Tantalus

Tantalus

By Nicholas Becher

I am writing this piece for a very specific reason. And although I say that with conviction, I am not really sure what the reason is. 

When I was very young, I went to my first funeral. It was an uncle I never knew. I watched my grandmother weep as they lowered her son into a grave. My father, a king in my eyes, bellowed into my mother’s shoulder as the rest of us prayed. To this day, I have never spoken to my family about any of this. I was just there. An observer. An innocent, ignorant child. But I will never forget my grandmother, now in her late stages of Alzheimers, or my father who has told me a hundred stories of his brother, and the pain I felt in them at that moment.

This last weekend, I was reminded that I am human. It’s funny. Times I begin to lose myself I am shaken awake by an all too familiar and inescapable pull. I was back home in the Midwest. My parents own a house in the country on a 5 acre plot of land. In Missouri, around October, clouds roll in from every direction, and they spark and shimmer in the blackness of the night. The air is still beneath you. You can feel yourself hovering in the breeze. And in the distance, while I sat in a lawn chair inhaling cigarette smoke and polishing off the last sips in a bottle of whiskey with my best childhood friend, I could see a flittering blue and purple cloud flicker above the far-off city. My friend and I had nothing else to say to each other. So we just watched the purple and blue fill the spaces between the expansive black night sky. 

The next day I met up with a woman I hadn’t known for very long. She had a smile that made me remember that I had skin, and that I had a pulse, and that I could breathe. We walked through a cemetery in the twilight with a hundred stars staring down at us. I told her that the people beneath us, all the bodies in the ground being melted by time, that they were all thinking, conscious things at one point. I told her that they spoke to people and made those people cry, or hurt, or love, or laugh. And that just by mine and her’s being there, adrift in a sea of corpses, recognizing that they had existed at all, that we were tapping into something eternal. I held her hand and we stared at the grey tombstones. A hundred thousand names etched into marble. The air was still cool beneath us, and I felt safe, like their breath from underground was holding us in place.

In Greek mythology, Tantalus was punished for butchering his own son and offering him as a meal for the Gods. His punishment was to stand in a pool of water with a fruit tree above his head. When he grabbed for the fruit, the branches would rise out of reach, and when he went to drink the water, it would recede so that he couldn’t drink. Tantalus became the symbol of wanting something unobtainable. 

Most of the time, I am moving. And I fool myself into thinking that is what makes me human. But there are moments - subtle moments - when I am reminded that movement has nothing to do with life, or with being human. These moments occur when I am perfectly still. And when I allow myself to stop trying to eat the fruit or drink the water, to listen to nothing and know that it is all there - those moments are where I belong. 

There is a mountain on Oahu where the road winds up and up and up into heaven. You can get into your car and see the island from every angle. You can hear the wind blow down from space and taste the meteorites falling from the milky way. I was there by myself, staring out at Honolulu on the day I arrived back from the Midwest. I was waiting for something to happen. For a cloud to roll in and spark with that beautiful blue and purple electric. And not long after I found myself hoping for that electric cloud, I realized that I was reaching both up and down for an answer. For a way to hold on to this fleeting second of my life. 

They call that mountain Tantalus.

I’ve been trying to figure out what I should say to those people who have lost someone they love. I guess most people who have to give the condolences assume some kind of responsibility; that their words are supposed to help in some way. But honestly I think that is a bunch of bullshit. And most everybody realizes that a simple ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ just doesn’t quite get the job done. I think that ultimately we say these kinds of things because we know there is nothing that can be said, and the sentiment itself helps, even if it is in the smallest way. 

But what I wish I could say is that I can still feel the sweat between my fingers from when I held that girl's hand. I can still feel the cold air beneath me keeping me afloat in that cemetery. I can still see the flashes of purple and blue in the blackness of the Midwest autumn. I can still feel the smoke in my best friend’s lungs as we looked out across the place we had grown up in together. I can still hear my father howling in my mother’s shoulder at his brother’s funeral. The moments we feel have gone forever, the people we believe we have lost, become tangible again, palpable, non-illusory, resurrected in the stillness, defining our character. And only when we are still do we realize how beautiful all of that is, and how lucky we are to have been a part of it. 

