neck is sealed with a seamless plateau of new skin. She seems fine, except, judging by the way she’s reaching out her hands, she wants her papi to hold her close.

  You got it, baby girl. I embrace her, and together we go follow the coconut.

  El Cuento de Follow That Coconut!

  It knows where it’s going. It takes a left through the galley and waits for me to open a door on the opposite end. It goes through the doorway and stops before the stairs that lead to the deck. Coconut wants up, apparently.

  I put on a windbreaker hanging on a hook by the stairs—tricky when holding a baby—then pick up the coconut and carry it up the stairs in one hand, my baby in the other. I go up slowly, and have to hold the coconut between my knees to open the hatch to the deck.

  Sea spray, salt, the wild roar and the relentless blue of the Pacific Ocean. It’s hot, and it shouldn’t be, this time of year, this far from the equator. The sky is clear, and the sun is painful. I’m always freshly bewildered when I emerge from belowdecks.

  I kneel and place the coconut on the deck. It starts rolling toward the bow. I tuck my baby girl inside my jacket, leaving only her neck to peek out, and follow the coconut, walking fast.

  It tumbles end over end, gaining speed, dodging obstacles by going around or tossing itself over them. For a finale, it catapults itself overboard.

  When I peer over the edge, I see the coconut cutting a wake in the water, due west.

  I walk as quickly as is safe—two arms around my tucked daughter—across the deck and to the helm.

  There, I place my baby girl gently on the floor and let her crawl around. I flip a switch to speak to Prudencia. “Follow that coconut, Prudie. Follow it wherever it goes.”

  El Cuento de Nádano Has a Terrible Idea

  “How’s school?” I asked Connie. I’d called to see how her midterms were going. It had to be a voice-only call from the breachdive, since I was so far out at sea.

  Connie sighed. “Oh, they’re trying to kill me with papers, Papi.”

  She called me Papi now, instead of my name. I liked it. “Yep, sounds like college,” I said.

  “Grad school,” she corrected.

  “Yeah, like I said, college.”

  She snorted. “You’re just jealous because you never went to college.”

  I pulled my head back, confused. “What do you mean? We went to school together.”

  “You majored in Marine Affairs. That doesn’t count. I mean, what kind of degree is Marine Affairs? It sounds like you learned how to cheat on your wife with fish.”

  Ha! She was being playful, not overly nice or careful. I was becoming a person she could joke with again. The time away actually was helping us. “Well, guess whose degree is paying for your fancy master’s program? So you just say ‘Thank you, Papi, for letting me follow my dreams.’ ”

  “You’re right,” she said, suddenly a lot more tired. “This is my dream.”

  I didn’t want the fun to end. I tried to salvage the moment. “Hey, it’s not that bad, is it?”

  She took some seconds to reply. I imagined she was doing the tension-headache eye-rub. “Ela’s been crying.”

  “Crying? What do you mean?”

  “You know, tears, bemba like a diving board, uncontrollable wailing, crying?”

  “But why? Is she sick? Have you—?”

  “If you ask me if I’ve taken her to a doctor I’m going to scream.”

  Of course she had taken Ela to the doctor, and the doctor found nothing. So she’d tried a stricter sleep schedule and a looser one, three different diets, holding her more, classical music—still Ela cried. She tried dozens of other things—still Ela cried.

  “I haven’t slept in weeks,” Connie concluded. “I’m kind of at the end of my rope.” A beat. Then: “Except I can’t be. My rope doesn’t get to have an end. I have to pull more rope out of the air like a magician and give that to Ela, too.”

  I wanted to tell her I loved her and I would rescue her and we are a family and I really was better now. But that would be too manic, too much. So, rubbing the back of my neck, I picked my words very carefully. “So. Well. Maybe it would help if I took our baby girl for a while?”

  The quiet before she answered was as big as the universe.

  But when she answered? Big Bang. “Yeah, Papi? You feeling up to that?”

  “I am,” I replied. “I mean, you keep calling me Papi. Maybe I should start acting like one.”

  Her voice, desperate for hope, tried to hide how desperate for hope she was. “Can you even take her on your boat? NOAA would let you?”

  “Oh, yeah!” As cool as I wanted to be, I couldn’t help blurting, “NOAA has this whole initiative called ‘Babies on Board: Support Services for New Parents.’ I can send you the brochure.”

  “NOAA has a brochure for everything, don’t they?” she laughed.

  “I know, right? But listen: they’ll bolt a crib right in to the floor of the boat that will turn into an escape pod if there’s any trouble. Seriously, it’s from the future. And they’ll give her an RFID chip in her ear, so we’ll always be able to track her. They’ll provide age-appropriate food based on what we tell them. We tell them she’s allergic to walrus butts, boom! No walrus-butt baby food.”

  “Ha!” she said. But she didn’t say anything else. She good-humoredly waited for me to go on. She wanted so much to be convinced.

  I did my best. “The breachdive is the safest boat in the world, full stop. It’s because of the AI captains. It’s like what happened when computers started driving cars: accidents dropped almost to zero. There’s never been a single accident on board a breachdive more dangerous than someone bumping their head on a low doorway. And I’m short! I’m so short, Connie! I can’t even jump high enough to bump my head!”

