Читать книгу When the Song Left the Sea - Kevin Ph.D. Hull - Страница 4

On a calm clear morning from the lonesome crest of the coastal range, the wheat-colored hills diminish in perfect symmetry, and fall away toward the broad, driftwood cluttered beach and the cold blue-green waters of the vast Pacific. From here one might see the great Gray whale on their annual twelve thousand mile pilgrimage from the feeding grounds of the Gulf of Alaska to the breeding and birthing lagoons of northern Mexico. Here they prepare for the long return voyage in a vast elliptical orbit with a new – yet, as a species one might say, ancient – family in tow; a distance used for the training of their beloved children in matters both practical and profound. These immense mammals of the deep, living nomadic as well as predictable current-bound lives, represented for Hector a transient home upheld by the strong bond of family, something he’d sought, unsuccessfully, for the nearly sixty years of his solitary life; the life, muted and isolated, of a once powerful and idealistic man, now reduced to periods of long silences and solitary drinking. The wide beach between Morro Bay and the little town of Cayucos was the closest he’d come, geographically speaking, to a sense of home; but even here, lost from view among the high dunes and the fidelity of the threshing waters, he felt like a fraud, an interloper hiding from life’s grievous absurdities.

Morro Rock stands at the isolate opening to the jetty like a monument to the gods, through which fishing boats, tourists’ crafts and private motor boats navigate their way into the small yet precarious harbor. The narrow bay is divided by the embarcadero on the mainland and a long uninhabited dune peninsula seaward.

The giant, fifty-four acre granite rock is located at the road’s western end, just north of the jetty; overlooking the restive sea as an imposing landmark to the sleepy little town of Morro Bay. Old photographs show an even larger rock, revealing the extensive mining that went on in the nineteenth century; mined in spite of the local Indian’s adamant and vocal argument in the holiness of the ground. What was left of the two primary tribes, the peaceable Chumash and Salina, after the missionaries’ indoctrination (which included smallpox infected blankets) were merely humored and the desecration continued until both tribes were nearly extinct. However, remnants of their traditions can still be found; and the Rock, buffeted relentlessly by the timeless sea, maintains an otherworldly, ethereal quality.

The embarcadero is primarily a brief walk past fishing boats and fish and chip restaurants and curio shops, which end at a small park on the south end of the bay section of town. The ‘Rock’, however, remains an impressive sight, nearly as tall as a small mountain; with long gray grains of erosion and sparse chaparral, it captures the first and last white lace of the ubiquitous fog. Some mornings, as the fog disperses, ragged patches linger round the crest, and slowly melt into nothing. Heading east toward San Luis Obispo are seven long dormant volcanic peaks, whose rock faces add a starkness to the otherwise smooth and flowing scenery. The barren hills, descending from the pine-covered coastal mountains, are brown and golden except after the winter rains which transform them into green folds, unfurling gracefully to the broad shore.

Dwarfed by the eastern range of pine-covered peaks and dry valleys, this rolling, feminine topography ends abruptly at the shore, making the ‘Rock’ seem that much more impressive, a solitary ‘mountain’ standing sentinel beside the crashing waters. Approximately five miles north is the smaller village of Cayucos, hugging the defeated hills and a flat wide swath of beach. A long gray pier groans on swaying pilings above the immense ocean, whose chilly air meets the hot desert-like breezes inland, to create a reliable pattern of summer fog. Along the demarcation line between cold and hot air masses tremendous temperature differences occur from one mile to the next. This is a land of two seasons: wet and dry. Inland, summers are reminiscent of the great south-west desert, while our stories’ location is generally foggy and cold, with the exception and exceptional Santa Ana winds; erratic easterly winds in which the heat overwhelms the pattern and creates warm breezy summer conditions, usually in the fall or spring but at times even between winter’s rains.

