Things That Make Me Move or Not Move

I’ve been thinking for a long time about the things that move me from here to there. You see, when I get scared, I freeze. It’s happened when I’ve seen something sudden and frightening, like a fight breaking out two tables away at a restaurant. I’m sitting there drinking coffee with my friend Slick or Beasty, and suddenly there’s an angry man climbing over the salt and pepper shakers and tackling the man he’s been talking to to the floor. Those five seconds or so when he’s hitting and hitting, even as the other guy’s eyes begin to close and the blood begins to drain from his face—it’s then I don’t know what to do. Maybe this is normal, but I’ve known people whose first impulse is to jump to their feet and get in between the two fighters. I couldn’t possibly do that. I don’t have the instincts for it. And it’s not as if I don’t have good instincts otherwise, because I’ve been pretty lucky with near-accidents on the highway, swerves I’ve had to make without thinking, controlled skids around debris—things totally beyond the abilities of others.

“Tell me what makes your heart stop,” I said to Beasty once. It was July, hot even on the water. The swells were flat. We rocked a little on our boards, not even trying to surf, and with each little rock a bit of glare nailed itself into our eyes.

“Nature, I guess,” she said. “I could die on a day like today.”

“No, I mean what paralyzes you?” I said.

She thought about it for a moment. “The way Slick looks at me,” she said.

Beasty’s name is really Elizabeth. Her family has always called her Liz, but she’s preferred Beasty since we hatched that private nickname in third grade. She had grown fond of toads, and always kept two or three of them in an old aquarium in the cool light behind her garage. She called herself the Queen of the Animals then, and so the name made sense, but even long after she had let the toads go the name stuck between us. It survived her vegetarianism in fifth grade, it made extra sense during her Goth and punk periods, it was a lime green tag that to this day does not get painted over on certain underpasses around town. It makes a different kind of sense now, when she attacks the waves the way a white shark would attack them if a white shark was a land animal trying to keep from wiping out.

“The way Slick looks at me sometimes,” Beasty said, “I think we’re eleven again and we’ve just lifted some change from my mom’s purse. But then he looks at me like he has plans for me, and that’s when I want to rip him apart for even thinking any such thing. But I just go blank. Every word I know disappears and my whole body gets a charley-horse.”

If Beasty is a shark, Slick is seal on the waves. When he crouches under the roof of a curl, his black wet suit merges with his black board until it is hard to see where one ends and the other begins. If Beasty is all over a wave, ripping it apart under and over, Slick tucks himself into the most hidden recess of its curl. He becomes a shadow inside its shadow, a black blur inside a blow of spray.

“In another life, I’d like to be a bullet,” he said once. “Or a poison dart.”