First Life: Brother’s Keeper
“The road is long
with many a winding turn
that leads us to who knows where
who knows when.
But I am strong
Strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy,
He’s my brother.”
-the Hollies, “He Ain’t Heavy”
“Hey Polly.”
Randy mutters his greeting sluggishly, as he swipes a hand through his disheveled morning hair. He removes the cap from the yellow Tetra-Min container, and tilts and taps a few autumn colored flakes into my bowl. Then, rubbing the sand from the corners of his eyes, he peers at me, his face ballooning in the glass as though he had suddenly swallowed the sea. “Still the same,” he comments. “No new legs.” Then, turning away, the proportions of his face suddenly diminishing, he mumbles, “Well, that changes today.”
I wiggle my leaf-shaped tail to propel myself up towards the floating flakes. The drag of my hind legs increases as I approach vertical, forcing me to swim harder, faster. When I am close enough, I suck the water powerfully, creating a momentary whirlpool; one of the larger red flakes succumbs, crumpling into my mouth. I experience the somewhat abstract taste of mosquito mixed with the blood of dried worms.
“Today,” Randy says, popping his head out of a black T-shirt, “I’m taking you home.”
I nearly choke. Flake fragments explode out from my jaws in a small dissipating cloud. Home? What the hell could he be talking about? This is my home. This fish bowl, on this shelf, on this desk, in this yellow-walled room.
Randy sinks into the chair at his desk, leans back precariously, fingers interlocked over his abdomen. “But first, I’m going to tell you a story. The story of how I got here, and how you got here.” His eyes gaze unfocused up at the textured ceiling. “It all started a long long time ago.”
“Oh great,” I think to myself. “Another of Randy’s stupid stories...”
***
Before Randy begins, please allow me to introduce myself. Randy, my keeper, calls me “Polly,” short for “pollywog,” this despite the fact that I am neither female nor quite a pollywog (I have grown hind legs, after all). I prefer to call myself what the human scientists have named my entire family: “Ranidae.” It sounds more dignified, and it happens to be close to “Randy” (though I’m not sure if that’s exactly a good or bad thing). Furthermore, it means “of or belonging to a cosmopolitan family.” “Cosmopolitan” can mean “distributed or dispersed throughout the entire world,” which my family is; supposedly, we have colonies occupying the wet places of every land. But “cosmopolitan” can also mean “worldly” or “cultured,” and this, I feel, is an apt description of myself.
You see, I have inherited a knowledge of the world far beyond my ken, not just of things naturally significant to a frog, but of aspects of the world of humans. Aspects including the ability to understand human speech, an acquaintance with human culture, and (to a very, very limited extent) a comprehension of human behavior. I have used this knowledge over the past three years to try to understand humanity through observing Randy. The only conclusion that I have come to, of course, is that humans are strange and inscrutable creatures, and Randy, well, he is perhaps the strangest of them all.
Just listen.
***
“It all begins with my older brother Dean,” Randy states unequivocally. “One of my earliest memories of him- one of the earliest memories I have of myself- is of the two of us playing chanbara, pretending to be samurai.” He leans back and closes his eyes, trying to picture the scene in his head. “We were standing in front of our house, the center one in our culdesac, right next to our mailbox. We were both holding metal re-bars, him all easy and nonchalant, me with my knuckles white. His skinny nip eyes stared me down. Then came the shpeal, an amalgam of phrases from various testosterone laden sources: Abarenbo Shogun, Black Belt Theatre: ‘Kisama! You keeled my braza! Bukkorosuzo!’ He lifted his ‘sword’ high up above his head, and swung it down, again and again and again.” Randy’s eyes still closed, he lifts his arms towards the ceiling, as though trying to shelter himself from a falling sky. “Whenever my brother hit, my ‘sword’ would ring and shake so much that, if my grip were loose, it would tumble out of my hands, and if my grip were tight, then I would feel my teeth rattle.”
