This is a short story.
We were both nervous, our sister and I, which is why my parents had the excellent idea to take us to a hibachi bar. It was another vacation tradition I hated, and had since the burst of flame lead to the hibachi chef, a well groomed Japanese man, pointing at me and laughing in surprise at me jumping back, and my mother just huffing, “Jesus, will you relax?” She looked at my dad, and said, “Just like Monie,” our grandmother who was in a home and constantly complained about her nerves.
My dad merely smiled. No matter how much I liked the food, I was always remembering that moment, which typified my family life to me. My mother reacting harshly, my father, smiling patiently. Clara, my sister, was the one who got my grandmother’s nerves. Though I suppose all families are subject to their relative’s neuroses, and I am in no way free from my grandmother’s anxiety. Clara, on the other hand, was a sort of carbon copy of Monie, down to the wedge-like qualities of her face. Inside of Musashi, the hibachi bar on the boardwalk, I could tell by every trembling of that wedge that she was not going to handle the explosion of flame very well. Clara, unlike me, could tap into a deeper anxiety. Once she knew what would happen, she was much more scared of it happening. As long as she was ignorant, she was fine. I had forgotten this when I told her about Musashi. I just wanted to prepare her.
“Honey, are you okay?” My dad asked. He was lying. He knew she wasn’t.
“Yes.” She said.
“Are you not excited?” Now my mom was on Clara.
“It’s fine.” She said.
Dad looked at me. “How was she today?” My dad and mom had sent us down to the beach to play by ourselves for a moment, leaving me as a defacto baby-sitter. I was told not to swim and stay with Clara. We were sitting at the edge of the water when I warned her about the flame. All I had been trying to do was keep her from panicking. Now she was anyway.
“She was fine.” I said. My dad smiled.
“A lot of ‘fine’ here, and I’m not seeing any of it.” Mom said. Turning to Dad, she whispered into his ear. He nodded. He took Clara.
“Here, let’s walk outside for a moment.” Clara took Dad’s hand and I watched them walk out of Musashi.
Our chef had a smaller goatee and an olive complexion with a long ponytail. He looked at the table. “Just you two?”
“Oh no.” My mother said. “My daughter and husband are outside.”
“Darn,” he said. “Thought you were one of those single moms I hear so much about.”
“Oh gosh.” She said.
“Nope,” I said. “She’s off the market.” My mother looked at me and I realized I had spoken too much again today.
“Well, with a guy like you, I’m sure.” He said and laughed. It was one of the few times I felt like my mom was caught off guard by anything, and it caused her to laugh too.
By now my dad and Clara had come back inside. They all sat down at the bar again.
“Clara’s feeling better. She somehow found out about the hibachi fire.” He looked at the cook. “You guys still do that?”
“At a Japanese steakhouse? Yes.”
“Should we–”
“No, like Clark, she is simply going to have to learn to get over things.” She said.
“Take it from me,” the cook said. “It’s not too bad. We have little girls come through here all the time. And they don’t cry.”
He put down a thick carrot and took out a cleaver.
“Here,” he said. “Watch this.” He chopped a pointed end of the carrot and then, facing me with his cleaver, flung it directly at my forehead. I moved out of the way and the tip of the carrot rolled across the linoleum.
“Look at that.” My dad said. Clara laughed.
“Think fast.” The hibachi chef flicked another carrot, a small disk of it, and this one laid on my sister’s head, like a frisbee landing on on the face peaks of a cliff. The image of one wedge on another made me laugh, though I doubt my sister was happy about this. Another flick of carrot from the chef landed in my father’s shirt, landing among the tawny forest of hair.
“Hey now.” He said. He grabbed the piece of carrot from his chest and bit into it. As he did, the hibachi chef shot the last disk of carrot at my mother. It gently hit her clavicle, then rolled down her shirt. She cracked up. My father looked mortified. She fished it out.
“It’s just some fun.” She said.
“Right. Fun.”
The hibachi chef didn’t seem to mind this awkward moment. He seemed, if anything, to be relishing in the discomfort. “How about I bring out the salads and we get started?” He said.
The salads were iceberg lettuce and thin strands of carrot with the viscous and gingery shrimp sauce ladled over. I ate mine, but Clara dug into hers. “I like this sauce.” She said. “Can we get more?”
