Theoi Project A (C) 2000 - 2011, Aaron Atsma
Two short stories lay atop the desk of the creative writing professor. One was cleanly typed and covered with the white frosting of a title page. The other consisted of three or four stiff, wrinkled sheets of blocky handwriting on clean butcher's paper. The neat manuscript on the left belonged to the neat girl on Professor Keene's left; the grimy hobo foolscap was tagged to the deep-eyed big blonde boy across the table, wafting of sand and surf, whom the professor now addressed.
"First off, Joseph, let me tell you what I like about 'The Wrath of Okeanos.' You obviously feel this ocean mythos deep in your DNA. But one needs some irony, some possibility of an outside perspective."
Professor Keene's tone was the type you employed with a rattlesnake when you have a rock tucked behind your back. "What I don't like as much, besides the handwriting," he added tolerantly, "is the relative brevity and lack of character development. You clearly grasp the need to show and not tell, but we don't know enough about the inner life of your protagonist."
"Protagonist?" Joseph's voice was drowsy, like someone deeply ensconced in a bed, or a bathtub.
"Your hero, um, Okeanos. You need to fill us in on him, because while these characters--archetypes, almost--could be interesting, we need an entry point, a way to join the conversation. How did they get this way?"
"They were always that way."
Keene looked over his glasses at Joseph. Actually, the professor wasn't totally sure about the "Joseph"--the first symbol of the boy's signature on the class card resembled a fishhook more than it did the tenth letter of the Roman alphabet. "And as for the victory of Okeanos over the resulka in his rescue of the oceanid--"
"The rusalka."
"Sorry, rusalka, I'm not up on my Russian ocean mythology--it did not feel sufficiently hard-won to me." He cleared his throat and read. "'The long-armed Okeanos glided easily through the choppy waves and captured the betraying rusalka, with claws that could open a raw sea bass for supper.' And the ending is too easy. The rusalka simply says, "I go willingly," and she dies a merciful death. The End. It's what we in the biz call an anticlimax."
The professor knew he should cool it with the subtle ridicule, but my God the boy had actually written the words "tenth son to a god." Aquaman was a Shakespearean hero by comparison.
Still the story would earn Joseph an A. Keene stamped A's on every story that crossed his desk because that was how it was done in the Year of our Lord 1969 at this wave-of-the-future, study-what-you-feel-college. And because Joseph or Hoseph had a blank face and a big frame and a certain dead-seaweed look in his eyes that Keene could imagine scoped to the business end of a rifle if he ever woke up. A good thing the college was under-budgeted for a clock-tower.
"But that's what happened to Okeanos ages ago. When the land was empty and the sea was full."
Oh boy. Keene had endured this same talk at the boy's last student conference. It had given him ample food for thought. It had even enabled him to work out a plot of his own.
"Joseph, this is Sarah Maloney. She's in the other section."
Sarah extended a lotioned hand. "Charmed." She brushed the bangs out of her eyes, tossing back her head in a lioness sweep.
"So, Sarah, let's talk about 'The Night He Died.' Your story is corrosive and dramatic. An abused girl thirsting for vengeance against her brutal military father. But perhaps crafting an appeal to straight melodrama would have been preferable to this unconvincing attempt at day-to-day realism." The grin became sly. "And what's with the slumming? Do you think you have the chops to convincingly capture a middle-class family? Don't forget that reactionary cliche, write what you know."
An attuned observer would have discerned a second conversation flowing below the actual one. Joseph, blinking steadily at something beyond the wall, was not that observer.
"The story, to be blunt, is a little boring," Keene said into the languid afternoon. "And after all her brooding, daughter pushing father down the stairs is anti-climactic. Why not buy a gun from a pawn shop? Better yet...concoct some mysterious third character who can be persuaded to do your dirty work for you. I'm giving this a provisional A, but it needs more work."
After the session Sarah fiddled with her makeup mirror until Joseph had lumbered across the room and retrieved his sea-green canvas bag, so that they ended up walking out together.
"Mr. Keene's quite a character, isn't he? He knows his stuff, though," she said.
"I like my story the way it is."
The bright, well-trimmed April afternoon was a crinkly blanket of blankness, green with potentiality: anything could happen because nothing had happened. It had to be said that Pacific Park College was far from the worst place to tuck oneself away from the world's confusion (and, oh yes, the military draft) and learn ancient Greek, or integral calculus, or all about the local mangrove trees. As for Sarah--she'd spent her three semesters waiting. She would know it when she saw it. Now, she was blinking.