The great Gray whale pass in strength some distance out, and on a clear calm day one might find them on their mysterious journey, to or from the frigid waters of the northwest currents and the warm lagoons of northern Mexico. Dvorak’s lumbering cello concertos, of late Hector’s favorite composer, reminded him of man’s equally strange journey; the deep cry of the cello and the majestic currents of the sea were somehow related, free of intellect with its innumerable and suspect definitions. However, these sightings were becoming rarer as the whales withdrew farther from shore, perhaps intuitively grasping the need to distance themselves from the strange land creatures, who it seemed, had become more intrusive and destructive, with an energy which rose like a dry wind from the shifting plates of the immense and mysterious land.

Slightly to the east of the sea is a small, well-manicured cemetery – a rectangle of earth no more than a few hundred yards from the broad beach and Highway 1 and the first exit into the town of Cayucos. Protected from the sea by large grassy dunes and the freeway running north and south, as well as a slight incline toward the eastern hills, its silent residents, though apparently within dangerously close proximity – and with an unobstructed view – of the unrelenting waves, have never had anything to fear from the ocean waters, and hence lay peacefully, one would hope, with nothing to fear from the elements.

Predictably the days are foggy and cool, but on this day the late afternoon sun shone brightly and the still air gave off fragrances of licorice, eucalyptus and rosemary. Hector dragged his paraphernalia to a certain plot and sat down, facing the sun, and cast an approving eye upon the gravestones.

To the rollicking insanity of Cocktails for Two, he popped open the first beer of the day, with his whiskey chaser, and watched the white foam roil over his fingers as he saluted in military fashion, his friend, Death, and brought the taste to his lips. He turned up the music, took a long draw, and only then looked upon the stone before him. Scrawled recklessly, with a black permanent marker, were the words:

What’s Her Name

Wife & Liar

Good Riddance

“Anybody home?” he muttered in a gravelly voice, and then broke into hysterical laughter. “What’s that you say?” he answered himself, laughing with such violence that he seriously began to question his sanity. He tapped the stone with his thick knuckles as one would knock on a door.

“Hey!” he shouted, “I’m talking to you!” The whiskey burned pleasantly throughout his body and a golden light shone through his half-closed eyelids, as he slid to the ground beside the grave, stretching himself to his full height and finishing the bottle. While he dozed, a translucent half-moon climbed over the eastern hills and the sun at last disappeared in a pool of color on the ocean’s horizon. After some time the calm waters sparkled in the faint moonlight. In the distance a fog bank was forming and slowly beginning to creep toward shore like a phantom.

“All alone, it appears,” he mumbled sarcastically, staggering to his feet. As he left the cemetery, Morro Rock was being consumed by the fog – the view slowly vanishing in the spectral dark. Hector, blind drunk, saw nothing.

These ‘parties’ had gone on for some time and he had begun to look forward to each Saturday with a sense of morbid glee. On the following Sunday morning, as he sat reading the sports page, his sister, Martha, as yet unaware of the extremity of his madness, confronted him for the first time.

“You’re only keeping the sadness alive!” she said, clearly frustrated. He jumped to his feet and turned to face her, his intense face flushed with conflicting emotions, overcome by a murderous rage. He had predicted and dreaded her participation in this, his solitary fever.

“Damn this world!” he cried, biting off the words like a man spitting from his mouth the worm in the apple. “I’m holding onto her in the only way I can – through hate!” And he banged his fists upon the table, turning toward the window and looking out upon the gray fog-enshrouded sea. “Because–God help me–I still love her!” He clinched his fists and held them in front of him, trembling, as a man holding for too long a great weight. Then he turned like an automaton and marched out the door, and kept walking, all the way through town, to the dunes and the faithful sea. But he would inevitably end up at the cemetery, ruminating on a death that had yet to happen. These stolen moments at the edge of the immense waters somehow helped to put his recent strange behavior into perspective.

