“You can’t go.”
Randy says this with as much calm as he can muster, standing in the middle of the doorway.
It is Friday evening, and Dean and his friends, scattered about the living room, are staring at him in silence.
“What are you talking about, dweeb,” Dean mutters abruptly. Dean’s friends smirk and begin to turn away.
“You can’t go,” Randy repeats. “It- it looks like it’s going to rain tonight. Who knows, it might- it might even flood.”
“No, it doesn’t.” Dean shoves Randy roughly aside. His friends laugh openly.
Undaunted, Randy rushes over to Dean, grabbing his left hand.
“Ow!” Dean shouts, pulling his hand away. His eyes flare dangerously. He’s about to shove Randy back, but noticing all eyes are on him, thinks better of it.
Whether Randy realizes how close he was to being pushed to the ground or not, he doesn’t pause to appreciate it. “Look,” Randy begins, breathless. “I didn’t want to tell you this. But there’s a monster down in the canal.”
Despite his obvious annoyance, Dean laughs. He glances over at his friends, and they share conspiratorial winks. “A monster?”
“Yes,” Randy says. “A kappa.”
“A kappa,” says Dean, nodding. “What is that again?”
Randy looks down at an empty corner on the ground; it’s easier than seeing all the incredulous, mocking faces above. “At first, I thought he was just a water-monkey, or something. But then, I found out that kappa are actually the angry ghosts of unwanted babies who were drowned in rivers. And this kappa, he hates you.” Randy dares a glance at his brother, to make a point. “He hates you because of how you treat me.”
Dean’s expression is at first condescending, and then puzzled, and then (at the last part) almost hurt. He is quiet for a couple of seconds. Then, he walks around Randy, and his friends follow him. “You’re a riot,” one of them murmurs in passing.
Randy is about to follow them, to make one last attempt to save Dean. Just as Randy reaches the door, however, Dean stands like a wall at the threshold. He doesn’t look Randy in the eye. He just calls above his head: “Mom, Dad. Can you take Randy away? He’s trying to tag along.”
Mom comes around, and pulls Randy sharply by the arm. Randy tries to pull himself free, tries to reason with his mother. “But Mom, you don’t understand- the kappa-”
“Randy!” she shouts. “Stop it!” She looks out the doorway at Dean’s assembled friends, and gives an embarrassed grin. “I’m sorry,” she calls out. “Go! Have fun now! Catch a lot of toads!”
As Dean and his friends leave, carrying lanterns and flashlights and buckets and nets towards the backyard fence, Randy is pulled upstairs by his mother. All the while, she is complaining: “What is wrong with you, embarrassing Dean in front of his friends like that?”
Randy just hangs his head as he is ushered into his room.
“You go to bed,” Mom commands. “If I catch you trying to sneak out, then Dad’s going to hear about it!”
As soon as she departs, Randy shuffles over to his louvered glass windows, gazing out at his brother and friends. He just manages to see the last of their group crawl through the opening in the chain link, and disappear into the canal. He can still hear them, their jovial conversations and laughter echoing off the slanted canal walls and into the sky. And he can still see their lamplights and flashlights, shining up and out, and casting strange shadows on the darkening weedelia fields. And then, suddenly, they enter the tunnel, and their voices become abruptly muted.
Randy lies on his back, feeling his heart pounding. What had he done? And what could he do?
He thinks. He remembers what Yagoro said, that just as all water finds its way down into the canals, so too do the careless words and whispers of the townspeople. “The pipes,” he says out loud to himself. He creeps out of his bedroom, and into the nearby bathroom. He closes the door behind him. He leans over the porcelain sink, and hesitantly speaks into the drain at the bottom of the bowl, as through a microphone.
“Hello?” he calls awkwardly. “Yagoro? I- I hope you can hear me. Please- don’t hurt my brother. I know what I said earlier –”
Just then, Randy’s mom opens the door. The back of Randy’s head glances the faucet as he jerks himself up.
“Who are you talking to?” Mom asks sharply.
Randy conceals the sharp pain at his occiput with a forced grin. “Nobody,” he mutters. “I was just- I was just about to brush my teeth.”
“Well, hurry it up!” Mom says. “And go straight to bed afterwards. Don’t wait up for your brother. I want you to go to sleep.”
Randy nods. “Okay.”
When the door is closed again, Randy puts the stopper in the sink, and begins to fill it with warm water. He needs to make a sound, a sound loud enough to reach Yagoro, and, hopefully, stop him. But that sound also needs to be quiet enough to slip under the attentions of his parents.
He dunks his head fully into the sink.
