by Rocco Lo Bosco
“Trembling, they were saying to each other, ‘Doesn’t this hurt, doesn’t this hurt?” Hayashi Kyoko (victim of atomic bombing of Nagasaki)
Once upon a time the phone rang and Edward, cursing, put down his hammer on the railing and gruffly brushed past his small daughter to answer the call. “Christ, every time I get on a roll in that damn shed, the phone rings. Where the hell’s your mother?”
“Hey Dad,” Trish said, “Don’t push, okay?”
A thin metallic voice spoke to Edward in measured tones. “Good morning, this is Conway Industries. We have fully satisfied thousands of investors over the last five years, and our success can be part of your future. We at Conway pride ourselves on intelligence, integrity and technology. If you are interested in a low risk, high yield opportunity, please leave your name and phone number after the tone and an operator will be back to you in a short time.”
Edward waited for the beep and said softly, “This is Edward Balsa, please have a real human being call me back as soon as possible. I very much want to tell one of your representatives where to jam it and how hard.”
“Sarah!” he roared, facing the stairs leading up to the second floor, “That does it! No more work on the shed. Let’s go to the beach!”
“Pick up the phone,” she yelled back down.
Picking up the receiver, he heard his wife’s voice against the dial tone. “Hi! I want to give Trish her gifts today,” she said.
“Your worse than she is,” he answered irritably.
“Come on, Eddie. It’s only two days ’til her birthday and I’m working Sunday.”
“Okay, okay, let’s give them to her after we come back from the beach,” he said, hanging up before she could answer.
Trish had come to stand next to her father. She tugged at his pants pocket. “Hey, are we going to the beach right now?”
“Yeah, babe, go get your pail and shovel.”
“Dad, is tomorrow still my birthday?”
“No, Trish, the next day is your birthday. Now go get your stuff.”
“Am I going to get sneakers and a surprise?”
“Yes. Now go!”
“Alright!” she yipped, running up the stairs as her mother danced down.
“The beach?” asked Sarah. “Did you say the beach?”
“Yeah, what the hell. Why not. I know I stayed home today to finish the shed, but this computer just called me and suggested we all go to the beach. Do you agree?”
“Hell yes, Eddie, that’s a great idea. And we’ll have a barbecue for supper.”
“Yeah, a Friday holiday.”
She walked up to him, wrapped her arms around his neck, pressed her nose against his. “Long live computers if this is the result of your conversation with one.” Releasing him, she walked to the kitchen door that joined with the small shed he had been renovating. He’d nearly completed the paneling, now only having to wall off the space below the storage platform which was wedged between the wall and the stairs leading into the basement. The damp darkness beneath the platform, closed in completely on three sides by cinderblock and partially on the fourth side by the steps, seemed more conspicuous in the bright new room.
“Did you thermal-seal under the platform?” she asked, craning her head to answer her own question.
“Yes, boss. I crawled right into that smelly cave and moisture-proofed it. Whether the seal will hold ….” He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “That space is the lowest point of the house, a few inches lower than the basement actually.”
“Will we still have a moldy smell in the shed when it rains?”
“I don’t know, but closing off the space will cut it down, I think.”
He disliked that odor she had referred to and nearly began to tell her that it recalled a time when, as a kid living with his parents in Corona, he’d go into the boiler room to look at the gruesome pictures in his father’s war books. A smell lifted off those two books with the gold block lettering printed across the serious blue covers – THE SECOND WORLD WAR – an odor of age and dampness and mold, an odor that somehow matched the pictures of death. The books, he’d thought, smelled as they should, and that remembered odor seemed similar to the one beneath the storage platform: dampness, mold, decay.
She’d turned to see his distant gaze. “Something wrong?” she asked.
“No, no, nothing at all.”
“You’re not annoyed that I want to give her the presents before her birthday, are you? Because if you are, that’s just tough.”
“Ah, you’re a mush,” he said with mock disgust.
