The Sea
Edgewater was so alive at this time of night, but so peaceful that Alexis Thibodaux was never afraid. The little restaurants were all open and the air was balmy with the late summer breeze from the lake. People were walking up and down Thorndale, away from the business of the day onto the business of the night, and behind curtains the square lights of apartments were coming on. Past them was the gentle rumble of the El, this one going north, the next going south, and a car trawled by playing some nameless song. He was high and happy, and a message went off on his phone, but he wasn’t inclined to answer it. Darius’s pinged a moment later, and he didn’t seem to want to answer it either.
“I’m of a mind to stay in,” he said.
“I didn’t know you were of a mind to go out.”
“I’m always of a mind to go out,” Darius said. “A little. But tonight I think I want to watch a movie and go to sleep.”
They passed the pizza spot and looked at each other.
“We already ate,” Alexis reminded Darius.
“Yes, true. And neither of us is thin or on a diet, so I don’t know why you said it like that. Plus, we’re going to be hungry again, and by the time we’re hungry, Pete’s will be closed. Everything will be closed.”
“For a city this big, it’s certainly not the city that never sleeps.”
“It sure in the fuck isn’t. I mean, unless you count bath houses and the gay bars.”
“Until you can get a burger in a bath house, I don’t.”
They ordered two slices a piece from Pete’s, and Alexis said, “When Beverly went to New York she was telling me about how the pizza was a dollar a slice.”
“Beverly is a dumb bitch.”
“Hey!”
“But she is. And you know it. And she shouldn’t be. And those slices are thin as a piece of paper. You can’t get a slice of stuffed spinach pizza with pepperoni the size of your head in New York. And look, we just got two.”
They passed the convenience store that accepted EBT and the other shop that was always closed on the first floor of their building. There were two stores they knew nothing about, and in the middle of the them, the door into the lobby of the Cassowary with its strange blue walls and odd maritime theme. To their right, and past the elevator was an old pink carpeted lobby with a piano, and now and again they sat there, but now they took the elevator to the seventh floor, and to the piece of the apartment that had been made from two and they undressed, Darius slipping into a caftan and Alexis undressing before him and pulling on basketball shorts and a ripped tee shirt.
“Quo Vadis?”
“Are you speaking in Latin or asking if I want to see the movie?”
“It’s in streaming,” Alexis said. “I used to watch it as a kid.”
“I wonder how cheesy it will be to us now.”
“Let’s find out.”
Alexis took the large chair, and Darius stretched out on the sofa while the overture played. He kept looking to the counter and Alexis said, “If you’re thinking about the pizza, just eat the pizza.”
“I know, but….”
Then Darius said, “Well, fuck it, maybe a little.”
By the time the movie had launched into the Miklos Rosza theme, and Deborah Kerr and Robert Taylor’s names had come up in gold letters, Darius had folded his legs under him and was opening up the hot slice of pizza, anticipating sausage and stretchy cheese.
“Of fuck,” Alexis murmured.
“What?”
He had just checked his phone.
“It’s from Rulon.”
“Rulon Nelson?”
“Do you know another Rulon?”
“No.”
“He’s in town.”
“Oh,” Darius said in a different voice. “Well, Chicago is a big city, and we’re on the seventh story of a secured building, so you can answer that later. I don’t know that I’m ready for company.”
“No, no,” Alexis said. “Neither am I.”
“And not that company.”
“He’s only texted. He didn’t call or anything, so it must not be that urgent.”
“Does he actually remember where we live without directions?”
“I doubt it.”
“That’s the last thing I need—damn, this shit is good—” Darius stopped to eat the pizza. “A knock on the door and his big ass.”
Alexis put his phone away.
“I’m just gon watch the fucking movie.”
After he’d gotten Desiree pregnant, he tried to make a right life for them, to fix up his fuckery. They’d gotten married and he tried to be a good member of the Church. It seemed like he was always trying and never succeeding. She was a second marriage anyway. He thought it would work out because he’d said it must. After all, families were to be forever. Forever. This was Heavenly Father’s plan.
