by Doug Wood

In the summer of my tenth year, when my parents were going through a difficult time, my father asked me if I would like to spend a few days at my grandfather's house by the sea. Even at that age, when I did not entirely understand what was happening to my family, I could clearly see the pain in his eyes, and hear the trembling in his voice. Although he had phrased it in the form of a question, implying some kind of choice, there was an unspoken level of pleading to it that I should accept the offer.

Although I did not know what had come between my parents, I was still saddened by it. And angered with them and myself, frustrated because I didn't know how to stop it. I knew my father, in particular, harbored a lot of guilt; he had tried unsuccessfully once or twice to explain what was going on. But staring into my eyes seemed to crush his resolve, and he only wound up hugging me in a painful embrace, crying softly into my ear. So, when he asked me if I wanted to go, while I knew I could have argued against leaving and won, instead -- to my surprise and maybe his, as well -- I agreed. And on the last day of June, I boarded a bus for the long trip down the coast.

At the departure gate, my father and mother stood apart while they waved goodbye. As the bus pulled away, I thought of how uncomfortable and strange the distance between them seemed. In the past, I would have stood between them, bridging that gap. But now they were sending me away, and there was nothing to connect them anymore. It made me sick and angry just trying to figure it all out. I think I came very close to hating them at that moment, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

The bus rolled south, down through the lush Summer mountains. Just north of Orange county, it began the long inland detour around the San Gabriel Mountains and the Los Angeles basin.

Nine years before, Godzilla had destroyed most of it, leaving vast craters of scorched and ruined earth in the wake of his passing. Uninhabited now for the most part, save for those too poor to do anything but rebuild and live their lives as best they could manage, there were still many areas cordoned off, considered "hot" by the EPA even a decade later.

Near San Bernadino, the bus turned west again, and passed through many towns before finding the Coast Highway again. I began to smell the salty sea air through the half-open window. It had always reminded me of my grandfather.

For as long as I could remember, he had always lived by the sea. When I was four, my parents and I had lived with him for two months after our first house had been damaged in a fire. Every summer since, we'd spent our vacations there. Suddenly it occurred to me that this would be my first time alone there with him, and that perhaps we would never go there again as the family we had been. The salty breeze had almost made me forget. But now my mood darkened as that sad realization slid home.

My Grandfather was waiting for me when the bus pulled into the Solana Beach depot. I retrieved my duffo bag, dragged it over to the car, and looked at him. The smile on his face faded.

Of course he knew what was going on. But now with that one glance into my face, he knew that I knew. Silently, he opened the car door. Silently, we drove to his house. Silently, we went inside. Silently, I went in to the guest room and closed the door. I laid down on the bed, buried my face in the soft pillow, and cried and cried until there were no more tears left to cry. And then, exhausted in both mind and body, I slept.

Silently.

My Grandfather's house was built on a low bluff overlooking the ocean. Inland, an almost impenetrable barrier of trees and shrubs afforded him an unusual degree of privacy. Seaward, where the Gulls cawed and trolled the waves for food, where we as a family had once watched in awe as a pod of Humpback whales passed less than two hundred feet out, the ground gave way to wide beaches of untrodden sand.

In the past those shimmering stretches of virgin sand had been mine alone to play on. I'd spend hours out there, hunting for seashells or crabs. Sometimes I would swim, or just lie down, ignoring the trapped heat radiating all around, and make long lines of sand angels.

Only rarely did my grandfather ever join me, and I never, never saw him swim. For someone who had chosen to live by the sea, he'd always seemed to view it with no small amount of suspicion. Perhaps one might even call it a bit of fear. But whenever I'd asked him about it, he would look at the ocean for a long time without replying. So long, in fact, that by the time he changed the subject, I had already forgotten what I'd asked him in the first place.

For the first few days I was there, I could only muster up enough enthusiasm to mope around the house. Outside the sunshine looked inviting, but it seemed somehow wrong to enjoy myself. So all day I just stayed inside, watching TV or reading quietly in my room. This went on until my grandfather got sick of it.

One morning, after I'd wandered in and out of the living room for the umpteenth time, he stopped me with a voice that was uncommonly stern.

"Kenny, why don't you go outside?"

"Do I have to?"

He turned off the TV. "Yes. Quite frankly, your pacing is getting on my nerves." Then his expression softened. "Your parents are trying to work it out. Inside or outside won't change what happens up north. Go on. I'll call you when it's lunchtime."

So I went outside. Without much caring where I went, I wandered south along the bluff. The ocean was a blue-green jewel cut by the chalky-white of cresting waves. Although I was wearing shorts, I didn't much feel like a swim. At the point where the wild grass thinned to sand, I turned inland and began walking toward a line of trees. I never noticed the pit until my foot came down on nothing.

