Puzzle – So What Really Happened, I
by
Jansen Estrup
“We've all been warned about living in the past. We know to guard against nostalgia. It's a seducer. It tells romantic lies. It breeds reactionary sentiments by glorifying and simplifying what was and devaluing what is. Nostalgia is essentially tragic. It tells us the legend of the fall, portraying a paradise we cannot regain.” Walter Kirn
“Suppose I call you Al,” John said, hoping that name would be somehow offensive, and that Monitor would prefer to stay distant, aloof, even officious – a Paul Simon “Al” would offend such a nagging ass.
“Al? Okay, I like Al.” A dog might be called Al and become a devoted friend. Both of them realized that. Should new friends share a joke first? Why am I soft in the middle? Chide each other? Rebond, somehow? Shake internal 'hands' like old companions, like long lost pals? As 'Monitor' Al had been tagging along for more than seventy years. No dog could have been more loyal, more protective … is protective the right term, like a bodyguard? Al might be short for ally, a far cry from the monitor, the overseer, the prosecutor of a lifetime.
They needed a new relationship now. First name basis. Shared secrets. Intimate stuff. Monitor … err, Al knew things … terrible things. Awful crimes he kept from his charge. But Al could not keep everything from John, and that was his own guilty burden. Al had to sleep sometimes, too, and the filters, nets, dream catchers and such failed.
That's when John suffered most. They both did in a round-robin elimination bout.
“So tell me, John. What really happened? Talk to me about it.”
“When?”
“You know when. When it began, of course.”
Oh, that. … Al is right. John has endured enough.
“Okay, Al. Let's give it a try.” John's heart is not in this. Never is. But he can't keep putting it off, can he? He is nearly eighty years old.
“Set the stage."
John hesitated again, took a deep breath and looked around him one more time to see that it was safe to zone out … zone in, actually. He exhaled, slowly, a bit ragedly. A second breath was deeper and he felt himself relaxing. The exhale was smoother. He began to remember.
As the years receded he shrank in size and scope. He is small. So is his world.
He is nearly four years old. His father works down the open road at the shipyard, sometimes two shifts, sometimes on patrol of Tampa Bay at night with the Coast Guard Reserve.
There is a war.
His mother is sick and he has a newborn sister. His brother, Pete, is about 2 and a half and John is charged with taking care of him. At two Pete is strong and happy, but he cannot talk clearly. John is the only one who can understand him. He translates for his parents.
During the day John and Pete play with a rusty red wagon and sometimes his brother pulls him down the narrow back street to a small store where they exchange bits of paper for bread, sugar and such.
They have a dog. It is only a large growing puppy, but seems formidable enough to the children.
They live in a small white house with green trim. The screen doors do not fit right. Flies and mosquitos can get in, especially when John forgets to close the door. John did not learn to speak early, either. The first sentence he could say was, “Shut the door!”
The house is near a two lane highway, a disreputable Depression Era thing called Tamiami Trail and most of the time large olive-green trucks rumble along it in convoys of soldiers and materiel bound for ships in the harbor.
Behind the house is an extensive marshland grown tall with saw grasses, something called cooloola and a tidal stream which meanders around in it like a giant snake. John has been warned about snakes, but it is the tall grass he is afraid of. He is not sure why. It is taller than he, but his fear has something to do with fire.
This day, the day it started, Pete and the little dog wander off into the marsh. John is afraid to go with them. He calls and calls, but Pete will not come back.
John does not know what to do. He is afraid of leaving his brother but afraid of going after him, too. He does not know how long it takes him to decide. Time is not a thing he understands, yet. In the end he runs home, where his mother is sick in bed. She is angry and sends him to the little store where there is a telephone.
After another span of time, a band of men comes grumbling about 'better things to do', they glare at John and go off into the swamp to find Pete. They find him skipping along the creek bank with his dog just as a downpour begins.
John's father arrives home in his car. He is angry. They are all in the car, driving around Tampa in the rain. They stop at places called orphanage but at each one John's mother says, “No, it is a firetrap.”
Fire again. She is obsessed with fire.
John's father stops at a house with a 'Rooms' sign and below that, 'laundry'. He argues with a fat woman who keeps saying 'no', but he gives her money and, without a word, leaves Pete and John with her. He drives away in the rain with Mother and infant Sister to someplace called Hospital.
More time passes. The rain stops, but not the wait. The fat woman's house smells awful, like bleach. The food is strange. John does not like it, so Pete will not eat, either.
John watches the street from a corner of the black-out curtain. He has been scolded for letting light out, even though the room is dark. He watches all night, ever more anxious as a fire starts and spreads out across the water front. Sirens wail. A man in a funny hat walks up and down the street. John cannot understand what he is saying through a wide tube.
“Where is my father,” he asks himself again and again. Impatiently, Frantically. Angrily. Is that when Monitor first began responding to him?
“Yeh, probably.” Al volunteers.
“Yes.” John agrees.
“Why haven't you asked any questions about this event?” Al asks. “No, no. I don't mean the fire. Wartime secuity kept that out of the papers, the history books. I'm talking about your father.”
“What about him?”
“Why didn't he come, for example. Why didn't he talk to you, tell you what was happening?”
“Adults do not share unsolvable problems with children.”
“You think that was his reasoning”?
“Maybe he had too much to think about.”
“And so he could not spare you a few moments to reassure you, to comfort you, to tell you it wasn't your fault?” Al was the same relentless bastard he'd been as Monitor. Only he did ask different questions, now. “He couldn't say, 'everything will be okay' or 'You'll be safe, here … I'll be back as soon as I can'?”
John has no answer, except that not saying so meant that it was his fault, had always been his fault ... was still his fault. Even now, John could not be sure exactly what he had done wrong, what he should have done instead.
“So what does that say to you, to toddler John waiting in a strange place not far from a raging fire?”
John tries to picture it, the oily smoke lying low in the street alongside a canal, an early dawn. There are barricades and fire trucks blocking the streets.
The morning crawls into day, and on to afternoon. Then evening. Eventually his father does come, striding out of the smoke. John knows he has seen his father in fire before.
Al asks, gently, “Is that why you are afraid of fire?”
John does not know. Yes, maybe. He runs out of the strange house to his father, crying with … what? Joy, happiness, relief …
“Did you imagine you had made them all disappear? And now, somehow, you've made him, at least, return?”
“No, that's silly.” Magical thinking, a child's game.
“But what about back then, as a child. Isn't that what you thought … feared?”
There is another long pause.
Finally, Al asks, “And then what happened, John?”
“I grabbed his legs, tried to make him stop, but he just kept walking. I cried. But he didn't care.”
“How do you know that?”
“He looked at me with a terrible face. He said, 'Be a man!'”
“You were four years old. It was your birthday. It was his birthday, too … did he say 'happy birthday'?”
“No. He gave me a wooden carving, a small ship ...”
“ … And told you to be a man.”
“And then he walked away to 'hospital' … whatever that is.”
This piece of the puzzle smells rank, of unanswered questions, and oily smoke, and the certainty that being a man means eating ones fears, and disappointments and rage … and accepting the role of caste-off, outlaw, a nobody feeling the gravity of shame.
John feels it fester for a long moment, feels the anger, a building toddler rage.
“Did he come back the next night?”
“I suppose so. I don't really remember. In my nightmares it was only one night. But many years later, my mother told me she was in the hospital two weeks.” John falls silent, trying to remember.
Then Al redirects it for him, but not at his father or mother, not at the godlike adults who should protect their flock. Al says, “And what is happening to your brother while all this is going on?”
(to be continued in II)
