Riptide: Chapter 1

In this waking nightmare, where a young man’s deepest shame was molded from phantasm to dread clarity:



Del Norte County’s biggest soccer stadium hosted a vast, green field; near-featureless plane that terminated abruptly before the wide, netted throat of the goal post he’d come to hate.



PRESSURE IS ON ARISTAEUS, DON’T EMBARRASS ME Dad whisper-shouted in his ear, and his breath stank of pilsner like it always did on these hot days.



The pressure had always been on, from the moment of his mistaken conception, to the fourth grade musical, to this singularly horrible moment out here before a crowd of thousands when he did embarrass dad.



A bounding leap forward through air that was thick like water, foot impacting weakly with the pentagon-split face of the soccer ball, sent hurtling through the air, arcing missile-like, quiet and surreal, but for the moment it -CLNKED- off the goal post’s sharp corner, scattering off into the gaping maw of the audience.



BOOOOOOO!

HSSSSsssssst

The flash of the camera lens from behind as he fell to his knees in despair, cataloguing and preserving the moment of his humiliation forever in time and space. When he turned around to confront her, that dreadful photographer, it was to the sound of the door slamming shut as Dad left forever: “You’re a worthless piece of shit, Ari.”



Lane Caillou, timid little wallflower in his grade who thought she was some big-shot photographer, lowered her camera, gazing with those impassive blue eyes...petulantly ignorant of how she’d destroyed his high school social life. “What’s wrong?” she asked before -



He dragged her along the riverbank, ankle splintering in his grasp, trail of fingernails and broken camera parts in her screaming wake -



The bloody kill, a choking splatter, the rich scent of another person’s insides -



Raw flesh separated from bone, shorn by his teeth, sliding down his throat, staring into dead, accusing amber and blue eyes -



Ari became aware again, abruptly. None of the usual dramatics after a nightmare of this sort - and this was by no means the first one - just the warm, dawn wind carrying Pacific salt-stink from the west.



His mouth was full of hot, gritty meat - cheeks bulged with the raw flesh of something that, until a moment ago, had been very much alive but was now smeared, broken red paste and bone in his hands. Bits of fur and what appeared to be a tail were scattered at his knees in the dirt.



Naked and gummed with blood, mud and tree sap, Aristaeus Sidrakis, his mother’s only son and honestly just your average hormone-riddled, troubled high schooler, let the mess drop from his hands, opened his jaw to let half-chewed gore roll down his chin, his thin chest into the dirt. Numb, disoriented as his gray matter tried to catch up with the sudden, jarring shift in reality, Ari reached into his mouth and pulled a clawed, mangled rodent's foot from under his tongue, wincing as it caught in delicate tissue.



This wasn’t the first time he’d come to like this. The week before, somehow he’d gotten all the way down to the waterfront, waist-deep and naked in the ocean before waking up and splashing with indignant fear back ashore.



By around this time his alarm would be going off pointlessly; he was awake and Mom wouldn't be back home from the clinic for another hour, - his dad had taught him how to read the time by checking the sun against the sky; banded a much prettier shade of red than his hands, suggested he had a bit of time. “ P-toofh …” he spat a wad of something in the grass near his patio before sliding the door open with a hiss, wiping his mouth with disgust.



Ari scurried past Mom’s room to silence his alarm before 4:59 read 5:00, then stood before the bathroom mirror, taken aback by his ghoulish visage.



Aristaeus Sidrakis had his mother’s long, aristocratic features. Short brown hair, streaked here and there with copper, threatened to grow wavy and wild if not shorn close; deep-set, unfriendly gray eyes, a hallmark of the maternal line, gazed back with teenaged worldly fatigue. A thin-lipped mouth, still smeared with red, did little to improve an uninviting demeanor, his dad's Mexica origins reflected in his deeply tanned skin, the shape of his nose. Familiar self-disgust and loathing clashed with guilt and, for the first time, concern that this sort of night-terror may choose not to limit itself to the night. "Can't let her see this," he grunted as his toothbrush mixed the complex flavor of organs, marrow and muscle with Crest Toothpaste, running the shower to as high a temperature as he could get.



