The Murk

Short story largely inspired by a fish pipe project I worked on several years ago. Which sounds exciting, I know.

The Murk

 

It happened several years ago--how many years, I can’t remember--so you’ll have to bear with me if the details are a little vague.  The important parts, I remember like they happened yesterday; but the details tend to get a little hazy over time, you know how it goes. 

     I was in high school at the time.  Well, technically I wasn’t.  I wasn’t really anything, as a matter of fac--"it was the summer after graduation, before college.  That formative stage between adolescence and adulthood--the real-life bildungsroman, the coming of age, and all that.  Except I never went to college, never formed into much, and that age came and went, all because of this.  I was seventeen, though, at the time, and I thought I ruled the world.   That much I remember.  I think it was August, but all those months are kind of the same, so it could have been July or September, too, I guess.  It doesn’t matter.  It was hot, and so were the girls--that’s what I remember.  That’s what any seventeen year old kid would remember.  Right?

     I guess I should tell you a little bit about where I lived at the time.  ‘At the time’?  That makes it sound like I moved all over the place, which wasn’t the case--not the case at all.  In fact, it was pretty much the opposite.  I grew up in a little nowhere town along a nowhere stretch of highway that was such a nowhere place in general that it actually, in fact, was no place at all for about fifty years.  Didn’t exist.  Like a page erased out of a book.  What I mean is, sometime back in the 1950’s--don’t ask me what year--the ocean swelled way up and the little town I grew up in got swallowed like a city of Jonahs and digested for fifty years and then spit back out sometime in the early 2000’s, there being nothing left by then but bones--bones of people and of the buildings--bones of the whole community, I guess you could say.  Of a generation.  Just spit right out like after fifty years they weren’t good enough to keep or pick your teeth with.  Fancy that!

     But anyway, around that time I guess the water fell back down to where it had been before; and it wasn’t long after that that people started making their way back--people that got away, fifty years ago, and their children, I mean--and I guess some of ‘em got together over maybe a tumbled down coffee shop or something and remembered what it was like to have coffee there and decided it would be nice to have coffee there again sometime; and, believe it not, less than a year later they did just that.  Rebuilt the city, same as before--same nowhere Main St with its nowhere shops and nowhere church and nowhere hospital up on the hill, nowhere housing; and they called the place ‘Kelley St’--and it’s still called that, or was when I left.

     Strange name for a town, don’t you think--Kelley St.  But I guess it fits--there’s nothing there but that one street.  But it’s not even called Kelley, it’s just Main St.  Go figure.

     Yeah, I suppose.  It’s as good a name as anything else, that’s for sure. 

     So that’s where I grew up.  I was born there, in that hospital on the hill (I can’t remember its name) and the strangest thing about it is that sometimes out here I’ll wake up and look out the window at the sea, but the window I’m looking out of isn’t the window of my cabin but the window of the room I was born in, and the sea I’m seeing isn’t this sea but the sea that swallowed up Kelley St fifty years ago.  At least, it seems that way when it happens; really it’s just a dream--I really wake up (I don’t know why, the dream is totally peaceful--I’m not falling out the window or anything) and what I see is the same thing you and I can see right now.  Sea for miles, nothing else but clouds and gulls and the stink of fish guts.  Yeah, you can see it, the stink.  Spend enough time out here and you’ll know what I mean.  I’ll tell you what--that’s one thing I won’t miss.  Fish guts.  Probably never look at another fish again as long as I live.

     Did I ever tell you about the fish dream?  I’ll dream sometimes--yeah, it’s happened more than once--that I’m out there swimming with my friend from high school (who I’ll tell you a little more about in a minute--he’s part of my story), swimming like a beast (and I never could swim that well, in real life, unless you think a bag of bricks carves a pretty fancy breastroke).  I don’t know why we’re swimming--I think it’s just natural, like it’s what we were made for--in the dream, I mean.  We’re out there swimming like you and I are standing out here right now, breathing; it’s just our way of life, I guess.  I wish I had a fancier way of saying it than that, but I don’t.  I’m no poet--just like you’re no fisherman.  No offence. 

     Yeah, I guess I’m not much of a fisherman, either.  Not that I’ve ever heard your name before.

     Where was I?

     Oh, the fish dream.  Well there really isn’t much to tell.  We’re swimming, me and this friend, way out in the ocean, away from land.  There’s nothing around, it’s just us and the water and the sun overhead and the waves aren’t much and we’re both just swimming.  As far as I know, we’ve got no destination--just exercising our fins, I guess.  In a manner of speaking.  Guess it’s not much different from going for a walk through some uncivilized countryside, some place nobody’s discovered yet, some place where there’s no such thing as time, even.  If such a place exists.

     I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming--I don’t remember setting off and, like I said, I can’t see any land; it must have been a long time.  But there’s always this point in the dream: a cloud blows in from who knows where and covers up the sun, and the sea grows dark and restless; we’re fighting the waves that all seem like they’re fighting for supremacy--over what, I don’t know; maybe us--in a sort of king of the hill type of way, rising up for all their worth and crashing against each other like rams on a stony bluff.  For absolutely no reason--the rams, I mean.  Why do they do that?  Don’t they know how far down it is?

     Anyway, we’re getting tossed about like beans in a maraca.  The sky is totally dark now, and raining; we can’t see our own hands, our own faces.  We’re still not tired, but something else sort of steals into us both--I can feel what he feels, too--a kind of dread, like we need to get to land, pronto.  Only neither one of us knows which way land is--it doesn’t even register in our minds, ‘land’.  What is land, anyway?  So we just swim in circles, jumping at every sound, flailing in the darkness for anything solid--he’s grabbing hold of me and I’m grabbing hold of him--we’re both sinking because we’re both grabbing so hard, neither one of us knows what it is we’re grabbing.  It’s like I can’t feel him, and he can’t feel me--the only thing we both feel is that dread, that sense of land, as if land (whatever it is) has become the air that we breathe, that we’re suffocating without it.  I guess all dread feels that way--at least, most of the times I’ve found myself dreading something it always seemed like that, like I couldn’t breathe.  But maybe that’s just me.  I haven’t studied it or anything.

     But that’s pretty much the fish dream.  It always happens like that: the storm, the fear, the suffocation.  The real kicker is how it ends.  The storm just keeps on raging, and me and my friend swimming in circles, pulling each other under by mistake, shouting God knows what to God knows who; and all of the sudden, there’s a light.  It’s pretty far away, just a little sort of hazy light in the distance, sort of pulsing.  Like a gas lamp burning at the edge of the world, as a warning to sailors--something like that.  Of course that’s not what it is--but that’s what it always seems like.  And in a dream you always believe the same things over and over, no matter how many times you find out they’re false. 

     Yeah, you’re right.  It’s not always just in dreams.

     So, anyway, me and my friend--we stop going round in circles when this light appears, and we just tread water and watch.  I can’t really say we’re hopeful of anything, or that we’re waiting for it; but it’s coming closer, that much is obvious.  The pale light expands slowly against the darkness like a rising sun that can’t quite chase the night.  And it’s strange--everything disappears when that light shows up: all emotion, all fear, all thoughts of anything except that light.  So I guess we are waiting for it--only, we don’t know we are.  Like we don’t have a choice.  Just like we didn’t have a choice swimming in the first place.

     Eventually, the light separates a little from the darkness, and we see the outline of something like a boat--one of those old garbage barges that you’ll see scouring the bay, but definitely not a fishing boat.  Somewhere along the way, the sea’s grown calm; it’s still dark, so the storm’s still raging--somewhere.  Just not here. 

     A little way off, someone shouts from the boat, asking us if we need a lift to dry land.  I guess we’d forgotten about it until then, but his shout reminds us and we say thanks, be much obliged if it’s no trouble.  Our voices sound strangely weak--apparently we really need that dry land, more than we knew. 

     But this is where it goes wrong. 

     The boat comes up along us both, swimming in place--it’s not a physical boat, because we can see right through it.  We could the whole time, probably, but it just never registered.  Or maybe we couldn’t--maybe it became less material the closer it got.  Is that the right word--material?  Anyway, it comes to a stop beside us, and somebody from on deck throws out a line.  It’s a fishing net, except it’s all beat up--like somebody just decided to get rid of it in the bay and so these garbage guys scooped it up one day and thought they could get some use out of it, saving two fishes like us--who knows.  You know what they say, One man’s trash…

     So we both grab hold of the line, and they pull us aboard.  I don’t know what it is, but something in the line is a little rough on our hands; when I finally get on board, I look down and see that mine are bleeding.  He looks down and sees the same thing.  Sorry about that, says the same voice that called out before--I don’t know how but his voice sounds just as far away now as it did when he first called out--like he’s somewhere else.  And, believe it not, when we both look up, there’s no one there.  Not a single person on deck.  Just us and that old beat up fishing net, and our hands bleeding, like we’d both got a handful of raspberries or something.  I don’t feel so well, my friend says.  And as a matter of fact I don’t feel so hot, either.  Not sick, just…like something was off. 

     We looked all over for whoever it was that had thrown us the net, but there was no one.  Just a pile of garbage and a few fish scattered about the deck--and they stunk like high heaven so we figured that’s what they were, garbage.  Scales missing, staring sightless eyes.  The bones are even sticking out, and one of ‘em’s moving around a little, like it’s full of maggots.  I’ve seen that before--it’s not something you forget, maggots.  Makes me shiver even now. 

    How are we feeling now? the same voice asked, from the same nowhere place.  Not so pleasant, is it?  Not so pleasant, the hooks.  As it so happens, I still have the net in my hands; and I look at it.  I’m not sure why--it’s like the voice was telling me to, but that’s all he said: not so pleasant, the hooks--but I’m holding the net up real close, it’s dark and that one gas light lantern is all I have to see by.  It isn’t long before I realize that the net is riddled with old, rusty hooks; and, of course, now I know why my hands are bleeding.  So does he.  We both know. 

