The Ancient Shark Of Despair's blog

Monday, May 07, 2007

We were waiting at her door and Sarah was crying. Carolyn answered and let us in. We sat round and I asked her if she knew that we were here the whole time. Yes. She said that she didn't have the heart to let us know, we were so into it.

I told her about the magical effect her house had on it, it must have been enchanted. She looked at me strangely like she didn't know what I was talking about. She smiled so that it was okay, but you could see she wanted to know too.

"That's the funny thing." She said. "We all just want to know the same. But what does it get you?"

"I don't know." I told her.

"My house isn't enchanted." She told us. "I guess that it has just absorbed so much of me over the years. That's what happens when you have as many emotions as me. You grow like that and then everything around you gets jealous and tries to latch on."

She turned to Sarah. Smiling, she placed her hand over Sarah's eyes. How it must have looked to her, Sarah. How she must have seen things that last moment that she held her eyes open as the hand progressed. She must have learned something, I'm so certain of that. You see, her hands were warm and being in this house you felt as though your own warmth depended on how close you were to those hands.

Sarah stopped crying and whispered something to herself. We all stepped closer and asked, "What did you whisper there?"

"I don't want to learn." She said. She only said it a little bit louder than the first time, which was a whisper. Only this time her whisper turned itself into something in our ears.

We all could hear her triumphant anger, just saying that she was through with all of this was enough for her. I turned to ask her what happened, but Carolyn stopped me. I almost thought that her hand was on my eyes, that's how hard it was to see. I couldn't talk either. I just wanted to say that it was okay. You know, how I usually do.

Sarah said this to us, "I'm not cut out for this."

I tried to gasp but I was choking.

"Look, it's okay, Shark." She just carried on. "It's just that... I've been dragged across this tired country and just waiting for things to happen and I'm not even sure if you knew what you were doing half of the time. Actually, it's not okay."

I looked down and thought to myself. I didn't want to feel angry, I know that it would have been wrong. I thought of all the corny feelings shows on TV that I have watched. I was thinking about all those non-sitcoms where adults tell children how to feel when things go wrong and I looked at my stomach, growing slowly. I don't remember any shows where they're telling you how to feel about being fat.

Sarah's looking at me through a gap in Carolyn's fingers and I wanna snap at her. She looks down to where I'm looking, which just happens to be be my stomach. I'm about to tell Carolyn that Sarah is peeking when Sarah keeps talking.

She says that it's all just turned around so quickly and now all of a sudden she's got no bearing. She says that it all makes sense now and at the same time she can't bear it. What could she do? I tried again not to choke but it all fell through. I almost jumped with excitement when I realised that I wasn't in control. That's how emotions work.

Moe was standing quietly. He was just a shadow. He was looking down. I bet he was thinking about that guy at the fair and how he wouldn't know what to do here. He wouldn't know how to deal. He wouldn't have any frame of reference.

"This house is lying to us." He said calmly. He was quiet about it, but he didn't need to whisper.

Sarah cut him a sharp look. Carolyn's hand stayed so still that from some angles it looked like she was doing the ripping away.

"What?" We all mouthed.

"This house is lying to each one of you." Moe said again. His posture was so straight. His voice was steady. Like a rock.

He bolted out of the door, we were hardly already in it. Sarah took off next, scared to lose her rock. She shook the ground with her jump, she jumped so far from the door off the front steps, she was so quick. I didn't realise until a few seconds later.

Carolyn was looking at me, crying. She held her arms out to hold me, but then I guess just in her own imagination she saw doubt and pulled them back in. She clenched them back to her body. She gripped in against her chest so hard that her sleeves started to pull open, I was sure she would be naked in a second. I turned to run but I felt like I couldn't. I thought my eyes worked perfectly, but all the time that I needed to see something it just looked too bright. I was so sure that if I had to fight, my blows would take forever. I couldn't move fast.

My running was agonising. It took so long to move and the whole time I could see Carolyn being crushed yet again by another person. My head could work fine. I could turn around and look at her and back again and all this is really fast. It's just my damn body that taking so long.

Moe calls me and for a second I forget. I look out at him and I realise that he isn't too bright for me to see. I think to myself it must have been something else the whole time. Something in my eyes or something.

I burst out of the doors and practically fly. I look back at Carolyn and she's tearing herself out of her clothes. Her body so tense that her not being able to move is what's doing it in the first place. She's couldn't even stop it if she tried, all her clothes just tearing off.

As soon as I get out of the door I'm moving too fast and I don't feel that guilty about Carolyn anymore. I'm thinking that it's not really my fault anyway.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

I almost thought Moe would be telling us how he told us so. We were all rushing out of the house, but it's funny how quickly things changed. It's funny how quickly we all made up for what had happened and agreed that it was Carolyn that had turned us against each other. It was the house in all truths, but it was Carolyn's emotions that made that house the way it is. You can't just blame the house for that sort of happening. The house isn't real. Carolyn is real.