“Come up to change,” she said, grabbing his wrist and pulling him in tow, “I want to show you what I got her.”
While Trish changed into her bathing suit and gathered together her pails and shovels, Sarah showed her husband the red and white sneakers speckled with blue stars and the mobile she’s bought for the kid’s birthday. The mobile reminded Edward of his wife; graceful and breezy, it balanced a suspension of wooden birds painted in iridescent colors: blue, red, yellow, green. “Look, the wings even move up and down on some,” Sarah laughed, bouncing the mobile slightly to show him.
He took the mobile and raised it. “Beautiful. She’ll love it.”
Sarah grew more animated. “You wouldn’t believe how much I paid for it. Only fifteen dollars at the new shop they opened at Burnwood Avenue. And the sneakers were ten at Shoe City, and they’re perfect because it’s Flag Day next week and all the kids are supposed to dress in the colors of the flag.”
“How quaint,” he said, his face expressing the taste of lemon.
She laughed. “Yeah. Who’d ever guess that after marching on Washington in the sixties, we’d be dressing our kid for flag day in the eighties? We used to hide from our parents when we smoked pot; now we hide from our kid. How quickly it all passes.”
They were both lying across the bed and kissing when Trish barged into their room. “Hey, guys, I thought we were going to the beach!” she cried, banging her pails against the door for emphasis. “You’re not even dressed yet!” The mixture of impatience and jealousy scrambling her features caused her parents to burst out laughing. This infuriated her and she stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Her parents were now laughing so hard they didn’t even hear her fling the plastic pails down the stairs.
The ocean pulled, gathered, returned. The breakers pounded in their nerves, and the brilliant specks of ungovernable light flying off the water dazzled their eyes. They turned left when they hit the shoreline, walking through several warm, small tidal pools where loads of kids played with bright plastic pails and shovels. Blowing in steadily from the ocean, the wind whipped a mist off the breakers and tore the gleeful shouting of the kids. Trish wanted to stop and play in one of the pools. “Okay, but only for a little while. I want to go to the bay today,” Sarah said.
Trish made mud pies, loudly complaining to her parents when they collapsed. Soon she left her spot and wandered off to play with another child. At the edge of the tidal pool Edward and Sarah sat bathing their feet and watching Trish, who had lost track of them, struggling with her constructions of mud; they delighted in her small shoulders, her sensitive squirrel-like movements, the wind lifting her hair.
Soon the child Trish had been playing with jumped up and scooted away. Trish rose and looked around for her parents, and, when she realized she’d lost them, began to wail. Her parents, watching her, exchanged an anxious glance. “Let her try to find us,” Sarah said. “Just for a minute.”
“I can’t,” he said, quickly getting to his feet. “She’s about to panic.”
As he ran up behind to surprise her, she spun around, her eyes full of fear, the shovel still in her hand. She dropped it as he picked her up and screamed at him, “Where were you? Where were you? You were lost and I was scared!”
He held her head tightly in the cup between his chin and shoulder and kissed her face and whispered laughingly in her ear, “Silly kid, you were the one lost, not us.”
The three continued to walk, following a swerving inlet that led to a womb shaped bay, raised, it seemed, off the beach. Here the water shone a heavy blue, a liquid jewel that narrowed as it met the sea. Roughed by the wind, the wet hard sand here felt like the hide of some great beast under their feet, and because it was a walk from the main beach, there were few people around. Off to the left in the distance a blue bridge arched gracefully over an expanse of water, like a mirage penciled in against the deep blue sky. To the right of the bridge a more substantial looking red brick lighthouse gleamed in an excess of light.
He dove into the deep clean water, and when he surfaced he was shivering. “Come in, guys, it’s beautiful.” Sarah and Trish stood at the water’s edge, the girl undecided and the woman opposed.
“Come on, Sarah, it’s really nice in here. We’ll hug. Come on!”
She tested it with her toe. “It’s too cold.”
“Please come in, just for a little while. Please.”
