Twelve. Home
After that I didn’t really go to class and Jack didn’t really go to work. And then the next day, and then the next. Together we headed out at breakneck speed for the west.
The car screeched to a halt against the lip of the black dunes and I stumbled out sick.
“You may have to vomit,” Jack warned. “I can have that effect on people.”
We stared at the warning sign at the entrance. Collapsing dunes. Falling rocks. Strong riptides.
“All right!” I cried. “This beach has it all!”
A sheep tethered to a wooden stake chewed in plaintive contemplation as we hauled two long boards out from a shack and waxed them on the grass.
“Just look out for sharks,” Jack warned. “But don’t be afraid. Just bop ‘em on the nose, they’ll go away.”
I didn’t quite know what to say. “I… don’t want to bop a shark on the nose,” I managed.
Jack waved a hand. “Oh, they’ll probably never get close enough anyway. The dolphins are usually good at keeping them away. Why so surprised?” He smiled when he saw my face. “You think humans are the only ones who like to surf waves?”
But I was starting to get it. It made sense when you finally caught a wave. At the right moment you throw your weight and drive one arm deep into the water, turning on one axis, until you’re facing the sand and paddling like hell waiting for the roar of a wave cresting behind you. Then if your arms push hard, and you keep going faster and faster, even when it seems like there’s no hope, out of nowhere it hooks you, and the board lifts, and you feel your heart lift right along with it, and you sail majestically out over the water.
Your heart soars, it leaps into the sky. It’s love! There’s magic in it. You’re carried up onto the crest and into the mercy of something far bigger than your own soul, and it’s chosen you, you’re a part of it, just like you’re a part of everything and we walk through life in sole shoes like something separate but we’re wrong. There’s something bigger pulling us along.
Nearby a tanned boy bobbed on a short board. Together we sat up on our boards and slapped at the water and called out for waves. And in between he told me all about his life. In the afternoons, he worked in his father’s orchard, and in the mornings he was the first person in the world to greet the sun, bobbing out on the sea.
“There’s only one problem,” I said, “with living in such a gorgeous place. Where do you go after a place like this?”
The boy looked at me blankly. “After?” The word dripped out thick and slow.
“Sure, you’re still in high school, right? Aren’t you going to college, or off to work?”
The boy stretched and lay back across his board. “I figure I’ll just stay here. Hang out.”
“Don’t you want to see other places?”
“Are you kidding? I live in paradise,” he declared. “Why would you ever leave?”
I stared at him. “You’re eighteen.” He didn’t care. “You don’t even want to see the city?”
“I hate that place,” he spat. “The people living there are nothing but pretenders.”
I took a long look at this curious creature as he left. He turned with a strong arm and cruised back towards the waves, a gorgeous young thing never to desire anything beyond picking apples in his father’s orchard and living on the sea.
His words rang in my head as I turned back to the sea. The water stretched out in an unending horizon of serenity. Every now and then the black riptide pulled me across the beach and I would have to paddle long and steady to get back to where I wanted to be.
What makes a surfer? Not just the skill of standing on swells, or the dream glide on an enchanted sea. Perhaps it's the moment when the wave hurtles those souls back to that place from whence they came. Surfers smile, turn around and paddle back out again.
But that was the most beautiful moment to me. Now in calm waters, and knowing the strength it would take to get back, but turning around and doing it again anyway until sunset filled the sky with blood and cotton candy.
“What do you feel like making for dinner?” Jack asked.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” I cheerfully replied. “I can’t cook.”
Jack froze as if he had been slapped. “What do you mean, can’t cook?”
I meant that I had never been taught, that I had been driven out of the kitchen every time I tried by an angry mother who told me that I ruined everything I touched.
“Trust me, I can’t.”
“I hate that word, can’t.” Jack spat the word like venom. “Anyone can cook. And tonight, you will.” He dragged me to the markets of cheap and exotic things and gathered a pile of vegetables in his arms. Then, as if the thought had just overtaken him, he turned on his heel and added olives, sun dried tomatoes, feta and a fine Merlot. His card declined and he used another.
As I prepared dinner, he kept watch over my shoulder, removing half the water from the rice, turning down the heat on the meat and taking off the vegetables just as they turned bright. Afterwards as we crunched down on hard noodles and bland food he said it was delicious and insisted that I had done it all by myself.
I gave him an incredulous look. “It’s barely edible. And without you, I would have ruined everything.”
Jack shook his head. “Nonsense.”
We fell into a new routine, and I quite liked it. I would prepare dinner, while Jack looked over my shoulder and adjusted anything that needed to be fixed.
“You’re me,” Jack said, “if I was an American girl from the Midwest.”
“And you me,” I replied, “if I was a boy on an island. Maybe fate brought us together.” I smiled.
Jack shook his head. “There is no fate.”
“What, everything is chaos?”
“Not necessarily,” Jack said. “Everything matters – just not in how you think.”
“I guess if people don’t believe in God they have to believe in something.” I looked at Jack. “What do you believe?”
“That we have a responsibility to each other as humans,” Jack said. “That we’re all on this ball together.”
How did he do it? How did everything he say come from some place that sounded like I was remembering it, rather than hearing it for the first time?
We used to conjure up reasons to spend nights together. Now, we didn’t even bother. If we felt no reason to do anything we did nothing. We would forget what day it was and roam around the city trying to guess. We would lock arms and stride in step at the south city markets. We picked strawberries and listened to life stories at fruit stalls. And got drunk in small pubs with millionaires and mailmen.
