by Pete Hautman
Shin watches, hugging the light. It takes about a hundred of those red flashes before the saw cuts through the lock. I swing the hatch up.
Shin unravels himself from the post and peers into the opening.
“It’s dark,” he says.
“There’s a platform a few feet down,” I say. “I’ll go first.”
I grab the edge, and lower myself down through the hole to the platform. It’s a relief to be out of the rain.
“Okay,” I shout. Shin’s feet appear. I grab his ankles and help him down. Standing face-to-face on the tiny platform, I can barely make out the shape of his head.
“I can’t see,” he says.
“What did you expect?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said we have to be in the water to be safe, right?”
“I think so.”
The sky lights up with a thunderclap that is so loud and close I can feel it vibrate the shell of the tank.
I say, “Maybe this is a stupid question, but you know how to swim, right?”
“Of course I do,” Shin says.
“Good.”
I shove him off the platform.
* * *
AND ALL THE FOUR-LEGGED CREATURES OF THE EARTH DID DROWN. AND THE REPTILES THAT CRAWLED UPON THEIR BELLIES DID DROWN AS WELL. AND THOSE WHO WALKED UPON TWO LEGS, THEY DROWNED TOO, WITH NEITHER PRAGMATIST NOR FAITHFUL SPARED FROM THE FURY OF THE OCEAN.
* * *
29
It took three hours for the storm to pass. Shin and I spent most of the time hanging on to the bottom of the ladder, talking. Actually, Shin did most of the talking. I just listened. Listened as my best friend told me the “truth” about water towers. I had not realized, you see, that the ocean was a conscious entity, or that the towers could walk.
“In fact,” Shin said, “when we climb out of here, we could be miles from St. Andrew Valley. The gods frequently shift location at night, moving from town to town.”
“Gods?”
“Demigods, actually. The towers are Avatars of the Ocean, subject to his might. They move at night.”
“I wonder why I never noticed that,” I said.
“Because the Ocean did not wish you to notice.”
“Oh.”
“In fact I’m pretty sure that they transition by employing a form of antigravitronic pulse. That would also explain how they are able to move through inter-stellar space. See, the Ocean originally came from another part of the galaxy by means of the towers. Hundreds of millions of them landed here, injected their water cargo into the Earth, then self-destructed. That’s why iron is the fourth most common element on earth. And so much water. Of course, that all happened a couple billion years ago.”
“I thought people built the towers.”
“That’s what they want you to think.”
“You’re serious,” I said.
“I know it sounds unbelievable,” Shin said in a voice that sounded completely sane, “but it’s true. I’ve been talking to them. It’s quite a burden, you know, being chosen. You must know. You’ve been chosen too.”
“I have?”
“You are the one. You opened my eyes and ears.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“At first I doubted what they were telling me, but the signs are clear.”
A white flash from above, beaming through the hatch and lighting up the interior for an instant just as the walls of the tank rang like an enormous gong, shivering the surface of the water.
“You see?” he said. “We are under the protection of the Ten-legged One.”
“Did we just get struck by lightning?”
“Yes. It is a sign.”
When the sounds of the storm finally faded, I suggested it was time to climb out of the tank, but Shin refused to budge.
“I’m staying,” he said.
I couldn’t talk him up the ladder. I don’t think he was afraid, he just didn’t want to leave.
“I feel safe here,” he said.
So I climbed out of the tank and down the tower and walked to the Amoco station and called the cops on my best friend. I waited and watched as the police and the fire department spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how the coax the Chosen One out of that tank.
It was light out when they finally dragged him, kicking and shouting, out into the morning sun.
* * *
… AND THE TOWERS DID CRUMBLE THEN AND GIVE THEIR SUBSTANCE UNTO THE EARTH …
* * *
30
I am searching for beer bottles, crumpled newspapers, car parts, fast food wrappers, soda cans, and other fascinating items. When I find one of these treasures, I stab it with my litter poker and scrape it off into a blue plastic bag. Here on the grassy shoulders of Route 17, the hunting is good. My first bag is almost full, and I have only been searching for an hour.
Seven hours to go.
I am wearing a fluorescent orange vest. I can see another orange vest a few hundred yards away on the other side of the highway. The shoulders of Route 17 are dotted with garbage-pickers. Some of them are volunteers, doing their part to make St. Andrew Valley a cleaner, prettier place to live. Me? I’m paying my debt to society, which has been calculated at 210 hours of community service.
Only 209 hours to go.
I’m bored.
For a while I keep myself going by fantasizing. I imagine myself coming across a hundred-dollar bill. A gold ring. A bagful of hundred-dollar bills. A mint copy of X-Men number one.
Instead, I find a soggy grocery bag, a cigar butt, an armless plastic doll, a broken hubcap, and the dried-up corpse of a muskrat. I leave the muskrat behind.
I’ve almost caught up with the guy ahead of me. He must be picking up every cigarette butt and bottlecap. I wonder who he is, and what sort of civic guilt caused him to sign up for garbage duty. I watch him stop, jab a tiny scrap of paper with his poker, and carefully transfer it to his blue bag. His movements are so slow and deliberate I want to run across the highway and grab him and shake him.
