Tentative Tentacles, Trembling Testicles
By: Ronald C. Flores-Gunkle
Tags: Short Story, Relationships, Fiction, Static Apnea, Creative Writing

Tentative Tentacles, Trembling Testicles

I am nothing, if not my all

By Ronald C. Flores Gunkle

Photo by Utpal Pande on Unsplash

How naked go the sometimes nude!

Robert Graves

Is it possible to will yourself to die? I stopped breathing. It didn’t work. Perhaps it takes practice, like swimming underwater.

How long has he been under? Two minutes? Three? Shouldn’t you do something?

I can hear them. Maybe I should do something. Swallow? How much water do I need to drown? Will I sink or float? I can do this.

Shouldn’t you pull him out?

I expect four tentacles, a quadriplegic octopus, to dangle on the rim.

This is bizarre. Why does he do it?

Dumb question. Why is snow white? How does frost bite?

He’s in training. Give him time. He easily does three minutes. A warm up — child’s play, he calls it.

I should stay here forever wrapped in silken sheets, instead of a sloop sending signals to the shore. I taste cod.

He’s coming out. Shall I make him black tea?

Moths flicker from black moss. I slip out, a white eel, from the wiggling water, my trembling testicles tucked tentatively in my hands. I swim nude, sleep nude, live nude. It is how I am complete. I am my junk. Surprised at the vulgarity? I am nothing, if not my all. Black tea? Black as oak leaves, suffocated by a sudden storm, stirred into the sea. Why isn’t black tea black? Or green tea green? Nothing is what it is. I am not what I am.

How do you take it?

Don’t ask him. Jason doesn’t like to be interrogated.

But the tea. How will I know how he likes it?

He won’t tell you. He hasn’t spoken a word since he was five.

I see. He’s special. He looks good. Is he stuck in some infantile stage of development? That may explain why he doesn't get dressed.

He is in training. He’s comfortable that way. He is unique, but hardly infantile. He reads and writes voraciously. Reads Latin and Greek. Half the library is his. If it is something he deems important, he writes me a note. He has chosen not to speak and not to wear clothes; it is his choice. Nude is natural.

I don’t know this new man. Ted. Probably Theodore, Θεόδωρος, God’s gift. Presumptuous on the part of the parent who named him. Might have been the hair, bountiful and yellow-brown, like burnished gold. God’s people love the gift of gold. Yet it’s odd that such a common metal — like common people — should be so overvalued. Does Sebastian overvalue him?

He answers yes and no questions.

I sip the tea, while Ted sips me. The tea is uninteresting, as Ted is, but I nod assent. Assent reveals nothing about what a person is thinking, dissent is always revelatory.

Simple answers are refreshing. My ex-wife — Jason’s loony mother — never once answered a yes or no question. It almost drove me crazy. ‘Would you like tea?’ I might ask. Is it organic?’ She’d answer with a question. Then she would go into a discourse on how important it is to know the country or region where tea is grown, where and how it is processed, packaged, and shipped; how much the people who picked the tea were paid … Never, not once, in the five years we were together did she ever answer with a simple yes or no on any subject whatsoever. If I pointed it out to her or tried to force a yes or no out of her, we would end up in a terrible row.

So, my guess is you’ve never have rows with Jason.

No, never.

…

I am not always nude, or naked. Robert Graves’ poem apart, I don’t see any distinction in the terms. On the rare occasions Sebastian has me leave the house and grounds, usually for medical or legal reasons, I wear outerwear. I never wear underwear. My penis and my testicles are not junk, they are part of me and I like to be aware of them. I like to know they are there.

I admire your support of your son’s idiosyncrasies. I can see why you are sequestered here with him. It is a lovely estate, really, and the tropics seem to suit you both. Do you miss London?

It is impossible to miss what I never really had. London is about as real to me as winter is to Jason. We live in summer.

What is your goal? What will become of you two? The boy is obviously a man and you both have to consider the future.

My goal is to care for Jason. His goal is to set the world record for staying underwater. He is in training to accomplish that. I am in training to keep him alive until he succeeds. And there is my writing, of course.

A world record? I had no idea such a competition existed.

Not too smart, Sebastian’s friend Ted, unattuned to the vagaries of sport. Even Guinness is keeping count. Most people pass out if they hold their breath for more than a minute, give up and gasp. Brain damage if they stay underwater too long. Like any sport, it takes perseverance and practice. And a modicum of caution. Little more than three minutes was Houdini’s record. And he didn’t have a demented mother, non compos mentis, to hold him under. My good fortune was to have had habilitas. Now I persevere and practice.

During storms, day imitates night like the idiotic negatives of vacuous horror movies: stars appear like candles agonizing on altars. Her Mercedes, eminently distinguishable from the tin sarcophagi that errantly invade our entrance, trespasses. Frightened fireflies retreat into the world’s cellar.

The clack of her slippers; I followed. Medea lurked. She pierced the withering waters, her slippers, asterisks on a chaise. Her forbidden embrace, pulling me with her under the silent cerulean sea. Three minutes, 30 seconds. My father pulling me out; no mother, no slippers, no car. Me, addicted to her mortal elixer.

I am Jason, Ἰάσων, the healer, searching the depths for the Golden Fleece. Why? To ransom my lost mother? To pin a medal to my naked chest? To mine metal for Sebastian?

He has been training day and night for years. No Static Apnea competitors have successfully held their breath underwater for 12 minutes. Jason is near that. He qualified in the trials in Dubai and now that his top competitor has, unfortunately, passed away, he is the number one seed.

He didn’t pass away. There’s no away to pass to. He willingly ascended to the bottom of his crystalline cage. Dangling tentacles tried to ensnare him, but the door of eternity shattered and no one could impede his entrance. It waits for me.

Will he, ah, dress for the event?

No, AIDA, the International Association for the Development of Apnea, will allow it — with the proper restrictions to the public and press. This is how he feels complete, it is how he wants to compete. It is how we all come into the world and, he says, that’s the way he will go out.