1. Everything is flux 

It was wrong, and he regretted it: unwinding her head when she said what she said. The circuits of her throat cast a blue light on the ceiling. Her arms gradually settled against her hips. There are moments in every life when the sun intervenes at a certain time of day, roughly 2, 3, or 4 in the afternoon, and anything seems doable or inconsequential; you feel nothing strongly, except unbearable frustration at whatever intrudes on your dissociative state. It becomes easy to break something, and for just that moment its brokenness does not register as a loss—only at all times to follow, forever. He held her head in his hands, turned it around, inspected what lay inside through a hatch in the top; her curly hair, strawberry blonde and longer than he had realized, dangled and swayed like a fern that had caught the sun. Anything done in such moments is sloppy and ill-considered; he reattached the head to the best of his ability and nothing happened, one eye remained closed and the other remained open, the mouth still revealed the lower and only the lower row of teeth. He ran a finger over the items under the hatch, touched, though he knew—as the memory seized him later, with a shiver of retroactive distress—that he was never meant to touch the rows of fiber inside, so like hairs in the mane of a horse. He consulted a specialist. She did what she could, using tools even finer and more delicate than the fibers themselves; they were like fly hairs, the hairs on the legs of a fly. The face settled into itself. The body began to move. She cried and he cried. They embraced. She forgave him. As he knew she would. He was exhausted; for the rest of the day, he slept. Sometimes she entered the room, touched his hands or his forehead, or rubbed his foot, and he was so relieved he cried again. He felt like a little child. Her voice soothed him, her touch made him feel as if a fever was breaking, but the voice was distant, and the touch not entirely familiar. She was the same, or similar. Her body felt right. But as the week went on, he understood that changes had occurred; her voice had a thinner sound and she looked subtly different, which was enough to make her look completely different, even if she said the same things, did the same things. The specialist was blunt. Something is different, yes, something will always be different. Some things are not meant to be done. Some things are not thought doable under normal circumstances. But they are doable, he said, and they are done. Of course, she said, they are done, and we have to adjust to them, but something will be different, something will always be different. What troubled him most was his inability to explain who or what he was mourning, or why he felt as he did—that he must always be waiting now for the return of someone who was not absent: that a portion of his life would be spent waiting to see, one more time, a person he saw every day. In the park, several days later, at about 2, 3, or 4 in the afternoon, he observed a conversation between two joggers who had stopped to refill their water bottles at the fountain by the bench where he sat drinking coffee. These two joggers, young women he did not know, spoke to one another in sign language; they had peaceful smiles on their faces. One tapped her index finger, or perhaps her middle and index fingers, he could not recall afterward, against the palm of her right hand. His attention was drawn to the gesture by the joyful click as her fingers struck the groove above her wrist. He did not understand sign language, not the merest gesture, but something about it made him uncomfortable; his thoughts immediately turned to his own situation, which embarrassed him. He covered his face with his left hand, then pretended to be lost in thought so they wouldn’t notice his attentiveness. They soon filled their bottles and moved along. The sign, when he considered it later, reminded him of one thing in particular, the act of cracking an egg, which is perhaps what they were talking about: eggs being cracked. As for why, at that time of day, when the sun created an impression of unreality, it made him self-conscious, he had no idea. He knew it was nothing to do with him; they had not been accusatory or condescending; their attitude was pleasant, even blissful; he had not been the subject of their conversation. And yet he could not help sinking into himself, there in the sunlight, where his mind held him for some time, perhaps a quarter of an hour, until finally he was released and allowed to walk home. 