That’s when I recognize Dan Grant. I haven’t seen Dan since the night Henry fell off the water tower. I didn’t realize he was on the clean-up crew. He must have been dropped off by a different van.
He stops, bends over, picks up a brown bottle, pours a few ounces of stale beer, and drops it into his bag. He looks just as bored as I feel.
As his spiritual leader, I feel an obligation to make his life a little more interesting. I drop my bag and run back to the muskrat. It’s still dead. I impale the flattened beast on my poker and carry it across the highway. Dan, intent on a scrap of newspaper, does not see me sneaking up behind him with my muskrat-on-a-stick. When I’m a few feet away I fling the muskrat over his head. It lands right at his feet.
Dan lets out a yelp and jumps straight up, almost as if the soles of his shoes have exploded. He lands and leaps again, this time straight back into me. We both fall down. I’m laughing.
“Greetings from the Ten-legged One,” I say.
He rolls away from me and scrambles to his feet.
“Jason?”
“You shoulda seen yourself jump,” I say.
He looks from me to the muskrat. “That’s not funny,” he says.
“Sure it is.”
“You’ve got a warped sense of humor.”
“I know. So how you been?” I ask.
“Better, since I quit hanging out with you.”
“What did I do?”
“What didn’t you do? Look at us. Picking up cigarette butts eight hours a day.”
“You think that’s my fault?”
“Look what happened to Henry and Shin. Henry’s all busted up. They got Magda working at the homeless shelter washing dishes. And Shin has gone insane.”
“He’s not insane.”
“What do you call it when they lock you in the psych ward?”
“That was just for a couple days. He’s home now. He’s fine.”
“You’ve seen
him?”
“No, but I called him.” It’s true. I called him. But his mother picked up the phone and told me not to call anymore. I asked her how Shin was doing. “Fine, no thanks to you,” she said. No thanks to me? If it wasn’t for me, her son would have been struck by lightning. “His mom wouldn’t let me talk to him,” I say.
“I don’t blame her. None of us should ever have listened to you. God is not a joke.”
“Sounds like you’ve been talking to your old man.”
“I just don’t think you should joke about it.”
“Are you forsaking the Ten-legged One?”
“Cut it out, Jason. You think you’re being funny, but it’s blasphemy.”
“You really have been listening to your dad.”
“So? If I’d listened to him instead of you, none of this would have happened.”
“Is this about me hitting you with the ping-pong ball?”
He picks up his bag and poker. “Get lost, Jason.” He stabs the muskrat with his poker, stuffs it into his bag, and walks away.
Maybe I’m the Antichrist. Maybe I’m a pawn of Satan. But I don’t feel evil. Besides, if God is real, what does he care about some kid from St. Andrew Valley worshipping a water tower? When I die, do I go straight to hell—or just serve a few millennia in purgatory? I’ll have to ask Just Al about that. It’s the sort of thing he would have an opinion on.
Maybe Dan is right, and it’s my fault that he’s picking up dead muskrats, and that Henry busted his leg, and that Shin got hauled off to the psych ward. But if I’d never invented Chutengodianism, things might have been worse. Maybe Shin’s snails would have started talking to him, or the voice of Zolag, Uber King of Nutbagia, would have come to him through his shoelaces. Maybe Henry would have fallen off the tower and died. Who knows? Things could be worse.
Still, I keep hearing my father’s voice: Your friends listen to what you say.
I wait down the street from Shin’s house until I see Mrs. Schinner get in her car and drive off, probably to run some errands. As soon as she’s out of sight, I run around to the back and knock on Shin’s window. No response. The side door is unlocked; I let myself in.
Shin is lying on his unmade bed in his X-men pajamas, sleeping.
I look around. Dirty clothes scattered across the floor. Walls covered with maps and drawings and posters. Shelves jammed with computer games and comic books and books about snails and trains and astronomy and math puzzles and chess—all of Shin’s nerdy passions. Desk piled high with more books and coffee cans full of technical pens and mechanical pencils and colored markers and, in the center of it, a large spiral-bound sketchbook. In short, everything looks like before, with one glaring exception.
The gastropodarium is missing.
I watch Shin sleep. His breathing is choppy. His spidery fingers curl and twitch, and I can see his eyes moving beneath closed eyelids. Dreaming. I am afraid to wake him up. I am afraid he will not be the Shin I know. Was Dan right? Has Shin really gone off the deep end?
I sit down at his desk and open the sketchbook. Page after page is covered from edge to edge with his crabbed script. I start reading in the middle of the page.
… and I saw ten thousand towers descend on pillars of flame and as they settled upon the plain their members did bore deep into the firmament and inject new life into the parched soil, and the towers did crumble then and give their substance unto the Earth …
I wonder if the men who wrote the Bible were anything like Shin. I turn the page. More writing. Thousands of words. More words than I have written in my entire life. I flip through the pages, not reading, just staring at the sheer mass of words.
