Izan wears the slacks Reverend Rashan loaned him for witnessing. They stick to the back of his sweaty knees and reek like the Reverend—cedar soap and the vinegar he drinks to keep his bowels constant. Izan also wears the button-down he stole from Savers and the thin blue tie Father left behind nine years ago. He carries a green, softcover book. Reverend Rashan rewrote the Gospel of Luke in one frenzied, overnight hallucination, then had one hundred copies printed on-demand. All the New, New Adventist Followers carry them. So does Izan, though he’s no believer.
Izan follows his mother. They toil uphill—a steep walk that makes Izan’s knees ache and his sides cramp. The August afternoon boils his lungs and dries out his mouth. Izan suggested this neighborhood. He had not remembered the hill or the wide stucco houses with their broad gardens, which meant long walks between front doors. Izan had only considered the number of windows, the number of floors, the roofs with cupped red tiles that made the homes look as if they belonged on the Mediterranean Sea, not overlooking the swampy, cat-tailed, Midwestern banks of Minnehaha Creek.
“Ma.” Izan calls. She turns. Sweat fronds the front of her blouse, and heat frays the braid swung over her bony shoulder. “Let’s split up,” Izan says. He points. “You finish this side, I’ll take the other. We’ll meet at the park.” Before she can answer…if she will answer, because since Mossi’s death, she’s been worse than a cellphone with uncertain reception…Izan crosses the road.
He presses the doorbell on the first house. He looks back. Across the street, Mother still stands.
“Go on,” Izan mouths and waves her forward. Even this gesture, in this heat, wheezes him. So when the door opens suddenly, and the cold air rushes at him, Izan sways in a moment of shock.
“Yeah?” A boy his age, fifteen perhaps, stands in the doorway. His eyes blink from thick pockets of flesh and his knuckles, lined on the door frame, sink into pudgy hands. Flesh buckles down his bare legs and hides the shape of his knees.
“Can I help you?” The boy stares at Izan with bright, rolling eyes.
“I’m Izan,” Izan says. “I’m here on behalf of Reverend Rashan’s Followers of the New, New Adventists Church. Do you have a moment?”
“Sure,” the boy says. He doesn’t move. Neither does Izan, who’s never gone further than what he’s just said. “I’m already Catholic, though,” the boy says.
“It’s not quite that.”
“Then what is it?”
Izan tightens his grip on the book in his hands, but the glossy cover and his sweaty palms launch it towards the boy. The boy catches it, surprisingly quickly, on the bounce off his stomach.
“Huh,” he says at the title. He thumbs to a page. Reads it. Then another. Izan shifts around to make the heat more comfortable.
“This isn’t a Bible.” The boy taps the cover with a fingernail gnawed to its pink quick.
“You have parents I can speak with?” Izan looks past the boy. Sun spins off a glass chandelier and drops tiny rainbows on the boy’s cropped hair. Greyer rainbows slide across a TV screen wider than Izan’s entire bedroom.
“There’s Sula. She does the laundry and dusts. Where is your mom or dad?” the boy asks. He rubs a finger along his nose and scratches one big toe against his other ankle. It softens the rudeness to curiosity.
“She’s across the street. We can get this done faster separately.”
“Get what done?”
“Well. This,” Izan says.
Izan doesn’t believe in Reverend’s Rashan’s rule of seven or the ten commitments of NNA or the Great Disappointment. Or the Greater Disappointment. But he believes in the apartment Reverend Rashan and the Followers rent for him and Mother above the Gift and Oil shop. Last Saturday, Reverend cornered him after service and suggested that the apartment was becoming costly. He spoke in a shushed but determined way, and Izan—accustomed to that baritone raising bodies from the folding chairs to sway in the sweaty backroom-turned-chapel—grew sarcastic. How many tithe-bearers, Izan asked, do you need to fund that waterlogged ceiling and pasture of mold? Reverend Rashan narrowed his eyes at Ivan, sucked his front teeth, then took his skinny bones off to ‘hello’ to Mrs. Linjare.
“I’m collecting donations. That’s all. Unless you’re thinking of converting. But a donation is faster,” Izan says.
The boy cocks his head. “Come in. I got water.” The boy turns into the house. He pads towards the TV. Izan follows, stepping into the fumes of Pinesol and lavender.
They pass the TV. It’s framed in gold like the artwork—mostly polka dots in teals and browns—that surrounds it.