“If you keep up, you’ll be full of sauce.” My dad said.
“Just like your father.” My mother drank from her glass and looked around the table. “Are you excited for the shrimp, Clark? I remember you enjoyed that.”
The hibachi chef came back. I braced. “I think I am.” I said.
“Do you like shrimp or not?” My mother said.
“Hey.” My father said. Somehow, the way I was spoken to always shocked me, even though I knew it was going to happen. My father’s rejoinder was the answer for me.
The hibachi chef began his display of his knife skills. He had a two pronged fork and a spatula. His arms were out now, revealing a carpet of dense hair and fading tattoos. I could hear the fork and spatula scrape against each other, like the chirps of a metallic cricket. Clara, for now, was mesmerized by his tricks. There was no hint of anxiety when she watched him dance the spatula between the fork’s two prongs, flipping the spatula into the air, and catching it behind his back. The rest of us knew what was coming as soon as he put those utensils away in his small cart, carrying the oil and other essentials.
He reached back to the cart for the clear bottle of oil. He pushed out a strong stream across the griddle while looking at my parents. He pulled the lighter from his apron, clicked the flame, and squirted oil into it. A tower of flame shot up from the grill, and my sister screamed. Over my sister’s scream, I heard, “You never listen to me.” I couldn’t discern if it was my mother or father. I was mesmerized by the flame, looking at the hibachi chef, and the piercing scream of my sister felt like forever.
I got up and left. I ran outside, at full sprint onto the boardwalk. Musashi was built on its own platform of the boardwalk, a small square island. I could see that I could walk onto the boardwalk, away from the restaurant. The feeling I had was like that of a fish realizing that by extending a flipper outward, he could contact a world he wasn’t aware existed, something he would have to grow into. The world he was used to no longer applied under the new rules. My parents were no longer the only ecosystem I was bound to.
This doesn’t mean that I knew what to do. That’s what set me to wandering the boardwalk, a child alone among happy families, college boys and girls who looked like gods, and old vacationers.
We had already walked the boardwalk, so when I walked it alone, it is not as if I saw things that I could suddenly do. There were gift shops, of course, with hermit crabs and beer bongs. There were murals in the windows of air-brushed t-shirts, cartoon characters high and looking at tits or butts, puns about the same. Inflatable flamingos, boogie boards with sharks on them, and floaties for the ocean. What I hadn’t considered in my flight from the table was that I didn’t have my money. Dad had decided to keep a running ledger of how much Clara and I had asked for in the way of souvenirs so he could redirect us if he felt something was too expensive. Of course, there were odd toy stores and snacks. I had begun realizing I was fairly hungry.
Upon realizing I was hungry, I realized something else: my family hadn’t come looking for me yet, even though I had to have been gone for fifteen or twenty so minutes. If they looked inside Musashi, they’d realize that I was no longer there. Perhaps they were checking the car or somewhere else, I thought.
The boardwalk had a section where a series of carnival games were set up. There were odd street performers through here, one playing the steel drum, another at the edge of the section barking the words to “Margaritaville”. The singer, a younger black man in his 20s, played the guitar well enough, but as he tried to sing the lyrics, everything came out harshly, like he was singing thinking of something less relaxing. I passed him to see a small tent set up: a lilac canopy that had been faded by sun and surf.
A boy passed me. We were both around ten, and he wore soccer shorts and a loose t-shirt. He had jutting ears and a high forehead. These weren’t so much the sort of things that get you made fun of– I had my own experiences with bullying, if only lightly– but rather distinct features, the kind you could easily recall of someone if you absolutely needed to. We walked away from the barking singer and got closer to the lilac tent.
The easel blocked us from seeing the face of the man working at it. Instead we saw his limbs protruding from the side of his easel and his eyes downcast at his work. We were not sure what he was drawing. But there was a simple sign, printed on notebook paper on the back of the lilac tent, and written in a blocky child’s letter: THE CARICATURIST: WORK FOR FREE! SEE WHAT I SEE!
The other boy looked at me. “I want to get a caricature.” He said.
“From this guy?”
