FLAMINGO BAY
ISAAC RADNER
The crocodile floated log-like in the water. Warm afternoon rain fell so softly that it might have escaped notice if not for the small, rippled circles dancing across the water’s surface. He watched the reptile from where he sat on the marina’s edge. It was so perfectly still—the only motion of its long body was that of the water gently pushing and pulling it—that he briefly wondered if it was dead. But the creature soon lazily opened one golden eye to look at nothing for a slow moment before closing it again and resuming its motionless passage across the water’s surface.
He’d been making the drive South to the marina almost daily for the past few weeks. The first time he arrived there mostly by accident. He had needed to get out of the apartment while his girlfriend packed her stuff. There weren’t too many places to go in the middle of lockdown, and he didn’t want to be around people anyway. So, he just drove South, farther and farther away from the city until he found himself at the marina. The road ended there, and he got out of his car to watch the last rays of sun disappear behind the ocean’s flat horizon. Approaching the marina’s edge, he saw them floating in the water, maybe ten of them.
The sight of those primordial beasts in the gloaming was like looking through a window into another world. He struggled to find any relationship, any through-line between them and his life beyond the marina. And, for as long as he sat there watching them drift on the tide, he existed in that separate reality with them.
He visited the marina many times over the following weeks, drawn to the strange separateness of the world he had discovered there. The disconnect that he felt from everything and everybody else while there was a blessing that he sought as frequently as he was able to make the one-hour drive south. When not at the marina, he mostly laid on the faux-leather couch in his apartment, silently staring at the flies crawling across the ceiling. Besides his bed, it was the only real piece of furniture left in the place. His girlfriend had taken everything else after she left him and went back west.
Laying there on that old couch in the middle of an empty living room, he felt like he was drifting on a vast sea. This was not a serene ocean like the one in which the crocodiles floated so calmly, but a churning mass of dark water threatening to pull him under at any moment. His bare apartment was a claustrophobic raft, as suffocating in its own way as the roiling waters beneath. He knew he wasn’t the only one struggling with isolation. He wasn’t the only person who had been laid off when the lockdown started. And his wasn’t the only relationship which had crackedin the pressure-cooker environment of a one-bed apartment during the pandemic. Still, he mulled over his anxieties until each sat brightly in his mind, worn smooth and polished like a worry stone.
Brightest among them was the emptiness of his small apartment— or, more accurately, the cause of that emptiness. He hadn’t realized how much of the stuff in the apartment was hers until she left, leaving a cold vacuum of bare walls and floors in her wake. It would be easy to blame the pandemic for the breakup. It was comforting to believe that their relationship was simply one of the countless casualties of the virus, a tragedy caused by a natural disaster that was nobody’s fault. He was plagued, however, by the creeping knowledge that the relationship would have ended anyway, and that it would have been his doing, a result of his own inaction.
Laying on his couch, surrounded by empty space, he was most aware of another emptiness, a void of feeling where he should have felt loss or sadness. He didn’t miss her. She knew he wouldn’t, and that’s why she left. He wondered if he had ever loved her or simply brought her back from university with him like some kind of souvenir. She hadn’t wanted to leave her friends and family out West, but he had convinced her to come out to Florida with him when he’d gotten a job there after graduating. He had simply been scared of leaving university and his friends there. Scared of being alone. She was a lifeline back to that community, a creature of that world he brought with him for comfort, familiarity. Of course, she left him once she realized this. And now that she was gone, he didn’t miss her, but he did feel alone– alone and ashamed. He was ashamed of his inability to be alone, ashamed that he had wanted her around out of fear instead of love, ashamed of his apathy in the face of her departure.
Shame and anxiety— his body was incandescent with them, and he needed to move, to leave that cell of an apartment for anything else. So, he went to look at the crocodiles. He found them as he always did, floating silently in the water. The day was hot, and the air was thick with humidity. Thankful for the cool breeze off the ocean, he watched the creatures’ aimless passage across the marina. The silence and stillness of those great beasts was punctuated by the cries of seagulls from where they circled above. Occasionally, a bird would swoop down close to the water, scanning for fish. The group of gulls slowly made their way west across the bay, and as they approached the portion of the marina where the crocodiles drifted, he sensed a subtle shift in the reptiles. They made no obvious movements and seemed to drift as calmly as ever, but he felt a contracting of their long bodies, like springs coiling tight.
It happened so fast he almost missed it. A seagull descended to fly low over the water’s surface and ventured too close to one of those waiting beasts. In an instant, that coiled spring of a creature released the energy it had so patiently housed in its long body and propelled itself up out the water. Its body was a knife, momentarily flying through the air as gracefully and naturally as the birds circling above. Like a trap being sprung, its long jaws closed around the unwitting bird, collapsing its wings and crushing its hollow bones. Bird and beast crashed back into the water, and then all was again calm. The crocodiles floated as they had before, and the gulls moved on further down the coast.