The kitchen beyond is steel and granite and glass. Frosted air hums from its ceiling vents, and after the barbed heat outside, the beige coolness wheels Izan around.
“Sit.” The boy nods. He fills a glass at the refrigerator.
Izan takes a stool. It cools his thighs straight through his pants. He cups the tumbler the boy hands him and stares out the patio doors so clean he doubts they’re glass. A pool shines brilliant blue in a yard too bright and green. It’s easy for Izan to imagine himself beneath its water, so deep down that sound loses its edges and becomes nothing but a dull thrum upon his ears. Then the ice in his glass cracks, and he’s back in the kitchen.
“So. What’s your spiel? Like, I’m going to hell if you don’t save my soul?”
“I don’t believe in hell,” Izan says, which isn’t entirely true. The crummy, bald apartment that buzzes with fluorescent lights and 1970s checkered wallpaper comes close. But mostly, hell’s the hollowness beneath his ribs that when he lays on his bed, fills with water. It’s the nights, too quiet, when he hears the soughing of baby Mossi sucking in lungfuls of soapy bath water. It’s being too late to do anything about it.
“So?” The boy says again. “I got money. You gonna tell me what I get for it? And don’t say salvation. I got plenty.” He rumbles the ice around in his glass. He stares at Izan expectantly. Izan studies the whirlpools his fingerprints make on the glass. Reverend Rashan was serious about the rent. And with Mother the way she was now, what else could they afford?
“A…wish,” Izan says. “Yeah. We got a Jesus statue that grants wishes. You want anything? You drop a few dollars in the box by his feet. You pray. Presto. It comes true.” At least, that’s what Reverend says, but over the years Izan’s put in five dollars of change and Mossi’s still dead.
The boy turns his head, mouth gaping, and his eyes sweep across the counters, over the cabinets, working their way outside to the pool. The way he looks around, Izan can tell he’s seeing everything as Izan is—suddenly strange and distant.
The boy’s gaze works back to Izan. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Maybe there’s one thing I want…”
“Alright. You can just give me the money and I’ll make the wish for you.”
The boy shakes his head. His dark hair flaps beneath the ceiling vent. “Nah. I’ll come see this statue.”
“It’s pretty lame.”
The boy shrugs a shoulder.
Izan sighs. “We meet Saturdays. At the Gifts and Oil shop down Lake Street. Seven o’clock.”
“What do I wear?”
“You know. Something like this.” Izan pinches his shirt. The air conditioning has cooled the cotton stiff. It crackles between his fingers.
“Alright.”
“Fine.” Izan slips off the stool. He follows the boy past the shiny fridge, through the living room with its geometric rugs, past the TV that reflects a shadowy version of everything.
Izan realizes when he opens the door and the heat blows in that he’s still got the glass in his hand. He hands it to the boy.
“Saturday, yeah?” Izan says.
“Saturday. I pay Jesus and he gives me a wish.”
Izan looks hard at him, but the boy says it earnestly, without sarcasm, before he shuts the door.
Izan starts up the street. He collects ten more dollars but no more congregants before he hits the park.
Mother sits on the bench. She ignores the children riding on the swings, their peachy legs pumping pale and furiously against the sky. Her fingers drag over the Reverend’s book, opened on her lap. She can’t possibly hear Izan coming, what with the children squealing and the grass too supple to make a sound. But she looks up, nonetheless.
“Oh,” she says in the voice one uses when they come across something they’ve long forgotten. Like a sock beneath the bed or a dollar in a coat pocket. “It’s you.”
Saturday at six, Reverend Rashan shuts up the Gifts and Oil shop and drags folding chairs from the wall to the bare center of the backroom. Weeknights, Reverend rents out the room to the Boy Scouts or Alcoholics Anonymous. On Saturdays, he uncovers the four-foot statue of a Jesus crowned with battered, concrete thorns. Jesus has no nose and only half his toes. Reverend found him leaning against a dumpster between Burger King and Kum N’ Go. It was a sign. Reverend Rashan, known then as Rashan Whitehead, had heard on KMJL about the squabble between Seventh-Day Adventists and the General Council’s stance on the Great Disappointment. Then suddenly, on his afternoon round to peruse the alleyway inventory, there was Jesus, staring up at the red shed roof of Burger King.