     Not so pleasant, the hooks, is it? the voice says, one more time.  Only this time it’s close, it’s really close.  In fact, it’s right behind me.  I turn around and see the fish that I’d taken for garbage, they’re all standing there like humans, standing on their hind fins--or whatever you call them--and each one of them is holding a giant, rusty hook like a sword.  Not so pleasant, at all, it says.

     And that’s the fish dream. 

     I guess there really isn’t much of a point to it, except that it’s another reason why I never want to look at a fish again.  It was standing up, for crying out loud!

     Strange as that is, the story I’m going to tell you is even stranger.  Or maybe not--I guess it just depends whether or not you prefer reality or fiction.  To each his own, as they say.  I certainly have my opinion on the matter.  But that was just a dream, and what I’m going to tell you really happened.  If that makes it any stranger to you, well I guess that’s just how it is.  I happen to think it’s strange enough--but you’re the writer, so you tell me.

 

First time I saw her was the spring of that year.  That’s not true--I’d seen her loads of times at school; but she was older than I was, she’d already graduated and gone off to college and I guess she was aiming at becoming a marine biologist--where, I do not know--so I’d passed her in the halls any number of times, but if she recognized me from you, pops, I’d gladly give you…well, I don’t know what I’d give.  I guess I don’t have much.  All the hair I got left--but that’s not much, either.  Point is, she didn’t know the first thing about me--my name, my grade, what classes I was good at, what sports I was in, anything.  I was just another wave in the ocean, far as she was concerned.  Less than a wave, actually--that wasn’t a very good metaphor, you notice waves.  But you get what I’m saying.  Typical story of a guy with no shot.  Those waves were far luckier than I was.

     Yeah, you’re right.  It did seem worth it, at the time.  It always did, somehow.

     Anyway, that spring was the first time I ever really saw her--or, I guess I should say it was the first time she really saw me.  It was an accident, I guess--not that I have to tell you, it’s not like she was waiting for me or anything.  And, truth be told, by this point she was pretty far from the front of my mind.  Not quite at the back, but not too far forward, either.  Somewhere in the middle, where things get lost.  After all, she’d graduated and left and all I was thinking about at the time was graduating, myself, and what that meant, what to do after, turning eighteen--my birthday’s in December, by the way.  Of all the rotten luck.

     But like I said, it was spring--I guess she was home on break--and it was a Sunday morning and usually on Sundays my friend and I would go down to the inlet in the crags and do a little fishing.  I’d like to go into details, but it wasn’t exactly authorized--if you know what I mean.  But there was plenty of brush on the banks leading down and unless we made a real racket, we pretty much got away with it.  I say ‘pretty much’ because there was this one time, not long before this story, in fact, when we were out there and both of us ended up falling asleep; and when we woke up ol’ Officer Brooks was sitting there between us, smiling like there wasn’t a thing he’d like more in the world than to throw in a line of his own, but for his badge and all.  It wasn’t until later that I realized he had thrown a line in--but that’s beside the point.  After that we didn’t go as much, because knowing Officer Brooks like I do, or did, that was pretty much his way of handing out a warning.  And when he handed out warnings, that usually put an end to things--whatever they were.  Not that anything too crazy ever goes on back home, not usually.  I don’t know if it’s because people liked him so much or because of what he went through or just because that’s the way we are in Kelley, but he never had to warn anybody twice, usually--and he never carried a gun.  Just that one time--but there’s a bad apple no matter where you go, I always say--even Kelley.

     Where was I? 

     Right, her.  Her name was Zelda--was?  Still is, unless she changed it--not that it really matters much, but I thought you’d like to know.  A different kind of name, don’t you think?  Short, dark hair, Asian, used to wear these bright red shoes all the time that looked a little bit like boxing gloves on her feet; worked at the Pallmart in town--not Kelley, we’re too small for anything like that, but the city, I should say.  The one up north.  The one that wanted to buy us out, when we were still getting back on our feet.  A lot of things happened around that time, come to think of it: all that Buffer nonsense, that creepy house on the hill, what happened with those kids--not to mention little K.  All that on the heels of the fiasco that brought Officer Brooks down here in the first place--but I doubt any of that interests you.  Anyway, I’m the wrong person to tell it--that’s another story.  I’m having a hard enough time with mine.

     That Sunday morning, I headed off for the inlet with my friend--we didn’t bring our poles on account of Officer Brooks--and we didn’t really have any plans except we both liked the morning air and I thought I might do a little reading.  Believe it or not, I do read--it doesn’t fit, I know, but it’s the truth.  My favorite is Dickens, but I’m really not all that particular.  Most modern books don’t do a whole lot for me, but I’ve always sort of felt that originality went away with the radio.  Once televisions and movies and internet started to take over, people just started shutting their imagination off because, let’s face it, most of the time they didn’t need it.  Probably one of the greatest tragedies that no one really spends any time getting sad over.

     Good point--they probably don’t even realize it’s gone.

     I remember I was reading The Sea Wolf at the time--ever read Jack London?  Who hasn’t, I guess is a better question.  Find me any kid ever who attended elementary school and I’ll show you someone who’s read White Fang or Hatchet, at least.  Well, these days who really knows.  But I think maybe that was the book responsible for me giving this ol’ seafaring life a shot--Sea Wolf, I mean.  Then again, maybe it just happened.  Sometimes there’s just no reason, at all, you know? 

     I never really cared much for Robinson Crusoe, by the way.  Talk about belaboring the point--although probably the funniest quote you’ll ever find is that one where Robinson points out to the reader that he doesn’t want to bore them with details--man.  I think I laughed for about four seconds when I read that.  I’d say the man’s got a sense of humor--but have you ever read it?

     Anyway.

     So there I was, Sea Wolf in my back pocket, not much on my mind (except maybe the prospects of Humphrey and Maud), and a lot of daylight to kill, and not much homework.  I lived up on the hill, not far from the school--course, nothing’s far from anything, where I’m from.  You could pretty much open my bedroom window and see all that Kelley has to offer--and the sea, beside.  Let me tell you: the Kelley sunsets are something else.  I like to think that I’ll go out that way, in the same place I was born, looking out over the same sea, watching the sun set.  I mean, I don’t like thinking about it, but it’s a pretty nice image, wouldn’t you say?  All I’m trying to say is: you’d think it would get old, but it never did.  Some things just never change.

     There’s a little path that goes everywhere up there, all the way up to the Lookout Road and the quarry and branches so many times that it probably looks like the roots of a giant tree, from an airplane I mean.  All running down toward the sea, but not quite getting there.  Petering out at the Main.  My friend’s from the city up north.  I can’t ever remember what it’s called, though.

     But there’s one path that doesn’t quite go all the way down with the rest.  It bends around behind the church and disappears into a copse of close-grown furze and dogwood and runaway hedge--that’s where we’d go to fish, the inlet I mentioned.  There’s a pretty decent downslope there--not something you’d want to try in the dark--of mostly crag rock that sort of tapers toward the sea.  Follow it all the way and eventually you’ll find yourself on what little sand we have in Kelley.  Toward the bottom you’ll find some pretty fascinating tide pools--urchins and starfish and hermit crabs and mussels, pretty much the usual suspects but that doesn’t mean they were boring.  Far from it.  And it was all ours--me and my friend, and Officer Brooks later on--our own little treasure chest that nobody else knew about.  I guess we were proud of it, in a way.

     That Sunday, though, we followed the path like always, slipped through the gorse and the dogwood and the hedge and into that secret world--all the way down the crags, nothing much on our minds, I guess, because neither one of us had anything to say.  I guess that’s why I didn’t see her until I got all the way down there--her back was to us and she was kneeling there on the crag, looking at the tide pools like she’d maybe look at an heirloom jewelry box she’d just got and opened for the first time--it might have been like that, too, considering her field of study.  And maybe that’s why she didn’t see me, either.  We were both absorbed in our own little worlds.  Our anchors fixed firmly in the shoals of those worlds, the wind bringing us together the way it brings all things together; and carries them past, too, sometimes without notice.  All that about ships in the night, you know?

     She must have heard my footsteps though--sound echoes pretty strong down there--and she must have been startled; she stood up all suddenly, and it must have been her first time down there because she slipped and nearly fell backward.  I, on the other hand, who knew that place like the palm of my own hand, rushed to catch her--and promptly fell on my face, head first into the very pool she’d been watching a moment before.  I suppose that’s all gallantry’s good for these days: a mouth full of salt water and a couple of scraped elbows.  Of course she didn’t fall. 

     When I gathered myself, and the courage to face her, I think I managed some awful joke that I’ve never been able to remember since--it was that bad.  She laughed, though--of course, she was already laughing, so I don’t know if that counts.  But I like to think it helped.  My friend was laughing, too--that was his contribution.  Anyway, that was when I found out she was home on break.  She told me what she was studying (that’s when I found that out, too, come to think of it) and how different it was there, and how she’d been getting a little homesick because all the swirling blossoms made her think of Kelley, how it’s hard to really ever call a place home unless you’ve left it and come back--a lot of sentimental stuff like that, that to be honest I wasn’t paying very close attention to.  You could say I was a little numb in the head.  That she was talking to me, at all, was hard enough to comprehend.  Strange that I can remember it all now, though, isn’t it?  The details.  The things you forget and the things you remember.

     Maybe.  I don’t know.  It’s hard to imagine, I guess.  I don’t really know if this counts--I always feel like if I look hard enough I can see it all, the bluff and the shops and the little houses up on the hill, all of it.  It doesn’t really seem all that different, being at sea.  Well, I guess if that was true, I wouldn’t be going back, would I?

