They couldn’t cancel the summer or the town would die. “Death either way” he thought. But he felt that the talks of closing the beaches where spread with a lack of conviction that almost betrayed excitement. There where more tourists than ever. Shark hats and attractions, shark restaurants and drinks, appeared fungally as if by spontaneous generation.
Even though he didn’t see the attack, he felt the air charge as everyone cried and rushed off the beach and it was enough to start chocking the air out of him. Then the crash of feelings as the moans of his undead rise: “We’re all gonna die”. He tumbled to the parking lot to sort out his panic attack. Nobody reproached his absence in the chaos.
The army therapist had advised him to go to the beach. Exposure therapy. He did and got a job there. He wasn’t sure if it helped, but it felt right. If he’s gonna feel like the beach is underneath reality so that its fin is always taunting, he might as well drive the bastard to the open. He had developed a disgust for reality as if all visible things where just the exposed part of a predator submerged behind an impenetrable aquosity.
He worked security at the beach, not as a safeguard, just dealing with people struggling with that other great liquid: alcohol. And there was something so ridiculous in handling inebriated tourists during work to then go get drunk in his free time. It pleased him to see life be so brazenly absurd.
After the first attack he came back home and set the six pack on the table. “This is it, what holds everything together. There are two oceans that sustain life in this country, coffee and beer, the wax and wane of humanity... And all life comes from the ocean.” He emptied the beer and the splashing foam rolled by his beard, down his gullet. He drank so fast that by the fifth beer he was asleep.
He was in Seaworld, there was a big show in one of those amphitheaters for marine spectacles. He saw the cheerleaders from his junior high school come out and rile up the crowd, but instead of dolphins the figure of a great white shark appeared in the great pool, jumping through hoops. Then the crowd roared, someone was pulled out in rags by officers, it was his old pal Mike, Mike Jabowski, who was killed in the war, he was carried like chum above the pool and then the great sharked rose through a hoop and bit half of him off and the crowds roared.
He woke and felt as a patch of trampled grass covered in dew, breathing heavily in his coat of perspiration. He chugged the beer that was left, warm now, took a cold shower and went to see his family.
He sat at the lawn drinking cold beers to take away the memories of warm beers. His mother was telling him about the attack, they where there, and Jimmy thankfully seems to not have been aware of anything. Jimmy was his brother and was neurodivergent. He sat seeing his retarded brother swim in an inflatable pool, bitterly judging his happiness and judging himself in return for it. He crabbed submerged, with his new snorkel and shark fin, slithering through the pool. And it struck him, the way somethings do immediately, when he heard music play in a neighbors house and felt bitter, not because he enjoyed it, but because he remembered enjoying it. It seemed his brother was the healthy one and him the diseased. “Well, I guess that’s why I medicate” and he finished the beer.
The days after became unbearable to him, the giddy crowds filled him with ever present anxiety. Gulls, pigeons and humans seemed almost perfectly aligned in their malign frantic joy. Everyone with their phones out, making skits, pretending to be dragged down to the indifferent floors of the ocean. “The only place where calm exists probably”. He developed a deep hatred, started acting rashly against the drunks. Nobody complained. He felt out of control continuously. The atmosphere was happy and excited and that was the worst: nothing bad was happening while everybody wanted it to. He felt like the only sane person holding the last remnant of reason as a safeguard in a hurricane of smiling ghosts.
And then one weekend his mother and his brother joined the madness of the beach. He had to get opiates from one of the semi-authorized drug dealers that prowled there, to deal with his own family partaking in the suicidal stupidity of the crowds. Even doped he felt a continuous propensity towards quaking in every movement. He saw his brother with coiling excitement as his mother put on sunscreen on him, barely restraining his body from rushing into the ocean. He flapped his arms for his mother to put on his googles, fins and other accoutrements on.
The dumb happy eyes of his brother, how did he live without worry? There he was, spending the day in the beach, putting things into his mouth. He thought.
Evolution didn’t make much sense to him, why would something as wretched as thought exist, it seemed more just a colossal mistake. A shark, now, that’s pure logic, an elemental creature of numbers, a solid mathematical theorem. Maybe my brother is another one of creation’s triumphs, a correction of a grave mistake.
