If you knew about him, you would want to go talk to him and tell him it’s not his fault and you’d tell him to live, or if he is dying, or wanting to die, he should at least do it without closing the doors of the world. But your words would tire you out. Even more, they might convince him out of spite or frustration to go into the water and never come back, or to leap off the high rock where he sits, and throw himself to earth from one side of the rock like when he was ten and made wings and jumped off this very rock cliff. For one moment the air took hold of his sewn wings and he flew for just that moment before he landed, scratched and bruised on the ocean sand. What a moment, that second in air.

Now you look at him and think he never had a boyhood or wings.

Now at night he never lights his grandfather Witka’s kerosene lamp. He doesn’t even have a wick for it any longer. Just as it is for him, what ignites and maintains the fire is missing. He doesn’t want light and some people hear voices from the place at night so they stay away.

Thomas wishes that, like the octopus that came to land when he was born, he could place himself inside something small and pull the last stone over the opening.

During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came before him. Witka’s grandson, his dark hair unwashed, his face still one of handsome angles, sits in the dark of the old house like an octopus in a dark corner, is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can’t escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard. And Thomas harbors too many secrets.

Death would be beautiful for him, but he’s destined, miserably, to live. He owes a debt to life. It’s as simple as accounting, as hard math. He owes something. Maybe he will understand what it is now in the dark at the place where the old man Witka once watched for whales. The sea is beautiful, but he looks at it not at all, not even for whales. Soon his clothes grow too large for him. Inside the sleeves and collars and legs are memories inside the body that can’t be forgotten.

Like the octopus from 1947, the one that could have gone into a basket to hide, the one that portended good things for this child, Thomas is contained in small things, the gray house, cups and cans, packs of cigarettes.