Modern times can present a sensory overload thick as white noise in a fog. The electron melee can render a modern person numb in the process of insulating the self from the onslaught of stimuli in a daze too thick for penetration. That person might be called “out of it” or “out to lunch” or “somewhere else.” Reclusive intervals may allow deeper access to the interior, for better sorting valuables from junk in a crazy, mixed-up world.
A common interlude for reflection is at the gate, between check-in and boarding. Ravid Rockulz, with faint jocularity, wonders if the airlines hired psychiatrists to set it up this way, to enhance the travel experience, so the rush, rush, rush of departure will pause for the mobile, adventurous, uprooted, disenfranchised and homeless to inventory their hurried, empty lives.
Let’s see: This item used to be happy, so I’ll lean it here in this small corner with these other tidbits I once thought good. While this, that and those other items are all sad, very sad, so I’ll stack those on the medium shelf, next to the huge shelf already sagging with tragedies.
Ha.
Ha, ha.
Very funny. Why am I not laughing?
How long ago would Ravid Rockulz have called anyone crazy — or threatening, or in need of a scratch on the head — for suggesting that he would abandon Skinny? Well, not abandon. Not really. Gene loves kitties; she said as much and has three of her own and lives in the same neighborhood, so she’ll know where to look if Skinny goes home. Or what used to be home. For that matter, the neighborhood still is home in many senses, with familiarity and friends. Besides that, a fellow could always duck back in and rescue his cat, once he gets settled into his new home in Tahiti. Maybe. Maybe they have a special three-day visa for pet rescue. Or a half-day visa to salvage the last vestige of love in life. Maybe an in-and-out Skinny visa? A fifteen-minute quickie on account of she only weighs seven pounds? Hey, who knows? Maybe a guy’s home in Hawaii will look easier, and so will progress in general. Maybe new construction everywhere in the inexorable march toward sophistication and convenience will indeed facilitate social and cultural evolution. Maybe Minna’s aunt Velma, who runs the federal district bench, will agree to something or other. Maybe the old place will be available for rent again on return, and he and Minna can be reasonable in their friendship. What would be so bad about a little ficky fick every now and then, not so often, to demonstrate civil understanding and prove the friendship between them? Why not? Maybe.
But speculation that the old neighborhood might shape up with great good times and salt-o’-the-sea soulful living one more time is a certain symptom of happiness going away. Let’s face it: Old neighborhoods do not shape up again. Wishful thinking is the last gasp, even as former happiness is front and center on life’s lazy Susan for scrutiny from all angles. That doesn’t mean you can reach it or hold it any more than you can bring money home from a dream. You can’t, because it’s a dream, and it fools you one moment to the next, presenting itself as real.
Then they fade away, the moments, the wish, the happiness, the life. For that matter, what’s the difference between happiness in the moment and happiness as a memory? No difference at all is the answer; each is illusory, giving way to new moments and memories in the making...
Fuck that. You’re so full of shit. Happiness in the moment is fun. It feels good, and if you don’t know that, or if you’re a nincompoop schmendrik who needs to call it illusory, then you’re a bump on a log who never lived anyway, never cut loose and let go headlong for no tomorrow, and I mean a million moments in a row, like from jumping off a perfectly good boat down to a hundred and forty feet, where reality doesn’t get any more real. That is, with tanks and daylight and the magic at depth, not tied up in duct tape at night.
Fuck that, too. Let it go.
Except that letting go might be the new buzz phrase for modern people processing too many changes; with massive popularity comes loss of meaning. Except that cliché is often grounded in reason and necessity. Like now, when a man of above average fortitude can let go and is doing just that with alacrity — except for Skinny. She’ll most likely leave the body in this life before her man dies, and that’s a consolation — a difficult scenario grasped by a realist — but then if he hadn’t gone away, he could still be with her, by her side to help her on her way when her time comes. For that matter, better that she should go first, so he can assure her care and protection for as long as necessary. And now she’s alone, facing the end by herself.
But enough of that. All people and cats must take the journey sooner or later and always alone.
Enough.
Put your mind elsewhere right now. Okay, in a minute, as soon as new images come in for review and assessment. Like the shape of the future, which from here looks like a mirage, an illusion on a desert, beyond the shimmering heat.
Hey, I thought I told you to ditch that illusion noise. It’s okay that the horizon is where things are headed, because life should be dynamic, not static, because mobility makes for a balanced view, including cross-cultural experience and insight, not to mention the outer-connectedness most integral to the inner yadda yadda, hitherto and forever more. Outer-connectedness? That’s a good one, but it can’t very well be integral.
Outegral?
Let’s face it: Until the last hundred and fifty years, a trip over fifteen miles took a whole day. Okay, so that was on land, and a seafarer could cover what, a hundred or two hundred miles in a day? That doesn’t count here, because life on board in the olden days was a commitment of no return, for a year or two anyway.
Now a traveler can span half the globe in a day, ostensibly adding years to normal life span in time saved. Besides that, jet travel adds scope to life, making vast areas of cultural variety accessible to anyone in new worlds formerly reserved for intrepid or wealthy adventurers.
Except that time saved is not time earned. Frequent flyers actually get less return on effort than their ancestors, who seemed happier on fewer miles and no amazing free gifts. They also lived free till their dying day — free of surrogate adventurers in oppressive density chattering tediously about their physical contact with places they never sensed, never understood, never lived in but merely visited on brief reprieve from personal ruts. Like now, in the gridlock of vacationers here at the gate, suburbanites for the most part, pedestrian masses yearning to be free, sighing in wondrous disbelief at the amazing, fantastic and fabulous sights and sounds they will soon call their own by virtue of physical presence.
I was there.
I did that.
Count me in.
