The Caribe Club

They will christen themselves the Caribe Club, Jig proclaims to seven rapt boys, because caribes are cold-hearted. Caribes attack whether provoked or not. The sound of splashing infuriates them; they turn frenzied at the smell of blood. A caribe, Jig continues—and here he exaggerates, so easily corrupted is he by the adulation of an audience—a caribe can strike for no reason at all. If it’s simply pissed off. “Like us,” he says. “We don’t take shit.”

Jig doesn’t seem like a boy who won’t take shit. He walks the earth in a dreamy, expectant fog. He wishes he could abandon school, renounce the Caribes, and dedicate himself to his mother. He wants to inhale her, memorize her, bear her witness.

But his mother insists he socialize.

Make friends. Consider sports. Found an organization. Yes, yes, start an alliance, of sorts. And here Caitlin brightens, irresistibly, so he can’t rebuff her. Hmmm . . . I’ve got it, she says wavering, losing her balance. And that’s when he hears her propose the piranha club.

Jig, of course, gussies this up, as is his way. Caribes, he decides. His precocity is winsome and proven, though his parents won’t breathe the numbers. He animates the mundane, invents names for things. When Jig pays attention, nothing eludes him.

Yet when he launches this intensity toward Caitlin, it disperses, as if she has disappeared. He cannot picture demise yet doesn’t believe in immortality. His mother would be incapable of leaving, wouldn’t she? She should keep him close as armor, yet now she has pushed him aside.

Jig considers the implications of a club based on, of all things, a piranha. No animal could less resemble the gentle, eleven-year-old Jig. Though he can’t verbalize it, even to himself, it seems a renunciation, an order to change.

He suffers the point, and being a boy who has always been eager to please, he begins. This afternoon he defaced a library book, wincing. It may have been a petty crime, but it’s the first step in transformation.

Jig has carefully chosen his Caribes. They are boys like him who fervently seek approval. Unlike him, not one of them has a whit of charisma. Jig looks hard at the Caribes and vows to be as devoted to them today as he was to his mother yesterday. He will invite them into his nest, and they will accept. Jig is, like his mother, impossible to refuse.

So Jig stands in front of them, pretending to be thrilled by an angry fish. He proffers a photo ripped from a reference book. “Behold the caribe,” he says theatrically. This is how he talks, and the Caribes admire him for it.

“I think piranhas are more scarier than caribes, with bigger teeth,” says Brad, a bully destined for felonious pursuits.

“A caribe is a piranha, Einstein.”

“But why would a fish be so mean?” asks the stunted Sam, of whom Jig is unfashionably fond.

“It’s the amygdala, Sammy.” Jig taps his head. “Pure instinct, my man.” And thereafter he calls Sam his “amygdalite,” a nickname the others envy.

Jig knows the boys don’t share his urgency, but as he speaks, he wonders. If he could tap the images projected on their frontal lobes by the words he tenders—piranha, blood, attack, death—could he turn them cold blooded? Could they all avert heartbreak?

Of course, had Jig the faculty to see each Caribe’s future, he would disbelieve. This morning’s awkward Sammy of the bloody nose and school-seat squirminess, for instance, will give way to a Sammy of four athletic sons, of blissfully unkempt lawn, of satisfying marriage. This Sammy will have a perfectly happy future. One Jig need not defend him from.

But Jig can’t perceive a future from which a boy—or a mother—needs no protection.

As soon as her son leaves, Caitlin’s need for him becomes percussive. Yet she knows these thumps are heartless: It would be selfish, after all, to let a boy stay pent-up, to allow him to absorb such loss.

Caitlin is here alone for the first time in months. She walks through her rooms, evaluating. Perhaps this could be the problem: blocked chi. An energy hang-up that could force her to feel wrong and do wrong and be wrong and then make her . . . what? An irrational woman.

Chi. Chakras. Meditation. Mantras. They are today’s last-ditch religions. Last week she worshipped shark cartilage. The week before she practiced penance through macrobiotics. Her longest-running faith had been in doctors. They were insistent and invasive, like tyrannical lovers. Overcoming cancer was her obsession, their profession. It was intimate. It was what she had. But now she sees they’ve been cruel with hope. It is over; she prepares for death, left to a husband who has withdrawn and a son who has drawn too close. And so? So nothing.