About two-thirds of the way through the book, the words abruptly end:
… for it is by my image that you shall know me, and it is by my image that you shall be saved.
I turn the page to a drawing of the St. Andrew Valley water tower: The Ten-legged One in all his glory, with every strut, seam, cable, and rivet precisely and lovingly rendered with the tip of an ultra-fine technical pen, a masterpiece of accuracy and detail. It must have taken him hours. Maybe days. I turn to the next page, and the next. More towers. Not just water towers, but towers of every description. Some of them I recognize. The Eiffel Tower. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, before it collapsed. Others are fantasy towers, convoluted, ornate constructions. But most of the drawings are of water towers. Towers with double and triple tanks. Towers with tanks balanced on impossibly thin columns. Water towers in flight. I page through slowly, astonished by the quality, precision, and detail of the illustrations. I knew Shin could draw, but I never knew he could draw like this.
I am looking at a picture of a pair of distorted dark towers standing on a mountaintop when I feel Shin’s breath on my neck.
I spin around in the chair.
“Hey,” I say.
Shin’s eyes are sleepy, his mouth is slack, his hair is sticking out all to one side.
He points at the dark towers. “My parents,” he says.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m good.” He turns the page. “This is me,” he says. The drawing is of a tall, spidery, insubstantial-looking tower.
“What happened to your pods?”
“My pods?” He smiles. “I let them all go. I let my pods go.” He turns to a drawing of a tower with knotted, twisted legs and a distorted, angry-looking tank. “See this one? You know who this is?”
Oddly enough, I recognize it. “Is it Henry?”
“Right.” He turns the page to a sleek and jaunty five-legged tower.
“Magda,” I say.
He shows me more. Columns of towers representing the police; a great squat tank representing the St. Andrew Valley High School; a pallid, featureless tower that is unmistakably Dan Grant.
“Look,” he says, turning the page to a large, blocky water tower supported by four stout columns. The drawing is larger than any of the others, filling the page from edge to edge. “That’s you,” he says.
I look at him, right in the eyes.
“Shin, are you crazy?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “Do you think I am?”
“Well, this water tower stuff … it seems like you’re, you know, so into it. You don’t really think the water tower is God, do you?”
His eyebrows crumple. “Don’t you?”
“As a joke, sure. But … no, I don’t.”
He is looking at the sketchbook, at his rendering of Tower God Jason Bock.
“You said you did,” he says.
“Yeah, but I was—”
“How do you know it’s not true if you don’t believe in it?”
“I … huh?”
He looks up from the sketchbook and into my eyes. “How can you understand something you don’t believe in?”
“Shin, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s like saying you can’t understand leprechauns unless you believe in them.”
“Do you understand leprechauns?”
“I don’t believe in them.”
“There you go.”
* * *
AND IN THE END, ONLY THE OCEAN REMAINED, AND THE OCEAN WAS ALONE.
* * *
31
I met with my father the other day to give him my book reports. The meeting got off to a rough start when I told him that I had written nothing.
“Here’s my report,” I said, empty-handed. “I didn’t care for any of them.”
He stares at me, his face showing nothing. “You read them all?”
“I read as much as I could. They’re all pretty much the same.”
“Oh? You’re telling me that Teen Jesus is indistinguishable from Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain!”
“They all require a belief in a supreme being. If you don’t believe in God, then the books don’t mean much.”
My father sighed and sat back and said, “You think you’re an atheist, then?”
“I’m not sure what I am.�
�
He looked at me for a long time then. I think it was the longest time he has ever looked at me without saying anything. Finally, he spoke.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Jason.”
“Why?”
“Because it means you’ve got a long, lonely road ahead of you.”
“It’s my road.”
“You’re right about that.” His shoulders dropped and I felt something go out of him, as if he had been holding his breath for years and had suddenly remembered to exhale.
“All right then,” he said, his mouth curved into a sad smile. It wasn’t one of his usual looks—angry, bewildered, impatient, friendly, curious, or astonished. It was more of a level look, a look of recognition and understanding.
“All right then … what?” I asked.
“You’re sixteen, old enough to make your own choices. I’m not going to force anything on you. If you don’t want to go to church anymore, that’s up to you. TPO meetings are optional. Worship water towers, trees, frogs, whatever.”
“What’s the catch?”
He laughed, shaking his head. “There are a lot of perfectly good religions out there. You’re a smart kid, Jason. I know you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
One week before school starts I am at Crossroads Mall to buy myself a new pair of shoes—I wore out my last pair out on Route 17. I am hulking along the mezzanine, imagining myself as a mountain troll from Middle Earth, when I see Henry and Magda. Henry is still on crutches. Magda is walking with him, talking and laughing, carrying two shopping bags in one hand and touching his arm with the other. I stop and watch them approach. They are so wrapped up in each other they don’t notice me until they are about to crash right into me.
“Jay-boy!” Henry says. “What are you doing here? I thought you were grounded for the next ten years.”