They look forward to six more days of it before returning to the job — make that the position — where imminent promotion, a sound economy and a solid market-share point to more, more, more of the best of everything. Then comes supplemental acquisition, maybe a third car or an extra TV. You can’t beat the new flat screens with higher definition. Or a change of wall-to-wall carpets a few years ahead of schedule might be nice, along with some new appliances or a nip and tuck. Like that couple on the far side of sixty: Her cereal bowl tits and his drum-tight neck make them right for a zombie thriller from Hollywood. How much better could things get for people like that? Well, they’re headed to Tahiti for starters, or maybe finishers. Who cares, anyway? They’re not hurting anything. Unless he’s an industrial asshole hell-bent on killing nature for personal gain, like the billion-dollar developer on the Westside who actually lives in Europe but insists on fouling our reefs in the name of livelihood — for the people, don’t you know. Well, who’s to know? Still, the tits and neck are enough to make you wonder where we’d be without growth.
“Mark my words,” says the disheveled man in the seat beside Ravid. “One day soon, this will be the perfect Executive Club.”
“What?”
“Executive Club. You know what that is, don’t you? You pay a few hundred bucks a year, and they treat you like a human being, like they used to do for free. You know, like how they used to wash your windshield and check your oil? You’re old enough to remember that. You sure look old enough — no offense, but you been run hard, huh? Anyway, now you pay extra. A few hundred and they give you cold soda. Air conditioning. Some pay phones and magazines.”
Ravid nods, hoping the man beside him is not deranged, or at least that he won’t go berserk, though events of the last days and nights have fairly inured him to hazard. The gate area is choked with people, with twice as many bodies as seats, with people squeezed double, sitting on the floor, mulling, spilling into the walkway, lingering in front of, beside and behind the counter, where they are reminded to stay in front of the counter if they’re in line and somewhere else if they’re not. We must follow these rules for security.
To keep America free?
Nobody listens, because no place else is available. Still, the reminders defer to the rules, more rules in response to more people doing wrong things. But how else can they adapt except to behaviors that don’t fit in the plan? They could stand on their heads or lie down, but that wouldn’t free up much space. They could vanish into thin air at the whim of a wizard who...
“You see what’s happened? The overhang on that building right there shields the sun from half the gate area, but the rest of the seats are in direct sunlight. You think you’re hot? You think you’re sweating? You think it’s beading up between your eyes and rolling down your nose and your neck and ribs? Me too. But I got news for you. We’re in the — pardon me — fucking shade. Oh, yes. Look over there. Ten degrees hotter I’d say. We lucked out. We got the good seats. I’m telling you, not so far in the future, this’ll be the Executive fucking Club.” Ravid looked at the seats in late afternoon sunlight. The passengers there are sweltering. The difference seems marginal, but he’s glad he’s not in sunlight. He wipes his forehead and hopes that’s the end from the fellow next door.
But no — “Okay, we feel it, so they feel it too. Just you watch. Next thing: They’ll see what we see, but we won’t say anything. Doesn’t matter. They think like we do. It’ll start small — just you wait, first will be an optional up-charge for Executive Seating. That’ll mean shade. Look, you got what, two hundred seats in the shade? They’ll start at five bucks, and when that sells out, they’ll test the market by going to ten or twenty. What the hell — you’re spending hundreds on the ticket, so why not start cool? Not cool, but not so hot. Get it? I’m in business. Tourism. That’s business. That extra twenty bucks would add up to what, say, two grand on the full flights? And most of them are full. That’s pure gravy. Two grand could make the difference between profit and loss on some flights and minimize loss on the other flights. You wait. You’ll see. Crowds of middle class people crowded tighter than a gnat’s asshole in what this airline will call “shade” — wait. Make that cool, soothing shade. Or, you get the cheap seats with the poor grunt migrant workers sweating bullets on folding metal chairs. Yeah, metal chairs with no cloth, no foam, just metal, in the sun. Sweating. What they do best, right? You wait.”
Ravid waits all right, avoiding acknowledgement of the nutty guy nearby, even as the disturbed man erupts with small aftershocks: “Shade? Shade, my ass. You can’t say it’s any cooler, but it’s not in the glaring sun. So they’ll want more money. It’s like saying an open flame is cooler than a blowtorch, which it is, but if you were sentenced to death by fire, would it make a difference what was under you? No, it would not.”
Overhead TV monitors placed for viewers from every angle keep the area up-to-date on the war to keep America free and establish democracy in the Middle East, but not for oil — never for oil. Then comes news of terrorism, major accidents, natural tragedies, corporate criminals and their status in the legal process. To balance the news with smiling faces come stories of children making the world a brighter place for those less fortunate, children coping with debilitating disease, children starving to death or excelling at sports or studies. And back to the war.
“They call this fucking air-conditioning,” the troubled traveler bemoans. “Except that there’s no air, and it’s not conditioned.”
It’s true, evidenced by universal sweat, though one pesky person really doesn’t need to bray the uncomfortable truth when it’s so obvious to everyone. What does he think, that he’s saying something nobody knows? He can’t be that stupid. Can he?
But can he, Ravid, offer an effective response — or maybe a counter eruption to quell the incessant blubbering beside him? Maybe a quick serving of the Devil’s own discomfort — and horror — would squelch this guy. How can anybody be so tiresome in a situation already too tedious?
“You know...” Ravid wades in. “This airport used to be a few gates. No jetways. Just those stairs on wheels, and you got on and off from the blacktop. This used to be a beautiful place.”
“Yeah. Used to be. You should have seen it before you got here.”
Ravid turns to double check the man’s complexion, to see if the presumptive “you” was intended, or if the man merely meant nineteen years ago.
Well, the man could be a poi dog too, or maybe he’s got a deep base tan. Who cares? A running mouth transcends anyone’s birthplace and is achingly familiar to a tourism professional with impeccable haole blood quantum.
Ha!
