Category: Sketchbook

Adrift

He had been sick once. He couldn’t remember the sensation now. He knew, if he forced his brain into the task of retrieving the memory, that there had been a time not long ago when he had spent several hours with his head over the side–whether it was port or starboard took even more mental work to withdraw–sending everything left in his stomach down into the murky sea.

The sea. It had been a romantic idea to him once, a word that you said with reverence and respect, the way only the most dedicated religious people now would use the word “God.” Even that wasn’t a good description. Even the faithful believers didn’t have sensory responses when they spoke of God. Anyone, even desert rats like him, had some sensory response at the mention of the sea, even if it was just an image of a big blue splotch stretching all the way to the beach, where the more interesting figures of humans strayed along the surf.

Well, that was a long time ago. Long before he’d caught the lifeboat off a ship that wasn’t really sinking, and gone too far adrift to get back. It was the kind of accident you could imagine happening, but never thought would ever happen to you.

He had come to do two things: One, see a whale, finally, after fifty years of collecting photos, browsing magazine articles, reading the occasional book, and falling asleep to certain documentaries on Sunday evenings. Once, before he’d reached the point of falling asleep during those documentaries, he’d seen footage of a diver filming a humpback whale that moved gracefully through the deep like an acrobat, like a dancer, like someone who did something beautiful because it was a joy to do, and no other reason. Those thoughts might not have occurred to him at the moment. What did occur to him was the presence of such a beast, and the real existence of what had been only an intellectual fact, like the fact of the sun. He found himself crying.

And that had started the collection of photos, computer wallpapers, blog posts, magazine articles, etc. etc. He’d read Moby Dick, but only once; it was too human-centric. All of it, chasing after that moment, when the truth of whales had broken on him, and he’d wept to know there was such beauty in the world.

And then the other goal when he started out on the trip was to meet a woman who shared his bizarre attraction to these creatures of the deep. Surely one had to be out there, and surely fate was kind enough to decree that she would be single, yes?

No. Instead he was on this rocking boat, throat still a little burned from vomiting, mind numbed by the endless motion of the waves and a little cooked by the sun overhead. He imagined that his skin would soon be burned to a crisp. The good news, if he was looking for good news, was that he would probably starve before he died of skin cancer.

Well, even in this apparent misery, stomach raising an unending outcry for food that wasn’t there, even now, he thought he could try to appreciate some of the beauty of the sea. Maybe. Although, if he looked too close to the boat, he thought he saw a shark fin or two, as the undersea predators drew near to investigate what he’d just deposited from his gut.

But further out there, where the sky met the distant horizon, the deep blue water below touching the light blue water above, that was something he could try to appreciate. The clouds out there, a few light, faint whiffs drifted by in peace. The world was unconcerned about him, hollow and cooked as a potato skin, adrift in the great wide deep.

Something bumped the boat. He moved to the side, too brain-dead to think of being cautious. A question ran across the back of his mind, how painful might death by shark teeth be, compared to starvation or sun-roasting.

But there weren’t sharks there. He couldn’t see anything there for a moment. Then a dim shape rose, clarifying itself.

He nearly fell into the water. Could it be–? He saw the long, curved outline of a huge head, ship-like, submerged there, two crescent shapes sliding away from the main curve down at the bulk of the body. He looked, but couldn’t see far enough to identify the narrowing of the body into the tail.

A whale?

It rose from the deep in a sleepy motion, as if not caring much, letting the water’s motion bring it up. Now he could make out the shape of the head, drawing together into a point like an almond, no, like the prow of a boat. Almost like the prow of his boat, as tiny as it was compared to this creature.

He was breathless. It was. A whale. There beneath him, a giant of the deep, a living mountain of the sea, and he was floating tenuously over it.

If the whale should decide to breach….

But instead it hung there, in the ocean, like the clouds above, idling in the sky. A beast borne up by the blue waves. Asleep? He remembered that whales slept by resting one half of their brains at a time. So even if this one was asleep, it was still conscious, sort of.

What did it think? Why was it here? What did half its brain dream about, while the other half was awake and ready?

