Until he Brings Me

“It tried to take me when I was four.”

We had been asea for a few days. It wasn’t like he was silent for those days, but this was the most - I guess profound thing - he’d said in all that time. His tone was flat, matter-of-fact. It had no hint of anger or resentment. It was just a simple statement of the past. The ocean had tried to take him when he was four. This was well before I had ever met him. The taking, not the voyage. I had known him for years and then lost touch only to reunite on the ocean. It was just me and him on the boat. The two of us making the trip.

I met him when I was in middle school. He was a strange kid from the start. Maybe that was why I liked him. We both liked water. It was a strange habit or fascination for someone land-locked. We didn’t have anything larger than a lake for miles and even that was a mediocre body of water in any respect. Don’t get me wrong; It took folks every year. Mostly, it took those folks who didn’t respect or understand the water. Those folks who thought actions on land pertained to those on the blue or green or black, depending on depth and the secrets it kept. They didn’t, if you didn’t guess. The water was its own set of rules. Occasionally they overlapped, but often as not, if you treated it with disrespect the water took you without a second thought.

He had been awkward to say the least. It was immediately evident that he was going to be the target of those bullies everyone knew about. Even if he didn’t, it was apparent to most that sight lines were laid by the predators swimming among us. However, even then, even with not knowing him, I felt that we had something in common. A pulling, a current that drew me toward him. At first, I just drifted at the edges, not knowing why I was hanging around. Then it happened.

A big fish in our small pond found him outside the policed areas of the school. Timothy’s, insisted his victims use his full name, attack was tentative at first, a few verbal jabs to see what the others would do. When no one stopped him, it progressed. It advanced to a spectacle. I fear what it would have become if I hadn’t arrived. When I got there, it was a torrent of physical activity, pushes, shoves, punches. He received each one. And even though it seemed like it would increase the damage, he flowed with the hits, drifting from impact to impact. Until something intervened and broke the stream of hatred. Ignorant, hatred. I took a few blows to the back as I covered him, but I was on the swim team and most of them were just homebodies.

Later in life I learned to fight and discovered how to actually hit people. In this fight, none of us really knew, except maybe Timothy. His blows were the only ones that left welts. The cronies and hangers-on planted their fists in muscle mostly. Muscle that had been strengthened with hours and hours of laps in the local exercise pool. When the gale of fists slackened, I was firmly between him and Timothy. I didn’t really care about the rest of them, I just needed to stop Timothy’s onslaught. He staggered a few steps from my blow and came to a halt, wavering on his feet, swaying.

Timothy said something that, I’m sure, sounded important and cartoon villainous at the time, but is completely lost to me now. I barely remember his face. I do recall the look in his eyes. It was haunting. I think of it whenever I’m confronted with opposition in my life. If that look isn’t present, I believe our differences are something we can discuss, but when I see that look, I know, I feel this is a person beyond reason. This is a person who just wants you to hurt. Oddly enough, it has served me well over the years.

From that point on, he and I were pretty tight. We had lunch together. We hung out. Our parents met and became friends. Our families intermingled. Everyone was happy. His family had moved around a lot before then, but this seemed stable - a middle of the country, small town. Nothing happened, no one ever got in too much trouble, just like the TV presented.

Our lives progressed like that for years. People knew where I was, he was. They made their assumptions. We didn’t correct anyone. We talked and lived, had fun, and had our concerns about life. It all seemed so normal. The one oddity was that his parents forbade him to come to my swim meets. In fact, he wasn’t allowed near bodies of water in general. My folks wanted us all to spend the summer at that tepid lake, but it ended up just being me, my parents, and siblings. It was less than ideal for my teenage self. I consoled my temper with learning to sail. All in all, it was the best thing that could have happened. I fell in love with the water and the wind. It became an obsession. I got books from the small, lake town library, bought instruction manuals from the old man at the dock no one talked to. Hell, I talked to him for hours to learn what he could tell me about line and sail.