“Maybe later. Let’s go up to the dunes for awhile.”
He emerged from the icy bay, shivering, anxious for the sun and wind to dry off the clinging droplets of water. They climbed a high dune about fifty yards from the bay and ducked down a bit below the top–a shelter from the wind cutting in from the sea. A few weeks ago Trish had found a dead gull in this area, it’s body picked clean, just some dried feathers and bones, defunct withered wings, a skull with tiny eye sockets.
“How did it die?” she’d asked, “Did it get burned?”
“Maybe it broke a wing and fell down,” Sarah said.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“When?”
“A long time ago, maybe,” Edward said. “Then other birds ate it probably.”
“Why?”
“Because they were hungry.”
“Will this be how I look when I’m dead?” And she’d gone on. “Did another bird maybe kill it? Was it a boy bird or a girl bird? Was it a kid bird or a mother or father bird? Does its family miss it? Is it flying in a different sky now?” Impotent against the wind of her questions, her parents had fended them as best they could.
“Can we bury it now? Shouldn’t it go in a hole like grandpa did?” They buried the seagull, using her plastic shovel to dig the grave. “Can we dig it up now?” she had asked, after they’d buried it.
“Yes,” said her father at the same time her mother said no. The parents exchanged glances and Sarah shrugged. They unburied the seagull.
“What’s this?” (“The skull Trish. That’s where the brain goes.”) What’s this?” (“The breast, the rib cage cage, Trish. That’s were the heart was.”) Where’s the heart right now?” (“I don’t know, Trish.”) “Can I have a feather?” (“I guess so, Trish. Yeah, why not. You can have a feather.”) “Can we bury it again, this time deeper?” (“Okay, but we’re not digging it up again. What’s buried should stay buried.”)
They buried it again.
“Can we dig it up one more time?”
“NO, Trish absolutely not!” said Sarah, glaring at them both.
Today the child found two ruined mollusks near the dune. She brought the shells back and put them to her ear. “Hey, I can hear the ocean. How come?”
Sarah told her that tiny animals once Iived in those shells. “What happened to them?” Trish asked.
“They had a fire drill,” Edward said, “And forgot to come back.” “You’re kidding,” she said and slapped his shoulder.
“They’re just gone, hon,” Sarah said, deciding to avoid another barrage of death questions from her precocious five-year-old.
“Oh, I know what happened, Ma. The water came and they had to find other places to live, and the shells make the ocean sound because the water came in them.”
“How’d you figure that out?” asked Edward.
Trish looked at him inquisitively. “If I take the shells home will they forget how to make the sound?”
“No, Trish, they’ll always remember. Come on, let’s go down and build a sand castle,” Edward said.
After the castle, a simple square shape with a round dome in the middle, was completed, he entered the water again, calling Sarah and Trish to join him. “Not today, Eddie,” Sarah moaned, walking down from the dune. “It’s too cold. Let’s go back now.”
“Today, today!” he said, leaving the water to stalk them. “Now or never,” he said, laughing.
Laughing, Sarah backed up quickly and Trish giggled, clinging to her mother’s leg.
“Take it easy, I’m not going to dunk you,” he said, taking his wife’s hand and leading her gently toward the water. Trish hung on cautiously to the seat of her mother’s bathing suit, stretching it out behind her. “Look, you’ve got goosebumps,” Sarah said, laughing, to Edward. ‘Tm not going in!” But they glided into the water, yelling and laughing, glided inch by inch until Sarah was up to her neck and Edward up to his chest and Trish held fast between them. “See it’s not bad,” he said. Sarah said, “It’s cold but it feels nice.” Turning in slow circles, the three of them hugged in the water. “It’s like a dream,” Trish said.
After they arrived home and showered together, Trish was put up for a nap and her parents retired to bed for an hour of lovemaking before dropping to sleep themselves. Trish woke them later, bleating for her supper. It was near six, with plenty of light still in the fine summer sky, and so they followed through on their notion to barbecue and eat outside. Sarah prepared the meat on the kitchen counter while Edward readied the grill. Trish swung back and forth on a tire attached to a tree limb by a long rope. She called to her father, “Hey, Dad look at me swing.”
