Chapters (18)
It’s getting dark. The water on my left shows residue of the whole brilliant sunset thing. On my right the ocean reminds me of some sleazy guy’s hair, super-black and shiny at the tips with a slick, sweeping texture and a general not-quite-right-ness. Or a huge bucket of eels and leeches—slimy, sucking, biting monsters.
The sky and the sea are twins, outsized, uninhabitable, changing all the time with the light. The sky plays nice, mostly, aloof and distant. The sea’s the dangerous one.
I know it’s everybody’s dream to live by the water, but water’s horrible if you think about it. Like floods—whenever there are floods the sandbags piled up against the door don’t quite do the trick, and floodwater gets in, and somehow floodwater’s always contaminated with sewage and malaria and shit like that. So it gets through the sand (the sand must be in on it, a scheming old friend) and soaks into everything and starts to rot out your life from the inside. And pretty soon you’re up on the roof trying to attract a rescue. But the place you get rescued to is worse than the rotting place you left because people who’ve lost everything have a tendency to go crazy, and too many crazy people in one place is a war.
Bang. Bang. The wind brings new blasts grumbling up from Duck. Even the ground has turned against me now.
The lights coming from the first houses I encounter are comforting. I could really torture myself thinking about all these future scenarios. It’s fucked. But I don’t have to live in the future. When I can switch off my doom predictor, the present is actually okay. It’s a warm night with the noise of bugs in the grasses giving the air a nice texture. The water is still a couple of paces away from my door. And I’m an adult. Everything is under control.
I almost walk right past the chapel, but turn back and decide to ring the bell.
Ooo. Giddy and Milton are making out in one of the back pews.
“Don’t mind me,” I singsong at them when they look up, faces flushed candy pink and plum brown.
“Hi, hey. Hey, kid,” Giddy sputters. Milton whispers something in Giddy’s ear and she snorts a laugh as they get up to leave.
I walk down the stone aisle and into the room where a gnarled, thick rope hangs in the center. It’s satisfyingly stuffy and old-smelling in here. I tug and the bell sways. The hammer’s dangling like a uvula and then it knocks against the side of the bell. Iron strikes metal with wince-making harshness that softens almost instantly and radiates out in all directions and envelops me. I ring it eighteen times, but I’m sure no one’s counting.