     I don’t know about that, pops.  I know lots who left and never came back--and I’m not just talking about the flood back in nineteen-fifty-whatever; plenty of kids I grew up with who just up and left, like there was nothing in the world worth sticking around for.  Cook, for instance.  I never did find out the real story with him, now you bring it up…  Oh well.  It’s not really any of my business, is it?  And I can’t blame him, or anyone for leaving.  I guess maybe I felt that way, too--but things change when you leave ‘em, take on a new meaning.  Or maybe it’s us who change.  Beats me.

     But I’m getting sidetracked already; never mind that.  I’ll try to keep to the straight and narrow, best I can--but remember, I’m no storyteller.  That’s your department. 

    I talked with her for a little while there in what my friend and I called Crag Valley (not really--but we should have).  Mostly about the tide pools--she was pretty interested to find out I’d been there a million times already.  In fact, I think her exact words were I’d have come with you, if I’d have known.  Something like that.

     Of course, I didn’t believe her for a second.  Like I said, she had no idea who I was.  I may have been a little numb in the brain, but I wasn’t delusional.  That, and she had a boyfriend. 

     Yeah, you said it.  You really can’t win ‘em all.

     But at least she knew who I was.  And maybe she wouldn’t have been able to remember it an hour later, but she knew my name.  We parted--to be honest, I’ve only seen her once since then, and I’m not holding my breath it will happen again--she’s married, I think, professionally--but I remember walking away feeling something like I’d just saved a small country from starvation.  I’m not sure why starvation--I guess that was just the pride talking. 

     That happened in the spring; and, I guess, that was where it really all started.  I don’t know if you ever found yourself in this kind of a situation when you were younger, but having finally appeared on the stage of Zelda’s world, I was bound and determined to remain there.  It didn’t really matter if she had a boyfriend or not--sooner or later he would cease to be her boyfriend, thought I, and I was going to be there when that happened, or I was going to die trying.  In the spirit of chivalry, I guess.

     It’s true, I’ve heard the same thing.  But I was ready to die with it--it’s a perilous thing, being seventeen in love, pops.  Don’t you forget.

     The next day at school, I think I spent all day dreaming up ways to make myself unforgettable.  And I thought of some doozies.  But somehow I kept going back to my face in that tide pool--somehow all my scenarios ended like that, with a splash.  Maybe I should have taken it for a sign, but I didn’t.  I never really cared much about signs.  Not even out here.  Especially not out here.

     I thought about her all morning, until lunch.  Then I thought about her some more during lunch, and for a little while after that.  I guess it was around one that I finally gave it a rest--not because I had run out of scenarios that ended with my face in a tide pool, but because at one we had Science and Mondays are typically field studies.  Which meant I would actually have to distract myself with school work for an hour--imagine that, at school.  Well, not quite an hour; fifty minutes.  I hoped that by the end of that fifty minutes I’d have at least figured out a way to stay on my feet.

     I didn’t, of course--but that’s getting ahead of things. 

     Field studies were a breeze.  We’d all load up into a white van and drive on up to the Lookout road a little ways in and we’d unload there, and there was a little trail that led down to the creek and we’d all go down there and take our own sections of it and just sort of observe the water I guess and one of us would take notes and the other one would pretty much say whatever popped into his head to say, as far as what he could see.  A stream journal.  It never changed--we saw the same things pretty much every single time--so we just sort of made things up.  It wasn’t very scientific.  In fact, it was a complete joke.  I don’t think anybody at the geological center up in the city was waiting on pins and needles for our observations of Kelley Creek.  I really don’t.  Water and streambed and crawdads had been discovered pretty thoroughly by this point.  And I don’t think they were all that interested to find out that the creek flowed into the sea--which was a pretty general hypothesis that we all made, at least three or four times that year.  Of course, we never found the outlet--but even a bunch of disinterest high school Seniors could tell you that much, and that’s just what we were.  But it got us away from the classroom, so we didn’t complain.  Eleven of us, total--twelve counting Mr V, but I don’t think he minded all that much, either.  It’s a pretty small school in Kelley.  But I’m sure you guessed that much.

     That day was no different.  We got a late start because somebody threw the foreign exchange student, Richard, out of the van window again, and we had to go back and collect him.  It happened every once in a while, he’d somehow end up getting tossed out a window--and it could be any window, it didn’t matter.  Never too high, though.  It was our way of making him feel welcome, so we didn’t want to hurt him or anything.  Richard-Punting is what we called it.  He didn’t mind, he always came back laughing.  He understood, he called it a strange kind of Western affection and I guess it was.  But we were in high school, so what do you expect?  He was from Azerbaijan.  He sat in front of me during math, and I remember once affectionately filling up his open backpack with empty sunflower seeds.  Well, my friend helped me.  I have no idea what ever happened to Richard.

     After we picked him back up (he was laughing, of course, and so were we) and finally arrived at the unloading point, we split up into pairs.  I always paired up with my friend but since we had an odd number of students in the class that meant that one of the groups had to have three--can’t have anyone on their own--and this time he and I went with this girl Emily.  She was the only person in my class that I was older than--she was born on Christmas Eve, as a matter of fact; not that it mattered anything special to me, but something like that sticks with you.  I was born on the thirteenth. 

     Yeah it was on a Friday, what difference does that make?

     Now you made me lose my place, pops.  Oh--that’s right: Emily. 

     To tell you the truth, I don’t know much about her.  You hear things--or you did, used to--but I don’t know how much of it I believe.  We were classmates, but that’s about all we had in common; she didn’t talk much, not to me, not to really anybody, far as I can remember.  Course, she had her reasons.  I just didn’t know it, back then.  I don’t think anybody did, really.  She kept it all to herself, didn’t confide in anyone.  Except for Jared, I mean.  If you plan on staying long in Kelley, you may hear a thing or two.  They were still talking about it when I left, anyway.  Kind of a scandal, kind of…well, kind of a lot of things, I guess.  But don’t ask me the details.  Like I said, I don’t know how much of it I believe--only people who could set the record straight ain’t talking, that’s for sure.  In any case, I’m the wrong person to tell it.

     All I was trying to say was that this quiet, introspective gal was who I was matched up with that day--so try to imagine what it was like for me: all bursting with questions about how a guy’s supposed to go about catching a girl’s eye and stuff, and the one girl I’ve got to ask is Emily.  Fat chance, right?  I believe I said that to my friend, even, when we were walking down to the stream--Fat chance, I said.  He didn’t say anything, but he knew what I meant.  He always did. 

     Was she pretty?  Sure she was.  Really pretty, in fact.  But I guess I never really thought much about it until we both went our separate ways.  Distance has a way of clarifying things, I guess.  And when you grow up with someone like we all grew up together, they sort of become like family, and pretty doesn’t really have the same meaning.  I don’t think I need to spell it out for you; but sure, she was.  Why do you ask?

     Well, maybe.  But there’s not much you can do about it, now.  Besides--well, like I said, that’s not my story.

     The creek was called Kelley--I can’t remember if I told you already, but it was.  In a stroke of original genius, apparently.  I don’t know where it started but probably somewhere up on top of the Lookout--it wasn’t exactly a mountain we were scaling to get down to the stream but it sure felt like it, sometimes.  And you couldn’t really make out the top because of all the trees, real giants they were, untouched probably from the beginning of time.  At least, that’s how I remember them.  So long’s gone by since then that I could just be exaggerating them without knowing; memory does that, you ever noticed?  Things always seem smaller the older you get.  I don’t know what that says about growing up, but I sure liked it better back then.  Back when questions didn’t exactly need answering, when tomorrow meant the day after today, when believing something was good enough.

     Didn’t mean to get on a soapbox, there, but tell me if I’m wrong. 

     Go ahead.

     Anyway, when we got down there to the creek, the three of us, we fanned out along the bank and for a little while we didn’t say anything, just sort of lost ourselves in observation, or pretended to.  I can’t say with any honesty that I was thinking about the concentration of silt or the streambed or the current velocity or obstruction or anything like that that would have sounded nice in the journal, and I didn’t care much for the little trout or the crawdads or the water striders or salamanders  or anything else.  It all shared a kind of disassociation, like they were all shades of the same unreality, something that existed outside of the world that I lived in--and, granted, my world was a population of one--but with room for two, counting Zelda--but the point is I wasn’t paying very much attention.  So when the man appeared on the other side in his orange and yellow reflective vest, I might have watched him for several minutes and not thought anything more of him than that he was just another shade of that unreality--just something that I was looking at through the Hubble telescope, like he might as well have been on Mars.  Something like that.  And I’m not really all that sure he noticed me, either.  All he seemed to care about was the water--he was really looking at the water he had his own journal or something and he was kneeling over it like it was asleep, like you’d lean over your child at night to hear them whispering in their dreams, to whisper back to them--or whatever it is parents do.  Not that I’m an expert. 

     Do you have any kids, pop?  Not that you’d really call them kids--they’re probably my age, by now. 

     No?

     Well, I can’t say I ever saw much point in it.  Don’t get me wrong--I’m glad I’m here.  I just never took to the idea, that’s all. 

     Yeah, that’s right--to each his own.  My thoughts exactly.

     So anyway, this man with the orange and yellow vest finishes up with whatever it is he’s writing down, and he stands up and puts his hands on his hips like you’d imagine old Perόn on the balcony, looking pretty pleased about something.  I’ve got an idea now what it was all about, but back then I just wanted to laugh.  I couldn’t think what in the world he could be so proud of.  And it’s my experience that people who look proud for no reason are generally asking to be laughed at, if not now then later.  But I didn’t laugh; and it wasn’t very long before he saw us, and smiled, and said something that I didn’t really understand because I was mostly still taking up residence in my world of one, trying to make sure it had the shape for two.  But Emily must have understood him well enough, because she answered, and the two of them had a cute little conversation about fish and the way the stream was flowing and how it wasn’t quite flowing the way it should but he had the answer to that, by God, and it must have been in that journal of his because he held it up when he said so like he was Moses coming down the mountain. 