And when I got home, I continued my self-education and shared all I knew with him. He devoured everything. I’d learn it, and he’d learn it after me. And in that, we both learned faster and better than we could alone. We knew what to do in bad weather. We knew what hitch was best for what conditions. We might have been the ablest seamen in the most land-locked county in the world. But with his parent’s rules and the local geography, we had nowhere to practice. So, we constructed a boat in the woods. It took months. We made an outline of the hull. Built the masts from trees we felled. Okay, we dropped way more trees than we used. A few might have fallen a tad dangerously. If you ever wander back there and see trees hung up on other trees ready to fall when given a cross-eyed look, that was probably us.

But we made it. We even made enough of a taffrail to do lashings. And we practiced. We practiced until our fingers bled and our muscles ached. We dropped sail, we belayed, we did everything the manuals told us. With no water. With no wind. But we did it. We did it until his mother found us in the woods in our ship. Then he was gone. It was junior year. He was there; then he wasn’t.

I spent that summer on an internship at sea. I learned to do everything we’d practiced in the woods on the water. Some things were right. Some things were like nothing we’d ever imagined. I learned to read the weather and to plot courses. It was the most fabulous thing I’d ever done, but I returned to a world without him or the ocean in it. I continued on the swim team. I dodged Timothy through senior year. I went to prom. I did all the things, but it was in a lucid trance. I just did those things until I could get back to the water.

Out of high school, I signed on to a sailing ship using a written recommendation from the old man at the docks. I learned all I could from the crew. They were great. The next boat, not so much, and on and on until I finally had my own boat. She was beautiful. I sailed her with folks who wanted a more hands-on vacation than just a cruise. It paid the bills and afforded me a number of contacts in the wealthier circles of the world. Word of mouth spread, and I never was without a family or couple that wanted to learn to sail, at least a little.

Then he stood at my berth, duffel bag flung over one shoulder. As I pulled in, I recognized him immediately. A little grey in his hair. A little taller. A little wider. He stood looking out into the sea glassy-eyed. I said his name and he smiled, that toothy smile of the boy I’d known. We embraced and I asked how he’d found me. He shrugged and said it was the only ad that had ever grabbed his attention. He’d hired me for the entire summer. That was usually 3 or 4 families worth of travel. I asked where he wanted to go, he said “to the sea”. So I took him to the place that I felt the most at peace.

Over the days of travel he moved like he had in our woodland boat. I corrected a few things, and he adjusted. It was like he’d been born there. Some things I didn’t even have to correct, he said they just felt more right. One night, in my favorite place as we relaxed silently on deck, I asked if he wanted to move on to another place. He shook his head lazily and asked if we could stay for the night. I agreed and went below to start dinner. He helped. It was a glorious meal. Fish we’d caught, the biggest I’d ever seen on my cruises. Not too big that we’d waste anything, but just right. We were stuffed and drunk. And we talked about our lives, in my galley.

The night sky grew purple and pink and then finally black, speckled with white and blue points of light through the portholes. He told me he had gone into business and found a series of formulas that optimized the workflow of organizations for something or other. It sounded from his talk that he likened the work to how a river flows to the sea. I nodded knowingly, a skill I gathered from my first captain, and listened to him talk. Most folks just wanted to tell their story. I’d met plenty of those over my life. I learned to nod knowingly and frown at the right points.

He became silent. I glanced up from my drowsing complacency and looked at him. And he said that the water tried to take him when he was four. That was why his parents had moved so much when he was younger. I sat up and looked into his eyes. His sea green eyes. He told me about the call of the water. And how much his time with me meant to him. Our pretending about sailing was the closest he could ever bring himself to water, voluntarily. His parents had instilled in him a deep-seated fear of any body of water larger than a bathtub. He’d never ventured to the coast before meeting me again. He’d passed up job opportunities. He’d lost loves. He’d feared the coast so much that he’d settled into a life devoid of the seas or rivers.