In the sudden stillness of the midday heat, so incongruous after the violent commotion moments before, his breath came fast and shallow. He didn’t think he had ever seen something so beautiful as that crocodile flying through the air, the deadly arc of its flight timed flawlessly to intersect with the bird’s swift passage across the water. It was the beauty of a creature perfectly executing the one thing it was designed to do by the long, patient, and sure hand of evolution. He was most struck by the mindlessness of it. The beast gave no thought to what it did. It did not question its actions nor doubt its ability. It simply acted, mind and body joined in perfect union for one lethal moment. And as the crocodile sunk back beneath the water, the bloodied body of the bird still twitching in its teeth, its golden eyes were absent of guilt or remorse.
It was this mindlessness, the subsumption of thought into deed, that allowed the crocodile to achieve a perfection of action that no human could. For, no human was ever alone, never unified. There was always one self that was watching and thinking, while the other moved through the world. He could feel these two selves there at the marina’s edge. One sat cross legged on the concrete of the dock, looking out across the green ocean. The other paced behind him, aware of his position on the dock, observing him as he looked out towards the water, analyzing his posture, wondering what others might think of this strange man sitting on the ground, whispering a million other thoughts into his ears, and picking incessantly at the scabs of his worries and anxieties. Those two selves were always there, each an inescapable partner of the other.
Unlike him, those primeval beasts before him in the water were completely self- contained and whole. Their rough hide, their long sharp mouths, and their snakelike tails unchanged throughout the millennia. And through this ocean of years, they had drifted as they did now before him, alert only to the feel of water across their skin, the moving shadow of their prey in the waters below, and the perfection of their deadly form. Beyond this, beyond their world, there was nothing. There was no guilt about things done or not done, no regret for people they may have hurt. There was no worrying about the world, about death and disease. And there was no fear of being alone.
He thought of his apartment and its oppressive emptiness. It was so different from the vast, soothing emptiness of the ocean and the peaceful emptiness of the minds of those beasts before him.
He took off his shoes and let his feet dangle off the dock’s edge, dipping them into the water. It was cool against his skin. The crocodiles mostly seemed oblivious to him, even though they floated only several body-lengths away. However, the closest of them, though it didn’t move its body, opened one eye to stare at him. He stared back into that thin, tall pupil that cut across the center of the creature’s golden eye. In it, he saw only a watchful blankness. If there was any curiosity in the reptile’s gaze, it was not the kind that wondered at who he was or guessed at his thoughts and motivations. Rather, it was a patient and simple curiosity that only waited to see what he might do next.
While he felt fascinated by the crocodile, and while he marveled at the beauty of its golden eyes, another part of him, a much older part buried deep in his mind and body, was stirred from its long dormancy by the creature’s gaze. It was an aspect of the human mind that had once been the mind’s chief feature, early in humanity’s long evolutionary journey. But over the eons, the mind continued to develop and grow in subtlety. Like cities being built on the remains of older cities, those original foundations were lost beneath the construction of new streets and buildings, increasingly elaborate and breathtaking in their complexity. It was this complexity that eventually allowed for the emergence of that second-self within the mind, the self that watches, questions, and wonders—the self that is conscious of its other self. With its emergence, humanity would, could never be alone again. Those original foundations and structures of the mind, however, were still there buried deep beneath the layers of all those increasingly elaborate constructions that had been added over millions of years. And it was to this original part of the mind that the crocodile’s gaze seemed to call.
His mind responded that ancient city rising up through the sediment of all those others built upon it, rising until it reached those beautiful towers and flying arches that were the newest, most elaborate addition to the vast sprawling architecture of the self. These it subsumed within its own walls, the walls of an ancient temple, a monolith hewn roughly from the oldest, most primitive strands of DNA. Within these walls, the self was again as it once was, and still was for the crocodiles in the bay – singular, unified, alone.
Sitting, matching the gaze of the crocodile, a great peacefulness descended upon him. It settled slowly upon his mind like a thick blanket, muffling his thoughts until they were almost gone completely. A vibrant explosion of color, sound, and smell took their place – input from his senses unmediated by any analysis or thought: the sticky salty air filled his nostrils, the sun poured its light down generously upon the blue ocean where it broke into a million shining diamonds that danced across the waters’ surface, and a gentle breeze played across his skin. Never had the world felt so immediate and so vast.
His last full thought, as he slipped into the water, was that his was the first time since moving there that he had actually been in the ocean. Then all thought was lost to the endless push and pull of the tide. Human and crocodile continued to eye one anther— two creatures suspended on the ocean, aware only of the vastness above and below, and of the other, slowly drifting closer upon the glittering water.
Isaac Radner is an emerging writer based in Denver, CO. His short story, “The Man Who Ate the Moon”, was recently published in the literary magazine ‘Does it have Pockets?’. He has a BA in Political Science from Colorado College and an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago.