     After a while, he disappeared.  He left a few wooden stakes in the ground, with pink flagging tied round the top and some numbers on the wood that I don’t think he ever bothered to explain, but then again nobody asked him to.  Emily said that he was an engineer come down from the city about a fish pipe they were looking at putting in somewhere farther up the Lookout where the banks had sort of encroached on the water and slowed down the current and made it harder for the poor little fish to get in and out of.  Matter-of-factly, while she was writing in the journal, as if it was the plainest thing in the world--and maybe it was.  I never much cared about fish, though.  Probably where that dream came from, now I think about it. 

     I don’t know what she wrote in the journal that day.  Usually we work together to make it interesting, but with the engineer and my mind wandering all over the universe, I can’t say I was really much help.  Don’t think my friend was, either--although he was a lot more interested in the engineer’s project than I was.  Or Emily, either, I guess.  All the way back to the van, he kept imagining the project kind of like an architect imagines a building, I bet.  Forming the blueprints up in his mind, erasing them and drawing them back up again.  He must have come up with twenty different ways for blocking the creek and bypassing the work site and clearing the aquatic life; and that’s not to mention the different kinds of pipes he thought up, how they’d dig out the hole and how they’d lay it in there, how they’d level it and keep it level, what company would come down for the job and how long it would take.  I really have no idea why he was so interested, but he was.  He always had the strangest things to say whenever we’d be walking back from a stream survey, come to think of it.  Like something down there, in the air or the water or whatever got into him, tripped a wire in his brain and he’d start thinking about the strangest things.  Usually future things--like what the world would be like in a hundred years--that sort of thing.  Which, I guess the pipe project was no different--it would change the creek, and maybe the whole Lookout, who knew?  But that was my friend, for you.  Total mystery half the time.

     As for me, I always left the stream thinking of the past.  I don’t know why.

     It did take my mind off Zelda, though.  In the end.

     As for Zelda, I never did figure out a good enough way to get her attention.  I only had a week, after all.  Her break ended and she went back to school--wherever that was--and I didn’t see her again until that summer.  And by then, like I said, I’d nearly forgotten all about her.  But you know what I didn’t forget about?  That fish pipe. 

     Strangest thing.

     It wasn’t just the pipe, either--it was the whole project.  I’m a little embarrassed to tell you, but it sort of turned into a minor obsession of mine.  I can’t tell you how it happened or when it began, but it’s like when Zelda left she left a kind of hole in my mind and that project just slipped in there, somehow.  I can’t even blame my friend--he never said another word about it after that day.  But I do remember sitting in class--the blossoms were all gone by then, of course--and watching the equipment roll in in convoy from the city, piece by piece on flatbed trailers and then two giant excavators that had to be hauled in commercially: a yellow Case and an orange Hitachi.  Sure, they were just machines--but I couldn’t help imagining them all as something else, something alive, and the work they were brought in to do my mind embellished into something a lot more important and interesting than the widening of a stream.  As if it wasn’t really a failing stream system they were coming in to correct, not really water that was getting blocked up.  I don’t know.  I didn’t make much sense to me then, either.

     Day after day, the workers drove in at precisely 7:23 am--I saw them from my dining room window while I ate my morning Raisin Bran, that’s how I know--and then sometime around 4 they would file back out.  I could only imagine what they were up to, those days--and you better believe I did.  I just couldn’t think about anything else.  I would even have dreams about it, that’s how bad it was.  And I have never been a mechanical person, never learned the first thing about cars and engines and gears and what makes it all go, couldn’t have told you what an excavator looked like before they rolled in, and if you would have asked me I’d have said a jumping jack was a kind of rabbit, probably, and that a plate compactor belonged to some kind of fancy dining set.  I did know what a dump truck was, though--I had that much figured out. 

     Anyway, for about a week every morning at 7:23 I watched them roll through town, and for about a week every afternoon I would hear them leave--the pickups, I mean.  Loud diesel engines, all of ‘em.  White, the letters GLT on the side==I never found out what they stood for.  And then, one day, they just didn’t come back.  I was late getting out the door, and even later getting to school that first day because it was like the world couldn’t turn unless the wheels of those white pickups did the turning; I couldn’t understand it.  I was in denial--if you can believe that.  Silly as that is, it’s true.  I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that way about anything, like your entire being depends on its being there, and then it’s gone and you almost feel like there’s no point in getting out of bed.  Believe me, I tried.  I told my mom I was sick--and I was, but try explaining that to her. 

     Of course, I couldn’t explain it to anyone.  I told my friend, because I told him everything--but even he looked at me like I was crazy.  He never said so, but I knew that’s what he was thinking--I always knew. 

     Well, school ended in June--that much I can tell you, the date of my graduation got burned in my mind from all the cards and party invitations: June 4^th.  It was a Thursday.  The Friday after, we all took off together for what I guess you could call a Farewell Camping Trip up into the Lookout.  I’ll leave the details for your imagination, but let’s just say it was unsupervised and pretty well typified all that we imagined our adult lives would be.  And I probably don’t need to tell you how wrong we all were--but ignorance is bliss, like they say.  And it certainly was that weekend.

     But none of that really matters.  The point of it all, as you probably already guessed--at least, as far as I was concerned--was the pipe project.  Now, I can’t tell you why I never went up there on my own to investigate; but for one reason or another, I never did.  I wanted to.  I imagined the scene, the machines, the pit and the pipe--and maybe that was the reason: the fantasy I had somehow unintentionally concocted became more important to me and more perfect than whatever the reality would prove to be, and maybe I just had to preserve that.  And, of course, the best way of doing that was to never go up there, myself.  My friend was against going, and that made it easier, too.  In fact, he almost seemed afraid of the place--I didn’t think so back then, but the more I remember it all, the more it kind of stands out that he knew, somehow…  Well, I don’t want to jump to the ending just yet. 

     Guess how far away from the pipe project we set up camp?  I think it took us about ten minutes to find it in the dark, me and my friend.  Said nature was calling and for as many rules we broke that weekend, we had a couple more that we stuck to; and one of those was that nobody took off on their own.  Jared--you remember, the only guy Emily would ever talk to--wanted to come along, but, well, let’s just say it was probably better that he didn’t come along anywhere until morning came along itself.  And as a matter of fact, he’s got a pretty interesting memory, far as that one night is concerned.  Anyway, we took a flashlight between us and set off--and, like I said, about ten minutes later, there it was.

     I guess I really should say there they were--the machines, the equipment, the two pieces of that one gigantic pipe, all the pink-flagginged stakes you could hope for, a wheelbarrow, a generator even, and a water pump.  A great big fan--which I still can’t explain.  Shovels, rakes, tripods that I guess were for taking pictures, but I couldn’t find any cameras anywhere.  Piles of all kinds of rock: round and jagged, big and small.  There was even a pile of sand.  The pit was all dug out, too, and one end of it was all filled up with murky water.  We could tell it was murky even in the dark--the reflections, the shadows we cast--I don’t know how we could tell, but we could.  Of course, that murk added to the mystery--at least, in my mind.

     My friend wanted to go, but I couldn’t leave, not now.  I don’t know how long we stayed there--or how long I stayed there, trying to make sense of the murk--as if there was anything there to make sense of--crouched down over the soft ledge that had already sloughed off several times and was threatening even then.  I could feel it shifting beneath me, but I just couldn’t move.  Come on, my friend said, let’s go, let’s get back, we’ve been away too long, they’ll come looking and you know what will happen.  They’d all get lost is what he meant--and he was probably right, but I wasn’t listening.  I couldn’t leave it, not now; I know it’s weird to say it--and believe me, it is weird--but it’s almost like I was in love with the murk.  Like there was nothing else in the world that I wanted--and my friend could just take himself on back to camp if he wanted, and leave me.  I wouldn’t have minded, just then. 

     Eventually, though, they did come looking for us.  Flashlights sweeping the area, voices; and what do you think happened?  I’ve never been so jealous in my life--not before, and not since; that murk was mine, mine!  What right did they have to it?  So I told my friend that we had to go--which he thought was a grand idea--but we argued about which way--I wanted to circle around so that they wouldn’t find the pit, and he thought it would be dangerous to take off through the dark without a light.  Oh, yeah--the batteries died while I crouched there, in love with the pit.  So I guess we must have been there a pretty long time, after all. 

     In the end, neither one of us got our way.  The ledge gave out under me and I just managed to fling myself back up onto the bank while the lip of the ledge fell with a dull plop into the water, crested momentarily like an island of muck that the murk slowly enveloped. 

     It’s strange, isn’t it?  Up until that moment, I probably would have fallen into the water and been happy to never surface again.  And that’s no exaggeration, either.  But the moment that bank gave out, something else gave out inside me--whatever twisted illusion the murk was weaving came unraveled, and I so threw myself to the ground--as chance would have it, right at my friend’s feet.  As if I was asking him for forgiveness at the same time that I was saving myself.  And at that point I didn’t even have anything to apologize for.  Strange, indeed.

     We made it back to camp, without meeting anyone along the way.  And, as far as I know, nobody else found the pit.  At least nobody said anything about it.  They were too busy making jokes about why we’d been gone so long--like seventeen and eighteen year olds would be expected to, the same vein.  More details that I’ll just leave to the imagination. 

     The next day we were all too busy hiking and fishing and playing pranks on each other that I never found the opportunity to go back to pit; and that night I was so exhausted that I fell right to sleep.  I didn’t even dream.  And in the morning we packed up and left.