Reverend Rashan loaded Jesus onto the Nissan truck and propped him in the window of his Gifts and Oil shop, where Concrete Jesus overlooked the bus stop and the Cash ‘N Pawn. That was the same night Reverend Rashan rewrote Luke’s gospel and passed the book out to his customers in what he calls “The First Great Witnessing.”
Izan pushes the chairs around the linoleum floor to make three rows of six. The Reverend’s attached the statue to a scooter, the yellow plastic kind used in elementary schools, and Izan wheels the Jesus statue to the front. He unstraps Jesus while Reverend Rashan cranks open the transom windows. No air comes in; it’s too thick. Only the narrow whine of trucks and buses slip through the screen.
Mother wafts down from the apartment and wipes a week’s worth of dust and centipedes from the chairs.
“I’m gonna wait at the front,” Izan says. He stands just outside a slab of sun the doors let in. Handfuls of Followers trample through the beam. Dust spirals in their wake, then settles into a slovenly orbit until the next disturbance. Izan nearly gives up—then sees him.
The boy huffs across Lake Street, his round head swiveling in all directions. He plods through when the coast is clear. Izan waits beneath the cowbell looped to the door. When the bell jangles, he darts forward.
“You made it.”
“I took the bus. This okay to wear?” The boy points to his navy blazer with a Minnehaha Academy logo and a shirt so clean, Izan tastes the soap.
“Yeah. Looks about right. Come on back,” Izan says.
“What is this place?” The boy squints around.
“Just what it says out front. Gifts and Oil.” Izan squeezes between utility shelves crammed with junk. Busted oil jars leave rings of rust on the shelves; floral fumes raft everywhere. Plastic lotion bottles warped by the sun throng the center counter, and a few bug legs and the gossamer part of a wing cling to the crusted shoulder of a shampoo bottle. More junk dangles from hooks in the ceiling or bulges from plastic shoe trees: belts with large metal buckles, watches, an assortment of plastic-wrapped wigs.
“Wow,” the boy says. He stalls by a headless mannequin ringed with Mardi Gras beads.
“We’re late.” Izan grabs the boy’s soft cuffs and tugs him into the back room. Reverend Rashan has draped the windows with purple towels. It dusks the room enough for the painted Mexican candles to pop bright and orange. Their flames flicker across Jesus’s broken toes and off the scooter’s wheels.
“We’re over here,” Izan says. Mother holds two seats in the third row. Izan squeezes past the legs of those already sitting. Metal chairs squeal as Mrs. Linjare and Mr. Patel push themselves back to accommodate the boy behind him.
“This is my Mother. Mother, this is—”
“Simon,” the boy says. Mother nods and seems about to speak, but a Follower hits play on the karaoke machine. Mother’s attention snaps to the ropey man at the front. He waves his skinny, penny-colored arms in the air. “Stand up for Jesus,” he shouts above Elvis Presley’s brassy ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ There’s the scraping of chairs, then his ecstatic, Can I get a hallelujah?
“Hallelujah,” Mother shouts back at him—Him. Reverend Rashan. Reinventor of the Gospel according to Luke. Oracle of the New, New Adventist Church.
Provider of their lives.
After Mossi drowned, they barely used the tub, but when Father left, sticking out the winter, then packing his plaid suitcase into the Aveo when the snow softened and filled the streets with lakes, Mother zip-tied the shower curtain shut. She took five-year-old Izan down to the basement where an aluminum shower rose between cartons of Halloween and Christmas decorations. Lint and rust shook off the pipes above and fell onto his soapy skin. Grit from the concrete floor stuck to the wet bottoms of his feet when he climbed back upstairs. He never felt clean.
Father’s first recycled postcard of polar bears water skiing came weeks later. Its original message was whited out and his own was scrawled above. Thinking of you, kid. Then another came—a smiley face wearing sunglasses. The day his third postcard arrived, so did a knock on the door. Izan, sitting cross-legged on the weedy carpet and watching G.I Joe reruns, got up and answered.
“Is your Mother home?” a man leaned down. His cheekbones pushed through his dark shiny skin, and his gums were so thin, Izan saw the pale roots of teeth behind their pink.
Before Izan could answer, Mother came up beside him. She held a package of ramen noodles between her hands, and steam from the kitchen sheened her neck and arms.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m here on behalf of the New, New Adventists Church.” Reverend Rashan straightened up. His darting, bug-like eyes poked around their living room, then he pointed to the pickup parked on the street, the Jesus statue tied to the truck bed with an orange cord, and two people, dimmed behind windows, waving from the cab.
