“I have not vilified a slave to his master.
I have not caused anyone to go hungry.
I have not made any man to weep.
I have not committed murder.
I have not caused calamities to befall men and women.
I have not been angry without just cause.
I have not added to the weights on the scales.
I have not carried away the milk from the mouths of children.
I have not stopped water when it should flow.
I am pure.
I am pure.
I am pure.”
The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Papyrus of Ani, 1240BC

Little.
Impetuous.
Woman.
My daughter.
Her mother in muscular looks and smirks and pointed argument.
Her mother less fifty percent.
Those very fifty that fill me with white rage occasionally.
Half me too, I should say in all fairness.
The half which I dislike most but makes her proud.
Go figure.
Our children.
Half of them is a mirror held up to our face, half is a fist and a high finger shoved under our nose.
We don't deserve this.
They disagree.
We're in this delicate balancing act.
One word, one squint over breakfast, you fall off the rope.
Sheer magic prevents you from crashing on the ground.
The moment you start to fall, you find yourself back on the rope.
As if nothing before actually happened.
And this goes on and on, like a loop.
You never seem to grasp the trick of staying on for good.
My daughter, little impetuous woman of sixteen.
I think she's so little but she's so woman.
Perception is often stronger than reality.
Jen, Jenny, Jennifer.
I observe her growing up.
She doesn't notice me growing older.
She hasn't reached that point of no return yet.
That single moment when the countdown can't be stopped.
The mechanisms of life are so good at deceiving us.
Her vision is too fast.
Too busy scurrying.
No time to ponder.
Protected from the future.