As people we apologised to each other and Sarah said that she didn't know what she was talking about and that all she ever wanted to do was to learn from me and she didn't know why she ever ran out on me in the past. She understood what I was doing the whole time, not so that she knew better than me, just that she understood me the way that I wanted her to understand.

"I'm sorry that I didn't trust you enough that I ran out." She said.
"I'm sorry that I tried to take Moe with me, it wasn't right. He's yours, not mine." She said.

Moe nodded quietly and he quickly looked like he forgot what she said. He knew the whole time what was happening and could always tell how our emotions were coming out wrong. Emotions are okay when you're using them to be nice to people, nice to each other. The way it became, we were throwing them at each other and I even wanted to have Sarah hurt because she was saying that she didn't like some things about what was going on and that she didn't like some things about how Celene fell in love with me when she did.

"Moe, how did you do that?" She asked him. I looked at him and showed him that it was okay. Go on, Moe.

He smiled and his lips looked like they would blister if he smiled anymore. you can't hold that sort of thing in. His lips held tight and it looked like his cheeks would burst and all his thoughts would explode all over us. He just kept quiet and maybe shook his head, still smiling. I remembered that this is how his friend at the fair had done it and I worried for a second that maybe he would fall into the same trap. It would be hard to be friends with him if he couldn't talk right any more.

Carolyn looked out from the door and tried to speak and we thought that we wouldn't hear her because of her emotions. But it turned out to be because we didn't want to know what she thought in case we found out how she felt and got sucked back into the emotion house.

"You can't trick us like that." I told her.
"We don't want to go through that again." I told her.

She cried at us and we all looked away except for Moe. I don't think that there's anything that guy wouldn't want to understand.

"Pssttt! Hey, Moe." I tried to get his attention. "Don't look at her tears. She'll use them against you."

He waved my advice away with his hand. He looked at me with disappointment on his face, all tired. I was scared that his emotions were getting out.

"It's so sad." He said to me. "She's stuck in there and we can't help her."

I nodded and smiled bleakly. I think it's about time to get out of here.

He started to move slowly towards her house.

"We can't just leave her here. We have to help." He said to me.

I thought I saw him wink. It would make sense, like he was telling me that I shouldn't believe what he was saying. I ran at him and tackled him to the ground. He freaked out.

I'm a shark. Being tackled by a shark is usually a sign that you're going to die, if you're a human. He started crying.

His emotions were leaking out his eyes. I wanted to slap him, but I couldn't work up the will to inflict pain onto Moe. I spat on him.

He tried to push me off of him, but he could only use his one arm. His other arm wasn't working. He used his working one to wipe the spit off. I looked at him and tried to explain what was happening to him.

"Get off him!" I hear coming at me.

I turned to see the speaker but before I could see I was forced violently to the ground. I heard what sounded like a wild beast screaming. I could hear its wild breathing.

It was tearing at my skin, but I didn't want to fight it off. I could see Moe from my position on the ground. His eyes were calm and his body was still. He taught me right there that you don't need to fight back in life. I felt secure knowing that he was okay with what was going on. He was lying ont he ground with his head turned towards me. He stood up.

"Get away from him!" Carolyn shouted again. "Get away from my son!"

Moe. Moe was her son.

She had stopped clawing at me and even backed off a meter or two. I think she was scared that I would retaliate. She moved slowly towards Moe without taking her eyes off me.

"Are you okay?" She asked Moe, constantly switching her eyes between me and him.

He nodded.

She fixed her eyes on his.

"Why are you crying?" She asked him. He looked away.

Friday, May 11, 2007

"You're his Mom?"

Carolyn shifted uneasily. She looked at me and pretended to laugh. I tried to stare her down, but it wasn't like I couldn't have guessed. The way she smiled at him and was always on his case in silence , I guess.

Moe is Ashkenazi. Being so clever that he turns to sadness. You can see it in his reluctance. It's like he's just always aware of all the things that we spend most of our time ignoring. I think the rest of us just spend our time thinking that the world's the way it is and nothing changes and all the while you've got Moe just in constant realisation that anything he says now isn't actually going to hold up. I think maybe I'm like him, though. I can usually see stuff like that. I've got the perspective.

I couldn't believe that Carolyn was Ashkenazi too. The way she says her things is like there is nothing outside of her being there right now. It's like she can say things with no consequence. Could she be Ashkenazi?

"No." Moe said, and you could believe him.

We were sitting a mile down the road on an bench on the side of the highway. Sarah waited behind us, there wasn't actually enough space on the bench for all four of us. We were working all of this out. Just plain sitting down and acknowledging the issues. Pretty serious stuff.

"Moe is... He's..." She offered. "He got it from his dad. I just don't want to talk about it."

"Okay." I said.