Randy leans forward and opens his eyes to look at me. “I hated playing chanbara,” he confides. “It was terrifying as shit. I mean, those re-bars were heavy. You could do a lot of damage to someone, even if you weren’t trying to.” He looks away briefly, towards some hidden corner of the floor before continuing.
“So, after surviving my brother’s onslaught, like twenty freaking hits, he told me,‘Now it’s your turn. You attack me.’ And I hesitated. Cause if there was anything worse than being attacked, it was being the attacker. At least if my brother swung and I got hurt, then it wouldn’t be my fault. But if I hurt him?” Randy sighs audibly. “But there was no refusing my brother. When I finally took a pathetic swing, he shook his head, clicking his tongue, and said in his best Japenglish:‘Yoo mast be wan wis yo apponent.’ After the second strike, he switched over to Chinglish: ‘No grasshoppah, haaa-dah!’ After the third meek swing, he gave up doing voices (thankfully) and spoke plainly: ‘Come on, what are you, a girl? Swing harder!’ So I did. ‘Harder!’ he commanded again. And once again, ‘Harder!’ Finally, I just closed my eyes, wrapped the re-bar back behind myself like a baseball bat, and unwound. The re-bar whistled through the air. But instead of the sound and feel of metal ringing on metal, there was this sickening crunch, then the clatter of metal, and then my brother’s cry: ‘Randy, you little shit!’”
Randy lets out a long, slow breath. “When I opened my eyes, my brother was clutching at the knuckles of his right hand. His nostrils were flaring, and his skinny eyes were so wide I could see all the way around his pupils. Well, maybe halfway around.” Randy again leans in close to the tank. “If a skinny eyed person is really mad, their eyes don’t narrow, they open real wide. ‘When you can see the whites of their eyes,’ as it were.” Randy demonstrates briefly, stretching his normally sleepy eyes wide open, till I can see, not only white, but the purple and red of clogged vessels. Gross.
“I remember cowering down and closing my eyes, holding my ‘sword’ above me, as if it were going to protect me somehow. But nothing happened. I peeked my eyes open a crack. And you know what? My brother was just standing there, calmly rubbing his knuckles. ‘Be careful next time,’ he said. And then, just as I was about to lower my ‘sword,’ he added, like an after-thought: ‘You little shit.’”
“I was sure I broke his knuckles, or at least dislocated them or something, but he never got them checked. And he never told on me. From then on, every time he lost at something, every time he messed up at a piano recital, every time he just missed first place in swimming, I would always see him make this really tight fist with his right hand, so tight that his knuckles would click and pop. And though he never said anything, I would imagine him thinking that it was all my fault, that, if it weren’t for me, he would’ve won, things would’ve been perfect.” He shakes his head slowly from side to side. “But he never actually said anything.”
For a while, Randy is silent, his eyes closed and blind to the ceiling above. Then, he rocks forward, opens his eyes, and stares straight at me. “From that point on, I always felt, I don’t know, indebted to my brother. Like somehow, he saved my life.” He laughs, shaking his head. “I know, sounds stupid. Saved me from what? From him? But that’s brotherhood. Hard to understand. A strange mix of, I don’t know, competition and mercy. Like half the time I’m trying to keep from being beaten by him.”
Randy smiles wryly. “And the rest of the time, I just want to become him.”
***
I too had a brother once.
Back before I came to occupy this fishbowl, I lived in a small pool in a dark and wet place beneath the earth. For a long time, I was alone, swimming back and forth between the borders of my puddle, eating algae and tadpoles and whatever else I could scrounge. Perhaps my life would have continued on like that forever, blind and oblivious, had he had not appeared.
He startled me one day, a croak issuing forth from what I had mistaken for a shapeless pile of detritus at the border of the pool. “Greetings, little brother,” he said. Swimming incautiously towards the sound, I stared with underwater eyes at the hulking figure with the huge and menacing grin. The grin swiftly opened into a mouth, and the mouth imbibed water from the pool, almost sucking me along with it.