As the water bravely scalded away most of what could be cleaned, he felt the familiar ache in his bones of an oncoming growth-spurt...if he was lucky he’d end up breaking six feet like his uncle, otherwise he’d end up short like Oppa, and skinny, and “this is what I’m worrying about?” he asked himself aloud in disbelief, picking bits of meat out from under his nails with shivering disgust, wondering if he should make himself throw up. Realistically speaking he had far bigger worries than his vanity: what if his mother caught him mid-psychotic fugue? Or what if he hurt someone's pet?! Not like Ari had ever had one but the thought of killing someone's dog or cat disturbed him more than hurting a person...until he considered what he might do if he came across a kid or old person when he was like that.



Thoughts vacillated between the horror of whatever he’d killed and eaten; the trig homework he’d “forgotten” about last night; wanting to see Mom; missing his dad and hating himself worse for that. Thinking about Kali, wanting to see her.



Mom didn’t like her, and that was part of the allure - a forbidden person, not just because she was twenty one to his callow sixteen, but because she was fun . She didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought, she just lived wild and free. Worked when she needed, partied hard as she wanted and boxed like a devil; he’d learned twice before that she was faster, stronger, better than he was. Someone he could trust in a way he couldn't with Mom.



Almost as tall as Ari, body hardened by nature and browned by the sun, Kali was, to him, like a form of artistic violence incarnated in a woman’s body.



Familiar sexual tension that he knew went unshared, a tightening of muscles in his lower belly and lower still but the rush was cooled by the cold reality of that situation - Kali saw him, a minor no less, as something of a little brother...a protege to pass her badness to, maybe, but never anything more...not that it changed anything. He’d still want her and he’d still want to be around her.



It felt disgusting for his thoughts to move so easily from his sinful actions against nature to sinful desire for someone far out of his league.



"Quit it...quit it quit it!" He hissed to himself, knuckles rapping painfully against his forehead as he forced himself to stop thinking about it. Ari had responsibilities here, since it was just the two of them and she worked these crazy bullshit shifts so they could keep the house. It wouldn't be fair for her to cook and clean on top of that.



Out of the shower, shorts on and into the kitchen to make her dinner, and lunch for her next shift; otherwise she'd be eating that Subway garbage. Eat fresh? "More like eat ass…"



"Should I tell her?" He asked a sparrow sitting on his windowsill. Its glassy, little animal eyes regarded him with terror and it flew off in reply. "Clearly not…" No. Mom had more than enough to worry about, and he knew she felt needlessly bad about all this. No, there was only one person who could help, or even begin to understand his situation.


-------------------------------------------------------


Later that day, after school and somewhere he shouldn’t be, trying to be way cooler than he really was...



“You brought him again?”



Condensation crawled down the the bottle’s curved side, insolent, glistening little fat diamond of water shaken to the table’s surface, pursued by a froth of Modelo. A love-hate relationship with a beer was an inappropriate thing for a teenager to have in the eyes of the law, and thus the unease.



“Nope. Carajito came cuz he wanted to, right?”



“Obviously.” To drive the point home, the he-in-question lifted the bottle to his lips and successfully held back what had once been an embarrassing wince every time he tasted Modelo. Or Corona. All that pilsner industrial brew tasted the same with varying degrees of carbonated piss-flavor, but those labels, along with that room-temp, gag-inducing taste, reminded him of a tense, warm stability.

“Okay whatever I’m just saying, if Leroy decides to pop in here it’ll look bad for me.” He did that stereotypical thing bartenders did with the rag - Caleb’s dishcloth of choice was a scrap of faded blue that looked like it’d survived Reconstruction - wiping it in little circles over the same stains that would never come out.

To be fair Caleb had a point, the cops took underage drinking in bars rather seriously, and especially because this was a small town so everyone was up on everyone else’s business and would totally recognize Natalie Sidrakis’ troublemaking boy. Lately they’d had a lot of other shit on their plate though.

