When the fat man in the Aloha shirt began to squeal after dragging the body out of the water, my dad finally shot to his feet and scrambled down to the shoreline. I didn't get up, though, too involved with my digging to bother moving. Normally grave events involving grievous somatic injury are seductive to the attention of even the most self-absorbed individuals, so I suppose you could consider my apathy rather strange. Particularly since the person whose heart my father started messaging and whose respiration he artificially assisted was my brother Barry.
I was twelve years old at the time, Barry an unlucky and definitive seven. We were not especially close. For a while he tried following me around everywhere I went like younger brothers do with older brothers, or in the manner of those subservient domestic canines always slobbering at your heels and wagging their rear ends in quest of scraps of food or affection. I put an end to that behavior with intimidation, which I bolstered with physical violence when mere intimidation proved insufficient. After I beat his face in a couple of times, pinning him down in the front yard ivy with my knees and flailing away as if he were my worst enemy, Barry finally got the message: Don't follow me around or I'll hurt you.
My father was a GP with a small office over in Burbank, California, not far from the studios. A few feckless B movie actors and a former Micky Mouse Club Mouseketeer who went on to grace the silver screen in bikini-clad roles during the beach party film craze were patients. He was a great fan of the Pacific littoral and on weekends, weather permitting, the family would often spend the day at the beach.
Just before the accident Barry had been hunting for mole crabs in the swash while my parents read magazines in the shade of the primrose parasol my father planted in the sand upon our arrival like the family flag. It was in the afternoon, shortly after lunch. As usual we'd brought along an ice chest loaded with soft drinks, potato salad, the Saran-wrapped tuna fish sandwiches my mother confectioned the night before, as well as a grocery sack containing a large bag of potato chips, paper plates, Styrofoam cups, and a fresh jar of kosher dill pickles. The weather was fine, with only a few innocuous cumulus clouds sailing lazily overhead threatening nothing dire, and temperatures leveling off in the high seventies.
I think when Barry waded into the surf, following a whim the nature of which will forever remain obscure, unless one of us encounters him on the other side of the divide and inquires, my parents' awareness had been diminished by the lunch they'd recently consumed; to couch it in more bombastic terms, I believe they suffered from a state of postprandial somnolence. I noticed what was going on, however, and accurately evaluated the lethal dangers involved, as there happened to be no one near Barry in the water and we'd installed ourselves far from the nearest lifeguard. I even said, though doubtless in too feeble a voice to rise above the whoosh and churn of surf, the whipping white noise of those ceaseless maritime winds, "Barry, get your ass out of there," because the kid didn't have his floats on and was a poor swimmer, being scrawny as a famished kitten, and unathletic from birth. Once waist-deep he turned around, probably in search of parental guidance or validation, or even fraternal encouragement, who knows, some people never forsaking hope no matter what, and at that moment the wave broke over his back, a treacherous rogue in a series of four or five much smaller swells, knocking him off his feet and engulfing him in a great confusion of sudsy liquid.
Presently, at least if you weren't experiencing respiratory impairment due to submersion in a fluid, the obese, middle-aged guy in his loud Hawaiian shirt came strolling along. He carried a fishing rod and tackle box and was presumably heading for the pier to do some angling. But first he noticed a juvenile human arm peeking out from the lather of spent waves. He dropped the fishing equipment, waded into the water, pulled Barry, now limper than the proverbial wet rag, onto the beach. The man cried for help in that kind of falsetto, fat man's voice which always seems like a paradox somehow, rousing my father from his metabolic torpor. Dad hurried to where the body lay supine in the sand and went into competent physician mode, the one in which you refuse to let your sentiments, whatever they might be, impede the objective exercise of your professional skills. But coolly and impartially applied or not, the medical art could no longer do anything for my brother.
One thing is sure: Never had I seen Mom as upset as when she stood watching Dad working on an inert Barry while the banshee-like siren of an ambulance sung its distant and mournful song. Her face, so pleasantly reassuring under standard circumstances, transformed itself into a gruesome mask of some emotion I preferred leaving unnamed. At one point she grew hysterical, and it required the whole gathered crowd to hold her back, for she seemed on the verge of throwing herself, like a romantic suicide of centuries past, the soul poetically inconsolable, the coiffure wilder than the elements unchained, into the frothing tumult of the sea. By that time with my plastic toy shovel I'd created a hole nearly deep enough to bury a vertical four-year-old.