“Careful,” croaked the shape, closing its mouth into a grin once again. “Though we are family, I would not hesitate to eat you whole, were I so inclined.”
“Who- who are you?” I struggled to voice the question. Only after I “spoke” it did I realize that it was my first question, indeed, my first words ever.
“Like you, I have no name,” he said. “But also like you, and a select few of our kind, I can speak in the human tongue. Until now, I have had no need of a name, having encountered no one who could converse with me. But now that I have found a partner, perhaps names are in order. Or, if not names, then referents. From now on, you will be my little brother. And that will make me your big brother.”
And that was how it all began.
Every now and again, Big Brother would interrupt my solitude and appear at the edge of my pool. He would always begin with a threat to consume me whole, but never seemed to get around to carrying it out. “After you entertain me with talk,” he would say, “I’ll eat you after we talk.” And then he would tell me about everything, about the world of frogs, and the world of humans (which he had never dared to experience closely, but nevertheless knew much about), and of the mysteries binding the two worlds together. And though he did most all of the talking, with me doing most all of the listening, he seemed content afterwards, and would crawl away into the darkness outside of the water, that inaccessible darkness, muttering something about “eating me the next time.”
***
“My brother can do anything.”
Randy is continuing his story.
“He’s good at school, good at the piano, good at swimming. And what’s more, everyone loves him. I never dreamed of competing with him, much less trying to become anything like him; that would be like a- like a candle flame, no, a lit matchstick, trying to outshine the sun. No, instead, my policy with my brother was to just stay out of his way. It was much safer that way. He could have his fight-to-win mentality, his chanbara match with the world at large. Me, I didn’t want to play. Somebody always got hurt when I did, and usually, ultimately, that somebody ended up being me.”
Randy shakes his head. “Of course, things never work out the way you intend. See, I never chose to be smart like my brother. It all happened unintentionally. One day, when I was about seven, I found a few of my brother’s drawings. Dean, he used to draw these action comics in colored felt tip pen. They were filled with Kikaida-clones, stacked kinetic ovals tilting to roll off the edge of the page. There was always a super villain, a giant with death ray eyes. And there was always a group of heroes, each with their own special powers: one had an impenetrable force field, and another had blades on his arms that could slice through near anything.” Randy gestures largely to accompany each description; my favorite is the mime act that goes along with “impenetrable force field,” palms flat against pretend walls.
“So, I found a few of Dean’s drawings. And I liked them so much that I took them to school. I remember holding onto them tight, so tight that the colors started smearing into my hands. Anyway, the other kids saw the drawings, my teacher saw the drawings, and for some reason, everyone assumed I had made them. Everyone was shouting, ‘I wanna see!’ or ‘Neat!’ I didn’t have the courage or the inclination to tell them the truth, that, no, they weren’t mine. So, I didn’t. And guess what? Immediately, I developed a reputation as some kind of artist. That was a significant step up for me, cause up until then, I was a nobody, the kid no one cared to know.” Randy chuckles. “Funny thing was, after that, after all the attention, I discovered that I actually could draw. Oh, not in my brother’s kinetic style, but decent enough that I managed to uphold the reputation. The stolen reputation.”
Randy takes a deep breath, and sits up just long enough to lock his eyes on me.
And I wonder, as I often have before: Is he really talking to me? Or am I just a sounding board, a pretend audience for his soliloquies?
***
One day, I asked Big Brother, “Why are we able to speak the human tongue?”
Big Brother paused, licking his massive chops with his prehensile tongue. “Why?” he boomed. “Or how?” He croaked in sharp barks, a sound I had come to recognize as laughter. “Ah, now you ask of the true mystery. I myself wonder about this all the time.” He made a coughing sound, clearing his throat of a fly wing. “There are a few myths regarding this amongst our kind. One says that ‘once upon a time’ a human prince was transformed into a frog, and in order to change back and restore his true form, he required the kiss of a human woman. Perhaps that prince failed to steal that kiss and secure his freedom. Perhaps, weary and disillusioned, he settled down with one of our water borne kind. And perhaps that prince, a possible ancestor, passed on his useless and vestigial human wisdom to his progeny.”
