The Perfect Son

Howling winds and crashing waves - the two elements battled for dominance as a deafening cacophony of sound filled Milo to the brim, flowing through every orifice, flooding him until he could no longer distinguish himself from the elements.

           With a deep breath, he grounded himself. Felt the coarse dirt between his toes and reveled in the tiny sharp rocks that threatened to break the soft skin of his underfoot. Milo was, more than anything else, aware of himself and the silly little situation he had gotten himself into. At this moment just three days ago, if he had been told that he would be in this spot, staring out over a screaming abyss, he would have…well he would have simply ignored the person that was telling him such nonsense.

And yet, here he stood.

It had started on a Wednesday. He had been on his way into class – his micro-biology class that he hated more than anything in a degree that his father forced upon him – when he found himself taking a shortcut he would usually avoid and stuck within a crowd. It was here that one deft finger tapped twice upon his shoulder. When he turned, he came face to face with a tall, dashing man, if only a tad lanky. This man – Todd he had introduced himself as – wore a blazer and slacks that struggled to properly stretch over his long limbs, and had his hair combed back in such a way that made his face look almost unnaturally long. Yet, his chocolate brown eyes, and uneven smile added a beauty to him that Milo was forced to appreciate, if not fawn over.

           “Milo, is it?” The man asked, his voice a trembling baritone but his eyes confident. How he had managed to pick Milo out from a crowd of equally tired and struggling students, Milo did not know and could not be bothered to question.

           He stood for almost too long without responding, only for a slight breeze to prickle him out of his daze.

           “Yeah,” he cleared his throat and forced himself to stop mumbling. He could hear his mother berating him for it from her spot on the other side of the country. “Sorry, I’m late for class. Is everything okay?”

           Todd seemed to look gently over him for a moment. Was he studying Milo? Looking for something? Milo could not tell. But all too quickly, the man met his eyes again and began to talk.

           The lanky man introduced himself as a member of the grading board for the school of medicine and asked for Milo to follow him with a variety of placating sentences about Milo not at all being in trouble. Later, Milo would find that the man had been lying. He would realize that, of course this man was not on the grading board, for he seemed far too young for that and the people on those boards were surely all older and wizened and grumpy. Milo would reason that a person at such a level would surely be able to buy clothes that properly fit his limbs and, more than anything, would contact Milo in a more reasonable way than simply finding him in a random crowd on a random Wednesday in which he happened to be late for a class.

           But in that moment, Milo did not consider these things. Was it the sleep deprivation, the sudden influx of anxiety or simple naivety? He did not know and could not tell.

           Todd – if that was even the man’s real name – lead him on a walk that had Milo huffing and puffing. Absently, it occurred to him that he should make use of that gym membership that he had yet to use.

Todd seemed unaffected.

He was led to a coffee shop and, just when he thought he would be treated to the ever-elusive and frustratingly over-priced  iced coffee, he was instead led out the back, through a hallway that seemed to lead to a variety of different businesses and into the kitchen of take-away shop. Grime and other substances that Milo refused to ponder over stained the walls and counter-tops surrounding this overly cramped room. Steam rose from various pots and pans, filling the air with a prickling heat that immediately brought a layer of sweat to Milo’s head.

Todd seemed unaffected.

           “I hate to complain,” Milo lied, blowing steam toward Todd with his words. “But where are we going?”

           Todd made a gesture that was an obvious sign for Milo to follow and moved up a narrow set of stairs that, with its narrow and tall steps, somehow seemed the perfect match for the other man. Milo followed, one sluggish step after another, lungs straining all the while. On the landing, Milo found Todd facing him, his fingers crossed neutrally.

           It was here that he told Milo the truth. He told Milo about angered sea gods and ill-fated pirates. He spun tales of colossal sea monsters and hidden civilizations; humans with special powers and beings that almost looked human. And, to top it all off, Todd told Milo of a man with an unnaturally sharp beard and pointed navy fingernails who aimed to empty the sea. And then, he finished his story and he fell silent with a gasp that scraped air into his desperate lungs.

Milo laughed. It was an empty laugh that turned into a wheeze and when he finally stopped, the tall man stared down at him with an unchanged expression.

“Right, good joke, mate,” Milo pat the man on the shoulder. “Thanks for getting me out of my class but I really should get going now.”

