He had never even seen the boy. Not one single time. That was the most incredible part, the part that virtually ensured that no one else would understand. It was all too easy to believe that since he had never seen the boy, that the boy had therefore, in some sense, not fallen under his jurisdiction. It wasn’t his stretch of beach to patrol; it was well outside his peripheral vision and belonged to a seasoned junior lifeguard named Carl, who had not only quit but may have been fired in the same second, not that it mattered in the slightest anymore.
On all previous days, between saves, Ryan sat like a chryselephantine god up in his tower, monumental in his deckchair. They really were like that in Southern California. Big, broad, with well-muscled bodies and deeper tans than most people could aspire to in a lifetime. White blond hair and perfect white teeth. Ryan loved himself truly, as, in his world, truly he should. His victims were absurdities, but he loved the saves themselves. He loved the mental image of himself as he blew his whistle and stood up in his chair, feeling the muscles in his abdomen tighten already, as he jumped onto the hot sand running, thighs churning the dry distance. Every movement was so utterly rehearsed that he needn’t invoke a single conscious thought until he actually encountered the other’s body.
His life was the beach, and at night, he slept like the dead.
——-
When the mother appeared, he stepped back, for once ashamed of his international orange trunks and guard paraphernalia, which branded him a potential perpetrator far too easily for his liking. He was marked up by a whimsical stripe of blue sunblock down his Aryan nose and one more picking up the deep groove just beneath each cheekbone. He hung his head, aware that there was no way to convey gravitas with a pair of board shorts and a whistle, bouncing with each movement from around his neck.
The mother’s face was wild with colour, with the scarlet, pink and white logic of a de Kooning. She gave the impression of a scribble, a figure drawn in such haste that some of her features were missing. When Ryan was discharged away from her, at last, he realized that she seemed to have fists and forearms, but no shoulders, and legs, but no feet. Had a child summoned her up in a panicky fast sketch? Or had she jettisoned form with the speed she used to run up and down the length of the beach screaming, the silence bursting her eardrums?
Her boy felt missing to her, like a set of keys flatly gone when you empty your purse out onto the floor and paw through the detritus. You know in advance you just won’t find them. Likewise, the boy just wasn’t there. There were no keys on the carpet, though there were surprises (Rolaids, a lost earring), and there was no boy on the beach, though there were surprises (a hermit crab and a single brand new Nike sneaker, size 12 (how the hell did Mr. Sneaker get home?)).
Ryan wanted to be sick on the sand, to relieve the tension and maybe show solidarity. But he could not befoul this day any more.
——
The land rovers were already appearing, in a pointless procession. Their headlights scared up nothing. The beach was cleared and the boy was not there. You would need to drive into the water, presumably, to find him. The waves had him, Ryan suddenly realized. The boy would be back in the morning.
Night or day, he vowed suddenly, he was going nowhere. Before the body was lifted into its plastic bag and removed, he would lay down a towel over the body as a personal honour guard. Ryan had seen the funerals of foreign dignitaries on TV, and wanted to drape his large towel, with its absurd cross that was supposed to denote safety, over the boy before he was lifted away. Ryan found out that the boy had been six.
——
Every two weeks or so, on his days off, Ryan had made the long drive up to the Bay Area. He drove the Honda Civic his father had bought him as an 18th birthday present. He told his mother that he would go on to college in good time. He announced an interest in marine biology. Why not? Ryan was bound for the sciences if he left the beach at all. There had been essentially no culture available to him during his formative years. LA was a land of movies, but no films. And, of course, there was always television. Always, literally. Some visitors to his beach, victims in the making, even brought small battery-operated televisions to the beach, where the small sets would in turn be victimized by the sand.
——
The policeman drove the woman back to her hotel at 2:30AM. Ryan was deputized to attend, though the reason seemed obscure. Did he represent the guards or the sea itself? Or even, simply, himself, made culpable through his seniority? He sat in the back of the squad car during the drive, held in by a mesh cage like a prisoner, watching the tousled mess of the woman’s hair bounce periodically with the rhythm of the street.
Somehow, the hotel manager already knew. An elevator door was summoned by a young valet, whose only function seemed to involve ensuring that the woman would be moved swiftly enough through the lobby to avoid her collapse there. The valet rushed ahead upon reaching the correct floor, produced a master key card, and held the hotel room door open an inch. Such are the courtesies given to the bereaved, for at least a couple of days, before the coarseness sets in and bystanders feel free to ventilate their tedium.
The policeman received a single “no” when he asked if he could be of further assistance. He posted himself at the woman’s door until 6AM however, as if protecting her from further calamity or an invisible perpetrator, like a rogue wave or undertow.
——
When Ryan made the same inquiry, the woman asked simply, “what will you do now?” and held the door open for him. He let the door fall shut behind him and parked himself where he stood, hands clasped as if at a funeral. Ryan didn’t know how much reality it was appropriate to communicate under the circumstances.