“Yeah bro, I get it, you’re running this totally legit thing, don’t wanna draw attention cuz you’re slingin’ to the kids.” Kali smiled that dazzling smile of hers, and it reminded Ari of a stream under whose surface darted waterbugs with their nasty dagger teeth.

“Somebody’s gotta sell it clean.” A decent enough attempt to save face, and Caleb’s retreat at the behest of one of Kali’s crew further down the counter was another wise face-saving choice; Ari was familiar with this concept and noticed it in everyone ever since Uncle Frank pointed it out to him. Everyone had to save face sometimes...except Kali, and this was one of the many traits that drew him to her after she’d signaled that it was in fact okay for him, a junior, to hang out with her.



Neither of them spoke for a short minute as they watched Caleb plod along with that limp of his, and both shared in the moment of contempt. It felt good to share that...they could be disgusted together, rather than simply being on the receiving end. Weak. Crippled. An easy kill opponent.



You know how with most people you feel this need to fill the quiet? Like, you can’t just exist with someone you aren’t intimately familiar with all that easily...just the act of being around other humans took effort, but not with a very limited few.

In that comfortable, rare quiet he let his senses drift around Antlers’ Brew Pub. The place had once been a processing house for shellfish caught along the coastline before the Good Friday Tsunamis in ‘64 had reduced it, and much of Crescent City, to rubble.

An old crabbing captain with a drinking problem who used to take his hauls here, a Paul Connor, bought the plot and rebuilt it but things never got back to how they were. To pay off his gambling and booze debts Connor turned it over to his creditors, and it eventually was turned by one of them, a repugnant little woman named Jean Laseco, into its current incarnation, passed to her son Caleb after he came back from Basra, stuck with a limp...after taking a spill from a moving helicopter, also a victim of his own alcohol abuse.



Antlers’ looked like it was confused about its identity, worse than Ari. Was it a sports pub? The Rams memorabilia suggested as much, but then there was the great big fishing net suspended above a pair of crossed oars and the singing big mouth bass on the wall whose animating spirit had long ago left it silent and ugly. The bartop was a slab of carved linoleum - he’d argued about its color a few times with Kali, insisting it was ‘puce’, or ‘the color of dried blood on linens’ as he put it (she stated it was a ‘shitty brownish purple and that’s that’).



The appeal of bars, frankly, was lost on him, other than the fact that going to them made you cool, as did drinking, smoking, shoplifting, everything else boring, unhappy old people said you weren’t supposed to do.



There were maybe...seven, eight people here right now, keeping as wide a berth between each other as possible, like they just couldn’t get enough distance. People here wouldn’t survive a second in San Diego or Los Angeles, both of which played into some far off, nebulous dream of escape he entertained; lately they were starting to look about as empty as the Modelo in front of him, though he couldn’t put his finger on why.



"So." Kali's short nails clinked on her bottle as she broke the quiet between them, and she lifted it to her lips with a light clatter from the beadwork woven into her dark, two-tone hair...the color reminded Ari of a rottweiler. Her flashing teeth had his attention as she gazed at him fond mischief. "Like I was saying, you're doing like what those livestock tell you to, and you’re buying into that ‘bad attitude’ crap they feed you."



That kind of criticism normally raised his hackles, and he knew this was going to be annoying to listen to.



"It's not your attitude, Ari. I'll tell you that much…at least not the way those cattle are tellin' ya." She took a swig from the bottle, and to Ari looked like the coolest being who’d ever existed. Her dreads and tattoos, that natural air of easy rebellion, she was just the sort of creature Coors or Miller would love to get their hands on for a commercial gig. Kali spun toward him on the barstool, crossing a leg over the other, black work slacks pulling up to reveal a hint of ink on her ankle. “I’ll tell you what your problem is.”

Here we go. Ari put his chin in his palm and watched her with glum skepticism. “Yeah? You think you know?” he challenged, tipping the dregs of Modelo back and gagging it down manfully. Blech.