The ground crumbled under my other foot and I fell forward. Fortunately the drop was short and I landed in soft grass. After I brushed myself off and saw that I was alright, I almost laughed. But then I saw the jagged, broken cinderblocks, and the laughter never came.

The pit was roughly 45 feet long and maybe half that wide. An immense juniper bush hung over one end, its rootball half exposed. The ground was overgrown with ragweed, dandelions, and wild saw grass. Strewn about were the gray lumps of more cinderblocks. Rotted boards jutted up like desiccated ribs. What I had fallen into was not a natural gully, but looked more like the foundation of a building.

As I walked around, it seemed to me that the debris roughly defined the dimensions of a normal-size house with several ground floor rooms. After a while it became a kind of game, trying to figure out which rooms were which. What I couldn't decide was what had happened to it. Perhaps a sinkhole could have dropped it down, but I couldn't reconcile the condition of the debris with this theory. The cinderblocks were not just broken, but looked as if they had been crushed. By some immense force coming down from above, I assumed, but I couldn't imagine what.

Then a voice from the edge of the pit shouted my name and I jumped. It was my grandfather, looking down at me through the grass. His face was a sweaty, angry color.

"Kenny!" he shouted, which almost caused me to jump again. I don't think I had ever heard him shout before. Sometimes he was stern, but he never got really angry, like he was now. "Get out of there this moment!"

Frightened, I tried to clamor out of the pit, but the dirt was soft. My shoes kept slipping. My Grandfather bent down, seized my arm, and with a hard jerk, he lifted me out. His grip tight on my wrist, he dragged me back the way he had come. His eyes were wide and filled with something terrible to see, fear or anger, I couldn't tell which. But I had never seen him this way before. I never even *knew* that he could be like this and I was terrified of it.

"Grandpa, that hurts!"

"Shut up! I've been looking for you for a half hour! Then to find you *there* of all places!" He stopped suddenly and pulled me around until he was looking into my eyes. "Never, never go there again. It's a dangerous place."

"But there's nothing down there," I protested. "It's...it's just an old ruined house."

"Nothing?" he asked tightly. "Come with me."

He dragged me back to the house and then left me standing on the porch rubbing my arm, while he disappeared inside. When he re-emerged a few minutes later, he was holding a strange box-like device I'd never seen before. Without a word of explanation we walked back to the pit. I had to run to keep up with him.

We were still 25 feet away when he began to wave the box in front of him like a metal detector. Immediately, it began to click. I realized with a sense of dread that he was holding a Geiger counter. He held me back and took five steps closer. The clicking sound quickly increased until it chattered incessantly like static from a broken radio.

He looked at the reading on the dial. When he spoke again, his voice was drained of the menace from before.

"It was worse 11 years ago," he said, "but it's still no safe place for a child to play. Now do you understand?"

Dumbly, I nodded. Suddenly I wanted to run back to his house and wash my hands of the dirt. "But how did you know? How did you know the ground was..." I couldn't bring myself to say it.

Radioactive.

The Geiger counter continued its clicking, buzzing warning, but fell forgotten to his side. Now there was a new expression in his eyes, one that of late I had seen all too frequently in the eyes of my parents. It was that curious mixture of pain and sadness that seemed to deaden the color of flesh, to deepen the lines of age. A haunted look, it was, born of a terrible kind of inevitability, a cold sense of the cruelty of fate.

"I knew," he said softly, "because this used to be my house."

That night after the table had been cleared and the dishes washed, Grandfather started a fire. For a long time, he just sat in his recliner, contemplating the flames, while I roasted marshmallows and waited. Then after a while, he got up and walked over to the large bay window looking out over the water, and told me his story.

To the darkening ocean as much to me, it seemed, he said: "I hate the sea." As if mocking this statement, a large wave broke against the invisible breakers with a sound like thunder, casting a spray of white foam into the sky. "Especially now, at night. I *hate* it. It moves as if it were a living thing."

He turned back to me and offered a sad smile.

"I know what you're thinking. So why do I live here, then? Why not move to the city where everything stands still? Your father asks me that at least one time every year. But what he forgets is that it wasn't always like that. I keep hoping that someday I'll be able to forgive it. Perhaps even learn to love the sea again...the way your Grandmother used to. When we were younger, we sailed and scuba dived every weekend. It was our mutual love for the sea that made us buy the house where that pit is now. You're father had married and moved away, and we had begun to think about retiring."

I put down the stick with the melted marshmellow on it on a plate in front of me. I wasn't really hungry anyway. "So what happened?" I said. "To that first house?"