“Yeah, I see. Be careful or you’ll hit the fence.”
While cooking the meat, he surveyed the backyard: the scrubby lawn which still looked beautiful–emerald colored and somehow ephemeral, just because the afternoon sunlight carpeted it so perfectly; the crooked little fence, the large imposing trees in the back, his child swinging on the old tire. He stood on tiptoe and peered into the kitchen window to see Sarah reaching on tiptoe into the cabinet for paper plates. All this seemed so ordinary and so perfect at the same time; this scene a kind of fulcrum on which his life rested for a moment in serene and fulfilling balance.
Sarah brought out the plates and the silverware when the cooking was completed. “Oh, get the radio,” she called to Trish, who was riding the long arc of the tire. “We’ll listen to some nice music while we eat.”
“Do I have to, Ma?” Trish complained. “I’m too hungry.”
“If you’re so hungry, then stop playing Tarzan and come to the table. But not before you get the radio.”
Trish jumped off the tire and stormed towards the redwood table where both her parents already sat, dishing out food. “But I don’t want to listen to the radio while I eat!”
Her parents exchanged a glance, then Edward said, “Trish, did you hear what your mother said? Get the damn radio this minute!”
They sat and ate, surrounded by the smell of the cooking and the low soft music of the radio, and they felt the day diminish around them. The food was delicious: steak, com on the cob, baked potato, hot Italian bread. Later, the last crescent of sun would grace the horizon and the magnificent sky, darkening, would fill with the moon’s silver toys.
Sarah was the first one who cocked her ear to the radio and he quickly followed. In the frozen moments that followed, Trish looked from one parent’s face to the other, looking for clues, but seeing only hardening masks of fear. “D-Dad, Ma, what’s the matter?”
When her parents eyes met, Trish started to cry. Something very bad was happening, she’d never seen her parents look so afraid, and whatever it was, she just wanted it to go away. “Shut the radio off, Mom!” she said. “Shut it off, shut it off!”
“Twenty-five minutes?” Sarah said to Edward. “Twenty-five minutes? They’re kidding right? This is a joke, right?” She rose to her feet and it seemed as if she were on strings and someone was bouncing her semi-limp body up and down. Her eyes were half shut. “Uh-uh-uh” she moaned, “Uh-uh.”
Trish jumped off the bench and clutched her mother’s legs, called her mother’s name, Sarah, and begged her to stop “acting scary .”
Edward looked mad; he looked as if there were a fire burning up every cell in his body and his face radiated the heat. Sarah continued her strange and frightening dance, oblivious to Trish’s pleas. The child ran to her father who clutched her reflexively in his arms, his eyes staring ahead wildly and blindly.
Her father’s body felt rigid and cold to Trish and this increased her fear. “Daddy, what’s the matter! What’s going to happen?”
He stood up quickly still holding Trish and pleaded, “Please stop that Sarah. Please.”
She looked at him white faced, her hands tangled together in a knot on her chest. “What’ll we do now, Eddie?”
“We go into the street, that’s what we do,” he said more to himself that to her. “We go into the field behind the school. Right in the open field.”
She gaped at him wide-eyed, nodding her head slightly as if to clear it for comprehension. “What? What are you saying?”
He rocked his daughter violently and thrust his clenched face into his wife’s. “We go sit right in the middle of the goddammed open field behind the school two blocks down. Get it? That way there’s no chance.”
“No chance…” she repeated, dazed and still nodding her head.
“No chance, Sarah. None, zip, zero! We’re only a few miles from a target. No suffering in the field. We go to the field. Do you understand?”
To his daughter he murmured as he rocked her, “Easy baby, easy. We’re right here, We’re right here with you.”
