Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part VI.
VI.
As you were out to sea, nearly drowning, the plastic militiamen were swept away on a most strange and unforeseen adventure. Like most adventures, theirs started in the jowls of a beach-combing sea-mutt. While you were submerged beneath the waves, this scampish young dog with matted hair the color and consistency of wet diapers came running from out of nowhere- on a bee-line course to your collection of bellicose figurines. With equally quick swiftness he had shaken the bag loose with his muscular neck and snatched up the first things to drop out- your precious ‘Duke’ and ‘Rock n’ Roll.’ And as stealthily and mysteriously as he had appeared he disappeared up the beach again with two new playthings in his mouth.“Wow,” I said. “You sure do speak dramatically and insightfully for a crusty old anonymous guy on a beach.”
Quoth the seaman,
Well, I’ve seen many things in…“…I mean,” I interrupted, “You speak like some people write. It’s almost as if you could serve as some kind of ironic, archetypal narrator in a metatextual short story.” I myself was amazed at my well-developed vocabulary for a ten-year old.
The dog-I shall thenceforth call him Cerberus- ran at full speed away from the waves, towards the dry dunes. He weaved in and out of the staggered clusters of anonymous vacationers- around and even between their tanned, coconut-scented legs. All the while he kept in his tight jaws Duke and Rock n’ Roll, chomping down on them as if they would serve as his final meal in the near future.
Cerberus ran.
And ran. Like a salivating running machine, his tongue hanging out. But still he held on to Duke and Rock n’ Roll. Until the time came for a rest and he slowed to a trot. Trot slowing to a walk. Walk becoming a sleepy stumble until Cerberus collapsed on the wet sand of the beach, finally laying down for a spread-eagle nap, loosening his death-grip on Duke and Rock n’ Roll for the first time.I sat in rapt attention listening to this odd man’s even odder tale, wondering the same thing that most sociologists would wonder at this point: where are the parents? Well, when sociologists have dreams of their own, perhaps
they can have parents in them!
Immediately after hitting the ground, the exhausted dog fell into a deep slumber. Caressed by the sound of the gulls overhead, the steady whoosh of the wind and waves enveloping him in their peaceful anesthesia, he drifted far, far away into a dream world of his own…
All men are great in their dreams, Sigmund Freud once said, and dogs are really no different. Beneath their fur and tails and collars and keen senses of hearing are hearts of flesh-pumping blood. But Cerberus was different. He found himself running in slow motion through a watery world of fire hydrants as plentiful as trees in a human’s dream world. He ran without ceasing, without tiring. Yet in his heart was the vague sensation that he was failing. Failing his dog-wife. His dog children. Even his loving human owner and wife were disappointed in his actions. It was the unceasing pressure in his head- the instinct that all of these dogs and people were ultimately let down by his failures. These vague feelings plagued his dreams and had even begun to spill over into his waking hours. Many were the hours he would sit on his haunches, staring at the gray old wooden fence of the backyard where he lived. As if that fence would move or speak some word of worldly wisdom to him.
But it never did.
It was unchanging, consistently fulfilling its unceasing purpose: to keep him in the yard…“Wait a minute,” the dream-me interjected. “How do
you know what this dog was dreaming?”
Sometimes you can just tell, the mysterious salty dog in the overcoat finally replied after sitting in silence for an uncomfortable few seconds.
As Cerberus lay in his unquiet slumber, dreaming his dreams, a lone seagull circled overhead crying out in that lonely way that seagulls and coyotes do, as if someone will answer. While uninterested in the strange lump of mottled fur on the sand, the seagull noticed two small plastic novelties right nest to the dog’s mouth- your ‘Duke’ and ‘Rock n’ Roll.’ Attracted to their bite-size proportions the seagull swooped down to disencumber the dog of the out-of-place toys. For fear of waking the dog and betraying common wisdom involving sleeping dogs, the bird gingerly stepped around in the sand, pecking at the machine gunner and sergeant just long enough to arrange them for transport in his beak. And just as the dog exhaled an unconscious snort, the seagull was up in the air again with what it thought would make a lovely breakfast for the kid-gulls back home.
