The Breakers

The Breakers

by Paul Lascara

My youngest brother, Mark, called me while I was staring over my desk and out the window, at the back lawn and the one tree that I needed to trim. As if inspiration was out there, like I was one of the tired, soggy, dead romantics who thought his muse was in nature. So I guess his call was good timing. Our middle brother, James, was hurt. The hospital at his base called Mark and Mark called me. I'm the oldest.

“What else did they say?” I asked.

“Not much. Sounded like he had been there awhile. They didn't even say explicitly that anything was wrong! Just that someone should go down there. I got the feeling that they were toeing that confidentiality line,” Mark said.

“Right. So what do you think?”

“You're closer.”

“Yeah. Email me the address.”

“Yeah.”

“I'll call you when I get there.” I thought for a second. “When was the last time you talked to him?” I asked.

He took a moment. “Has to be months now, Patrick.”

“Fuck. I'll call you.”

On the four-hour drive to James' base, the air rushing through the truck windows sounded like being under the surface of the ocean. Every difference between James and I is contained in how we played at the beach when we were kids. We would go out into the water together, past the breakers, past being able to touch sand, even in the trough. We were strong swimmers, and we would wade, rising and falling through waves the color of sun-bleached tennis court pavement, waiting for the big, rare, early breaker. When it came, we would turn and swim, fight the riptide and try to match the wave's speed so it would carry us. And here's the distinction between the two of us. When the wave crashed, James would straighten his body out and pin his arms to his sides and ride it as far as he could. I didn't think that was any fun, so when the wave crashed on me, I would let it throw me, flip me end over end beneath the surface. I liked the unpredictability of the motion and the excitement of running out of air while the wave still gripped me. When it was over, I would pop up and look for James on the beach, where we met before going out again, past the breakers.

At the base hospital I found Lieutenant James Anders of Special Operations Command paralyzed below the waist and no longer a lieutenant, no longer any rank. He was not speaking to his doctors, including the psychiatrists who had him under observation. He wouldn't speak to me either, but after I threw the observer out, he asked me to take him home. For four hours, the whole way home, he didn't say a single thing more.

“I figured I'd put you up--” I remembered and turned, holding James' olive-drab green laundry bag, and looked down at him.

“--stairs in the guest room. Sorry.”

“It's alright.” He looked around with his brow furrowed a little too deeply, like he didn't expect home to look like this. He hadn't seen the house in years, not since the thing-you-can't-call-a-party after Dad's funeral, and I suppose he hadn't seen it from four feet high since he was ten. Looking down on him, I realized you don't often see the top of someone's head. His brown hair was longer than I'd seen it in a long time. He was out of regulation, but that didn't matter anymore.

“Sorry, I turned the downstairs bedroom into a study.”

“I'll be fine,” he said, and started rolling away from me. I could barely hear him it was so quiet.

“No, this won't work with the stairs and the wheelchair and everything. I'll change it back, put my desk and stuff back upstairs,” I said.

“I'll be fine,” he said from the living room. I walked after him, and saw him tip himself over sideways onto the couch.

“Jesus, James!” I ran over and tried to help, but he pushed my hands off his legs, and after trying for a while to get them up onto the couch himself, decided he would rather sit than lay down, and scooted himself back into the cushions with his thick arms.

“Do you feel like talking?” I asked. He looked around. I guess the familiar view from the couch helped.

“Okay,” he said.

“What happened?”

He looked at me with a purposefully blank expression, except for the eyes a bit wider than normal.

“No, James. No. Not gonna happen.” He just looked at me. “I'm not going to expose the crazily dark secrets of the government's cyborg assassin network. You and your burn-after-reading bullshit.” I thought for a second. “I'm your brother.”

He turned and looked into a corner of the living room. “Training accident.”

“Fine. Be that way.” I remembered the psychiatrist talking to me in the waiting room. “Do you want to kill yourself?”

His eyes shifted to me and then quickly back to the corner. “No.”

“Yeah, I'm not buying it, sailor,” I said.

“I'm not a sailor anymore.”

“I KNOW.”

We just sat there. It didn't even register on James' face.

“I'll be in the study.”