I joked to myself about how the next logical step would be to burn down the house. People get really attached to homes. That's why hers turned out the way it did. I'm always telling you guys that you have to just let go. Now you see what happens if you don't for so long. She just got so attached, ended up making the whole house this dirty extension of her needy pain. I wouldn't call it pain though. Moe's got pain. The real stuff.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

"Let me tell you about him. Let me tell you how I met him. Then you'll see."

Said Carolyn. About Moe's dad. Carolyn had this gushy daze in her. She was talking about love.

"We were training at NASA and he was the top of out class. He didn't talk to me much. He wasn't very good at it. He would always get confused and smile shyly. He didn't really talk to anyone that much. He spent most of the time in his room, just working stuff out.

"We always joked that he had vanished again, but he would always come out with a scruffy beard and all the same old clothes on. One time he did actually vanish. He had gone for a walk after class and was all into problem-solving, the type that sends people into space, and wound up two cities down. I can imagine how it must have been for the locals. I can imagine having to try talk some sense out of that boy while after he's just gone mad for a day and walked his way into another world. You never really know that guy.

"They almost dropped him out of school, but it's funny how admin works. I don't think they ever got round to kicking him out. He was still there when we all graduated and he was the only who made it into space. When I found out that he had been chosen to go, I knew that there was something special about him. I wrote his name in my diary over and over again, until it didn't even make sense anymore. I drew pictures of our hearts being sent into space and I listened to all my favourite records. Looking into the mirror I mouthed his name and nearly cried.

"Later that night I snuck into his room. I had never been in there before, I don't think that anyone had. There were newspapers piled up everywhere, he said that they were for him to read when he woke up from this dream. I guess he laughed real quick and apologised. I told him that it's okay. I looked around his room. I felt like a princess."

"Why don't you get some nice posters up on your walls, Ric?" she asked him. "There's no colour in here. It's funny."

He didn't respond too much. It was like he wanted to first work out what before, but by the time he said it, it seemed like he'd removed himself from their conversation.

"Hey, I know." She spoke to him again. "Why don't we go down to the bar tonight."

"He looked at me for a while and mouthed different approaches. He ended off saying that he guessed we couldn't wind up not doing that. We sat around at the bar down the road and I found myself chatting to some of the guys from our class. I told them about Ric's room. About how he had this tunnel where you had to bend down to get through the newspapers. I told them about how he was using books with a plank as a shelf to hold more books. We all laughed at that. We liked the irony. The one used to be my boyfriend. But we agreed to just be friends.

"We were tipsy. You couldn't tell with Ric though. He still didn't talk much. He just grinned when you joked with him. He joked that he didn't understand, laughed nervously and apologised.

"I got Ric to take me home, we were all living next to each other in these NASA bungalows. He seemed hesitant. We ended up in his room surrounded by all those newspapers and glass bottles and the walls were just lined with the stuff. His bed was in the center of it all, we just sat there and I talked about how I always saw the world and he kept making these jokes about how he didn't really see the world. Always laughing right afterwards and smiling shyly. He would grin after that and I smiled at him seductively.

"I talked about that guy that I had gone out with. I talked about how that guy didn't understand me. Ric understood me.

"I told him I had some more booze in my handbag. I asked if he wanted some. All the time I kept looking at those crazy newspapers and thinking about how it was like we were in a magical newspaper castle. I was pretty tipsy and I ran my hands along his leg whenever I laughed.

"I don't think that we ever really thought much of each other before that. I certainly hardly even noticed him. He was a bit geeky. But that night, love told us what to do. It's funny, you can't say 'no' to love."

Carolyn looked at us smiling. Her eyes looked fresh, like she was young again.

"That's beautiful." Sarah said. She smiled back at Carolyn. "True love."

Moe was standing just outside of our circle. I motioned to him to come closer. "This is about you." I thought. Moe took a step backwards.

"You see, Honey." Carolyn said to him. "You see how I met your father? True love."

Monday, May 14, 2007

"We have to find him." Carolyn said to us all gathered in a circle. "He's just drifting in space without us. We have to make a plan."

"Guys?" Sarah pleaded gently. We just stood there, frozen. I think I might have been drifting in space myself. Moe's eyes were all over the place, but he wasn't about to tell anybody anything. I think he was the most frozen.

Carolyn told us why he was special. She told us about all the wonderful things that he could do with his mind and how she never really appreciated that until now.

"What do you mean 'until now'?" I asked her.

"You know. Until this. Until you guys." She told us.

I wondered how long he had just been drifting out there by himself. I think all that mattered right now was that there was something right to do and we could so do it. I looked at Carolyn hard. I looked into her soul. I opened my mouth slowly just to let her know that I was going to speak and that she should pay attention. This is important.

"Are you ready?" I mouthed. Then I said it out loud. "Are you ready to find him after all these years?"

"No..." She answered. "I mean 'yes'. I mean 'I need your help'. All of you. You need to help me."

I stared at her steadily. I will help you. I will help you, but only because Ric needs help. He's more important than us at this stage. I can just feel it. If only I knew why at that point.