“We’ve come to save you.”
After the service, the Followers file up the aisle. They stuff coins furred with pocket lint into the cardboard box set beside Jesus’s missing toes. The box’s flaps are taped down and a ragged hole has been scissored from its top. The coins dropped inside will get shaken out and separated from the fuzz and gum wrappers. The tithe helps pay the rent for the shop and the two apartments upstairs, the one Izan shares with Mother, and the other the Reverend’s.
Izan shuffles up the aisle with Simon sweating behind him. Reverend Rashan hovers over the donation box. He smiles at everyone who drops a coin in. Behind him, a floor fan ticks its head back and forth and blows his cut-onion stench everywhere.
When it’s Izan’s turn, he drops in a penny he stole from the cup at the register. Reverend Rashan nods curtly, then looks expectantly past him. Simon pauses beside the box. Reverend Rashan licks his lips. Simon slides a twenty from his blazer’s pocket and stuffs it into the hole.
“Praise be to God.” Reverend Rashan turns to Izan and grips his shoulder in a way that tells Izan he’s done well…really, really well.
Back in the shop, Simon and Izan find Mother hemmed in by a case of perfumes and shelves stacked with Vo5 hairspray. They drink lemonade from dixie cups and balance Nutterbutters on Christmas napkins. They loiter on the rim of other people’s conversations. The noise turns from the Reverend’s homily—facing the end days—to topics more pressing: the drought, Minneapolis’s ninety-seventh homicide, Mrs. Abara’s weeping bunions.
Mother smiles over her dixie cup and tilts her head at the Nutterbutter crumbs dropped onto Simon’s lapel. They hang there like mini asteroids in a navy sky.
“Minnehaha Academy. That’s a good Christian school,” Mother says. Maybe Mother’s remembering Layla from Roosevelt High. Layla who came once for dinner, the Friday before Easter. Layla who wore a faded flannel shirt and cutoff jeans over black nylons. Mother tried to talk to Layla over the frozen pizza about the Great Disappointment. Layla thought she was referring to the last election. When Mother said in her vague, faint way that no, it was the day Jesus didn’t show up, Layla asked how that could ever be a disappointment.
“What Bible do they teach?” Mother asks Simon. She grips the glossy green one the Reverend’s written.
“I’m gonna walk Simon out,” Izan says.
Once they’re across the street and standing inside the bus shelter, Simon exhales a puff of hot air. “So…that was interesting.”
Exhaust grays the shelter’s plexiglass. Everything beyond moves in silhouette.
“Yeah. Look, thanks for being polite and all. I’ll get the change back for you,” Izan says. Simon probably attends mass in a building designed specifically for people to pray…a place with pews and stained glass and an actual altar.
“Nah. Keep it all,” Simon says. “You said Jesus can make a wish come true?”
Izan’s gut goes cold. It’s a sharp feeling against the evening’s heat. “It’s not like Concrete Jesus is gonna turn you into Hulk Hogan. Or give you a million dollars. Or bring somebody back from the dead,” Izan says. He understands the limits. He’s wished to turn back time. To before he gave Mossi a bath because he wanted to explore, unencumbered by Mother, all the impossibly small, pink and silky parts of Mossi, elbows and fingers and toes and the strange navel pushed out like a kernel. And if that was asking Concrete Jesus too much, he’d settle for Mother being angry. Or hateful. He’d even settle for her loathing. For being anything but Drifting Mother. Locked-inside Mother. Mother who’d slipped down the drain along with the bathwater. “He’s not a fracking genie.”
“I guess,” Simon says. “Maybe you’ll come by again?” Simon points. Bus 7E pulls up. “That’s me.” Simon cranks each heavy leg up the steep metal stairs. At the top, he waves until the bus doors hiss shut.
“Simon. We need more souls like Simon,” Reverend Rashan booms in his service voice. He leans away from the green-topped card table in Izan’s kitchen. Mother drains orange grease from hot dogs split in the microwave, then packs them in buns set on plastic plates.
“Praise be to God,” Mother says and slides the plates across the table.
Izan snorts and gets up. He floats towards the kitchen window. A box fan leaning against the screen blows in grit from outside. Izan pulls the dust into his lungs. He could drown like this. Doctors might cut him open. Inspect his lungs. They would look for the telltale darkness of the collapsed alveoli marbled with paler, acrated areas. If none of these appeared, they would determine he drowned in something other than water. Like dirt.
