Freewill (8 page)

The two of you are headed out the door, with the hopeful silence of your grandparents at your back.

What's it like? It's like this. It is like you are not walking but swimming, out the front door of the house. Like you are being taught to scuba dive, this is your first trip down with the instructor, Angela is the instructor, and Gran and Pops are big silent fish floating behind. They are obviously afraid of making the wrong move, the wrong sound, which would catch your attention and alter your behavior and history. Making them responsible.

So they float, as the entire world at this moment appears to float. You are led along by Angela, by the hand, and as unnatural as it seems, it is not an entirely unpleasant sensation.

Bloop. Nothing but the odd air-bubble noise at your back as you wade out into the world that is three days older than the last time you saw it.

Hasn't changed much, has it? Has it?

“So what am I, like an experiment, a curiosity, a vigil?” you ask as the two of you walk along toward the actual water. Water that even people who aren't crazy can see.

Are you ever walking along toward anything but water?

She looks at you blankly. You are fairly resistant to learning, are you not? Could you not have guessed by now that this is not the way to talk to this person?

“So, what are you up for today? Some wild grocery shopping maybe?”

“Not up for anything. I'm out here because you brought me out.”

“Makes me kind of responsible for whatever you do now, huh?”

There's a thought. You could live with that thought probably. Somebody finally being responsible for your behavior. It's the answer, isn't it, to the question you have been aching to ask, if you had the nerve.

Who's responsible?

“Sure,” you say. “You want the job?”

“I do not, thank you very much.”

“Then why did you—”

“You know, a sense of humor wouldn't do you any harm. From what I can tell, you are completely without one. Are you aware of that?”

Well?

“No. Actually, no, I am not aware of that.”

This is where the conversation pauses because, after all, where is it supposed to go from there? You are too old, Will, to develop a character trait as large as a sense of humor now, don't you think? Where would you get one? How would you go about cultivating it? She is right, it is missing, and having it would be a blessing. But you were not wired that way. You were not blessed. And somebody owes you an apology for that.

But you must press on without. Perhaps what you do not have is made up by those around you who do?

“Knock knock,” you say.

“Oh my god,” she says.

Please don't.

“Knock knock,” you say.

“I am
not
answering that door,” she says.

“Knock knock,” you say.

“Who's there?” she says as ponderously as if she had a bowling ball riveted to her chin.

“You,” you say.

“Oh my god, I can't believe you want me to say yoo-hoo. It's even worse than I thought,” she says.

Another large merciful silence ensues and when you emerge you are standing in front of the spot on the bridge which you have been watching on the television. Many many flowers lie there, browning in the May sun, crippled Mylar balloons struggle to beat the inevitable pull of the pavement, melted-down stump candles cling to the ground. There are a couple fresher bunches of blooms still hanging to bits of dirt from somebody's front yard, but for the most part, this service is over. Your sculpture, however, remains, stately and unchanged. First to arrive at the party, last to leave.

“Whatever happened to the first one of these?” Angela asks. “The one from, you know, the other spot?”

You haven't even considered that, have you? Would your work simply return to mother earth when it no longer served a purpose, like the carnations and bluebells?

“I don't know,” you say.

You stare. She stares. You have always been a gifted starer. Great concentration. Unaffected by the goings-on about you.

“You are gifted,” Angela says. She goes up to the sculpture, traces lines, shapes, curls, and cuts with her finger.

“No, I'm not actually.”

“This isn't ordinary work. I've never seen anything like it.”

“It's a mistake. It's nothing. I'm supposed to be a pilot. I don't, honestly, know what I'm doing.”

“Right,” she says, backing away from it. “I forgot. It's a beautiful accident then.”

Could this be true, do you suppose? Could there be such a thing? Can accidents be beautiful? Wouldn't you have to know what you were doing, in order to achieve something worthwhile? What do you think, Will? Do you think? What do you think? Is it all stupid blind accident? Is everybody fooling everybody else?

“Summer Wind.” Summer wind could not possibly be an accident.

No.

You walk forward and as a habit barely remembered but obviously embedded, you make a little bow, a genuflection, before respectfully removing your contribution to a moment that has come and gone.

“Can we keep walking?” you ask.

“Of course we can,” she says.

•  •  •

The surf is crashing so hard you must defer to it. Angela speaks just as a wave has slapped down, and is hissing its retreat.

“I don't know why I don't come here,” she says. “This is my kind of place.”

You are about to respond but must wait for the next wave.

“Ya,” you say, looking out over it all, the silver sand, green water, sky. It is, in some elemental way, yours, isn't it? Could you tell her that? Could you dare, knowing what she already thinks of you? Who could own this? Who could dare? But you do, don't you. “It kind of stinks in the summer though, when people are here all the time and there's nothing you can do about it.”

It is the right moment, when the days are long enough to give you light into the early evening but the breezes are brisk enough to blow light souls off the beach. One old-timer is walking his arthritic retriever about two hundred yards away but it might as well be two hundred miles, with the sound and the whip of the wind.

The sculpture lies in the sand between you. Like your baby, the two of you are watching over. Like it could make sand angels, if it had any arms.

“People aren't that bad,” Angela says, then hears herself, then starts laughing.

“What?” you ask.

“I can't believe what I sound like. Here's the real deal. There was a poet, who I can't remember now but who I used
to like when I was in regular school studying, like poetry and stuff that regular school students study. She said something like . . . how was it . . . ?”

Crash, and sizzle. The sea is the perfect soundtrack to this person before you.

“. . . oh right . . . I love humanity, it's just
people
, make me want to puke.”

Could this be it, your moment, your breakthrough? She is looking for it. She is looking into your uneducated face for recognition.