He made to turn but was stopped by Todd’s voice. It was quiet, shouldn’t have been heard over the bustling restaurant below them, and yet, it was all Milo could hear.

“It’s you, Milo,” he said. “It’s you who can save the sea and all that lives within it. It’s you the prophecy speaks of and it’s you that our lives rest on.”

Milo turned back to the man but he was not there. He looked around. There was no one. He was alone on this landing in this shop. He went back down the stairs, letting the steam surround him.

Milo spent the next two days deliberating. Well, really, he spent one day deliberating, half a day sleeping and another half panicking, but he would not tell anyone that had they ever asked.

Then, when the clocked ticked over to ten minutes past one in the morning on that fated third day, Milo left his bed – upon which he had been staring blankly into the surrounding darkness as his crappy pedestal fan failed at keeping him cool – and he left his dorm room in nothing more than long blue pajama pants, a stained wife-beater and a pair of slippers so old and beaten that he may as well have worn nothing.

He did not know where he walked. He would not have been able to retrace his steps if a gun was pointed toward his head. Rather, as he stepped out onto an empty road, the world around him doused in a dull yellow light from a nearby streetlamp, he took a deep breath of the fresh night air, forced himself to relax his muscles, and allowed the wind to take control.

If he thought too long or too hard about it, maybe he would consider that the wind had been guiding him his entire life, taking his from one place to another, from one journey to the next. If he thought about it, he may have realized that the points in his life when he struggled the most were when he actively fought against the wind, forcing himself to forget how to breath for something as silly as his parents’ failing affection. But Milo was not the type to think too long or to hard about such a thing, and so he did not. Instead, he walked.

When the wind turned from the road and pushed him to the edge of a forest, Milo stopped. A voice called at the back of his head that it was rude to wear shoes in someone else’s home and so right there, where nature met civilization, he slid his slippers from his feet and continued on.

And then, he was at that cliff, high above the water. The waves crashed below him with the anger that matched his father’s. The wind blew stronger and Milo came back to himself. Resisted the push of the wind. Behind him, he felt a presence. He did not need to turn to know who it was, for of course, it was Todd. It always would be.

“I don’t understand,” Milo said in greeting. “What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to save them?”

For a long while, there was no response. Had the wind taken his words away? Stripped him of his ability to be heard?

“Trust it,” Todd said. “Just trust the wind.”

Todd took the last step to stand at Milo’s side and looked down at the shorter man with yet another expression that he could not place. And then, he stepped off the cliff and he stood on the air.

Todd held his hand out to Milo, his long fingers begging to be touched. Like magnets, Milo’s hand found his and the wind picked up behind him and Milo’s feet no longer touched the ground. A billowing gust picked him up and swung him through the air and there was no single point in which Milo scared for the whole way through Todd’s hand held tight to his own. An anchor.

They were swept further and further from the cliffs edge until it was little more than a spec on the horizon. With nothing more than the moon and stars to give them light, they looked down to the churning water beneath them. The wind had won its battle of sound, but the waves made sure to complain about their loss.

Milo looked up to Todd, breathless, but Todd’s vision remained on the ocean.

“What do we do?” He asked and the wind carried his words gently to Todd’s ears but the other man only smiled and spun them around and, once again, he was gone, disappearing as if he had vanished into the wind itself.

Milo’s blood went cold for just a second before he realized that he would not drop. He thought back to earlier, how he laid in bed. What had spurred him to rise? A need for change? The wind? Angered sea gods?

In the churning sea below him, he could ever so faintly make out a single spec of light, like a star within the ocean. But this was no star, Milo was sure of it. Then, another appeared. And another. And another.

And then, the ocean was full of these shining lights of all different sizes. A city beneath the waves. Were those faces beneath the lights? Did they look up at him? What did they want from him?

And just like that, Milo understood. It did not matter what they wanted, but what he wanted. His whole life, Milo had lived by the whims of others – his mother and father, his friends, any partners he’s managed to keep for any amount of time.

The wind spun wildly around him. It had no direction. No up, no down, no side to side. It was just around him. And for the first time in his life, Milo had to ask himself a question.

As the supposed prophecy, the perfect son, the struggling student – as Milo – what did he want to do?

And finally, when he decided, the wind picked up and he told it exactly where to go.