No matter where he’s from, a single idiot can dominate an otherwise lovely scene — or exacerbate an intolerable one. Most days Ravid counts himself a world traveler, with the world coming to him in evolved, articulate women and men willing to answer his many questions. The problem with the odd diarrhea mouth is that nothing will stop them, short of insolence, which, frankly, is unlikely to salvage either them or the situation.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen...” The woman at the counter advises that regular boarding will begin in a few brief minutes — a troubling phrase. A minute is sixty seconds, not more or less, though insights of recent hours taught otherwise, that minutes assumed to be brief can in fact be interminable, down to each and every heartbeat of each and every minute for an entire night. “...those who need extra time in boarding or those with very small children.”
“Yeah, a few brief minutes,” the smoldering fellow says. “Like ten or twenty. Like we’re not already a shitload of brief minutes late.”
“You know,” Ravid replies, beginning to explain the burden one man puts on everyone by sharing his angst, or the awful difference between discomfort and horror, or the nuisance this man’s voice has become. But he stops. He stares off... Is that a bird of prey swooping to kill, leading with talons and beak and nature’s mercy? Wait a minute: Are those wings, or pectoral fins? And those teeth...
“Yeah, I know. And you’re about to find out.”
Ravid has seen predators take prey up and down the food chain. Near the bottom, prey go quick as a gulp. Climbing higher, they require killing prior to eating. Some die instantly, some from heart failure, while others squirm. Some predators pause for a brief minute to see if the prey will die conveniently first or require the kill. No matter if death comes from severing the jugular or a vicious headshake or live dissection or engorgement, time becomes paradoxical in nature’s transition. Practical time transcends technical time and takes forever; those moments may be brief but seem interminable. Once the kill is foregone, time stretches, resuming normal cadence after the kill.
Doesn’t it?
Unless you’re the prey. Then time becomes eternity. Now there’s a not-so-brief minute for you — unless it’s a minute of zero span, quick as a blink for the difference it makes, the first minute in an infinite series of minutes.
So the night had passed in minutes, heartbeats, waves, surface flutters, muscle cramps, stars, clouds and, of course, the curious, hungry crowd sensing from below. The only consolation of fear is the eventual acclimation to fear as the constant state of being, so that death’s sudden appearance or continuing absence merges into the same thing. Which isn’t fearless, because you’re still scared shitless for a few hours, till the fear muscles give out. You’re no less scared, but when death finally arrives it’s foregone, down to casual exchange between familiars: Oh, death. How’s it hanging?
Does that make sense? “Scared shitless” is a figure of speech — but it gains real meaning if the fear pounds within and without for a sustained period. Some major gut tremors along the way can press the fearful onward toward salvation. Changes occur in disposition and outlook, like the numbness that softens the fear and cramp, which isn’t like icing on cake; it’s more like a topcoat of additional fear. Even adrift at sea at night, fear becomes a baseline, easing the fearful to acceptance, which, after all, any death must lead to, all the sooner with violence nearby.
In any event, the man dies inside sooner or later.
Just so, if the fearful one is already scared shitless and then offs a major load, he is rendered marginally fearless, which feels like advancement on the spiritual plane, such as it is.
With one more exercise in letting go, the jettisoned stuff is easily viewed as unnecessary, like anything foolishly obsessed.
So, for a brief minute, fear turns to reflection on attachment and what might have been if things had gone differently or if chance had been kinder.
But maudlin regret becomes quickly incidental in dire straits, like the open ocean in pitch dark save the ghostly whites of the frothing crests. You can’t go back. You can only will yourself toward the tiny lights to the southeast, among which affluent folk savor their aperitifs this very minute.
So the burbling stomach sucks itself into a fist as regrettable scenes play back — like woofing Jorge’s Chili on the Fly. The fearful one clenches again, sorely wishing he hadn’t, not yesterday or any day, or was that earlier today? A viable man needs calories on any day, and Jorge’s Chili on the Fly is so convenient and filling, bubbling lightly on its little gas stove. But Jorge giveth and Jorge taketh away. Jorge used heavy cayenne to balance marginal hygiene in chili grown as a culture like yogurt, fleshed out with more beans, burger, water and lard (for flavor and viscosity) when the vat went shallow.
Chili can host a culture or two, though not as intended, making Jorge’s Chili on the Fly more like the Cannonball Express screaming round the mountain on a head of steam with the station coming on — something’s got to give...
And give it will, with special insistence from the odd gob of saltwater down the hatch. Oh, the ocean will not be contained.
But wait — the swimmer drifts, knowing he must squirm to ease the shoulders free so he might peel off the neoprene sleeves. Then he must pull the torso below the tunnel round the bend, so the Cannonball Express won’t crash into the station.
Then he’ll need to sprint, because sharks love a speeding train, especially when it smells like shit.
Then again, a sprint might be clumsy, given the fatigue, and clumsy movement will ring the dinner gong. Then again, drifting may be worse than a sloppy stroke, because predators prefer the easy meal, already dead and smelling dead, adrift with no movement.
So a bone-tired waterman is yet again between a shit and a sweat. But he must. Time and tide — and chili on the boil, saltwater in the gut and apex predators — wait on no man. Unable to peel a shoulder without sinking, he vows to buy a new wetsuit with that stretchy material, if only he can...
But he can’t. So he lets himself sink in order to peel the neoprene off his shoulders. He’s only sinking four feet or six. And what else can he do, spew in his wetsuit and seep shit till the whole toothsome gang shows up for chow?
Ravid ponders the nature of his crime in this or any life to warrant such a cruel correction, and he laughs and cries at once at the beating on top of his beating and the beating on top of that — all this six feet under, nearly drowning and stuck for lack of strength on a surplus of pain as the shoulder threatens dislocation. Then he is drowning and so yanks the shoulder free on a shot of adrenaline, make that a double, and look: no dislocation.