Caitlin tries to flow through the house, imagining she herself is chi. She keeps one eye closed to absorb energy and the other open to detect bottlenecks. She passes a mirror. Oh god. A Cyclops. This is the face of desperation. She widens both eyes and stares at herself, apprising. Alas, there is more beauty than yesterday. The sicker she is, the more striking she becomes. If she were any more radiant, she’d be a corpse. When she scuffs into the grocery store, people drift near. It is as if her soul is evaporating day by day and the thick steam of her is an intoxicant. Is she a healer? A saint? Perhaps an idiot. She’s fraught.

What the hell. Why not. Back to feng shui. Then, oh. She stops. Before her is the hang-up, and it is obvious. How could something with such bright personal history be the source of her ills? She wonders if getting rid of only a few of the Chia Pets will be enough, or if she ought to clear all of them. She thinks of Jiggy and how much he’s always loved these figurines and their fuzzy, botanical fur.

Caitlin wonders if it’s too late to expunge stagnant energies. If it’s too late to bring back Jig. If it’s too late to plant poppy seeds. If it’s too late.

She wants to think of the future. But she wants to pretend it doesn’t exist. She wants to hold on to Jig, but must force herself to let go. She wants to keep what she has but purge what she no longer needs. What she wants, most of all, is to nap. She lights a candle, and then can’t remember her mantra. Instead she recalls the Latin names of her garden favorites and whispers them softly.

When Jig comes home, Caitlin hugs him too tightly and enfolds him too long.

He is contained. As he slinks away, he hears her ask how the piranha club went. “All right.” Not turning around. And then turning around because he needs to share everything. He may be wildly intelligent, yet he’s still a little boy.

But she says: “Don’t tell me too much. Boys don’t tell their mothers too much.”

“Okay.” Now deflated.

“I was afraid that . . . Maybe it wasn’t the best idea. I mean, I know how kids turn up their noses at what a mother would suggest. At a time when she was, you know, sick. So not thinking right. The boys didn’t get the significance, did they?”

“Sure, Mom.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh.”

“Well, good then. I’m happy you have so many friends,” she says.

“We all need them. Especially you, Jiggy. Especially now.” And then she moves toward the den, quelling her instinct to invite Jig, and Jig, watching her slow walk, wonders if she’ll make dinner or if his father, home late, will reheat what Jig calls couscous compost, a conglomeration so uninspired there are leftovers from a week ago, the last time anyone cooked.

The Caribes meet in Scott’s damp basement. Scott’s parents search for, but find no contraband stashed under couch cushions. They’re suspicious. A boys’ club seems so old-fashioned. Could this gathering really be innocent? Scott has extracted a promise from his parents that they not intrude, so instead they intrude through heating ducts, listening until they’re bored.

The Caribes are difficult, Jig finds, so rowdy and childish that he remembers they’re all juvenile protoplasm awaiting a turn at Big Life.

“Jeremy sucker-punched you?” Jig asks one of his charges. “Just wait until we’re in Big Life. You can make him toilet-washer for Caribe Multinational.”

Bobby wants to know if he can bring a girlfriend to the meeting. Jig says no, but paraphrases, nervously, what he heard an older boy say: “But hey, feel free to bring on the blowfish—ha ha ha if you know what I mean.” Only a few Caribes do, and Jig, though not one of them, is embarrassed nevertheless; he knows he wouldn’t want his mother to hear this. Once his face stops burning, though, he is electrified. If this is transgression, this surge of being simultaneously unnerved and empowered, he likes it.

Jig ends meetings with a chant: “Pygopristis, Pygocentris, Pristobrycon, Serrasalmus. Pygopristis, Pygocentris, Pristobrycon, Serrasalmus.” The phrase sounds so beautifully Satanic that the boys memorize it quickly. And are only a bit disappointed to learn the words simply describe the family to which piranhas belong.

Jig wonders if by the time he reaches Big Life there will be nothing of him left. Nothing sweet or sad, pure or pained. If he feels wistful, perhaps it is because he already misses his former self.

Before the Caribe Club, Jig concentrates only on Globe World, a place akin to the enclosed little universe of a snow globe. It is a place where Caitlin is shaken, turned upside down, and jiggled sideways with her sickness. And holding her tightly, so is he. Each time turbulence stills to smooth, white drifts of normalcy, Globe World gets tumbled again.

During these blizzards, Caitlin visits doctors. If her numbers are good, she plays at being a person again. If her numbers are bad, she insists they’re not. But she cries—at the window, at the stove, in her bed. Jig hears it. And thinks: Aha, remission must mean lovely silence.

Despite this, Jig prefers Globe World to anywhere else. In Globe World, he has purpose. If he can influence his mother’s fate, after all, he can influence his own. He can’t fathom that anything, even cancer, is more insistent than love.