“Mom,” Izan says. She blinks at him.
“I’m going out,” Izan says. He leaves them in the kitchen.
“That’s one good boy.” Reverend Rashan’s voice turns the corner with Izan. Izan pauses at the front door, then opens and closes it, making them think he’s gone and not quietly standing there, jammed in the foyer against the mirrored closet doors, holding his breath, waiting for Mother’s reply.
There’s a silence, pulled apart at last by a drawn-out scratch that must be Izan’s plate pushed across the table towards the Reverend. Then Mother says in a voice bubbled and vacant, almost crueler than the pause before it:
“Praise be to God.”
Izan presses the doorbell. Its deep sound sighs from somewhere within the house. Finally, Simon answers. Coolness ribbons past Izan. The room behind Simon is dimmed by tightly pulled curtains that shift above blowing air vents. For all this cool luxury, Simon’s tee shirt still clings to him.
“You better come in. I’m letting in the heat.”
Once more, they traipse through the modern living room to the steel and tiled kitchen. Once more Simon fills a glass of water. Once more, Izan drinks—this time too fast and too hard. His stomach bulges. He feels his thoracic cavity inflating with water, flooding his lungs, his heart, the esophagus, the trachea.
Simon watches. Then: “I want to explore Carver’s Cave.”
“What?” Izan puts his glass down.
“You know. My wish. I know it’s nothing religious, but I’ve always wanted to. Just too scared, I guess,” Simon says. “Maybe your Jesus can give me the courage.” His eyes go blurry in the flesh they sit in. Like he’s—but why would he?—going to cry.
“I see.” Izan says. And he does. Izan should head back outside into the heat that thrums with cicadas and screaming crickets. He should sweat his way back to Lake Street and see what’s left in the fridge for dinner. But there’s Mother. The apartment. Everything he owes her.
“Sure,” Izan hears himself saying. “Courage might take Jesus a while to grant, though.”
“Then I’ll see you Saturday?” Simon’s face glows.
On the way back through the living room, Izan notices the single family photo pushed to the corner by all the artwork. Simon is held taut between two razor-edged bodies, a man and a woman, their minnowy arms carefully balanced around Simon’s shoulders.
Simon catches him looking.
“They’re backpacking in Machu Picchu,” Simon says. “I’d only slow them down.”
“Yeah. No, I was just….”
“I’m an only child,” Simon says.
Izan pauses. “So am I,” he lies. It amazes him, how true it is.
At the back of a pebbled beach, tucked into the bluffs that wall the Mississippi River lies the entrance of Carver’s Cave. Steel doors attempt to seal it off. Every summer, a new chain loops bright and hopeful through the door’s latch with a fresh padlock. But their shine rusts in the cycle of storms and sun, and someone lugs bolt cutters down the eighty-foot drop and snips the chain free. It’s left coiled on the ground next to flattened beer cans, Big Mac wrappers, and faded, forgotten clothing.
Deep inside the cave, flat as glass, lies an underground lake. The water is so clear that a flashlight shows a fine, crystal-grained bottom. Like shattered diamonds. But the lake serpentines into a profound darkness. Once, Izan flung a rock into that black, and the slap of water echoed astonishingly from gloomy, strange depths.
The only access to the lake is through a narrow passage that begins at the steel doors and drops steeply. After winter thaw or summer rains, the passage slicks with sewage and mud. Sometimes, factory refuse leaks into the passage and covers it in slime. Chunks of sandstone fall into the tunnel, narrowing it further until the next flood drags the debris away.
There is no way Simon will make it down there. Or back up.
Still, Simon comes to service every Saturday. He squeezes twenties into the box at Jesus’s feet. When school begins, Simon still comes. Izan gets to spending Thursday afternoons at Simon’s house. He drinks water from the fridge and eats the Pringles Simon plates on a platter dotted with blue flowers.
They have nothing in common. They stutter about movies. Simon shows him the Playstation his parents, now in Argentina, commissioned Sula to buy. But the console remains in its package. Simon tries to talk about a girl named Marcy who calls him ‘Bubbles.’ He tells the story in a way—face shiny, eyes wide—that betrays his hopefulness. Izan doesn’t want to say that anyone who calls Simon ‘Bubbles’ isn’t interested in anything but his humiliation.
Mostly, though, Izan and Simon are silent. The ice in their drinks does all the chattering.
The fall equinox comes.