Gasping at the surface he peels the neoprene to just below his butt crack, hanging onto the sleeves so he won’t lose it along with the shit or shit into a sleeve — just his luck — and he whimpers again, this one neither a laugh nor a cry but an appeal for mercy if not reason. Then he finds a position in which to float without losing his wetsuit or shitting in it. His skimpy swim trunks bind him at the knees, so a dolphin kick serves for moving slowly through the waves and waiting.
Laying his head down as if onto a pillow, he adds a swallow to the quart of salt water already guzzled. The clenching gut wrenches again.
And the soul in its tentative connection to the body does not hesitate; it serves, as it must, which isn’t to suggest prayer to a personal God as a default behavior for a waterman in his time of need. No, this reverence is for the Power and Glory of Nature, just like this morning, when a beneficent Sol smiled down on the gently lapping waters. So he sputters: Yea, though I swim through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because they’re not evil but nature’s creatures completing their task, just as I complete my task on the wheel of life, like being buried under a big, beautiful tree and becoming part of its lush canopy that will shimmer green in sunbeams but different, since a big animal moves through the ocean but also casts its shimmering beauty in grace and movement, till it also weakens one day and — unngggmmmph...
So Ravid achieves grace, parting ways from what he no longer needs. Except that the burbles don’t stop, and the pressure builds, recalling the tale first told by the ancient charter crews, about a guy with a terrible stutter who couldn’t get a date, because all he could say was, “Wwwooo...wooouulld yyyyou...”
He went dateless for years till he met this woman who wasn’t bad looking, but she was spastic — couldn’t hold still, twitched like spit on a skittle, especially when she got excited. Well, they had a few dates, and it looked like love, so they planned the wedding. She wore white. He had all his pals there. But they still had the problem of her holding still, especially when she got excited, wedding night and all. So they tied her to the bed, hands and feet, and rigged up the ropes with slip knots and led the ropes into the next room, so the newlyweds could have their privacy. Then the guy with the stutter looked at her and said, “I luuuuuu...luuuuu...lluuuuuuvvvvv...”
“Come on,” she said.
So he got her clothes off, and she looked great. So he climbed aboard, and by this time she’s so lathered up she’s straining at the braces, and the guy slips it lovingly to her and yells, “Okay! Cccccc...cccccuuu...ccccuuuuut her loose!”
So Ravid finds himself adrift at night, wishing the guys could be there to see his perfect delivery of the cherished punch line, cutting her loose in numbing torrents.
But open mike night is brief.
Nature hones on weakness. Fear and shit stink — both signal a life in transition. So a man striving to raise his odds must swim quickly from the slick.
He trails the top half of his wetsuit till he smells nothing more to lose. Feeling good as dead, blinded by salt and darkness, scorched by salt, senseless from water and salt, numbed by fear and salt, without smell, except for salt and a faint residue of shit, he hears no sound but senses movement on all sides. He squints for a dorsal fin — but then the shark you see is never so frightening as the one you don’t. Was that a fin or a shadow?
That one there.
He waits for the bump before the hit.
Then he drifts...
“Please have your passport open. You must have your passport open along with your boarding pass.”
“Now you’re fucked,” ventures the slovenly fool beside him, most likely judging by accent that he, Ravid, is traveling on a foreign passport, perhaps Israeli and not French. “It’s the whole wide world, and then the Jews. Am I right?”
Well, in this case yes, the derelict got it correct. This surprising insight puts a smile on the intrepid Jew’s face, as well as on Skinny’s face, which slides over to make room for Basha Rivka’s face, which isn’t smiling but sternly monitors the events unfolding, by which her good-time Charlie of an ill-advised and chronically unstable son will be allowed passage to Tahiti in spite of her insistence on the special visa back when he could have done it easily, like a mensch, in Yisroel. And he’d refused, as if it would have cost him nickel one, as if he couldn’t perform this little task to please her, his only mother, as if she didn’t have a few good years of experience and wisdom on him. She’d insisted, putting her foot down against his plain common sense. He explained that Hawaii is not Tahiti, and he did not, not, not need to kill another half day chasing a French Polynesia visa around the block.
Her retort: I’m your mother. Go and do the right thing. Please.
But he would not go, because a man must draw the line sooner or later between himself and his mother’s little boy. And now look: married! To a shiksa! And not your generally goyisha shiksa either, but a real shiksa chilarium! See how smart, now that you’re a man? And now tell me again, please, what are the children supposed to be?
The goat beside him bleats further inanity as Skinny smiles benignly alongside his mother’s righteousness, as somewhere in the murk Mano approaches, not so much threatening as ominously present. Mano always swims and must be somewhere at all times in compliance with the first law of physics. So? She was there alongside all night and into the following day. She swims alongside still. So what?
“We will proceed at this time with boarding of all seats in Zone Six.”
“Six, schmix. They ought to proceed with the Twilight Zone. You’re too young to remember that, huh? You remember the Twilight Zone?”
Like a man accustomed to uncomfortably sultry nights and mosquitoes in his ear, Ravid ignores the buzz, rolling over to Minna, who drove him to the airport twice, who insisted on showing her devotion, who would have driven him home in the parking lot or anywhere on the way, as if...
As if what?
As if she’s very horny, is what. What the woman from San Francisco not so long ago would have called “bonkers horny.” What an ugly phrase, but perhaps suited to Minna Somayan. Not a bad girl, except for her unscratchable itch.
Well, that same itch made her perfect not so long ago. No, Minna is perfect. I’m the unsuitable one. Well, she’s not perfect either. She had baggage — huge, messy baggage — including sexual perversion, which didn’t seem so perverse when she was doing it to me, but that was different. That was love — and me. Before that, she wasn’t doing it to me. Was she? And it wasn’t love. It was sick.