The salty sea air and the pulse of the sea’s great mystery soothed his nerves. He sat down beside a patch of sharp high grasses and listened. No more thinking, he thought with just enough intensity to make himself believe he was in control. Just listen . . . His thoughts poured out in a mad rush. The more he tried to still them the more complex and stubborn they became, as if intent on writing a novel. They went something like this:

Since we have separated all things in our hearts, words have replaced song, each syllable asking why existence? Why anything at all? And never enough words to touch something real or hear the marvelous silence where music begins, as if all things have simply fallen through nothing, while we search desperately for a place to stand. Our intelligence speaks in fragments of a world reaching forever toward perfection along the nameless road of desires, until life seems illusory, dark, lost in the confused interstices of the veiled heart. Lost! Lost! My son, so much the reflection of his mother, is a mirror to my shame, my illusions, my endless stupidity. . . I have transubstantiated her living ghost in stone, making of her life a greater death! And I celebrate her! I celebrate us all!

Although Hector would indeed return to the cemetery for another graveyard binge, Martha’s point had hit home. However, he refused to investigate the unpleasant sensations her ‘truth’ had made. It simply fueled his rage, and focused the dark side of his nature. He wasn’t ready for these kinds of thoughts. Later, however, he was sad with guilt, and in trying to allay this feeling he found himself observing cruel nature – the voracious illusion of beauty and time, time’s bastard children eating one another. In spite of his bitterness, he marveled at the mystery behind creation. And in spite of everything life had taught him, he felt a core benevolence, something divine struggling within things with a creative impulse in which love played the central role, the sad redeemer.

He recalled how he had hefted the stone to the foot of his future grave, and, after making sure he was alone, and with a deep sigh, took a long, satisfying piss on the cool, smooth marble. “You’ll set better now,” he’d laughed, somewhat nervously.

Martha sat on her bed, thinking. Her life had been one of reflection, but now there was an urgency that threatened to overwhelm them; her love, her dreams. She wanted to know what Hector planned to tell the boy when the time came. But most of all she wanted to ease the pain of her sad brother and bring him closer to his son. She had more than once broached the subject with him and received only silence. But the situation was impossible! Since the war he had closed off to life completely, the years piling up like snowfall over a grave. She knew how hard it must have been to allow that unconscionable woman into his heart. Only to have it end like this! But something had to be done! Hector had to be awakened to the love for which he was still responsible. The morning of their recent confrontation was the worst day of her life. For on that day she realized the depths of his feelings and the dangers implicit within them.

The awful truth stood starkly against the day: a headstone for a nonexistent grave, and her lost brother sitting before it – a grim devotee. The town wrote him off as unhinged. Between her sorrow and shame Martha’s efforts were focused on bringing father and son together.

David was beginning to show signs of vague and fearful understanding, for, like every child, he loved his distant and mournful father. Small children know more than they can express – but they know . . . And the knowing, often, as time’s brutality marches forward, becomes a bewildering, hurtful thing...

“You have to get over it, brother.” She cast a soulful, earnest gaze upon him, determined to breach the wall that separated him from himself; then she looked away toward the window, her eyes moist. Hector stood at the other end of the room. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, he lowered himself to the floor.

“When I came back from that damn jungle,” he said, as if utterly weary of life. His voice sounded strange in the silent room. Like a cry from deep within a cave, distant and faint in its futility. “When I left there,” he continued with a sigh, “I knew I would never again get over anything.” At this Martha looked up sharply, fully attentive, a pressure rising in her throat.

“Once I saw a North Vietnamese man in Chinese clothes fiercely control a machine gun, ranging his maddening fire from right to left and back again. His face was set, determined and unmindful of his own death. And I knew then that he was a ‘nation’, while we were an invasion hesitantly or recklessly wandering the jungles and dropping napalm haphazardly, as young soldiers, defensive, amazed and confused, watched the progression of a lingering war that seemed to have no real objective.