And there you produce it. The smile. Could mean a lot of things though, couldn't it? Doesn't mean necessarily that you got the humor.

Angela cannot sustain the patience to wait out this wave. “That,” she screams, “is the sorriest excuse for a grin I have ever seen.”

There, the smile broadens. But my, the stuff that is so elemental for everybody else . . .

The tide is at its highest. You know this. You know the tides, here, the times, the heights, without ever reading the little block buried on page twelve of the paper where they tell you such things. You just know.

“Seriously though, why are you here?”

She looks at you, at the sculpture, at the sky, at the water, at the sculpture, at you.

“Because you brought me here.”

“Seriously though . . .”

She stands up. She knows quite well what you mean. Folds her arms and gazes out at the water.

Try to imagine standing there and not gazing at the water. Can you imagine, Will? Have you the power? To imagine it or to do it? Does anyone? The pull of the water is so strong, can you conceive of anybody, any of us, daring to resist it?

Are we meant to resist, do you suppose?

She is searching for words. The words are all there, why does anyone need to search for them? She is being careful.

You assist. “Morbid curiosity?” you say.

You understand morbid curiosity, do you not? Why do you understand that, Will, when you understand so little of people and life and the way people live life?

“No,” she answers too emphatically.

“I don't mind,” you say. “I'm curious myself.”

“No,” she says.

But you cannot believe her, and you cannot get worked up about it either.

Even if she's here for the show. At least she's here.

“You want to help?” you ask, falling to your knees and digging like a dog.

She does. She drops next to you and in a couple of minutes you have a pile of solid wet sand between you and
a compact medium-deep hole in front of you.

“So I'm the freak here, is that what you're saying?” she asks.

“Ya,” you say evenly. “But I can live it with it if you can.”

She stares at you, tilts her head quizzically, then smiles cautiously. “Right, so you do have a sense of humor after all.”

What sense of humor?

“This is what you want to do with it?” Angela asks, pointing at the hole.

You nod. “Feels right,” you say, plunging the base of the sculpture into the sand like the marines on Iwo Jima. Together you and she pack the sand tight all around it, so that even this wind will not tip it. And you know, because you know, that the tide cannot reach it no matter how it tries.

Together the two of you walk back up the beach, and turn to survey. The low sun is at your back, and the wood looks so perfect, so warm in orange light against the ocean backing, it's as if it has grown there, up out of the ground, rather than having been jammed in there by you.

It is right. So little ever truly is.

Angela puts a hand flat on your back.

“So,” she says, “see you at the shop tomorrow.” It is not at all a question.

“See me at the shop tomorrow.” It is not at all a lie, as far as you can tell.

Good morning.

Listen to it, Will. I think you ought to listen to this one. First, you are doing the quasi-school thing again. You promised.

Second. Well, second you ought to listen, is all.

“Two more. The third and fourth of the town's tragic roster of teenage suicide victims were found last night drowned in the bay. The couple, local high-schoolers, were said to be a popular, sociable pair who had not exhibited signs of the problems normally associated with teenagers in trouble. They were found after a desperate all-night search after they failed to arrive home as expected last evening. Searchers were alerted to the scene by a sort of totem, planted into the sand
at the approximate location on the beach where they were thought to have entered the water. Police are investigating whether the couple themselves or someone else had planted the wooden marker.”

Rise and shine.

“No,” you say. “No, no, no, no.”

But that doesn't help anything, does it? What's done is done. It is not your fault.

“No.”

That was not what you intended. You cannot allow yourself—

“No!”

Gran rushes into your room, without even knocking. That has never happened before. But she has probably already been up, waiting, for an hour now. Bad enough. Bad enough, the usual reports. Bad enough, the routine day-to-day that she suspects you are not capable of navigating.

But this. Nobody is ready for this. Not on your beach. By your monument.

“It's all right, Will, it's all right,” she says, sitting on the side of your bed and trying to get a loving, grandmotherly grip on you.

“How can that be all right?” you demand. You hop off the bed, and point accusingly at the radio. “Gran, how can that be all right? I did that. I did that.”

“You did
not
—”

“I fucking well did. I did it.”

The phone is ringing. It is barely past 7
A.M
. and the phone is ringing. Nobody is answering.

“Do you think . . . do you really think, Will, that you have that kind of control over things? No, you don't believe that.”

“How do you explain . . . ?” You are still pointing at the radio. As if you really do want an explanation for it. As if you honestly believe there can be one.

But you don't. You don't, do you, believe that there can be an explanation? God help you, kid, you haven't been taught much, but haven't you learned at least that things cannot be explained away? When people go they take the whole story with them, remember that? They take it and leave nothing behind.

You grab a pair of jeans. “Please, Gran,” you say, indicating she should leave. The phone starts ringing again.

“Are we answering?” Pops calls from his room. Too casual. He is way too casual. This is alarming.

“No,” Gran answers.

“Yes,” you answer. Now why would you say that? That is the last thing you want.

It's what you get anyway, huh? Most of the time. The last thing you want is what you get.

The ringing continues. They don't go for answering machines here. Nobody calls much. You either get them or
you try again if you really want them. So the ringing continues. Then stops. Then resumes.

Gran is politely out in the hallway now, but cautiously not far from the door.

“Answer it,” you call as your head pops through the head hole of a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt.

“No,” Gran says.

“What?” Pops says.

Everybody seems to be shouting at each other. Why should everybody be shouting at each other? Even the radio guy seems to be getting louder, seems to be repeating himself over and over. Didn't anything else happen last night? Didn't precious expensive baseball players prance around America's ballparks and politicians bravely uphold our Constitution and the Tokyo Stock Exchange exchange things while we slept, or did the whole world stop functioning all night simply to let this monstrosity pass ahead to the front of the line?