2. Change is impossible 

Dad said all kinds of things to calm us down. It’s nothing, it was a long time ago. Which indeed it was. I was 8 or 9 at the time of this memory. They were together. I say 8 or 9 but I’m no judge of age, even my own; I was possibly 6 or 7, or younger—who knows? All those childhood years went on forever and now they’re indistinguishable, one vast blur, like a monolithic inscription you’re right up against, too close to read the words; you can only make out one or two letters in the stonework—that’s childhood for me. Or it’s like staring at the sky, and occasionally, like a clay pigeon, a memory shoots up and flies past my eyes, a shadowy one, birdlike and quick, but big enough that I can discern the shape and proportions. The rest of the blur I fill in myself, with myself. This memory comes back when I drink a hazy IPA, because my father was drinking a beer like that, bees tried to crawl into it, or when I smell pulled pork, or even a smell like pulled pork, a sweet grassy smell with tears mixed in, the tears of a childhood day like that one, when you’ve tripped in the grass and fallen and must perform, you have to attract the pity of your mom for just a moment, and then the tears go away, and you run again: that’s the kind of memory this is. We wouldn’t calm down and Dad told us it was nothing, it was fine, a long time ago, but he didn’t understand: we weren’t scared, just excited. We were picnicking in the park by the Battery. An insect crawled into my sandwich, what they call a palmetto bug. I pulled it out on the table and it lay on its back, kicking in the air, shiny with barbeque sauce. He said: It happened a long time ago, they rebuilt, that’s why the statue’s here. I couldn’t picture it clearly, or at least not accurately. I had an image, but I knew it wasn’t right; it was an oil painting for one thing, of a completely different town in a storm, late at night, although the plaque said early afternoon, and there was a succession of high, fierce waves, but it wasn’t like that, it was one swift inrush of water; in the town, locked in the amber of the flow, glittered daubs of white, heliotrope, carmine—buildings, roofs, heads—and one long turquoise streak: a palmetto that had shattered and shot down the streets like a log Paul Bunyan piloted accurately downriver. It didn’t occur to me to square this with the quiet park on the Battery, where the palmettos stood confidently upright, with perhaps a little bark unfolding like mummy bandages under the swollen, spidery canopies, and other picnic benches, unoccupied, shaded a lawn that terminated in a gravel path and two garbage cans of the kind often seen in parks: overfull, black, rounded at the lid, pawnlike. There were possibly dog-walkers. Possibly photographers. I will even imagine birds at sea, diving or hopping over the rocks, and crabs on those rocks, windup-toy small, frequently washed off by the surf, only to swim, or rather bob, until they resurface a little way down, hooking the rock with one feeler and propelling themselves, seemingly without effort, into some small declivity where a pool has formed. The statue no longer exists. (It was replaced with a new memorial, composed of mirrors; the choice was unpopular; birds attacked it.) Photographs do not capture its effect. It looked, when you stood in front of it, like it would crash down over your head, but it wasn’t impressive at all if you approached it from the side, as we did when we arrived at the park; then, it was like a man with a cloak, maybe an actor in a play, lifting his arms to scare you, but without conviction, as if he felt that—really—you were too old for it. It was nothing like the painting-wave I had imagined, dark and violent, a black bedsheet of a wave, with fingers and legs just breaking the surface—no, the statue-wave was oddly intimate: final and obscure, purposeful, abbreviating, but only for you, as you ate your sandwich beneath it. It might drag you away, but nothing else would be touched. The world wouldn’t be affected. Maybe we should move, Dad said—and we did: Mom was not in a good mood, my sister had an upset stomach. We sat at another bench and I turned my head to see the statue. It’s too scary, said Mom. She didn’t understand either. What’s not present isn’t scary, just exciting. Maybe at night it would be present, because everything is present at night, but not in the daylight, frozen, and only a little taller than my parents. And that was what Dad didn’t understand, because he fed off my excitement; he told me everything, waved his hand out over the coast to show how big it was, then waved inland to show how many people it dragged out to sea. It rolled in that suddenly, he said, and the only warning was an unusually low tide, a warning nobody understood, although the people who were about to die stared right at it, even walked out onto land they’d always known to be water, watched the sandbar widen and the reefs appear, white, heliotrope, and carmine, as seabirds swooped down to grab what they could of their occupants. I hadn’t understood that the wave didn’t need to be that high, it was a question of force, of its power to drag, and of speed, the rapidity with which it breathed in and out, sucking away what it covered; the wave in my brain was a crusher, not a dragger, and the statue supported me, if I imagined it to represent a wave on a