The Murk

“What are you doing here? How did you get this gig?”, Ziggy asked me. He was leaned back in his plastic chair, his guitar resting in the nook between his thighs, it was a classical, the kind with the stubby neck and soft, nylon strings.

“Are you not enjoying your time with me, Zigmund?”, I said, holding out my hands for the guitar. Ziggy passed the classical to me over the small, round table between us. I fished around in my shirt pocket and came up with a loose, bent cigarette and a match. I struck the match on the leg of my chair, lit my smoke, drew deep, then nestled the filter of the cigarette into the place between the string and the headstock on the guitar. Then I attempted to tune the instrument.

“I enjoy it as much as anyone can enjoy a tumor, I suppose.”, Ziggy said.

I looked up from the guitar and met his eyes, we both laughed. Ziggy was young, maybe twenty-two, good kid, real “child of the world” if you know what I mean. He was German by birth but you really couldn’t say that he belonged to any one place. He’d lived in South Africa, Thailand, Chile, the states for a while, Brazil, Timbuktu, The Land of Oz, you name it. Kid never stayed anywhere long enough to grow roots. Ziggy also had a real gem of an accent, some hideous bastard tongue, a mix of Spanish, American, and German, it was the aural equivalent of suicide soda.

“Really though,” Ziggy said, “What are you doing here?” He nodded in the direction of San Cristobal.

“Is it so hard to believe that I’m just here to cook for you and your fine family, Zigmund? Maybe get a tan while I’m at it?”

“Yes, it is.”, Zigmund said. “What business does a man your age have spending the last six months slaving in kitchen the size of a closet for a hundred dollars a week, sleeping on a boat almost eight-hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador? What are you, forty?”

“Thirty-eight.”, I said gravely.

“You own a house?”, Ziggy asked.

“Yep.”, I said, tuning the guitar again, doing more harm than help.

“You have a wife?”

I nodded.

“Kids?”

I shook my head.

“What gives?”

“Vasectomy.”, I said, “We have a cat.”

“No man! What are you doing here with a house and a wife in Arkansas? Mississippi?”

“Tennessee.”, I said, a little offended. Then, doing my best to mimic his accent, “Well, man, what are you doing here?”

“It’s my dad’s boat.”

“Ja, Zis I know.”, I said in a cartoon, uber German accent, Ziggy smiled, “but zis one should be in schooling, nien?”

“Nien.”, Ziggy said flatly.

“Yeah, you should.”, I said, “You should be studying pottery or… anthropology or something, ever thought about school in the states? Lots of good music in the states these days.”

“I’ve thought about it,”, Ziggy said, “thought about Prague, too. Maybe Germany, Paris...” Ziggy looked out at the purple-glass water reflecting the day’s last sliver of sun, rolling in swells through the dusk, breaking and whooshing against the hull of the small yacht, the island of San Cristobal shining on the water like a golden beacon, “…but I don’t know.” He said this as if he were in a dream, and I think he might have been, I think we both were.

“I know.”, I said, still tuning the guitar. Ziggy looked at me, questioning; Yeah?

“Yeah,” I said, deciding the guitar was as tuned as it was gonna get, “I know, it’s the same reason I’m here.”

“The mind boggles.”, Ziggy said, leaning back in his chair, crossing his tanned arms over his chest.

I plucked my cigarette from its place on the guitar and dragged, it was dark now, the sun had just winked out over the horizon and the last bit of violet after-glow was fading fast.

“My agent found it for me.”, I said, inspecting my cigarette as if it were very interesting, “This gig, I mean.”

“Agent.”, Ziggy said dumbly.

“Richie Katz, but I call him ‘Paul Stanka’ because he looks like a Jersey Boy and he bathes in Drakkar Noir.”

Ziggy looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. “Agent.”, he said again. I nodded.

“I’m a writer.”, I said weakly, looking at the guitar, noodling little chords to hide behind.

“A writer.” Ziggy said, looking for the cracks.

“You some kind of horribly mutated parrot?”, I said.

“What do you write?”

“Short fiction, for magazines and such. Mostly horror, some fantasy. I have two books, the first one did pretty well, people seemed really excited about it, the second… well, we had high hopes, didn’t we?”, I smiled, he didn’t buy it.

Ziggy worked this over, having a taste, “What were they about, your two books?”

“Two cowboys who hunt vampires.”, I said reflexively, I’d learned to just rip the band-aid right off, it was always going to sound a little silly. Ziggy looked amazed. I cleared my throat, “Ehem, it was supposed to be a series, my Lord of the Rings, but uh… like I said, the first one did pretty well.”

Ziggy was quiet for a time, his face said that he might be able to accept that, maybe, then he said, “Why didn’t they like the second one?”

“I don’t know…” I said looking up at the sky, the night was moonless and the stars had begun to peek out. I knew why they hadn’t liked the second book; it was because the first one had been good, really good, it wasn’t perfect but that story had bones, strong ones, and a voice. The second book…well, it wasn’t bad, it was worse than that, it was mediocre. No one seemed to care about it, which, I think, hurts worse than a bad review. I’ve been scared ever since.