Reverend Rashan closes up the gift shop for an entire Saturday. The Followers cramp the aisles with folding tables and set upon them crock pots filled with flaccid noodles or packed with pork tamales. Simon comes for the day. He slurps asopao from a paper bowl and nibbles the soup’s crumbling wads of chorizo. Mother talks with Mr. Patel and Mrs. Linjare. She glances over. Smiles. Izan’s heart flips in a way that makes him cough.
The crock pots empty out, and Simon makes for the bus. Left alone on the sidewalk, Izan ponders the dropping dusk and the leaves that rattle around in car exhaust.
He feels a squeeze on his shoulder.
“I admit, Izan, I doubted your dedication to our community. When you brought that large boy in, I thought that was just you again, mocking our ways. Your Mother is always telling me, you’ll come round. And here you are. I admit, Izan, I admit…” Reverend Rashan pinches his shoulder again. His nails press in, like the tips of a screwdriver. Izan stares through the shop window, past Concrete Jesus to the bottles of oil, the plastic containers of lotion, the wigs on Styrofoam heads. He sees Mother bend over folding tables and roll up the plastic tablecloths.
What Reverend said, about her believing in him…despite everything he’s done…it’s all he wanted. But now it crushes him with the weight of Simon’s three hundred and twenty dollars.
Time to end this.
Next Saturday, while Simon jiggles from one foot to the other waiting for the bus, Izan says, “I got a…a sort of message from Concrete Jesus.”
“You did?” Simon’s head jerks around. His jowls wobble an extra second.
“Yeah. It’s, um, time. Time to try Carver’s Cave.”
Simon says nothing. Traffic trundles past. Across the street, a mother stands beneath the McDonald’s arches, their yellow glow on her cheeks, and smacks the backside of her bawling toddler. A man in a frenzied suitcoat digs through the recycling receptacles. A Starbucks coffee cup rolls past them.
Maybe Simon didn’t hear. Izan clears his throat.
“Thursday then,” Simon says. A bus looms in the traffic. Its headlights push through the windows of the cars in front of it, making dark silhouettes of drivers and passengers.
“Okay.” Izan nods.
The cliffs loom above them. Behind them, the Mississippi slaps the sand. The gates to the cave have been pulled loose from their hinges. Izan peers in. Nothing but dark and the soughing of water within.
Izan strips off his sweatshirt and rolls down his pants. He shivers in boxers and tee. Simon undresses more slowly. He works the tee shirt over his head. His hair ruffles up like a rooster’s comb. With tiny hops and groans, he wriggles free of his pants. He stands in his boxers. His belly is pasty and dimpled and folds over his pants.
“Let’s do this,” Izan says. His teeth knock at each other. It’s either this or pay Simon back one-hundred eighty dollars.
“Alright.” Simon takes one long inhale.
Izan settles the handle of a flashlight between his teeth. He crawls into the tight, damp darkness. The sandstone scrapes the knobs on his spine and scuffs his knees. Condensation trickles down the cave’s sides and slicks his palms.
Izan takes the flashlight from his mouth. “Simon? You there?”
Simon grunts.
The tunnel slants awkwardly. Izan’s lungs toil. He’s read on the CDC website that infants drown in tubs, children in pools, and teens in lakes. Twice Izan’s come here to drown.
“Izan?” Simon grabs Izan’s ankle. They’ve lost the light from the entryway. There’s only the half-hearted beam from the flashlight. They wriggle further through the slimy sandstone, then plummet two feet onto a beach. They scramble onto their feet. The ceiling soars stories above them. The beach curves several yards on either side of them until the cave wall closes in on it again. Before them lies the lake.
The water is smooth. Black. A sharp square of light drops from a shaft above and onto its surface. Past that, both the ceiling and lake collapse into darkness.
“Is it deep?” Simon’s nervous, cloying breath turn’s Izan’s stomach.
“Maybe. No one’s swum out to where the ceiling drops.” Izan turns. “We don’t have to go in.” But Simon is already easing forwards. He wades out until the water laps the band on his boxers. “Careful.” Izan’s voice echoes strangely. He packs the flashlight upright into the sand. The orange glow of under-earth shows paled hieroglyphics carved by Native Americans, and newer, brighter scratches from teenage explorers. A spring dribbles somewhere and sounds like a faucet left trickling.
“It’s cold,” Simon says. He hugs his arms around himself. Water spills off his elbows and beats down on the rumpled currents. “Are you coming in?”
