TrickyBuddha Studios

By Bob McCabe

30 May 2004
(2,659 words)

A week passed on this little barrier island, and most of us spent that time on the beach. We pointed at where the water had been and hypothesized as to where it had gone. Some of us blamed the wall of fog that surrounded our island, saying that it was holding the water back. Others pointed to the impending full moon that was just a few days away.

A lot of the older people had gathered their metal detectors and wandered out near the fog to look for treasures that had been lost to the sea for ages. The less brave of us warned against going out so far, warned that the water could come back at any time, and that if we were out there when it happened, we’d be killed by the returning sea.

***

Nobody, of course, actually went out past the wall of fog but, occasionally, people did come in through it – the curious who had made the short trek over dry beach from the mainland. But they were the most forceful about not moving on. They were adamant that they had to be here. They pointed at the seagulls, saying that even they were more content here, digging for scraps of food, than in the idea of evacuating this place. And none of them were willing to talk about how things looked from the outside – what was on the other side of the wall of fog.

***

I can remember where, for me, the divide between reality and… where we are now, first struck. I was laying down on the jetty, pondering the dark, blue velvet backdrop of the night, and the half-moon that painted out a bit of white light.

“Is the night sky supposed to look like this? How long has it been since I last looked at it?”

I sat up a little, resting my weight on my forearms. I felt the wind blow over previously untouched parts of my body, felt how wet my clothes had become from lying on moist rock. A thick layer of fog had dropped from the sky, slowly concealing the beach and the lights of nearby homes until there was nothing but a feeling of being lost at sea, with no signs of life in any direction.

I laid back down in the warmer puddles and closed my eyes again to imagine being alone in a lifeboat in the middle of nowhere, and with nothing to look at but the night sky. I focused on the sound of water rushing in, crashing against the rock, splashing ocean foam onto me, then sucking out from between the rock and roaring back out into the foggy shroud. The ocean song was luring me into sleep, but then it grew more quiet and more quiet and then… it was silent.

I opened my eyes and looked, but there was nothing to see. Just jetty, sand, fog, and the night sky with the half-moon. The ocean was gone.

***

I lost my notebooks once. Well, more than once – but this time, this notebook… it was special. And as soon as I lost it, I knew it was lost for good. I knew that it would never be found. It was just a feeling I had. And even with that realization, I couldn’t let go of the desire to find it or the feeling of what might happen if I did.

I don’t even remember what might have been scrawled onto those pages. Maybe a story or a poem, some snapshot of my state of mind at a time long past. Maybe the pages were blank. What would happen if I found it? If I turned enough pages, would I find something buried within them?

***

Time passed and we saw some further change. The days grew a bit more dim, the nights became a bit more lit; it seemed like there was a general grayness to everything. The fog, too, took on the same color until it looked like our barrier island may as well have been surrounded by nothing. It reached so high up that it blocked out the sun and the moon.

But the most startling change was the sound of water approaching in the distance. At first, it was feint – like trying to hear the sea by holding a shell to your ear. But it grew louder and louder still over the course of those days.

***

I dreamt one night that I found my notebook.. I opened the pages but I couldn’t see if there was anything written on them. I thought, maybe if I can look closely enough, and long enough, I’ll find something, so I concentrated and held the book.

As I attempted to decipher the pages, I heard a bit of noise like hopping.

I looked down and saw a little white bunny. It sat upright, at that moment, slapping one foot against the ground in a cartoon-like manner.

Thump-thump-thump.

We looked at each other for a long time.

***

And then it was there, in all its glory. It was wider than our island, so immense that you couldn’t see anything past it, and couldn’t tell how far out it went. It blew through the wall of fog on the one side of the island, and momentarily cleared a hole in it.

And at that moment, despite the giant wave surging in toward our island, we all stopped to look through the hole in the fog. There was horizon on the other side. It was a magical blue sky, glowing from within its own color and showering everything that looked upon it. The moon, now full, was also visible. In stark contrast to the majesty of the night, it was a sickly yellow, hanging ineffectually in the sky.