The caricaturist’s eyes peeked over his easel. “It’s free work and good.” He said. When he said this, a horrid air came off of him. It was something I would grow to understand only when I grew older. At the time, I was shocked to be spoken to so directly.
“My dad says there’s no good, free work.” The other boy said.
“Sit down.” The caricaturist said. “I can only do one at a time.”
The other boy looked at me. “Rock, paper, scissors?”
At this point I had decided I’d like my caricature. Maybe I was searching for an alibi when I returned to Musashi. But I was curious to see how the caricaturist would render my features as well as the boy’s. So I stuck out my fist. “Count of three?”
One: we put our fists to equal footing. Two: they raised back up. I had to come up with a plan. Looking at the boy, I wasn’t sure what object he would pick. I defaulted to my usual: paper. He picked scissors.
A seabreeze blew across us and the boy took his seat. The caricaturist studied him and set to working with his pencils and crayons. The boy shifted in his seat a little.
“You have to sit still.” The caricaturist said. When he spoke, there was a serious misery in his voice, like using his vocal cords was pulling a great weight in his chest to the top of his throat. Maybe that’s why he spoke so shortly.
“I’m trying.” The boy said.
“Try harder.” The caricaturist shot back. The caricaturist returned to his work. Now the boy sat still in the seat, maybe in some way feeling chided for his wiggling. I couldn’t see around to see what was happening on the easel. In fact, the boy in his chair couldn’t either. The limbs of the caricaturist blocked both myself and the boy from taking a look at the work in progress. He could watch us, however, watch him do his work.
He did not seem to work with any hurry. Despite having another boy in his line, he showed no indication he would pick up pace. He also didn’t speak. When he looked over at the boy to see his face, he would quickly go back to the easel, and continue the laborious drawing. As he did this, the miserable air of the caricaturist seemed to reverberate around me. I was enveloped by this feeling he projected as he worked, like a sailboat caught in a hurricane with no hope of escape. The boy in the chair seemed entranced as well, watching the man draw a caricature of him.
It was at the peak of this I began to watch the boy closer. With each stroke of the pen, he underwent a slow but subtle change. It began with his ears. His ears, with each passing second, began a sort of odd molting, layers of dead skin falling off. Then, they began growing. Outward, skyward, groundward. They had grown to the size of palm fronds attached to the boy’s normal sized head.
A cracking came next. The boy was calm during this, but a sound something both hard and soft stretching invaded my ears. Like the ears before him, I saw his face now growing. But rather than the fairly standard directions of the ears, his face grew in all directions. It was like inside of his skull a bomb had been planted, and now I was watching the shrapnel explode into a new head. No matter how contained the explosion was, the destruction felt endless. His head had grown into something monstrous in size, too heavy to carry. The boy’s head slumped down, his wide and tall ears a canopy.
The caricaturist finished. “Ahem.” He said. He showed the boy his work and handed it to him. I couldn’t see what the caricature looked like.
“I don’t like this.” The boy said.
“It’s yours.” He said. “I only draw what I see.” He then turned the mirror to the boy.
The boy looked and grabbed at his face, now dwarfing his hands. “This isn’t me.”
“That’s what you think.” He said.
“You tricked me,” the boy said. He stood up and began walking away, stumbling, his head lolling about on his shoulders. He looked at me. I realized I was staring, and he ran away.
The caricaturist looked at me. “Sit down.”
“I have to go find my parents.” I said. I turned around and ran myself. I ran until I could get away from the barking sounds of the street performer, from the caricaturist’s miserable air, and the lost boy, wandering and transformed.
I made it back to Musashi. I walked inside and took my place at the dinner table. The rice and vegetables were steaming hot, and Clara had calmed down. I took my seat at the table.
“Sorry,” I said to my parents. “I ran to the bathroom.”
My mother looked at me. “It’s okay. You don’t have to announce it to everyone. Let’s just eat.”
There was no way to tell them about what I had seen, and I still have not.