Or Heavenly Father’s Plan, capitalize the P as well. You’d better.
And these days he felt like he was lying when he said Heavenly Father. He had been used to saying it, and during the two yeas he’d spent knocking on peoples’ doors, telling them about the True Gospel and the Plan of Salvation, they had thought Heavenly Father was just like when they occasionally called God, “My father in Heaven, or our Heavenly Father.” They had not known that, more or less, this was his name, nor had they known the greater secret, as the old song went, “I’ve got a Mother there.”
On the last day driving here, he’d began singing the old songs.
Come, come, ye Saints, no toil nor labor fear
But with joy wend your way
Though hard to you this journey may appear
Grace shall be as your day
'Tis better far for us to strive
Our useless cares from us to drive
Do this, and joy your hearts will swell
All is well! All is well!
Well, now, he felt like he’d been doing nothing but striving for the last fifteen years. He’d driven from Utah and was dimly aware when he arrived in Missouri, that he was dead inside, that something in him had been broken, and it had been broken ever since. He didn’t wish to dwell on it. Sometimes it came, like the shape of a devil it came. It kept him up all night and unable to eat, and the only thing that had kept things together was hard, back breaking work, construction, pest control, that awful rendering plant, the sweat, the sore muscles, the sick, overcooked, intestinal smell had been some sort of sanity.
His daughter was beautiful, and he hated to leave her. But whatever court battles there were to be fought with Desiree, they could be handled here, out east, as much as they ever had been in the mountains of Utah, mountains where, contrary to popular belief, it was cold all the time, even in summer, and snow could always be seen.
Was he an abuser? That’s what the police had said when they had come for him, when his wife had called them on him and he had been dragged off to that prison in Idaho and gone through all of that bullshit, shamed by his family who was paying the legal bill, publicly divorced—nothing private ever happened in the Church—and facing prison. But if he’d wanted to abuse her, if he’d wanted to hurt her, he would have. And when he had learned she was fucking the arresting police officer, well that was the end of it.
And then there he was, back in Utah, back I the bosom of a family with deep enough pockets to save him, who would always let him know they had saved him. There he was, not nearly enough. He got another tattoo on his back, the one of Saint Michael the archangel. They talked about him all the time. Mormons had scripture after scripture, not just that dry little incomprehensible book they showed outsiders. And there were secrets spoken of, but never written down, secrets that put you deeper on the inside. But there were always secrets because, in a way, you were always on the outside.
One secret was that Adam himself, the very first man, the original son of God, was the angel Michael. Some said, and he had run into plenty of Jehovah’s Witnesses, that Michael was also Jesus, and this made enough sense because Adam may very well have been God.
His mind loved to go down these mystic and theological rabbit holes, and even now, on the highway, in a land where everything stretched out flat all around him, he remembered what a friend had said to him, sitting on his couch, lazily smoking a cigarette.
“Have you ever thought: all the rituals, all the words, all the mysteries are just meant to distract you from the ordinary tedium and thanklessness of the life they prescribe for you?”
It was like someone breaking a bubble, or a spell, and he blinked on it, feeling at once seen and too seen. In a bit of mild protest he said, “Well, have you thought it’s the same with you guys?”
Alexis was a Catholic, and he said, “Yes. I never stop thinking about it. It’s how I prioritize.”
Alexis Thibodaux questioned everything. He never simply accepted a matter. His life was full of striving to do the right thing, though he wouldnt’t have agreed. Stopping by an Episcopal Church once, he’d come in and that was how, in time, he had joined that church, but he always said, “The Episcopal Church is a church. The Catholic Church is THE Church.” And Rulon understood this.
“I can’t decide between the two,” Alexis had said. “And I don’t have to. The Episcopalians are only in business a few hours a week. Catholics are always moving.”