The ambulance pulled up at last along the boardwalk, called by some unknown benevolent witness to the scene, its red beacon pulsing light, its siren terminating in a sigh. My father lifted Barry, whom I imagined next to weightless now that his soul had apparently flown the coop, into his arms, and carried him to the waiting vehicle. I abandoned my trifling occupations and helped Mom trudge up the beach behind the two of them. A couple of paramedics laid my brother's inanimate form onto a gurney they slid through the double doors at the back of the ambulance; we were informed Barry would be taken to the UCLA Medical Center, at which point the paramedics sped off with my father, who insisted on riding along with them. Mom, though rendered mute, had partially recovered her composure, so we gathered our affairs, leaving the motley collection of now dispersing onlookers for the family automobile. We'd gotten an early start that morning and had found a parking place in a lot close by. Still, toting all our paraphernalia without my father's assistance wasn't easy, especially the heavy, cumbersome parasol. But I benefited from the pleasure of riding shotgun in our recently purchased Thunderbird convertible for my efforts. We were living in that golden age when middle-class Americans might purchase a new car once a year.
We followed the signs to the UCLA Medical Center, which wasn't far, happily hitting every light green as sometimes occurs, when they're not invariably orange, or red, question of timing and chance, where Barry was pronounced, in the consecrated expression, dead on arrival. Dad emerged from some unmarked room and announced the terrible news to us as we stood waiting by a rumbling vending machine in one of those shiny corridors that smell of putrefaction, antisepsis, and laboratory science. I wish I could say I felt remorse for the part I played in the incident, for my critical inaction, but I only perceived a pervasive numbness, as if my mind and members were trapped inside a wad of cotton vast as the universe itself. That and an enormous fatigue untypical of my age group, where kids were high on speed from morning till night, when at last they fell headlong and without compunction into the waiting arms of Morpheus.
Enough sensation and mental force remained in me to regret the lugubrious atmosphere at home nonetheless, the sticky scenes with the uncles and aunts and cousins, who milled around like emotional zombies in our living room, the awkward interruptions of the neighbors timidly ringing the doorbell holding platters of finger sandwiches and cakes and oily fried chicken pieces to provide us with physical and moral nourishment, as well as the gloomy funeral itself, for which I was obliged to dress up in a sweltering monkey suit as temperatures rose to the canicular extremes often attained in the San Fernando Valley of a summer month. We were of Jewish persuasion—though non-practicing (agnostic, as my father used to say, neutral)—so Barry was lowered into the ground in a simple wooden casket kept mercifully closed. During the memorial service the rabbi read a selection of verses from the Psalms and described the kind of child Barry had been. I failed to recognize my brother from the rabbi's description but assumed that was part of what it meant to be religious—believing in things that probably never were after they'd already vanished from the earth.
I never admitted to anyone I watched Barry drown, although in the days following his death I suspected everyone knew. But soon I realized nobody could see through me as I feared, that I was opaque like a curtain not transparent like a window, that my parents had no intention of blaming me for something they were unaware I'd done, or hadn't done, and were simply desolate from having lost a child. A tad too desolate for my taste, in fact, as I suffered from a bad case of sibling rivalry disease and believed they'd always shown a marked preference for my younger brother, which might have explained my fatal passivity at the beach. In any event whether I'd previously obtained my fair share of my parents' love or not, with Barry no longer around it seemed natural that I should now dispose of it all exclusively. Yet I found myself before a bitter irony—no warmth of affection survived in my parents' hearts after Barry died. There was no room left there for anything other than grief.
To add insult to injury, by an incremental, if rapid, process my father went quietly insane. Never a voluble man to begin with, he grew taciturn to the point where he wouldn't open his mouth for any reason whatsoever, not even to stuff food in it, and a day arrived when he would not deign, from lack of energy or desire or both, to rise from his cherished leather lounger either. Institutionalization appeared the only recourse short of allowing him to wither like an unwatered house plant. I can picture still how gaunt and ghostly he looked in the loony bin under the inexorable overhead lamps as we sat together in the common area, a lurid stick figure with an unwavering look of stolidity. His only link to the exterior world was the television set playing nonstop in a corner of the room to pacify the inmates, most of whom were dressed like him in open bathrobes, loose-fitting pajamas, and backless house slippers, and for weeks on end his eyes never left the TV once to fall upon my person, nor that of my mother, during our daily visits.
You would have supposed: Here surely is a reactive mental illness. But a deeper diagnosis of manic depression with obsessive-compulsive tendencies was established and a course of electroshock treatments decided upon, as all the pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic expedients proved ineffectual. My father seemed happy afterward for the first time in his existence, a man high on life, his appetite returned and then some, though his eyes appeared a smidgen too wild and proptotic, as if for one reason or another he thought it preferable to never blink. One worrisome side effect, besides large swatches of his memory having been burnt away like in those blazes firemen set intentionally as a prophylactic measure—when watching the common room TV he believed he saw members of the family acting inside the cathode ray tube. "Isn't that Barry?" he'd ask when a cute blond kid appeared on a situation comedy or courtroom drama. Or, "There's Mom," he'd declare, if there happened to be a pert, comely brunette attired in a kitchen apron on some soap opera or Western. But these illusions only lasted for a week or two. By the time he returned home he was lucid again, though his character had undergone a dramatic change. Whereas before he'd been arch and full of gravity, now he was lightsome, easy-going, chummy.
