Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 He wasn’t sure what to make of it, since he’d never been to the beach. But he was certain the dream would come back, and there was only one way to find out what it meant. One morning, Jonathan sat up in bed and watched dawn’s solemn glow sieving in through his curtains. His legs itched to get him out of bed and ready for work, but his mind was again on Lena Beach. September rainclouds would be rolling in and frozen ocean winds would be scouring its shore. Jonathan shivered, slowly sliding his legs out from the covers and placing his bare feet on the icy carpet. The sensation briefly jolted him back to the present. Time to head downtown, where a new stack of papers would be waiting for him. After his usual morning routine, Jonathan climbed into his car, suppressing Lena Beach. All along Riverside Drive, he felt the pressuring need to turn left at the light towards work. Wrongness hounded him all the way to the intersection, but once he was there, he gave in to where he had to go, what he had to know. He turned right. Jonathan’s breath became ragged. As the road stretched out behind him, he was certain that there was no going back, not since the milk had gone sour. Before he knew it, he was passing Auke Bay Harbor, where numerous Bayliners bobbed against their moorings. As he drove further away from home and work, the houses thinned and the evergreens and cottonwoods gathered. It was just as well that the trees swallowed the houses, since Jonathan found them increasingly difficult to look at without thinking of their dark windows and stale air. At the same time, however, he was keenly aware of leaves rustling as wind ripped them free of branches before the coming rain. Eventually, he passed the ferry terminal, where the MV _Columbia_ sat moored with its loading bay open. When he saw the green sign just after the terminal marking the entrance to Lena Beach, he turned down the narrow road and drove until he found an opening in the trees. Already he was shaking again and had trouble rolling the window down to let in the pounding of the surf. Sprinkles of rain dotted his hands, dashboard, and wheel, spilling into the car along with the pungent smell of the tide. Jonathan left his car parked alongside the road and slid down the dirty slope, avalanches of dead needles following in his wake. When the brown trunks pulled away, they revealed green mountains, slate blue ocean, and silvery-grey clouds barreling close to earth. The colors of his dream resolved into the damp, foreign vista around him, but as of yet, nothing looked out of place. Bleached tangles of driftwood rested in beds of shell and gravel. Dried kelp seeded with dead crabs marked the high-tide line. Nothing living was visible. But once the heart thumping in his ears subsided, he could hear a sound he had never heard before--a harsh, distant buzzing noise. Jonathan searched the horizon for the source. Near one of the islands of the archipelago was a small white shape: a fiberglass boat, no canopy, barely more than a smudge against the mountains. Squinting, he saw two shapes sitting in the boat. People, Jonathan thought. There were people in that boat. And this time, they were real. Time stopped as he watched. Vol. II. Issue. III 280 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 But when it resumed, he saw the boat moving away from him. Anxiety dissolved into fear, and fear into desperation. As Jonathan stumbled down the beach, once tripping and skinning his hands on shards of shell, he felt a surge of the terrible emptiness from the hallway. He yelled at the top of his lungs for the boat to come back. More than anything, he wanted those people to hear him and come back for him, talk to him, touch him, tell him he had found what he had been searching for. He screamed and shouted until his throat was hoarse, waved his arms, threw rocks out into the water--anything to get their attention. He couldn’t go back to the way things were, never again. He had found them and his heart was close to bursting. Still, even as the patch of white shrank, he begged and pleaded for them to come back. He went so far as to wade out into the freezing water as if every inch of distance he closed between himself and the boat mattered. But the boat disappeared from view as it rounded a peninsula, leaving Jonathan alone on the deserted shoreline. Still he shouted until he lost his voice altogether and, without registering the movement of his legs, trudged backward out of the water. He collapsed on the gritty debris; for the first time in his life, his insides were knotting up and he wept. The boat and people were gone, taking the sound of its outboard motor with it. ### III. Everywhere he went, the silence haunted him. Even when the sky cleared and the sun painted leafless trees golden, all he felt was hopelessness and the penetrating cold of autumn’s early onset. The sun, which had always cheered him after Juneau’s long stretches of rain, didn’t matter. Not anymore. The loneliness was tearing him apart. He had long since stopped going to work and instead took to wandering the useless streets, screaming since no one could hear him anyway, since his world was a farce. When he could no longer bear seeing all of the peeling and slumping houses he passed, he stopped getting out of bed, laying there until lonely dusk turned into lonely dawn. All he could think about was losing sight of the boat as it rounded the peninsula. The people were all that mattered, but they were gone. A whisper in his head told him that he should end his life. At first he was frightened, but the voice steadily convinced him that there was nothing worth living for in this world. His whole life had been a sham--he couldn’t even remember his childhood, his parents, friends, college... he must have had all of these things once. What was going on, and why hadn’t he questioned his existence before? Because doing so would lead to this? No going back, now. But would he, given the chance? He got as far as pressing a knife into his wrist before deciding to step outside his front door one last time. A line of blood was already welling up around the blade’s edge, and tears soaked his face. Vol. II. Issue. III 281 September 2011
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