“The central highlands where we were advancing were at times uncannily silent and strange, at other times stricken with flames, with bombs falling all around us. We walked on, looking in all directions, but with one eye always returning to the sandy earth, where we expected to be sucked away; as if expecting the ground to fall away beneath us.” A long pause – the sea could be heard, ebb and flow, ebb and flow.

“I wish,” she began, her voice cracking. But she could say nothing further. Her shoulders moved gently. He continued sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. After several minutes he slowly rose to his feet and left the room through the kitchen. “I didn’t even think about that other kid. Only Bobby mattered to me,” he muttered in a quavering voice. “And his sudden and complete absence nearly paralyzed me.” He stopped at the door and looked back at his sister with an expression of incomprehensible sorrow and said: “The kid’s leg was gone – I lifted him as if in slow motion, threw him over my shoulder, and got us out of that damn clearing . . . and for that.” But he did not finish his sentence, turned and continued on through the door and out of Martha’s sight. She heard the door to his room close, feeling suddenly exhausted.

I claim this space, he thought, with an intensity of indefinable purpose, in the name of my beautiful insignificant life, my uncertainty and my foolishness . . . imagining the sheets boiled in saffron, the walls singing, the mirror gilded in gold, reflecting the divine. I am alone. And thus the years have passed, with echoes from the deep, like my friends, the great Gray whale whose song ripples in a shimmer of echoes, ever deeper, rising or falling, beyond the image of light and darkness. And this hapless thinking, rising and falling before the brain’s translations splintered by the heart’s wild urges, and manifest like the tides relentless give and take, moonlight and Eros, spirit and flesh, warring in the deep – the human experience a cry sent forth from the unspeakable mystery. Self or no self, the maddening question, a man’s history muddled by his ego, funneled down into sieve-like abstraction, ungraspable, unidentifiable, but perhaps omnipresent, in spite of all his experiences along the journey. “Let it go,” he groaned, “Just let it go.”

He was of medium height, carrying more or less the proper weight; a perfectly circular baldness, common in robust men, was defined by a circumference of thick, salt and pepper hair. His face was large: with a prominent nose suggesting extravagance; deep-set intense green eyes; a full, stubborn mouth and strong chin – he could have played a dock worker in the old movies. In fact, he co-owned an antique shop with his distant sister, and lived off his meager pension from his service in the military and the few knick-knacks sold at their sagging plank store.

“The dusty old junk,” as Hector referred to the sordid inventory, was housed in a shabby afterthought, loosely connected to the main residence: a two room flat gravel roof, wood-frame hut, in which he and his sister took turns as sole proprietor, housekeeper, clerk, and general connoisseur of artifacts both gaudy and obscure. Referring to the open, unlocked nature of the dwelling, Hector laughed and said with all the joviality he could muster in this dark time. “Sleep well, Ali Baba – the jewels are in the cupboard.”

Business was slow – slow as his life. He had few activities to fill his days – he was practically a ghost, far from the man Martha had known and admired before he went to war. She had expected him to change, but he was scarcely the same man. And the years had only served to set the pattern of his distance. She perceived a soul who had never lived the life he was born to live, and as his only remaining family she felt a duty to help him. But time passed as if in a dream. The worst part of it was his detachment; his pitiful lack of even the semblance of enthusiasm. She no longer knew him in the least. A brother, yes, but a man changed beyond recognition.

His nature was creative and reckless, passionate and romantic, with a streak of intellectual detachment and hopeless idealism that kept him generally conflicted and solitary. Although he was a man of strong sentiment, years of disappointment had tempered his emotions, making him reserved and analytical. His thoughts, however, seemed always to be running ahead of him.

Sara was nearly twenty years younger, but one could not tell from her behavior towards Hector. Indeed, despite the differences in their ages she had captured him with her sophistication, and burst into his consciousness full-blown and enticing. Before he could retrieve his balance, she was his lover, his son’s mother and, finally, his nemesis.