Then the fog crept back in, forming a curtain behind the wave and once again sealing our island in. But overhead, the sky remained clear, and the moon continued to hover limply against that brilliant blue night sky.

The moment stretched on, but we eventually turned our attention back to the looming wave, realizing it had stopped its advance.

The wave was more incredible than anything we could imagine. I had to lean my head all the way back, and nearly fell over in the process, to see to its top. Though the wave’s progress had stopped, its animation had not. Channels of water powered from the ground to its top, white ripples of foam coursing through the greenish-brown waters, then sank back within with cyclical energy. The wave rumbled with overwhelming power that caused the ground to vibrate slightly.

“Was this the end?”

It had rushed in as a giant tidal wave, threatening to overtake everything in sight. But now, that giant tower of sea simply stood there.

***

None of us did anything but whisper, at first.

“Why had it stopped?” We all wanted to know. But we were afraid to ask the wave directly, afraid that if we spoke too loudly or somehow displeased the wave, it might think twice of stopping, and simply annihilate our way of life.

***

One day a small-time reporter showed up. Like the others who had found their way in, he had no interest in leaving back through the wall of fog, no interest in talking about what was back on the other side. But he liked to ask questions about it to the others who were here before the fog had descended. He would go from house-to-house, camera man in tow, and deliver his correspondences – though no one was really sure if the feed was actually transmitting anywhere.

He would knock on the door, charm his way in, sit at the dining room table with the woman of the house while the camera man set himself up in a remote corner, and ask questions with a raised eyebrow and a thoughtful gaze.

“Ma’am,” he would start, “why are you still here? I – we, the rest of the world – simply want to understand: why is it that you stay?”

“Where would I go?”

“Anywhere,” he responded. His eyes grew wide. “Anywhere at all! Isn’t it possible that the wave is staying there to give everyone time to flee inward? Isn’t it foolish to not take advantage of that opportunity?”

“I wouldn’t be any safer there than here, so I might as well stay here.”

“Hogwash! The tidal wave! Fine, if you aren’t interested in saving yourself, then that can be accepted. But what about the children? What does this mean for the future?”

She shrugged, somewhat confused. “What about the children?”

***

Time passed for me and the bunny. How much time is hard to say, what with the oddness around us. But then there was rumbling, and a surge of water blasted through from the sand. The pressure was enough to lift the bunny several feet up, and hold it there. It was at eye level with me. It’s foot continued to tap, but now it was making a splash-splash-splash sound instead of a thump-thump-thump on the soft sand.

***

For weeks, the seashore community was blocked from its normal view of the sea, by the sea. The homes and their inhabitants had long since stopped staring into the sky at the looming tidal wave or the illness of the full, yellow moon. Eventually, even miracles lose their amazement.

Children wanted to play, once again, at the beach, and parents had less excuse to keep them away. There was no water to play in, but bits of the tidal wave continued to drip down from the overhanging wave, keeping the children cool and allowing them the same messy satisfaction of splashing in the water.

And when they grew tired of running in the muddy sand, they tried to understand their new world.

“When it first got here,” one kid offered, breaking the silence, “the wave, one kid put his hand in the water. He put his hand in the water and – ”

“Nuh-uh!”.

“He did, and the water, the current, it was so strong that it yanked him into the sky and maybe into outer space. He went so fast that his clothes came right off!”

“Really?” asked another child, fidgeting. “Where is he now? Did he get his clothes back?”

“I don’t know, but I heard he’s maybe in Florida. It took him that far away. Maybe he even died! It was really far.”

“You’re a liar,” one kid said, eyes watering up. “It couldn’t make you go to Florida! My Dad said so!”

“Oh yeah? Well, why don’t you put your hand in it and then you can see!”

***

Splash-splash-splash.

The bunny sat atop his plume of water, watching me.