The mother turned out to be English, which meant that she held it together better than could be expected, but it also meant that her utterances seemed redoubled with contemptuous superiority. You don’t want to have a Brit condescend to you in a catastrophe; it should be written into a manual somewhere. They all knew that her terms—-whatever that meant—–would be different. But that did not at all imply better. Just difficult to predict.
If for no other reason than because other people might have sentimentalized his death, it repulsed him later to think of all the times he had played with death surfing at Mavericks, taking the rocks and sharks and waves as challenges. He would never surf again, after that day, even when his parents begged him to return to his old hobbies when his life had been skeletonised and stalking the beach was all that remained for him.
In the hotel room, the woman appeared completely disoriented by fatigue and panic and she walked back and forth before the bureau as if she were about to reach for some object, but she couldn’t think of what. After a few minutes, she walked over to the bed and carefully lay back on the flotilla of pillows. The top of her strapless bathing suit rode down a bit, but she was past noticing. Ryan was ashamed for observing, for wanting to see even more.
Her chin suddenly appeared to collapse, a structure fallen apart like a sandcastle. It was all vibrating dimples now, a primordially horrible thing to see, as awful as a large hairy spider stepping out of a flowerpot. Ryan froze in place, new to this form of torture. His body felt unwell in every aspect.
“Where is he? What are we doing here? I should go back—what am I doing here? I need to be looking.”
She doubled over and hugged herself, turning sideways on the mattress. Ryan thought that he should offer to hold her, but she was too naked, and such a gesture would too easily shift form. Ryan was struck dumb by the wretchedness of the event, and turned and slipped out of the door, past the confused cop, and sprinted full out down the hallway and down the staircase.
——
Ryan too was fired after fleeing the mother’s hotel room. His own mother had to tell him; he had never returned to work, which provided the official grounds for his termination, and not his extreme failure of compassion. He said nothing in reply. Word had filtered into his room that Carl had been flirting with a pair of pretty girls instead of watching the water, and God was apparently determined to smack him pretty hard for that.
——
That night the sky had been shockingly black and the sea more frightening than Ryan would have reckoned. There was no bonfire or party to distract him, of course, and he realized that the deep was not nearly as familiar to him as he had thought. The tides were fearsomely intimate, probing the land. The waters stank, something he had never observed before, thanks to the masking funk of coconut oil that settled in the day. The lovely smell of sunshine was extinguished.
Ryan had picked up a bag from the admin office and, as he walked almost blindly from one length of the beach to the other, he picked up any garbage off the sand to clear the field more completely for his eventual discovery. Every time his foot hit a foreign object, his stomach lurched with anticipation and dread.
A month later, with the boy’s body still missing, the mother packed up and reluctantly returned to England. The active search for the boy’s remains had been called off within the first week, but the mother took some time to give up. As her final courtesy on US soil, a patrolman had been tasked to drive her from the hotel to the airport, and he stayed silent as she wept quietly all the way. He felt ridiculous taking such good care of her luggage when her treasure was lost. Leaving her at the gate, he felt her hatred when he said, “you take care now”. In retirement, he would look back on that moment and flinch.
Ryan turned day into night, beach-combing until dawn. He didn’t want the boy to be discovered by anyone other than him. Only he would look at any puckered tiny body or grey and dissolved fragments as anything other than a horrible naked thing, a source of screams and disgust. He took it upon himself to be the only witness. Upon the intimation of dawn, Ryan left for the day, having done all he could do for the boy he had come to think of as burdensome as a son.
The boy had had very little in the way of a life, at least from a documented standpoint. Like all children, he loved animals and kicking a ball around. He had gone to a private school at home. He had lost one front tooth. Ryan saw his face only in newsprint, in a few articles about “the tragedy at the beach”. He looked to Ryan like a young boy, like any young boy, really. Ryan had not only failed to see him in life, but now he failed to see him in death, and that drove him nearly wild with frustration.
One early morning, Ryan trod upon something that felt like some kind of fabric. He was shocked by the degree of shock he experienced upon lifting up a tiny pair of dark blue shorts with the boy’s nametag sewn into the waistband. He crumpled the material into a ball and held it up against his face and cried for the first time.
——
An hour later, he drove into the police station, looking substantially crazier than he might have guessed, to turn in his finding. The cop behind the desk looked at him with confusion and a little disgust, unable to categorize this experience. Ryan suddenly felt like a pervert, not a hero, and he ducked his head all the way down and left with a muttered goodbye. Ryan drove himself home, sickened by the sunlight and suddenly enraged at the cop, and began to draft the letter he would write and write and rewrite and never send to the mother still waiting across the sea.
Your images are so cleverly evocative. I love your turn of phrase.