the ocean of the dead.

When my mother is dead and when my father is dead and when half of the world is dead, when we run out of room to bury them all and when we burn all the bodies into ash, when the ocean turns grey with the dust of the dead, that is when I get into my car and I drive the many hours to the shore so I can see it.  I bring Tomak and my son, who is three and who is quiet like me when I was a child.  I call him Peter.  He is named after his great uncle.  He does not have a great uncle.  If my father had not been an only child, if he had had a brother named Peter, that is who my son would have been named after.  When I get older, if he asks me, I will tell him something different.  I will tell him I named him for the boy who flew and who never grew up.  He will like that, I think.  We never really  outgrow fairy tales.  We have to just pretend they are silly and for children. 

I am twenty-three when I have Peter, twenty-six when I bring him to the beach, when I point out over the water and when I tell him that somewhere in the mess of gray waves there are pieces of his grandmother and grandfather.  He doesn’t understand me, of course.  He is only a baby and Tomak lifts him onto his shoulders and he laughs and laughs and laughs and I stand at the very edge of the water and I pretend I can still feel them.  My parents.  But they are dead, and we cannot feel the dead.  They pass out of this world and into some other place.  Into darkness or into light.  I don’t know which.

Tomak and Peter fall asleep on a beach blanket.  The sun sinks lower in the sky and people come to the water to pay their respects and then they leave again but we stay.  We stay as the day passes into evening and they wake up and Peter plays in the sand but I will not let him swim.  He will not swim in the water of the dead.  I had a dream he would drown if he went into the water and I can’t lose him.  I need to die before him.  I can’t lose anyone else. 

Tomak takes my hand and he asks me if I am tired.  If I am ready to go home now.  I say almost, Tomak.  Only let’s stay a little longer here.  Let’s get a room, let’s wake up by the ocean tomorrow.  He says we can.  He lets me have whatever I like because I let him have Peter.  I never wanted children and when I got pregnant I wanted to let the air in.  And that’s what I said to him, exactly like that, and because he reads Hemingway I knew he’d understand me.  But he wanted the baby and I thought I could grow to want the baby too and so I kept it.  And now I love him.  Of course I love him.  He’s my son.  But if I never had him, I wouldn’t miss him.  I wouldn’t have known the difference. 

It’s like this.  I see everything.  The past and the present and all the paths of every decision I have ever made.  I saw Tomak before I met him, Peter before I had him.  I saw my mother die a thousand times and I cried for my father five years before he left me.  I saw this day on the beach and I see my own death, years away, but it is faded now.  The medicine helps.  The medicine dulls the edges of my memory and it helps me stay in the present.  Some things are surprises now.  Small things, I never would have guessed.

I’ve seen this day and I’ve seen the ring and I say yes before he asks me.  I never wanted to get married but it is what Tomak wants and I’ll let him have whatever he wants now because he’s all I have left.  They’re all I have left.  He proposes to me on the threshold of the ocean of the dead and I pretend like my parents can see us.  But I know they can’t see us.  I know they can’t see anything.     

from a longer piece by Katrina, in the hall of one thousand mirrors