At my desk I found myself staring out the window again, over the desk, framed on both sides by high shelves. I had an uncapped pen in my hand and nothing on the page. I had my laptop there, its cursor blinking at me, even a decades-old typewriter with a fresh sheet rolled in, just in case my particular brand of inspiration was device-specific. I didn't get a bit of writing done that day. It wasn't James. It had been like that for months. I gave up and went to get James' foot locker out of the truck.

I put the tailgate down and pulled the foot locker toward me. It wasn't locked. I looked back at the house and flipped it open. The inside had the overwhelming, leathery smell given off by tins of black shoe polish. There were spare laces, a K-Bar, a SOG dive knife, photos of James standing morose with people I'd never met in pixelated desert camouflage, standing against the railings of gray ships and backgrounds of yellow tents and behind that shining razor wire fences buttressed with concrete blocks white in the sun. There were three different pairs of combat boots, two with sand still on the soles, a small bottle of CLP and a picture of the three of us the last time he was here, him in his dress blacks and Mark and I in suits with our hands in our pockets. You're not allowed to put your hands in your pockets while in uniform, unless it be to retrieve an item. I put everything back where I found it in the locker, and lugged it inside. I put it by the couch as quietly as I could. James was sleeping. I set it down, and looked at him sleeping, and thought of the things inside the locker, and rushed to my study.

I paced back and forth in the small, sunlit space, glancing back over and over the row of filled notebooks on the top shelf above my head. There was nothing good in them and I knew it. I can get him to talk about it. I pulled a fresh notebook from the bottom shelf, and held it and wrote as I walked. This is just residual loyalty keeping him from talking about it. He's been discharged, rejected; that loyalty can't last long. He can't not want to talk about it. It's impossible. And depending on what actually happened when he got hurt, this could be the best thing I've ever written. I couldn't write fast enough for my thoughts. The power dynamic between us has changed; I can get the story out of him. I know I can. I stopped walking and let my hands fall to my sides, then started writing again. He can't know what I'm doing. I put the notebook and pen down and pulled open the shallow center drawer of my desk, pushed pads of paper and markers aside, and found my digital recorder. Alright.

That night I dreamt I was at the beach again, but there were no waves. It happens sometimes in the spring. When warm air over the water rises and cold air over the land descends, the difference cycles wind down off the beach and pushes the waves back, creating a vast, silver expanse. In my dream, the water didn't move exactly, just vibrated. I got a vague feeling that I should be looking for James, and then I woke up in bed.

Still groggy, I righted myself on the edge of the bed and waited for the blood to come back to my brain. After a minute or so, still in my boxers and bare feet, I snuck downstairs to check on James. He was still there, sleeping on his back on the couch. I snuck back upstairs, quietly shut my bedroom door, and called Mark.

“What took you so long? What was it?” he asked.

“Are you done with exams yet?”

“No. Tell me what happened!” he said.

“I don't want you getting distracted by anything if you still have exams. You've done too well for too long to screw it all up now.”

After a few seconds, Mark answered. “Patrick, do you remember when Grandma died?”

“Yeah.” I knew where he was going with this. “Of course.”

“Do you remember how Mom and Dad told us?”

I didn't say anything.

“But you remember how they didn't tell us. At breakfast they've clearly been crying, they're not saying anything, and then Mom drives us to school like always, and they expect us to function normally? It was a Friday, remember? Convenient, right? Only one day to get through, and then there's the weekend. Apparently two days is the exact amount of time it takes to introduce a child to death. Do you think if she had died on a Monday, they would ha—”

“I remem—”

“How distracted were you that day, not knowing what was happening?” he asked. I couldn't answer for a few moments.

“Very.”

“Fuck you and your patronizing.”

“He's fine. I promise. Tell me about your exams.”

He took awhile to answer. “I have two later today and one more tomorrow.”

“Call after your last one, or drive down. Everything will be alright. Go and study,” I said. “I love you.”

“Yeah.”

I decided to wake James at 10.

“I love you, just in case it needed saying.”

He wasn't fully awake yet, and mumbled “Thanks.” A few moments later his eyes cracked open. “It needed saying.”

“Your doctors told me a bunch of stuff.”

“What?”

