The Children Are Talking
NEW FRANCE ©ped
Seventeen
Thea, to her surprise, had not grown weary of Kent’s attachment; the village was an open book when they were roaming together, doing their seeking, searching, probing, resolving, sneering, and the hamlet took them at their face value—as lovers, which felt to Thea to be narrow-minded.
____They were hardly kissing cousins, she thought. They were spirits. Reflections of each other. Leave us be, she glared at the intrusive, older faces who casually peered out from behind front doors and shop windows. Sure, we hold hands. Sure, we stroke each other’s backs. We’re kindred and frightened and sensitive. Fuck you, patrician Presbyterian proprietors—we’re observers of your calamity of white empire. We can stroke each other when we’re feeling tender…you’ve left us no lesson but to love our last struggles and to trust ourselves. Hell, you would’ve done more for our world if you’d just touched each other when you were struggling and in need. Instead, you kept building smokestacks and slaughterhouses for cash and bankbooks, you bent old depraved potato sacks. Kent and I are young and weary, and you made us so, and we’re sucking up the last works of art into our senses. WE are the ones who’ll chase away your pitiless sentimentality and your memorial markers. WE are here to love and ceremonially pass through your shit. WE are looking at the colors and shapes of things, taking in the scents and textures of life outside of humankind, drinking in the last of the untouched drinking water and walking over places unscarred by your avarices. Leave us be, leave our love to ourselves, and don’t chase us down with your pedantic lessons. WE are observers, not participants.
____Kent reached for Thea’s arm and pointed across the lake. “There,” he said. “That white shed next to the cedar-thatched teepee thingy. That’s where my folks conscripted me into a windsurfing camp when I was sixteen. They thought I’d square with the cool kids if I knew how to tack and jibe on top of an eight-foot plank of polyurethane. ‘Skateboarding was for the urchins,’ they’d tell me. Windsurfing could keep me in a lane next to the sailing set and the skiers. I’d be flirting with scholarships and regattas, I’d be—”
____“You’d be fucking some girl named Elizabeth,” said Thea, “and wearing a polo shirt and a puka shell necklace. Probably wearing one of those sailboater’s bracelets to boot.”
____“Well, it all turned tits up when I headed out for the first time. Sure, heading downwind and out was no problem, but the tacking. Jesus, I spent three hours on dead chop out there, pulling the sail out of the water, watching gallons and gallons just slowly sheeting off the canvas and nylon. I must’ve pulled on that uphaul for half a day. It wrenched and tore open my lower back muscles and turned me lame for the whole summer.”
____“So, you were left without either board that summer. Poor baby. Did you learn how to read, instead?”
____“Skin mags. I also read the warning labels on glue and Everclear. I think the whole stupid season of burning skin and lame back, that whole summer, robbed me of half of my brain cells.”
____“And you blame your parents’ ambition by proxy for your plummet. You were ‘never the same’ after their attempt to reclassify you. I’m sure that—had you stayed on your street board that summer—none of your personal ills would’ve paid you a visit, hmm?”
____Kent smiled away the acid on Thea’s tongue. “Nope. By that fall I fell in love with Melissa, and we were donating to each other’s pain almost daily.”
____“Are you telling me, honestly, that your brief time with her before she broke herself to death was time wisely spent? I mean, you could’ve—instead—taken AP business classes, bore down, cracked into STATE, nabbed a degree, and made it into a seamy success track on your own steam. And THEN,” she paused to sweep a hand in front of the panorama of the lake, “then, y’would’ve pupa-chrysalized into a village god. You would’ve owned this place without the pain of attachment and loss. You would’ve earned your parents’ inheritances and your barbarian’s peace of mind. What went wrong? Why’d you choose to love a moping girl instead?”
____Kent trusted Thea. “I thought I could heal her with my penis.”
____“Is that so? That, some war bonds, a cup o’ joe and a smile?”
____Kent frowned. “No. I mean, you know. You would’ve done the same with her. You would’ve loved her off the ground. She was living with the pain of true perception. She saw the world as a curtain call. A requiem. An echo. She knew we were all far too late for the party, and she wasn’t about to become enslaved like the rest of us. She took in the remnant beauty, sighed, and died. Very naturally, you could argue.”
____“Enslaved?” Thea wrestled. “Wh—? Oh, you mean, right.” She peered over the wide and teasing plane of gray-green water. “Each breath is a negation. Each breath is a denial of a complete and overwhelming suffering. You could say we’re all chickenshit for breathing, now, huh?”
____“But we’re meeting and greeting, pretty girl,” sighed Kent, smiling at Thea’s fair forehead, her eyes a place too lovely to dwell. “We’re forging something among strangers-come-friends. We’re cooking up happy from scratch.”
____“Isn’t it funny,” mused Thea, still scanning the light-play off the freshwater, “that the only way we can cope today is by stealing the vernacular of the ancients? We’re talking like doughboys in the war. Fuckin’ usin’ platitudes an’ shit…I guess simple plays the paean for our time. I guess simple is the same as a drug…”
____“All of this was a drug. The boathouses, the piers, the picnic points, the music halls, the soccer fields…this was the antidote to the gears of exploitation. With all of this around us, who’d question volunteer overseas invasions, farm dissolution, deforestation, radioactive waste, meat agriculture, rampant retail, opium rain, race wars, surveillance, neoliberal tantra, autonomic commercial consumerism, trans-fats, bullets and bombs?”