His eyes were dark as he considered the question. For a moment I thought that he wasn't going to answer like all those other times when he just waited until he could change the subject. But...I don't know...maybe he thought that I was older now, old enough to understand. Maybe he was just tired of keeping it inside. Whatever the reason, very softly, so that I had to strain to hear him, he spoke.

"Godzilla happened."

Every kid my age knew that name. I had a picture book at home which I had read ragged, a rubberband all that held it together. It was published in memorial a year after Godzilla had destroyed L.A., the only US city ever to suffer a G- visitation. It was full of testimonies, essays, photos of the damage, and, of course, Godzilla. But the section that had always fascinated me were the drawings by the surviving children of L.A. My parents had lived in the Midwest at that time, and I was only a baby when it happened. But after I was old enough to understand such things, I often looked at those drawings, thinking in some way that they could tell me more about what had happened than any photo. Some of them were so terrifying they gave me nightmares.

My grandparents had only been living by the sea for a few years when the news broke that Godzilla had been sighted only 500 miles off the coast. Satellite tracking showed it headed due east at nearly 70 knots. If it stuck to its course, it would come ashore somewhere near Long Beach. Orange County began evacuation procedures, but no one took it seriously. The prevailing opinion was that *our* military could handle it. Radio talk show hosts made unkind jokes about the Japanese Self-Defense "Farce." An armada of Naval vessels set out from North Island, two Destroyer divisions and a Carrier group.

Less than 150 miles off the coast, the flagship reported a G-sighting. 10 minutes later all communication with the armada was lost. And Godzilla simply disappeared. How something that size could just vanish, no one knew. Perhaps it dove so deep that man-made devices could no longer track it. But the fact was, it had. Now it was conceivable that Godzilla could land anywhere. The entire West Coast, from Canada to Mexico, was thrown into a panic.

Grandfather called home from his work in San Diego. Grandmother's voice was calm, but she was worried. She had been watching the unfolding events on TV. Grandfather told her to pack clothes and food and be ready the moment he got home.

The commute normally took a half hour but the city had been thrown into chaos. Every egress from the city had been jammed with fleeing people. Accidents blocked exits, the soft shoulder had become another lane of traffic. Horns were blaring. People ran about seemingly without purpose, their faces transformed into masks of terror.

It took him nearly two hour just to get to the north suburbs. By the time he reached the Solana Beach exit, he found it blocked by abandoned cars. He pulled off the road, crossed the highway on foot, and plunged into the woods.

The trees and bushes were alive with fireflies. They flew into his face and hair as he crashed through. Never in his life had he seen so many.

By the time he broke through to the beach, twilight had fallen, and the sun was an angry red smear on the horizon. It was difficult to run through the sand, but he pushed himself. An endless time later, he topped a bluff less than a mile from his home. The light from the windows filled him with relief. He even almost smiled before he heard the sound.

It was something that you feel in your bones more than your ears. It came from everywhere. Trees and bushes nearby began to shake minutely before the vibration came up through the soles of his shoes.

Out at sea, a portion of the sky moved.

Irrationally, he thought that it wasn't alive, that it was just some colossal statue spit out from the depths of the ocean, an Atlantean Karnak lost beneath the waves since antiquity. But then it moved again and he knew. Knew that it was alive. That it was real.

Godzilla was coming ashore in front of his home.

He thought about the jokes that had been made at Japan's expense. But now staring up at its unimaginable gray mass, the rows of still glistening-wet dorsal plates, the utterly alien darkness of the eyes, he thought how arrogant it was to believe that man could kill this thing. How arrogant and stupid. When Godzilla moved, constellations disappeared.

As if attracted to the monster for some reason known only to their simple awareness, hundreds of thousands of fireflies began to emerge from the surrounding trees and bushes, a dance of silent phosphoresence, circling ever upward. Flowing on the gentle eddies of rising air like rivers of light, the fireflies swarmed near its face and it growled. When it swiped at them, a thousand died on its claws. When it bit at the air, like a dog snapping at an annoying fly, ten thousand more perished between the gleaming double rows of teeth.

Still the fireflies swarmed upward, flying into its nose and ears. Its massive head arched up suddenly, strained...and then it sneezed. A cloud of mucous with strands as thick as my Grandfather's arms drifted down lazily onto the tree tops.

My Grandfather couldn't move. His body was so seized with fear, it took an effort of will just to draw breath. Godzilla took the bluff in a single stride. Then as its other foot came up, he realized what was about to happen. The lights of his home looked as small as the fireflies.

A warm stream ran down his leg, darkening his pant leg, and his paralysis was broken. He started jumping up and down, screaming like a madman, trying to draw the monster's attention. But he was nothing, his ranting merely the tiny buzz of another insignificant insect.