“I doknow you little gilipollas motherfucker - Caleb, shoot us - ah, me!” Kali leaned forward and jabbed Crescent City’s worst youth delinquent in the shoulder, reaching for the little shooter of Lalo.

Oh boy she’s breaking out the liquor. His ferric gaze followed the clear liquid’s path from glass to her dark-painted lips, watching the movement of her slender throat as she swallowed, her own jungle-cat brown eyes regarding him with rye amusement.

“Your problem is you got a big bad bull’s balls, Ari.” Beads in her hair clattered as tilted her head to the side, making a lewd, cupping motion with her right hand, before jabbing her index finger against his chest. “But you got a little sweety bitch’s heart and it makes you second guess yourself after you show those schoolboys who’s boss. Makes you look weak.”

“The hell do you know about my balls or my heart?”

Ari aggressively leaned toward her, knocking over his empty bottle - Kali’s fingers intercepted it before it could break, motions spare and easy as she stared him down. “I’m not weak, I could take you,” he huffed, trying to sound tough.



This, he knew, to be a lie of course, as did Kali...you look at the two of them and you see it, Ari may have been a wiry, rough kid but Kali’s confidence spoke for itself. “Uh-huh.” Her smile widened a little bit as she reached forward and pushed his shoulder lightly, shoving him back on his barstool to fume her direction. “So now you’re owning it eh big guy? Feeling big and tall with a little booze in your belly?”



“Yeah.” Knowing how defensive he sounded stoked his frustration and temper, it made him stupid and malleable and he knew this. “Always am, and you know James was a different thing, coming up on me from behind, y’know, it wasn’t his fault. You on the other hand,” he leveled a bandaged index finger her way, “you’d deserve it.”



That whole drama with James was a regrettable thing that was, in the face of his eroding lucidity, increasingly worrisome...part of the cocktail of events he couldn’t explain and wasn’t able to confront; there was a wall there, between the living, breathing, aggressive teenage boy ‘Aristaeus’ and the night terrors. Hearing and smelling things he shouldn’t be able to...reacting with extreme aggression to a teammate - James - approaching him too quickly from behind for some innocent, non-threatening reason. Chavez, the team captain, had pulled him off the guy before he even understood himself what he’d done.

“Okay, okay, sheesh...you on your period or something man? You’ve been a real perra espinosa lately. You’re never gonna get laid if you keep being so damn pissy.” Harsh words aside, she grabbed his shoulder and gave him a light jostle back and forth affectionately, her pretty smile simultaneously pulling down his guard and making him uneasy. "Chiiiill man...you don't gotta be so hard on your homegirl, a'right?"



She was right of course, no denying it. Ari had been acting out even more than normal, snapping at Kali, Mom, even Robbie the other night during Arena Deathmatch which was totally uncalled for. “Okay, you're right, I'm sorry, you don't deserve that...you’re pushin’s all, and I get what you’re saying.”

“You don’t act like it, you act like you’re doubting.”

“That’s cuz I wasn’t thinking.” Ari’s palm smacked on the counter; across the bar, a big local named Rezz shot him an irritated grimace, rising to tell him off, but a look from Kali settled him down again. “I didn’t even know James was behind me,” he continued blithely, “or that it was him when I was mauling the guy. What if it’d been someone like a teacher, or…”

“That girl you don’t like?” The look in her eyes made him squirm, it’d make anybody writhe a bit. Lane’s impassive, innocent gaze, the way her lips parted just a bit to show her top teeth like a frightened animal flashed through his mind...her choking screams like a terrified rabbit’s in his nightmare.



“Or you.” An aggressive evasion.

“You know how that goes...how it could go carajito.”

Yeah. He did. The corner of her eyes wrinkled, a mirthless smile hinted at a no-holds, no-bad-feelings ass-kicking if he kept it up...so he just made a glum noise and fiddled with the empty bottle he’d nearly shattered, rolling it around on its base.