I silently tried to digest the ramifications of this story. Before it could settle in my mind, however, Big Brother continued. “And there is another legend. This other legend says that, again, ‘once upon a time,’ we frogs were merely fish that frequented shallow waters. One day, one of our ancestors spied a human being strolling along the shore. So fascinated was he by this strange creature, walking on the solid ground, and breathing the fire-laden air, that, through sheer desire and will, he began to transform himself to become more like it. He sucked his tail in through his anus; he shat limbs out, one at a time, from humerus and femur to branching phalanges; and finally, he imbibed the burning emptiness above the waters over and over until it invaginated within his chest, forming rudimentary lungs. He did all of this, and then crawled onto the dry land on his belly. There, he followed the human being surreptitiously, eavesdropping on the sounds emitted from the creature’s upper wind hole until he learned to understand human language. He likely would have become fully human over time, but the legend says that, for some unknown reason, he grew weary of life on dry land, returning to the waters to pass on both his physical and cultural enhancements, thus founding frog kind.”
After a moment, I asked Big Brother “Which do you believe?”
Big Brother laughed. “It hardly matters,” he said. And then he proceeded to analyze the stories with extreme rationality. “One legend says that the knowledge I possess comes from an ancestor that was originally human, while another says that the original frog ‘copied’ from a human. Both legends begin quite implausibly, requiring leaps of faith that no frog in his right mind would dare. A prince turned into a frog? A fish copying a human?” He smiled broadly, the corners of his mouth reaching almost to his eyes. “In addition to this, both require that Lamarckian genetics be true, a theory that the humans have long discounted as erroneous.”
Silence. Then, softly, in a somewhat haunted voice: “Truth be told, I sometimes believe that our thoughts, our very minds, are not our own. Sometimes I think that we are merely receptacles for the discarded thoughts of humans. A garbage can for their used up dreams.” A pause. “But it hardly matters,” he repeated. “We have what we have. What does it matter where it all came from?”
But, silent beneath the waters of my pond, I kept thinking to myself, “It matters. It truly does matter.”
***
Randy rocks back to an upright position, elbows on the desk, cradling his face between his palms. “One thing led to another. After my reputation as an artist spread, after demonstrating my intelligence-“ (he spits this last word out distastefully) “I was nominated to take a test to qualify for the Gifted and Talented Program in the fourth grade. That’s what they used to call it back then, as if the kids in it were something special. Hot shit.” He laughs bitterly. “I remember the test. They had me do all sorts of things, like connect dots into diamond shapes, or perform math with symbols I had never seen before. And the vocabulary questions. Those I remember best. There were two that I know I missed. The first was ‘malicious.’ It rhymed with ‘delicious,’ and it started with an ‘mmm,’ so I answered that it meant ‘ver-r-ry delicious.’ That got a smile from the tester lady. The other word I missed was ‘adjacent.’ The only thing I could think of, the only thing that kept running through my head, was Jason from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. So, I answered, ‘an Argonaut.’”
Randy chuckles thoughtfully. “It’s ironic,” he murmurs. “That I didn’t know what those words meant. Malicious adjacent.” His expression darkens. “I know what they mean now.”
He shivers suddenly, like a dog shedding water, before continuing. “The test changed everything. See, in the beginning, I was a nobody. Maybe I could draw a little, but that was it. But after I took that test, everyone in my family started paying a little attention to me, like maybe there was something worth salvaging in this-” he pats his chest absently “-piece of garbage. Not a lot of attention, but a little. Even my brother, who was always busy, even he sometimes tutored me, in his own fashion. Every now and then, he would ask me a question, usually a vocabulary question. ‘What? You don’t know what that means?’ he would say. ‘Well you better learn, stupid.’ Sometimes, when I got something right, he would say, somewhat reluctantly, ‘Well done, grasshoppah.’ It felt- different- to get that kind of attention, especially from my brother. It felt like I was at once both solid and floating. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was- nice. Maybe too nice. See, after having had a taste of- recognition, I discovered I had a hunger for it. Yeah, hunger. That’s a good word for it. Like an emptiness at the pit of your stomach, growling.”
