Wordless Light


Mom started playing solitaire the night the police came, after they left.  The real game, not the computer one.  I'd been gone
for three days at that point.  I'd never been gone so long before.  The police said they'd heard word of a teenage boy down
at the river three nights ago.  The word they had concerned gangs and guns and initiations.  Wannabes were mentioned and
was I one, they wondered.  They found five bullets and a single empty shell casing near the water.  The only fingerprint was
mine, a partial on the empty shell.

"And my son?"  Mom asked.

The officers sat at the table across from her.  Dad stood at the threshold to the living room, silenced by their words.  The
gray-haired officer said, "There is no body."

"No body."  Dad straightened, his eyes focused on the officer's profile.  He crossed the room, his eyes never leaving the
officer's face, and sat with Mom.  His eyes were glazed by the time he sat down.

"No body," he repeated after the police left.  "He's not a body," his eyes were red then and his voice soft, "is he?"

Mom had no answer to offer, she folded and flexed her empty hands, one over the other.  She had questions too, so over
and over they asked the same questions, first him of her, then her of him.  Where is he?  Where could he be?  Where would
he go? Their questions expressed their anguish that night.

Dad kept returning to, "He's not a body, is he?" until his skin was ashen with exhaustion and his eyes sunken black holes.  
Grief was having no answers.  Then he got up and went to bed, but not before goddammit slipped from his mouth.

Mom put a pot of coffee on when she heard Dad sink onto the bed upstairs.  She got a new deck of cards out of the
odds-and-ends drawer, and slit the plastic wrap with her thumbnail.  Solitaire gave her hands something to do while she
waited for her answers.  She spread out that first game while the coffeemaker hissed clear water black.

The red backs of the cards were wearing white now, where Mom's thumb drew them from the deck and laid them on the
table.  Her elbows on the kitchen table as she set the cards out, their corners wearing away as one game gave way to
another.  A pot of coffee, warming to dark gloom on the counter, kept her company every evening and late into the night.  
Dad was recording dead sounds at the river with a digital recorder.

She and Dad talked a lot those first days, hours disappeared at the kitchen table as they thought about what might have
happened and about what the police had done and should be doing in their hard, but so far unproductive, work.  Mom
working her cards all the while.  Every sentence a turned card.

Questions gave way to memories as those first days edged into a week and they recounted to one another the milestones of
their one child's life.  The first words he spoke.  Mama, according to Dad, and Mom laughingly agreed.  Gold star grade school
spelling tests were imagined more than remembered but the thrift store suit worn to the eighth-grade graduation was a true
memory.  Their reminiscences grayed and their smiles fell sad with high school.  Running with the wrong kids, tagging
wannabe gang symbols on garbage bins in rough neighborhoods, two nights when that boy ended up in the hospital, once
with alcohol poisoning, once after a gang kid broke his arm with a purple aluminum bat that knocked his spray can out into
the middle of the street.  Other nights when he failed to come home.

What should we have done?  Dad wondered.  Couldn't he have told us what was happening?

You should've talked with him more.

Didn't he talk to you?

Sons want to talk to fathers.

Goddammit slipped from his mouth again.  Dad felt stuck, sunk in sand.  I could feel it.

Sons want to become their fathers.  Mom wisdom.

Dad thought opposite.  Fathers make sons to live the life the fathers never had.  Fathers want to be their sons.  Dad knew.

As the first weeks became the first month, memories gave way to dark speculations about what happened down at the river
and where I'd gone.  The empty shell casing.  Had it been used on me or had I used it on someone?  Was one better than
the other?  Was I dead or in hiding?

They pretended, but they knew, but neither would admit it to the other so though the things that might have happened that
night could have had a million different outcomes, none would ever offer comfort.  They would just be words, dumb sounds,
nothing as real as being lifted by water or swept through with night air.

They learned over the weeks what I learned that first night: words mean nothing.  They fall into silence.  Dad staring as Mom
continued to peel the cards from the deck.  The red button of the coffeemaker glowing, but no one ever drank any.  A
comforting smell when the button was first pushed, an early morning aroma, orange clouds in warm light, which turned bitter
and thick in quick time.

"Down on your knees."

"You don't need to do this."

"Down."

Knees sunk in sand now, six bullets fall from an unseen hand to the riverbank.

"Please."

"Pick one."

"I didn't mean anything."

Gun smack to back of the head.

"Pick one!"

He showed Mom how the microphone jacked into the digital recorder.

"We'll talk with this.  Him and me."

She looked blank at him.

"Electronic Voice Phenomena.  EVP.  You turn on the recorder and let it run.  When you play it back, you listen for the voices
of those who've passed beyond."

She continued to turn the cards over.

"I'm going to the river.  Where they found the shell.  He'll tell us what happened.  We'll get our answers."

Mom looked at him.  "I'd like to believe that."

"An open mind helps."

