The Seas (9 page)

Dear Jude,

Today my mother and I found a kitty. It was a calico with black and white spots on its eyes.

Love,

When Jude was in the war I cleaned empty hotel rooms for money. In most of the rooms a man had taken a woman or girl and loved her with her face against the wall so she couldn’t see him. When I cleaned at the motel I’d touch the wall with my own face. I’d pretend he was behind me. I couldn’t see him. He was in the war. The walls tasted like salt. Imagine how the wall and the women and the girls feel through each winter and each war, standing with their faces up against a wall, playing one love scene they recall over and over again, like a video movie or the memory of something that broke.

I know this is not uncommon, but I’ve always required very little prompting to convince myself that this is a scientific experiment. Just my life, specifically. Almost everyone else is in on it. Jude’s either innocent or he’s the lead scientist. I’ve always wanted to be a scientist so I’ve tried to make friends on the other side, people who might risk passing me a dangerous hint from the resistance, saying, “There are others like you.” But that hasn’t happened yet.

Jude gets paid daily when he fishes and if he’s done well he’ll come by the house. “Let me take you out to lunch,” he says because he has a small pile of money. We usually go out for Chinese food. Jude’s hair looks Chinese, soft and black like a Chinese crow. I wonder how the two pieces of evidence work together in the experiment.

“Jude, have you ever thought that your life was an experiment?” I ask.

“Why yes,” he says. “Yes I have,” he coughs. “I think that’s an entirely natural thought.”

I see. He’s trying to throw me off the scent. I knew it.

“Testing,” Jude says. “Testing,” because he pays for our lunch and he stares at me silently for extended periods of time. On my side of the experiment those actions commonly mean, “Take me home with you and kiss me.” But Jude drives me to my house. “See you tomorrow,” he says and leaves. Sometimes he’ll even go before I can get my keys out of my pocketbook. I tell myself, “He’s got to get over to the lab and type up a report: Subject delusional—she wholly believes in the elements we fabricated for this experiment, namely,

love

death

ocean

mercy

The words fall like drops in some ancient water torture.

When I get home I tell my mother, “I’ve always wanted to be a scientist.” I am hoping that if I tell her this again she will let me in on the experiment.

She doesn’t. Instead she says, “I’ve always wanted to be a Christian Scientist. Why don’t we become Christian Scientists together?” She is not serious. She knows little of that church—the same bit most of us know about their not going to doctors. She thinks that she would like to be one of them because of how years ago she lost a baby at the hospital. She wishes she had become a Christian Scientist before she went to the hospital. I tell her, “The baby was dead inside you before you got there.” But she likes to blame the hospital.

“What does their name mean?” I ask her. “Why are they scientists?”

I am thinking that if she says, “Because they conduct secret experiments instead of going to church,” I will join up. But she doesn’t answer me. She stands staring out the window, holding the hole in her belly.

I show up too early at Jude’s. I could not rest. So I walked to his house while the street was still asleep. The street was dreaming it was the silver asphalt of fish scales, and it looks that way, too. Jude’s house is locked up. I go around back and lie down on the small stair landing outside, though it is cloudy. I imagine the curves of the woman he has in there and his hands on them. While I wait I hear lots of things, particularly one noise that sounds like choking and I think, “Good. He has killed her.” I sit up.

Beside me on the staircase is the molted exoskeleton of an insect and the insect who has come from inside. The exoskeleton looks like a brown paper bag, though the insect’s old hands and feet and antennae are exact, not like a bag but like the real thing. The insect, now outside its spent skin, looks damp and buttery. It becomes apparent that eventually, in a few minutes, the insect will unfold itself into a dragonfly. I can tell by the silica wings, still sticky.

Eventually Jude opens the door but only he comes out. I look inside behind him. “I didn’t know you were here,” he says.

No one else is with him. In the short time that I waited for Jude, not too long, the dragonfly matured enough to fly away. So I hated it because I knew that would never happen to me.