____“I questioned these things,” she said.
____“And how did your family answer you?”
____“Very well. Conscientiously so. They were good people. Just dead, now.”
____“To mourn in one breath.” Kent squeezed Thea’s shoulder. “Time is so short, now, that memory is hardly spoken. One breath.”
A westerly carved the lake into chop. The two watched as the mallards fidgeted away from the open water and toward a cove of reeds.
*
“I remember this place,” said Thea as they walked through a botanical lane between the fly-in seafood cantina and the unnecessary dry launch. “There’s a seesaw on a pile of cedar chips behind the grove of ash.”
____The seesaw was long-missing; only the cast-iron brace peered up from the earth, offering a makeshift bench of rust and ruin. The two sat atop it, staring now at the rippling, silvering branches around them. The cedar chips were all but disappeared, replaced by river rock and dandelion crowns. The sky gathered its silver as well, turning the firmament to a sterling lemon. The wind relented as soon as it had arrived, and a pall of stagnant air settled into their senses. The scent of paraffin and commercial exhaust blew threw the ash.
____“My dad and I teetered here years ago during a picnic visit,” Thea gently laughed. “He was caught up in the town crier shit about air quality. He told me about the latest menace of microplastics. He said they were discovering hundreds of parts per liter in the air reaching all the way into the Arctic. He told me I might be wearing a mask when I got older—he said people would soon experience cancers and failing lungs from it. I laughed. He laughed. We soon started pealing out about it. It was so goddamned absurd we had no other choice. We laughed because we knew what it meant. Soon, dust-bunnies would suffocate us in our sleep; soon, the Tooth Fairy would assault our neighbors for their gold fillings; soon, when we would reel our way back into living, the plastic would pour it on and remind us that IT was not a part of the fairy tale of sweet delay, that IT was real and climbing and swarming and beading down our throats—we’d know, sooner than later, that the lunacy of plastic death was oh, so completely real.”
____“Add it to the laundry list,” said Kent. “Put it right next to pesticides and radioactive wastewater. Christ, we should smoke more, die the ol’ Surgeon General’s Warning way. It would at least be in keeping with older traditions…”
____“But it’s Dad’s laughter, then. I hold onto it, now. It was one of the only times when I understood his sorrow, his contrition, his guilt for having given me life in the middle of this shitstorm. I could see the mania in his eyes, I could practically imagine his rage with his own parents for having given him life, I could see the evil in the chain of tradition, integrity, honor, obligation, grace, continuance…and only then, on this goddamned teeter-totter, did I have a moment to share in his disgust with equal measure. We were two souls crying out against the massacre together, crying with equal dismay, hope, anger and courage. We bonded over this maze of pointlessness as one being. It was a feeling of pure love.”
____“There’s a memento you didn’t expect.”
____“In this time, it’s practically my only keepsake. I can’t imagine how many millions of families have made curios out of the same moments of madness. Moments that stopped just shy of the aftermath. It should have been your photo album, Kent, but you were too young. You could’ve collected an album of mad faces, manic faces, delirious ones, demented ones. I suppose you could prowl the countryside today and take pics of angry and wrathful survivalists, pics of angry dogs and their cold, dead-eyed masters, but that’s just throwing back to ancient rages. No, Kent, the moment is gone for that survey of heightened mad-eyes. The glimmer, the spark, the fire, these qualities are snuffed out today.”
____Kent rubbed a hand downward along his face. “You once mentioned, when I first met you, that I should dabble with charcoal sketches,” he said. “I think charcoal is just about right.”
____“You’re giving up on your camera?”
____ “No,” said Kent. “My camera is giving up on everything.”
____“Charcoal, huh?”
____“Just like the caves of Old France.”
*
Walking back to their adopted home, Sam’s Lair, the two noticed the doctor as she made her way to the greenhouse holding a sack of manure. Her figure moved numbly—devoid of anima—and her face was tracked with signs of near-constant weeping.
____“Marc’s been gone for weeks,” said Thea. “Why is she still refusing to search for him? Why aren’t Lyle and Franklin doing anything?”
____“You know why, Thea.”
____“No, I don’t know why. I mean, just because he didn’t make it home doesn’t mean he was cannibalized by pirates, or jacked for his truck. And, hell, Franklin must be a vegetable of a beat cop if he can’t find the stones to do a sweep outside of his jurisdiction and smell around. I know there’s a reason Marc’s unable to contact us. I can feel him. I know he’s not dead. Can’t you feel him nearby? Can’t you?”
____Kent searched the insistent radiance in his friend’s eyes. He wondered why they all—so obediently—believed Marc to be dead; he wondered whether he was losing his grip on grief, or if the tribe on his block had just fallen into method dismay, and he almost lost his toes as he awakened to Thea’s conviction that the man was near, and that he was not unwell. “How—?”
“I can feel him,” she said, “and the feeling is not under my feet. It’s…it’s in the air.”