Page 1 of Sicken of the Calm
PROLOGUE
It’s the kind of blue thatgoes on forever. That you fall into, deep, deep. It lives in that space betweenlight and darkness, between wakefulness and sleep. Thecolourofnostalgia, it brings to shore a memory. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, Iremember being curled up in the warmth of the back of the car in the twilightof summer. I remember the smell of my family, of the seat I was pressedagainst, of the damp towels from the beach. I remember the radio playing softly,some familiar song on an unfamiliar station, the sounds caught in the bell jarof the night. Through slit eyes, I would watch the streetlights wash over theinside of the car in intervals, blinking between reality and dream. Everythingwould be quiet, and soft, and warm, and safe.
Then, from the darkness wouldappear a tunnel. Its waiting animal mouth would grow and all of a sudden,swallow. The music on the radio would fizzle and dissolve. The lights wouldyellow. The underwater sounds muffled the world outside. The moment the carwent under, I would take a deep breath, my ribs straining against the rush ofair, and hold. Hold. For as long as the tunnel lasted, I kept the air thick inmy lungs. The pressure would rise, my ears would pop, I would drift through theglowing darkness. My body wouldcentre. The world would shrink to thepoint of the pressure in my chest. All I would know was me, the tunnel, theunderwater sound that grew and grew and grew until–
The car would break thesurface, met by the open sky. The radio would shiver alive and I would gasp lungfulsof air. Everything would come rushing back, a crashing wave of oxygen. Therelief would be followed by content, by the moonlight, the chasing streetlights,the miles yet to run. On the front seat, my mother would turn to me and I wouldclose my eyes.
Lulled, I would sink into thenight.
CHAPTER ONE
At first, it is his hands. Thelong fingers curled precariously around a pencil held at the brink of falling,as if caught by nothing but will. The knobbly knuckles, sculpted with charm andcharacter. The curve of the nails always impatiently short. The pale, slenderwrists with the imprinted map of blue river veins. The sight of them amidst thecrowded forest of college students sends a jolt of recognition through me, a senseof vertigo as the lecture theatre is superimposed by the afterimage of a highschool class, where those same hands, that same tapping rhythm, had taunted mefrom a distance. The sight of them is all the more striking because I hadn’tknown that the boy – man, now, really – goes to the same university I haveattended for two years. Ezra. We had hardly spoken in school, but I would neverbe able to forget his name.
My stay at Fox Lake Universityhas been a coalescence of both under and overwhelming experiences. Trying tolive up to the stereotype of university life – a nutshell of media-sold images,of adventure and change and growth – has been a challenge I should have foreseen.I had almost expected a sudden metamorphosis from the cocoon of high school,the wing-span of my confidence forced to unfurl, but I am still the samefundamentally reserved person I was in my teenage years. Even with theadvantage of attending on a football scholarship with two years of high schoolcaptainship under my belt, I have not been able to typecast myself into therole of Outgoing Football Player. Almost every party I go to still has thatdisquieting moment of looking around at the people around me from my island andwondering,how am I going to ever breach the distance?
I still can’t quite figure outwhy everybody seems to be finding themselves, whilst I remain a little lost.
The trap of my thoughts ispierced suddenly by Ezra’s clear, hazel eyes as I am caught staring. I see theshock and recognition on his face and can’t help but frown in reaction, mydefault expression in discomfort. I look down at my large, brown hands clenchedover the PowerPoint slides I had printed out in preparation for theAnthropology class that is helping me meet my Social Sciences requirement. Ihad postponed the class to my third year, eager to dive straight into moreArchitecture-relevant classes that contributed directly to my major. Now,though, I’m not sure I have made the right decision.
I don’t look up when someonethrows themselves ungracefully onto the seat next to me. The lecture hasn’tstarted yet, so the sound of the rattling seat as the foldable bottom slamsdown gets swallowed up by the chattering of the afternoon class. The tieredseating is constructed with individual chairs but long, bench-like wooden tables,and his mess of pens and papers clatters next to my elbow.
I know it’s Ezra but I don’tlook up, even though I can feel my pulse racing in my ears.
Amazingly, Ezra remainssilent, if not exactly still. His smart mouth had often gotten him into troublewith teachers and hadn’t made him popular in school. He had seemedfundamentally resistant to a system that demanded silence and stillness, infamousfor talking back and getting an unceasing stream of behaviour points; areputation that completely overshadowed his diligence to schoolwork. But, maybeEzra is one of the people that has changed in all the ways I haven’t been ableto.
