Reading with Rasta: From the Lighthouse
From the Lighthouse by Chad Musick. Chapter 1.
When he’s in a talkative mood, Bigman claims he plucked me from the shore. He was out fishing and saw me float by in a basket of reeds. Scooped me right up to love, and love, and love.
Another scooped-up baby grew up and split the sea right open and walked away, calm as could be. I saw it once in a movie. Bigman tells me it’s just a silly story, but
there are days I feel like I too could split the ocean open. Maybe silly stories can still be true stories.
If I could split the ocean, I’d walk away and never come back. If he was being nice when I left, I’d take
Bigman with me, but he’d have to follow my rules. Rule number one, he’d have to let me call him John. Everyone
else calls him that, but he reminds me every day. I’m Bigman, he’ll say, and you’re Knot. Sometimes he even says it out loud.
He’s been quiet all morning, Bigman has, quiet enough that he doesn’t even mutter at me why it is he’s not talking. But I know.
It was a dark and stormy night, but it wasn’t supposed to be. I heard him myself when he promised the neighbors a fine, clear evening. Have a great wedding party! Have cakes and drinks and fireworks and open presents.
The way he said it, he wasn’t telling just them. He was also taunting me.
Please, lemme go. The minute he said no, I regretted having begged. He owes me for that. Since the mess with the old neighbors, I have to beg
if I want to see people. Nobody likes me anymore, even though I’m the same as always.
A long time ago, there’d been the neighbor girl, Annea. Has there ever been a more perfect name? She hadn’t cared I was strange. As far back as then, the grounds
outside our lighthouse were dying. The trees were leafless through the whole year, and the ground always stank of rot. When the sun crossed the sky, mushrooms would rush up from the ground everywhere shade touched.
But Annea would cross the yard like it was a lush garden and ring the doorbell. Back then the doorbell worked. I don’t know whether it does anymore.
Can Knot come out and play? That had been her, ten years old, asking for me, probably also ten or maybe a thousand years old. She didn’t care that everyone else thought I looked five. Maybe a tiny six. She knew I was older.
But that had been years ago. She grew up and fell in love and got sad and went away. And I didn’t. Didn’t grow up. Didn’t fall in love. Didn’t go away.
I’m still here. It’s why it’s just me and Bigman, Bigman and me, forever and ever. So please lemme go to the party? I would have had such fun.
Get in your room and stay there. That was Bigman, telling me who was boss.
Usually, after Bigman promises nice weather to someone, he’s careful to be nice. He lets me stay up late and watch movies, even the ones he’s seen a hundred times, and he fries up oodles of fish. The oilier the better.
But I’d forgotten myself a few days ago and run off. I’m not supposed to leave, ever. He reminds me by making his hands louder than his voice. As though I could
forget that I’m a prisoner.
Leaving isn’t safe. Leaving is against the rules. Rules are important. A boat without rules will sink off the shore, he’ll say, and a little Knot like me without rules would come undone.
Then what would I be? At best, lost and hungry. At worst, someone might snap me up and love me. I couldn’t take any more love without coming apart at the edges.
Bigman doesn’t like it when I leave. You know that, though, don’t you? Bigman says you’re just a birth mark, that I’m talking to myself when I talk to you.
Take your face out of your hand.
We’ve learned to hide it, you and I. You’re a blot a blight a bite a flower of ugly in a field of hideous. But I know you’re special. You’re the only one that’s been with me all these years, yeah? My parents threw me away before I even knew them. Annea ran away when she grew up, and I haven’t yet. I’m probably eighteen,
or maybe twenty or eighty. It can be hard to remember. So you ought to be old, too. But you’re still small like me.Everyone still thinks you’re a nothing.
After Bigman denied me the party, left me to be alone so he could rally his allies on the computer and storm some imaginary cave, I could hear the sounds of the fun
from south of our tower. The music drifted over the waves and broke free of the mangrove tentacles and finally crept up the walls and into the window of my room.