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part V.
V.
(This is the part of the story where you hear a harp glissando and see a fuzzy, white-bordered, cloud scene as a new camera shot zooms onto your screen. If this were a TV show or movie. Which it’s not. It’s written.)
I quickly arose from my near-drowning, still smelling salt in my nostrils, heart wanting to leap out of my ten-year old chest. As I gulped in oxygen like it was kool-aid, I looked around my sun-blocked surroundings to find my defiance of death went unnoticed by all present on the beach that day.
Save one pair of eyes.
As seagulls cried and little kids from other families ran laughing in ill-fitting swimsuits I noticed I was being watched by an unlikely, stone-still figure. Sitting on the remains of an ancient tree, washed upon the beach from who-knows-where, was an old gentleman. He stared in my direction, piercing eyes spanning the distance as if he were shooting a laser-beam into my soul. It was like when General Zod lifted a car without using his hands. When you know you’ve been watched with that kind of focus, you can do naught but go.
And so I went. As I neared the stranger, he neither waved me on nor shooed me away. I saw upon close inspection a gray beard and weathered long trench coat, an odd fashion choice for a coastal day in the south. His clothing and squinty eyes betrayed a man accustomed to the elements, to sorrow. For sorrow is being married to a wench as spirited and unforgiving as the sea. Perhaps he was a whaler or pirate. Regardless, you might say he was an ancient mariner. When I finally made it to the end of the tree trunk, this ghost-like apparition finally spoke, staring off into the distant reaches of the ocean, which connects all humanity.
I have seen your suffering. I have seen your life nearly snipped short, he said. His voice was that of a chainsaw idling in a tank of rock salt.
I have also seen your two small plastic friends, the military men. I have seen their disappearance and I know their shared story.“You mean Duke and Rock n’ Roll?” I said excitedly, half-believing that a crusty anachronistic old man from the sea would actually speak of my playthings by their proper names.
…the same, he answered.
“Please, mister. You’ve just gotta tell me what happened to them! One minute we were winning the war of the Savannah Beach and the next I was drowning and Duke and Rock n’ Roll were gone…”
Sit… he said, still staring off in the watery distance as if he were prophesying.
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part IV.
IV.
With ten-year old pride still intact I slowly made my way back up the beach in the way that you do when your previous understanding of the world comes crashing down around you and you receive a new vision of the forces out there. The universe was specially- designed for snuffing the life of a ten-year old kid and all his unassuming promise. Water and tides and the continental shelf-- all of them the wily traps of nature to take back her own. Not to mention the killer sharks that were probably looking on from the distance and smiling toothy grins as I gulped and choked on this new reality that tasted a lot like seawater.
That is to say, I walked up the beach slowly.
Since the sea didn’t kill me that day, I knew my mom would. How could I have been so foolish? To venture into the water alone was an act of stupidity so brazen that it could only be punishable by death. I’m pretty sure I caught a fleeting glimpse of my parents looking over blueprints for the guillotine they were going to build in the backyard to teach me a lesson, discussing the relative merits of stainless steel vs. alloy for a proper blade.
In actuality my near-drowning went unnoticed by mom and dad and the rest of mankind. Reality changed and I internalized it. You, dear reader, are the first to hear of it.
As I quietly rode back home in the rear seat of the station wagon, a wet mess, I held up my Zip-loc bag of heroic miniature friends. Perhaps one of those camouflaged Hectors with chiseled features could deliver a rousing speech to lift my spirits.