As I grew older, the people around me seemed to follow a pattern like carts on a track. At first, whenever I met someone, their personality seemed like some new frontier. When I met them, I felt like a cartographer placed on the shore of some new continent that sprouted from the depths of the ocean. I would spend my time with them, mapping out the territory of their personality, seeing the vistas and waterfalls. But invariably, after I spent enough time with them, the continent withdrew. In time I felt I had only made the map of an island, then a house, then a room, then a closet. What at first seemed like a personality full of peaks and valleys had become something more flat, with only one or two notable traits. The world felt like everything was a paper assemblage in a diorama. It felt this way from the point on I was supposed to realize and appreciate all the personalities of the world. What was sold to me as a rainbow was, at most, mono or dualtone.
It would be easy to think that by writing this story, I am attempting to communicate how wonderful my personality is, and that by telling my audience of what I failed to see in other people, I am positing that I am somehow unique and brilliant. But I was not free from that evaluation of other people. I was my greatest disappointment: aware of the drawling sameness of them around me, but too stuck in this awareness that I could not fix it. To do so would have been like making oxygen made out of whatever chemicals I like. It felt like a fixed law, this pattern: that, in time, everyone I met would prove themselves as flat as the rest.
We had a conference for the logistics industry at another city on the beach. I was expected to go, of course. I didn’t expect our resort side hotel to be one of the stops on the boardwalk for that particular city, another one much further up the Atlantic Coast than the southern beach my family took us to. We checked in as a team. Everyone started talking about going out onto the boardwalk. I told them I’d probably go to the beach, by myself. My team appreciated my abilities but tolerated me otherwise, so this was probably for the best.
The beach at night had its few stragglers: couples and drunks and night-walkers like myself. The tide had receded. Beyond the battered sand castles, their fortifications wasted down by the push and pull of the tide, there was the plain field of silty sand where the waves forever lapped. I decided to walk towards the pier, then back to my hotel. Amongst the stragglers, washing up here on the beach, I felt a solemn peace. I passed some of them walking, knowing I never had to pretend to know them. But while I walked, there was something familiar: an air I hadn’t felt in some time. It was then I saw the faint light illuminating the lilac tent, a purple glow lightening the dark water.
The caricaturist was working.
There were differences in his tent. While his easel was set up, there was also a small lantern nailed to the wood of the pier. On the sand there were empty cans of potted meat and cracker sleeves. I walked to him and he looked up at me.
“I have money.” I said. “If you’re working.”
“Sit down.” He said.
And so I did. The caricaturist took a look at me, and he began his work. I sat still, unlike the boy who worked with him forever ago. Still his long limbs managed to hug the easel, keeping me from getting a view of his work. I sat in the chair, ready to see what the caricature and the mirror would have for me. The boy who sat across from him forever ago must have felt the changes that took place in his body. We don’t feel ourselves grow up, other than awaking with growing pains. I wondered what transformation would hold for me.
The caricaturist drew until, at last, he let down his pencil and crayon. He turned his work to me.
He had drawn only a portrait.
“That wasn’t the agreement.”
“There was no agreement.” He said. “I refuse to distort the greatest witness to my message.”
“Your message?”
“If I have to tell you, you will never know. You have lived my message to your fullest. And now,” he said, “It is time for you to draw what you see of me.” He turned the easel over and I finally got a full view of his face. There was nothing extraordinary about the caricaturist. In his face, his body, his presence, the only thing notable about him was how I felt around him, a feeling of despondency I was now old enough to navigate.
“I can’t draw.”
“That’s what you think.” He said.
I took the crayon and pencil from him. As I looked at the caricaturist, I stared at him and began drawing. I don’t remember how or what I drew. In many ways, the caricaturist I stared at was impossible to caricaturize.
“You’re not actually drawing what you truly see.” He said.
“What do you mean?”
“I can tell.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Draw what you truly see.”
I sighed. I focused on him. I closed my eyes. I began my work. I drew him as the presence he truly was.
When I was finished, I turned the easel to him. He looked at my work then to me. He nodded to me. He stood up from his work and began walking, far down from the lilac tent. I saw him breach the water and continue until his head bobbed on the water like a distant boat, then disappeared.
After watching him walk, I returned to the easel. Without looking at what I had drawn, I tore it into small pieces and threw it onto the sand. I grabbed the mirror, and clipped it to the easel.
I looked at my face and began drawing. In time my face in the mirror dissolved into a nothing of disjointed features only massaged into flesh and form. It was my last portrait.