I huddled down in my blankets, stuffed up my ears with my pillows and my clothes and my fingers and still it pounded at me.
We’re having fun, it taunted me. And you’re not.
I went to the window and screamed at them, and their fun stopped being so fun. The moon grew dimmer when clouds scudded in from far away on the ocean. A storm aimed itself like disappointment right at the party, at the fireworks that were just starting.
Fweeee! There goes a firework, spiraling into the sky.
Boom. And the lightning strikes it.
And then? It was a dark and stormy night, oh yes oh yes. The pyromancer must have set the fireworks to go off in sequence. The lightning shot down a dozen before
anyone realized it wasn’t part of the show. The thunder drowned out the hateful music.
And the rain, oh the rain! Bigman says wedding cake is sweet, that it’s like eating a little slice of sugary heaven. But my sickness means I can’t ever taste it.
Not even a little bite. It’s a magic sickness, he says, because I saw a show about diabetes and they could eat sugar sometimes. Sometimes they even had to. It’s a magic sickness, not diabetes. And stop watching those shows.
I think I remember sweetness. Before the trees died, I must have pilfered fresh oranges from the grove. Sweetness was the taste of juice escaping down my chin,
mingling with the delicious knowledge I have now, that Bigman had lost track of me for a moment. Maybe forever! That last is my foolishness. Bigman would never lose me forever.
He loves me too much for that.
I bet cake doesn’t taste so good after the rain has come down on it. The burning embers of the aborted fireworks came down like broken promises, and the rain
fell harder and harder, first washing off the frosting and then cratering the spongy deliciousness of the cake. The little statue of the bride and groom fell over,
toppled to the table, tumbled to the ground and was smushed underfoot by the fleeing people. That’s what I think, anyway, because I don’t see so well when I’m being the storm.
If it didn’t happen that way, Bigman wouldn’t be in such a foul mood.
#
My window is the world, high above itself. The afternoon showers have finished, and I can hear the peacocks croaking murderous lies to each other
somewhere far south. Nothing but mushrooms lives here anymore, not since Bigman stopped taking care of things. There must have been a time when he took care, but I don’t remember it.
Once, he told me, this was meant to be a lighthouse. Your room was supposed to hold a giant lamp to warn the ships from the shore. My room doesn’t warn ships, though. Without the lamp, I live in a useless tower with a beautiful view. On a clear day, I could probably see all the way to happiness, if my sight were better and I took off my goggles.
In the story, Rapunzel let down her long golden hair and her prince climbed up it and rescued her. If a prince comes for me, he’ll have to use the stairs. Once, I told Bigman that.
Let me tell you how the world works, said he.
No prince will come. My hair is not long. My hair is not golden. It is short and thick and spiked, the white of fish bones, more porcupine quills than beauty.
Lucky I don’t need rescuing.
Sneaky as a strangler fig, I put on my explorer dress, check my goggles, climb out the window and edge down the tower to the library window. The tide is going out, releasing the smell of algae baking under the sun. Fishing will be good, when we go.
In the library, Bigman sits at his computer, looking out the other window. He doesn’t notice me slipping in, doesn’t hear the step of my feet on the timbered floor. Bigman thinks he’s the only one with secrets, but I’ve learned to keep some, too. Don’t see me, don’t hear me, I tell him.
Here he is in front of me, rubbing his wounded thighs with one hand while he types with the other. Without looking, he wipes his bloody hand on the towel he keeps by the desk.
Even sitting down, he’s taller than I am. As though I could forget, he’ll remind me. You’ll never be big like me, he says. I’m small, and I stay small, and so he is the one who forgets. You learn a thing or two over the years, you do.
When he’s hurting most, he reminds me he plucked me from the shore, and took me home to love, and love, and love, and I bit him for his troubles. I wish I could
remember the taste of it.
That bite still bleeds, he tells me sometimes.
Whenever he says it, I grin at him, showing him the same pointed teeth that pierced him.
Most times when I peek in on the library, he’s playing video games. He rages when his knight falls, screams in victory when he wins, yells at the people in his
headset to learn how to play. He throws things a lot. I like to watch him lose.