     Well, it would be nice if my story ended there, but it doesn’t.  You can imagine the hold that pit had on me in the days that followed.  I stopped going out on Sundays to the crags--I stopped going anywhere, actually--and when my friend came over I barely listened to what he had to say.  It was like I was still there in that pit--like I’d actually fallen in, and was still there.  It’s hard to explain, but that’s what it was like.  I’d dream I was there in the water--I’d dream I was the water--and I would call out in a watery voice to anybody who passed by to stop and have a look in the murk, to see what they could see, to come down and join me in the murk, to become one with the murk.  The murk became a living, breathing, capitalized thing--The Murk--and the line that separated it from me became smaller and smaller every day. 

     You can see why it’s so hard for me to remember the dates and the details--it all ran together at this point--or, I guess, it started to way back around the time of that stream field study.  Everything after that…well, for lack of a better word, it was just one big murk. 

     I do remember one day--July 29^th--because it was on a newspaper that my dad left on the kitchen table, and that I picked up one morning while I had my Raisin Bran and coffee.  I started drinking coffee that summer because it seemed like that was just part of growing up.  I’m not sure why else anyone would do it, the taste isn’t much to write home about.  Anyway, so there I was; I almost never read the paper, but sometimes I would read the comics or the sports and once in a while I’d try the crossword.  I’m not sure what I was aiming for that morning but I didn’t get to any of those; there was a headline on the front page: Lookout Remains Identified, and the small subheading below said Bones those of an engineer who disappeared several years ago.  I didn’t bother reading the article; there was a picture attached, though. 

     Yeah, it was him.

     I told you this was a strange story, pops.  But 100% true. 

     When my dad got home from work that day, I asked him if he knew anything about the engineer who went missing.  He said that he remembered when it happened and that he remembered when the story went away, but that was about it.  He said it was on the news now and then but that nobody could ever really figure anything out--they all just guessed that he ran away from his life and was probably living pretty comfortably in Europe or Mexico or somewhere else, or Canada.  It made a prettier story than blaming it on the Buffer--which was how they were spinning it up north.  He said that it was all over the news radio now and that nobody could figure out how they got there--did I mention where they found them?  In the pit, of course.  Right there in the murk.  That’s why the project stopped almost as soon as it started; that’s why the pickups stopped rolling through town at 7:23 am.  Because of that engineer’s bones. 

     My dad told me that it was a big mystery how his bones got there--and maybe it was.  But I’ve worked with a few engineers since then, pops, and let’s just say I think I have a pretty good idea. 

     You’re not an engineer, are you?  I guess I should’ve asked before.

     When my friend came over the next day, I told him about the engineer.  He already knew, though.  He said how lucky we were that we didn’t end up like him that night camping, and I guess I agreed.  Well, I didn’t disagree, at least.  I didn’t want to turn into a pile of bones, anyway.  But there was a part of me, too, that wondered.  However long the bones had been there, they must have absorbed some of the murk’s essence; and I wondered what that meant, the secrets those bones could tell.  If bones could tell, I mean.  I’ll admit, my mind ventured to a dark little borderline that rearranged the question and had me wondering what my bones could learn?

     I think my friend knew what I was thinking, though, and he changed the topic to something else.  I can’t really remember what--probably asking if I’d made up my mind what I was going to do that Fall, if I was going to go to college somewhere or what.  He was always asking me what I meant to do with my life--like it had any bearing on what he was going to do.  Sometimes I wondered if he was so tied to me that he would go anywhere, so long as I went.  We were pretty inseparable, those days. 

     It’s nice to have someone like that, don’t you think?  Course, you never know how nice until that person drifts away, or you do.  No pun intended.

     What did he want to do?  That’s a good one.  I’m not sure I ever really asked him, to be honest.  But not because I didn’t care--it’s just that I sort of knew.  We could read each other that way, we always knew what the other was thinking.  He would ask me because that’s the kind of guy he was; we were pretty different, in a lot of ways, but we understood each other.  To answer your question, I’m pretty sure he wanted to leave Kelley; and in case you were wondering, I didn’t.  Funny how things work out, isn’t it?

     That Sunday, I set off with him down to the crags.  He thought I needed some fresh air, and I couldn’t really argue with him on that.  I was feeling a little cooped up.  And I can honestly say that I had no intention of heading off up into the Lookout.  For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t really thinking about it.  Like Zelda, it was slowly beginning to fade into the middleground of my mind.  It was still there, the murk, but it was more of a shadow now than substance--it was no longer The Murk.  It was just a soggy hole in the corner of a pit dug out for a project that just happened to be on hiatus, in which some bones had been discovered.  I’d even forgot about the engineer.

     You ever heard that one--keep your friends close and your enemies closer?  Yeah.  Maybe I should have recognized the danger.  But I didn’t.

     And this is where my story comes to a head.      

     We didn’t make it down to the crags.  Part of the way down the hill, a low rumbling sound echoed from the west--in other words, from the city.  There was only one road that ran into Kelley and one road out, and sounds that came from the west came first from the north, which meant the city.  There was nothing else along the way.  Well, almost nothing.  But nobody ever saw anything come in or out of that old house--and, of course, nothing does.  I’m not even sure if it’s still there, I guess I’ll find out.

     The low rumbling belonged to a truck engine, one of those diesels I’d heard every morning at 7:23 and every afternoon for about a week and a half, turning the hands of my little clock until one day they stopped, and so did my world.  It really felt that way when it happened--I think I said so before--so it was strange to hear that sound again, to see the white pickup grow larger down the road, to remember all those mornings and especially that night.  As if the rest of Kelley was passing through a time warp and there I was to witness it all, like props on the stage of a silent play, and me an audience of one.  One moment I was there, watching that truck roll through town--and the next I was back at the pit, the machines there groaning to life, the whispering murk.  Like something was waking up inside me that had been sleeping, something I’d forgotten was there.  The sense that something was happening inside me, to me--but that it was limited.  That it required some action on my part, only I had no idea what that action was, or would accomplish.  It’s like someone giving you a box that’s all covered in locks and they say Here you go, open her up, and then they set a timer and you don’t know where to start, or even what’s inside the box you’re trying to open.  Maybe it’s something that should never be set free, you know?  Like Pandora.  But that’s the catch, I guess--she didn’t know, and neither did I; and it’s the unknown that draws so many past that invisible point of no return.  It has to be invisible, too, if you think about it--that’s what makes it impossible to find, looking behind you.  You can’t ever go back because you don’t ever know where you’re going back to.  Past, present or future--it’s all just scenery.

     The truck disappeared up the Lookout road, and then about thirty minutes later it came back.  There’s a little corner market there just before the Lookout road takes off behind Kelley; it gets pretty good business from the city workers that come down once in a while for projects like this or to haul rock from the old quarry, seeing as the city don’t have one.  Or didn’t, when I left.  High school seniors would come down for lunch, sometimes, too, but that was about it.  I guess there were others, but I never saw ‘em.  It didn’t have much, just a gas pump and things like hot dogs and chicken strips and pizza and pretty much nothing really good for you.  Which I guess is why it did so well with the workers and the kids.  The Post Office was across the street, but hardly anybody used that.  I can’t remember the name of the market.  I watched it come back from inside the store.  The truck, I mean.

     There was a little television fixed in the corner up behind the register--I can’t remember what was on, though.  I think it was the news, but I wasn’t paying all that much attention.  I do remember seeing that picture of the engineer, though--so I guess it must have been the news.  But what good the news or anything did on that television, I don’t know; never mind how small the picture was, the thing was always on mute.  Maybe it just kept the guy company, working there.  I know I’d get bored in there all by myself, and a picture on a screen is a whole lot better than talking to the shelves, like that nutty character in Steinbeck. 

     The pickup pulled alongside the store and stopped; the driver stepped out, stretched and yawned.  I guess he was tired--maybe he hadn’t meant to come all the way out here, maybe something had happened at the site.  That was what I thought--and trying to imagine just what set my mind working in ways that surprised even me.  Had there been another skeleton?  But then I remembered that nobody had been in or out, and that if there had been, the news wouldn’t be just showing the same engineer.

     He came in, bought a box of potato wedges and some ranch dressing and a soda, glanced at the television and sort of laughed, and then walked out.  I followed him.  It wasn’t anything I did on purpose, just he left the store and before I knew it I had, too.  He was getting into his truck--he’d left it running (you could still do that, back then)--and was about to drive away when he saw me.  I don’t know what it must have seemed like--I was staring, a thousand questions in my mind and not a single thought to keep them company--but he laughed again like he had in the store, waved, and stuck a potato wedge in his mouth; and I don’t know what I did, probably just kept on staring. 

     You might be wondering where my friend was during all this.  He stayed up on the hill--he wasn’t much for strangers, usually.  Then again, neither was I.  But he sauntered down while I was standing there; neither one of us spoke, and driver didn’t either.  He was pretty big, from what I remember.  Not overweight, just broad.  He was wearing some kind of button up shirt that was open to about his sternum, and his hat was dirty and sweat stained, and he had sunglasses on the bill.  He was sweating from the heat.  Some old country song bled out through the low rumble of the engine--I don’t remember which, and I can’t tell one from the other.  The potato wedges were almost gone.  There was a spitter in the console, about a quarter full.  That stuff always made me gag.  What can I do for you? he asked, and I can’t really remember what I said back, but I think I asked him what he was doing, told him how I used to watch them all come by in the morning so I was curious.  Not wanting to give the impression that I knew, or that I’d seen with my own eyes--I’m not sure why, but I thought it was for the best.  So he told me about the fish pipe, and how it had this one corner that kept filling up with water because the original pipe had been backfilled with logs and all kinds of garbage when the old mill cleaned out and disappeared, and the water just ran on down there and there was no way to stop it except to dig the whole thing out--which they had been doing when something came up and they had to stop work.  He said ‘something’ as if he didn’t really want to talk about it specifically, like a dirty family secret that everyone knows but nobody acknowledges.  Now someone’s got to come up once in a while to pump the water out so it doesn’t accumulate, he said--and that someone happened to be him, because he lived closest.  Rotten luck, he said.  But it had to be done. 