Sarah’s eyes cleared and her mouth snapped shut. “No!” she said, suddenly understanding. “No, we don’t go to the field. I want us to try to… to…”
“To what, Sarah? To what?” he asked, grinning in a mixture of fear and irony. “To what? To try to… survive ? Is that what you’re thinking? That we might survive?” He hoisted his daughter higher on his chest and turned away. “Let’s go into the field.”
“It’s some kind of hoax,” she said, her eyes suddenly widening with hope. “Hey, Eddie, maybe it’s a test or something.” She ran to the radio and spun the tuner through the broadcast frequencies, encountering the same voice, the same message that shredded her brief prayer. She shut her eyes tightly and clutched the edge of the table to steady herself.
“We go to the field, Sarah,” he repeated.
“NO, NO, NO, I won’t, give her back to me!” She clawed at his arm and shoulder savagely, trying to spin him around so she could get to Trish who began crying loudly again. He jerked his shoulder and she stumbled backwards, hitting the redwood bench with the backs of her knees which buckled so that she ended up seated on the bench. For a moment everything was silent except for Trish’s crying and the drone of the radio saying the same thing over and over. In a voice tightly controlled against hysteria he said, “Sarah, we have twenty minutes, twenty minutes, do you understand? The best place to be is in an open space where…everything will be… instantaneous. Let’s not take the chance of prolonging our suffering.”
Her voice was suddenly calm. “I won’t go into the field and you won’t take Trish… And you won’t go into the field either Eddie, will you? You won’t go into the field without us… I know you won’t.” And at last the tears ran freely down the side of her face.
“Where then?” he demanded in exasperation. “Where do we go?”
“In our basement. We lie down in the basement. The lowest point. Under the storage platform.” She rose from the bench, grasped his hand firmly and led him a few feet toward the shed. “That’s right, Eddie.”
He gave Trish over to Sarah who sat back down on the bench. Now that her parent’s seemed calmer Trish looked at them both. Maybe the bad thing she sensed was passing. “Ma, are we going into the basement?”
“For a little while,” Sarah said. “Just for a little while, honey.”
“And then will we come back outside?”
The question hung in the air for a moment. He was peering through the Plexiglass window of the shed door, staring hard at the opening beneath the storage platform. The thought that now he wouldn’t have to finish the paneling passed wildly through his mind. Five miles from an epicenter. They didn’t stand a chance, he thought. Incineration. The thought triggered a spasm of violent trembling and he felt a warm trickle of urine run down his leg and his own tears came silently. He turned toward his wife and daughter. Trish repeated, “And then after we go into the basement, will we come back out again?”
It’d be over in a few minutes, he thought. “Yeah, honey. Then we’ll come back out maybe. It’ll be okay. Don’t worry, you just stay between Mom and Dad.”
Trish broke into fresh sobs. “Then why are you and Mommy crying?”
“Because,” Sarah soothed, we had a fight, but it’s better now. Don’t worry, baby, it’s better now.”
“And why we gotta go down into the basement?” Trish asked, craning her neck to see her mother’s face. Sarah looked at Edward who said, “It’s a fire drill, Trish. It’s a special fire drill the radio told us about.”
“ls there a real fire?” Trish asked, a plea in her voice.
His face stiffly composed, he squatted down before his daughter and kissed her nose, a gesture both of conciliation and authority. “You ask lots of questions.”
He looked at Sarah and said quietly, “Go upstairs and get a blanket.
It’s damp in that hole.”
“Should we call anyone? My family? Your family?” she asked, her voice breaking. “No, I guess not,” she answered herself in a small voice, “Who would we call and what would we say?”
He nodded slowly, unable to meet her eyes. “The lines are probably all
jammed up anyway,” he answered.
His wife handed him the child and was gone. The words on the radio were fast and strange and impersonal; the voice in the radio sounded to Trish like it was coming from a make-believe man. There came funny sounds from the street too: some people shouting in frightened voices; a man yelling for everyone to “get in the car, get in the car, right now;” the distant crying of a woman. She hung on to her father’s neck and waited for her mother to come downstairs with the blanket. Her father seemed to hover over the radio a minute, intent on listening. then he snapped it off and took her into the shed.