Today, though, he’s emailing.
Re: Last night’s weather
I know you’re upset about the storm, but nobody could have predicted it. I only promise to make my best efforts, not a miracle. You can keep the other half of the payment, and I’ll keep the deposit. Deal?
No thanks to Bigman that I can read. He kept me from school, and I learned to stop begging. He thinks I watch only cartoons, but I’ve learned more than he knows from my shows. Even the ones I can’t remember.
Bigman likes to make deals. He didn’t make a deal with me about the storm last night, though, did he? No, he didn’t. It’s his fault things didn’t go the way he wanted.
Back out the window I go, and down the tower and down the beach to the water. I’ll have plenty of time to return before Bigman realizes I’m not in my room. He won’t need to hunt me down because he won’t know I was gone.
The blue crabs are playing in the surf, and I chase the seabirds away from them. Our beach used to be popular. Children would drag their parents here, and the families would pick along the shore to find discarded shells. The children would scare off the birds and giggle at the sand between their toes.
A few people still come. The ones who don’t know.
The locals stay away.
Away from the shore, back at the house, the afternoon heat is baking the rot that used to be an orchard. The mangrove trees, brought by wind or chance, have taken root along the shore, and it won’t be too many years before they’ve eaten the beach entirely.
Bigman has never liked the mangroves. They’re not supposed to grow this way, he’ll say. He’s tried burning them a few times. Tried poisoning them. Tried cutting them. Nothing gets rid of them.
He doesn’t like things that don’t grow like they’re supposed to. That means me, too. I know it, and I lie among the mangrove roots and let the waves lap at me
until I’m calm, and then I go home, climb my tower, and pad downstairs on salt-wet feet.
Bigman is playing video games now, and I let him see me.
Bigman with a big nose, and it’s useless. I could smell the brine and the seaweed and fish scale on me from miles away, and he just wrinkles his nose standing right
next to me. He doesn’t know it means I was at the water, in the water, of the water.
You always stink, he says. Go take a shower. Not a bath, a shower. And I laugh and laugh as I sit in the tub while the shower head fills a bath for me.
#
Let’s go fishing, Bigman says when he’s decided I’m clean. He must not be too mad about the storm.
It’s the evening that we should have had the night before, the sun at our backs as we head down to the 10 brackish water with my fish bag and his pole.
Our shadows are spreading in front of us, and he’s Bigman of course, but I’m Bigman, too. Rawr, I raise my arms up with my bag, and the shadow me rears up as a
serpent, taller even than Bigman. I could snap him up in my jaws, chomp chomp chomp.
He doesn’t like it when I’m silly, but we’re going fishing and so it doesn’t matter much. The fish will make us both happy. He never gets tired of catching them.
When we go together, we don’t take the secret ways to the secret beach. That means walking through the gardens. Bigman can’t walk quickly. He shuffles himself
along. He used to be a lot faster, but time has taken a toll on him. Like he got double time and I got none. He says I’m bigger, but I don’t feel bigger. I see he’s older. Maybe older than me and surely older than he used to be. He is getting smaller every year.
When your beard reaches the ground, will you die?
Maybe he doesn’t know. When he plays video games, the kids make fun of him. He’s an old man with an old man voice and an old man body, bent over like a dying tree.
Can you hear the beetles in the wood?
He doesn’t answer me, but the beetles do.
We can hear ourselves.
The garden is a dead thing if you only look at the outside. Inside, it’s not dead, just changing. It’s shedding its skin like a hermit crab moving from its shell. Soon it will look for new clothes.
Mushrooms come, the beetles say. They’re usually right, but it’s been a decade since the last tree died. Maybe they’re wrong, this time. Maybe they mean that mushrooms come for Bigman.
When we get to the water, the tide is low but rising. Bigman pretends he’s going to use his pole, just in case anyone comes by.
We’re alone together, and he sits in the water. He winces when the first salt hits his wounds, but he rubs his legs softly, scoops water onto them and winces again, until he gets used to it.