“Not yet,” Izan says. He squats by the flashlight. Simon wades farther. He’s a slow, white whale in the deepening black. His wake claps against the cave walls with the same noise of those plastic boats bumping against the sides of the tub.
Izan scoops sand into his hands. The diamond grains drip through his cupped fingers.
Sometimes, Izan goes to the bathroom sink, closes the drain, and fills it with water. He lowers his face until his nose cracks the water’s surface, then his eyes, then his ears. Sounds blur. He drags in one deep breath of water. It’s the closest he ever gets to Mossi before his hands find the counter and shoves the rest of him away. He thought here at Carver’s lake, with no edges, surely, he would follow through. But he always ends back on shore.
Izan glances up from the pile of sand he’s made.
“Simon?” he calls. He scans the darkness for Simon’s pale flesh. “Simon?” His voice ripples back to him.
Real drowning is not the chaos shown on TV. There is no flailing. No screaming. No loud and frantic flapping of hands. No one hears oxygen crash the bloodstream, or acid flick the heart’s electrical system off, or the larynx open wide so that water swarms in until the victim can’t speak.
Drowning is silent. It’s just the grief that makes any noise.
“Simon.” Izan hurtles into the water. The cold bolts through him. Waves crack at his thighs while he catches his breath. He spreads his arms, palms out, just like the Concrete Jesus. He rakes his fingers below the water’s skin. Scud and minnows rush through his fingers, but nothing else.
Mother fell asleep that afternoon lying diagonal across the bed, her mouth flopped open and her blouse unbuttoned, showing the coppery areola where Mossi had been drinking, dozing, and now wailed. Izan poked Mother, but she only closed her mouth in a clack of teeth. Mossi had covered himself in a mustardy, reeking poop. Izan had been told not to hold Mossi by himself, but he managed to drag Mossi by his arm and leg to the edge of the bed, and let gravity drop his baby brother into his arms.
On the bathroom rug, Izan stripped off his brother’s putrid sleeper and the diaper. He hoisted Mossi into the tub and worked him up the plastic ramp that Mother used when she bathed him. Izan turned the faucet on low and warm, then went to the closet where the plastic boats were kept in a shopping bag. He dumped them out. They smelled like the sea, and sand rattled inside them. Izan sorted them, first by size, then color, then favorites. It had been a while before he remembered his brother and the dribbling faucet.
“Simon, goddamnit.” Izan’s panic stirs up cloudy sediment, and water ruffles white in every direction.
When Izan dumped the boats in the tub, he saw that Mossi had slipped down the plastic ramp. All of him underwater. The baby had curled up beneath the suds like an unfurled flower, or a seed—like the first photo Mother had of him, unborn inside her belly.
The hair on Izan’s legs rustled in the current. Izan’s hand strikes something. He gropes for it. God help him, Izan’ll believe in the Concrete Jesus if it’s the boy.
Simon’s arm breaks the surface, then the rest of Simon, sputtering, staggering, grappling with his free hand at his eyes and nose. Coughing Simon. Big and pale and slippery Simon.
“What?” Simon gasps as Izan half drags, is half dragged himself, back to shore by lumbering, sputtering Simon.
“What the hell were you doing?” Izan hollers. He collapses onto the beach. Simon flops belly up beside him. Wheezing, he lifts above them, in the flashlight’s beam, a snail shell. It shines like a moon against the cave’s corrugated ceiling.
“I saw this in the water. I wonder how it got here?” Simon says.
“Who the hell cares?” Izan says.
Simon works himself onto his elbows. He sets the shell in the sand between them with the same reverence he has when stuffing twenties into the Reverend’s box.
“I do,” Simon says.
Izan feels a small pain. He clutches his chest, right where he remembers the wet shape of Mossi left on Father’s tee. Izan tried to drag Mossi out of the tub, but it was like grasping a bar of soap, or a fish, and so Izan thrust his thumbs deep into the tiny pockets beneath Mossi’s arms to finally grip him. Father was in first, still reeking of happy hour at Gruenkes, and scooped Mossi up. Mother followed, hair brambled from sleep. When she realized what was happening, what had already happened, she grasped Izan’s shoulders and shook him until his eyes rattled and the ceiling panels blurred. “Don’t kill him,” Father screamed and snatched at Mother’s wrist so tight, Izan heard the bone pop.
