Chapter 4 - Al/The Swamp

Al lay motionless in bed, waiting to hear his father’s snores through the paper thin wall separating the two of them. His room was completely empty, except for an old wooden desk in the far corner, an oak dresser just to its left, and the twin bed that Al had been sleeping in since he left his crib. The walls and ceiling were bare and painted white, casting an eerie blue in the darkness. Al felt trapped hundreds of meters below the surface, the sunlight barely penetrating through the thick icy water. It was here where he came to drown every night.

Sight no longer capable of entertaining his mind with colourful imagery, Al unknowingly dipped his naked body into the caliginous swamp of his thoughts. At first it was cold; memories of an ostracized childhood, a stolen soul and a dying mother chillingly flooded through him; constricted veins froze the heart.

He was tempted to leave this painful place, to go back and mask his insides with the outside world; escape. But the water warmed a little, and Al summoned enough courage to swim out further. He carefully pushed the murky liquid back; the bubbly strands of filth spun and circled in the wake of his arms. Soggy weeds of regret wrapped themselves around Al’s ankles, their roots ripping from the ground; Tiffany’s reflection undulated across the surface. Al splashed the water and watched each droplet of her face slowly land and disappear back into the depths of the swamp. He moved forwards, the sticky plants clinging to his legs, floating behind him like shadows.

His feet found a smooth rock underneath the surface. It was slippery, but nonetheless he stood up and was able to rest from the uneasiness brought about by the hazy water. For the first time Al could see and survey the swamp for all that it was, yet at the same moment stand in it, be in it, be it.

Sound waves banged against his ear drums. The rock and swamp vanished, and Al was rocketed out of his mind so quickly that it felt as though he had just crashed into his dark room. The sudden sensory overflow, the propulsion out of the inside back into the outside was violent; the waves created such an earthquake in Al’s thoughts that any swamp that he was made aware of, any rock that he had stood upon had been devoured by the crevice that broke its way through his mind. For a moment, Al tried to recall exactly what it was he had been thinking of, but casually shrugged it off.

He crept out of his room and made sure he could still hear his father’s snores before going down the stairs. The waves still crashing in his mind, he made his way down to the kitchen. Al took a can of peanuts from the pantry, carefully opened the back door, shut it quietly behind him, and leapt over the back fence into the woods behind his rural home.

Al had lived here his whole life. His parents thought it important that they live outside the city; for "breathing room," his father would say. The forest behind his home was vast, and Al had spent a good deal of his childhood alone within them. As a boy he would take peanuts from the house and feed the squirrels. At first, they were quite timid and cautious when approaching him, oftentimes circling around him. But the squirrels quickly got used to his harmless presence, and would jockey amongst themselves for better position at his feet before he even had the chance to sit down. Al and the squirrels had become so used to each other that they would even climb into his hand if he laid it out.

But now it was night, and it had been years since he had been in the forest. He opened the can of peanuts and spread them under the tree where he used to sit. Al hoped that maybe the squirrels would remember the boy who used to play with them.

He hid the empty can in a bush, and started jogging down the path. It was black outside, except for the dark blue glow cast by the moon coming through the tree tops. Al could faintly see the dim outlines of the tall black oak trees; the wind rustled through their leaves with the sound of a dead radio station. The static was the only noise disturbing the night’s silence, except for the thumping of Al’s feet against the dirt path, which he used to guide himself blindly onwards. As he moved deeper and deeper into the trees, the boy knew he was close. He quickened his pace to a run, knowing that at any moment he would reach his final destination.

And just like that, Al was there.