It isn’t even the perversion that’s so troubling, till you consider Cousin Darryl. How could any woman play sexual games with a beer-bellied macho idiot? Hateful to boot, with his beady eyes, his swarthy face, his faint moustache and chin stubble. His grubby hands. Did she actually think she could console me by saying that the cousins aren’t Hawaiian but merely local, cross-pooled from four nations or seven, and none of them island nations to boot, except for the Philippines, which don’t count? That place is urbanized, and they eat dog and kill their reefs with dynamite and cyanide, which puts them as far from the spirit of ahupua‘a as Times Square from a coral polyp. What the hell do I care?
But no, she insisted that those guys are not her people but interlopers by marriage a generation prior to statehood, which came in ’59. They claim originality and carte blanche reef rights with threats to kill you if you disagree, much less get in their way — and so she could only love me.
The fuck? Will you get out of my face with that crap?
What are you saying? Ravid asks her again as he asked two days ago, as if needing to confirm her failure and indiscretion, so he could bludgeon her again with, You did what with that guy?
Nothing! Oh, she denied reality, straining for a better version based on happiness and light: No! Not like I did with you! What difference does it make? He made me do it. You didn’t. Did you like it? Do you think I’m good? Did you think that was my first time? Did you think, gee, she really has natural skills, this being her first time and all? No, you didn’t. You thought: Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Because you didn’t want to think of anything but your dick getting all the attention. That’s what I had in mind, too. I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Never-Been-Jealous: I loved your taste. That should make you feel good, but it doesn’t, because you have to jump off the cliff with your stupid question: Compared to what taste? Do you have a problem imagining a dick in my mouth that isn’t connected to you? What difference does it make who it’s connected to? Would you feel better if it was a little white dick popping out of some khaki pants?
No! Ravid doesn’t care what those dicks looked like, not any of them. They all look like dicks, some curved, some blunt, some veiny and some even more disgusting than that. He can’t say he doesn’t care, because she won’t understand. She couldn’t see that it wasn’t a dick in her that troubles him — but that it was Cousin Darryl’s dick. Not that any other dick would be okay, or casual, or anything, just that Darryl is disgusting. Unacceptable.
Romance? With Darryl? Like with kissing and everything?
I’ll tell you something else. I never got intimate with Darryl...
You never got intimate with him? You just told me you did. Now you say you didn’t. What, he didn’t want to get intimate?
Oh, no. He wanted it. They all want it. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it — not any more than you could do it. It was too...ugly. Never. Love him? Never.
But you just told me that you...
So he hears over and over an obsessive replay of those personal things she shared and then denied — till he turns to the bedraggled man beside him in bittersweet resignation. The man assures him: “Listen to me, Mr. Man-in-Denial: The difference between you and Minna will never go away. She’s practical and focused, while you’re irrational and unfocused — except for your passion and conviction for the reefs and the cat and the women you hate to lose. She understands you. She accepts you, but she can’t make a case for herself because of her casual sex and shaky rationale, which makes you distrust her in all things.” Ravid senses keen insight at hand, and some very bad luck.
And luck in increments adds up to fate: His own nagging mother had insisted on the French Polynesia visa because fate is often whimsical, and she was right. Which is not to say that shit happens, but rather to respect the powers that be. “You never know! And it’s right here! Right around the corner! I’m begging you!”
So he didn’t know what would happen. Who ever knows? How can you spend a life safeguarding against stuff that won’t likely happen? Unless you’re neurotic? So he found out. So what? So he was wrong, and Basha Rivka was right, like she knew, which she didn’t; she was only neurotic, which isn’t the same as right, except by coincidence. Still she pressed like she did at his birth, complaining years later about it, calling it “the worst horror of my life, except maybe for the gallstones — now there was a pain!” But don’t get her off the subject — she would not repeat his birth for anyone but him, though he never gave a fig for what she had to say.
Okay, Mother, here’s your fig...
So Ravid concedes his mother’s foresight in this and all things, though leaving himself open to chance hadn’t proved so bad either, what with excellent local connections and the wheels of government turning as if he’d been a man of significance.
Soon he would tell her of the beginning and end of his new family. Pondering that exchange puts the impending flight and the cold, hard future into perspective. How much easier to fly thousands of miles south, reeling from a love mugging, than to admit to his mother the magnitude of his bad judgment.
The unnerving stranger says, “You know, you look like a shmata just plucked from the washtub. Did your mother not teach you to present yourself like a mensch? That’s exactly the problem. It’s not just you; it’s the whole veshtunkena world. You fit right in, which doesn’t help the situation. Hey, maybe you had a rough time — anyone can show the worse for wear — and maybe you’re a reasonable man. Who knows? But a stabilizing influence, you’re not. Look at you. Would a little effort be so much to ask? Is personal pride completely forsaken? Don’t you care what people think?”
Ravid runs his palm over a few wrinkles on his shirt and pants to smooth them and then turns away from the nudge next door. Yes, he had a rough time, and he’s not so reasonable as he used to be. Man, some people. What he wouldn’t give for an empty seat somewhere else, but that too is a chronic problem in a terminal world.
The nudnick next door fondles the raw nerve, testing the limits of patience, so he turns away.
Tell me something: Would the situation be more palatable, so to speak, if the troubling picture in your mind featured a nondescript man in a tweed suit? Or a pinstripe suit with a vest? Or seersucker, so to speak? No, it would be no easier — and that’s what you’re not seeing. Because a woman’s experience is the same as a man’s, but a man wallows in imagery, debasement and moral compromise. Physically stronger in most cases, few men are nearly as tough when it comes to their once-true love sharing intimacy with others, especially when it comes to romance of a pornographic nature. Is this self-abuse necessary? No, but it does seem to be required.
Yeah, so? What’s your point?
What did she expect of a seasoned dive instructor with an established reputation in the Sandwich Islands archipelago? Did she really think he would grin and bear it? Did she not anticipate emotional compost mere hours after the night of humiliating fear — and attempted murder — at the hands of her inbred cousins?
