The Angels -- Part 2

 

Thomas Jeffrey Vasseur

 

 

* * * * *

Everything's so different now. Every thing is different. The way I feel about being here, people's faces, this ocean, although the ocean is no colder than it was before, because the ocean was always cold, but darker now and lifeless, somewhat bluer and entirely blind. Usually there are boats here, sailboats and trawlers, headed for the faster water or the more valuable fishing grounds. It's hard to believe but this ocean is teeming with life: salmon and swordfish, sea urchins and crabs. There are bluefin tuna, I've read, fish which weigh hundreds of pounds and are worth five thousand dollars a piece because the Japanese consider them a delicacy. There is fierce competition for these tuna, but for the smaller fish too. The zones are closely surveyed, and the methods are vicious, I'm sure. They say that love makes the world go around but how much does what we love cost us. ¿Cuánto cuesta amarnos?

Out on the beach the same morning they told me, I couldn't believe there was anything moving beneath the waves. Apart from the motion of the water itself, there was no activity. No boats with their fishing nets, no surfers in wet suits--nothing--and I couldn't imagine any life beneath the waves either, although I'm sure I was mistaken.

* * * * *

I am fluent. Capacious. I'm interested. I want to find ways of keeping the solid moments we shared together, the pleasure that Frank and I knew. One way of doing this is to remember his arms and his legs, his mouth and his awkward monosyllables.

Frank never liked to talk much beyond the point where he'd said all he wanted. Perhaps he believed that too many words were a distraction, a slipping-away which sometimes, in their user's desperation, could constitute a loss. But I don't think Frank had enough faith in his ability to let me know what he was feeling. I would talk to him like this, the way I talk to you now, and he would listen to me, leaning forward occasionally to tell me things I wanted to know too. Frank told me what it was like being away from me so long and what his thoughts had tended toward at night, what he had wished for and what he had learned. With a child's enthusiasm, Frank told me what was involved in becoming a paratrooper--and what it felt like to fall out of the sky.

* * * * *

We used to come to the beach together and that is where we first met. On a Friday, I remember, during the summertime, when I didn't have to teach. After sunset we went out with his friends and my friends to eat shrimp and drink margaritas. Frank was originally from Charlotte, North Carolina. So this place was new to him as well. Frank was nervous at first, quite boyish and awkward when he talked to me, or whenever he tried to use Spanish. Frank knew a little. Everybody here knows a little, or says they do. But Frank wanted to learn some more.

So I thought of the whole Pacific coast that day on the beach, the day they called and explained that Frank was one of the first to fall. The newscasters broke the general news about the invasion, but the telephone call itself came over a week later. After the New Year had begun. After I had slid all his presents under the bed. I thought about us--about Frank and me--but also about this vast apartment. The Pacific Coast.

This land, you know. My new home.

It's hard to believe that it happened in the same part of the world. More or less. Of course, I'm talking about a huge chunk of the globe but the same continent with the same name, which is what I have to remind myself I'm actually standing on. Japan's an island. Cuba's an island. Even Australia. Only by a geographical accident do I find myself on what is called a continent, for the name doesn't fit somehow, and it does not feel like one to me. Right now at least, I'm on the biggest island on the globe if you ask me. And if you close your eyes and listen, then perhaps you'll see what I mean.

Or trace your finger down the continent's coast, southward, towards where I come from--that's where it happened all right. We're connected, you'll realize, up to a point. There are canals between every body. Oh yes, I know what I'm writing. I'm a schoolteacher and my English is wonderful. I'm saying there are gulfs between all of us.

But I'm not sure how good your memory is. I know little of your fascination with maps. So consider how the land swings down, low, in a crescent, past the Baja, past the borders. The land lies on its side like a sliver of moon, something wounded or weary, propped up against an ocean the color of midnight and another name that's a lie. Or think of the land as a person's body, someone smiling and leaning on an elbow, her muscles relaxed now that it's all over, one leg stretched out into the Gulf, the other sprawled in the Caribbean sea.

If I threw myself in the ocean here I could float all the way down, depending on the current. Sometimes the idea occurs to me. I could make it if the water happened to move that way. My waist-length hair would spread out like black seaweed or tentacles, swirl over my body and grow longer after I had drowned. I would take off my clothes to speed the journey, and who knows how long it would take, or if a fishing boat or an oil tanker would spot me. The albacore fishermen might fight over me--you know that joke men tell one another--or I could float off-course towards Japan.

Could I silently impress the sharks?

Avoid the hooks, the acquisitiveness, all the nets?