"So where do you get your ideas, Joseph? I've never heard anything like your tales about the ocean."
"I dream about the ocean every night."
"I bet you're a good surfer."
"I would rather be in the water than ride above it."
"I'm going to the Student Union to get a coffee and look over crazy Keene's notes. Want to come?"
"Sorry, I don't drink coffee. It gives me cramp."
For a moment Sarah Maloney just stood there, arm hooked on her hip, like a quizzical vase. "Wow. This is a first. Well, since you can't bear having coffee with me, would you deign to sit with me by the fountain instead?"
Holding hands, she led him under the campus archway, across the Bermuda grass tortured to within an inch of the soil, and sat below the oversized, marble, son-stripped Laocoon, writhing motionless in a clear white silence of distilled agony, a tension the surrounding non-statuary was too narcotized and tranquilized to notice.
"I liked the story you wrote last month. Dr. Keene showed it to me. I hope you don't mind. My favorite character was Okeanos. The hero who saved the mermaid?"
"The oceanid."
"Yes, that's right. And then the slaughter of the evil rusalka." She didn't smile when she said it. "You have amazing deep-set eyes, you know? As if you can see right through me."
"Maybe I do."
She made a laugh, then lowered her eyes. "Joseph, I have a confession. My story isn't all fiction. My father really does work in the defense industry. In fact, he's kind of in the thick of it all." Her voice dropped as she leaned in. "The guys that make the Agent Orange that makes all the little Vietnamese babies look like goblins? That's what his company does."
"What is your father or his company to me?" he said, politely, barely curious, staring out at the water.
Sarah's hand moved to her hair, then to the top button of her blouse, then with a sudden hop of inspiration came to rest on the mossy clumps of Joseph's knuckle. "You've heard about the depleted uranium from the weapons that poison the fish? Thousands of fish every day, floating up on the beach in San Diego. And my father, seventeen floors up in an office in San Diego overlooking the ocean, seeing it all. Not caring."
Joseph blinked, which made her realize he never blinked. "Fish?"
*
It was a long way down the California coast, and before they got to the end she had stepped him through the whole shameful story of her father, a fat munching spider in the military-industrial web. Eventually a grunting kind of understanding was reached: one shot, straight and true, in exchange for a lifetime of bliss in a brass bed.
Both now barefoot, they reached a chain-link fence pounded into the sand, surrounding a rocky promontory topped by a small three-story castle that resembled a Gingerbread Gothic. It glinted in the last of the light from the quickly sinking sun. "That's the place," she gestured. "That's where we live. You don't even have to go inside. He'll come out ten o'clock sharp. That's his way. The moon is full, so you won't miss his silhouette. But you'll have to get him the first time. He's pudgy but he's still strong. And you'll have to climb this fence because you can't swim around."
"I can't?"
"Because it's private beach and the rocks on the shoreline will cut you up."
"I can handle it," he said, without arrogance. Before she could rebut he half-dove, half-slithered into the Pacific, his 16E feet like flippers, quickly emerging on the other side of the fence. "See?"
"Wonderful, but please come back," she said, apprehending the lights in the mansion. "Daddy's home."
Joseph swam back around and plodded toward her, less graceful on land.
"Where did you learn to swim, Joseph?"
"I don't know. I must have been young."
"You don't know much, do you?" She smiled, and he went quiet.
Returning to campus, they rested in the invisible shadow of Laocoon, his suffering in eclipse for the night.
"I do feel I know you, Joseph." She unbuttoned his shorts and reached inside. "And I know you can do this."
*
Ten o'clock sharp found Bradford Maloney pacing his rocky little stretch of the California coast, packing his Irish Army pipe with the first scoop of the tobacco that had arrived by post that morning.
"Who goes there?"
"Mr. Bradford Maloney?" A surprisingly high, airy voice in the dark rendered the stout Irish name almost mellifluous.
Joseph stabbed him one, two, three times, deep splurging cuts that spilled the older man's thick, scarred heart out in gouts, the blood coagulating on the loose sand. The man emptied out too quickly to register there were not one but two shadowed figures on the beach with him.
"Joseph!" a familiar voice exclaimed. On land Joseph wasn't quick enough to dodge the bullet honing in with (ironically) military precision toward his brain.