much grander scale, a great black cloak of a wave, rising under lifted arms, vastly more sinister when seen from below: a wave that strolled around the park and dropped down over people, and then there was nothing left. Even though he described it clearly—a snaking wave, almost like a leak under the dishwasher, the way it creeps along the grooves of floor tiles, pooling and pawing between buildings and under supports and such statues as existed then, commemorations of previous disasters (the Wave of ’18, the Wave of ’42)—I still only saw it my way, furious and black, as much a cloud as a wave, yanking houses out of streets and pulling them beyond the Battery, where they bobbed up and down over the reefs, then sank, even as their surprised occupants opened the windows to see what was happening. That was more like what I knew from movies, and also from the car wash, where I had probably first seen the wave in my mind: the funereal brushes and curtains, tattered of course, like a phantom’s cloak, giving way to rumbling, liturgical bursts of water; I used to scream when we passed through—I couldn’t imagine anything scarier. I don’t think I’ve been to a car wash in fifteen, even twenty years, and perhaps only ever went through a modest number, but their whole machinery served as my personal image of disaster, death, and judgment. When they come, I thought, they’ll be like that, stately, measured, taking full advantage of both wings of the stage and minding the center, a direct and monumental presentation of the end of everything. I was always relieved, even dizzy with release, when we slipped out again into the sun, the water on the windshield breaking up in the light; I was like the bird that sings again after the eclipse, shaking but excited too, more excited than scared—maybe I had never been scared to begin with, or maybe there’s no real difference: in any case, the danger was gone, the immediate had receded, in fact had never come. That was the image I clung to, even when we passed the statue again and I saw how hunched and modest it was, and when I watched the seabirds dive—by now I was quite bored—and saw the little boats bob along in perfect safety. At some point we broke up; Mom was tired, my sister had a temper tantrum, they walked home. Dad—I don’t know. He insisted on staying at the Battery a little longer. He took pictures. There was a small brick building, barely more than a kiosk, with a museum inside. At the desk we were given a map of the whole Battery, one of those rectangular National Park Service brochures that have looked the same all my life, white letters on a black header; Dad unfolded it and showed me the pictures inside, so I could see the sunny day, the hint of shadowy water reflected, as always, on the sides of boats, the mud-colored fingers of ocean squeezing through the streets at a level that might cover my head, perhaps, but not his. We sat in a dark theater for the orientation video; nobody else was there. The narrator sounded hollow and worn out, as if his voice had been stored in a metal box for many years. When it ended, we looked at the exhibit. We saw the broken street signs, the shoes, the hitching posts, the boot scrapers, the spoiled woodwork, even a little diorama under glass, a model of the Battery; you turned a crank and water squirted up along the edge and oozed to the other side, passing over little figures in light blue clothes (the arms of the figures, on automatic hinges, swung over their heads as the water reached them; their eyes and mouths were black circular hatches) and into shops and under the porch of a church that still existed, and then drew back, quite ingeniously, to trickle into the gutter it came from. The model tilts slightly when you turn the crank, Dad explained; that’s how it works, though you can barely tell. He demonstrated. The wave seeped out again and covered the figures, who were still dripping wet, then he paused his cranking so I could look down and see them submerged, motionless, their arms raised and mouths open. I complained that I was hungry, the bug had ruined my sandwich—all this is coming back to me quickly, or else I’m filling it in—so Dad drove me to Applebee’s, where he ordered a whiskey sour. I watched the ice melt and the cherry in his glass slip lower and lower into the amber drink as successive shelves collapsed. I still wanted to talk about the wave. I told him what I had learned from reading the brochure, which was damp from the ring of water that had seeped around the bottom of my cup; I invented one gruesome story after another and stared into the fake Tiffany lamp over our booth as I thought up more details. Dad was never in a hurry to return home in those days; we stopped off at a used bookstore once I’d abandoned my meal. He bought me the only book on the wave, which I was too young for and never read; it had a black and white photo section I found disappointing but looked at compulsively. I had nightmares. I wrote my first stories about the wave, or rather drew them, and for years afterward, when we visited the Battery, I dragged us back to the museum, where I cranked the wave over the helpless figures, holding it still, as Dad had done, to keep them underwater.

…

Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work appears in 3:AM, Epiphany, Cincinnati Review, minor literature[s], and many other publications.