“That you're severely depressed. That your mental well-being is at risk. That I shouldn't leave you alone. And that I shouldn't talk to you about anything 'traumatic.'

He finally leaned forward and sat up, only to look at his legs while he said, “Really.”

“I want to help you. More than you know. But they're wrong. Sure, we need to be careful, but you're not going to feel any better if you try to repress everything. Right? People don't just forget things. There's no getting around that fact. Our memories will either inspire us or destroy us.

“So what do you want to do?”

“For you to talk to me. About anything you want; it doesn't have to be about what happened. We've been apart so much tha—”

“I can do that,” he said.

I wanted to blurt out 'Really!?' but I kept my composure, nodded slowly and said, “Okay.”

“Can I take a shower first?” he asked.

“Well yeah, of course.” I started to get up and go back to my study, but then I remembered. I turned back to James. He was looking around the room as if searching for something and not finding it. “Do you need help?”

I rushed back. I knelt in front of the couch and put my left arm around his shoulders and my right arm under his knees. He started to cry as I lifted him up. I got him in the wheelchair and into the bathroom, fumbling with his limp legs the whole time. He undid his belt and I pulled him out of the chair into a bear hug. His pants fell to the floor a little too easily, and with his own hands he pulled his briefs down. I set him back down and saw why his clothes came off so easily. I guess the wheelchair and couch hid it well, but James was thin, emaciated even.

“Is that supposed to happen?” I asked.

“Muscle atrophy,” he said. He pulled his shirt off himself, and I finally laid him inside the tub.

“Okay, you've got all your soap and shampoo and stuff here on the floor beside you.”

“Thanks.

“Need anything else?” I asked.

“Can you get the water for me?”

“Sure,” I said, and turned the knob. I forgot that the pin was still pulled up, and cold water shot out the shower head right onto James. “Oh shit,” I said, and pushed the pin down. James looked over at me, his hair matted down and drops of water still rolling down his face. I thought he was crying again, at first, but then I realized he was laughing. It echoed around inside the tiled space.

“Sorry,” I said.

That only made him laugh more.

“Yeah, yeah. Hey, you're the one who's all wet, not me,” I said, and walked out of the bathroom. I walked back into my study, shut and locked the door, and pulled the recorder out of my pocket and played back from the beginning to check the audio. Over the water sloshing in the next room, I heard myself talking again, this time in a distorted whine coming from the small speaker on the recorder.

I love you, just in case it needed saying

I got James out of the tub and helped him dress. He asked me for some of my clothes. All he really had himself was uniforms, camouflage patterns for battle dress, whites, blacks, and tans, great coats and patent leather. So I gave him sweatpants and a T-shirt. He laid back on the couch, looking at the ceiling, with 'NOT MANDATORY' written on his chest. One of those vaguely funny, inexplicable shirts. I sat in the chair by his head, pulled his foot locker over, and rested my feet on it.

“You ready to start?” I asked.

“What do you want me to talk about?”

“I had an idea about that while you were in the bathroom. I think you should start easy. Talk about something you're proud of.”

“On our first tour of duty, every member of my squad came home.”

“That was quick.”

“Well, I think about it a lot. It's rare.”

“How did you do it?”

“Thinking slow and moving fast, like they trained me. By the book.”

“Yeah, but how?”

“You want the details?” he asked me.

He gave me all the glorious details, more glorious as I pictured them than he was able to say. For the first time I saw the potential in the disparate events of a certain reality. He didn't know that he really told me about his men hidden in every shadowed crevice of a rocky hillside, and not watching the cold yellow sun rise over the Atlas mountains, but rather the thin goat path at the bottom of the valley. He didn't know he told me about standing between the wall and the door that was just opened in a bombed-out shell of a building. He didn't know he told me about actually riding shotgun. He didn't know he told me about shipping out on a submarine that drifts in the wake of an oil tanker, that traverses the Atlantic as the blank area on a screen. He did tell me about discouraging his men from keeping personal kill counts, and then writing reports in which he had to add them all up. He did tell me about the dangerous pride that swelled in him.

“What about your second tour?”

He didn't say anything. For a moment I thought he just hadn't heard me.

“How did your second tour go?”