Their relationship had progressed so quickly and unexpectedly, by the time he discovered the true bearings of her character it was too late. The damage had been done. In the beginning he believed every devotional utterance, as if spoken by the Holy Mother herself. For this lapse in judgment he choked down his shame. He considered her his life’s most egregious mistake, utterly indefensible in a man his age. And, ironically, considering the hidden vixen responsible, the reason had little to do with sex or the difference in their ages. He had loved her before lust reared its disheveled head.

Soon after the consummation he began to wonder if he would be enough for her. She seemed much more interested in their physical life, content to maintain a rather superficial relationship. And though he knew when she had been satisfied, the act seemed only to fuel her appetites. For Hector love-making was an event that did indeed reach a happy climax; while for her it seemed a mere prelude. And then, too, there were her roaming, unmistakable glances. These recollections infuriated him. Yet he had asked her to be his wife in spite of every misgiving, and, amazingly, she had agreed.

The consequences of such impulsiveness continued to haunt him. He spent his days fighting vapors, struggling to bury her ghost. I will now commit myself, faithfully, to her destruction. . . But could such a promise be kept?

She was thirty-eight when the child, David, came innocently kicking and screaming into this deceptive world. After giving birth she seemed more interested in getting back her figure than in mothering – as soon as her body would allow she began an intense and disciplined regimen of exercises and within a month had returned to her normal weight and was as beautifully firm and vibrant as ever. A tiny voice in the back of his mind began to mock him – you married a whore, you fool.

In fact, there was something even more attractive within her now, something deeper and unspeakable emanating from her; a new sensuality, which gave her a superior quality; perhaps it was simply the experience of childbirth – but in any case she now seemed to possess something intangible yet undeniable which she had lacked before. This did not escape Hector, and in the dark days to come served to make his bitterness complete. He remembered these words from the Bible: “Why seek ye the living among the dead?”And he added: “Or the dead among the living?”

“It’s party time!” he snarled at his reflection in the mirror, surprised by the savage intensity of the stranger’s image. It was Holy Saturday. His perverse ritual had, in fact, become the highlight of his week.

He loaded a cooler full of beer, whiskey and ice, a beach chair, a boom box, and an eclectic concentration of music in the back of his Chevy wagon and headed for the cemetery. Recently he’d added a beach umbrella to shield him from the sun. Saturday at the graveyard. . . Hallelujah! And he opened the round canopy and pushed the point into the soft earth, sat heavily in the chair, and opened a beer.

For Martha, indeed for the entire town, it remained a mystery how her pathologically shy brother had ever become involved with such a vivacious, shameless creature. But Hector would never forget.

They were the only two people on the beach that day. A storm was building at sea, the westerly wind increasing, the beach slowly dissolving in the gray mass before them. Yet she was picking up shells as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Hector had been walking aimlessly, pensive and solitary, as was his habit, occasionally tossing an errant shell into the froth. He found himself at her side. Rising from her shell-hunting she did not seem at all surprised to find him so close. She put her hands on her hips and looked out to sea.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said without turning. He was looking at her intently; two warm fingers seemed to touch the cool stone that had once been a living heart. He registered the feeling with a sense of startling unfamiliarity. And a flame of both joy and terror shot through his being.

“Yes,” he said, also without turning. They talked of innocuous, disparate things – common things. And somehow they had connected.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” He asked with trepidation and surprise. It was getting dark as the first intermittent drops of rain began to fall hard about them, leaving pock-marks in the sand.

“That would be nice,” she responded with a scrutinizing look, and took his hand with a kind of natural sweetness that touched him deeply; as if in that single gesture she had discovered who he really was. For such a lonely man it was a uniquely strange sensation, like waking from a long coma to find oneself in one’s favorite chair.

They sat in a dark café beside the wild and desperate sea, sipping steaming coffee. And to Hector’s amazement she appeared to be flirting with him. She was all smiles and warm deference; at one point reaching over and patting the tops of his weathered hands which lay stiffly upon the table, a coy smile upon her lips.

