Songs for The Lost

The Fire That We Deserve

THE FIRE THAT WE DESERVEAnd he woke. And he’d taken the fire from his dream and brought it with him into the world.

And the world was on fire.

- Unknown

The rustle of the surf soothes. It’s an old voice. It’s been friendly to us two beach children for a very long time. It’s offered solace to the world since the beginning, I think wondrously, as if this is the first time I’ve considered this idea. We’re beyond reach of its foamy spray in our place on the concrete promontory overlooking the deserted beach but I yearn for its touch. We’ve been here for hours, watched dusk submerge the sun into the lake and the moon materialize as if from nothing overhead and colour the beach in winter light.

The lonesome sound of a loose chain knocking gently in the breeze against the boarded-up concession stand drifts to us. The stone fountains marking the length of the beach at regular intervals look like small sculpted shrines from our vantage. The wooden lifeguards’ lookouts spike from the sand like miniature Wickermen, looking dismal and lonely devoid of watchful human occupants. Sand particles dance across our bare feet like the delicate touch of spiders. It’s been too long since last we’ve visited this childhood haunt. In its care, I feel nearly safe, as it used to make us feel similarly hidden from the world during our youth.

“Let’s get down closer to it,” I say, nodding beyond the guardrail and towards the foamy shallows.

“Okay,” she says, distantly. It’s hesitance making her voice this way, removed. She makes no move to vacate her place adjacent to the monolithic totem pole rearing skywards. I examine her. It’s the quintessential her. Shoulders bowed earthwards as if in obeisance to something divine; face round and pale and like the moon; eyes pensive and lost-looking; too thin, her simple garb of plain white t-shirt hanging raggedly over her bare legs, the dull green suggestion of the bikini she wears beneath peering through in the moonlight. I look beyond her: the totem pole at her side is stout, and dwarfs her small frame beneath its shadow. Its rolling basalt plain of carven visages seems to glare hungrily at her. Men have looked at her this way in her life. She’s usually only looked away, and wisely, but the world’s gaze has occasionally been as tenacious as the colossal carven eyes watching her now; distended and grotesquely immense, black wooden lips curling into malign leering mockery while she fidgets helplessly before them.

I urge her once more, “Please? Let’s get closer.”

“Okay.”

We place our bare feet onto the peeling metal railing separating observation platform from beach – making certain to avoid disturbing any of the myriad corpulent spiders suspended in their sticky beds among the metal bars – and leap lightly up and over and into the sand. Its soft touch is welcoming. I feel young again leaping like this. We’ve discussed the simple and nostalgic joy of this very act and motion in this selfsame place toomany times to comment on it now but I feel the need to do so besides. Still I resist, though, and only face silently the surf surging before us.

She takes my hand. It feels good. We’re wholly transformed now, young again in this place, holding hands like child siblings do before this simple act of companionship grows awkward to the eyes of observers. We drift across the sand until the sun-stored warmth of its caress turns wet and cool beneath our feet – soon the tide is licking languidly about our ankles.

“Are you upset that I’ve made us come here tonight?” she asks in a subtly imploring tone.

“I’ve learned to trust your dreams,” I tell her simply.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” I’m quick to say. “It’s...It’s amazing. I’m lucky to have seen it so many times.” Fear tickles me along my spine, though; a feathery ghost-presence along the nape of my neck; a gusting breath over my heart.

We walk along the tide line. The languor of the day has been refreshed by the chill of post-dusk. A splashing sounds nearby and we look but find nothing in the white foam or murky depths beyond, and walk on.

We pause a moment later, at her behest. She faces the lake. I stare out, too. Its immensity makes us as motes, another pair of sand granules. It’s the sea and the ocean and all the space of the world. I can’t distinguish its conclusion and the darkening sky’s beginning.

“The lake,” she says, dreamily. “It’s beautiful tonight.”

“Very,” I agree. “It’s where we came from.” I hear the immensity of the words, feel foolish and melodramatic until she responds.

“It is. I guess it’s fitting, somehow, that...”

We haven’t spoken of it since the day before, when she’d come to my house; taken my hand; cried; spoken with difficulty through her tears; explained her new dreams; reminded me of her old dreams, although I’d of course needed no reminding; explained that they’ve come together at last, old and new merged as she’d always known that they would.

I believed her, of course. As I always have. She’s my sister, and she’s shown me her queer truths countless times. I felt unprepared. She understood. I cried, too. She held my hand through it.

Then, today, near dusk, we’d come here to watch the spectacle, together in this place of old sanctuary for us; among the ancient rusted steel tangles of the jungle gym; the observation platform with its concessions and wooden benches overlooking the sand; and the beach itself, which took us into its sandy folds on many nights when we’d felt utterly abandoned in a bitter-tasting world but for each other. Drifting onto the property earlier, we’d felt like ghosts arriving at the time when the main body of beachgoers had been departing, bundles of blankets and baskets in tow, skin bronzed from their tenure beneath the sun. We’d watched the stragglers dissipate, too, like occasional sand specks blown at a zephyr’s behest onto the abutting grassy sward to the rear of the beach and the adjacent lawns and sleepy neighbourhood streets beyond.