My mother, on the other hand, rather than torturing herself with all these psychiatric complications, found a simpler and more practical escape route in the bottle. She'd never been much of a boozer before Barry died, just a nip here and there, hardly a thimbleful, to be sociable. But with my brother departed, and my father also gone in the sense that he was no longer the man my mother had married, the empty spaces they'd once occupied in her life needed to be filled by something. She liked vodka as a filler, perhaps because of its ostensibly odorless quality, a hooch undetectable on the suburban breath during Tupperware parties and kitchen chitchats with the local housewives. She'd pretend to be drinking orange or grapefruit juice throughout the day, but in fact she'd be sucking down surreptitious screwdrivers and clandestine greyhounds until passing out in a pathetic slumber on the living room sofa.
My father didn't concern himself with her newfound alcoholic vocation. Prior to taking his million volts he'd been an acute observer of human failings, and a bit of a petulant, condescending moraliser, a kind of Ashkenazi, heterosexual Clifton Webb, but now he regarded the weaknesses of his fellow creatures in a much softer and more charitable light. His wry edges had been sanded down, smoothed by that bottled lightning they'd sent coursing through his brain. Frequently he joined Mom for a highball party himself, and as he'd cut his hours at the Burbank office to the strict minimum he had plenty of free time for a few laughs over a few cocktails. When I returned home from school it was not unusual for the both of them to be loaded to the gunwales and navigating by the stars.
Things continued in this manner for nearly a year, my father remaining in his electromagnetically elevated mood while my mother descended into the dull swampy hollows of chronic inebriation. Then early one brilliant summer morning, balmy and smog-purifying breezes having blown in since dawn off the Mojave, my father suggested we head over to the coastline. We hadn't visited the beach since Barry's accident. It still continued to be my father's favorite place in the world, a sort of nostalgic childhood axiom that no application of realistic logic could ever disprove. My mother and I both relented to the idea, and so it was that we found ourselves sitting upon a strip of beach no different from the one we sat upon about a year earlier. I brought my plastic shovel with me, though I should've long ago outgrown that kind of toy I guess. But I enjoyed digging. It seemed to calm something within me that was in terrible need of appeasement.
I was digging therefore with the shovel, discovering white scalloped sea shells and a few gray disarticulated sand crabs, perfectly defunct, as well as buried stipes of rubbery kelp like strands of mermaid hair redolent of the sea, when I happened to glance in the direction of the blue expanse and spot a male child struggling in the uprush of dying breakers. In that foamy ebullition that exhausts itself in bubbly suds further up along the glittering shore he seemed to be in trouble, his head barely held above the surface of the water, and periodically vanishing beneath it.
I nudged Dad with my foot. "That boy appears to be drowning" I opined, pointing vaguely. The nearest lifeguard station was once again a good ways off. My father, who was playing solitary under the beach umbrella rather than drowsing over a scholarly review, raced down to the shore and tramped into the surf, pulling the boy up onto dry land. This time the child breathed spontaneously and seemed only mildly obtunded, though the coughing jag from which he suffered made his respiration difficult for several minutes. He was eventually administered oxygen by mask, making a complete recovery. It is true the whole incident took place well before lunch.
A snippet concerning this exploit, citing our two names as communicated to a journalist who contacted my father that evening over the phone, appeared the following morning on a back page of the LA Times, even if my tepid contribution hardly merited a mention. My father cut the article out of the paper with a pair of scissors at the breakfast table. The child he'd saved, an awkward, pudgy runt of a boy of eight about as crossed-eyed as it was possible to be without acquiring vision directly through the nostrils, turned out to be the son of a big-wig Hollywood producer. To express his gratitude the latter procured me some acting work, for which it was discovered I had an unsuspected talent, not that I needed very much (more than sufficient to launch my career in show business, at any rate), and introduced my father to some choice investment opportunities that turned out to be quite lucrative. It felt like redemption all around, except for my mother, who kept on drinking like she, too, had stumbled upon her true calling in life. And Barry, naturally, Barry stayed dead and interred and for that there were no happy endings, no second chances, nothing beyond a defective existence in our increasingly faulty memories and whatever might lie beyond the grave. But I didn't much believe in the afterlife because I figured God would've torn my heart out by now if he'd been up there. Unless he was like me somehow, of course, and just sat around watching while the world went all to Hell.
Powered by Froala Editor
Powered by Froala Editor
Powered by Froala Editor
Latest
Submit
Subscribe
Archive
Contact
Masthead
About