Rulon could not do the same thing Whatever Protestants thought about Catholics or Catholics thought of each other, they were still in the wheel house of Christianity. He knew now, or was knowing, that Mormons were just too strange. You couldn’t take those beliefs anywhere else, not even to the RLDS with their weird spiral temple in Missouri. If you loved Mormonism, if it meant something to you, you were sort of stuck with it until you found something with more mystery. Part of him was addicted to the secrets, addicted to the temple rituals, in need of the baptisms and rituals for the dead, captivated by the great bronze baptismal with twelve bronze oxen holding it up,. He rejoiced in the old prophecies and paintings on walls he did not completely understand, and even as he realized the Church would never be a home for him, he could think of no other.
Well, that was not quite so. He could think of no religious home, but there were other homes, or at least one. He was surprised by the straightness of the direction, for he had always assumed that Utah was far south, it was close to Mexico, right? He forgot how far north Salt Lake was, and now high the border of Mexico rose to their south. The drive was long, broken into stops, a little more than an entire day. You stayed on I-80 the whole way. Even a dummy could do it. And he should have known, for he felt like a dummy. His mind passed over the mistakes of the last years, the times in jail, the times before he had met this most dismal of his wives, when he was acting mad and living out of a car with a dog. He was insane now, but he was more sane than he had been for a while.
The first time Rulon Nelson was in the Midwest, it was out in Ohio, where he had made friends and experienced things he wasn’t always willing to talk about, even to himself. Then he had been Elder Nelson, tall, weedy, dark haired in his formal suit and great coat, a serious young member of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints, holding the priesthood power. When he had returned to Lassador, Ohio, half mad and full of the hilarity of people on the edge, in huge red sneakers, shorts, and tee shirt, tattoos worked on his calves, he had lived in the apartment above his friends Michael and Jay. They had known madness and despair, so he loved them, and this had been during the time when the world seemed to be falling into its own mental collapse, civil collapse, lack of love, That was even before the Presidency of Madness, and before the Great Plague and before the Presidency of the Dull, where a man he dubbed President Roomba, because he shuffled from place to place, bumping into things and falling, seemed unfit to run a fractious country. Those were the days of, don’t look now, the world is cracking.
Now it seemed the almost calm before the definite storm, or the beginning of a dreadful chick pecking at the inside of the egg to get out. He came from a family of dreamers and visionaries. His immediate family was, admittedly, a clump of dreamless yahoos who only envisioned new cars and bigger driveways, but he was six generations descended from the Prophet on one side and four on the other. He was a descendant of Brigham Young, the mighty if problematic Lion of God. His family had married into Mormonism, or else there might have been more lines. There were friends of his descended from the first two prophets by so many lines it was amazing they weren’t retarded.
But he had visions. He had dreams, and sometimes they drove him nearly crazy. Their last night in Lassador, he and Jay and Michael had looked down from the roof of a hotel to see all of West Lassador burning, and they had all gone mad, all known it was time to leave, gathered what they could and fled the city of the crazed. During the weird sojourn he felt like his Mormon ancestors, traveling away from corruption into some overheated promised land. They had stopped in Chicago, as those ancestors long ago had, though they might make their own peace in Illinois. Here they had stayed in the home of Darius, Jay’s cousin, and his friend Alexis, and Rulon had stopped himself from saying, “Black people just make more sense.” Why had he stopped himself from saying that. They probably would have simply laughed and accepted it.
After this, leaving Darius and Alexis, they drove west and until they drove north, and then Rulon left them, loyal to a home that had never been loyal to him. But Jay and Michael were his home. He should never have left. He’d been lost ever since.
The suburbs sprang up all around him now, light flashing off tall office buildings that one who had never been to Chicago might mistake for Chicago. He longed to be off the expressway, longed to be in the city itself among the busy streets, its people, the clacking El tracks. He hadn’t told anyone he was coming. He’d hinted at it in the occasional email, but he hadn’t told anyone. He new he was manic, didn’t make sense all the time. After he got a taco and a drink and found some place to piss and shit—it was time for that—he would let them know.