     I asked why they’d had to stop work--knowing the answer, but asking--and he said Well I guess you don’t read the papers.  He called it a temporary shutdown, and said that it wouldn’t probably start up again for a while.  Then he left.

 

I never saw him again.  I’m not sure it matters all that much, but that was the last time.  I never saw any of those pickups again.  As far as I know, all that stuff’s still up there.  But it can stay there, all I care.  If I never find out what happened to that project and those poor fishes or the engineer, count me as one who could not care less.  Not one single bit.    

 

     That night, I told my folks I was going camping with my friend.  Just one night, I told them.  They said something about the summer slipping away and a job and responsibility, but to be honest I wasn’t listening.  All that could wait, I figured--like I’d been telling them all summer, it could wait.  I took a flashlight with me but that was all.  In other words, I didn’t take my friend.  The clock was ticking--like it was an hourglass and that man in the truck had turned it over--and there I was, that box with all of the locks on it in my hands.  I needed to concentrate, I needed to find the key--I didn’t need anyone there telling me to put it down, leave it alone.  Actually, that’s exactly what I needed--but you know how things go.  The old obsession had waked itself up and it was all I could see, and all I could see I saw through the haze of that obsession.  The whole world existed inside that murk, which meant the whole world and all that I saw was in a murky haze.  Nothing seemed real, except the murk.  Not even my friend.  Not even me.

     It’s not all that hard to sneak around Kelley at night.  You might think so because it’s so small, but really the smallness is what makes it so easy.  There’s nothing about that place I didn’t know--which meant I didn’t need my flashlight until I was well past the Lookout gate and nobody would be able to see it.  It wasn’t the first time I’d done it.  I went there sometimes, with my friend or on my own--there was a nice little bluff that was pretty easy to get to that you could lay there and look up at the stars and how they reflected on the ocean and it was like you were laying at the very edge of the world.  It’s a small kind of feeling, but a good one, too.  That’s what I always told my friend when he said we should get away from Kelley--I told him if I ever wanted to leave I could just go there.  It was the same thing, far as I was concerned.  I could go anywhere when I was there.  It was like a good book except I was the one writing it. 

     I guess I felt a little like you.  Fancy that.

     I didn’t have any trouble finding the pit from the main road.  I had a pretty good idea from the camping trip and believe it not, once I started to get close I sort of felt like it was less my finding the pit than it finding me.  Like no matter where I would have gone, there it would have been.  I know that doesn’t make sense, but that’s how it seemed.  That’s how it seems now, looking back.  But I guess it doesn’t matter.  All that matters is that I found it--if I hadn’t, there probably wouldn’t be a story to tell.  I probably wouldn’t be here to tell it, anyway.  That’s one thing he was right about, my friend.

     The pit was carved out of a natural dip in the road; coming at it straight on, the decline took me by surprise and I nearly stumbled into a barricade of boulders that I guess they’d set up to keep someone from coming in and taking their equipment--it happens, I’m sure.  People with too much time on their hands.  I know I thought about doing it--not really, but I thought about what it would be like to do it.  Just hop right in and drive one of those big excavators off into the darkness of the Lookout.  Probably smack into a ditch, knowing me. 

     I climbed over the boulders and down to the pit; I don’t know what I was expecting, but the water was all gone.  There were little pools here and there that you couldn’t expect the pump to take care of, but mostly it was gone.  I could see bits of sawed up log beams jutting out of the side of the pit, like the bones of something buried there a long time ago, and the light from my flashlight reflected there where the water was trickling through.  I wondered how long it would take for it to fill back up again.  Everything else was the same--the tools, the stakes with the flagging, the fan, all of it.  The two pipe segments stacked up on the bank.  I’m not sure why but I had to fight back the urge to throw it all in the pit, everything I could manage--I know why I fought it but I don’t know why it was there to fight--it was like that pit was crying out for the emptiness of it all.  Maybe it missed the water, the murk--I don’t know.  And believe me, it really did seem that way--that it missed the water, that it had the emotional capability of feeling loss and deprivation or exposed or whatever it was that the water had meant, the murk.  Maybe it was embarrassed, I don’t know.  That it was anything at all is enough to make you scratch your head. 

     I found myself leaning over the edge, calculating the distance down, the solidness of the muck below.   I don’t know what I was looking for, what I was hoping for, but I picked up the biggest, heaviest rock I could and tossed it into the pit just to see what would happen.  Not much, it turns out; just a dull thud and when the stone rolled away it wasn’t anything like Jesus walking out but there was a noticeable dent there, that was all.  It infuriated me.  I can’t tell you why, either--well, I can, I have a much better idea of things now than I did then.  Things are always clearer when you look backwards at ‘em, when they aren’t covered up in all that murky haze--I think I said that already, though.  I wanted it to sink.  I wanted that rock to disappear.  That it simply rolled away seemed like a personal insult--not to me, but to the pit, the murk.  Like it knew the pit was naked without its water and was pointing out that nakedness by staying aboveground.  I’m not sure why it struck me like that--not even hindsight has been able to solve that one for me--maybe a weird kind of chivalry, I guess.  Or maybe I knew that rock was heavier than I was.  They had some big ones there, let me tell you.

     I started to get desperate.  I imagined myself in a forest of hourglasses that had all run out, the pit closed and covered in locks that I had no hope of opening.  I remember searching ever corner of the job site for anything that would open that box--shovels and rakes seemed pretty insignificant that night and I didn’t even bother with those.  Likewise the jumping jack.  I crawled up to one of the excavators--the yellow Case had the bigger bucket so I tried that one; it was unlocked, surprisingly enough.  I crawled in and set down in the cab, moved the beam of my flashlight all over the console and the controls and everywhere, looking for the switch to turn it on. 

     No, I’d never operated one before.  But that didn’t matter.  It wasn’t a matter of knowing what I was doing, just doing it.  I didn’t know what I was going to do with a machine like that, except that it had a bucket and the secret of the murk was somewhere down there below the surface, where the water was.  And maybe I didn’t know what any of the controls did, but I promise you I was going to figure it out before anyone got up there to see what I was doing.  Who knows--it was probably too far up there to make a noise down in Kelley, anyway; and never mind the city.  I don’t care how close that guy lived, it wasn’t close enough.  And I don’t know who had a key to the gate, but I guarantee you they were asleep.  Like I should have been, like anyone should have.  But there I was, and the only thing that mattered was getting to the bottom--the literal bottom--of things.  The hourglass I was racing against, it almost seemed like it was my own--that’s how desperate I was.  That’s how strong the obsession. 

     What are you doing up there? I heard someone say--a voice I recognized but didn’t recognize, that I knew belonged to my friend but that friend was not someone I knew--if that makes any sense.  I recognized it like you recognize someone’s photo--a representation of something that isn’t there.  My friend couldn’t be there, because I left without telling him--but there he was, wondering what I was up to.  It was a pretty fair question, too, in all honesty.  I didn’t have an answer for him then, and I still don’t--what was I doing? 

     I’ve asked myself a thousand times since then--what was I doing up there?  I still don’t know the answer, pops.  Most likely it’s not something I ever can know.  I was doing the will of…well, of something else.  I know it wasn’t my own will, let’s put it that way. 

     It’s not an easy thing to reflect on, as a matter of fact.  I haven’t talked about it in a long time.  I guess I’d forgotten why.  I’m starting to remember.

     But it’s almost over and I can’t stop now.

     What are you doing up there, my friend asked me.  For some reason his asking only heightened the desperation of it all, and I remember flailing wildly in the cab, hopeful of any kind of reaction from the machine--maybe like something out of Space Odyssey, a voice or something like that.  I don’t know.  It’s all pretty alien, if you think about it.  In any event, nothing happened. 

     I told him I was going to dig out the pit, like the man said they were doing.  As if that made sense out my actions--the pit, feeling jilted at having been left alone, mid-exposure, seized on the first chance passerby to finish the task; and that passerby had been me, that night of the camping trip.  Maybe there was something down there that needed digging up, something below the bones.  Maybe the same something was the reason for those bones, my friend said--but I didn’t listen.  He was just trying to get me to leave the pit alone, or at least that’s how I felt.  And he was--but I didn’t get it, I just thought he was trying to rob me of something that had reached out to me, that had got into me, that needed me; and, believe it not, it was something that I needed, too.  I don’t like to get sentimental, pops, but I’ve been a pretty lonely guy.  Even growing up, I didn’t have much in the way of friends--just this one I’ve been talking about.  The murk--the Murk, I should say--sort of settled into that void; I felt needed for once.  And when you go your whole life not knowing that feeling, I guess it doesn’t really matter all that much the end, so long as you’re the means. 

     Pretty stupid, I know.  But not everyone can be Charlie Chuckles. 

     I ignored my friend, and kept hitting every button, turning every knob.  I think I adjusted the seat, too, just because I could.  Obviously, nothing happened.  I saw the ignition but I kept telling myself I could get around it, somehow.  People do it all the time, hotwiring cars and things--Officer Brooks used to talk about it.  Happened all the time in the city, at least, so I knew it was possible.  But I couldn’t even find any wires to heat up, so that was out the window.  Probably for the best, actually. 