“So, you’re here to write.”, Ziggy said, now that he had his answer, he seemed a bit dissatisfied with it.

“Eh.” I shrugged, “Research is more like it.”

“I don’t understand.” Ziggy said, his brow furrowed.

“Don’t understand what, Zig?”

“You said we were here for the same reason.”

“I did, and I meant it. Writing may be how I got here but I’ve come to expect it isn’t really the why. Well, I know it isn’t. I haven’t written a damn word, nada, zilch, zee-ro. You and I, Zigmund, we are one-in-the-same, we may have been born to the land, but we belong to the sea.” A look of stone reverence passed the boy’s face, “You know it and I know it, it’s the only reason you aren’t doing keg-stands at Ohio State or polishing baguettes in Paris. Paris? Paris is nice yeah, but all cities are the same, you know that. This place…” I searched his face for the words, “…this place is miraculous. Right now we sit off the coast of San Cristobal, one of four Galapagos islands inhabited by people, four of thirteen. And on those other nine islands? Fantastic creatures! Myths. Things of fantasy. Giant, hissing tortoises the size of boulders, black iguanas with regal posture and serpent grins, seabirds with queer, pastel blue feet…” I began to giggle, “…lions that swim in the sea!” Ziggy smiled. “I guess I just had to see it again.”

“Again?”

I nodded, “I was here before, when I was younger, my grandparents took me on a National Geographic tour of the islands.”, I looked at the shining beacon of San Cristobal, feeling a little tired, “I was thirteen.”, I looked up at the night sky, the stars were in full force now, a mad scatter of twinkling light, so total, so mammoth, brushstrokes of nebula and smears of milky way.

“We don’t have that, where I’m from.” I said, gesturing to the stars, “Oh, we have you regular sort of constellations, your dippers, your minors and majors, but that…we don’t have that.”

Ziggy said nothing; I went on, afraid of the silence.

“We stayed on this little catamaran, my grandparents and I, there were maybe fifteen other people, three or four families. I really dug it man, from moment one. I had lived in Tennessee my entire life and had never been past Mississippi! It was like stepping into a novel, like Magic Treehouse, I used to read the hell out of those, totally alien, it all looked…untouched.”

Ziggy was looking at me intently, though I could only see an shadow of him against the night sky, I could feel his look.

“One thing from that trip still… well, I guess you could say it sorta haunts me.” I lowered my voice and Ziggy leaned in, “I have dreams about it.”

I licked my lips, “We used these little, black zodiacs to get from island to island, the ones with those motors with the handle, y’know what I mean? Well, one day one of the guides took five or six of us to one of the smaller islands to snorkel. The water was crystal for a good twenty feet, cerulean, shimmering, and ice cold, all of it flows up from the arctic. There were dozens of sea lions, they’re playful as hell, just wet dogs really, they swim all around you, nip at your flipper, nose at your mask, it was probably the most fun I’ve ever had. So, like I said, twenty feet or so was crystal, but outside that twenty feet is a deep, green murk. And I saw something, a shape of something in that murk, it was too small and too slow to be a sea lion, so I swam out towards it, away from the shore and the group.”

I smiled, “It was a sea turtle. A sea turtle. I had never even been to an aquarium and here was a sea turtle in front of me, looking at me. I was hypnotized, this thing could be eighty or a hundred years old for all I know and it’s looking at me like it knows me. That five or so minutes was the closest thing I have ever had to a religious experience. It swam out further and I followed it, keeping pace with it on its left, giving it some space y’know, and before I knew it, there was no more shore, only murk. And out there it seemed like the twenty feet of clear water shrank to about fifteen. I decided I couldn’t follow the turtle out any further, so I stopped and watched it drift out of existence, passing into nothing. I turned around to swim back, when a new, murky shape caught my eye…too big to be a turtle…or a sea lion.”

My voice took on a hoarseness, my mouth suddenly very dry, “It was ten feet, at least, tip to tail. And it saw me. My blood ran cold, I could feel every prickle of goose flesh across my body. It was a white-tip, this shark. I remember…even when its shape was distorted in the murk, I could see the sun screaming off that white tip. It slid out of the murk, a silent, grey missile, perfect, unchanged, searching, sniffing, now within ten feet, and it seemed to sort of… have a look at me. I’d never felt anything like that before, that sort of… primal fear… mortal fear, haven’t felt it since. I hung there, bobbing with the waves, a drifting statue, no thoughts, only waiting, watching. I’ll never forget the way it moved… the liquid motion of its muscles, gliding by, so slow, having a good look.”

I drew deep of my cigarette, it tasted of burnt cotton.

“I watched it pass me by, and slowly, in deadly silence, it dissolved into the murk. And I’ve never been the same.”

Ziggy said nothing.

“I have been in Tennessee the past twenty years…”, I searched the horizon of black, rolling waves for my words, “…but I have never left this place.”