The Beauty of Death Vol.2 - Death by Water

The Deepest Part of the Ocean. Joanna Parypinski-1

THE DEEPEST PART OF THE OCEAN

by Joanna Parypinski

WHEN I looked up from my algebra homework, I saw him standing in the dining room—barefoot, dripping a steady plink, plink, plink of rainwater onto the hardwood floor.

“Grandpa?”

He acknowledged me with a shaky wave and a raise of his mad Einsteinian eyebrows, stretching the jowls of his sourdough face, which ran wet with tiny tributaries winding through his wrinkled cheeks, while his sodden flannel shirt clung to his bird bones and melted into the antediluvian brown trousers that ended high above his bare ankles, above the gnarled and hairy feet daggered with fungus-yellow toenails that stood in the puddle he had created.

“I almost had her this time,” he said with a shake of his fist, the gesture of foiled conquest.

“Had who?”

He yanked the golf cap from his head and waved it irritably, scattering drops of water like shards of glass, said, “The mermaid,” and took a step away from his little puddle, succeeding only in dragging it into a river that followed him toward me, and “I saw her in a raindrop.” He paused, his eyes flickering with revelation, looked down at his small puddle on the floor. “Hallo, are you in there?”

I thought if I ignored him he might wander off—after all, it wasn’t my job to babysit Grandpa—and I was very much concerned at the time, as most teenagers are, with the bare minimum expectations of my familial role. Instead he came up to my couch, pushed my legs off one end, and sat down, soaking the cushion beneath him. He smelled like mildew.

“Hey!” I said, “I’m trying to work, here!”

“Emily, dearest. Don’t you ever play outside anymore?”

I snapped my textbook closed, careful to leave my pencil in the right spot, too anxious to lose where I was. “Not when there’s a tsunami outside.”

“Pah. You never seen a tsunami,” he said. “Where I grew up, we had real tsunamis. Great terrible waves that roared out of the ocean like dragons. Houses knocked down like cards. This? This is just a little rain.”

I looked out the window, at the flag whipping into a frenzy as rain turned to television static, as a flash of lightning burst like a migraine.

God, I hated this weather.

There’s not much you can do about it, though, when you live in San Francisco, and the rain drones on relentlessly as an army, and you can’t hear your own thoughts rattling around over the tempest that batters and bruises your raw nerves—when the sky is a seething black mass of artificial night. God. I’m all strung out again thinking about it, here in the darkness. My anxiety was bad before, worse after Grandpa’s stay with us, after what happened, but I’ll get to that.

Sad thing is, I’m not even calmed anymore by the whispery exhalations of the tide. Back then I could stand and listen to the waves, the sea, the sound of the midnight oracle portending moonlit movements and crashing elegies against the broad-shouldered beach, but now I know what might break the surface (so I’ve taken a preemptive strike instead, gone below).

A while later, my mother burst inside in a whirl of rain and wind behind the shield of her umbrella, her typically coiffed hair fallen in spidery disarray over her face. “Poseidon’s fury,” she grumbled, then spotted us. “Dad! You’re getting the sofa all wet. Emily—how could you let him sit there?”

She forced him to go change his wet clothes, at least, before he caught his death. He ambled dutifully up the stairs, and my mother said, “Come on, Emily. Help me out. Can’t you look after him when I’m not here?”

“He’s an adult, isn’t he? I can’t tell him what to do.”

My grandfather had come to stay with us not long after my grandmother died. Heart failure. She’d been a lovely, tiny lady, the daintiest person I ever knew, with pinprick little eyes, but she was surprisingly strong, able to lift heavy flowerpots and muscle her way through stirring thick dough. She was always there, a solid presence, until one day she wasn’t, and we could feel the very physicality of her absence—not just a lack but the inverse of a presence. Mind you, Grandpa didn’t take it well, or at least my mother told me he wasn’t well, and so he came to stay with us.

“He’s forgetful,” she said, sounding somehow ashamed.

But he didn’t seem forgetful to me—odd, fanciful, full of whimsy, but not forgetful. He told me stories of his childhood as sharply as if they had happened yesterday, not sixty years ago.

I couldn’t help but be contrary. What else do you expect of a fourteen-year-old girl? Even when I agreed with my mother, I simply felt compelled to argue. “What happened to respecting my elders?”

She looked at me sharply, then more softly. “Respect is more complicated than that.”

DO YOU want the truth? I couldn’t stand to see my grandfather like that. Here he was, the man who had raised my mother, who had dozens of stories about life in the tiny Japanese village where he grew up, making mischief with his friends, getting drunk on fishing trips, his brief stint as a naval officer. You could see the sea in his eyes, hear the roar of the coast in his voice. Now he was reduced to a rambling senior wandering around barefoot, purposeless, and in the way of selfishness I worried less about his mental state and more about me, about what would become of me when I was too old to tie my shoes—would I, too, someday become such an obsolete creature, force my grandchildren to look after me like a child myself, void of dignity?

So I tried to avoid him, tried to avoid the thought of impending mortality—turning antique, toothless. Hah. What did I know of growing old? What did I know of death? What did I know of the deep loneliness that comes when you’ve been ripped away from your partner of more than half a lifetime?