The foot came down, the ground shook, and his home simply disappeared. There was no crash, no explosion, just a pathetic muffled thump. The vibration sent him sprawling. He lay there, stunned and horrified, and watched Godzilla walk away. Where his house had been, where his life had been, there was nothing but a smoking black hole. He stared at it as if it would make some sense if he did so long enough. A part of him wanted to start laughing, but somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that if he did, he would never stop.

For a long time, he just sat there on the ground. Once a squadron of jets flew overhead. From time to time, from further and further away, he heard explosions, and maybe the sound of tanks, and Godzilla's roaring challenge. But this, too, faded, and he was left in silence. Someone found him like that near dawn. Deep in shock, he was taken to a medivac station, where he was treated. It was there that, after he had come to his senses among the dead and dying and injured, he realized that he was considered one of the lucky ones.

His home had been destroyed and his wife killed. His life had been cut off at the knees, and yet he was considered...lucky.

"The rest you know. Godzilla headed north and turned Los Angeles into a radioactive wasteland. Eventually, it just returned to the sea. Politicians and the military claimed it a victory. But I know better. I looked into its eyes. It left because it wanted to. Maybe it just grew bored, maybe it sensed something else more interesting. But if Godzilla had turned east for some reason, there would have been nothing they could have done to stop it."

After he finished his story, we sat in silence for a time. Then he walked over to the mantlepiece above the dwindling fire, gently took down a photograph, and with a quiet reverence informing his movements handed it to me. I had never met the smiling, dark-haired woman caught in the act of eating a hot dog on a sunny pier somewhere, with mustard running down her chin. But she was very pretty, and her eyes seemed to glisten with love and humor, and I suddenly understood a small portion of my Grandfather's loss.

"After I was released from the hospital, I bought this land and built this house. I wanted to be close to Eleanor. I'm sorry you'll never know her, Kenny, or that she'll never know you. But at least she got to hold you once when you were a baby."

I held the photo in my hands and studied it, trying to memorize every detail. Yet for some reason I couldn't explain, I kept thinking of my parents standing apart from each other as the bus pulled away in a cloud of dust. So close, yet separated by a distance that had seemed so vast.

"Do you hate it?" I asked, not looking up.

Grandfather considered this question. "For a long time, yes, I did. As stupid as it was, I even dreamed of revenge. But who am I? I'm no scientist. And then I heard in the news that it had perished, burned itself out or something, and those feelings went away."

He looked into my eyes and I could see it was true.

"That thing didn't know me, Kenny," he said. "It didn't know my name or who Eleanor was or what she meant to me. The house was just in its way. I mean, do hurricane victims feel that it's personal?"

He shook his head. "Well, maybe some of them do. But to me, Godzilla was something so much larger than us. I just had to learn to live with it. Sometimes it's hard, but day by day, I still try."

A week's vacation turned into a month and then an entire summer. Still it passed too quickly. My Grandfather and I had shared something and the summer passed too quickly for both of us. There were tears and promises when we finally parted in September.

My mother had been granted custody, so I went to live with her. I saw my father on weekends. Things were different, but okay. I didn't hate either of them. I just couldn't. Like my Grandfather, it was just something that I had to learn to live with, and day by day, I did.

But thereafter I insisted on spending every summer with my Grandfather. Through him, I came to know my Grandmother, Eleanor, as best I could. Somehow it was enough for both of us.

I still remember the time, maybe four years or so after our conversation, when he finally joined me at play one morning in the ocean. I was snorkling, gazing intently at the sandy bottom through my goggles for crabs or fish. When I looked up, I saw my Grandfather standing there on the beach, dressed only in swimming trunks.

As the waves moved up the sand to his feet, he would take a step backward to avoid its touch, as if he feared it might sting. I held my breath while I watched him struggle against all the terrible feelings that lay buried in the memories he had kept for so many years. Finally after what seemed like a long time, he did not move at the water's approach, but let it seep up over his toes and feet, covering his ankles for a moment's caress before receding.

Tentatively, he took a few steps closer and closer, the water coming higher each time, until at last the tension visibly left his body. He began to wade out, and when he was up to his white-haired chest, he dove under. A few moment's later, he broke the surface ten feet to my left.

I smiled at him, and he at me. And then...well...for an hour or so, we simply had the best time of our lives.

Many years later, after he'd passed away, I honored his last request, and his ashes were buried in the overgrown ruin of his first house by the sea. He left the second one to me in his will. To this day, my wife and daughter and I spend our summer vacations there.

Often on those still nights when the only sound is that of the ocean hissing through the open windows, I sometimes dream of something moving out there. A giant shape, it is, treading dark and silent against the sky, and illuminated by the faint fluttering light of a million and more hovering fireflies.