     At last, I gave up.  I was tired.  I was a pool of sweat.  I sort of melted out of the cab; my friend was there, looking out over the pit with this distant sort of concern that I could tell he was trying hard to keep from turning into anything else, like judgment.  That’s okay, I felt judged anyway just by his presence.  And it didn’t even occur to me that I’d never felt that way around him before; it didn’t occur to me that I had changed, that the Murk in me had made me into something else; or maybe I’d just decided not to notice, because that feeling of being needed was too good to let all those other details sink in, take root.  Anyway, I didn’t say anything, and neither did he.

     At last he asked me again what it was I was trying to do; and again I told him.  He said something about how I didn’t know the first thing about excavators and maybe he had a point, but I told him desperate times and the funny thing is we both missed the irony.  Or I did, anyway--he probably just didn’t say anything. 

     Yeah, I bet he didn’t miss it.  He never missed much, actually.  I could always count on him, that way.

     In any case, he told me, it’s pretty hard to operate anything without a key.  And as it turned out, he was right about that, too.  I didn’t respond, though, I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.  Maybe after it was all over, I thought.  I left him standing there and went back to the corner, the same corner that he and I knelt over that one night, the corner that buckled a little beneath our weight.  It had sloughed off pretty significantly since then, but it was still there, a little mucky hammock beneath which a small log like a sawed off leg bone was sticking out.  I could hear the water trickling out from somewhere up the road.  Looking down into the pit, breathing heavily--from exhaustion, desperation or adrenaline, I don’t know--maybe all three--I could see the wavy, distorted reflection of the moon and the stars, and myself like a funhouse shadow; and my friend, coming up behind me like a second head out of my own shoulder.  Even in that shadowy reflection, I could see the fear in his eyes--as if I was looking through them, looking at us both.  It was the fear I didn’t feel, but should have. 

     Like I had on the other side, I grabbed the biggest rock I could manage--a quarry rock about the size of a basketball--and heaved it into the muck, and would have myself along with it if my friend hadn’t been there to stop me.  Fortunate thing, that bracelet turned out to be, because that’s what he latched onto; and it held, somehow, and look--there’s even a scar.  Not that I cared much about the bleeding, not then.  I didn’t even notice.  In fact, I might have fallen all the way in and not noticed, that’s how fixed I was on the rock, whether or not it would sink.  So I watched--I might have prayed, even--the arc of the rock, strangely lambent in the light of the moon, like a comet that’s all burned out and falling.  I think I held my breath.  Finally the rock came down into the muck--one sickening plop--muck everywhere--and there it sat, half submerged; and there I was, thinking what I can’t recall.   Thinking failure, I guess.  Like the door somewhere deep below the surface had closed, and that rock was sitting on it, a weight I knew I couldn’t ever lift.  The secret forever concealed.

     In the quiet that followed, I remember noticing the blood on my arm--looking down at the bracelet, which I guess I never told you about, did I?  Emily brought them--made them and brought them on that camping trip, something that we could remember each other by.  I don’t know what she was afraid of--like I said, not many people leave Kelley, not by choice.  I don’t know.  I guess it’s interesting the way things turned out, or ironic--I’m not much for words.  But they say that sometimes people just have that feeling--but I’m getting off track.  All I meant to say was that the colors were all stained for the blood; the cool, salty air was getting into the cut and my arm was starting to sting a little.  I guess it kind of woke me up, too, because that was probably the first time I really took notice of my friend, there.  It’s hard to explain, but the world seemed to fall back in place, for a moment.  Or the murk was peeled away and I could see again, I don’t know. 

     We should head on back, he said, and I remember agreeing with him--if for no other reason than to get something to stop the bleeding, to clean it out.  I gave the pit a cursory glance--the rock was still there--and wondered how I had ever arrived here--literally, I couldn’t remember the journey.  That day and the man with his truck seemed a summer ago, like I’d wandered into a world constructed by memories or something.  Which made me wonder if I wasn’t really just dreaming--you know how dreams can be.  They can go on forever, and then you jump out a window or something and the falling wakes you; then after you wake you don’t remember anything else but the fall.

     Maybe I shouldn’t have thought about it that way, but I did.  I felt my friend’s hand on my shoulder, and realized I was back on the edge.  The ledge shifting beneath our combined weight.  Again he said we should go--and again I agreed; but neither one of us moved.  The one thing that did move, though--can you guess?

     Yeah, the rock.  The murk was pulling it down--slowly, almost unnoticeably down, like one of those big snakes that unhooks its jaw to wrap its undersized mouth around whatever it’s eating.  It looked like that, in a way.  The ground unhinging, the rock sinking centimeters at a time, growing smaller until it was gone.  There was no sign of it, no swell in the murk.  Wherever it had gone, it wasn’t there yet--however deep the murky vault, well, it was clear one little rock wasn’t going to make much difference.  This all happened silently.  I didn’t really notice at the time, but looking back it adds an element of the eerie, don’t you think?  Something disappearing forever without a sound.  But I wonder if it would have made one, even if it could.  It was such a peaceful descent, like those frogs that don’t know their getting boiled until it’s too late, or the lizards that come out to bask in the sun and later on you have to pry them away from their stone with a stick.       

     Of course, at this point there was no leaving the pit.  Even my friend understood that, he didn’t even suggest it.  He knew me well enough to know better.  I probably wouldn’t have listened, anyway.  The only thing I could wrap my brain around was that the door hadn’t closed, time hadn’t run out; I still had no idea about the key, but something told me that didn’t matter--and something else told me that I already had it.  It’s strange, but something really did seem to tell me that--or not me, but something else inside of me.  I’ve thought it about a lot--it was as if the murk was communicating to something else inside me, that wasn’t me  and didn’t belong to me, but that whatever it was, I had to obey.  Like there was a second me in there, somewhere, the brains of the operation--and the me, here on this boat--that night at the pit--was nothing more than a puppet, a dummy.  A shell.  I hate thinking it, too--but what other explanation is there?  As far as I can remember, none of this was my design.  There was never a point where I thought, Hey, there’s nothing more I’d like in this world than to find out what’d buried there under all that murk; I just remember feeling that way, waking up one day and feeling it.  Like it had always been there, waiting.  Sleeping.  And whatever it was that was telling that thing, that me in me that I had the key--I guess that’s what woke it up.  How, I don’t know.  At first I thought it must have happened that night during the camping trip, after graduation--but it was already awake, then.  The only thing I’ve been able to come up with since then was that it all started with that engineer--just don’t ask me how.  There’s still a lot of things I don’t understand about this story, pops.  And I think I never will.  But I think the engineer knew the secret--the one we met by the creek during that one survey, not the one who went missing.  And that’s the only way I can explain it.

     Yeah, it was the same engineer--that’s not what I meant. 

     I told you it was strange, didn’t I?

     I can’t remember how long we stood there, looking at the place where the rock had been--and I can’t say what my friend was thinking, just that he stayed right there the whole time.  We always felt like our lives were tied together, like we should have been brothers if the world made a little more sense.  It doesn’t surprise me that he stayed there, I just wish… 

     Well.  If wishes were fishes--and you know how I feel about fish.

     It’s strange, but whenever I think about that night, I sort of feel like it would have lasted forever, if all we ever did was stand there, looking.  As if time was waiting for whatever it was we might do--something had to be done, we just had to make up our minds to do it or not--before it could start up again, like when you lift the needle off a record and it just keeps spinning, soundlessly.  And as it turned out, the only minds that needed making up belonged to the murk and the me within me--and they’d been made up from the beginning, I bet. 

     Finally my friend said something.  Funny that it was him who broke the silence.  If you don’t do it now, he said, you’ll be doing it for the rest of your life.  Won’t you?  I don’t think I answered--I didn’t need to.  And he was right.  I knew it then and I know it now.  It was like a poison that I had to get out of my system, and there was only one way to get it out.  The murk had put it there; the murk had to take it back out. 

     My friend told me to hang on and he went around the pit in the direction of the camp, which is where all the tools were lined up and the wheelbarrow and all of that.  He grabbed something off the top of a fallen log and came back over to where I was standing, and I saw it was a rope.  If we’re going to do it, he said, we’re going to do it right.  He had me take off my belt and raise my arms up and he slipped the rope through all the belt loops in my jeans and then tied it in a knot--all which he did while I stood there like a statue, unmoving.  Then he looked for something to tie the rope to, but we couldn’t find anything close enough so he ended up going through the same operation on himself--took off his belt and slipped the rest of the rope through his own belt loops and tied a knot.  Then he walked as far as he could to test the distance, and I think we ended up with about fifteen feet of slack.  Enough to make a pretty good jump, in other words, but not too much. 

     What do you think happened then?  That I jumped in, sunk up to my waist maybe, realized how foolish the whole thing was, satisfied that inner me, woke up to find the whole thing a weird, protracted dream?  I wish.  Believe it not, I didn’t do a thing--just stood there, anchored to my friend who was in turn anchored to me--peering down into the pit as if there was something more down there than our murky silhouettes to be found, something profound and waiting.  I’m not sure why I didn’t jump.  Faced with the realization of my obsession, I simply froze--call it stage fright, I guess.  I was afraid--not of the murk, but of disappointing the murk.  So I just stood there.

     What happened next, maybe I should have seen coming.  I bet you did, pops. 

     Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.  I’ve asked myself a million times why, but I don’t know if there’s an answer, if it’s that easy.  I thought for a long time that he just got impatient with me--with the whole thing--and wanted to put an end it, himself.  Especially since I wasn’t showing any signs of jumping, myself.  And maybe it was that.  But there’s another part of me that wonders if he hadn’t meant to do it all along--after all, he’d been the one to get so interested in the pit when all we knew it as was a fish pipe project--but I don’t know.  That seems an awful lot like a copout, to me.  He didn’t know what would happen any better than I did--that much, I’m sure of. 