He rubs at his belly absently. I consume another large flake with a single gulp.
“See, once I felt that hunger-“ he pauses, apparently liking the taste of the word “- it consumed everything. I looked at my brother, saw everything he had, the praise, the friends- and I wanted it. I wanted it all. So I worked hard at school, harder than I ever had before. And for the first time, I started to become aware of myself, and my life, as a kind of tension, like a drum skin pulled tight over an emptiness. Trouble was, I wasn’t going to find out how I did on the G. T. test until the following year, the fifth grade. Just taking the test meant I’d be in a good class, but if I didn’t pass, I wouldn’t be in the top class like my brother was. So, for the rest of fourth grade, into the summer, I felt- suspended.”
Randy leans forward, his magnified face mere inches from the bowl. “So that brings us to three years ago, almost to the day. When I first met you.”
***
“When will I become like you?”
I asked the question suddenly, during an awkward silence, when Big Brother seemed at a loss for something to say. “Like me?” he croaked, somewhat disinterestedly.
“You know,” I said, wriggling my tail. “When will I change? When will I grow legs and breathe air? When will I be free?”
Big Brother laughed, a throaty sound that echoed in the vast darkness. “Free?” he barked. “Do you think I am free?” He shuffled his massive girth slightly to one side, then, in a blur of motion, caught a passing mosquito on his pale tongue. After a brief swallow, he continued. “Let me enlighten you, Little Brother. We are never free. Freedom is an illusion. It is the mirage in the desert that keeps the thirsty and drying frog hopeful. Hopeful, so that, perhaps after a thousand thousand stumbling leaps, he may reach the dried riverbed, and drink the thick, putrid mud.”
“But-“ I objected, “you ARE free. Every day, after you speak to me, you disappear into the darkness. You are not confined by the edges of a puddle.”
Big Brother laughed again, a cold and hollow sound. “And where do you imagine I go? Do you think that I dance somewhere amidst wet moonlight, beneath gentle falls, perhaps, fed by the spawn of dragonflies? No. There is no such place. And I am never free from hunger. Never free. I scrounge about amidst the detritus that falls into this place, the leavings carried here by the rain. Sometimes I am lucky enough to find a dead rat, with maggots to whet my whistle, and, more importantly, mother flies to stretch my tongue. But that is when I am lucky. Many nights, I go hungry. And when I come to speak to you, I am reminded of my hunger, most acutely.” Big Brother’s tongue leaked out of his mouth, and deftly twisted upwards to lick an eye clean.
I swam slowly away from the edge of the water, away from Big Brother. “I hate this puddle,” I muttered. “I hate this darkness. I want to travel with you. And I want to see the humans, the ones who speak this language. I want to listen to them, hear what they have to say.”
Big Brother suddenly rushed towards the water, his spherical eyes trained on me, his mouth half open. I panicked, and wriggled towards the far extremity of my puddle. He pursued me, his girth advancing a wave that slammed me briefly into the silty mud outside of the puddle, and then drew me back in towards his gaping jaws.
But he didn’t consume me. “Now let me make one thing clear to you, Little Brother,” he said, in a hushed croak. “Humans are dangerous, inscrutable beings. Haven’t you learned, from all that I’ve taught you?” He sighed audibly, his vocal pouch expanding and deflating like a balloon. “If you entertain foolish dreams of following the humans, then I would eat you myself, here and now, rather than allow a perfectly good meal to go to waste chasing its doom.”
Big Brother then slowly backed away, rippling the waters of my puddle. Then, with a single leap, he launched himself off into the darkness.
Alone again, still shaken by the chastisement, I stubbornly returned to my pollywog hope. Silently, I swore to myself: “I WILL grow legs, and when I do, they will carry me to freedom. And to humanity, too.”