The lecture, despite being thefirst of its kind this semester, starts with little ceremony. The professor isdry and unenthused, and I can already tell the class is going to be a pain inthe ass. This judgement, however, is a distant one, distracted as I am by Ezra.I feel him beside me like a buzzing in my ear, against the vulnerable skin onmy neck and the tightness of the fingers clutching my pen.
For the first ten minutes,nothing happens. I try to concentrate as the lecturer drones something about coursework.Then, just as I’m being lulled into a sense of security, my already fracturedfocus splinters as Ezra’s long fingers slide into view. His hand stays therefor a moment, right next to mine, a contrast of light and darker skin, beforeit lifts and disappears. Left behind is a folded piece of paper. I look at itfor a moment, feeling the frown between my eyebrows. I glance at him from thecorner of my eye, but he’s looking straight ahead, the summer freckles stillstark on his straight nose. Slowly, I open the paper. From the white sheetlooks up a small caricature of what can only be my face, judging by theoverabundance of eyebrow and square jaw, scowling back at me. It has asurprising amount of menace for such simple drawing. I immediately think of myfriend Iva and the way she would cackle at seeing such a true reflection of myresting murder face, as she calls it.
I slide the paper to the otherside of me and stubbornly look back at the pitched floor where the lecturerstands, looking up at our tiered seating. It can’t even be five minutes beforethe next piece of paper appears. This time it’s my sleeping face, including adrop of drool from my open mouth and a bubble of snot from my nose. I press mylips together, avoiding a snort. I don’t want to encourage him, caught betweenwondering if the drawings are due to friendliness or ridicule.
The stream of pictures doesn’tcease, evolving from my face to other things; a rendition of the professor’sapathetic expression, a squatting bird with “duck this!” in a bubble over itshead, the crude drawing of a dick. The last one causes a huff of amused breathto come out and I sense him shift beside me like he’s counting it as a victory.
The lesson ending is likewaking from sleep. I realize I haven’t heard a single word the professor hassaid and I sigh internally, packing the printed sheet I had been scribbling onnonsensically. Before I can leave, however, Ezra leans close to me, elbows onthe table. After a moment of hesitation, I turn toward him, allowing myself tolook at his face properly for the first time; at his brown, bedhead hair, hisalmost delicate cheekbones bellied by the bowed lips that so easily curl into asmirk. He’s a little tanner than usual from summer, his baby fat completelygone, his hair a little longer and even more unkempt than in high school. Apartfrom that, it’s the same Ezra that had caught my attention in school, even ifthe distance between our worlds never really diminished enough to get to knoweach other.
“So, you wanna do it with me?”he says in that familiar baritone that is always surprising from his lean body,even though his broad shoulders and height lend him a sense of strength. Mymind goes blank and to a million places at once. The silence stretches and Iwatch as his grin flattens slightly.
“What?” I say.
“The project. Wanna partnerup?”
“This is college. We don’t getpaired projects,” I say without thinking, and his smile widens again.
“Someone wasn’t payingattention,” he teases. “No worries, I made notes. We can plan what to do duringlab. It’ll be great!”
Before I can so much as askhow the hell he made any notes between all the drawing, he slaps another piece ofpaper beside me before getting up.
“See ya ‘round, Joaquin,” he saysand slides between the table and chairs until he gets stuck a little awkwardlyby the slow-moving traffic on the stairs between table sections as everybodyheads toward the exit.
I remain seated for a momentmore, looking down at the last piece of paper. A telephone number in messyscrawl sits innocently amidst a scrap of white. My fingers twitch.
I scoop it up, along with thepictures that preceded it, and leave.
**********
In the summer of my eleventhbirthday my friend Ivelisse, although calling her anything other than Iva wouldearn you a scowl, became convinced that the neighbours down the road wereabusing their dog.
Iva and I have known eachother for our whole lives. Both our parents moved from Puerto Rico to the WestCoast when they were in their twenties, their ambitious spirits chased away bythe dipped economy in the 1980s. With a courage that was difficult to fullycomprehend, they left parts of their heart skipping a bomba beat in theparadise beaches of Puerto Rico and moved toward the American dream they hadbeen sold on silver screens. There, they had eventually settled in aneighbourhood diverse enough to dampen the shock of leaving the sounds, smells,and rhythm of their country. Instead of a defection, the move had only solidifiedthe pride they felt to be part of Puerto Rico, in soul if not in body, and Ihad often been taken during the summer holidays to visit the beaches and rainforestsof the colourful island.