     Anyway, he jumped.  While I stood there, like a statue, considering the murk and my own incompetence, he got himself a nice little running start and jumped right into the pit, into the murk.  Feet first.  I don’t know if it was because of the rock I threw down there or the fact that he wasn’t a rock but a person--but he slipped right into the muck as if he’d jumped into a swimming pool; one moment he was there, suspended and lambent and still visible--the next, all that was gone.  He was gone.  I pulled the rope immediately--I thought it must be like quicksand--I braced myself against a few small boulders and pulled with everything I had, expecting a fight.  There was no fight.  There was no resistance, at all.  The rope came flying back out of the pit, still tied in knot just like he’d tied it--only, somehow, he’d not come with it.  I stared at the rope, like I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at--and I couldn’t, it didn’t make sense.  I knew something was wrong--and I knew what that something was--but the correlation wasn’t there.  Whatever it was that empty rope and that pit had to do with me, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out.  It only lasted a moment, the feeling--and I didn’t understand what it meant until later: my inner me hasn’t made a peep since then, or the murk.  I untied myself and threw the rope to the side and scrambled to the edge of the pit, searching that morass for any sign of my friend--but it was like he’d never even been there.  The surface was slate and gray and still and reflective here and there of the moon and stars; I could hear the water trickling down from the old log culverts and the bypass and I could hear the pounding of my own heart, but that was it.  I lowered myself down into the pit, the muck came up to about my calves, and I started digging in the muck--frantically, until my arms grew heavy, my shoulders burned, my eyes bleary with sweat and tears.  I think I was yelling his name--in fact, I know I was, only I didn’t know it at the time--and when I couldn’t dig anymore, I ran up and grabbed a shovel, but found I couldn’t sink the spade into the muck because I was afraid of hitting my friend.  So I did my best to force the handle down as far as I could--it went about three feet, but that was all.  Either the ground turned solid or my arms gave out, I don’t know which.  The last thing I remember is climbing out of the pit and running down the main Lookout road straight into Kelley, looking like the Creature from the Gray Lagoon, sounding like him too, I bet.  After that I remember waking up in the hospital.  Three days had passed.  Officer Brooks was there. 

 

They never found my friend.  I don’t remember asking them to look but they did--I guess it was all that yelling I did.  In fact, one of the first things Officer Brooks told me was that he’d heard someone shouting up Lookout in the early morning hours and he was headed back to his patrol car when I came shuffling out like the mess I was.  I guess I collapsed right there in front of the Post Office, and it was Officer Brooks who scooped me up and brought me all the way up to the hospital.  He said I was talking in my sleep, that I kept talking about someone slipped below the surface, down in the murk.  Of course, he didn’t know what I was talking about; but he asked around and eventually worked it out, what I meant.  He got in contact with the company in charge of the project and they sent someone out--maybe the same one I talked to, I don’t know--and they dug out that mucky corner of the pit down to dry soil and didn’t find anything, and then filled it all back in with rocks and that was that.  When I went back up there--the only time I ever did--they had the pipe in and the road back in place and it was like nothing had ever gone on there.  No leftover rock, no tools, nothing.  Just that trickle of a stream ambling toward the sea, and silence. 

     I know I said I never went back and that I didn’t know what ever happened with the project; I guess I don’t really know the truth.  The place I went to might have been the same pipe, or it might have been some other place entirely.  By the time I made it up there, nothing was the same.  Not up there, and not in me.  I could hardly keep the days straight for the longest time.  Still do, actually.  Guess my temporal equilibrium’s shot--if there is such a thing.  But if there is, and something like this wouldn’t do the trick--I don’t know what would.  Maybe Normandy, but we can’t always pick our battles, I guess.  No matter what they tell you.

     I never saw my friend again.  As far as I know, nobody has.  Officer Brooks never asked me about him, and I didn’t really feel like talking, anyway.  His family moved away without a word, but I don’t really blame them.  Whatever he was to me, he was their only kid.  I would have moved, too.  And I guess I kind of did, didn’t I?

     Anyway, that’s the end, pops.  That’s it.  Strange story, don’t you think?  A lot of questions and not too many answers, but I guess that’s no different from life in general.  Ordinary questions and strange ones, it doesn’t make much difference.  I never found out the true story of that engineer, either.  Not that I looked very hard.  I lost interest, I guess you could say.  In the pipe, in the world--without my friend, I was lost.  So I took to traveling, sailing--moving around was the only way keep my mind from going back there to that night, from beating myself up trying to do things differently.  It’s gotten easier over the years, but it’s never easy--and I don’t want it to be.  You forget the easy things, at least I do.  Losing him was like losing a part of myself--the memory is all that’s left now.  That’s why I still wear the bracelet, to keep it from ever getting that way.  From ever slipping into the middleground, like so many other things have and will, like Zelda.

      That reminds me--I said I had two stories, didn’t I?  I almost forgot the second.  Don’t worry, it won’t take long--good, I think I hear the lookout.  Must be land ahead.  Can’t tell from down here for all those clouds.

 

It was right at the end of that summer.  I was down at the crags--it was a Sunday morning and I didn’t know what else to do with myself except do what I’d always done--and I think I was just kind of lying there.  I had a book, but I wasn’t reading.  I wasn’t thinking about anything, my mind was a total blank.  It was actually really peaceful, and that was a rare thing for me, just then.  Usually all I could think about was my friend, and that night, and myself standing there on the ledge not jumping in, myself pulling in the empty rope, myself digging the muck.  I wasn’t sleeping much, either--but you probably guessed that.  I still don’t sleep all that well, actually.  It’s not just the fish dream, you know. 

     Anyway, there I was--eyes closed but open to the darkness of my empty mind--when I started to hear something siphoning through the crags from above, soft and measured, like the echo of steps.  Which is what they were, of course.  I propped myself up and watched the descending figure--I knew it wasn’t him but until she was standing there in front of me, I could have swore it was my friend come back from the muck--or wherever it was he went.  But it wasn’t him--in fact, it was Zelda.  She’d come down for one last look at the shoals before she had to go back to school, she told me--she was sad to go, she’d come down once in a while hoping to find me there but somehow we’d never crossed paths.  She seemed genuinely sorry, actually--and I don’t think I was making it up.  She seemed a little reticent the whole time we made small talk--mostly about the tide pools, but about books, too, anything but school--and she kept brushing her hair behind her ear and gazing out toward the sea.  For some reason the whole scene is painted gold, like the sun was setting--but, like I said, it was a Sunday morning, so that’s not possible. 

     After a while, she told me she had to leave.  Apparently her bags were already packed--she’d only come down to say goodbye.  She didn’t say to the shoals, so I like to pretend she meant to me.  And I never saw her again, so I don’t see the harm.  But at that point neither one of us knew what lay ahead; she told me she’d be back in the Spring and that she hoped to see me down here again; I told her that I probably wouldn’t be coming down here all that much anymore.  When she asked why, I told her about how it was a kind of ritual for me and my friend to come down on Sunday mornings, but since my friend was gone there wasn’t much point in keeping it up, that it wasn’t the same place anymore.  Which she said she understood--even though looking back, the only thing that really changed was me; I just didn’t know it then.  After a short silence, she said she wasn’t quite sure what I meant: did my friend move away, or did something happen?  So I told her that, too--as much as I could.  It’s hard enough to tell now, so you can imagine what it was like then.  I told her there had been an accident, that maybe she’d heard about it in town.  Nothing stays secret round Kelley very long, you understand.  But she hadn’t heard anything, not unless I meant the engineer--which I didn’t.  She seemed confused--and I was confused.  I asked her if she remembered meeting him, earlier that Spring?  She thought, quietly--and then, almost in apology, she shook her head, no.  I’ll never forget the way she looked, like she had just seen me standing there for the first time, like someone she couldn’t quite remember.  She shook her head again, just once, slowly.  I remember, she said.  I remember that day like it was yesterday.  I remember meeting you. 

     I couldn’t respond.  My voice was caught somewhere in my throat--her words, her tone, the way she kept shaking her head, like she was really sad about something but didn’t know what.  As if she had anything to be sad over.  I don’t know how long we stood there, but I know she never stopped shaking and I never stopped hating her for it.  It surprises me now, the hatred--but it was real.  The kind of hatred you feel looking in the mirror sometimes--the agony of truth.  That’s why I hated her--it was like she knew something that I didn’t, but all she could do was shake her head over and over like one of those coin-op carnival dolls, one of those fortune tellers; and maybe I was afraid of what she might say about my own fortune, or maybe I just hated the idea that she would have anything to say at all.  What did she know?  So I never said anything to her, and she never said anything else to me.  Not even goodbye.  I don’t even remember her leaving--just all of the sudden she was gone.

     All the way home I replayed that day at the crags in my mind, the day we both met Zelda.  The entire day--me with my London, him with his thoughts, and her with her tide pools--but the more I tried to focus on the details, the dimmer they became.  Pretty soon I couldn’t remember anybody’s face but hers.  By the time I got home, even that was gone.

     If you asked me what he looked like, I couldn’t tell you.  I can’t remember his name, either, and I’ve never talked to his parents since they left.  Why is that?  I’ve asked myself a thousand times, pops.  How does something just disappear like that?  Like he did, in the muck.  I’ve never stopped looking for him.  That day when I got home from the crags, the last time I saw Zelda, I found a note in my bedroom, on my desk under a picture we had taken as a class right before graduation--he was behind the camera, I guess, because he wasn’t in it.  The note said I hope you find your friend.  Signed, ‘Z’.  I know he’s still alive, that he just went someplace, slipped through some window in the murk and he’s probably wondering where in the world I am, just as confused.  It’s a wide world, pops; but I’ve never stopped looking.  Hard to find something when all you’ve got is a bracelet and a scar and story that don’t make sense, though.  But it happened, just like I remember.  And that memory is all I have left.

     Yeah, you’re right.  It is better than nothing.

 

Author's Note

Old story