I am walking along the beach with Brendan. We go at a pace somewhere between his and mine. I hold his hand but it is indeterminate, it has no warmth, no heft. In one way I am leading him and in another he is drifting me, like two currents of varying depths, or a rough interface of Arctic and Gulf streams.
I tell him about the ship I am about to board and the treasures I will find and bring back to him, old gold coins which he can store in the sand castles that line the shore far behind us. I tell him about emeralds from South America and jade from the Orient that I will pull from the sea right next to us and lay under his pillow for him to find when he wakes up.
I know I am desperately trying to buy his attention, hoping he will remain interested, curious, entranced enough by my tale and my promise if no longer by my life; sufficient, if not to keep his hand in mine when I wake, at least to return him to this shore the next night when I dream. Will settle for that. I will settle for anything.
I don’t look down at him, I can’t, the dream won’t allow me; it’s condition for finding him is that I have to trust that it is Brendan, my son, walking next to me silently, between the land and the sea. I imagine his face as that child’s pale sleepy visage I last saw five years ago in Jan’s Honda Civic dew-misted window -- no, not quite; i imagine the boy he would be now, longer and more angular, eager to lift from the breast to his father’s voice. Not that either.
I realize there is no imagining left either, that he has slipped too far into oblivion. I just know its there, like all of the land under the sea; it’s there between the grey indeterminate hour’s breeze and its surf, those soft bluegrey eyes taking in the same scene, translating the same dream into a mind passed over to the Other World.
Brendan had his mother’s eyes. Sometimes I looked at him and saw Jan staring back. Once when he sat on the beach building a sand castle he stared at me with the look in Jan’s eyes that night she held me so tightly in that beach hotel bed and begged me to come, to bring her the son he became ... Eyes staring right out of the sea’s vast antiquity, a uteral welcome home known in the fish depths of my DNA, 500 million years down my brainstem. Is he looking at me? Or ahead where we walk and will wake? Ashore at our lost home? Or out on the wild eternal waste of old tears?
I hate this. I must know. I flounder and thrash, swim madly up from the dream, break gasping at its surface in the raging black of a broken man’s night. What have I done, why must I know? This is far far worse, this brutal inchoate bloody raw now. Can I go back? Will he join me again on that beach tomorrow night when I dream?
I will surrender. I must. There is no other escape. I will pay the Devil for his safe passage home.
I lay there sweaty and wretched, cooling as the dream dries from my aging, too-long untouched skin, raw to the hard breeze coming through the rear window as it ratchets the eaves, grieving back down into the salt bitterness of the far surf crashing amens from a son’s sand-barrow grave.
