The Dockweiler State Beach was nice and relatively crowded. There were people spread out over its shoreline. And people were scouting it out either on foot or on rollerblades. Others were relaxing on beach chairs, under a canopy or inside a tent. The parking space was crammed with RVs, compact cars and motorbikes. It was starting to get a little dark when Antwone had gotten there – by way of a taxi – and the setting sun was casting its last rays over the ocean, making it glitter like millions of diamond shards.
Liv found him standing by the main entrance and led him to the lot she and her friends had a settlement on. A long scarf was wrapped around her neck and it slightly trailed behind her. She wore strappy sandals and her footprints were so small in the sand that they looked like a child’s.
Her friends welcomed Antwone in their midst as if he’d always been one of them. They were a merry bunch, a little wild and loose-jointed in their manners perhaps, but they were in their twenties. And in an unreal place like this, being wild was the way to be for it to serve its purpose. Plus they really knew how to kick back and they easily numbered to fifteen. And the ones Antwone had seen the night before were there too. Including … what was her name––Monique. She extended her hand now and he was glad he could remember her name and make it clear he did remember it. That kind of attention usually set pretty well with new acquaintances.
Apparently, their little get-together had been going on for the best part of the afternoon. Now they sat around in a circle and were drinking out of plastic cups, and eating snacks out of wrapping bags.
With the sun coming down, it was time to light the fire. And so wood was bundled together into the shape of a pyramid inside a fire pit made out of stone. Pretty soon, with the use of lighter fluid, the fire was lit. Someone brought in a bag of marshmallows and the fiesta was really started with their roasting.
There was a pair of musicians in the group and they performed chill-out music under the cheering of everyone else. They were good musicians and they deserved every bit of cheering they were getting.
With their hearts lifted and their limbs loose, some even began to dance around the fire; in solo or in duo or in trio. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that they didn’t have a care in the world. They were relatively young and they were solemnly dancing to put that youth to use, to almost feel it fuel their insides and let it move their legs and bounce their heads.
Antwone later realized that these young folks were living life the way he hadn’t. There was a difference in the mentality. He had chosen to look at life and write about it because living it meant risking making a spectacle of yourself, just like they were doing right now, waltzing around the fire.
And Liv… She was sitting not far from him, and she was clapping her hands and she was laughing and he could see her face between him and the fire and suddenly he thought about Mary, because, just then, it had occurred to him that Mary and Liv both shared the same way of laughing. Both their laughter came more from their eyes than it did from their mouth. It was a good laughing. It made you want to snap a picture of it.
Later on, after the dancing had let up but the chatting and the drinking was still going strong, Antwone pulled himself away from the group and walked down to the edge of the shore. He looked out to the Pacific Ocean but was not overawed by its infinite vastness. He had seen it all before, during his deckhand days.
Some airplane noise mingling with the sound of tidal waves beating against ridges of jagged rocks made for a hypnotic lullaby. And so, Antwone stood there, alone and losing track of time. But then he felt someone approaching him from behind.
“Seeing anything interesting out there?” Liv asked him.
“Only waves,” Antwone said. “Pounding and pounding.”
She came up next to him and looked seaward. After a moment she said, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Cold and unpredictable, that’s what it is.”
“You don’t like the ocean?”
“Oh, I’ve sailed on it.”
“Really? Like on a boat?”
Antwone smiled at the inanity of her question.
“Of course on a boat. It was a freighter. I was a deckhand on it.”
“Boy, what do you know! You don’t look tough at all.”
Antwone turned to look at her and she was grinning.
“That’s because I’ve never had to spar,” he said. “But if someone messes with you, let me know and I’ll knock them around.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
She nodded toward the ocean again. “What was it like out there?”
“Calm for the most part,” Antwone said. “But grueling all the time. The job was physically demanding so every bit of rest was appreciated.”
“You travelled a lot?”
“Yeah.”
“You miss it?”
“No. Not really.” He added an afterthought later, “I used to write little notes and put them in a bottle and drop them at sea. That’s a hobby I miss.”
Liv smiled. “What’d you write in those notes?” she asked him.
“Thoughts, you know,” he said. “What I was thinking at the moment.”
“And what were you thinking?”
It was Antwone’s turn to smile. She really had the curiosity level of a child.
“Gosh, what was I thinking back then?” he repeated lightly. “That’s actually a pretty good question.”