***
“My brother was in the seventh grade, over at Wheeler,” Randy continues. “Somehow he found out that the biology teacher over at Mililani High needed toads for dissection, and was paying a buck a head for them. So one evening, he and his friends all showed up at our house wearing hip boots, carrying kerosene lamps, high powered flashlights, and large red fishing nets; one of them even brought a huge empty Rubbermaid trash can on wheels. They planned to harvest toads in the rain drainage canal behind our house.”
I have vague memories of that place, the rain drainage canal. Dark water. Deep silences. I shudder involuntarily, my tail quivering like a leaf in a light breeze.
“Everyone was excited. Even my parents. Why wouldn’t they be? My brother and his friends, they were the sunshine boys, the smartest, most popular kids of their age; mom and dad, they were reliving their youth through them, the ‘best and the brightest.’ My mom, she ordered pizzas for the boys, and my dad, who never spoke to me, he gave tips to them on the best places to look for the toads.”
Randy takes a deep breath, then lets it all out. I can feel the wind of his exhalation vibrating the glass almost imperceptibly. “Of course I wanted in on the action too,” he says quietly. “Like I said, I was waiting for the G. T. test results. My future was kind of hanging. Was I going to follow in my brother’s footsteps? Or was I just going to be second rate the rest of my life? So I got dressed from head to toe in yellow rain gear. I walked among my brother and his friends like a tennis ball bouncing around a sequoia forest, eavesdropping, offering pizza slices or cups of soda to everyone, and generally trying to look as though I belonged. I even pulled out an encyclopedia and looked up the entry for ‘Toad,’ showing the pictures to anyone who seemed interested. See, for me, my brother and his friends were, I don’t know, they were like the sun, and if I didn’t follow them, I’d be left alone in the dark forever.”
Randy bows his head forward, pressing his wiry, unkempt hair against the glass. I cannot see his face. His voice only comes to me through vibrations in his skull. “But when the time came to leave, my brother blocked the doorway before me. ‘Where are you going?’ he said. ‘I’m not babysitting you.’ He looked around to make sure my parents weren’t around. Then, he made a fist with his right hand. I remember how his knuckles grumbled in rhythm, Snap-Crackle-Pop, and how he repeated that rhythm with words: ‘You Little Shit.’ I remember how he laughed, along with all of his friends.”
Randy sighs, then leans back into the chair, a sad smile on his lips. “In that moment, I felt as though a re-bar, the same re-bar from so long ago, had suddenly thundered down upon my head. I remember walking back to my room, still wearing my stupid raincoat, peering through the slanted glass louvers as my brother and his friends made their way through the field behind our house, through the hole in the chain link that led down into the rain drainage canal, their lamps and flashlights surrounding them with an aura of daylight. Then, I watched them enter the tunnel at the end of the canal, like the sun going into the heart of the world. And I remember lying there as the echoes of their voices faded underground, like my own fading heartbeat. I remember staring at the dead ceiling, this same dead ceiling above me now, feeling as though I had lost the sky, feeling like I had been left behind, stuck here, forever.”
***
Big Brother didn’t return for a while after his warning against humans.
I regretted offending him.
I missed him.
Although there was always a feeling of uneasiness around him, a feeling that, at any moment, he could make good on his threat to consume me, I had nevertheless grown used to the conversations, indeed, I had come to think of them as my very lifeline. No, not my physical lifeline; that desperately depended upon the growth rate of the algae, or the presence of tadpoles or insects or other aquatic small fry. No, it was another lifeline, one superimposed over the other, the life of my soul, the life of my selfhood. That other life, that second life, needed conversations, needed attention, needed to speak and to listen, like a fire (something which I had never seen, and could barely imagine) constantly needed something to burn.
Just when that fire was about to flicker and die, Big Brother appeared again.
“Greetings, Little Brother,” he croaked. “How goes things?”