Plus, he still imagines he can stop the globe from quaking.

Because sometimes he can. Jig tunes in to Caitlin, to the twitch at the corner of her lip, to the tic in her left eye, to the veins in her hands. He says something. She smiles. And then the Globe has settled, she is just his mother, and nothing terrible has happened or ever will.

Caitlin has collected Chia Pets for twenty years—the original ram, the ubiquitous frog, bunny, bear, turtle, a Loony Tunes collection, Tweety, Taz, Elmer Fudd, Scooby Doo, even Albert Einstein. One Christmas Jig and his father track down a limited edition Mr. T who grows a startling green Mohawk. Another year they buy Caitlin an edible Chia—an amalgam of baked granola with alfalfa grass hair. When Jig wants to delight, he shows her Web pages: Chia cams, horticultural diaries, a mockup of a Saddam Hussein Chia. And if Jig comes up with a particularly innovative idea, he says to his mother, “I’ve got a Pedott!” referring to the man responsible for the Chia and the Clapper.

Every time Caitlin arrives home from her “wringings and washings,” as she calls them, before the “wrung-out” part, she and Jig go through a routine. Caitlin only performs it because she believes Jig is attached to it. And Jig only endures it because he supposes Caitlin requires ritual. On bad days this Chia Pet masquerade makes Jig tense as metal.

It starts happily enough. In first grade Jig loves the Chias. He is partial to the hollow sound they make as he gallops them across the kitchen table; he envisions the Chia Hippo as a dinosaur, the Puppy a wolf. He wishes the Chias were his and tells Caitlin so.

She spreads her arms to take them in. “Someday, Jiggy, all this will be yours.”

And he asks: When? Thursday? Next week? Monday?

Thus begins the kind of repetitious game children first love, then loathe. Jig runs home from school, bursts through the door and says, “Well? Do I get the Chias today? Do I?” It isn’t the Chias, but the possibility of possessing them, that intrigues him.

But then comes the stub of discontent. Day after day the silly game continues, until Jig realizes Caitlin has no intention of relinquishing the Chias. She is toying. Soon he grows beyond the performance, while Caitlin does not. It is his first disappointment: that he can fool his mother this easily. How simple it is to pretend excitement; how sad that not even she can identify it as charade. Jig realizes he is alone. Every child discovers this; but Jig’s lesson comes back bitterly whenever his mother mentions the Chias.

Today Jig despises the jagged little grooves, the thick, gelatinous paste of seeds. A few months ago he has to turn away at the sight of his mother, newly bald, cheerfully painting salvia columbarie, horticultural hair, on Homer Simpson.

Now when Caitlin says, “Someday, Jig, all this will be yours . . . ” Jig is reminded that someday is almost here.

Jig warms to his revised self. Whereas in the past he padded, solitary, around Globe World, he now moves in a stern pack of boys, like a piranha swimming in a shoal.

At the next Caribe meeting Jig proclaims that to be a member of this group is to be concerned not only with aggression but with appetite and action. A Caribe must fill up. Be full. “It is a fine thing,” he says, echoing something his mother had declared, “to achieve satiety.” None of the boys has heard the word “satiety,” save Jig, who has only half paid attention. To refresh his memory, he looks up “satiety” but now mistakenly instructs the boys to pronounce it SAT-tee ETT-tee.

Years later, when some of the boys become college drinking buddies, they will raise their brews. “To SAT-tee ETT-tee!” they will call. “To the Jigster!” And years after that, at reunions and weddings and dinners of commiseration following divorce and disease and disaster, they will still toast to satiety but one of them will inevitably wonder, “Whatever became of the Jigster?”

Caitlin’s use of the word had, in fact, been related to her Chias. She had said the only part of her life in which she’d ever achieved satiety was in collecting Chia Pets. She bought more than she needed and owned more than she wanted. She was pretty damn well full of them. “I wish,” she had said, “that I could achieve satiety of years instead.” Caitlin, too, had begun to hate the Chias.

These days Jig knows what to do when he hears his mother cry: he sends her razor-toothed urgency. Be Caribe, he projects. Dive. Hunt. Kill. When Caitlin loses pound after pound, barely nibbles pieces of food and instead repositions them as if trying potential moves on a chess board, he pleads: Bite. Bite. Eat. Eat. Eat to SAT-tee ETT-tee.

Jig has heard that ravenous piranhas can reduce a large mammal to bones in minutes. It may take cancer a little longer, he sees, but it seems to do exactly the same thing.