He let them know as night fell. He didn’t expect to hear from Darius right away, and he didn’t. It wasn’t urgent. Nothing was urgent. He parked his truck past Bryn Mawr in one of the little tucked away lots near the beaches. There were four beaches that lined that area. The first being Hollywood Beach with its rainbow pier. They called that the gay beach, but when Rulon asked Darius or Alexis if they’d ever been there, they both said no. And then there were two or three others, linked by long paths with streets and hills to one side, and the stormy lake to the other. As evening came, Rulon sat on a bench, watching the waves wash up onto the chunky blocks of concrete that made a sea wall. The beaches were disappearing, Alexis had said. Alexis said that once he came looking for Juneway Beach of Sheridan Road, but found there was now only water slapping against concrete blocks like these. He’d walked down the coast and saw three beaches were gone until he got to Jarvis Street Beach, and there the beach was smaller than it had ever been, and strangely gloomy. You could tell that things which had been above the water were now sucked down below.
From the four beaches along Edgewater, where the water stretched blue and lovely, it was impossible to see the violence of Lake Michigan. That was all hidden by stretches of blond sand. But here, where there was no sand, grey water slapped against the concrete blocks. Rulon texted Darius now as well, still not worried, but thinking, as the night set in, that he might message. He ate the last taco, and as day turned to night, he headed back to his truck, locked the doors, and went to sleep.
Rulon opened his mouth and cried out in relief.
A moment later In the night, the rolling hills of the beach transformed. The crash of the waves boomed on one side, and on the other cars ran down Lake Shore Drive. Water stretched on into the blackness, and to the west, pricked with lights, rose the many high rise apartments. The lot he sat in was lost among hills. He saw little tents where other homeless people were staying, and when he walked past the trees, there were men sneaking in and out of them, and from the dark came the startled sounds of pleasure. His scrotum tightened. His body thrummed with the energy of this night, but he realized he’d been feeling like this all day. In the grass, men on all fours were being fucked in the semi privacy of the park. Rulon walked with his head up through all of it, and then, finally sat on a park bench, looking out at the stormy waters.
There were sea creatures down there, surely. This was a sea even if no one called it that. The maps, the names, all hid something. The world was not as it appeared, and he remembered being With Brother Owens on a trip to Chicago years ago, on one of those rare times when they weren’t being watched, and going to the pier, both of them in black pants, black tie and white shirt, looking like accountants and staring into the water.
“Did you see it?” Owens demanded. “Did you see it?”
Unmistakably, a tentacle came up from the waves, out of the brackish green of Lake Michigan, and then, almost in an instant, it was gone. He had seen it, but thanked God that Owen had said it first. By then, when Rulon was twenty, he had seen so many strange things, he questioned his own sanity.
Tonight he sat by the van and watched the blue expanse become something else, black and calm in the night. There would be no creatures rising up out of the water this night. He’d heard of a friend of a friend or a cousin of a cousin who had casually said he saw a mermaid, just fucking said it. Not here, but on another part of the lake. Rulon had said nothing, only kept smoking his cigarette, but he never forgot it. The response had been, “Mermaids live in the sea, not in Lake Michigan. It’s too cold.”
Such a serious answer, a bit joking, but serious. Rulon had said nothing. He looked on the water and thought, “There will be no mermaids tonight.”
While he sat, he heard others passing by, and then, at last, someone sat beside him.
Rulon said, “What’s up?”
“Nice night. Isn’t it?”
“Weather’s still good,” Rulon agreed.
The man’s knee hit Rulon’s again.
“Sorry about that.”
“No matter.”
The man said, “You looking to get up to something?”
“I might be,” Rulon said and stood up, taking down his shorts.
The man went to his knees as Rulon sat down, and he took Rulon Nelson’s cock in his mouth. As the waves washed on the rocks, Rulon put his hands in the man’s hair and closed his eyes. Exhaling he slowly fucked the warm mouth, feeling the greedy sucking, the tightness on his cock. A few moments later, with immense relief, he unloaded, hold the man’s head down and as the stranger gagged, cheeks bulging,, the stranger got off his knees and wiped his mouth, saying, “Thanks.”
Body stilly buckling, head humming, relieved of the tension that had been the undercurrent of this whole night, Rulon said, “Sure thing.”
And then he watched the man walk off into the night.