Sustained, high-pitched laughter suddenly sounded from Liv’s group of friends. Other similar laughter resounded from among the group as well.
“Sounds like they’re having a lot of fun,” Antwone said, looking in their direction.
“Want to go back?”
“Not just yet,” he said. “But I’m not holding you up.”
“Let’s walk along the shore,” she said and Antwone thought, Why not?
So they walked along side by side. It was dark all over. And there were several bonfires lighting up the shore. Clustered around the fire pits, people were partaking in some sort of singing activities with a drink in hand, sometimes two. Antwone saw someone expertly juggling three sticks on fire. Suddenly he felt like having a smoke but resisted the urge.
“By the way, it came back to me,” Antwone said, “how we met the first time.”
“Yeah? Well I’m glad. I knew you’d come around today if you remembered.”
“Oh, so you knew that.”
“Yeah. I have this thing. I can almost read people. And sometimes I don’t even have to try.”
“Is that right?”
“Believe it or not.”
“Oh, I believe you.”
She eyeballed Antwone.
“No you don’t believe me,” she said. “You’re just being sarcastic.”
“So how do you do it?” Antwone said
“Don’t have to do anything. I just pick up the little things about people, you know. Things that give them away.”
“I happen to think I’m pretty good at that stuff too.”
“I watched you tonight,” she said. “And even before that when you came around to the restaurant.”
“Isn’t it rude to spy on people?”
“I wasn’t spying. I was simply watching. I wasn’t sure about how to approach you because I was nervous as hell and it’d been so long. But I felt this connection, as crazy as it sounds, and––well, you know what happened next.”
“Things could’ve happened differently,” Antwone said. “I may have not turned out here today.”
“But you did turn out. It’s like we’ve both come full circle, huh?”
They walked in silence for a minute then Antwone said, “D’you pick up anything about me then?”
“Yeah,” she said. “The stiff look, the introverted attitude. The hallmarks of all tormented souls. No wonder you’re such a big-time writer.”
Antwone laughed.
“Alright, alright,” he said. “That’s one point for you. What else do you see?”
?
??Besides the crazy calm,” she said. “I see a secret. You don’t want people to know about it because it’s yours and yours alone and it’s perhaps the only thing worth telling that you don’t want to share with the world.”
Antwone’s face backtracked a little bit. He thought that Liv was good. She was able to pick up on things like she had said.
“I’m like that myself,” she went on. “I don’t tell a lot of things to people. But I like finding things out.”
“You’d make a formidable private eye.”
She giggled. Then, in a serious tone, she said, “Sometimes I think that my over eagerness is a left-over from the years I was doing drugs. Meth … speedball … LSD. I used to do a lot of it and other stupid things. That’s around the time we met. I think I had hit rock bottom by then.”
Antwone remembered the shape she was in. The way her hands were shaky, the way her eyes were slightly unfocused, not from tears because the guy she was with, Harlan, was roughing her around, but from only being half aware of what was happening to or around her.
“What happened to that guy?” Antwone asked before realizing maybe the timing wasn’t good to ask such a question. But Liv didn’t seem to mind.
She smiled to herself and said that she didn’t know. Antwone would never know who Harlan was to her. She must have been quite submissive to him.
“Sometimes,” Liv said, “when I feel bad, and I mean real bad to the point I may use again, I repeat the words to myself. Your words. And they just do the trick of setting me straight again.”
Antwone hesitated. But he had to ask her.
“What did I tell you?”
“Thought you said you remembered.”
“I clearly don’t remember that part.”
She looked heavenward. The night had gathered a few hours ago already and there were no stars in it save for a flashing dot emitted by a flying airplane.
“Ask the sun not to shine,” Liv suddenly began. “Ask the rain not to fall. Ask the world not to go round. But don’t ask men to change. Because you’ll do them wrong. Because they became what they became. Clever but unkind, strong but hard. And they know it cannot be undone––”
She turned to him.
“But you,” she went on, “how could you possibly know? It was never your fault. Because you are an angel. They look at you and they see your light. And they crave to consume it. Because to them you are an angel. And you are falling far from grace––”
“—And it’ll be a real pity,” Antwone said, “if you fell all the way.”
“So you remember now?”
“Yeah I do now. My sister… It was a poem she wrote for me. We were young then.”
“Oh, is she a writer too?”