For some reason, at the instant his head breaks the surface, the ancient memory flashes, the one of him nearly drowning in the surf, the one where his parents and brother stood high on a sand dune laughing. It saps his resolve, and he finds he can’t think of anything to say to save his brother. He lifts his dripping face from the water, breathless.
“I hate myself.” The thought comes spontaneously, and fully formed. It surprises Randy with its forcefulness, and its truth. Other thoughts follow it, like tongues of flame. “I can’t do anything, not even to save my brother. There’s always been something wrong with me. I- I think I was born without a soul. I don’t know where this hate comes from. It’s easy to think that it came from him, that he made me hate myself. But he didn’t. It was always all me. It was always all me. I hate myself so much.”
And suddenly, Randy realizes what the answer is: the one thing that he can do better than anyone else, better than Dean, and better than Yagoro.
He dunks his head fully into the sink once again, and screams the answer, tears flowing and mixing invisibly and silently into the waters.
When he is done, he wipes his dripping face on a towel, and walks back to his room. He suddenly feels deeply exhausted. He crawls into bed, barely managing to push aside Owlie and Donald Duck, and the books he had “researched,” before falling into sleep as into a pool with no bottom…
It’s the oldest dream.
The waves, the wind, the sand.
The laughter.
And in the midst of the tumult, just when Randy is about to give up, he hears the voice: “Sink. Sink. Sink and then float.”
But then the dream continues.
There is a hand that wraps around Randy’s wrist. It pulls him, leads him, reorients him. His head breaks the foamy surface, and in the brilliant, burning air, he can hear himself coughing above the shhh of the waters.
He blinks the stinging salt from his eyes.
It’s his brother Dean.
“Stand up,” he says, smiling. “C’mon, stand up!”
Randy’s feet suddenly feel a floor underneath. He rises up, his face almost copying his brother’s smile.
“C’mon!”
Randy wakes up.
There is a sound in his room, the sound of someone walking softly across the carpeted floor. Randy opens his eyes very slightly, so that he can peer through slits into the darkness. He sees a dark silhouette leaning over him, its face obscured in shadow. For a terrifying moment, Randy imagines that it is Yagoro the Kappa, slinking out of the canal to pay a personal visit. But the figure withdraws slightly, and as it passes through a sliver of half-light, Randy sees that it is only his older brother Dean.
Dean seems to carry something in his hands. He gently places it on Randy’s cramped wooden desk. The contact of the object onto the desk’s surface is accompanied by a small sound, halfway between the contact of metal, and a splash of water. Then, Dean sits in Randy’s chair, which creaks softly beneath his weight.
For long moments, Dean sits in silence. During this period, Randy struggles to keep his breathing slow and even, to maintain the illusion that he is still sleeping. Oddly enough, whether the illusion worked or not, Dean abruptly begins to speak.
“You have to understand,” he says, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Nothing ever came easy. And no one ever helped me out. I had to do everything, all by myself. So if I leave you out, if I’m not always the best brother to you, it’s because that’s how it was for me. It’s because-” Dean seems to want to say something more, but sighs and leaves the sentence unfinished. He gets up from the chair swiftly. “I found this. It reminded me of you.” And with that, he leaves the room.
Randy waits for long minutes after the sound of his brother’s breathing grows even next door. Then, he slowly and quietly slips out of bed and creeps over to the light switch, on the wall beside his desk. He flips the switch, his eyes wincing at the sudden illumination.
He gasps.
On the middle of his desk is a bowl fashioned out of blue-green pennies, all rusted together. The bowl is half-filled with dark water. Hovering within that water is a pollywog, forest green and mottled with dark spots.
“Ranidae,” he whispers.
According to legend, there is one way to defeat a Kappa.
Kappa may be shiftless, with unfathomable motives; but they are also creatures of propriety. It is said that if you bow to a Kappa, they cannot help but bow back. In doing so, they empty the bowls on the tops of their heads, and lose all of their magical powers.
The rules of politeness have changed over time and across cultures. The modern Kappa no longer recognizes a bow as a simple physical gesture. No, for Yagoro, a bow must mean something real. It must mean that someone has lowered himself first.
Yagoro thinks about this as he drifts on the black currents, deep beneath the earth. The boy Randy discovered the one thing he could do better than anyone else, and in so doing, had stolen back any and all of Yagoro’s powers over him.
Yagoro feels himself sinking, feels the gentle pull of an invisible current. He knows not where the waters carry him, and he doesn’t care. “Kappa no kawa nagare.”
Someday, he will find where he belongs. Somewhere, he will find someone that needs him, like a brother.
“Until then,” he murmurs, his voice staining the waters, “I will sink… sink… sink… and I will float.”
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