They buried a casket half the size of the tub. The neighbor with the sheepy gray hair that watched Izan sometimes, and Grandma Hardy with her cloudy eyes stood at the grave with them. The neighbor dropped in a bootie she’d been knitting, and Grandma Hardy planted a squeaky giraffe that’d been Izan’s before it was Mossi’s. Mother wore a splint on her wrist . She wore it for months until it stank and became one more thing Father couldn’t stand. He exited their hurt in skeins of blue trailing from the muffler, and Mother, already lost, didn’t stop him.
“Look,” Simon says slowly. He flips the shell on the sand with the tip of his finger. “I gotta confession to make. I don’t believe the Jesus thing. I picked Carver’s Cave cause I’ve seen you come out of here. And I just… I just…figured, it was something, you know, you liked to do. Come swimming here.”
At first, Izan gets a slow, thick feeling. Like maybe he really is, and finally, drowning. But the deeper Simon’s words sink him, the faster Izan boils. “You’ve been spying—”
“I wasn’t, I just happened—”
Izan bolts upright, cracks his head on the shale above him. “You leave me alone,” Izan screams. Someone had seen him. His most private failure. Izan charges toward the tunnel and the square of daylight. He will not go to Simon’s house, large and sleek and empty. If Simon appears on Saturdays, Izan will turn away, pretend he does not know him, pretend there has been no ice-fogged tumbler pushed across a kitchen island, no waiting for the bus while the sun slid down the shelter’s glass.
Reverend Rashan will find another tenant who can pay to keep the lights buzzing. Mother will stand at the bus stop in her denim jumper and turtleneck, hair bound in a colorless braid, the Mickey Mouse carry-on beside her. She’ll stare as if everything is happening in some strange and distant way, like in a mirror, or underwater. Because it’s not Mossi that drowned that day. It was the rest of them.
“Wait.” Simon wheezes at the edge of the tunnel. “At least take this.”
Izan pauses. He backs up through the tunnel, then stands again on the beach. Simon waits, his arm out, the slope of flesh beneath it sandy and shivering, in his fingers the snail shell.
Izan plucks the shell from Simon’s fingers. He cups his palm around it, then launches it deep into the darkness.
Things that they can’t see—eel-like fish, snails, mosquitos—whine and slide and flap through the silence.
“That’s okay,” Simon finally says. “I deserve it.” He is quiet. Then: “Don’t know what I was thinking anyway. I can’t even swim.” He gives a nervous laugh, and Izan knows what he is doing—scratching one big toe against the other leg’s calf. Then Izan remembers the pool in Simon’s backyard. So blue and unwrinkled. The single family photo. The parents who said he’d slow them down. Sula, who only speaks to ask if Simon has any laundry. The girl who calls him Bubbles.
Izan thinks of his own life. Mother, before her grief turned into religion, in her yellow bikini, hair piled up, the sun bronzing the back of her neck, her belly fat with Mossi. He remembers her laughter at the plastic boats she bought at the Kmart blue-light special, those bright reds and yellows and blues bouncing on the tide. He remembers Father tugging them in the plastic bag to the public pool, dropping them in, hoping Izan would learn to swim. It’s easy, Father had said. People aren’t meant to sink.
It’s something Izan didn’t discover those nights he tapped into the Reverend’s internet and scrolled for hours through blue-lit Google searches. Something no one discussed on Wikipedia or Reddit: the difference between sinking and drowning.
He sees suddenly why it is he can’t drown, yet beside him, Simon sinks.
A lazy bubble drifts up inside Izan. He opens his lips, and it floats out as laughter—a whole flotilla of laughter—and when he’s done, Simon’s droll, bunched face starts him off again. At last, gasping, Izan drops to the beach and pats the space beside him. Finally, he and Simon have found something in common.
“It’s okay,” Izan says. “I can’t swim either.”
“Float” by M.E. Kopp and the artwork titled Float by Sara Robertson appeared in Issue 43 of Berkeley Fiction Review.
M.E. Kopp is winner of the Jonis Agee Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize nominee, andfinalist for the Loft Literary Center’s Emerging Writers’ Grant. Her most recent work can be found or is forthcoming in The Pinch, The Florida Review, Sonora, Peatsmoke, and TheSouth Carolina Review. She is currently querying her first novel, a finalist for the Shirley Holden Helberg Grant.
Sara Robertson is a senior at UC Berkeley earning a BA in English. In addition to painting, she enjoys writing poetry, making jewelry, and rock climbing.
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