  She laughed. Then she stopped laughing and thought. Good vibes still poured through our connection. “I’ve never been apart from Ela.”

  I was still in blurt mode, so I said something I instantly wished I could take back. “I have.”

  Connie didn’t take offense. Instead she said, “Yes you have. You’ve been working hard on yourself. Remind me to kiss your AI psychologist.”

  “She’d like that,” I chimed in. “She’s saucy.”

  “And NOAA has a program to help new parents. And breachdives are very safe. And you are Ela’s papi as much as I am her mami.”

  I didn’t want to say anything wrong, so I said nothing. I just sat there and hoped as hard as I could.

  “But it’s not fair to you,” she said finally. “You’ve never had to take care of her by yourself back when she was a good baby. And now?”

  “And now,” I said, “I will dry my baby’s tears. Like any good father would.”

  She sucked breath. “You’re gonna have to dry my tears first, you keep talking like that, Papi.”

  El Cuento de Nádano Traversing Uncharted Waters

  Though the coconut leads us, it keeps pace with us. We gun the engine, we slow to a powerless coast—it doesn’t matter: the coconut stays exactly the same distance ahead of us. As an experiment, I ask Prudencia to change course. When we turn north, the coconut stops moving and, floating placidly, waits.

  When we get behind it aga
in, it heads off to wherever we’re going as fast as we’re willing to go.

  We’re still offline, so no GPS. But our backups have failed, too. The compass spins in its bowl. For a while we could sound the bottom of the ocean and know our position, but the ocean floor has descended to aphotic depths, unreachable.

  We can’t even use the stars. It’s daytime. It’s been daytime far too long, according to all the clocks onboard. But the sun refuses to move from its perch in the sky. It isn’t going to let any of this happen in the darkness.

  My headless baby girl’s sleeping in the captain’s chair. I have her covered in my jacket. I need nothing else in life than to watch the rise and fall of her breathing.

  “I don’t want to be anyone’s papi if I’m going to act like my parents,” I say to Prudencia, out of nowhere.

  “You love Ela so much,” she replies. “You’re nothing like your parents.”

  Don’t want to wake my baby girl. I sing my response to Prudencia softly, like a lullaby: “Don’t lie to me, Prudie. You saw me, you saw me. Don’t lie to me, Prudie, you saw it come out. The monster, the monster. Don’t lie to me, Prudie. You saw it, you saw it. The monster came out.”

  El Cuento de La Canción de la Honor Freezer

  This is the freezer.

  Where we keep the corpses.

  When seamen at sea go.

  To Davy Jones’s locker.

  Inside here I can’t hear.

  Like sound’s just as frozen.

  As all my compassion.

  For my baby’s tears.

  She’s weeping she’s weeping.

  Oh no I can hear her.

  My baby my baby.

  I’m freezing I’m freezing.

  Rage do not come here.

  Rage you’re unwelcome.

  Rage go away now.

  Don’t scream in my ear.

  El Coco you saved me.

  From Papi and Mami.

  Please one more favor.

  For everyone’s sake.

  I’d rather be dead.

  Than be cruel to my baby.

  Coco please give me.

  A coconut head.

  El Cuento de Una Isla Muy Extraña

  Such pity in Prudencia’s voice. Such fierce, protective gentleness. If I didn’t know better, I’d think Connie had programmed her. “There is no monster in you, Nádano. You locked yourself in the honor freezer. You would have let yourself die in there rather than put Ela in danger.”

  “So you admit she was in danger.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth!”

  It’s a heck of a time to laugh. “You don’t have a mouth.”

  Prudencia softens. “You overreacted, Nádano. Big surprise.”

  “Sarcasm,” I say, boggled and not unamused. “From you?”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve learned a lot today. But don’t change the subject.”

  “And what is the subject?”

  “This: every single parent in the world has been driven over the edge by their children’s crying.”

  If she had said something I could have in any way found funny, I would have laughed myself into a coughing fit. Instead, I split like a coconut, and my milk pours out. “What if I had died in the freezer, Prudie? My baby out in the middle of the ocean, no one to take care of her.”

  Back to herself now. Back to the Prudencia who always knew how to talk to me. “I would have taken care of her. And you knew that. And you knew I would take care of you, too. You knew you weren’t in any danger, and neither was your daughter. You just needed a break. Of course, sticking yourself in the honor freezer was an overreaction. But you only did it because you could. Because you trusted I would take care of things.”

  Honesty wells in my throat like a blister, and then, like a blister, bursts. “You’ve helped me more than anybody. Even more than Connie. Of course I trusted you.”

  “You’re a good man and a good father,” says Prudencia. “You just have to always remember to get the help you need when you need it.”

  “I know, Prudie. That’s exactly what I’m doing right now, following this coconut. I’m getting the help I need.”

  The breachdive begins to slow. “I think we’re here, Nádano.”

  My baby girl notices, too, stirs in the seat. I stand and grab binoculars.