*
"Open and shut," Sarah said three nights later, dressing for bed in the bedroom of the house she would own outright, once her father's will passed probate. "Officer Carlton virtually said so. He's a lovely little pig. Troubled boy high on goofballs stabbed my father, who fired his pistol in self-defense. Both dead at the scene. You know, I do believe Father was alive when I shot Joseph. I heard him groaning."
Professor Keene wandered into the bedroom, wearing a robe monogrammed B.M. He sat down on his side of the big brass bed. "I shouldn't be here so soon."
"The door is downstairs."
His easy grin curdled. "Did I forget my place again?"
"This isn't mistress-servant, professor. More like Russians and Americans."
"Just like old times, then. So how did the boy do?"
"He didn't go for the Agent Orange thing. I don't think he even knew what it was. So I went on a hunch and made up something about uranium in the ocean and he perked right up. But he was wavering at the end so I kept his spirits up."
"How--no, don't tell me." Professor Keene wandered over to the dresser. "What's this?" He jabbed at a piece of paper taped to the mirror.
Sarah shrugged. "It's a poem he wrote for me before he left."
"A love poem?"
"Actually, no. More like...goddess worship. You know, I don't think he even wanted me." There was wonder in her voice as she adjusted herself in the mirror.
He looked it over. "Very nice. Freshman Gothic with echoes of schizophrenia."
"Don't start."
"It has an internal consistency that demands attention. Preferably psychological. I see he summoned the spirit of the ocean for you. It's a recurring pattern in Hoseph's work."
"Knee-jerk cynicism is so dull."
"Sarah, folks stared at him when he walked into class. Do you know how hard that is here, short of blowing up the cafeteria or wearing a Nixon button?"
"Wouldn't It Be Nice" came on the radio. First love. Years ago he'd stuffed a dark spot in his life with reams of awful poems (and a few good ones) on the subject. Keene turned the radio up; he found it affecting in spite of itself.
Sarah smirked. "Look at Mr. High-Brow."
"I like noise." His eyes narrowed. "Are you certain he floated away with the tide?"
"I live here, Professor. I think I can read a tide table."
It was a night for strange shapes and silent shambling, the beach still as a sand-globe under the fog. A night much like one six thousand years ago, when the ocean rejected one of its own. Pale gooseflesh puckered and altered into something of land and something of water, cursed and corrupted by both. Five-pronged footprints ended at a thick, useless door.
With the radio up, the noise of the front door crackling into splinters failed to register with the two heavers upstairs. Only the squishy clomping, closer and closer on the oaken stairs, stirred Sarah, who sat upright in bed and switched the radio off. "Hear that?"
Keene shook his head, then froze. "Now I do."
A final squish; then an abrupt quiet shadow at the doorway, the rankness of small curled dead things billowing into the bedroom. "Rusalka." A serpent's sibilance over serrated shark teeth. "Rusalka," it repeated, remaining perversely in the doorway as if awaiting invitation. The hands were longer now, melted into little scythes at the ends.
Sarah had survived her hateful pit of a high school by playing the angles. Kissing ass so her peers would not hate her quite so fiercely for her military-industrial pig father, intimidating and leading on teachers to massage C's into B's or A's (the A's were where the massaging came into play). But there were no more angles. Even the room's little window was painted shut. Cornered, she took the quick and straight way out. Perhaps that was admirable in her, if nothing else was.
"What did he say?" Poor old Keene hadn't gotten the news yet, though they had both read the story.
"I don't know," she lied, the academic's dooming ignorance allowing her one last bitter grin before the end.
Shaking off his clutches, she rose from the bed and turned toward the creature at the door. "I go willingly!" she shouted, opening her nightdress as she rushed forward, the better to plunge herself cleanly, quickly, fatally, onto the scythe-like finger-blades of Okeanos.
*
A right-of-center guy in New Jersey, by way of Mississippi. His new self-published cozy mystery novel is Death in the Eye. You can find out more at www.claywaters.org.
Review by ErichForschler
Mar 14 2014
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Read this twice. I had to read it twice because I wasn't sure I understood it. Wasn't sure I liked it. But the cadence of it drew me back to give it another read. The author wrote it with a great sense of confidence, and through that confidence came a freedom to write freely and create something unique and provoking. It made me think. Then I thought about it afterward, too. Give it a read.