“I can’t quit, and I can’t get kicked off, not until I’ve fixed things.” No hiding from that, he’d fucked up badly with the team, it was only by virtue of unusual speed and grace that he hadn’t gotten the axe. Nonetheless, with his grades slipping, the disaster at the state championships, beating James’ poor face in, he had much to atone for. At the back of his mind was the animal he’d killed and eaten, threatening to break free from compartmentalization and beg for some sort of retribution.

“What, with James and those other pussies?” Kali tsked with dismissal, a jangle of her wallet chain as she tugged on her young accomplice’s sleeve, pulling him to the rust-squealing backdoor and fishing a pair of American Spirits from her pocket. She pushed one into his hand, dragging him out into the parking lot behind the bar, under warm, drizzling rain.



“No.” A flick of an orange bic in his hand as he lit her smoke, then his underneath the overhang, squatting on his heels. Ari’s gaze was drawn inevitably toward the intersection of Harding and Northcrest, a dismal sight which never failed to make him feel vulnerable and exposed. Square, colorless buildings jutting up from the concrete like worn-down teeth broke the flat expanse. Roxco Furniture across from them - save 20% on our big couch sale! - a Shell station...an auto-body shop.


Ruthlessly boring.

“Well...yeah.” Nicotine and foul flavor made him aware of his pulse, somewhere in his right temple and at the base of his jugular vein.

Kali’s bemused stare glazed over slightly as she rolled her eyes, cigarette dangling from the corner of her lip. “Oyy oyyy...it’s about the Day of Infamy isn’t it.” A dramatic, yet dismissive hand gesture. “Madre de puta …” Kali began but paused, maybe thinking better of it.



The Day of Infamy was dangerous ground to tread on, a wrong word could unleash an avalanche of swearing and attitude, of adolescent-masculine defensiveness and face-saving; already she could see him growing still, fingers curling into fists, bending his cigarette, barely smoked. “Just saying, big guy. You’re letting lessers drag you down...and you know, fuck ‘em. Alien-Lane, your principal, Chavez, who needs them?”



A tap of her cigarette, ash disappearing in midair when it touched rainfall. Ari really wished he could be cool like she was, just effortlessly without trying. “Don’t waste your youth on this mijo . You should be like, making money, kicking ass, getting some pussy…” Kali leered over him with a laugh, chuckling as Ari lightly shoved her back with a good natured complaint. The way she said that word - ‘POO-sy’ - gross and hot at the same time.

“I dunno dude, not for a bit, not after the Goldschlager incident.” The warm, syrupy smell of cinnamon and the singularly terrible sensation of Lorrie Margulis vomiting all over his lap made the skin on his neck crawl...that'd been a few months ago at Tammy Martina’s party. Talk about a waste of youth.

“You little fuckers just didn’t pace yourselves, I’m telling you son...little bit of liquid confidence goes a long way, cuz everyone loves confidence. Speaking of which.” She took another few pulls of her Spirit, shorted it, slipped it back into her case and put an arm around her younger companion’s slightly bony shoulders. The casual, simple contact and acceptance made him feel way better than he'd willingly let on. “Let’s go knock over Cazadore’s, I gotta restock and you gotta get your ass back in the saddle...and I’ll help you with that after you help me nip some Cuervo.”



This close he could smell whatever weird, hippy perfume or essential oil she wore, but also the tang of her sweat, the alcohol and tobacco on her breath. An inappropriate pang of desire for her, this girl five years his senior who for some reason was wasting her time on him instead of someone cooler, someone her own age...an uneasy shift in his pace at her side and not for the first time he found himself wondering just how much she knew about what went on inside of his head. Should I tell her about the animal I ate, or that I’m afraid of hurting people? She has answers to everything...but what if she just calls me a bitch?



She was talking, saying something, and he couldn’t help but notice the way her leg brushed against his, the shape of her sculpted thigh muscles against the dark fabric, crawling up to the curve of her rear.



A tangle of adolescent male thoughts made a tumult in his head that quashed his earlier ruminations; push her against the car and kiss her / don’t be stupid you’re a kid / taste her bloody guts between your teeth / you don’t know the first thing about girls Ari.