Like lime on garbage, her callous behavior hurried the disintegration and disgust, taking a waterman down to nitrogen, potassium and the other. Calcium? No. It’s the other one, not calcium.
Never mind. It’s none of your business, anyway. I’m not sure why I’m even talking to you. So shut up. Bug off. Okay?
“Whatever you say, brother. I don’t know why it came up in the first place. We’re at the airport, done deal, Tahiti coming on. Let it go, wouldja? What the fuck?”
Yeah. Whatever.
Except that something still stinks of fear and loss. Slumped and shrunk, looking like End Shot from La Vie en Rose, Ravid waits for his zone to be called, dispirited and swept away, his sadness inscrutable.
But he survived — triumphed over insurmountable odds, crawled up from the sea to reclaim life as we know it. Passage through the Valley of the Shadow of Bureaucracy through check-in and on to the gate was a cakewalk next to drifting in the open ocean at night, except for the unnerving anxiety a waterman feels so far from his element.
That makes no sense, but few things do. He wants to lie down and sleep, which begs the question: The best sleep ever has what in common with detainment and deportation? Easy: Neither one is lost at sea at night. Or wet. Get it?
Besides that, who cares? Deportation, shmeportation; I’m on the way out, Brudda. José, can you see?
But this is no time for jokes, especially with vision clouded by their ominous farewell and her groping hands, underscoring her love or her character — who could imagine such advances? She had grinned stupidly, hinting parking lot perversion and whatnot, maybe to provide him with some imagery to remember her by. Usually open-minded to playfulness, Ravid had twitched in decline.
So she’d leaned on the horn and waved out the window: “Ey! Tita!” Turning back, she explained, “That Leila. She’s a kick. Really fun when she was drinking. Man, twenty-five and no more for her. Terrible.”
Hmm, yes, no more. Terrible.
Now waiting at the gate in the solitary confinement of a crushing crowd and life passing before him, he laughs at love’s delusion. Really fun when she was drinking? The shitbum one seat over glances sideways, as if he’s annoyed. Ravid gives back stink eye for stink eye but sees the message in Minna’s eyes. It foretells the road not taken in all its frightful turns, round the bend to forty pounds gained, to the stretch marks and vengeful drinking and denial — or maybe just drinking and drinking and, oy vey, four kids, or six. Her smile skews on a litany of demands.
Such a future could surely have come to pass, and he, hapless husband, would have revisited this very moment over and over again, each time with a wish upon every coin in every fountain, every graveyard passed, every wishbone snapped, every star in the firmament, first or fallen or otherwise, that the fork in the road had separated them.
And so it has.
“Thank you.” With a perfunctory peck on the cheek such as a friend would give a friend in gratitude for a ride to the airport, he’d turned to the terminal with no look back. A man recently in personal contact with God on the high seas gains clarity in life. Maybe the fatal difference between the principals here is her lack of depth, while he’s in over his head — a dive leader at that. It could never have worked.
Sure the match seemed obvious at first — an innocent, honest mistake, a ruse of the flesh with nothing common to develop other than recurrence of flesh. How else could things play out other than the way they did?
Let’s say it was a palm grove on a balmy day instead of four miles into Maalaea Bay on a blustery night; he wouldn’t sweat the centipedes in the wet squeezes under the fronds, not even the nine-inchers. They’re only curious, raising their heads to see who turned the lights on. But it wasn’t a forest or daytime. The fear was dark and deep, and it lingers — and this is what you must see, that I am right now heard, smelt and felt by predators in medium to triple XL, including el tigre. I suppose their appetite is no different than my own — make mine a sizzling rib eye, if you don’t mind. I don’t feel in the least fierce or avenging, only hungry and game for deep gratification on a solid feed.
Do a knife and fork make any difference to the donor? Or ketchup?
No, they don’t. The only crux is whether shark is my predator or my guide.
Oh, they assured: You know by sense, the same as knowing you’re alive. Once known, you can have the faith. The faith renders you fearless, confident in the presence of a powerful friend. If you don’t know, you lack the faith, and then you’re on the menu, because you know something else. Aka Leialoha said too many people claim to know what “the Hawaiians” want, but Hawaiians differ, like all people everywhere. One man’s aumakua is another man’s lunch, which is not offensive or meant to be so. It’s simply how it is.
One man’s angel of death is another man’s spirit guide. And if you are the man with guidance, then you have no choice but to follow. Because it’s not a matter of choice, but of knowing. If your parents aren’t Hawaiian and never told you, then it’s a matter of sensing, then knowing. Then you can relax or be afraid. And maybe that’s why it works — even scientists say that sharks sense fear and are attracted to it. The important lesson here is that a spirit guide, once sensed, can provide guidance in the trickiest situations.
Our fadda — not whodaguy Art, in heaven, but de udda one, da kine great, great, great, great granfadda — went swim’um out for talk story wit Mano, for find out.
Mano swims nearby as she has for the last few nights and probably has for some time. But maybe the discomfort is not from fear. Maybe it’s from resistance. Souls merging could be a frightening event, the clay and plastic stretching and bulging with nasty noises like celery crunching and roaches squishing underfoot like in the movies — or maybe not. At any rate, it would be different than a digestive process, with its squishes and gurgles.
So maybe the basis of my faith is not what I thought it was. I’m not sure what I thought, but I suppose I would have said that love was the foundation of my faith — that I love certain things and believe in them. Maybe it’s not love. Maybe it’s more, or maybe the faith isn’t mine but is part of a greater force, a phantom form that swims in water and thin air, its guiding principle and objective being...
What?
Salvation?
It doesn’t feel like salvation, leaving a home of nineteen years with nothing but some camera gear and a laptop in a cushioned case and some shirts, shorts and underwear crammed into a dive bag with some high-pressure implements for breathing underwater while weighing you down and keeping you up. Unless they fail at depth, leaving you inexorably down or hopelessly ascendant, neither of which should be a reason to die, but mechanical failure as a continuing potential should keep you alert to ever-changing options in an exigent world.