“You listen here, soldier. We suffered a defeat today. No secret about that. You go toe-to-toe with Mother Nature like that, you’re gonna wind up ass-over-head a few times. But you survived today for a reason. You get up. Dust yourself off. Try again another day…”
But something was horribly wrong! This was not the full complement of soldiers I started the day with! I was missing two vital members of my team- Duke and Rock n’ Roll! Somehow, amidst the confusion of nearly leaving this mortal coil by way of a watery grave, two of my favorite plastic pals had gone missing. Who was going to make the dramatic speech in front of the giant American flag? Storm Shadow? Not likely. There was never any empirical evidence that he could even talk!
I learned another pretty big lesson that day: sometimes things get lost.
They just “get lost.”
There is no rational reason for it or method for recovery. You can try to retrace your steps, check under the couch and cushions, check in the junk drawer or “think harder” all you want. It will end fruitlessly. Sometimes things are just “gone” and gone for good. Scissors, a black glove, a green They Might Be Giants hat, a leather coat, a Bible, a circular container of needles for sewing buttons…gone.
After a few days of life without the missing object, it becomes easier to just give up thought of where it could be. There comes a time when you have to surrender to the inherent chaotic void that roams the world and accept the loss. Better to do that than live with tension for the rest of your life. Just face it, baby. It’s gone and gone for good.
But I have found that, for some reason my subconscious has been unable to let go of Duke and Rock n’ Roll. In fact I recently had a dream, a most wondrous, strange dream that depicted the alternate history of the fate of those two. Maybe it was “a bit of bad mustard,” as Ebenezer Scrooge would posit, but it was a wondrous vision all the same…
Pure, Simple, Fantastic Part III.
III.
The memories from this fortuitous day in question are hazy at best. Perhaps a more writerly way to say that would be “I remember it like it was yesterday…” In either case, sitting here in my landlocked adulthood one thing I’ll never forget from my previous life on the beach was how the man-made world seemed to gradually fade off into the naturally-made world. It wasn’t more than fifty yards or so before sandy concrete and parking meters morphed into dunes that you couldn’t see over, interspersed with non-functional staircases crafted with lonely, grayed-out boards made ancient and pitted from lifetimes of exposure to the moist, ceaseless winds originating from somewhere halfway across the world.
On the really hot days you couldn’t run out to the tide fast enough to escape the scalding sand if you were brave and went barefoot. And venturing from parking lot to waterline in shoes and socks was equally treacherous. Every step you took poured more sand through holes in your shoes until, by the time you could actually see water, it was like lifting witches’ cauldrons filled with barbells and attached to your legs.
Even though I was prepared for a most intensive, specialized shoreline assault mission with my Zip-loc bag of Joes, I regret to say that I remember none of the details of play that day. For all I know it could have been an epic, bloody battle like at the end of Red Dawn.
But isn’t that the way childhood is? I know that I know that I know that I spent oodles of time, hours upon hours posing these miniature militiamen into appropriate positions. However, I’ll be damned if I can remember any of the moments themselves.
Like I’ve hinted at earlier, time is measured in different ways when you’re a kid. I have this theory that I’m not quite ready to publish in Scientific American yet, but it goes as follows: as you get older, the basic unit of time increases. When I was really young the basic unit of time was a day. All planning stretched out no further than a day: “Today I’m going to eat my toast, watch Tom and Jerry, hide in the backyard while mom sweeps the house, have some lunch, maybe watch some Disney channel and wait for Dad to get home.” By high school I could never prognosticate further out than two days. By the time I was in college the basic unit of time had expanded out to a week. “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I have English Comp, Math for Poets, and Fundamentals of Blah, blah. Tuesday and Thursday I have my science lab with that cute Darcy girl, and this weekend I think I’ll hang out with my dorky guy friends.” Now, having reached my thirtieth birthday, the basic unit of time is about two weeks- one paycheck. I’ll bet my parents are making plans by the month. My grandparents…
I wonder what the basic unit of time is for those gray-haired, Chinese mystics who live to be, like, one hundred and forty and learn how to fly.
I digress.