“Do you live nearby?” she asked sweetly.

“In this town,” he replied with a soft chuckle, “everything is nearby.” She laughed recklessly, again patting his hands.

Hector had been slightly embarrassed. He felt awkward and unsure of himself. He’d never married, and all the women of his life could be counted on the fingers of one hand with fingers to spare. She was dark, full-figured and impulsive. She had nervous eyes that possessed an uncanny depth and penetration; an untamed quality that attracted Hector more than any halo.

But her seemingly sincere attentions hopped from one object to another, making it impossible to be sure just where her true interests lay.

In truth, the appearance of depth was merely apparent, colored by her relentless beauty. She bored easily and hadn’t the patience to go deeply into a subject. Her response to life was tactile; she lived by her senses, casting about for ever new sensations. Not to say that she was unintelligent. She possessed a generous amount of animal cunning. But her craftiness, relying almost exclusively on the senses of the moment, did not and could not satisfy her secret needs; and so, she largely ignored it. The light cast by her great energies, coming from such a beautiful package, may have easily hypnotized a better man; but Hector had lived and so found it difficult to forgive himself for being such an easy mark.

Thus there was something frivolous about her. Or, perhaps, to be fair, it may have been the residue of past defeats and humiliations, an impulsiveness based on a blind faith in the odds. For she was indeed a gambler. And gamblers are first and foremost losers wagering everything on an aberration, a powerful, unreasonable fascination with Chance.

No doubt she possessed an enigmatic and direct manner; this gave her an air of mystery, and, in Hector’s estimation, the status of someone wonderfully uncommon – like an alien fragrance, made sweeter by the quality of its strangeness. He had fallen under a spell. Besides it had been a long time since he had been invited into a woman’s bed, and she was most definitely a woman.

She found, to her surprise, that she genuinely liked him. He was primitive in an unfamiliar way, primitive in a way that implied honesty – straight and sincere. But she sensed something else in him – something nebulous and inexplicable. A complex man in hiding – this feeling vaguely frightened her. A man, she sensed, whose scars were covered and would always remain so, as he went about his days in a perfect mask, one might say, a death mask; or, rather, a mask that fit him perfectly. Secretly insecure, she sensed in terror that she was wrestling with a storm and the feeling left her feeling ill at ease. Yet she was intrigued – theirs was an unlikely marriage, fascinating and doomed.

He imagined great things in her and foolishly believed what he imagined. For example, her playfulness he took for generosity of spirit; her passion for depth of feeling; her warm deference for respect and affection. In truth, she was fickle, carnal, and mocking...

For her it may be fairly stated that she took Hector just as he was – she suffered no illusions: a nice man, quiet, sincere, honest, certainly. Why clutter things with sentiment? She had simply wished to investigate the type. She’d had little trade with nice men. She was on a kind of vacation.

But one could not expect her to remain on vacation indefinitely. Nor for her to abandon her true nature. Once her investigations were ended, then what? Life would provide. Invariably she would return to her habitual patterns of self-destruction and immolation, and hook up with the most dangerous man she could find. This was her accepted Fate, her destiny to which she had long ago surrendered in the brutality of black eyes and bloody lips.

Hector proposed after three ecstatic weeks, and, to his great surprise, she had accepted – with a gay laugh and coquettish toss of her shiny ropes of hair. Soon thereafter they were wed by the local Methodist pastor in a quiet ceremony, attended and witnessed solely by Hector’s reluctant and puzzled sister. Hector hadn’t a clue. Her powerful attraction overwhelmed every warning. His personal assessment was that he had found his luck at last. Why should he throw it away?

Sara had known for some time that she was pregnant. At first this had given her pause, an incipient desperation that grew side by side with her unsuspecting child. Abortion was never even considered – she had her reasons and her personal sense of morality. However, she imagined her gypsy life ending in a dull, domestic anonymity. It was during the early stages of her pregnancy that Hector first suspected her true feelings. After the child was born she abandoned all pretense, and Hector withdrew into himself like a wounded animal.