Hāʻole

Hāʻole:

A tragedy by Nicholas Becher

Breathe

They call me the haole. The breathless one.

There is an ocean in every direction and the tide is always taking people outward and outward. I thought about who I would tell about all of this. About the waves and the tide. I couldn’t think of anyone else to write. So you will read this - or you won’t - and this will all seem so unsolicited and uncanny that you might just feel me on the other side of the world calling out to you.

What I mean about the outwardness of it all, here on this island, is that nothing is ever here to stay, and nobody is ever home. Everything is always headed outward. I was alive one time - I mean really alive you know, like when we used to go into the cemetery across from the high school, when I would hold your arms into the grass and you’d soak up the dew and the surfacing skin and bones of the beautiful dead. I was alive like that, on top of a mountain that overlooks the entire island. I heard of this place you could climb a million stairs and you’d be in heaven. So I go there, up a million stairs, and I’m just so alive. And I’m in heaven. I’m in the clouds and the ground I stood on wasn’t there anymore. I was just an angel with wings looking out at everything that had disappeared. Nothing was real anymore. The people or the cars or the skyscrapers. Nothing was there. It was just the Earth, unscathed.

The day after I climbed the stairs, I was sitting at home with this girl. She was there with me on the mountain, we had climbed it together. This was about two years ago now. I was with this girl and I loved her. You know how I get with these girls - falling in love every Saturday and by Monday I’m destitute in a corner of my bathroom with the shards of a shattered beer bottle interspersed between my legs like a stained glass window. But I thought she was a safe bet. Not a safe bet that smells like desperation and loathing. A safe bet like I felt her so much in my heart that I couldn’t lose.

Well I was with this girl after we climbed those million stairs, and I was just thinking back on the orange-pink clouds cascading across the skyline and the cool morning air falling down from the stratosphere. I’m sitting there on our couch just staring out the window at the rain, and she sees me and realizes that we would never be there again. That we just climbed to the top and that was as free as either of us would ever feel as long as we were in it together. And I could feel her start to pull away from me just then - well her heart, you know?

All of it reminds me of that summer after freshman year. When you and I had those shitty restaurant jobs at the pizza place next to the middle school and we’d go to the Triple-A hockey games every Friday night. You were dating that fat kid with the pretzel nose. I remember you were telling me how his chubby gut flopped over his pecker and reminded you of a baby’s belly button. We were out back by the creek smoking Camel Unfiltered and I was laughing so hard I choked on the smoke. And I keeled over coughing up this cigarette smoke so hard that I lost my footing and rolled down into the creek. I was soaking wet. You laughed at me and helped me out and ran your hands through my wet hair, dirty blonde in the sunlight between the tree branches overhead. And I could tell you wanted to kiss me but I never thought you would. But when you did, it changed everything for you. Before that, the pretzel nose kid was just what you needed. Then you felt more and knew he wouldn’t be enough. You left him the next day.

That’s what this was like. This girl and me at the top of the mountain. You and the fat kid in high school. One moment we think all of it is ethereal and we sing our swan song, until the next moment when we see what heaven is like and we’ve lost our sense of rhythm and harmony all together.

So they started calling me the haole. The breathless one.

One day, just all of the sudden, I was alone. I was here on this island with the impossible task of self-definition. I had this idea, before she left, of who I was and what I was supposed to be and where I was headed. Then she was gone and I felt the whole purpose of my living here had been denigrated. And all the people on the island were watching me lose myself - lose my breath.

Like I said that was almost two years ago now. But today when I was sitting in the back of my hatchback with my laptop writing a poem about the ocean, I looked out at the drop-off into the ocean where a little ledge protruded out, and an old Japanese man walked up to it at a snail’s pace. I imagined his skin falling away from his bones as he took each infinitesimal step toward the black-green sea. I imagined him exposing his forever-hidden feathers underneath that skin. I imagined him becoming a seabird and flying away. But as he inched his way toward the ledge, he looked down at the cliffside leading into the abyss. He looked out toward the setting sun - a sun he had seen repeating itself since he was a child - throwing its rays horizontally through the atmosphere, illuminating the island in its expansiveness. He looked up through the glow of the blue sky and saw the stars in his mind’s eye. Then he looked, finally, back at me looking down at him.