His stomach groaned again, and then he realized it. It’s there! Right there, beneath me! I could jump out of the boat and swim down to it if I wanted. I could touch it. I could touch it! It’s there, an enormous, gorgeous creature unlike anything else in the whole creation. It’s right there and I could touch it if I wanted!

The whale moved. He leapt back in terror, bracing for the moment when the beast broke the surface and sent him flying away into the sea, smashing into the waves and sinking with a miserable splash.

But the breach never came. He went to the side and saw the whale’s outline slide through the deep, the tail now, sweeping together almost to a point before flying outward in the wings of the flukes, beating against the sea to move its great bulk forward.

Something hissed from his mouth, and this time it was clean air, not vomit. A hiss of recognition, and relief. But then, it’s leaving.

He watched the shape below as long as he could, till it disappeared completely. Even then, his gaze trailed after the whale, unseeing.

His eyes started to drift.

A sharp, white plume of water shot from the water’s surface and dissipated. His eyes jerked back to the spot, and he saw the deep gray, almost black shape of the whale’s back rise above the sea, like the last patch of land left in this wide open water. It slid along forward, and then the flukes rose, like a flourish of the hand, as a monarch saluting his people, and lowering his hand to bid them be at peace.

Be at peace. The flukes sank into the sea, and it was still. He sat back in the boat and wept.

“Notebooks”

Used to be notebooks were those large, flat things with colored covers and cheap, thin cardboard backing that fell apart after you used it too much. The wire spine held the pages together, usually, unless the notebook was really cheap, or for some reason they were the bad part of the batch, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t pass quality control or something. Then their pages would quickly disintegrate and fall out of the spiral, leaving behind little dandruff-y flakes of torn paper stuck in the spiral, like the long strands of clumped dust that collects in vacuum cleaners. You could pull those out and wad them up into tiny little wads and probably do something with them, but they just ended up littering the table or other workplace, perhaps one of the long dark brown tables at the Hosanna lunch room, which perpetually smelled of coffee and something someone microwaved a while ago, and now is getting stuck in your nostrils with a violent hostility, making you wish it wasn’t so cold outside, so you could go out and sit on the porch where all you smelled was fresh air. But anyhow, sometimes there were those spiral notebooks that had pages that were too aggressively perforated, and the slightest pull could have the pages falling out all over the places. Or there was the other extreme, where the pages weren’t perforated well enough, and your attempts to pull the page out with a nice, neat edge to it were thwarted about halfway down the page, when the part of the page that was entwined with the metal spiral gave way and came loose, and you held in your hand a page with a straight edge until halfway down, it started springing a vista of skylines like New York City or Arches National Park. Sometimes the blue lines on the paper were watery, sometimes they were crisp and dark, sometimes the red line there sharp as a laser, sometimes nowhere to be seen. I’ve used many of these kinds of notebooks throughout the years, from the purple one that I wrote about last year, which took into its pages my Myst-ic maps, to the spiral fat book that Grandma gave me a few years ago for the big therapy endeavor.

“Stars”

Stars are incredible. It hardly needs to be said–except it really does need to be said. We don’t live beneath the cosmic blanket of glory that most of our ancestors lived under up until just a few generations ago. We have choked out the light of the stars with what astronomers refer to as “light pollution,” a strange term to be sure. We have become so saturated in the lights of our own world, the combined brightness of millions of tiny little glowing spheres that we have blotted out the beauty of the billions of burning spheres stretched out across the expanding vastness of the universe. If that isn’t a parable for the modern world in general, I don’t know what is. When you look up around here, all you see is a couple twinkling little dots of white or blue up there, maybe Orion or the Big Dipper, the only constellations you managed to recognize or remember from your childhood study of the stars. Or perhaps for some reason you can recognize Casseopeia as a clever tool for snagging the heart of that girl you met one snowy night in the beginning of a chick flick. But that’s hardly relevant. Until you get away from it, you don’t see the vast magnificence. Unless someone with a camera brings it near. Which is good, but even then you don’t quite grasp it the way you would if you were out there standing beneath it, watching the milky river of light split through the middle of the purple night, feeling the chill breeze on your face, not thinking about it, but only the incredible silence and stillness all around you as everything but the sky retreats into the dark black. Now it’s the other way around. When the sun goes, the light in the sky goes too, and all the world below retreats into its cozy lightbulb brightness, its incandescent decadence. Or its fluorescent decadence, and besides that, the strobe lights and flashing neon of the night bars and the clubs darkening the world with the brightness of their lights, using light not as a pointer to joy and heat and wonder and truth, but as a tool to manipulate the brain’s natural hunger for illumination–the brain and the heart’s hunger–as a snare for the soul, woman Folly lighting up her glowing Vegas display and crying out for all the simple to turn in here and taste just how sweet stolen water really is, how good it feels to let your streams be scattered in the street, and take your fill of so-called love till the morning. And outside, the stars from their courses still cry out and seek to fight this outcry against them, still shining bright enough….

