Open Water by Caleb Nelson (books to read in your 30s .TXT) 📗

knife. You heard the sound rattle in your chest, pressing shut unserious features. Total eclipse. When you came to, you were beside yourself. This is what it means to die, you thought. Total eclipse. The sky turned black. Ha. You looked in one of their eyes and saw the image of the Devil. He had an index finger gripping the trigger, like he was holding onto a lifeline. He looked scared, behind the crumpled forehead, the hard eyes, he looked scared. He looked scared of what he did not know, of what was different. He looked scared because instead of questioning himself, of interrogating his beliefs, of not filling in the gaps, he continues to look at you as a danger. You fit the profile. You fit the description. You don’t fit in the box but he has squeezed you in. He looked scared. They all did. You wouldn’t accept their apologies, nor their extended hands, because even these are weapons in the darkness. Easy mistake to make. Second time this week for your friend, playing dead. Let’s ask anyone else who has ever fit a description: you ever had to play dead? Have you ever not been seen? Are you tired?

But when it happens to you for a second time that week, you have to tell someone, even if it is yourself:

I was just walking home. Usual route, cut through the park. I’m what, thirty seconds away? If that. There’s a car stopped at the intersection. It’s weird, cause it’s late, ­pitch-­black out, the headlights are off, but the car isn’t parked, there’s a driver and a passenger. It’s only when I really squint that the headlights flick on, full beam. Blinding. And then the car comes towards me, real slow, snail’s pace, man. I could jog faster. Anyway, I start moving faster, but I know the car is gonna reach me before I get to my door. And when it does, the driver winds down the window, but doesn’t say anything to me, neither of them do, just drive by real slow. It’s weird, I didn’t even notice the police markings on the car until they had pulled away.

It has only been a week since she called you and suggested that when you disembark from the DLR, you get an Uber to her house. You have spent the time tumbling. Today, on Saturday, you wake late in the morning. Your mother and father are already awake. It has not been long since they returned from Ghana. Something is not right. You can feel it. You enter their room, and your father is sitting on the edge of his bed. His shoulders have slumped inwards. He has slumped in on himself. A stale trail of tears runs down his cheeks. You pull him up and hold him close, letting him breathe in the comfort of your arms.

‘Your grandfather is dead,’ he whispers.

Grief rattles about your mind like a loose pebble in a shoe. You can’t see where you’re going. You call her. Despite everything, you call her, your closest friend, tell her that you’re tired, in your spirit, that you have made peace with dying but it hurts all the same. And she sits on the phone while you weep, remains on the phone in silence when the tears have stopped, distracts you with her raucous humour, and when the conversation has run its course she reminds you that she’s there, always there for you.

But even here, you are hiding. You cannot tell her about when your father walked into your room one evening, holding out the tiny black phone he uses for international calls.

‘It’s Grandad.’

Your body stiffened. The phone was still there, in your father’s hand, the static on the line audible from a distance. You know of the man on the other end of the line: you speak a few times a year, ask each other customary questions about your lives, your health, but custom is where it stops. He is family, yes, but you don’t know him. You take the phone to your room.

‘Hello.’

‘Oh. You don’t call me?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You don’t call me. I never hear from you. I don’t have long left. You have to call me more often. I could go any day now.’

‘OK,’ you said and, dashing out of your room, returned the phone to your father.

Coming back to your room, the shame you were experien­cing gained distinction. He was right. You didn’t call him. He was in his eighties and, after several strokes, required assistance to live.

In your kitchen, you wonder what your tears are for: the loss of him or the loss of yourself ?

To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not when it will spill.

What you’re trying to say is that it’s easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulner­ability. Not better, but easier. However, the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate.

At some point, you must breathe.

13

Several months after the fever breaks, you are walking from your house in Bellingham to your friend Imogen’s place in Gipsy Hill. It’s May now. You see an extension cord trailing in the grass like a loose thought as a woman slices a blade through overgrown hedges. A man walking past, coming downhill, carrying his daughter. Tiny gold hoops in her ears. She grips on his shoulder, straddling either side of his torso; his arms around her waist. Sunlight chasing them down the hill. You walk on.

In her garden, you sit with the family. Two brothers, her father, Imogen. Her older brother fetches you a beer, the neck perspiring. You unpluck a button on your shirt, feeling a few beads of sweat release themselves from where they were trapped between material and skin. You all sit, basking in the first hints of summer sunshine, the lazier heat which rests and doesn’t shift. Time slurs. You’re holding