He mouthed something to me. Just a word without any sound, “Breathe.”

And he closed his eyes and stepped out over the ledge, falling like a leaf into the waves crashing against the cliff below.

I don’t know what happened with the Japanese man. One can only assume. I just sat and watched the sunset, trying to breathe. Because if I had stood to look down and find the man in the water, 30 feet below, it would have all been lost. The knowledge and wisdom and love that the old Japanese man could instill in the final experience in his body, all lost. So I just sat there in the back of my car with my laptop and let the island fall asleep. Then I moved to the driver’s seat and drove away. And the whole time I moved across the concrete, I dreamt the man would only fall long enough to grow his wings to take flight as the seabird within him. Birthed into a new mind. Born into a new self.

I dreamt you were somewhere in the South, maybe Arkansas or Georgia or Louisiana. You always loved Baton Rouge, although I don’t think you ever went. You were always pretending you had that drawl. I liked that about you - that you could imagine you were somebody different from yourself. I dreamt you could sense me thinking of your golden eyes.

I dreamt you were trying to breathe - the same as me.

The haole. The breathless one.

Dragonflies

There were dragonflies everywhere.

Springtime in the Midwest with your parents and brothers. We were too young to drink but your mom and dad didn’t mind as long as we didn’t leave the house. Granted, it didn’t take much back then to get me to pass out on your couch. They knew me for so long they probably would’ve let me sleep in your room downstairs, but I wanted to be respectful and I know you hated that.

Your backyard was on a hillside and your little brother was throwing a frisbee in the air trying to hit the dragonflies. They were too fast for him. He launched the frisbee and it caught a gust of wind and I remember everything seeming to move in unison - the dragonflies and the frisbee and your brothers short brown hair and your mom and dad dancing to Fleetwood Mac on the porch. Everything was swaying to and fro in perfect harmony. But the frisbee caught the wind and wedged itself between some branches in an overhanging oak tree. Your backyard was on a slope so we were straining our necks to try to get it down. Your brother must have been five or six at the time.

I don’t think there are dragonflies on the island. Sometimes I go to a little spot in the mountains that leads back to a tiny waterfall. And if I look at things at the perfect moment, the dust in the air might be whisked away by a sudden wind and look like a little bug with dragonfly wings. But that’s the closest it could be. They have geckos here. I sometimes see them slither in between the cracks of the sidewalk and I try to imagine what life would entail being so small. Every maneuver so delicate.

I suppose it’s not that much different than what I do every day.

I grabbed a fallen branch from the woods at the bottom of the hill - one long enough to reach the frisbee in the tree. Your brother grabbed the biggest stick he could hold in his tiny hands. I couldn’t help but smile at the little guy. The branch I held was about a foot short of the frisbee, so I started jumping into the air to knock it down. Every time I jumped, your brother jumped too. I could feel you behind me falling in love.

When I first moved here I lived down in Waikiki. I came to this place with that same girl I climbed the mountain with. I imagine you would want to know what she was like. That’s what was great about you and me - you never got jealous and I didn’t think you could make mistakes. But I know you would’ve wanted to know about this girl. You never met her but she was beautiful. She had green eyes. The greenest I had ever beheld. She was small, like you. Maybe a hundred pounds on a good day. And her hair was jet black. But I think the most beautiful part was her eyes. They had this way of making you forget what other colors looked like. As if you saw this celestial jade and it blinded you. The rest of the world, for a few seconds after, was a poignant green.

She had been living here a few months before I moved. So she had the place in Waikiki all set up. It was a shitty apartment. Smaller than our one bedroom in Bayless, over by the Dairy Queen. And there were roaches crawling through the electrical outlets and a moldy scent to the carpet and the ceiling had dust that hung like tiny stalactites. But I didn’t hate it. In fact, it was the happiest I had felt in my life up to that point. The first time I set foot in that grungy place, my heart was so full and pure and infallible that none of it mattered in the slightest.