Except for the tanks. Nobody travels with tanks. Or weights.
I got my weights, because they’re so expensive to replace. And maybe to remind me of my cross to bear, though we don’t use that phrase because of the burden left uniquely to us from that most fateful and unfortunate cross to bear — unfortunate for Yushke and for us; at least we have that in common. And him a Jew, too. Maybe that’s why.
Still, ten pounds of lead is a burden not soon forgotten by a traveler, interisland or international. I wonder if they’ll allow my weights. Or this cooler. It’s soft. What the fuck? I mean, What the heck? A couple sandwiches, a few cans of sardines. Some crackers. Why not? You go to buy that stuff, you drop forty clams in a heartbeat. So why not? Money falling off for hotels and restaurants. No job, no prospects...
Uncertain faith and no clear objective. No cat — talk about one true love; Skinny must be wondering where and why, and who will feed her and scratch her neck just so.
Mano shimmies past, a murky wraith, a peripheral vision that vanishes on direct view, but then she comes around from behind or the other side. At this point she’s an apparent travel companion, along with continuing visions of admonition from the cat and the mother...
Okay, the mother and the cat.
Hanging off and slightly back, Mano lolls easy, hanging out, more of a presence than a threat. He clearly senses her shoulders dipping this way and that, indicating a casual cruise. This outing is recreational, without fear or hunger, because her endless swim is sometimes without appetite or destination. Sometimes she simply is, like Skinny and the rest, free of material motivation, without tangible objective. Too bad that a zealous scientist will come along and chart this too, soon after stabbing her with radio telemetry hardware. In the meantime she can sustain her animal essence unencumbered, living up to the mystical acuities and transcendent bliss the animals enjoy more than most humans do. She cruises the deeps without fear or hunger, artfully graceful. Her movement is a gift of gratitude from God or Neptune. Ravid watches her for a minute, and he mumbles, “So be it,” in recognition and greeting.
“Be what?” asks the adjacent hobo, warming to the camaraderie.
Minna must be home by now, thinking that it’s over, which it is in the practical sense and will be technically too, once the borders are cleared and the French lawyer can push the annulment papers, which seems only right, so the Somayan junta will understand exactly who wants clear of whom. Maybe. Unless it’s too expensive. He could write them a letter much cheaper. He could tell them that they’re really no great catch as in-laws go, and he’s very happy and grateful to be clear of a terrible error in judgment. And wrong values. And moral standards...and everything. They’ll get the picture. Minna can fill in the details when they press her. And press her, they will. Fucking nosy in-laws, judging him — him, who has forgotten more about their near shore than they’ll ever know. She’ll get over it — she’s likely already thinking about tonight, heading out with the girls to get loaded and see what happens — see if something new and slick might displace what went so inconveniently missing.
I didn’t look back.
“I don’t mind,” she called after. “I’d do anything for you. You know that. Don’t you?”
Thanks, really, you’ve done way more than enough.
Ravid raises his hand again to shoulder height as if to swear an oath on the truth of what is known. But he doesn’t know shit, which begs the bigger question: Why must he be so mean-spirited in difficult moments, killing hope with his own limitations? Well, that feels like progress, like the right question is now on the table. Is Mano smiling? Does that mean fear or guidance is now a close companion? Or that Mano approves? Or does this toothy grimace merely indicate indigestion? Or impatience at the gate?
Maybe progress is subtle, and a waterman of unwavering rectitude is softening and warming to his own fallibility — as a concept — since crawling up and out of the sea. That is, fearlessness and acceptance surround him like air, like time and space are the stuff he breathes. He inhales deeply, taking it into his blood.
Basha Rivka mutters her mantra. The words are visible, till they blur like wallpaper with a silly flower print: A man should not be a rolling stone...
...shouldn’t be...
...rolling stone...
...a man...
Ravid sings the rejoinder, as off key as Bob Dylan, reminding those nearby that having nothing renders nothing to lose. Which isn’t so bad. Some people take terrible risk and spend huge money to achieve this indomitable indifference. Freedom from fear opens the eyes, the heart and mind to a world of possibility. Nothing to lose makes this the time for all good men to come up with answers to their newly defined questions:
How could events turn so perversely, so that he no longer seeks her company but is driven away? How could her grace and beauty leave him so bereft? Or is he the defective character? Is she not right for him by virtue of her imperfection? Flaws are part of perfection, because perfection doesn’t really exist, except in paradox. Humans must remain imperfect to stay among the living. She eats and shits. Gets head colds and indigestion. Belches and farts and laughs at the wrong time. Yet he exceeds her in all these things. Does he not love her?
Does not a shiny new car seem more comfortable and less worrisome once you get the first ding in the door? Reality is a good thing to grasp.
When did I get so wise? Or am I only tired? Should I not stay and watch her develop, seasoned by our love? I’ve never seen her in the water, but she’s sleek as a mermaid. Should I not stay to see if she could, perhaps...
“We’re now ready for boarding all zones.”
“About fucking time,” the grumbling man grumbles.
“I’m not going,” Ravid replies.
“What? Not going? You’re here. You’ll get nailed on the ticket, man. You got to go.”
“I already got nailed. On the ticket. I don’t got to go. What do I care about a ticket? I got a beautiful woman in love with me, and I walked away without even looking back. I hate this shit.” He grumbles at the cumbersome camera bag and dive bag, the latter with its rude habit of gaining weight till he can no longer handle it without banging into everything nearby. But he hoists it up with some umph and a grunt. “I’m not going,” he reaffirms to the wino behind him, turning around to say so long, farewell, adieu, auf Wiedersehen, because the easy way out is the easy way back in — he can hole up at her place, so to speak, till Immigration Naturalization gets it straight and sees: As a married man, he’s now qualified to join the struggle to keep America free. INS guys ought to lose interest by their first coffee break, and things should cool off otherwise and elsewhere too. Any man can get another job — are you kidding? On a boat, in Hawaii? And time and tide can work admirably well for a waterman of notable skill and instinct, and don’t forget the reputation that will precede him.