I feel calmer now, in our solitude, though only just. I murmur, “Do you think? I mean, do you really think...Tonight? That it’s tonight?”

“...Yes.” The old certainty infuses her voice. There is no more doubting: tonight is the time.

A pair of gulls appear from the darkness over the water and pass low over our heads. Their cries are unnerving. They remind me of children in pain, but of course I don’t say this to her. A moment later and several more follow, imitating the wails of their predecessors. When yet a dozen more materialize from the air, she comments simply, “Look.”

I nod. “Where are they coming from?” Where they’re coming from isn’t really the thought which troubles me, of course. They come from some innocent place: a distant beach; a strand of sandy knolls to the north; a copse of thin trees; nests; speckled eggs. But what urges their frantic and headlong flight? The unspoken question rides the air between us like a spirit presence.

She makes no answer to what I’ve said or left unsaid and when I look to her I see her staring fixedly along the tide line in the direction we’re following. I pursue her line of vision – the long line of crabs scuttling from the spume astounds the eye; like medieval siege engines they roll forth in frantic waves towards the haven of dry beach country, while some of their prodigious number float lifelessly on all sides; armoured husks painted black with what appears some unknown fiery touch and bobbing heavily in the rolling shallows.

We watch together a while, bewitched by the spectacle. Eventually she says, “Because I wanted us to see it together. If I’m right and it’s the end. I want us to see it. Like this. Together. Who else would I want to be with now?” She looks to me. Her eyes are haunted, desperate.

“Okay,” I tell her, and add, “Me too...And you’re always right.”

She doesn’t need to offer explanation, of course but, as is her nature, she seeks to besides. “You were the only one who helped during that time... You know. A sister couldn’t ask for a better brother. It was a dark time. I felt so alone. But I had you. And I got through...I wanted us to be here together...”

She drifts off, and I’m crying and I know that she is, too. This mutual faltering disheartens me. I need her strength if I’m to stand and face this gathering wind and the squall it heralds. A younger brother learns to depend on his elder sister in these ways. I wait, and allow my ragged breathing to subside accordingly in the gradual mellowing of my hysteria.

The tears dry on my face in the subtly energized air.

We stop walking without speaking of doing so. We scan the horizon in silence. Something stirs there. From the far west to the remotest east as far as can be seen. A black flickering in the lingering torchlight of daytime which limns the plane where water meets sky.

“Do you see?” My voice is soft, scared. I cringe at the weakness in it, so un-brotherly.

“Yes. I’ve seen this before.” Her words drop firmly into the rising wind, as charged as the newly sizzling air.

I’m shaking my head. Somehow it feels as though I must make the gesture in accompaniment of the words, “I’m sorry your dreams have been this way. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Still I’m sorry. My God. Look at it. You were a little girl when you first...”

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” The elder sister once again comforting and offering strength to the faltering younger brother. I resign myself to her greater courage, and ask:

“Will it...Will it hurt? Will it hurt very much?”

“...No.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m sorry.”

The horizon surges blackly. A violent claret burns there.

“What did we do that...What did we ever do? To have this come for us like this? I mean, it’s not...fair.” I’m speaking louder now, in accordance with the rising wind, the sand lifting from earth and tapping at our faces.

“We must have done something,” she says stonily, assuredly. “For something like this to come...Something like this can’t be random. This...

There has to be a reason for this.”

It makes sense. I think of the wrongs that I’ve committed in my life, and those done to me and to my poor, sweet sister. There have been many when I consider closely. My heart clenches when I think of her as a child burdened beyond her years. I shiver in the wind. I blink in the sandstorm pelting my cheeks. We stand resolutely in our places in the face of it. There is a battering of our calves then: we look and see that the lake is spitting up its denizens. Carp and salmon pelt us, slipping in the current rushing between our legs, piling into each other where our legs bar their passage. Their silvery scales are blackened, as if burnt by some extremely powerful incendiary source. Several gulls and sparrows litter in the lake detritus about our bare feet, too, shrivelled and curled into themselves, feathers likewise scorched.

“My God,” I mutter. A nausea is rising from my belly. I anticipate its arrival in my throat and wince, seek to swallow in an ineffectual attempt to sway its imminent presence.

She says, “I’m happy that mom and dad are gone. And spared this.”

“Me, too,” I say, watching the surging waters in the distance. “My God, me too.” I add, “Despite what they were,” and hope that I haven’t said too much.