When Caitlin goes to the window, she observes the leaves and petals of her garden fade, gray, then elope with the first breeze that chances by. Her flowers become skeletal and so does she. She runs her hands down her torso. Her body is a novelty, thinned to sharp-boned essence.

She knows it’s time. The house she once lit is dimmed to dilute pain; her living room is tarnished with hospital bed, syringes, vials, and nurses; the fur on her Chia Pets grows uneven and yellows.

Caitlin’s husband is gentle and attentive, and her son is busy and distant, as if the two have reversed personalities. She misses Jig. She wishes for a moment that she would have kept him for herself instead of releasing him to life. But this is right. Her husband should partake of her death, while her son should breathe the world. It’s why she first proposed a prana club, inspired by her gods-of-the-moment, the Upanishads, Sufi texts, Hindu teachings.

Prana. The life force. The root of breath, knowledge, movement, energy. She had almost instantly regretted this ridiculous suggestion. Oh, come on. What a thing to propose for boys.

But then she was surprised. Jig appropriated the idea. She had, after all, been prattling on and on about prana and chi for days. But still.

Yet why not? Why doubt? After all, who feels energy and laughter, beginnings and endings, the revival of breath as intensely as an elevenyear-old? Sure, it was silly. All this New Age babble was silly. But so were Jig’s beloved Chias. And wasn’t it at the intersection of the silly and the serious that life happened? Like the finger paintings Jig had done— solemnly preserved and labeled? Like the time she dropped the Christmas turkey down the stairs and thought it tragic? Like the way her Mr. T Chia kept appreciating in value? Like the. And the. And the. And on, she thinks.

Caitlin writes to Jig now. A gift, an apology, a plea, a promise, a ceremony, a last communion, a tribute to the life force, and to Jig for being able to embrace it, a long letter to remember her by. She distills the best of herself onto silken blue stationery. The Chias will be cleaned and boxed so Jig can regrow them in his own room. She will tuck this letter inside the box, knowing that unpacking the Chias will be the first thing Jiggy does.

Caitlin has managed to bequeath him what he most hates. Jig recruits the Caribes. They load the huge box onto his old red wagon, and make a solemn procession of it, a sacrilegious shoal of boys streaming down the street. This funeral is not for Caitlin, but for Jig: let the gentle Jig be buried.

The Caribes follow Jig to a highway overpass. Sammy slits open the box with a pilfered paring knife, and it takes four boys to hoist it over the guard rail. A few packing peanuts flutter and hang in the air until there is a blizzard of them, and then clay Chias fall and smash on concrete below. They chant: “Satt-tee-ett-tee! Satteeeetee! Satteeeetee!”

Finally five pieces of blue stationery are released. The wind picks up; the papers drift back to Jig as if desperate to fulfill their destiny, and he reaches out for them. But just then a car skids on the highway below, swerving to avoid broken clay, so the boys scatter and run.

It is breathtaking how quickly memory is erased. By the time Jig is an adult he will remember only that when Caitlin laughed, her back fillings showed; that she had a specific smell, though he can’t conjure it; and most vividly, that she proposed he form the Caribe Club with boys who became his cohorts in a few acts of vandalism. Why had Caitlin suggested this name when piranhas are violent, killing things? The word itself meant devil fish. What was a boy supposed to do with that? He suspects Caitlin was not such a good mother, that she was perhaps pushy or bitter and probably responsible in some way for how he—even today—does and then regrets Caribe-like things, curt, slashing things.

One afternoon in the future, paging through a magazine at a dentist’s office, Jig will pause for a piece about piranhas. He’ll learn that most piranhas aren’t aggressive. They are nervous, put-upon, delicious, mainly herbivorous fish. It is man who hunts piranhas, not the other way around. A sidebar on the page will catch his eye because it refers to 2004, the year he was eleven years old. A piranha causes a stir when it’s discovered a world away from its Amazon home, in the Thames River. Headlines read: Man-Eating Fish Appears; Deadly Fish in River; Ferocious, Carnivorous, Dangerous, Powerful, Fierce, Saw-Toothed Fish Found. But the point of the sidebar will be made by the photo that accompanies it.

There will lay the red-bellied Caribe—a creature that was once an exquisite silver flare now turned sad and immobile. The fish will be atop a ruler to show it measures a scant four inches. Rows of lovely white teeth—teeth so tiny they could do no harm—will gleam like jewelry, like sharpened strung pearls alive in the glare of a photographer’s flash.

Jean Hanson