Here & There

by Joshua V. Scher

  Otto waved at his mother as he stomped out of the ocean with his father and Ecco. Eve waved back. She brushed the sand off her palm on the towel spread out next to her and reached into the cooler to retrieve a Ziploc’d tuna sandwich. The boys screamed with delight as Reidier lifted them both up and over a wave that was chasing them. Otto held his left hand, Ecco his right. Both boys armed with orange water wings. The three of them glistened with symmetry, like a three-headed sea monster emerging from the primordial sea soup.

  She had been surprised by Ecco’s prowess in the water. Otto had kept a close circumference around his father, never straying too far out of the radius of Reidier’s arms. Ecco, on the other hand, delighted in the buoyant medium, kicking and splashing in whatever direction a wave turned him. His haphazard play was so relentless that Reidier had to continually march after Ecco with Otto in tow. Where Otto only tacitly trusted the unknown of the deep, Ecco rejoiced in its newness, completely ignorant of the unknown. At one point, Ecco even removed one of his water wings and held it with his opposite hand so that he might dive below the surface and disappear except for his periscoped arm.

  Eve crunched into a corner of her tuna sandwich, while watching Reidier and the boys dig for sand crabs at the water’s edge. Tuna sandwiches had been a delightful and bizarre epiphany for Eve when she moved to America. Both in Morocco and France she had of course enjoyed the fresh tang of a seared tuna steak. During college, on a weekend jaunt to Amsterdam with her boyfriend at the time, she had learned about the delicious variety of mayonnaise, devouring the exquisite yin-yang contrast of piping hot pomme frites tempered by the cool, viscous white.

  Tuna salad, however, was an altogether different concoction, repellent in appearance yet surprisingly stunning in flavor. The mixture of chopped hunks of meat, curls of celery, and whipped paste created an epicurean whole much more than the sum of its parts. The flat, comforting shield of toast would moisten and layer itself against the palette, while the tart, gummy mixture of tuna and mayo would wrap around the tongue’s taste buds, and the crisp celery yielded a surprising and satisfying crunch between the molars.

  In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, philosopher David Hume reduced the creative power of the mind to merely the compounding or transposing of that which we perceive into a new magical “creation.” The act of invention was the act of recombination. A golden mountain is the joining of two ideas: gold and a mountain. Greek mythology is full of these creations: centaurs are the combination of horses and men; griffons, eagles and lions. Tuna salad was the appetizing manifestation of Hume’s ideas, the recombination of two disparate entities, the mermaid of sandwiches.

  It took some time and a lot of coaxing for Eve to finally condescend to eat meat from a can. The concept of flesh sealed inside tiny tin drums for preservation baffled her. Surely it must be some type of punitive cuisine fed only to prisoners of the worst sort. Yet there it sat, in its place of prominence on a corner shelf in the market; and shoppers were willingly buying it in packs of six. Eve could not understand it any more than she could accept the concept of all-you-can-eat restaurants. Why Americans would pay extra money to gorge themselves past the point of fullness, past the point of comfort, distending their bodies like they were trapped at a banquet in Dante’s Inferno, was beyond her. Nevertheless, Eve had to capitulate to the incomprehensible delight that is tuna salad.

  “They’re also called mole crabs because of how they burrow into the sand,” Reidier said to the boys, who were collecting their bounty into a red bucket lined with mud and filled halfway with seawater.

  “Emerita,” Otto said.

  Ecco had begun to remove the sand crabs from the bucket and line them up on a piece of driftwood so they would not burrow away. He grouped the larger ones at one end and the smaller ones at the other.

  “What?” Reidier asked Otto.

  “Emerita,” Otto repeated. “That’s their genius.”

  “Genus,” Reidier corrected. “And very good.”

  “Genus,” Otto repeated, while digging up another of these gray, shy crustaceans no larger than his thumb.

  “Discovery Channel?”

  Otto shook his head. “’Quarium. Maman took me.”

  “Ah, that was nice of Maman. I think I’ll go check on her. No going in past your knees.”

  The boys both nodded, neither looking up from their work. Reidier stood up, stuck his hands in an outgoing wave to clean off the mud. He squinted at her as he sank-stepped his way up the beach.