Why, he wondered, couldn’t he simply send her packing? But she had touched his imagination deeply. A once sealed door, behind which lay his dead blood-brother in a jungle of blood, a repressed childhood, an unwanted solitude, and now the realization that he’d never lived the life he’d wished for all those useless years; a once sealed door that had been opened in foolish emptiness could not be allowed to close behind him for his ideal images to die all over again – images, as perfect as God himself, of enduring love and the courage to bear the loss this implied. He had nursed these ideals bitterly, the merest shred of hope mocking him in his ever-expanding withdrawal from life. His undying romanticism and idiotic idealism made him gag – his entire life stood against him as proof that he was a singular fool.

In his more reflective moods he was aware of the terrible game he was playing. Hope for what? She was utterly gone! He admitted that he had never really known her. But do we ever really know anyone? He asked the shadows of his thoughts to no avail. At last he faced things squarely, with an indignation approaching wrath.

Four months after the baby, David, was born, she left town with some guy she met at a bar. A narcissist, a gypsy wanton! He thought bitterly, like a general perusing (on a forced march) the articles of his surrender. Look under fool in the dictionary, he hissed, and you will find my stupid, stricken face.

Upon much reflection Martha believed she had discovered the reason for this unlikely union: the woman had inspired his compassion! To her Hector was a man of self-sacrifice, an innocent. But his lack of warmth towards the boy, now four years of age, troubled her to no end. Bewildered, she struggled to find a way to reach him. Her quiet, solitary brother was now completely inaccessible. Things couldn’t have seemed more hopeless if Hector had been reported lost on one of Jupiter’s moons.

She had suffered his silence and suppressed anger for these four years. And although she loved and sympathized with him, she had begun to lose patience. Indeed, he inspired her compassion, as Sara had no doubt inspired his. But Martha’s primary concern was for the child and the opportunity Hector was losing and would never, most likely, regain. And it would be the same for David: in every way that really mattered he was an orphan. Thus she had decided to push her morose and inscrutable brother as far as she dared – until he saw the light! His withdrawal from life had ramifications to which he seemed oblivious: his pain extending out to unknown regions and growing like a fungi.

To complicate matters, Martha had recently received a letter from Sara, a letter Hector not only refused to read but even to acknowledge; as if no such person existed. He had erected a modest stone on his burial plot and was working assiduously to destroy her ghost. This, of course, created quite a stir in the small town: alarm, mockery, fear, sympathy, and even anger. Strangely, this pleased Hector.

“She’s his mother, she has a right to see him,” Martha once again chastened him. He was sitting in the den, reading his time-worn Conrad. Martha was standing in the doorway, holding the forbidden letter. He slowly lowered the book, an expression of resolve frozen upon his unforgiving face.

“She has the right,” Martha repeated, unflinchingly, like conscience itself. Hector, rising to his feet, shook his head in adamant dismissal.

“If there’s a God in Heaven,” he thundered, dropping the book to the floor, “then he’s both our Mother and Father. . . Don’t talk to me about rights! You earn your rights, and that bitch relinquished hers!” Then he made a quick, obscene and uncharacteristic gesture. “To hell with ‘em all!” He finished his tirade and stared back at her defiantly. She hesitated, taken aback by the vulgarity and violence of his reaction.

“The love you stand by is your life,” he continued firmly, his rage somewhat abated. “This earns you your rights! Your privilege to be called mama or daddy!”

“Yes,” she began in a passionate whisper,” resolving to respond strictly to his reasoning, “and you have someone to stand by, someone who needs you. . . I’m asking you to stand by your son!” She was engaged in an obvious fight to control her emotions; the blood rushed to her face and her pupils dilated. “That’s all I’m asking,” she said forcefully, and turned and left the room. Again the arrow had hit its target. Hector staggered toward the front door and gazed out into the choppy sea, then sat on the edge of the living room couch, a slight tremble in his hands.

