Brad Watson - Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives

“What are you doing with that man?” she said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you drownden him?”

I said the first thing that came to mind.

“I am baptizing,” I said. “I am cleansing his heart.”

It was late afternoon then. I looked back over my shoulder at Maeve. She was half lit by sunlight sifting through the leaves, half in shadow. A mostly naked child in rotten garment.

Underwater, Uncle Sebastian jerked and his eyes came open. I held him harder and waded out to where it was up to my shoulders and the current strong toward the spillway, my heart heavy in the water, the pressure there pressing on it. Behind me, Maeve waded into the shallows.

“I want it, too, Uncle,” she called.

Sebastian’s arms ceased thrashing, and after a minute I let him go. I saw him turning away in the water. Palms of his hands, a glimpse of an eye, the ragged toe of a boot dimpling the surface, all in a slow drifting toward the spillway, and then gone in the murk. Maeve lifted the gauzy nightslip up over her head as she waded in, her pale middle soft and mapped with squiggly brown stretch marks. I pushed against the current trying to reach her before she got in too deep. There was such unspeakable love in me. I was as vile as my uncle, as vile as he claimed.

“Hold still, wait there,” I said at the very moment her head went under as if she’d been yanked from below.

The bottom is slippery, there are uncounted little sinkholes. Out of her surprised little hand, the nightslip floated a ways and sank. I dove down but the water slowed me and I could not reach her. My eyes were open but the water was so muddy I could barely even see my own hands. I kept gasping up and diving down, the sun was sinking into the trees.

She would not show again until dusk, when from the bank I saw her ghost rise from the water and walk into the woods.

The strays tuned up. There was a ringing from the telephone inside the house. It would ring and stop awhile. Ring and then stop. The sheriff’s car rolled its silent flickering way through the trees. Its lights put a flame in all the whispering leaves. There was a hollow taunting shout from up on the ridge but I paid it no mind.

I once heard at dawn the strangest bird, unnatural, like sweet notes sung through an outdoor PA system, some bullhorn perched in a tree in the woods, and I went outside.

It was coming from east of the house, where the tornado would come through. I walked down a trail, looking up. It got louder. I got to where it had to be, it was all around me in the air, but there was nothing in the trees. A pocket of air had picked up a signal, the way a tooth filling will pick up a radio station.

It rang in my blood, it and me the only living things in that patch of woods, all the creatures fled or dug in deep, and I remember that I felt a strange happiness.

LOOMIS HAD NEVER BELIEVED THAT LINE ABOUT THE quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships. Then one day he’d decided that he should marry, have a child, and he told himself that if one was open-minded these things could lead to a kind of contentment, if not to exuberant happiness. That’s why Loomis was in the fix he was in now.

Ever since he and his wife had separated and she had moved with their son to southern California, he’d flown out every three weeks to visit the boy. He was living the very nightmare he’d suppressed upon deciding to marry and have a child: that it wouldn’t work out, they would split up, and he would be forced to spend long weekends in a motel, taking his son to faux-upscale chain restaurants, cineplexes, and amusement parks.

He usually visited for three to five days and stayed at the same motel, an old motor court that had been bought and remodeled by one of the big franchises. At first the place wasn’t so bad. The continental breakfast offered fresh fruit, and little boxes of name-brand cereals, and batter with which you could make your own waffles on a double waffle iron right there in the lobby. The syrup came in small plastic containers from which you pulled back a foil lid and voilà, it was a pretty good waffle. There was juice and decent coffee. Still, of course, it was depressing, a bleak place in which to do one’s part in raising a child. With its courtyard surrounded by two stories of identical rooms, and excepting the lack of guard towers and the presence of a swimming pool, it followed the same architectural model as a prison.

But Loomis’s son liked it so they continued to stay there even though Loomis would rather have moved on to a better place.

He arrived in San Diego for his April visit, picked up the rental car, and drove north up I-5. Traffic wasn’t bad except where it always was, between Del Mar and Carlsbad. Of course, it was never “good.” Their motel sat right next to the 5, and the roar and rush of it never stopped. You could step out onto the balcony at three in the morning and it’d be just as roaring and rushing with traffic as it had been six hours before.

This was to be one of his briefer visits. He’d been to a job interview the day before, Thursday, and had another on Tuesday. He wanted to make the most of the weekend, which meant doing very little besides just being with his son. Although he wasn’t very good at that. Generally, he sought distractions from his ineptitude as a father. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of bourbon, and tucked it into his travel bag before driving up the hill to the house where his wife and son lived. The house was owned by a retired Marine friend of his wife’s family. His wife and son lived rent-free in the basement apartment.

When Loomis arrived, the ex-Marine was on his hands and knees in the flower bed, pulling weeds. He glared sideways at Loomis for a moment and muttered something, his face a mask of disgust. He was a widower who clearly hated Loomis and refused to speak to him. Loomis was unsettled that someone he’d never even been introduced to could hate him so much.

His son came to the door of the apartment by himself, as usual. Loomis peered past the boy into the little apartment, which was bright and sunny for a basement (only in California, he thought). But, as usual, there was no sign of his estranged wife. She had conspired with some part of her nature to become invisible. Loomis hadn’t laid eyes on her in nearly a year. She called out from somewhere in another room, “’Bye! I love you! See you on Monday!” “Okay, love you, too,” the boy said, and trudged after Loomis, dragging his backpack of homework and a change of clothes. “’Bye, Uncle Bob,” the boy said to the ex-Marine. Uncle Bob! The ex-Marine stood up, gave the boy a small salute, and he and the boy exchanged high-fives.

After Loomis checked in at the motel, they went straight to their room and watched television for a while. Lately his son had been watching cartoons made in the Japanese anime style. Loomis thought the animation was wooden and amateurish. He didn’t get it at all. The characters were drawn as angularly as origami, which he supposed was appropriate and maybe even intentional, if the influence was Japanese. But it seemed irredeemably foreign. His son sat propped against several pillows, harboring such a shy but mischievous grin that Loomis had to indulge him.