“Life is all about rhythm,” he said, at long last, nose twitching. “It’s the rhythm of knowing when to and when not to.”

Splash-splash-splash.

“It’s waiting to merge with traffic, wondering if you should close your eyes and dash out there just go become a part of it, when you could simply wait and safely enter the road with no one around; it’s the end of a movie, and leaving a few minutes early to avoid traffic but missing the extra thirty seconds that played after the credits finished, or missing the peace that comes with digesting that film in the dark and with the proper music playing; it’s laying at the bottom of the ocean, pulled under by riptide, and holding your breath with calm because you know that the riptide will let go, and you’ll float safely to the surface – so long as you didn’t waste that air fighting that rhythm.”

As the bunny finished talking, the funnel of water stopped and lowered the bunny to the ground.

Thump-thump-thump.

***

“It’s all a jumble, that’s what I mean.” The boy pointed at the tidal wave. “And what about after? When it crashes, what will happen next?”

The rabbit dropped down on all fours, nose twitching once again, searching the sand, then stopped.

“It doesn’t have to be anything. And maybe if you try to make it something, you’re not really letting it be what it is. Sometimes it just has to be what it is. And you just have to let it happen.”

“But – but I don’t…”

Thump-thump-thump.

***

“Why didn’t anyone ever ask the reporter why he stayed?”

“Someone did, once. Someone who was here before the fog lowered. They said, you always attack us for staying, yet here you are doing the same very thing you attack us for. Isn’t that hypocritical?”

“Really! Someone said that to him? What did he say, in return?”

“He hemmed and hawed at first, saying that it was his job as a reporter to stay there, in order to get the story that everyone wanted. But she called him on it.”

“She did? Oh my! And then what?”

The man shrugged. “The reporter, he… he looked sad, from how I heard it told. His shoulders lowered and he paused, deep in thought for a long time. Then, he told his camera man that they were done, and they packed up and left. He never said anything to anyone after that. You can see him walking up and down the beach most days, just kind of lost in his own world. The camera man usually follows him, but I don’t know if he turns the thing on anymore or not.”

***

I was laying down on the beach, staring blankly at the tidal wave as it circulated. The bunny’s nose twitched and it leaned forward, toward the wave – but never moving its rear feet from its current position.

“It’s a recurring dream,” I said to the bunny. “I’m there on the beach, and then the wave is rushing in. At first, it doesn’t seem all too different because it’s so far away that it looks normal sized. But as it gets closer, it becomes impossible to ignore. It’s just too big. Everything is shaded because the wave is so tall that it blocks out the sun.”

Thump-thump-thump.

“And then what,” asks the bunny.

“And then it stops. It’s waiting. I know it is. But I don’t know what it is waiting for.”

“Did you ever think to ask?”

“I wouldn’t even know where to…”

The words drift off as I stand up. Thump-thump-thump, I hear in the background, but I ignore it. I walk toward the tidal wave, beneath the curl of the wave’s upper lip. Water splashes down from above, but I walk closer still.

The sound is deafening. The water moves so quickly my eyes cannot track it. And it’s cold. The spray coming off the wave is like ice. Without thinking, I cross my arms to warm myself, but keep walking.

There’s a glint coming from the sand just in front of the wave. And as I get closer still I realize it’s the metal ring from a notebook binder.

Thump-thump-thump.

“Rhythm,” I think to myself. “Life is all about rhythm.”

I reach down and wipe sand and salt water from the plastic cover. I trace my fingers over the cold metal coils of the notebook binder. Then I open the notebook and let my eyes dance over empty pages. Before I get to the last page, I close the notebook over and press it into the water. The notebook is gone in an instant, swept away by the swift upturning of the wave. I stare deep into the insides of the tidal wave, attempting to peer through the murk.

I hold my hand up to the wave, then put it down. I wait a moment, and then hold it up to the wave again. And in an instant, I, too, am swept into the murk.