He appeared diminished, even gaunt, his dark moist skin looking somewhat grey and luminescent.
“Same as ever,” I replied truthfully.
“Ah,” Big Brother acknowledged, somewhat feebly. “It is a cruel season for me. But I have seen cruel seasons before.” And he fell into a dour silence.
After having offended him previously with my intemperate questioning, I was reluctant to say anything. I swam gently, slowly, around the puddle.
It was Big Brother who finally broke the quiet. “Did I ever explain Lamarckian Genetics to you?” he asked. And before I could respond, he answered his own question. “No, no, I don’t recall I ever did. Lamarckian Genetics is the idea that the experiences and physical developments of each individual somehow changes the genetics of that individual, and therefore has the potential of enhancing the larger gene pool. It’s the idea that what we learn and accomplish in our short frog lifetime may have some lasting significance for the entire frog race. It’s an outdated and discounted theory, of course. Pure nonsense.” And then Big Brother gazed down at me, and I could swear that his eyes were sad. “But it has its appeal, nonetheless.”
“Big Brother,” I began hesitantly. I did not understand his explanation in the least, much less its significance, but I could feel my own questions expanding within me like frothing bubbles. Sure, I was still afraid of causing offense, but I simply had to ask them. “Why do frogs transform? Why are we born as pollywogs in water, only to have to change into frogs that can live on land?”
Big Brother grinned weakly. “You might as well ask why water is wet,” he said. “But if you need an answer. We belong to a class of animals called the Amphibians. Do you know what amphibious means? It means to be possessed of two lives. The only way to answer why we have two lives, one in water, and one on land, is to refer to evolutionary theory, the theory that completely superseded ideas like Lamarckian Genetics.”
Big Brother needed to take a breath at that point, his vocal pouch expanding and contracting rapidly, like an indecisive bubble. “According to evolutionary theory, the pressure for frogs to transform was an inborn need to thrive in a changing world. You see, at some murky point in the past, land masses rose out of the ancient seas, and a breathable atmosphere farted itself out of the ancient plants, resulting in the formation of a new niche environment. Our ancestors sprouted legs and grew lungs midway through their life cycle to take advantage of this environment. For a time, they were eminently successful. As large and as fierce as today’s crocodiles, our ancestors were the high end predators of the day, feasting upon the hapless fish that strayed into the shallow marshes.”
“To ask why we stopped there, not progressing on to become purely land-based creatures, misunderstands things. I mean, according to evolutionary theory, the reptiles, the dinosaurs, did evolve out of us amphibians, so it’s not as though some of our kind didn’t move on and leave the waters. But for those who did stay behind in the ‘half-way’ marshlands, well, they soon lost their position at the apex of the food chain. Amphibians slowly began to shrink, until they became the same size that we are today. No longer ferocious and feared, we frogs became the runts of the animal kingdom, with our only consistent defense mechanisms being the ability to hop about, and, in certain cases, secrete toxins.”
Big Brother fell silent for a time. “So, to answer your question, we frogs must undergo a transformation midlife, because we haven’t evolved to become completely land-based yet. Or, to put it more simply, we have to change because we haven’t changed.”
***
Randy is quiet for some time. His head is face down on the desk, with his stacked forearms forming a pillow for his forehead. He looks like he is taking a nap from studying. Just when I think his story is over, his voice floats up from its enclosure, soft and tired. “I remember waking up sometime later that night. My room was dark, I wasn’t sure what time it was, but I could see a tall shape, and I could hear my brother’s voice: ‘You awake?’ I didn’t answer. Maybe I was still pissed at being left behind. Maybe I just thought I was still dreaming. But my brother’s voice continued anyway. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But they’re my friends. You’ll understand someday.’”