  “He is kind of amazing, no?” Eve asked.

  “He’s like a sponge. Remembered the genus of sand crabs from your trip to the aquarium over two months ago.”

  “No, not Otto. Ecco.”

  She could feel him strain to stay still, struggle not to drop his jaw and look at her. She knew he was trying to tread carefully, as you would stalking a deer that took a moment to nibble at some berries, so as not to spook her from the topic. She could feel him searching, hunting for the right words to say to keep the conversation on course.

  Eve felt a wave of guilt wash over her. How long had he been waiting for this? Hoping for any sort of break, moment, mere acknowledgment. All she had ever been able to give him was horror and wrath. And he had taken it. Taken it all. She heard his breath deepen as if working to hold back a shudder.

  Finally, in the end, he said nothing. Instead, he reached out and tucked a wisp of hair that the breeze had pulled behind her ear, then traced his fingertip along the strand up and over the bump of her ponytail. He always loved her in a ponytail. She had thought about that when pulling it back in the mirror after breakfast.

  “What is he doing, lining them up like that?” Eve asked, and jutted her chin toward Ecco’s sand crabs on the driftwood. Ecco had turned his back to the crabs and Otto was now shuffling them, rearranging them in a line along the wood.

  “Seeing how well he can tell them apart.”

  “What do you mean?” Eve asked, looking back at Reidier with a quizzical expression.

  Seagulls floated on the breeze and squawked in descending repetitive tones.

  “Ecco named them all. Apparently he can tell them apart.”

  “So Otto’s testing him?”

  “Mm hm.” Reidier nodded.

  “Has he been getting them right?”

  “Every one. They look identical to me. But I’d put one in one hand and one in the other, he’d tell me their names, and then I’d switch hands behind my back, and he could still tell which was which. Every time.”

  Eve turned back and watched Otto testing his brother. The sight was touching, picturesque even. Two little boys playing in the mud at the water’s edge, the blue ocean stretching out behind them to the horizon, a wavy line between a dark and light blue. Maybe Ecco was like tuna salad. He was this bizarre recombination of reality, arising out of incongruity. A Humean chimera that dazzled and delighted. Maybe—as long as she didn’t think about it. “You must feel like the proud papa, when you look at him.”

  “He is a marvel,” Reidier agreed tentatively.

  “And he’s all your creation.”

  Reidier looked at her, unable to read her tone.

  Eve gave him a half smile. “I mean, he is your creation. Modeled on ours. But, well, you made him. A modern day Dr. Frankenstein who fabricated a boy instead of a monster.”

  “I suppose you could look at it, him and me that way, although Dr. Frankenstein stitched together parts from various corpses.”

  “He did. And you animated a vast collection of inanimate quantum particles,” she said, in the same tone that someone would observe that a school bus is yellow. “It really is marvelous.”

  Reidier dug his feet into the sand at the edge of the blanket.

  Eve frowned at herself. She hadn’t intended the conversation to go this way. She hadn’t intended the conversation at all, really. Her comments just came out, like goosebumps in a chill.

  “He’s quite magnetic,” Eve said, and placed her hand o
n top of Reidier’s, which he had posted out behind him like she did.

  She could feel the tension ripple out of him. It reminded her of the light, almost ticklish sensation of him drawing physics equations across her ribs with lipstick.

  Reidier was looking at her now.

  “I’m not quite sure whether it is because of his quirks or in spite of them. And Otto is intensely taken with him.”

  “Two peas in a pod,” Reidier said.

  “Literally. Why do you think that is?”

  While pondering Eve’s question, Reidier wiggled his toes back as if he were slowly trying to snap with them. Wet sand that had been clinging to his skin rained down over his foot. “It’s how he sees things. There’s no presumption. Most kids take in all the newness of the world, but they’re hard at work trying to order it. They want to learn the rules of the game. Growing up is one long series of trials and errors of worldviews, constantly revising the way of things until we finally arrive at a set of givens expansive and reliable enough to become our worldview. That’s the moment when childhood ends, when our list of givens gets set.