Sarah came down with a couple of blankets, a flashlight and a bag containing some food and bottled water. The three of them squeezed through the opening in the paneling. The late afternoon light streaming in through the plexi-glass window dimly lit the space and at first Sarah did not turn on the flashlight. They sat huddled on a blanket, Trish squarely between her parents, sharing their laps. Occasionally there’d be the exchange of a tight embrace or a kiss, and in the near darkness Edward’s and Sarah’s tears flowed more freely now, and Sarah’s teeth began to chatter, though she fought to control it.
“Open the flashlight, Mom.” “Not yet Trish.”
“It smells in here. I don’t like it.”
“It’s not too bad Trish.”
“When are we going to go out again?”
“Soon honey, soon.”
“Mom, why is your mouth making that noise?”
“I’m cold.”
“But its not cold in here.”
“Mommy’s cold, honey.”
Sarah opened the flashlight and unravelled another blanket she’d brought down. “Look honey, look what we got for you.” She held up the bird mobile and it dangled and tinkled in the beam of the flashlight.
“Oh, Jesus,” Edward moaned softly, looking at the mobile, his daughter’s suddenly excited face, his wife’s quivering expression. Then he looked away into the damp and moldy smelling darkness. “Oh God.”
“For my birthday?”
“No this is a special surprise,” Sarah said, her voice trembling.
“I like it, Mom. It’s beautiful. Thank you.” She kissed her mother and reached to kiss her father. arah held the flashlight on her lap, the beam cutting upward, illuminating the three faces in the thickening darkness. “Dad, you’re still crying.” It was more a question than a statement.
He wiped the back of his wrist across his eyes roughly. “I’ll be fine. Hey, that’s a real pretty gift we got you,” he said, his voice going husky. “YOU like it?”
“It’s beautiful. Can I hang it in my room?”
They sat waiting beneath the platform. Edward and Sarah huddled together tightly, exchanging squeezes and kisses and glances and whispers and “I love yous,” and crying quietly and trembling and praying. And they held their daughter and brought her against them, kissing the side of her face, the back of her sweet smelling head and she smiled and received their affection nonchalantly, tugging forward and jangling her pretty blue mobile directly in the beam of the flashlight so she could see the birds move and sway and reflect sharp needles of light.
Trish fingered the largest bird, the blue one, suspended by three invisible strings. “Hey,” she said, “This is really beautiful.”
Author’s Note:
I protest the threat of our mutual annihilation by the bomb. Although we must repress daily, the visceral awareness of that threat in order to function with a semblance of sanity, most of us know on deeper levels that it is a sad, sad era we live in, a heartless era in which survival plays against a background of political madness and moral exhaustion. In offering this story, I am offering the creative extension of an anxiety attack I had one fine June afternoon while cooking outside for my family. And truly when I consider the bomb and the implication of the bomb, past and future, I am considering the death of millions and millions of people and perhaps even the eradication of human possibility.
The thought of going up in a nuclear explosion like a gossamer in a blast furnace or worse, being burned and/or rotting by degrees with radiation poisoning, is at once, unbelievable, paralyzing and terrifying. The first two responses may allow many of us to go on seemingly numb while the missiles accumulate and the time for their use draws near. In the power of the last response, terror, we may finally take to the streets (or at the very least to the blank page) in protest. Surely it’s a worthy cause. If the story contributes an iota to the outcry against what’s being done to us by the machine that’s overtaken humanity, I’m glad. Perhaps outrage has its critical mass too, once reached engendering a chain reaction of protest and sacrifice, an explosion of humanity who will not stand like cattle beneath the nuclear hammer.
Beyond this, the story may be my own act of personal magic. Perhaps I’ve offered the three fictional characters to Moloch in the hope that the real people they represent will be allowed to live out their natural lives.