As his brother got into the ocean he realized that, though he managed to be at the beach, the one thing he hand’t done, and hadn’t even presented to him as a possibility, was getting into the ocean. It might’ve as well been lava, as if water burned. “And how’s that working out for you— being clever?” He remembered that line from somewhere. And then the gasp, and the shouts. He stared dumbly at the crowds, he could hear nothing, just mouths opening and closing, splashes of water, flashes of pictures and solar reflections of phones screens held steadily as even the sun halted to stare below.
He got sick, got up and grabbed the rail to the staircase into the parking lot but threw up before, a stream of acid bile sucked by hot sand.
He left the job, went home and drank to oblivion.
His big brother was looking at the sharks through the glass and he was again a child, fascinated by what seemed an aquarium labyrinth that confused the limits, so that he felt as if they where in a tank too, as if everything was inside a tank, infinite. His big brother took him to the glass of a grand circular pool, surrounded by bizarre seat accommodations in platforms and said “Sharks make love possible” He wondered at this. “In this ocean world you can fall in love and you can get eaten by a shark, and both make each other possible… A shark is the possibility of beauty” He showed him two enormous paintings in the vault ceiling: One, a Venus radiant in a conch of foam where hair, sun and waves mix, and the other, Venus coming out, dismembered, from the jaws of a shark.” He wanted him to stop. “That’s what today’s celebration is”. His big brother unclasped him as he tried to cling to him crying, people grabbed and restrained him “Be proud. Look!”. Everyone turned as his brother fell between the two paintings into the pool with a trumpet splash. He saw him descend through the water amidst a halo of bubbles, eyes open as the sharks swam.
He woke up panting. He had never dreamed about his step-brother Robert before. He took what was left of a beer from last night, it was bitter. He thought about quitting the job. What was the point if he was not able to make the shift like last day? But as he thought and waited to detox from the alcohol and the dream, it was suddenly already time to go to work and he hadn’t made up his mind. “Death either way” That’s what his CO had said then. It calmed him and he never knew why. Either way, he could get more opiates.
It was a good day at the beach. Because he had brazed for the worst, with the help of the drugs and the inexplicably calm crowd that day, the unexpected generosity of life made him feel relaxed, something like a handicapped happiness. That day he didn’t drink because he was frantic, but because he felt almost content and that confused the hell of him.
He developed a sort of dull optimism the next days, enjoying the stupidity of the opiates and the hypnotic rhythm of the water splashing and sucking. He even discovered with estrangement, and almost irritability, that the lazy and benevolent way with which he dealt with the drunkards now, seemed to command some strange obedience in them. Anxiety would try to rise but it calmed down, slowed by deep breathing into a narcotic summer sleep.
The day it happened, it even took a while for him to react, but, when he did, time had already dilated. During the confusion of shouts, cries, selfies and frantic recording, he scanned the beach, he saw on the far end his stupid brother wading from the bloody tide into the strand wearing a buddhist grin. Pleased with his trick of transforming into a shark without anyone noticing. He then looked at the bobbing body half chewed sink, until only the hand remained and it spiraled as in a rehearsed wave and it was sucked down. His chest trembled in a soundless laugh while a wave of uncontrollable sorrow quietly disappeared. In a nervous wobbling he went to get a beer from one of the stands, undressed into his trousers and entered the ocean. He gasped as the first wave took him off his feet, and then, as he steadied in the roll, sipped his beer as he bobbed up and down in the excitement of all the other humans pressed between jaws of heaven and water. “Everyone loves that shark “ he thought as he took a gulp of beer “Death either way”.
Rihanna goes totally casual for Harper’s Bazaar’s March issue.
Thanks for reading
Some Benno prose!? BP ... electric! hah, this was fun to read. I laughed at some of the starting pages and saw myself in the character's habits.
This is a good critique on how death and tragedy are made into spectacle, and that maybe the solution is to drink a beer and invite the shark - so to speak.
Hope all is well!
This was very fine and very fresh. Well done.