I may not remember the details of how exactly my crack-team of commandoes secured the Georgia coastline that day, but that may be due to one of those moments of childhood singularity- you know, the kind that you remember a couple decades thence and write about in a short story?
At some point that day, as the sun had gotten as high in the sky as it was likely to, I placed Duke and Rock n’ Roll and Scarlett and the whole gang back in their Zip-loc so as to spend some time in the water.
One of the great things about beaches is that they are equal-opportunity bodies of water. Unlike a swimming pool, lake, or pond there are a variety of ways to enjoy yourself without having to commit to total immersion. You can dip your foot in a pool, but eventually you have to jump in.
At the beach, however, you’re allowed to just sit right at the point where the water gives up its advance on the sand and recedes back. It’s possible to sit in an inch or two of water for hours on end and come away feeling like you’ve had a pretty productive day of water sports. And people walk along beaches without shoes but dressed in regular clothes all the time. And being a conservatively timid kid I found myself plopped down at the water’s edge, fascinated with how it never seemed quite possible to dig a hole in the wet sand. Every few seconds the dying throes of a wave would creep up and erase your efforts. The feeling of the earth below you, melting between your toes is a sensation that is difficult to forget. Normally, that sensation- the wet sand, hot sea, seagulls chattering- that was enough.
But this day, this momentous occasion, it wasn’t enough to dwindle in the puddles and tide pools.
Many times in the past, I had watched my brothers wading in water up to their necks, jumping into waves, seemingly miles out (but in reality, maybe fifteen or twenty feet), they laughed and yelled with excitement as they waited for the next wave to splash into them. And I figured I could be just as daring. So, I slowly walked out further, ever so further into the sea- solid, wet sand slowly giving way to inches of water, giving way to water at my knees, giving way to…And upon each new goal set and attained, the ocean kept coming at me, ceaseless, the little white-capped piles of water ahead of me slowly becoming hills, becoming mountains, all unaware of my presence.
It was at that point when the warm water was at chest level that I lost my footing, probably surprised by an unexpected wave. And I learned fear.
It’s amazing how in one flash-of-lightning you can become fully aware of things you took for granted one millisecond before.
One instant before I was swept away that day I lived in a world where there is always a ground to place your two feet, air for your lungs to breathe, and sight without burning. But all of that went away in one frightening instant. For the first time I had recognition of fear. It’s an odd, chilling sensation when your head goes under water, feet touch nothing, you twist and arch your back, squirming to find bottom so as to make sense of the surrounding murk and the sound…Oh my God , the sound. It’s the sound of suspension, stasis, like a low hum, with eery slicing sounds as your arms flail in the water.
The vast expanse of the ocean was waiting for me that day, like some kind of patient predator- one of those that builds elaborate traps and simply bides their time until their next meal stumbles by.
But for some reason, the sea said “not yet.”
That flash of panic was followed by the knowledge that I wasn’t in that deep of water. “There’s gotta be a floor here somewhere.” I had kicked and squirmed enough, stretched and reached out far enough that my fingers eventually felt solid ground again. I could make heads and tails of my situation in space, from which it’s a fairly natural maneuver to get your head above water by leaping off the ocean floor.
That first huge gasp of air after sucking in a nose full of salty water is exhilarating. I couldn’t run up to the beach fast enough, swimsuit weighing me down, hair plastered to my head, all the while looking around to see who noticed my near drowning, to know whether I should feel embarrassed. No one seemed to notice as my world changed from an idyllic romp in the sun to a universe where fear and death were possible. No one noticed as reality expanded one thousandfold in less than a second. No one noticed. I could check off the worry of embarrassment. But was that better?
I could be dramatic and literary and say I remember that event every day of my life and thank God for blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, I go years without even thinking about it. In fact, I only am reminded of my near drowning when I come desperately close to admitting that I can’t swim, an adult of thirty-something years of age.
Thankfully the older you get the less you have to talk about these things.