The pink froth doesn’t scare the fish. They’re used to blood in the water. It’s only people that get funny about such things.
Go ahead and catch us some dinner? He smiles when he asks. It means all of me is forgiven for last night’s storm, and he didn’t catch me sneaking out earlier.
I leave my clothes like a castoff cocoon on the beach. The evening is peach silk, ballet slippers, and a sleek dress. Maybe tomorrow I’ll wear a tuxedo and top hat. Some days, the costumes are all I need.
Them and the sea. In the water, I am home.
Come see what I have in my bag. I call out to the fish, and they come to look. I don’t let them back out, except the young ones.
I swim for a while even after the bag is full and writhing. At sunset, the mermaids—manatees, the Bigman in my head corrects—drift by to see what I’m doing and whether I’ve left any trinkets for them.
The day is coming.
Mermaids aren’t supposed to talk. They never have before. They like to gather up people’s junk, bits of polished glass, whatever is shiny, but they don’t talk to me.
Maybe I’ve been swimming too long and have a brain fever. Bigman has warned me about the fevers.
I swim back to the shore and get dressed while Bigman starts creeping back, carrying the bag of fish. Out of the water it’s too heavy for me. They still flop around.
Lucky us, it means they’ll still be twitching when we get back to the house.
Bigman will chop off their heads and tails. We’ll feed those to the clowder of cats that live on the fringes of our blight. Blackie is here, which is why I’m telling you about the cats.
Fish tonight, Knot?
Blackie must smell it on me. She likes me best. Some of the other cats are shy, but crooked-tail Blackie has been forward ever since she was a kitten. I give her a toothy grin and she gives it right back.
We walk so slowly back, so slowly that I’m skipping circles around Bigman as he plods along, and Blackie is batting at the bag with her claws pulled in. She doesn’t like them getting stuck.
Every year Bigman is getting slower. Maybe soon he’ll stop entirely, and I’ll leave him here in his empty castle on his ruined lands. See how well he fishes when I’m not here to help.
Did you leave the door open? He looks at me sharpish, and I shake my head in denial.
Of course I didn’t.
Sometimes, over the years, the nasty kids from far away have invaded. “Are you a boy or a girl?” It’s the first thing they always demand to know. And Bigman always shoos them away.
That’s nobody’s business unless you’re romancing them, he says each time, and laughs.
Can you even see with those things on? It’s the second thing people ask. Bigman doesn’t shoo those people. Sometimes he is those people.
That’s nobody’s business unless I’m hunting them, I say. I don’t laugh.
The door is open, and Bigman staggers up the stairs as fast as he can and yells in pain. “They took my computer!”
The vegetables are scattered on the floor, and they’ve daubed the floor in what looks like blood but smells like ketchup.
The day is coming.
Bigman’s good mood is gone, and he leaves it to me to chop the heads off the fish.
#
This bright morning, Bigman swaddles his legs in gauze and shuffles his way to his truck.
Clean up the mess. I’m going to get a new computer.
What if I wanted to go?
But of course I never go. It’s been a long time since I left our grounds. At least that Bigman knows about.
Cleaning up is boring. Boring!
Good enough, to pick the fallen things up. Good enough, to splash some water on the floor and wrap my feet in towels and waddle around like Bigman.
I find Blackie and her friends and give them last night’s fish heads, and I’m still alone.
If I left, maybe he’d be too slow to catch me?
Better not. It’s not about speed, now is it?
What d’you think, Blackie?
Search his treasure? Is that what you think? Oh, you wicked beast. You clever beast.
I can’t ignore my friend’s suggestion.
Bigman’s room is a mess. He’d call me a pig if mine were like this.
Among the dusty cables, the half-read novels, the musty old clothes, there is a bag of silver fragments that click and sparkle.
You know what they are, don’t you? They’re just like you. I didn’t know he’d kept them.
The last time I saw these, a year or a decade ago, it’s so hard to remember, he was telling his lady friend that they were guitar picks. He’d even used one to strum a bit, and she’d laughed in delight.