An open mind for words was not a mind prepared for the sensations where I lived.  There were no longer words here, only
waves of motion.

He put the recorder in a backpack with a flashlight and a pint of whiskey.

"I didn't mean anything."  Voice broken with tears now.  Five bullets on the sand now.

"If you're one of us, it'll know."  The bullet chambered, the cylinder spun.  "Ask it."

"Let me go, I'll run away."  Words spilled forth, pleading words, promising words, words that would mean as much as words
ever could if they worked.  "I'll never come back."

"Ask it."  The voice was ice.  "Now."  Gun moved to the temple.

Words dropped from the trees above, black birds falling, knees becoming sand, wind drawing a breath, and sound stuttering
forth.  "A-am I one of them?"

"Bullet doesn't lie, friend."

Hammer struck primer, primer bled light, its voice swept through with moonless night.  It had all been said.  Words gave way
to motion, a pure sensation that words would never know.

                                                                                          ***

Recorder button glows on the hard back of the sand.  Trees reach over the bank to the river and night fills with cool air rising
off the water into the leaves.  Everything enters everything else, merges.  Traffic buzz on a bridge in the distance becomes
the drone of crickets at the tree line and I come out of their rough music moving above the sand, above Dad.

"So many things to say," Dad said, pint in hand.  No more than two sips gone in the many long nights he spent here on the
edge of the water, but always in hand, a precious child.  "Where to start?"  He looked up in the trees, like he might see
something there.  "Tell me now so later I'll know."  The red glow of the recorder button filled him with the only hope he knew
anymore.

Laptop on the table, Dad presses play.

"Listen."

Mom, still peeling cards from the deck, still playing this same game, has begun to wear her exercise clothes again.  It's after
work.  They're spandex and form-fit, her athletic shoes unlaced under the table.  I know then she is all right.  She'll start
jogging again, joining her friends.  Grief will fade, though the memory of it will stay.  Her questions answered in the
repetitious turn of the cards, in the ritual of her nights.  Card drawn, breathe in.  Card laid down, breathe out.  Breathe in,
card down.  Breathe out.  Card drawn.  Just keep doing it, just keep moving.  Transform your grief to movement.  Motion is
all we are.

She turns an ear to the computer, though her hands keep working the cards.  Night sounds crackle from tinny speakers.  
Minutes pass before the drop in water of a leapt fish.  Then the broken caw of a disturbed crow and Dad's feet on the sand.  
His voice: "Say something."

He drags the sound button to 22:28 on the file.  "It's interesting here."

Mom sets the cards down and listens.  Motion interrupted.

"Closely," Dad urges.

Cricket music stops and a glitchy sound breaks in over the flutter of leaves.  An electric sizzle.

"It's him."

"It didn't sound like a voice."

"He's learning to speak this way.  He's an infant there."  Dad dragged the cursor back and let the sound play again.  Mom
returned to the game, moving the cards.

It wasn't me though, it wasn't anyone.  It was Dad's dreams, it was a fault in the file, it was nothing.  There is no language
here, just movement; air, water, sound, and light, all moving, pulsing through many phases and forms, and we are their
waves, nothing more than motion.

Another night.  "Won't you tell me anything?"  The bottle was emptying this time, the brown liquid moving.  It was a different
night.  He felt no voices, knew there would never be any words.  He drank.  "Can't you speak?"  His voice loud and another
swallow.  Never any answers.  "How much time before you learn to talk?"  Recorder button a red eye watching.  Me, a gentle
ripple in the leaves above.  "I can't wait forever."  Me, dropping toward him.

"Weeks gone now.  Not a word.  Not a goddam word!"  Hard steps on the damp sand.  He was unaware of the cool air on his
skin.  Me.  He drew a breath as we touched, then breathed me back into the night.  He wanted words but I was only
movement.

"Why doesn't anyone know?"  He turned to the half moon shining above the river and shook the bottle at it.  "Why doesn't
anyone say anything?  Why all this silence?"  He only saw the light of it on the water, not the dark of it in the sky.

Unanswered questions still grieved him; the need to know filled him with torture, kept him from moving elsewhere.  "He's not
a body."  He didn't understand surrender.  "Is he?"  His feet splashed at the river's edge, dank water filling his shoes.  "Am I?"

Cold light reflected off the moon and became the silver water that washed his knees.  He waded deeper and I became the
light moving toward him.

He asked, "Is this his bullet?" then reared back and threw the bottle in a high arc over the river.  Brown bottle splashed and,
filling, became brown water, and drew down to the muddy depths of the river.  Rocked in the low pulse of the current, it
became the river.

"My son gone."  He moved deeper into the water.  "My son," a shake of the head, "gone."  Trudging up to his chest now,
pockets filling with water, shoes full of sand, river pulling him to our motion, he began at last to surrender.  "Gone here?"  His
voice a question, but the words an answer.  The light I'd become filled him and he knew then what had become of me.

Carter Meland