  “Ecco seems entirely unconcerned with establishing a set of givens, let alone finalizing them. He’s not trying to codify the rules of the game. Instead, he’s in a constant state of play and wonder. As a result, he perceives reality at a fundamental, irreducible level, completely devoid of expectation. He sees the essence of things.”

  “In their Platonic ideal form,” Eve reinterpreted.

  Reidier nodded. “Bert calls him a little Buddha.”

  Eve laughed at this, throwing her head back. “Yes, that sounds like Bert. What is Buddha about the sky?”

  Reidier shrugged an I don’t know.

  “Blue.”

  Reidier tilted his head at her, in confusion.

  “I did not get it either. But that’s what a Buddhist priest told me over breakfast, just outside Angor Wat. Maybe we can have Ecco explain it to us.”

  “A Zen master once told me to do the opposite of whatever he told me. So I didn’t.”

  Eve looked at him for a moment and burst out laughing. She pressed her forehead against his shoulder, “I ’zought you were serious for a moment. Of course you know Buddhist jokes.”

  “What jokes?” Reidier feigned innocence. “Buddhists are cutting-edge scientists. It’s from Buddhists that we finally learned that the leading cause of death is birth.”*

  * * *

  * A Buddhist monk walks into a pizza parlor and asks for them to make him one with everything.

  * * *

  Eve actually snorted at this one, which made Reidier laugh, which made Eve try and hide in his armpit out of embarrassment, which only made Reidier laugh harder, which only made Eve snort again.

  The two shook in hysterics, finally collapsing back on the towel together. They found each other in that moment, lying on their sides, tears in their eyes, their cheeks hurting from laughing so hard.

  Reidier brushed another stray wisp of hair back behind Eve’s ear again. “I love you in a ponytail.”

  Eve raised her eyebrows as if to say, You do? overplaying the coquette.

  The palm of his hand traced over her shoulder, dropping down her side, until his finger hooked inside her bikini bottoms. She closed her eyes, focused on the sensation of his touch held against her skin. She loved whenever he touched her like that, slipping his hand up the sleeve of her shirt or tucking it inside the hip of her jeans. It was intimacy, it was ownership.

  There’s us and there’s everybody else.

  “I love your fingers hooked inside my suit.”

  This time Reidier raised a coquettish eyebrow, mimicking his wife. She let out an Oh of mock offense and smacked his shoulder.

  “No!” Otto screeched.

  Eve shot up. The boys were still at the water’s edge. Three seagulls flapped above them in wait. It could have been a postcard. Except for the expression on Otto’s face. He stood ankle deep in the water a few feet away from Ecco. He seemed stunned. Had something stung him? Had a crab bitten him?

  Then Ecco brought his fist down with a self-satisfied THUNK and SQUISH.

  Otto screeched in horror again as Ecco casually tossed the mangled carcass in a high parabolic arc. The gray corpse rotated end over end. One of the floating seagulls dove down and caught the feast in midair. The bird rose up, banking away from the others, in a selfish maneuver, and tossed the whole sand crab back down its gullet.

  THUNK/SQUISH. Another crushed crustacean soared through the air and was caught by another gull.

  THUNK/SQUISH toss, THUNK/SQUISH toss, THUNK/SQUISH toss. Ecco was calmly going down the line of the log in rapid succession with a detached curiosity.

  Otto’s screams turned into outright weeping.

  Before she was even aware of what was happening, Eve had covered the distance down the beach to the boys, caught Ecco’s arm in middescent, and with an unexpected severity, yanked him away from his “chopping block,” and tossed him onto his bum in the water. Two more steps and Eve had scooped up Otto into her arms.

  His crying seemed to be in stereo. It took Eve several moments to actually come to her senses and realize what she had done. Otto wasn’t crying in stereo, Ecco was now crying, more startled than hurt, sitting in the water, staring at Otto, mimicking his exact expression and tone.

  Eve was at a loss. She had no understanding of how to parse the situation. So she left it. Turned around, holding Otto in her arms, and marched down the beach.

  Eve cradled Otto against her, kissing the top of his head, whispering, “Calme-toi mon petite. Shh, shh, shh, mon petit trognon de pomme.” Behind her, she could hear Reidier trying to soothe the still-crying Ecco.