  Ahead of us is a small tropical island. Milky Way sands, palm trees swaying on the shore. Children—scores and scores of them—cavort on the beach, or sculpt the sand, or ponder the biome that forms just where the water crawls toward their feet. Some haven’t learned to walk yet, while others are nearly adults. They must have come from every part of the world, from every culture. The only obvious commonality is that they have no heads.

  Only then do I notice the silence. Never have children played so quietly. My guess is that their necks are full of laughter.

  Also on the shore stands a naked man, staring at me, waving.

  The fingers of his waving hand must be two meters long. He has no sex, no belly button, and no nipples, but his build looks otherwise male, pot-bellied and middle-aged. The knotty fingers of his other hand are so long that they idly scratch the sand at his feet.

  And since his head, too, is a coconut—bedraggled and dripping, since it has just come from the ocean, I realize—he looks surprised to see me, even though it’s clear he’s been expecting me.

  “Too dangerous,” says Prudencia. I see her camera has turned to the shore. “Don’t go down there, Nádano. Remember what he did to me? Let’s think first. Let’s try to understand what’s happening.”

  I pick up my baby girl. “Don’t worry, Prudie. I know what I’m doing.”

  “How can anyone know what to do right now? This is . . . It’s . . .”

  “You said you trusted me, Prudie,” I said, with one arm bouncing my baby on my hip, and with the other hand snapping my fingers so that she turns the camera back to me. “I know Coco. I’ve been here before. But I won’t go without your permission. I trust your opinion too much. May I have your permission?”

  Prudencia thinks. Thinks. El Coco is still waving, tirelessly friendly. And then I hear the gangplank extending. “Okay,” she says. “On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  She wiggles the camera back and forth. “Take me with you.”

  I need a moment to understand what she means. But then: of course, the handheld! Why hadn’t I thought of that? “Prudie, you’re a wonder. I’d have you with me always if I could.”

  “Aw,” she replies.

  It’s a matter of three minutes to go belowdecks to Sick Bay and retrieve the handheld. Carrying my baby girl up and down with me still isn’t easy, but it’s easier. Maybe I’m getting the hang of things a little.

  When I’m back on the deck and look out to the island, Coco starts waving again. I walk down the gangplank and onto the shore.

  El Cuento de la Reunión de Nádano y El Coco

  As I approach El Coco—he stands by himself a little ways off from the playing children—I point the handheld at the palm trees on the edge of the beach. They’re stretching toward the water at 45-degree angles. Clustered beneath their branches are some coconuts, and also some heads of children.

  “Do you see them, Prudie?” I ask the handheld. She can’t respond—no speaker on the camera—but the indicator light is on. It’s so important that she witnesses this for herself. There’s no way I could explain to her the faces clustered above me, like putti sculpted into a cathedral ceiling. They’re alive: yawning, sleeping, fully awake. All ages, all genders. Some seem leery of me; others dispassionately track me; still others look on the verge of a smile.

  I don’t see my baby girl’s head on any of the trees. “Hello?” I say to them, but none respond. “¿Hola?” doesn’t work, either.

  “Once they speak, it’s time for them to return to the world,” El Coco says. I never heard him approach; he’s so close to me he could rip me apart as easily as he had raked through the mainframe, crumpled the w
all panel.

  My headless baby girl grows restless on my hip. I bounce and rock her. “Is that why you bring them here, Coco?”

  El Coco gestures to the frolicking children. “I tend to them. I talk to them, sing to them, run with them, let them show me the shells that they discover. I let them watch their own bodies running and playing, delighting in being alive.”

  He holds up his rootlike fingers to me, tapered at their ends like carrots. They grow, erupt, springing forward as fast as flying fireworks, until they can reach the heads hanging clustered on a nearby tree. The heads laugh when touched, lean in to El Coco’s fingers. “I can wipe their tears with my feet still on the ground,” he says. “I stroke their cheeks and remind them how beautiful life is when there’s love.”

  I take a deep breath to say what I need to say next. “Ela’s been crying, Coco.”

  He turns to me while still stroking the faces of the hanging children. There is such gentleness in his unmoving features. “I know, Julito, I know. Why else would I have come to your family, but to bring you comfort?”

  No one has called me Julio since I was a child. Much less Julito. It is—this is impossible but true—fine. It doesn’t hurt.

  El Coco lowers his hand, and his fingers retract as fast as tape measures, until they’re only long enough to touch the ground again. He extends that hand to me, and I take it.

  His fingers wrap around my bicep like vines. El Coco is careful to leave the handheld in my hand uncovered, though a few fingers, like curious antennae, waver over it, sensing, exploring.

  “I know you prefer to work in the dark, Coco,” I say. My voice is more pleading than I had intended. “But I need Prudencia with me. She’s more than a computer. Please don’t take her from me.”

  The coconut floats back on El Coco’s shoulders, as if reappraising the handheld. “I can tell. She has grown. She has the mind to see me now, the language.”

  Coco stoops so that his coconut looks directly into the lens. “I am sorry for attacking you, Prudencia. I had thought you would steer Julito away from me. Clearly, I underestimated you. But I will make amends. I will help Julito fix you. I can travel anywhere as quick as a thought, you know. I will bring him whatever parts he needs.”