The Boat Man

This is for the writing group I'm involved in. This week's topic was "past lives".

I sat in the dark, sandwiched between two other weirdos on the couch as we stared at the TV. We were watching some crazy-ass underground horror flick. I had drank a substantial amount of cough syrup not long beforehand and it had finally kicked in pretty hard. I squirmed a little on the sofa, feeling uncomfortable to be squished up next to people and feeling uncomfortable for feeling uncomfortable. I didn’t know if they were touching me or if I was touching them and I didn’t know why it mattered. I tried to pay attention to the movie instead, but I had no idea what the hell was happening in it. I glanced briefly around the room at the other folks, some with whom I was very close and others who were casual acquaintences. Their eyes were unanimously glued to the television.

‘I feel like an alien’, I thought.

My friend Steve’s voice rang clearly in my brain. ‘You are an alien’.

I looked over at Steve, his full attention seemingly to be on the movie.

‘Yeah, man’, another voice piped into my mind, the voice of a girl I had only met that evening who was sitting next to me on the couch. She was pretty but she didn’t seem to like me all that much, and as much as I might’ve liked to have been snuggled up next to her, I didn’t wanna appear to be creepy by enjoying our thighs touching one another’s. She shifted a little next to me and I wondered if she had done it intentionally.

‘Don’t you remember?’, she continued, sounding a bit frustrated at my ignorance but friendly and warm too, as if she were trying to coax a scared kitten out from under a bed. ‘Watch.’

I turned my attention to the television. On the screen, there was a pond with the sun shining on it and countless toy sailboats bobbing happily on the gentle waves. The image filled me with a sense of peace and happiness as well as with a sad, empty longing for a time that was now long gone. I felt embarrassed for being so emotionally overwhelmed by a bunch of goddam boats in a movie that was about people getting killed by a chainsaw juggler or whatever

the hell it was that we were watching.

‘It’s okay’, her voice said soothingly. ‘Yellow sailboats were always your thing. It was one of the things we all loved about you.’

‘Yeah, bro’, my friend Jake’s voice chimed in. ‘Remember when me and you had that boat race and you totally kicked my ass? You were always the champ when it came to racing those things’.

I looked around me somewhat wildly. Nobody was exhibiting any sign of paying any attention to me. I looked back at the TV. The boats were no longer an important part of the storyline. There were hundreds of people who had been watching the sailboats, one of whom I somehow recognized as my mother, though she bore no resemblance whatsoever to the mother I know. In the movie, the spectators were smiling and lazily enjoying the warm afternoon. A thought tugged at the corner of my mind that I knew these people, that they were family. I thought I saw myself, a small child standing on the shore of the pond, holding my friend’s hand while we watched the dippy little sailboats fighting to not capsize in the breeze.

‘This is what they did, James’, Steve’s voice cut in suddenly. Sharply. ‘This is what they do’.

In the movie, large, black military-style vehicles descended quickly over the hill that lay behind the crowd who stood on the bank of the pond. The friendly chatter of the people turned to screams, their smiles twisted into grimaces of understanding and horror. The children looked confused and began crying, including the little boy who I somehow recognized as being myself and my friend who I was holding hands with. Some of the people threw their hands in the air as a sign of submission. Others turned and tried to find safety by plunging into the pond, some of them carrying children in the crooks of their arms.

The black not-tanks had arrived. Large people clad in masks leapt from the huge trucks, their faces concealed by black helmets and mirrored face masks, wielding large, two-handed truncheons and wearing pistols on their hips. A cold, loud voice bellowed from a speaker ordering the crowd to stand still. The people were crying and shouting in protest. Within seconds, gunfire erupted from one of the vehicles and was quickly joined by the others. I saw myself crying as my mother stooped down to hug me, to protect me, to tell me that we were gonna be okay. The gunfire silenced as the mean guys in black bore down on what remained of the crowd. One of them pulled my mother from me by her hair and threw her to the ground on her back and began stomping on her face with his heavy boots. He yanked me from the ground by my arm and carried me by one arm towards the now silent and smoking black trucks.

The camera panned across the now-bloody crowd, mothers and fathers dying in the grass, gurgling goodbyes to their children where the camera view finally set on the pond where bullet-ridden corpses lolled amidst the idiotic yellow sailboats.

Steve’s voice cut into my mind evenly. ‘You know how you and me were like brothers from the first time we ever met? I love you, James. We’ve known each other for thousands of years. You have to remember, man. We need you back. You’re the Boat Man.”