There was a night when the green eyed girl had to work pretty late - she was waiting tables at a cowboy bar down on Kalakaua - and I was drinking Jack straight from the bottle. So I was sitting there reminiscing, listening to the screaming tourists fuck each other and forget themselves, when one of these geckos slithers in through the doorway to the patio (I would later find out that on the island, a patio is called lanai) and starts to make its way across the wall. At first I thought about grabbing it and throwing it back outside, but I was drunk and I didn’t really feel like hurting anything, so I just let it go.

The gecko makes its way over to the outlet, and it just sits there staring down at the three prong holes. And I’m there staring at the gecko, who is staring at the holes. Then I start to wonder if someone is staring at me, staring at the gecko, staring at the holes. And then I start to wonder if the roaches inside the holes are staring at something else and if all of us are just staring and staring and staring like we are in an art gallery. Until, finally, a roach peeks its little head out of the hole in the outlet. And the gecko just waits and waits and waits until the roach decides to make a run for it. So the gecko sees him lunge out of the hole and snatches the roach into its mouth.

I started thinking about the dragonflies. I started wondering if your brother turned out anything like that little gecko. That patient little guardian. A few months later I would find out that, in Hawaii, geckos are a sign of a spirit that watches over you when times are hard. I saw it in a film I watched for college. Some heroin addict looked up at the ceiling as he was about to shoot up and saw the gecko staring at him. Just staring and staring. And he sticks the needle in his arm and starts to spiral into a euphoric high. But when he gets back, the gecko is still there. And the guy thinks that the only reason he survived that trip was because of the gecko. The patient little gecko.

Staring and staring.

Landfill

Landfill

By Nicholas Becher

I first met Devil Dan at an AA meeting back in ’97. I wasn't an alcoholic. I was just a writer with no fucking clue how to come up with interesting characters and it seemed like a good place to start. And that was that.

“Used to work at this landfill, see,” Devil Dan told me. “And one night… this is a few miles east of St. Louis, see. And one night I’m out there cleaning the shitters in the staff bathroom… this was back in ’78, see, I was a janitor. Worked overnights. And I hear this yelling and screaming and it sounded like someone or something was getting the soul sucked out of them, see.”

He was a jittery guy. He had this twitch in his right shoulder like he was always dancing to an upbeat jazz ensemble. He had the palest skin I’d ever seen on a man. And his eyes were different colors. One black and one crystal blue. I remember that crystal blue like it was my own goddamn reflection in a placid lake.

Devil Dan and I were sitting on this grey stone bench during our one-on-one at AA and he just starts unloading his story on me while I’m drinking cold coffee and chain smoking cigarettes. Dan asked me for a square and it broke in his hand while he was trying to light it, like he had Parkinson’s or something.

“Go on,” I said, “Take another.”

“Sorry. Thanks. Sorry,” he said, collapsing in on himself with remorse about the cigarette.

“Well, you heard the yelling and then what?” I asked him.

“Oh yes, sorry. I started making my way up this ridge, see. This was when I had a gimp leg from falling off a ladder around Christmas. And I made my way to the top of this ridge all limping and such and I see these two trucks backing down a gigantic dirt ramp into a hole. I mean this hole, this ramp, must’ve been sixty, seventy foot down, see. They were probably digging it all day. And the ramp was just massive, man. I mean massive.”

He hadn't taken a single puff on his cigarette, so when he said this he moved his hands up and down and the giant ash at the end broke free from the cherry and fell onto his pants without him realizing it. I really wanted to wipe it away for him. It was bothering the piss out of me. But I didn't. I just let him go on.

“So these two trucks… I mean these were tractor trailers, eighteen wheelers, semis. They start backing down into this hole, see. And me, well I’m up on the ledge on the other side of this landfill just looking down squinting real hard at all these guys bustling around and yelling at each other. And I’m squinting and squinting until my eyebrows are sore. Then I hear that screaming again, see man, it was… and this isn't a joke man, this is what I really heard. It was coming from inside those trucks. It wasn't anything I’d ever heard before though, see. I was only twenty-six I guess. And this screaming wasn't from anything human I’d ever heard in my life. It was like a hundred cats being burned alive or something. I don’t know man, something I can’t explain to you right here right now.”

Get the whole story here, on Amazon or iTunes!