We spun from beach to beach, and swam in lakes and lagoons. We rode bikes on islands and slept under the moon. We climbed volcanoes and napped under sunken statues. The radio was broken so I sang us songs. We rolled our hands out the windows past rows of chopped lawns. We wandered through the parks and licked ice cream on the lips of fountains. When the car overheated, Jack showed me how to fix it. Then he taught me how to drive manual on a deserted country road in the rain. We had big nights in where we ran from policemen. He taught me how to roll cigarettes in a single flick.
Everything either made us collectively happy or collectively furious. And I was greater by his side. He didn’t know his father any more than I knew mine, but I knew that somewhere within the tangled vines, raging seas and open, spacious grassy fields, we would arrive at something.
We traveled to towns where dolphins were known by name, and to towns with too many dolphins to ever know. We collected stars in the countryside and rode surf breaks with the tribe. We swigged wine on hilltops and slept in vineyards at night. We helped fisherman pull their catches in from the sea. And swam in the phosphorous swirling lime green. We climbed mountains and found the bridge that led to heaven. The good was the wild and sacred again.
What had I done to deserve such a friend? Someone that would skip by my side and
fix all my flaws? The thought of returning to class when I had such a ready guide to life at my disposal seemed ridiculous. Jack was my missing piece, my guru, my guide from the Orient. He was an angel who dealt directly with things while the rest of us were stuck in senses. I felt like I could learn everything in the world running at his side. And he let me.
When Jack asked, “What do you want to see now?” I cried, “EVERYTHING!”
And when I asked, “Where are we going?” Jack howled, “CRAZY!”
I wondered what had happened to his family.
That night there was a party. Of course. Dark liquors flowed onto lips, stained carpets. In theory it was for my birthday. In practice it was just another night.
Past Jack’s third cigarette and swinging chairs between our legs and my breath, whispering in Jack’s ear, “I don’t know anyone here!” and Jack throwing back his head in a laugh, Jack and I talked about everything. We talked about God and nature and I told him about how divine revelation had replaced Enlightenment in the American countryside. I told Jack about the soul of Afrobeat and Jack explained the natural Georgian dynamics of cities. About republics versus colonies, environmental versus resource engineering, arts degrees, New York, Los Angeles, and escaping death on mountain peaks. And Jack talked about labor politics and I Republican sex and Democratic violence. We lamented the disappearance of the femme fatale, and agreed on self-reliance. And I told Jack how half the country clamored for peace while the other wanted an all-out war, frozen in fear and frantic to follow some blank abstract blueprint from fifty years back. And Jack ran up the trees and told me about the lava bombs and lagoons that came from the volcanoes under the city. And I told Jack how I loved to read Hegel, but not in the subway – for the subway Shakespeare was better, for rapping along with the train rail jingle. And I told him how nobody sang Black Betty like Leadbelly, and how Francis Bacon’s painting begged to be touched.
And Jack told me all of the things he had been. He had been a snowboarder, a bartender, an assistant to a mafia head. He had done a little bit of everything.
I figured if half of the things he was saying were true, then he would still be out there, jumping and running and swiping and doing all the things he talked about, instead of spinning a yarn for a girl from a strange and faraway land.
Even if they were just Cretan lies I found him wonderful and exciting nonetheless. Who cares if they were just stories? When someone moves with that kind of magic they can get away with whatever they want. It was such a beautiful and reassuring place to be. It was as if Jack made the city have some sense by always having a reason for how everything fit with everything else.
Past fingers pawing, skimming through lists of irritating songs, none of which we wanted to sing, as we sat on the couch, legs in tangles, splitting our last beer–
“Addison and Anodyne,” Morgan drawled even though Jack had disappeared. By his side Adam was dressed as a giant bear. “I see the circus has come to town.”
I glanced around. “Jack’s not here.”
“I’m sure he’s not far,” Ben laughed. “Wherever Addison is, Anodyne’s never far behind.”
“That guy is such a cad!” Adam howled. “How does he do it?”
“I’m more impressed by the fact that they let themselves out in the morning.” Morgan said, giving me the eye. “What a lucky guy.”
My ears burned hot even though I told myself I didn’t care what they said. I was the only one who had seen his hidden depths – the political dreams, how he picked up trash as he walked down the street, the quiet work he had done bringing water to remote Pacific island villages. His faith that one small person could do so much good was like a white light bouncing around in an ordinary day’s darkness.
But I was the only one who saw. It broke my heart that no one bothered to ask Jack about all the great things he’s done, or his dreams. They all just wanted to cut him down into little slices, one dig at a time.
“We’re just friends.” Jack promised Shelley, throwing an arm around my neck. He was always half a step ahead. Shelley was one of his favorites.
“Out of all the girls I have ever known,” Jack confessed, “you are the only one I haven’t slept with.”
I wasn't quite sure why I was privy to all this.
After that it all went downhill rather fast. When I regained consciousness I found myself violently ill and unable to move off the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I moaned ad nauseam, my arms curled around the wastebasket. Jack stepped gingerly over me and I felt my limbs lift off the floor. When I opened my eyes I was on the couch in front of a blue plate with beans and toast.
“Eat, eat,” Jack nudged from behind an apron as he meandered back to the kitchen. I sniffed at the food. “I’m not sure if I’m hungry,” I called out over my shoulder before finishing it in two minutes flat. I managed to mumble a thank you before sinking back into the clouds of dust.