I felt the boat settle a little and stood to check, but his smile and raised hand sat me back down. The calmness flowing from him eased my fleeting distress. My boat was sound, and I took good care of her. My hull had called out to me a number of times during my travels. This one reminded me more of a surprised eek rather than a terrified life-threatening scream; if it was my boat at all and not some errant wave or passing denizen of the deep dark. Just in case, I sang out to the beastie in my slightly tipsy state. In my line of work I’d found they all called back and I sung to them and they sung to me. Some of the more traditional families felt this was odd, but their children often sang along once I taught them the words. He knew the words and joined with me. The closeness of the cabin reverberating with our calls and sounds.

Our conversation continued long into the darkening night. I retrieved a bottle of wine I’d secreted away beneath a loose plank. I had saved it since my purchase of this vessel. My parents had bought it to christen the boat, but it was an old boat and didn’t need rechristening. So I saved the bottle. It was terribly expensive; I didn’t have the heart to tell my folks that it wasn’t really necessary to christen a boat with such a fine bottle of wine. I opened it and the release of the stopper brought forth honest two-sided conversation. Neither of us took more time than the other, we shared experience, neither of us waiting for our turn to talk. Instead, we added to each other’s story. And we shared each other. Our stories intertwined, his shrinking from the sea, mine becoming more entwined.

And the sky grew darker. The blackness seeping in through the windows. I brightened the cabin lights as we talked and laughed. He had lived a good life. A life of discovery and discipline. His parents had passed. He drew out the containers carrying their ashes from the duffle.

“Drunk driver,” he said solemnly. We drank to their memory. And drank again in silence for a little longer. The darkness outside grew to match the dampened mood of the room. I felt its cold smothering the light. I turned on a few more lamps to brighten not only the space but possibly our thoughts. I grabbed his shoulders and pronounced our amazing reunion and our life at sea, our dreams. I stated firmly that life is meant for those who search and find. And we were those people. He smiled a sad smile. It stopped me cold.

“I am a searcher,” he drew out in his long drawl, “You’ve brought me home.”

I sat hard onto the galley deck. The world suddenly confusing. The dark regaining its strength. He smiled that toothy smile and stood holding out his hand. I gave him mine. We walked from the cabin to the deck. It was darker than any night I’d ever seen. And then I saw it was not the blackness of night, but the wet, oppressive darkness of the deep. Water surrounded my boat in a perfect bubble, from my keel to the tip of my mast from bow to stern. The stars I’d seen from my portal were the errant denizens of the deep with their luminescence. Magnificent creatures seen only on small monitors, but never by unaided human eye. I turned to him mouth open. He smiled and stepped to the edge of the deck his parents’ ashes in each hand. A regal lifting of his chin and the world lit up. Ruins stretched as far as the eye could see - palaces, cathedrals, arches of stone and coral. All overgrown and covered in verdant sea life.

“This is my home. This has always been my home,” he sighed. A ripple sent from his voice alighted all the creatures of the deep. They glowed and grew, building life in this dead metropolis of the deep. I stood wordlessly on my ship’s deck. The only ship, that I knew, to see the floor of the ocean and this drowned city. He set the urns down, stepped close, and hugged me. I hugged him back. The embrace of people knowing they would not see each other for a long time.

“Know, if I see you, you will always be protected on my waters,” he said quietly, “You have returned me and my kind to our home.”

“But,” I offered weakly, “won’t you be alone?”

“I’ve always been alone without you,” he replied with a smile, “If you sail on me, I will never be alone again.”

And he retrieved his parents’ ashes and stepped off the deck into the dark, silent waters of the deep. My bubble ascended airward at a startling pace, I gripped the rails as ocean flora and fauna slipped past. Creatures stared blindly into the air bubble of my passing, bony tooth and razor fin, slashing angrily at my disturbance.

And then I was on the surface. Calm. Settled in my center of solace in the dark sea. The place I’d always thought was mine and mine alone. But now I knew. I knew it was ours. It was a holy place. It was where the last king of the sea lived. Alone, but for me and those like me. Those that lived on the surface and thought of him. Those that hoped the deep was benevolent to those who respected the water. Those that felt kinship with the waves and the things that lived therein.

Know that he is there, in his deep city, full of wonder. Know that he hears you and is open to your questions and your respect. Know that I know him. I love him. I miss him with all my heart and will travel his waters until he brings me to him.