We’ve been fogged in for five days. The fog makes me both love and hate the weather. I hate it because it brings me down, but I love it because if the foul state continues I won’t have to do anything important with my life, and in many ways I am quite happy in that knowledge.

The television talks about those who couldn’t make it through the winter. People who ran out of oil over a weekend or had a slippery car wreck, or a man who went overboard in the weight of a net, or someone who got electrocuted listening to the storm radio in the bathtub, or someone whose liver finally gave out from drinking too much.

Karen, the deaf girl, was here for dinner and though she’s gone now my mother is still feeling quiet. She is sitting in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room reading a book about the Italian Mafia. Jude and I are trying to watch television for the fourth night in a row but my grandfather interrupts. He has been reading some odd dictionaries I got him at the library’s yearly sell-off. One is a Russian to English from the 1950s. “I don’t think you’ll believe what I found,” he says. “A word, razbliuto. We don’t have a word to match it but we should. We should develop it tonight because the word means, ‘the feelings one retains for someone he once loved.’”

“Hate?” Jude says.

“No, not that feeling,” my grandfather answers and looks at Jude with disappointment.

“Betrayal,” my mother says without looking away from her book.

“No,” my grandfather says. “It’s the little house love moved out of, maybe a hermit crab moves in and carries the house across the floor of a tidal pool. The lover sees the old love moving and it looks like it’s alive again.”

They are all wrong. There’s a reason why we have no word for it. You don’t get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you’ve washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea. There is no word for that dirty water.

The three of them argue about the word razbliuto. They try to develop an English word to match it.

“How about ‘disamoured’?” my grandfather proposes.

“Or ‘screart,’” Jude suggests.

“What about ‘evol’?” my mother says and smiles. They look at me for an idea too. I don’t say anything because, ‘once loved’ is not my specialty as I haven’t stopped yet. “Excuse me,” I say and leave the living room. I step out our back door.

The night is cold and beautiful. Though there is still a layer of damp moisture close to the earth, higher up the fog has lifted some and I can see a few stars for the first time in days. I crane my neck up looking overhead, studying the constellations for a long while. I used to know some of their names, but have not studied the sky for so long that I have trouble remembering. I would be better off if I developed my own system of constellations, and that way I wouldn’t forget what Ursus or Pleiades or Orion is supposed to look like. I could make letters from the stars and have them spell words that I’d never forget. That way I would know the sky. I would be able to navigate accordingly. Looking up I start to spell. J, I see. I spell. U. I look around the sky. D, I see and scroll across the stars looking for the next letter. I cannot find an E. My neck is getting rigid, my head filled with blood. That is how I know, how I can feel a tingling that someone is watching me.

I right my head, though the rest of my body freezes. I scan the yard moving just my eyeballs until I think I see him. My breath is labored with fear so that it is all I can hear. “What do you want?” I ask and just then my eyes focus for a moment against the wood of the shed that has grayed in the weather. I see him. He is shaking his head no, no, no. Only this time I recognize him. “Dad,” I say and try not to blink. I stare and am certain it’s him. “Daddy,” I say because I haven’t seen him since I was eight years old. He is wearing a very old denim shirt. It is torn and sodden. It is the same shirt. He is wearing his rubber boots. The same rubber boots. “Daddy.” My eyes are getting dry but I’m scared he’ll disappear if I blink. My eyes start to tear. He dissolves.

I walk very carefully, very slowly over to the shed. I am scared even though I know it was him. I am scared that something will jump out at me. I touch the wood where he stood. He came from the water and the wall is wet. Without turning I back away and shake my head just like he did in case he is still watching. Because I understand what he is saying to me. I run for our door. I lock it and pull the curtain shut like a blanket over Jude.

Scientists have found that the significant asteroid named Eros demonstrates signs of erosion. I am not making this up. The scientists have trouble figuring out why this is happening since there is no wind and no water in outer space to make erosion happen. I am nineteen and Jude is thirty-three. I think the only way I’ll catch up to him here where we have water and wind is for him to stop growing. He is outside my house and sees me in the window. He waves hello. Or for me to get old quickly, and so I wonder what the force is that is eroding the asteroid named Eros and wonder where I can get myself some before my father comes back again.