He heard me. In profile, on his back, I saw this chest rising faster. Not mandatory. I made a show of looking at my watch.

“That's probably enough for today, anyway.”

I spent the afternoon listening to the recording on headphones and taking notes. I was frantic and excited to get all the ideas down before they slipped away. Something touched my shoulder and I jumped. James had rolled up behind me.

“HO-ly shit James.” I pulled the headphones off, hit pause on the recorder, and shut my notebook. I saw him look down at what I was doing and then back up at me.

“You have any beer?” he asked.

“I have half a bottle of scotch. You wanna get drunk?”

He breathed in, let it out, and hung his head. He was so narrow. “Hell yes.”

I stood, slid the notebook back onto the top shelf, and followed James into the kitchen.

“What, y—”

“What?”

“Shut up a minute. I'm trying to tell a story.” The eighth-of-a-bottle of scotch sat on the table, James and I on opposite sides of the circular kitchen table. I was hunched over, and James was sitting back, making patterns on the table with the condensation on the bottom of his glass. He seemed to be holding his liquor well.

“I'm tr—. I'm trying to tell you the story, but I wanna make sure you don't already know it because...What's the point...right? I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Do you know the story?”

“...What story?”

“Dammit.” I swallowed a little scotch. “Do you remember when we were young, we were still taking baths together, what you said that time?”

“Seriously. Seriously. How do I know what you're talking about. Seriously.”

“Ah fuck. You'd know what I'm talking about by now if you remembered. When we—”

“Tell me the story.”

“I'm trying! When we were young, when we were still taking baths together. I mean, we were talking and stuff by then; that's an important thing to remember. And Mark was still too young for the bathtub so he wasn't there.”

“Too young for the bathtub? How else...”

“You don't know? The sink, man.”

“What's the sink have to do with it?”

“You bath—bathe a bath—you bathe a baby in the kitchen sink.”

“You can do that?”

“Yes. Stop interrupting.”

“Okay okay.”

“So mom was giving us a bath; you were barely talking at the time. And we were just taking a bath and you turned and pointed at my—at my penis and said 'Mine's bigger.'”

“No way!” James started wheezing laughter, and I couldn't help laughing myself at the look on his face. He recovered, breathing heavily. “Was it?”

“I don't know!”

When I finally slept that night, the beach was covered with bottles. Empty scotch bottles were stuck in the sand, neck down, as far up and down the beach as I could see. The tide was coming in, sending waves further and further up the shore, and froth surrounded the bottles like little islands. The water began vibrating again, rose higher and higher in frequency until it hurt my ears and made the bottles shake. Suddenly every bottle on the shore burst. The tide went out, and carried the shards of glass with it. I woke up late, hung over, to ringing in my ears and a headache.

I braced myself against the walls as I walked down the stairs, and found James sleeping on the rug in the den.

“Ow,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said into the rug.

“I don't have any headache stuff, so I'm going to the store. Do you need anything?

“A lobotomy.”

“Will you be alright until I get back? Do you want me to put you in your chair?”

He shuddered. I hated to remind him.

“No.”

“Okay. I'll be back soon.”

Half an hour later I backed through the front door with a few bags from the store, and saw James wasn't lying on the rug.

There was a muffled whine coming from my study. I set the bags down and started toward the noise.

“James? I got some Advil.” I pushed the door to the study, and it swung open in time for me to see my notebook slip out of James' fingers and flop onto the floor beside his wheelchair. Behind him the bookcase lay flat, splintered on the floor with the piles of other notebooks fanning out from the top, strewn about the hardwood. The headphones were pulled out of the recorder, and it was playing for all to hear.

You want the details?

James looked up at me from his empty hands. His lips were pushed together.

“James...”

What about your second tour?

“Don't worry. I'll tell you everything.”

How did your second tour go?

“I am so sor—”

“Not yet. Sit down.”

I couldn't get to my desk, so I sat on the back of the fallen bookcase. “Please, you don't have to tell me anymore.”

James spun around to face me where I sat, and fixed his eyes on the floor. “I did not have a second tour.”

“It really was a training accident,” I said.

“No. Car accident. My fault. Girl in the other car died.”