In elementary school, his schoolmates would make fun of him for his oversized glasses; any part of his face caught behind the lenses was sucked in by the thick pieces of glass, creating the illusion that his brown magnified eyes were displayed on screens a centimetre in front of his face as opposed to existing within his eye sockets. In the second grade, two large front teeth had grown in, each protruding from his gum in opposite directions forming an upside down V. He had abnormally large ears, and his mother and father made sure his dark brown hair was kept tidy (he would always return to school from the summers with a perfectly fashioned and homemade mushroom cut). Al more resembled an unfortunate cartoon caricature than a human child. Only once, during the third grade did his peers ask him to join in their games. They didn’t have a magnifying glass and resorted to using Al’s glasses to light ants on fire. When this didn’t work, the large spectacles were viciously thrown to the ground and stepped on in turn by each of the other children. "Thanks for nothing, four eyes!" spat the ringleader.

Al walked home crying, too ashamed to return to class that afternoon. When his mom questioned his not being at school, he told her he wasn’t feeling well. When she asked about the whereabouts of his glasses, he told her that he had lost them. Al’s mother was oblivious to her son’s exclusion, ignorant in her belief that her little boy was perfect, and therefore must have plenty of friends.

As he grew older and took the reins to his fashions, Al invested in a pair of eyeglasses with much smaller lenses. ("But they’re so impractical!" exclaimed his father. "How on Earth are you supposed to see left, right, up or down?") By eighth grade, his dentist had finally convinced his parents to take their son to an orthodontist, and by the eleventh grade, he had straight teeth, a stylish pair of specs, and had at last grown into his dumbo-like ears. Al kept his hair longer, and was extremely proud of the way it would wing out over his ears. His ostracized youth was all but forgotten, and the older, handsome Al enjoyed life more than ever.

In twelfth grade History class, Al met Tiffany. From the moment he laid eyes upon her, the seeds had been deeply planted, and for Al there was no going back. The pair started dating soon after they met, and by Christmas time they were serious. His feelings for her grew like ivy, and by graduation the vines were so tightly wrapped around the idea of Tiffany and what she meant to him that it began to feel like a noose around her neck. She cupped his vulnerability in her hands like a glass ball; for awhile caressing the globe for all it was worth. But Al’s hands were void of any fragile ball of hers, void of her vulnerability; Tiffany was Al’s reason for existence, and he was simply her temporary joyride. At the end of the summer, a trap door revealed itself in Tiffany’s parted hands, and the glass ball shattered into a million meaningless fragments that pierced and cut into Al’s heart. His ivy-like emotions, with nothing more to envelop, knotted into one another and quickly rotted; any feelings Al had left were blood-stained shards protruding from his bleeding heart.

His mother had been growing ill for some time, and he had made the decision a few months prior to the summer to take a year off. She was bed-ridden, but did not want to be at the hospital so a special bed had been set up for her in the spare bedroom. Al spent his days beside his mother, reading to keep himself occupied. His father, since first hearing of his wife’s illness, had increasingly shut himself from the world, trapping himself at the office or in his room. It pained him to see his suffering wife, and he avoided this at all costs. Al was disappointed in his father for acting in such a selfish way, but was unaware of the hypocrisy in his disappointment; he himself had disengaged from his social world when Tiffany so swiftly and irreparably broke his heart. The difference lay in that Al found it somewhat comforting to spend time with his mother, whereas his father was tormented by it.

On the night his mother died, Al could not find it within him to cry. His emotions had long since evaporated, leaving behind a dry desert void of any oasis. He stared at her rigid corpse blankly, emotionless. If anything, her calm, her quietness comforted Al; she had finally been set free. His father’s oasis, however, had been kept plentiful over the course of a successful marriage, but while he wept in his room for days, it was quickly drying up.

The emptiness left by Tiffany, the numbness left by his mother were now just two holes that existed as bitter reminders of what he once held; Al’s past mocked the future for the happiness it could never have. He had lost everything, and he was desperate to have something, any inkling of feeling, if not just for one more future moment. It had come down to tonight, where he found himself running down the dark path in the oak tree forest behind his home.

Al had fallen off the path and was back in his swamp. It was clearer now, warm and comforting. He gently swam through it one last time, completely aware that it was about to disappear back into the nothingness it had come from.