Randy lifts his head up onto his chin, so that his eyes peak up over his forearms. “I remember seeing his silhouette place something on my desk, a glass jar, through my slit open eyes. And within it, I could kind of see something swimming around. I was curious, and I almost sat up in bed so I could check it out. But I also wanted to pretend to be asleep. So I didn’t move. After a while, my brother told me where he found it. ‘It was just wriggling around in a small puddle,’ he said, ‘at the bottom of a rain gutter, all the way on the other side of Meheula.’ My brother was all excited, telling me that the tunnel they were in actually went across town, that it caught the runoff from all the rain gutters on that side of Mililani. Then, he told me what you were. ‘A pollywog!’ he said. ‘Not a tadpole, but a pollywog!’ He told me that he had never seen a pollywog or a frog around Mililani. A shitload of tadpoles and toads, sure, but a pollywog? Never. Then, he said, ‘I don’t know why, but it reminded me of you, swimming all alone like that.’”
Randy rises suddenly in his chair and leans forward, peering into the fish bowl. “That was you, by the way,” he says unnecessarily. Then, he sinks back into his chair. “I didn’t respond to my brother, but he kept talking. Maybe he knew I was awake; then again, maybe he believed I was still asleep, maybe he was just using me as a sounding board, talking to himself. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘When you get to Wheeler, you’ll make good friends, just like I did. Friends who will watch your back. And then you’ll forget about me, ‘cause then you’ll have a life of your own. Promise, grasshoppah.’ And then he got up and left the room.”
“A life of your own,” Randy murmurs wistfully. His eyes train on me. “Three years, you’ve been with me, Polly. And in that time, you’ve only managed to grow two legs. And me, well, I haven’t even learned how to stand on mine.” Randy is quiet for many moments, as though collecting his thoughts. Finally, he says, “So that’s why, today you have to go home.” He springs off the chair suddenly, disappearing from view. When he returns, he is carrying a large mayonnaise jar half filled with water in one hand, and a green aquarium net in the other...
***
The sun came into my world one day. Or so I thought.
I had never seen bright lights before, never experienced the world except as dim shapes and concealed surfaces. So when they came, those inconceivably large giants bearing white blindness in their hands, I was simultaneously fascinated and terrified.
Suddenly, a world I had thought I knew was transfigured and transformed, filled with color and ugly clarity. Big Brother himself, whom I had known as a sometimes menacing, sometimes comforting shadow, when they came, Big Brother suddenly appeared small and vulnerable, a sickly looking being that crawled about on its belly. Big Brother’s eyes filled with terror as the giants and the light came, and with a leap, launched himself into a darkness that was no longer dark, nor mysterious, nor vast. He managed to cower in a tiny hole not much larger than himself, peeking out with small, glimmering eyes.
I could not look directly into the light, my eyes were not used to it, but I couldn’t turn away either, consumed by my curiosity. And so, I got my first glimpse of human beings, in shadowed, separate parts, a hand stretching out away from the light, a high contrast profile of a face with darkened eyes. “Holy shit!” I heard, a voice both loud and clear, quivering the air with echoes. “You saw? What was that?”
Another voice drew close, light descending, turning everything white and almost transparent. “Whoa,” it said. “Check it out. A pollywog.”
I realized that the voice was talking about me. Suddenly, I felt small, vulnerable, recalling Big Brother’s warning. I wriggled my tail in fear, all the while knowing that there was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go.
“I’m going to catch it,” said that near voice, with quiet certainty.
And suddenly, a shadow invaded the puddle, rippling the water chaotically. And before I could even decide where to swim, I felt myself embraced, felt myself, for the first time, strangely heavy. The water left me, or I left the water, the only home I had known, and the world became strangely empty, insubstantial, and then quickly painful, burning. My undeveloped eyes searched the dizzying blur around me, searched for something to focus on and hold onto. All the while, I could only gasp one soundless question over and over through my jaws.
“Big Brother, where are you?”
"Where are you?"
[This story (and its "sequel") need a MASSIVE overhaul; the use of a pollywog named Polly as a parallel narrator is both awkward and not as revealing as I'd like. Also, the story seems less a "story," and more the simple (and boring) recounting of events of a life; in other words, there isn't a powerful sense of unity to this...]
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