“No. She liked what I wrote. And when I doubted myself, when I didn’t think I could do it, she’d write a poem in secret. Then she’d read it to me and, if I liked it, then she’d tell me she’d written it. It was her way to tell me if she could do it, then I could do it, way better.”
“So she knew you like the back of her hand.”
“Conceivably,” he said.
Far ahead in the distance, over a stretch of terrain that seemed completely vacated by the present beach-goers, there was a volleyball field and, in the dark, the poles holding the nets looked like big toothpicks jutting out from the ground.
It was precisely at that moment that Antwone realized that this little walk downwind on the beach was something he was enjoying, maybe for no concrete reason; maybe because Liv was alongside him or maybe it was for the natural beachy setting.
Next to them, the ocean was chiming its guttural, wave-breaking music, a music that made a good, pleasant noise because it never got in the way of your train of thoughts but instead accompanied them all along, and made you want to open up and talk about one thing after another, just so the moment, this moment of emotional communion, would last a little longer so to be remembered by.
“There was this lighthouse by the house where we grew up in,”Antwone suddenly said.
“Yeah, where was that?”
“Fall River.” Liv gave him a puzzled look and he added, “Massachusetts.”
“Is that where you’re from?”
“No, I was born in Upstate New York.”
Liv smiled. She said, “Monique is from there.”
Antwone nodded.
He found the coincidence amusing. Then, after a beat, he said, “The Borden Flats Lighthouse, you could see it from thirteen miles off from anywhere along the waterfront. Our house was on the bank so the lighthouse had become sort of an anchor point, to my sister and I. We’d sit for hours just looking at its beacon and it was all about being in the moment and forgetting about everything else.” He paused for a second. He saw that she was listening to him, not just hearing, but listening and he said, “You know about that sensation, right?”
“Yeah, I think I know.”
“I forgot; I think I forgot what it was like to just … to just be … in the moment, you know. Because there are no consequences when you’re in there, there’s no thinking, no planning, there’s no fear of what may or may not come next. It’s just you in that single frame of time, and good or bad, those things mean nothing when you’re in it; you can accept them both and appreciate life as it is because all you need to be happy is in that single moment and outside of it you’re simply lost––”
He struggled with what he was trying to say; and the way he was trying to say it did not help with his elocution. So he started over:
“I feel like I’ve been lost for so long. After a while I thought if I just kept focusing on writing then I’d be all right.”
“Aren’t you?”Liv asked him. “All right, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the thing, I just don’t know anymore. I used to walk everywhere when I lived in New York. Actually I do that here too. I think what I need is a good moment of clarity. The kind of clarity I used to have when staring at that lighthouse in my youth.”
“You know, if you feel lost,” Liv said after thinking for a moment, “just look around to your friends for clues and you may find yourself again.”
Antwone grinned.
“Is that a received wisdom or you got it from Life magazine?”
She outpaced him swiftly and came up in front of him. She wanted to face him. She wanted him to know that he should not take lightly what she said. “You know, as the saying goes, ‘Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are’.”
Antwone stopped walking because she was looking straight at him and walking backwards and he did not want her to trip on something and fall.
“What if I don’t have any friends?” he said.
“Then I’ll be your friend.”
“Are we going to be friends?”
“We already are, aren’t we?”
A smirk had formed on her face. She was a funny girl. And Antwone could use her friendly company while he was in town. He smiled to let her know that he was okay with them being friends and all. And they walked along. They talked some more. She was easy to talk to, Antwone thought. Even though from then on he left the deep personal stuff out, he knew he could talk about it with her and not feel anxious about how it’d all be received on her end. She intuitively understood things. And that was good enough for him.
Just now they were coming upon an oversized drawing carved out in the sand. An oversized slogan was also put to it. But it was quite dark and the light coming off the bonfires illuminating the beach did not help much to make it out. Antwone could make out some of the letters. Plus some of them were lost under the beating waves. Other than that, you could still make out the people who roamed by on the shore. They were blurs at first, then when your eyes adjusted themselves to whatever light source was there, you saw the people as discernible shapes, and you also saw their shadows, and you could tell one from the other because the shadows were more geometrical.
A little while later, Liv got a phone call from Moniq
ue who was wondering where the hell she was. Liv hadn’t realized they had walked out on the group for such a long while. She told Antwone that they should go back.
And they did.
11