“I’m tree. I’m tree,” the little boy who lives next door says to Jude and holds up his pinky, ring, and middle fingers to demonstrate. Last week that boy asked me, “Do you love ice cream?” and I told him that, yes, I did. So he asked me, “Then why don’t you marry it?” and ran behind my house laughing.

Jude says to the boy, “Why, buddy, I think its three.” It sounds like, “My bonnie lies under the sea.” I haven’t come out of my room yet since last night. I am too scared. I haven’t told any of them, not even my mother. I am too scared. They won’t believe me. I hear Jude come inside the house. He is downstairs with my grandfather. If Jude comes to my door I will ask him before I let him in, “Jude, do you love me?” and I think he’ll say yes, so I’ll ask him, “Then why don’t you marry me?” Because I have never heard of even one mermaid story where the mermaid’s family does not come up out of the sea to kill the mortal man who won’t marry the mermaid. They always come to get their daughters back.

The scientists working on asteroids suspect that the erosion on Eros is caused by magnetic fields and magnetic storms. The friction in attraction. So I am certain that I will erode faster than Jude.

I learned about the asteroid Eros while I was visiting our local library with my mother. Oddly enough there were people receiving flu shots in the library among the books, of all the places. There were bright red bags to dispose of the used needles. The bags were clearly marked BIOMEDICAL HAZARD among all those books. There are many things to make me angry here, many unbeautiful things, but I know the icecaps really are melting and it fortifies me when I remember that all these ugly parking places, all these red bags, will be on the bottom of the ocean soon. At the library I saw a photo in the newspaper of dark and open water near the north pole. When the ice caps melt to water, volumetrically speaking, there becomes more of it so it is a concern for people who live on islands or people who have homes too close to the water. In the north where I live the land is still bounding back up from the weight of the ice that once covered it. Each year the ground moves skyward in fractions. However, it is not moving fast enough. It would be best to get used to the water. I will try to tell people in town. I will go with Jude to the bars and strike up conversations with other drinkers. “It’s coming,” I will say. I will tell them about the biologists who found that whales evolved from something cow-like, something rhinoceros-like. “Whales evolved into the water!” I will say. It is possible, and not a backwards evolution. I will urge the bar patrons to practice in their bathtubs. I will repeat, “It’s coming.” They will think I mean Jesus and the horsemen. But I don’t. So I will tell them, “Well, the horsemen should remember how to swim.”

Jude is out back helping my mother move some flagstones. I can see his arm muscle peeking out of his T-shirt. I notice my mother is also looking at Jude’s round arm muscle and for a moment I am angry at her. I look up at the ceiling in my bedroom and think that there must be a leak here in the house where the wind and weather has gotten to me. The leak follows me from room to room and drips on my head even when there is no rain. It is eroding me. It used to follow my father, but since he’s gone it follows me. This dripping torture waters down how I see things. This drip fills the tub upstairs. From the tub I tell my father, “I know you are very mad that Jude doesn’t love me. You are right to be mad. He has misled me,” but as soon as I say it I want the words back. I drag my fingers through the bathwater. One “very” left. No sign of “Jude” or “misled” or “you are right.” Just like water to take the best words quickly.

The following day I finally come downstairs. My mother is in the kitchen. She is making a cup of tea and the two of us watch the odd direction steam takes in exiting her teacup. “Are you sure you don’t want any?” she asks.

“Umhm.”

There’s no draft or movement in the room but the steam is making it very clear that there are certain strata in the kitchen’s invisible air that are denser than others and so the steam avoids them and wraps itself between them like rope.

“Are you feeling better?” she asks. I nod my head yes. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she says. “I went out with Jude after we finished up here,” she says. “He wanted to get drunk.”

“What’d he say?”

“Well, he asked if I would have a drink with him.”