Dear Mr. Dvorak,

When you reach that heart rending series of notes, and drop me to the center of my being, for a moment then, life seems real and such beauty wakes me in the deepest place, the placeless place in which I have wasted my days circling myself, involved in ludicrous mental chatter, in tacit acceptance that my illusions are real. Then the deep longing enters, poised on a wave of tears, and I know, for just an instant, that nothing so beautiful and so true can come without pain . . . the pain of waking. For this, I am grateful beyond words. Did you know the very real magic birthed in the majesty and the agony of your work? Could you too hear it? Did you know that your music had the power to give a man the strength to suffer another day, as he searched for that which cuts so deeply and fills his emptiness with a glimmer of hope?

Most days went something like this: long walks on the broad beach, the dull sheen of driftwood in the encroaching fog, the fragrance of eucalyptus, wild rosemary, bottlebrush and sage, the brown hills covered in tall mustard plants; the micro-climates’ strange influence on earth and man alike – cool, foggy coastal summers, hot sun-drenched golden hills inland. Suddenly one crossed the demarcation line between cool tatters of fog and serious heat, the unpredictable sea and the whale’s journey; dolphins and sea lions too singing ocean joy – as if to teach the land-locked world. Then there was Morro Rock, beautiful and imposing, decorated in gull excrement, home to the once endangered Peregrine falcon.

This was the world Hector haunted now – a pint of Jack Daniels in his back pocket, a small notebook and pencil in his shirt pocket. He simply wandered aimlessly, belonging to nowhere and nothing. He was in a different war now – not the ‘wrong’ wars greed and stupidity had created from Korea to Iraq; no, this was a true ‘Jihad’ or holy war in which a human being tries to transmute flesh into spirit – and he was the battlefield, the general, the president, as well as the dutiful grunt.

David had witnessed, in hiding, the scene between Martha and his unhappy father, uncomprehending. But a question was forming inside him, a question that he could not put into words but whose meaning was even then beginning to weigh upon his heart, knowing, in his childish innocence, more than he could assimilate.

He climbed the stairs to his room and pulled a box from under his bed. A toy car was on his windowsill but he had yet to see it. Previously, Martha had given him some toys and various items – some of which he kept in his box. He slowly removed the lid and searched among baseball cards and action figures until he found what he was looking for. He saw the mysterious toy car and put it beside the box, on the floor, while he reached inside and brought out a picture.

For a few moments he studied the face in the photograph, the long dark hair and the reckless smile, the dark eyes, arms akimbo, before a background of ocean surf. He studied the face, as it were, for some kind of answer, a feeling of vague longing pressing on his chest. . . And a response seemed about to congeal in his throat, only to fade away. Then he put the picture and other items away and picked up a shiny metal car; a detailed replica of a ‘49 Ford, painted bright green. Martha had not given him this either; he had simply found it on his window-sill just a few days before. Just as he would find the others. No one had said anything. Momentarily he put the first car and the photograph away and sat on the floor, absent-mindedly holding the lid.

Martha had taught him his first word. He whispered that word now, not knowing why, unable to find any better word for the strange feelings that were suddenly welling up inside him.

“Daddy,” he whispered, and placed the lid neatly on the box and slid it gently back beneath his bed.

Dear Antonin,

If I may be so familiar. Your music has spoken my name, so, yes, I know you. You sing like the great whale, a cry of echoes shimmering beneath a membrane of light and darkness – the mysterious deep. Of course God exists! You seem to be saying. But this does not mean he is maintenance free. We are too weak to sing his songs, to take the world back to where it belongs. And because of our weakness nothing changes.

Beneath the covers in the dark room, the little boy pulled his blanket tight against his chin and once more whispered the word “Daddy,” and soon fell asleep, clutching a shiny toy car to his chest.