“Oh, God. James, car accidents aren't anyone's fau—”

“I was drunk.”

He spun around again, and wheeled himself into the den. I stood and followed him.

“James. James. I'm sorry. I never would've pressed you if I'd known.”

He rolled around the coffee table to his foot locker. He flipped the lid up and started pushing things around inside, creasing the photos, and spilling edge dressing on his boots. “That's my point,” he said.

He finally pushed his way through to the bottom of the locker. He pulled out a black pistol, laced his fingers around the grip, put both thumbs on the trigger, and held the muzzle to his sternum. I fell down against the coffee table.

“James. No. Please...”

“It wasn't heroic. It wasn't even tragic. People who do good things abroad still return and do bad things at home. I am not the fallen warrior and you are not telling my story of courage to the world. I could barely see him through the tears glazing my eyes, but I think I saw him press the gun harder against his chest. 'Depending on what actually happened when he got hurt, this could be the best thing I've ever written.' Do you really want it that much? Do you still want to use my story, knowing how it ends?” He took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

“Yes!” It was all I could think to say.

He opened his eyes again and leaned toward me. The bags under his eyes stood out in shadow. “How do you tell a story with that kind of ending?”

“You don't,” I said. I leaned forward and put my hand on the slide of the pistol. “It wouldn't end there.” I gently lifted the gun out of his hands and placed it on the rug behind me. James fell forward out of his chair, put his hands out and caught himself on me.

Minutes later we were still on the rug, and heard a key slide into the front door lock. The door swung open, letting in the afternoon sun, and Mark stalked into the hallway with his bag.

“Patrick? James? I'm here.” He pulled off his sunglasses and saw us on the floor.

“What's with the gun?”

James and I looked at each other. I tried to say something, but couldn't. Mark came closer and let his duffel bag hit the floor.

“Why are you guys crying? Why is there a wheelchair?”

All I could do was wave Mark over. He sat, and we pulled him toward us.

I parked the truck along the boardwalk. Mark put the printout of the first chapter in his bag and we piled out, stretched our legs, and lifted James out and into his wheelchair. We grabbed our bags and made our way down to the beach. It was tough going. When the concrete stopped, we had to carry James the rest of the way. His wheelchair was no good in the sand. Finally we made it to the shore and laid him down. There weren't many other people out. It was still early in the day and early in the summer. The sun was just breaking over the ocean's horizon, throwing a line of orange light on the crest of each wave.

“So what do you think of the story so far?” I asked Mark.

“I think you're off to a good start.”

James was looking around in his bag for something.

“What are you doing?”

“Hold on.” He pulled out a bungee cord and a pull buoy, a piece of foam that swimmers use to hold up their legs if they're working on arm strokes only.

“No, no,” I said to James.

“I'll be fine, I'm the fastest swimmer of the three of us.”

“Yeah, but that was before.”

“Well good, then. Now we'll all be about the same speed. It's my handicap.”

Mark chuckled. “Ha. Nice. If you keep that up, we'll start making cripple jokes, too.”

“Less talking, let's get in the water. Help me get this stuff on,” James said.

James held the pull buoy between his legs while Mark and I wrapped th bungee cord around his thighs.

“Try that out.”

James grabbed the buoy and tried to pull it out.

“Good.”

Mark and I walked to the water, carrying James between us. We waded in, holding him above the waves until it was deep enough for us to swim in. We dropped him and he raced off, his arms churning, beating a path through the waves. The buoy kept his legs from dragging down, and we finally caught up with him out past the breakers. We waited, rose and fell together, were pushed in and pulled out together, waiting for the big, rare, early breaker to carry us back to the beach.

The sound of the ocean changes out there, in rhythm with the waves. On the crest you can hear everything, kids yelling back on the beach, the wind brushing past, the whitecaps hissing at you from further out. The crest is nice. You can see what's coming. Every crest, we tried to get as high as possible and guess which wave in the queue is ours. The trough is different. The next and last wave hem you in, blocking sound and sight. You can hear yourself think in the trough, and sometimes it's scary. If you're alone.

We fell off the crest and into the trough again, the water sloshing around us.

“Did you get a good look?” I asked.

“The one after this.”