He sent me away when he noticed me, when I forgot to make him ignore me. The woman had looked at me in surprise, too.
She’d been wearing a costume, just like me. All shimmery scales and big poufy hair.
And shame.
Yes, and shame. I could smell it on her. Bigman never smells of it. He sometimes smells of anger or jealousy or pain, but never of shame. He’s like a cat, that way.
The fragments beg to be touched. They smell of loneliness, but I don’t like to look at my skin.
You say you’re white, I asked Bigman, once. What color does that make me?
Because Bigman’s the white of pig belly, of earthworm. Until he gets sun, and then he’s the white of unripe tomato, when it’s not green anymore but the red
is just bursting to the surface. Too soon to eat, too late to yank from the vine.
You’re white too.
The white of maggots.
Or milk. Blackie thinks she’s clever.
I fetch some milk and pour for her. Maybe she is clever.
So I’m white, but my hands are red fishnet on white pain, except for you, my friend. You fit in my palm, and Bigman doesn’t take you because he can’t recognize
that you’re special, too.
But your friends are back now.
Solve the puzzle.
Bigman showed me jigsaws once, when the weatherman reported a hurricane was headed our way.
Our house should stay dry and safe, shouldn’t it? Our neighbors might be in danger, but I’m not, and you’re Knot, yeah?
He stayed up all night with me, showing me how to find the edges first, to piece things together by shape and color, by touch and memory. And he was right, that the
storm didn’t bother us. It had been good it didn’t bother us, so we had time for the puzzle.
So I know what to do now, don’t I?
I start at the edges, the places on my hands where the red lines stop and give way to the unbroken ugliness of my arms.
The first one is the hardest to find.
And then, I do.
It’s a relief when it sticks to me with only a little help, like taking the first swim of the day and feeling my bladder let go.
And then the second, the third, the fourth
Finally, the last one.
The clicky silvery of the fragments, which Bigman had once used to play a guitar for his friend, feels like part of me now.
My hands are silver gloves. The gloves feel more real than my skin ever did.
And there you are, nestled in the center, almost glowing with happiness that you’re not alone anymore.
And I remember so much. I know now what Bigman has stolen, because these are mine and these are stolen. Each of them is a year of my life, and without them
I was left with only the shadows. I could remember Annea, and that we must have been friends, but not that we loved each other. Not that we whispered secrets. At least, until the deaths.
And I remember Bigman, and what he’s done, and who he is, my captor. Bigman won’t like this at all, will he?
I hear his truck wheezing up the road. I’ve dallied too long in my memories, and I want to blast his truck with lightning, strike him dead and run, but in remembering I
know it would do no good. He is a crooked old man only in his body, just as I am a Dragon only in my soul.
Blackie knows none of this, only that I have something new. She goes into my hands.
Such lovely hands.
I put her out the door. You know Bigman doesn’t let you stay.
One at a time, I pluck off the scales.
That’s what they are. That’s what you are, my heart.
One gone, and a drop of blood, and I can’t hear the dolphins playing in the distance.
Two gone, and more blood, and I can’t smell oysters grilling anymore.
Each one plucked is a loss, a diminishing. By the time I pluck the last one, I’m bleeding and crying, and I don’t know which is blood and which is tears, and I am so small.
So alone. I can remember something is missing, but not what, like waking up suddenly from a wonderful terrible nightmare hope dream.
I stuff them all back in the bag. All except you. You, I leave. You are mine alone.
The bag of scales, all the blood gone and drunk by the scales, goes back into his closet, and he rattles the door and curses as he drops the first box and goes back for the other.
We don’t talk about his computer. We don’t talk about the scales.
He is Bigman, and I am Knot. Not yet ready to escape, but hoping that’s what the mermaids meant, that the day of my escape is coming.
#
We still have some left from last night.
Bigman doesn’t want to go fishing again. Every time he leaves home, he comes back worse than he left. All afternoon, he tinkers with his new computer. Cursing,
sweating, exclaiming with delight as he finally gets it working.