Milt Sinew and Cold Station

Temperatures outside the isolated station were cold enough that even inside the heat-generating metal walls, people’s breath still puffed in clouds as they moved through the halls, bumping each other continually because every corridor was only wide enough for one and a half average people, and the gravity’s pull on everyone, coupled with the indulgent diet designed to stave off depression, made everyone a little rounder than average.

Milt Sinew observed this again as he stood in the surface elevator waiting for the doors to close. He fished in his deep pockets and mentally grabbed hold of one of those last thoughts. A diet designed to stave off depression. It hadn’t worked too well. Everyone he knew was in a shade of the blues. Even he, the laughing, joker of the crew was only standing in this elevator because the trip up to the surface was long enough for him to let out a sigh.

The doors finally closed. There was a pause before the elevator began to progress upward. Milt drew in a breath, and sighed it out. His fingers finally found the box in his pocket, and he pinched inside it to draw one long white cigarette into view. He perched it between his lips and fumbled for the lighter in his other pocket. The smoke bobbed in and out of his vision as he raised the little flame to its end. The next moment he was breathing warmth and heat, the only warmth and heat that could be found around here.

The elevator dinged to a halt, faster than anticipated. Milt sucked smoke into the back of his throat as the doors opened and the ever-present janitor stared into the chamber.

“You coming out?” he asked through fat jowls that looked like extra marshmallows were stuffed in them.

Milt smiled thinly and shook his head once, holding his breath and mentally urging the doors to hurry up and close. Once they slid back shut over the blank face of the janitor, he exhaled, sending simultaneous bursts of smoke and breath vapor billowing into the chamber. Milt coughed. He was used to taking risks like that, and having them turn out fine. Usually the janitor wasn’t there.

The janitor. Milt pinched out his cigarette and shoved it back in his pocket. The burned patches on his thumb and forefinger were numb enough by now that he could do it without pain.

That janitor was an enigma. He’d been here as far as Milt could remember, yet no one knew his name. They only knew the blue coveralls and stubbly jowls, and the mop he was sometimes seen toting.

Milt absently fished a palm-sized can of air freshener from his pocket and sprayed it for a good fifteen seconds, till his nostrils reeled. Not enough to cover the smoke smell–nothing ever was–but this time it was brownie-scented, so before anyone noticed the smoke smell they’d be thinking about something else.

Whenever anyone saw the janitor, he was at the elevator door. Never down the hall, or near the sealed airlock to the surface, or even a little further down the hall. You never saw his back either. The man could have a hole in his pants large enough to display any number of ludicrous underwear choices, and no one would be the wiser.

At that thought, Milt smirked and the elevator doors opened back on the original level. He stepped out into the halls and was confronted with everyone’s attention. He thought he could sense their drooped heads pick up a little bit. Almost as if they expected a speech.

“Hello,” he said. They smiled.

They expected something funny. They always did. He scrambled around in his head for something.

“Forgot my keys,” he said. They chuckled and turned back to their work. Milt melted in along with them, looking for something else to do. As the joker around here, he was something like a captain. The only one who could keep his spirits high enough to make a decision.

He felt around in his pocket for the box of cigarettes, and counted them up by the feel. Three. There wouldn’t be another supply shipment for another four months. Let’s hope there aren’t more than three big decisions to make before then.