Jenny's birthday was coming up.
She didn't ask to go to a rave or a house party.
Instead, she suggested a trip to the beach hut.
“We'll see,” I said, lacking conviction.
I wasn't sure she'd find the ocean hut and its rudimentary marine lab interesting.
“You promised you'd take her one day,” her mother reminded me.
“It'll be fun, Daddy. Maybe we can come up with a subject for my science project.”
“That should be easy with your biologist of a father.”
My wife had settled it.
Jenny gave me a thumbs up and flashed a smile.
I could feel its whipping.
The weather played along, one of the first good, hot spells before summer.
We were packed to go.
“You two go ahead,” my wife apologized at the very last minute.
She was filling the cooler with iced tea.
“I got some work to catch up on. I'll join up tomorrow afternoon. With Jenny's birthday cake. How about that?”
We drove for half an hour or so.
We emptied the car and covered the last mile on foot.
The hut stood perched on its narrow hump of sand, untouched by the tides this time of year.
I showed Jen where I worked.
The algae in their dishes, the microscope, the shelves with samples of dried starfish and urchins.
The tanks where I kept live specimens.
The trellised window giving out on the ocean.
The endless charts.
The endless graphs, curled at the corners.
Emblems of a research career with no beginning and no end.
For a moment there, I thought I was seeing the lab through Jenny's eyes.
She absorbed it.
“Why are you into this line of work?” she asked when I was done.
I leaned against the doorpost on our way out.
“I guess I do what I was made to do.”
Outside again, we were struck by the setting sun.
Its light was deep orange and dense, almost physical.
We tossed our sweaters.
“Slice up dead crabs and clams?”
I locked the lab.
I circled the hut and checked the frail stilts supporting it.
I thought I should come up with an answer.
Somewhere from the depth.
Given one chance, don't we all make the wrong wish ?
I couldn't tell her that.
I stalled for time.
“Don't freak out, okay.” I said after her.
We walked down the stretch and rolled out our tents.
“Did you ever discover anything, Dad?”
I thought of the piles of paper, print-outs, projections, estimations.
The nights bent over primitive neural connections.
Not to say that I was proud but there was a part of significance in it, for me.
“Yeah. I guess.”
Jenny knotted her sweater on the pole of her tent.
She spread her arms, signalling she wanted to hear this.
“So?”
I nodded, Robert de Niro bobbing his head before he speaks his mind.
“The thrill of it is when something unexpected comes along.”
Did you discover a new species, or something!”
She grew excited.
“No. That's not what I meant. It lies in the beauty of the mechanism, you understand? The endless power of life to adjust. Even in its simplest forms.”
I started to build a fire.
I knew Jenny would be surprised and happy with it.
She moved between the tents.
She looked sprightly.
The skin on her back and thighs bronze.
Lean and tight as helm grass.
Dusk was seeping in, one inch at a time.
The fire caught and I busied myself with the meal.
Jenny sprinted off.
She ran the perimeter of the sand bank, feet slapping the water.
After a few rounds, she joined me and sat by my side of the low fire.
She tilted her head sideways, chin slightly up.
So much her mother when she was out to please me.
“Drop that. Let me make you something, for a change.”
I passed her the tongs.
I stood up, drew a glass of cold iced tea and drank it.
“Let me show you something,” I said.
I dug in one of the bags.
I threw coarse salt into the flames.
The salt crackled with little emerald flashes.
Jenny had a go herself.
I watched the logs burn, my daughter, the two small tents, the flat curve of the ocean beyond.
You polish the life, the same life, the same hard life, until it shines.
“All ready, Dad.”
We nibbled at the meat straight off the fire, mixing it with great gushes of air, mouths open wide.
Our teeth were aching in our skulls.
Impossible to keep a straight face.
We laughed at each other until the tears rolled down and we rolled backward in the sand.
Then Jen squatted, and fed me, going about it like there was a ritual going on in her mind.
I praised her burnt sleeve potatoes, fanning my face after each new spoonful.
We collapsed again, screaming, choking, eyes streaming.
At our feet, in the sudden night, the fire began dying out.
Red logs, twinkling with scorching heat.
So densely black was the sky.
It blended into the sea.
Only the habit of gravity told us the sky was above us, the sea all around.
Black over our heads, blackness in all directions.
Just Jen and I, wedged between water and air.
We stood up and strolled in unison toward the ocean.
We waded in, peddling silently with our arms.
Waded in the absolute dark and liquid night.
Waded in this inkwell, the air in tepid layers about us, the sea smoother than any water.
The ocean swelled and sagged in a slow rhythm against our thighs.
We were immersed in this immense, pulsating universe.
Part of it.
Unliving.
Unbreathing.
Just part of it.
But oh so part of it.
Part of a whole.
Jen and I, fitting perfectly into this perfect infinity.
All that appeared unravelled before, the loose pieces we call habit, was joined now.
My heart filled the world.
I was a giant in the galaxy that Jen and I made together.
I extended my hand, not knowing what to expect.
My daughter's hand floated into mine.
“Look,” I whispered. “There.”
“Yes.”
Fluorescent algae surrounded us.