When I make myself small, he doesn’t notice me. You know that doesn’t mean I can just leave. If he wants me, I have to make myself bigger, show him where I am so that he doesn’t come searching.
But now he’s distracted. I bring him a whiskey.
I didn’t ask you to bring this.
You don’t want it? The smell of thirst is pouring off of him already. I start to take it back, and he snatches it from me.
It’s not long before he’s not thinking of me at all, and I’m out my window and down the tower. But I’m full on fish, and the grounds sound wrong. Water is splashing where it doesn’t belong, in the fountain.
The green wizard—the arborist, Bigman would say, if he could read my thoughts—said the water was poisonous and that’s why all the trees were dying.
When Bigman turned off the water, it just made them die faster. They were never meant for the weather we have, too little rain because it makes Bigman’s bones creak
and so we sing rain rain go away, and it does.
But now I can hear the fountain running, splish splashing against the evening noises. I pick my way along the stiff weeds. Even they don’t have enough to keep
them alive. The driveway is torn asunder by poisoned tree roots, leaving only a narrow way where Bigman’s old truck shambles through on the days he goes out.
That’s not many days anymore. The delivery truck brings us vegetables and other groceries once a week, but we mostly eat the fish. I don’t mind, but he gets sick of it sometimes.
Hello, fountain. My face looks back up at me in dirty water. My reflection is wearing its own goggles that reflect the fountain. The little stone boy is cheerfully pissing rusted water into the pool.
There’s a valve at the base of the fountain. I know the secret, where the water can be turned off. It’s no good to waste it. We still need it in the house. It’s too poisonous for trees, but Bigman says it’s good enough for us.
I’m underwater on this place already. I can’t afford to sell it and I can’t afford to move. He spends a lot of time worried about money, but not much time trying to find any, it seems to me.
I twist the valve, but the water doesn’t change. It keeps leaking into the fountain. Another broken thing that Bigman will say we don’t have the money to fix and won’t come do it himself.
The sun goes down all of a sudden, while I’m trying to get the water to stop. When I come up to check it, the water isn’t just there anymore, it’s glowing like so many
of the fish do if one is quiet and doesn’t threaten them.
A trail of faint light leads off toward the edge of our property, where the trees and the bushes start growing again. I risk catastrophe and lift my goggles, and the light vanishes. I put them back on.
I haven’t meant to follow the path, but I find myself now in the dark beyond my home, away from the angry neighbors with their jealous wedding cake.
The old neighbors used to be old, but these ones are young. They don’t notice me hiding in the bushes watching them.
The adults don’t, anyway. I’ve been spotted by the child.
You don’t see me. She ignores that and sees me anyway. Soon, she’s sidled up to the bushes and is staring right at me. When they’re that close, it’s hard to make them stop noticing.
The day is coming. She whispers it at me. I don’t know what she means, even though I feel like I should.
She whispers again. My birthday is coming. I’ll be six. We’re going to have a party. You should come.
Oh, my heart, I have missed the little girl so much since she grew up. What was her name again? This one isn’t her, I know that, but she’s taller than me, like the
other one was, and when her blue eyes look at my blue lenses, the ones that hide my milky eyes (like damn cataracts, Bigman says), she doesn’t step away and she doesn’t reach out to poke them.
Will you come to my party? She’s so hopeful, so pure and pretty and just who I wish I could be, that against my better judgment I nod. She smells like kindness. I’ll come to your party.
I’ll be six. Bring me a present.
Her parents call her away. They don’t notice me. The way it should be. When the girl waves goodbye to me, they ask her. “Who are you waving at?”
Her voice is smiling. “My new friend. There’s a new friend in the bushes.”
They cluck at her and laugh.
“No, there’s Knot.” They know I’m nobody’s friend.
Recognized, I dash away home. My heart is hammering loud enough Bigman must hear it rattling the glass of his window as I climb past, but when I’m inside I hear him snoring. He knows nothing.