“We’ve all done something,” she says. “Everyone’s done something wrong. In an entire life, who doesn’t? Collectively, taken together...We deserve this.”

Pride fills me: she’s my sister. This wise woman and predictor of inclement horizons. So mature and brave-eyed. She’s not finished delivering her wisdoms, though.

“I’m glad we’re here. I...I always feel young when we’re here.”

I smile at the words, somehow. Somehow they’ve urged this impossible reaction from me in this tremendous moment. “Me, too. Always.”

We watch the horizon. It seethes. It moves in so startlingly vast a manner that it spellbinds the eye. It indicates the scale if not the enigmatic nature of the calamity stirring there.

It’s been on my mind all day. I let the words out into the rising gale wind. “I never forgot, did you know? I always remembered and I always believed you. That day when we were kids, and playing in the backyard. You’d seen...this. You’d seen this. You’d fallen asleep on the lawn chair with a comic book across your lap. I was reading in a chair beside you. You woke up screaming. You tore the comic in half. Two pieces. Completely in half. You screamed so much. You flailed around on the patio. Mother ran out from indoors, losing her mind, thinking you’d been bitten by a snake. Shenever believed anything you told us, of course. About that. Like she never believed everything else, too.” I gesture waterwards, and say, “You screamed this picture out loud. I was so scared, because I believed you. I always did.

From that afternoon onwards especially. You were only six years old. And so many times since then, too. You saw this.”

She’s nodding. Emotions are vying for ownership of her features. She succeeds in maintaining a stoic gaze trained towards the brewing horizon. She’s so grateful for me but she’s always been the stronger of us.

We’ve remained on the same course during our walk, parallel to the tide line, but the water level’s risen substantially within the past several minutes, as has its temperature: gone is the lake’s cool touch, replaced with a monstrously amiss warmth that burns the skin. Something thuds into my calf. I look and see the stiff gull, its soaked and charred feathers imbuing it with an appallingly pathetic appearance. It’s been blasphemed – I notice then that its head is missing. A thick layer of ashen black surrounds the wound. We’re examining it wordlessly when a human arm bobs between us: long and burly, it had once belonged to a robust man. It, also, is charcoal black, and crumbling in long strips in the pitching current.

She gasps a moment later. Her hands fly to her mouth as she seeks to stifle a cry which she doesn’t completely succeed in doing. I look away, too, but likewise not before witnessing the collection of blackened limbs roll in with the perverted tide; legs and arms of varying sizes, several torsos and loose heads like black coconuts bobbing in the scalding waves. Meat pieces which once formed whole men and women; flesh components of sailors and fishermen and families enjoying their final midnight sail.

Three-quarters of a child drifts towards us, severed roughly from the knees downwards; face absent in the wake of a great ash countenance flaking apart in long sheets of black. An amorphous lump, festooned with seaweed clumps and which holds some lingering indefinable semblance to a dog or other large animal rolls past us, slapping the packed sand as it’s hurled beachwards.

An enormous wooden plank rears from the surf nearby, remnants of a boat carcass; turns about wildly; disappears in the spume like a giant ladle into a violent cauldron. An ashen buoy rises from the depths, too, and is likewise interred beneath the weight of roiling water immediately after appearing.

The moonlight illuminates the scene bleakly. I loathe its wan light for the things it shows us even as I understand my own misplaced conceit.

We teeter in the gale wind. Water laps at our knees. Soon our thighs are submerged. We falter in the watery wake but make our stand where we are. The beach behind will give us no shelter, of course. There can be no shelter from this. Her dreams told this and we have evidence of their veracity before us. Hands raised as paltry shield against the sand whipping at our eyes, we only continue to scan the distance.

It’s near to us where we stand huddled close, rocking in the mightysquall. The small hairs on my forearms are reaching anxiously to meet it. It’s nearly upon us. A light burns profoundly on the water. It burns the very lake away. It’s bearing down upon our tiny shred of beach. In its embrace individual wrongs are razed. I think of our parents interred in cemetery silence and feel no joy in knowing that this will be my final thought of them.

“It’s here. It’s finally here.”

Her voice in the raging air is soft but certain. Its sound reflects her as I’ve always known her to be, perfectly. Its sound is strong, its timbre courageous if faltering: she faces this thing as she can. She doesn’t turn and seek to escape its wrath. There is no reason to attempt this and she refuses besides. I love her. I communicate this love through a vigorous clenching of her hand in mine. When she returns this embrace, I feel as though I may be prepared for what is coming.

“Thank you for always believing me.” She’s shouting her words now. The courage in her voice remains. “You were the only one.”

The reliable rustle of the surf is no more – our old friend is gone. In its place a tempest roars such as has never roared on this beach or any other sandy strand before. In its cacophony we continue to clasp each other’s hands and this, as ever, is the strongest we can be.

Peace

Paradise