Verily singing his decision to go back, not exactly back home but across that certain threshold that may actually lead to a happily-ever-after, he turns to the grumpy guy behind him to state his intentions. He comes face to face instead with Mano, who yawns impressively, measuring the man before her or showing her inexorable appetite or unctuous boredom or both, like it might be time for nappy-poo right after snacks.
Except that a shark has yet to visit a boarding gate, and the obtrusive fellow nudging from behind butts in on a moment of personal confusion with advice against going back. “You can’t go back. Not now. Not ever. You can’t. Look at the facts. Get real. Get a life. Get some balls, man.” What a pushy fellow.
No wonder I have to leave a place founded in beauty and humility, rent asunder to humanity.
“I hope I never get as bad as you are,” Ravid mumbles, surrendering to the line shuffling forward, eager to board at last. One thing for certain on this troubling, tentative night: He’ll make distance from that guy. Anyone can have a rough period.
Just look at me.
But a guy who won’t shut up is plain unnecessary.
What’s it any of his business? Why can’t I turn back?
These questions swarm among many as he inches along, turning timorously back to the nosy malcontent, to insist on privacy and independence.
He stops on a premonition: What’s the chance of this grumbler having the seat next to mine? Given the long odds on the rude events of the last fifty hours, a grumbler next door may be a five to one...
But the grumbler is gone, posing another big question on a man’s rational connection to the space-time continuum, not to mention the thought-to-speech interface or the eccentricity-insanity high wire, or the radioactive heat coursing through his veins. Taking inventory of self, faculties, acuities, thought synthesis and fundamentality, he concludes:
I am me.
This is tough.
I will not react, even as my eyeballs roll into my head. I will think and act. I will breathe slow, deep and steady. I will surface slowly as my slowest bubbles. I’ll hang out at fifteen feet for five minutes...
No, ten minutes...
No. Five is plenty.
Stabilized at a more socially acceptable level, he scans the immediate area to see who might be staring at the loony-tune grumbling to himself. Settling back into blithe functionality, he confirms both his presence and context, however tentative either may be. He wishes a nice day with a warm smile to those on the periphery and nods cordially to the amorphous cruiser alongside. Then he wonders who is on whose periphery, and if the day is technically over. And it’s night.
Where did the grumbler go? More important, did he actually occur? We know that time can disappear, that we can be a few miles down the road with no recollection of those miles in passing; poof, they’re gone, like now. Distraction displaces those miles and minutes — unless time jumps forward to accommodate its easier passage. But could the jump vaporize the person beside him? Could the grumbler have jumped into nothing?
So the grumbles replay, with questions. Complaints and images are scanned for palpability, because a man as rigorously worked as Ravid can be forgiven a few extra figments, unless he taunts the boundaries of appropriateness. He scorns most values of a society so easily led, mostly by the nose but often by the genitals. Still he needs to know what is fantasy and what is real. He watches, removed, slightly out of body but with perspective on the grumbling voice. The voice was his own, or the words were only imagined, so he asks the lady behind him if...there was...a...you know...a man, an unkempt fellow who looked...well — Ravid chuckles here to demonstrate the great good humor of the situation — an unkempt fellow who looked wrinkled, crumpled, slept in, who looked hosed down and dried out, who looked like — as we say in the boat business — like he was shot at and missed and shit at and hit... Did you see him? Here? Just a minute ago?
The woman responds concisely with a fearful, defensive gaze, lips compressed way too tightly for words to escape, though a muffled whimper sorely tries. Ravid nods, comprehending the grumbler’s troublesome disposition, no matter who he was or where he is, though between these two travelers is a fair consensus of whom and where he is.
But it couldn’t have been Ravid. He doesn’t talk like that, always complaining like a disgruntled tourist who expects the royal treatment just because he’s paid the fare, because his life back home isn’t so peachy, and a vacation is more than a getaway; it’s a chance to balance the power, to compensate what went wrong with what will now be set to rights. These onerous people suffer what the crews call rectal optitus, which is a shitty outlook on life. The telltale symptom is the victim’s head being so far up his ass he needs a glass navel to see through. Ha! Ravid laughs again, as if to signal continuing good humor or offer a calming influence or something. But the woman turns and walks away, allowing no time for a proper explanation. Just so, Ravid’s happy outlook more or less disproves that the other fellow could have been him. Any man can suffer residual delirium in extreme hardship and grievous loss. He may remain dazed by the challenge of an unknown future, of pressing on to unknown lands with no friends, a small budget and a heavy heart, because fatigue can twist a brain like a pretzel. And before he knows what’s next, up is down, left is right, green red, day night and so on ad infinitum.
But if it couldn’t have been Ravid, then who was that unlikely traveler, forlorn and beat, shuffling like a panhandler, prematurely stooped, sleep-deprived and unstable, looking gang banged and left for dead? Can you blame these people close by for bunching their eyebrows, trying to imagine this unlikely candidate on his way to a carefree holiday down south? How does a moaning mumbler fit in with the rest of these festive vacationers, with their leis and smiles, their good cheer and happy anticipation? Hobos might be expected in the urban core, maybe on Market Street or in West Hollywood.
But on his way to Tahiti?
Well, this is no weekend outing, for one thing, and a man with a load on his mind is bound to look different than a tourist singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. And maybe sound different...
He squints on the long shuffle down the jetway to better manage the vertigo and to help keep his place against the deep eddies to the left, indicating aggressive movement of a relatively large being just below the surface.