Undulated in long swaths of faint, greenish light.
Large tattered ribbons dimmed out while others flared up and enfolded us.
“Yes,” Jenny murmured.
“Yes.”
Her voice unravelled thinly over the water.
“Yes.”
Hardly audible.
At some point.
I let go of her hand.
At some point.
We retreated.
We were standing on the dry again.
I heard her wriggle out of her wet bathing suit.
A last spark lit up from the fire.
In the brief amber flash, Jen appeared taller.
She looked at me, surprised but unembarrassed, and I didn't look away.
I glided out of my shorts.
I straightened up, and became aware of Jenny's presence, close by, behind me.
Closer still.
She brushed against me.
Flattened herself against my back.
The taut flesh of her, fully alive, pointed against either side of my spine.
Her skin. Silk, not yet leather.
Her hand glided over my chest, went down, striped my abdomen with sea water.
The same hand that instinctively closed itself round my finger a few minutes after birth. The goop was still on her but I craved for that first little grip just like I was begging for it now.
You are my body, Jen, my body which adopts your shape.
I turned, and scooped her face.
I could feel her lashes flutter against my skin, her smile spilling over the cup of my hands.
She drew me to her mouth.
So right.
Her mouth, where it should be, you understand.
It felt like it should be there.
Belonged there.
Had always belonged there and nowhere else.
With mine pressed against it.
I sucked in the blazing air escaping her lips.
She loved me.
That truth hung between us.
We didn't need any light to see.
But she hadn't learned yet what love is.
All that love can be and give and make to receive.
I love you, Jen, and you can't fathom just how much.
Feet firmly in the sand, drowning, higher and higher, close to vertigo.
This was her mother with her serious beauty, holding me sixteen years ago and offering me the earth.
Hand in hand, we liberated fear, we freed freedom, she and I.
Side by side, we shared the sweetness and heaviness of being together, the look and judgment of a spouse resting on all things.
I'd have walked across hot coals for her.
She'd just had to snap her fingers.
Whereas Jen.
Jenny offered me nothing.
She was not choosing me and I was not choosing her.
It was just her and me on a sandbank at a conjecture in time.
Our trajectories crossed but they could just as well not have.
That's how it was.
That's how it is.
You don't plan anything.
You just walk into it.
I never chose anything, you know, not deliberately.
For all we know, it's as simple as that.
Things come to us.
Events wrap themselves about us.
Right there and then, I thought that what happened could be without consequences.
Detached from all else.
Jenny's left hand was under my head and her right pulled my buttocks to her.
I unhooked, then unfolded her arm.
I kissed the inside fold of her elbow.
I kissed the palms of her hands.
Where I went, my face bathed in a radiant glow of warmth.
I kissed her fingers, one by one, in the complete night.
I licked her fingertips.
Licked the salt off them.
The water we come from.
So similar to blood.
Savoured something darker still than the night.
Kelp. Peat.
Musk.
All at once.
Rich, more drunken than wine.
Eyes wide open onto the black.
“Oh Jen. Jenny, Jenny.”
You're black and beautiful.
I kissed her lips again and my underside was swollen with her rising wave.
My lips will never tear away from your lips, Jen.
A tremor took hold of her.
A moan.
Hers or mine?
Was that my little girl?
I got the full bucket of cold water over me.
I gulped for air.
I inhaled and exhaled heavily.
The future was looming, clear as diamond, and as sharp.
What tears us apart are the choices we must make.
How could I part with what I cherished most?
I couldn't.
Listen to me, I couldn't.
But, if I kneeled.
If I faced her hips with the contours of sand dunes.
The unknown river of her.
The crucible of her.
If I kneeled before her, I'd be lost forever.
Both of us.
I waited a little, throat throbbing, knees buckling.
I fought the surging images.
And the words I refused to even consider.
Let them pass.
Let them go by me.
Help me.
The sea sounds reached me again, distant at first.
I kissed Jen's eyelids.
I kissed her forehead, my eyes closed and lonely now in the dark.
Then her hair.
Tenderly, you understand, the Nemesis of passion.
I dropped in the sand and groped blindly about for a towel.
I draped her with it.
She shook herself loose and vanished into the night.
We withdrew to our separate tents.
I crawled in and lay flat on my back, still panting.
My chest heaved.
Constricted by tight steel bands.
There was a beating heart inside, clubbing against the metal.
The only muscle within me resisting the metal.
I couldn't tell if Jen was asleep or awake.
She might be listening, like me, into this limpid night.
There was the slight lapping of incoming waves against the shoal.
The rustle of sand being dragged back into the sea as they retreated.
The lapse between my heartbeats extended, adjusted to the pervading cycle of the sea.
Beating to another time.
In the short silences in between, I tried to locate her breath.
I knew I listened to her looking into the night.
I used to feed her, held steady in my crooked arm, her big eyes marvelling and locked on mine.
Her laughter enchanted me whenever I heard it, put my heart afrenzy.
Love is complicated.
Love does not come easy.
It's a mess but it's important.
It requires the best of us.
Love me and hate me, Jen, right now it's exactly the same.