MY FATHER always came home in the middle of the night. He worked odd hours, so I got used to hearing the creak of heavy footsteps ghosting down the midnight halls—the shadow outside my bedroom door—his indistinct presence, there without a face. On weekends, he materialized on the couch as if he had always been there, feet propped on the ottoman, a bowl of chips perched on the slight bulge of his stomach, a bottle dangling from one hand over the edge of the armrest. Our conversations weren’t really conversations back then: he would eye me skeptically, suspiciously, and ask how school was going with the tone of a mildly curious interrogator, and whatever my answer, he would nod slowly and return to the television.

“It’s because he has no imagination, the poor bastard,” my grandfather told me once. “That’s why he’s always in front of the tube.”

Was the problem, I wondered, that my grandfather simply had too much imagination? Was it that he could no longer quite disentangle the threads of reality from his own woven works? I couldn’t imagine my father going senile—he was simply too matter-of-fact. And you know what? He never did go senile. He died at sixty-eight, still doing puzzles and answering Jeopardy! questions with lightning precision, when a swift-moving cancer swept through him like the tide, sweeping him away before my eyes.

For a while I was terrified of my own mind, which was already prone to flying, dancing, skittering lizard-like from one horrible possibility to the next—an anxious mind. “Getting away from me,” that’s what my mother called it: “Your imagination’s getting away from you again, Em.” Maybe that. Maybe it’s overcoming me. In the end, though, I couldn’t keep it contained, and I guess it didn’t really matter.

A lack of imagination won’t save you, either—in the end.

THE SWEET sleepy silence that falls in the wake of endless rain is like a cool wash of balm easing over shattered nerves, those tender spots like spoiled fruit, and in that wake a gleaming bepuddled world, puddles slick and gray and gathering at the edges where the road dips down to receive the curb. Amid that dreamy lonesome after, after the storm, I couldn’t find my grandpa anywhere, and here I was supposed to be looking after him.

When I did find him—which wasn’t that hard, mind you, he was just down the street—he was standing in a puddle up to his knees. A puddle that should only have been a few inches deep, a puddle nearly flush with the ground. A whisper of a puddle.

But there he was, up to his knees in it. Like he was in a hole, and the dull light made him strange, colorless, sunken.

When he saw me, he pointed—“She’s down there! I saw her!”

It’s amazing how quickly the mind accommodates impossible things, for in a moment I was no longer contemplating the spatial disparity (where oh where were his legs, were they gone, were they gone?) but instead worrying over what a neighbor might think if they looked out their window right now and saw us standing in the drowned street like fools.

He looked up again to see me gaping at him like a fish, and when he looked back down he seemed disappointed. “Oh, c**k and balls,” he said. “I think we’ve scared her off.”

Have I mentioned that my grandfather was delightfully crude? Every time he swore, it was with such imaginative gusto, you could hardly blame him for being profane around children. He made curse words sound as wholesome as apple pie.

He stepped out of the puddle, drawing one pale leg, saggy and dripping, from the inch of water that could not conceivably have contained it, that had swallowed it into some elsewhere, and planting his bare foot on the pavement. His trousers were rolled up to his knees. He didn’t unroll them until we were inside, and when he did they were ribbed with angry horizontal lines.

“Grandpa,” I said, “Look. I know you’re older than I am, and all, but I really don’t think you should be walking around like that. It’s not cool, you know?”

What? You expected an eloquent speech? Give me a break; I was fourteen.

We sat at the dining room table where a lightbulb in the overhead fixture had burned out, leaving us in an uneven half-light that crawled eerily over my grandfather’s face.

“May I tell you about her?” he said.

“Who?”

He hitched up his pants and said with a shrug in his voice, “It would be a lie if I said I’d never loved anyone other than your grandmother.”

“What?” I was appalled—I didn’t want to hear it, this mocking of his marriage, this reminder that he wasn’t just a stock grandfather with stock stories but a real human being.

“Before I ever met her, I fell in love with a mermaid.”

“You…?”

“It was after the worst storm I’d ever seen. Ripped and raged through that piss-little fishing village, bringing the sea with it. A nasty b***h of a wave caught me and threw me, tossing and tumbling. I nearly drowned. Eventually I found myself a bit worse for wear on a flooded road, and that’s where I found her, stranded. At first I thought it was a corpse, but bodies tend to bob to the surface—she floated just below. When I looked down, damn it all to hell and back again, I saw the most beautiful creature staring back at me. Black hair like silk, face pale like the moon, eyes deep as the ocean, breasts— ”

“Grandpa!”

He put up his hands in surrender. “Well, she was beautiful. With a silver tail and everything, though I couldn’t see where it ended. It was long, I’ll tell you that. She said she had come from the deepest part of the ocean. I was smitten. If you haven’t felt those pangs of desire yet, Emily, you will soon I’m sure. Well, we had ourselves something of an adventure, swimming through the debris-ridden road to get her back to the ocean where she belonged. When we got there, damned if I wanted to let her go! I knew we couldn’t be together, but I imagined building a great wonderful fish tank, big enough for her to live in, big as a house!

“Instead, she told me to follow her. Down.

“I’ll tell you this: I considered it. But in the end, I couldn’t do it. What an ass was I, Emily! I let her go. But I came back to see her a few times more. We met at the beach, and sometimes I told her stories, and sometimes she sang songs that could tear your heart out—hypnotic songs. Hers is a voice I’ll never forget. It haunts my dreams.