“It was his fault, you know.”
Randy pulled the pillow over his ears, sandwiching his head. Then, as though recalling the futility of the gesture, he reached instead for Donald Duck and Owlie, wrapping his arms around the stuffed creatures, to choke the pretend life out of them. Owlie’s hollow tummy tinkled comfortingly.
“His fault,” Mr. Kappa’s voice repeated, like an echo slithering across the inner walls of Randy’s head. “His fault.”
Randy rocked slowly from side to side. The water bells in Owlie rang gently with the motion, like a buoy on the tide. “Be quiet,” he whimpered softly. “You’re not real.”
Mr. Kappa’s rebuttal was swift. “Of course I’m real,” he hissed, like an off-station radio frequency turned up really loud. “He said so himself, remember?”
And Randy, as though on cue, remembered. He rememberd the very day his older brother had confirmed, or even exascerbated, his nagging fears. It had happened while they were riding their bikes home from Mililani Uka, when the high afternoon sun and the exertion of the quick-paced peddling made the world seem solid and safe enough to speak about such things. Between gasps for air, Randy had asked, “Dean, is there such a thing as a Kappa?” And Dean, after giving the question some thought, looked over his shoulder and said, “Of course there is. Giant turtle with a wicked hook for a mouth. And no brains. It’s got a bowl of water where it’s brains should be. It lives in the gutters, where it’s wet, and when it’s dark and rainy, it sneaks out and steals little runts like you to suck out their brains and pull out their guts.” As they passed a corner gutter, Dean flinched his bike away; “Whoa, I just saw one there!” he shouted, laughing as Randy screeched his brakes, peering into the darkness.
Randy shook his head to clear the memory, but as he returned to the present, his eyes seemed to register the very same darkness, only now more pervasive. “He was joking,” Randy proffered as a desperate counter. “That’s what big brothers do. They joke around.”
“Sure they do,” chided Mr. Kappa smugly. “Sure they do.”
And Randy rocked from side to side once again, hugging Owlie and Donald Duck to his chest like some desperate and gently ringing buoy, wishing the deep black ocean of the night were far shorter in the crossing.
The day began before the alarm clock.
Despite little rest, Randy surfaced from his fathomless dreams spontaneously, like ambergris or the corpse of a fish. It wasn’t because of the perception of dawn’s light, because at 4:55, more often than not, there wasn’t a discernable trace of it; nor was it a sound, whether of waking birds or the car ignition of neighbors heading off to work. No, it was something invisible, silent, without sense. Something subtly switched when the time was just so, and the pieces of himself slowly emerged into awareness one by one until there he was, an island with a clear edge.
His first act, often before opening his eyes, was to reach for the alarm clock at his bedside to turn it off. Then, he groped for the crumpled cardboard beside the clock and, even though it was much too dark to see, squinted at the first item on the list, which he had successfully performed: “5:00 Wake up”. He smiled briefly, trying to recoup a feeling of accomplishment, and pretended to read the next item in the list (which he had long since memorized): “5:05 Wash face, brush teeth.”
As he crept out of bed, he idly wondered (as he had every morning since the first iteration of this routine) whether the 5:05 in this case was supposed to be a deadline, or a start time. After all, the waking up was an instantaneous thing, something which he did ahead of schedule; was he just supposed to wait five or ten minutes before proceeding to the next item, or was it okay to just dive in? As he did every morning, he opted for the latter, thinking it was best to be ahead of the schedule if at all possible.
It was his mother who had composed the schedule for Randy, back when there were fears that he was too amorphous a child; it was explained to him that
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