The sun rose.
The sun filtered into the tent.
Took its time.
Slowly, without fail.
Sun-up.
First light, first warmth.
Time picked up speed.
A fresh day ahead, for me.
For Jenny, all of life.
I prayed she would see that.
I prayed for the first time in my entire life.
I never believed there was anything out there but I couldn't take any chance.
Not this time I couldn't.
So I prayed hard.
I watched the blood drain from my knuckles.
I swung open the tent flap and breathed the still ocean.
I was out and stretched myself.
The reef of sand stood out like cream in a cup of coffee.
Gulls were circling the wooden tide hut on its saltbitten pillars.
Jen pulled herself up from her tent too.
“Hi. How're you?”
I'd never heard her talk like that, with such precision.
She looked fine, that is, she didn't look shocked.
My pulse was banging like a bass drum, sending out shock waves through my gut.
She kept staring at me, expected me to speak.
She knew it was killing me.
Talking felt like too much effort.
“Hi,” I said.
The word 'baby' was on my lips but I swallowed it.

There was her mother.
She hopped over the channel of shallow water separating us from the beachhead.
That moment of utter emptiness before she stood in front of me.
The rift of emptiness before.
Those seconds counted as seconds and weighed a lifetime.
Sandals sloshing and all smiles, my wife embraced me.
I didn't cringe, like I expected.
She put her arms generously round me and held me fast against her.
Then she detached herself and pressed the flat of her hand against my cheek.
“Morning, darling.”
That was good.
That was her.
Her alone.
Anybody who loved that good must have loved a lot before and have a lot in store.
“What have you two been up to?”
“Leave him alone,” Jen threw in.
I jumped to Jen's rescue.
“This is a father-daughter thing.”
“What father-daughter thing?” her mother said.
She was curt.
She sees through me, as in straight at you, Jen.
She built this invisible fence around me.
Trespassers are spotted.
I knew she would never abandon me.
Never cease to protect me.
The guilt I didn't really feel seeped in.
The stab of last night lay hidden in my soul.
I lulled her.
I scoured the sand shelf.
Last night had been so coal dark.
I was relieved I couldn't trace my daughter's and my own footsteps in the sand.
For a moment, I wished I could though.
Let it be seen.
Let it be known.
Judge me for what I did.
Only for that.
For that alone.
The way Jen and I didn't make love.
There were no traces of it by morning.
The sea had washed them away.
The past is well passed, I knew.
The past is prologue.
We stayed mute.
My wife decided to explore the hut on the sandbar.
Jen rolled up the canvas of her tent.
She attracted all the sunlight to herself.
Sand stuck to her shoulders, and glistened.
“Can I ask you something?”
That same voice, same new her.
“Sure.”
“You can call me Jennifer from now on, okay.”
Her head lopsided and she winked at me.
A love potion I couldn't drink.
Tender on my mind.
I so wanted to carve this moment into memory.
Keep it close.
Know that she looked at me.
Saw something better than I am.
I wanted to hold that.
She seemed adorable, my daughter.
Look at her.
Don't you ever wonder how saplings pierce the air?
How they win over atmospheric pressure?
Don't you want to understand how the branches of young trees reach into heaven?
How they defy gravity?
How they hold up in the wind, being so graceful and tender?
Look at her.
Just look at my daughter.
That is how.
The apple blushing at the end of a twig.
At the very last end of a twig.
Forgotten by the apple pickers.
Be blessed, Jennifer, be blessed.

We stopped for juice and tea and coffee and fresh rolls.
Then we wandered along the fish stalls.
The three of us, side by side.
“You look beautiful,” I confided into my wife's ear.
“Thank you,” she said.
I nodded.
She turned slightly away.
But I could see her blushing.
We walked.
Jennifer stepped up ahead of us.
She halted at one of the stands and ran her fingers through the crushed ice.
We caught up with her.
Our daughter faced us.
“What do you want, honey?” her mother asked.
She slipped her hand into my back pocket, held it there.
It felt snug, a reward.
I ground my cheek against her hair.
The familiar smell of her filled my head.
Her earring stung through the auburn wisps.
It meant nothing without the sting.
I felt the sharp puncture distinctly.
Her keen mark on me.
Jennifer laughed at us.
“Come on, you guys.”
She threw some ice slivers in our direction.
“I want to go to Europe during summer recess,” she said.
Her mother sucked air through her teeth, then glanced at me.
“Women want everything,” I sighed.
My wife pinched me through the pocket.
“That's because they give everything,” she added with vigour.
My hope propelled itself, sucking up like blotting paper.

 

[END]

© 2003 Nolan Keating