  It took half the length of the beach for Otto to calm down. He was still upset, but had run out of hysterics. His breath was a staccato of gulps with every inhale, as the sobs subsided. Small waves rolled up and down the beach with a reassuring beat. The sun warmed them.

  At the end of the shore, a river carved the edge of the beach into a sandy point. The estuary ran down into the ocean chasing after the fading tide. Eve let a recovered Otto down to explore the jetty of sand. He found his way to the edge, where the water whittled the bank into a miniature cliff of dried mud that rose twenty centimeters up and out into a precarious precipice. Otto entertained himself by stamping his feet along the bank and watching hunks of dried mud calve off, slide into the current, and dissolve into the sea.

  Eve looked back down the beach. Ecco and Reidier weren’t too far behind. Ecco stomped through knee-high water, Reidier trailed behind him as if in a daze. Eve squinted, wondering if the two were more Pinocchio and Geppetto or the Creature and Frankenstein.

  “That’s far enough, Ecco,” Reidier said, as they approached the point, still fifty yards or so behind Eve and Otto.

  Ecco stopped and looked back at his . . . at Reidier. A small wave rose up over his knees and lapped against the beach. Ecco giggled. He lightly patted his palms against the nearly smooth surface. Not too far from where he stood, a dark curve of blue rippled through the otherwise light azure of the glassy ocean. It was the current running off from the estuary. The river and ocean whittled the beach into a scythe of sand. Ecco continued his rhythmic, soft slaps as he pushed through the water toward the liquid border.

  Eve wasn’t surprised that they had followed. She knew Kerek wanted to give Eve the space she needed, but could only tolerate so much distance. He was drawn after his wife and son with a gravity beyond his control, orbiting in wait with the patience of a moon.

  Kerek risked a look toward Eve. He smiled slightly, then the corners of the smile dropped as he sucked his bottom lip beneath his top into a resigned frown. Kerek turned back to the water and watched Ecco pat the calm surface of the ocean with his right hand and the bumpy texture of the estuary current with his left.

  She hadn’t meant to react so harshly. Had it been so bad? Was it simply boys being boys? She turned back and followed Otto along the bank of the po
int, back behind the dunes. As Otto stomped down the edge, she imagined her little son was a giant, destroying the cliffs of Dover. The water devoured every hunk of land he shook loose into its depths.

  No, it wasn’t Ecco’s violence that bothered her, per se: it was his detachment.

  Eve’s gaze tracked the river back as it curved through the sawgrass-lined banks and disappeared into the woods beyond. She used to think rivers were like they had told her at school. They swept through the forest, eating away at the earth all along and carrying chunks of land out to sea. Now she wasn’t so sure. It was all in the way one looked at it, really. People always focus on the land, don’t they? But maybe the river wasn’t eating away at the ground, carrying the land out to sea like everybody told her; maybe it was the land that was grasping at the water, trying to hold it back, keep it in, when all the water wanted was to get back where it belonged, where it came from.

  The breeze blew another wisp of hair across her face. She tucked it behind her ear. Turning back, she could just see over the dune to the other side of the point. Reidier stood, fixed in the water, a ruin of Atlantis. He seemed calm, at peace. The water lapped at his knees, his hands resting in his pockets, as he gazed out at the ocean and watched the dark blue current carry an orange buoy out to sea.

  The scream rose out of her throat before the realization registered with her brain.

  It was a high-pitched, guttural, pained sound like an eagle’s screech upon spotting a predator in her nest.

  It was a stunning pitch, literally. Otto froze in his tracks of destruction. Reidier’s muscles tensed and locked. The world stopped moving, except for the orange flotsam. And Eve.

  For the second time in less than half an hour, Eve found herself unexpectedly in motion, while her mind raced to catch up and get a handle on the situation. She sprinted up and over the dune, down the muddy shore, and into the water so quickly that her legs couldn’t keep up with the momentum of her upper body, and she tumbled into the ocean. Upon contact, Eve instinctually pulled herself forward with a breaststroke she had honed in secondary school.