The Seal

I had been walking for a couple of minutes to reach the bridge that connected the two sides of the pond, now my vantage point to a man occupying my favorite bench.

It is worth noting that I walk to this same spot every day without exception, come glacial winds or humiliating humidity. A minuscule sliver of my country of exile, a bench that I’ve come to share with strangers often in silence or indulge in on my own, soaked in crepuscular sun juice, tickled now and then by a soft breeze. 

Today has been a regular day. No major events, just another attempt at a ground invasion of my home country. No shattering news, just that of the savage, systematic bombing of civilian areas that preludes shameless annexation. Singular human lives amassed in cold, inhuman death tolls. Children, women, men, who only yesterday, existed with their virtues and their vices, their loves and their resentments, their fears and their hopes, their homes and their photo albums and their toothbrushes, had now been reduced to mutilated corpses under the rubble. War as usual, I thought. You watch the news then you are the news. My hunched posture remains invariable, that of an exasperated man, a man on the cusp, the cusp of what no one knows exactly. 

There sat this stranger-foe, occupying my favorite bench in a carefree display of his almost transparent thighs, already strangled by tight shorts on the first day of spring. With monopolistic greed he sat, not on one edge of the bench but right there in the middle, shutting an invisible door to any possible conviviality, and exuded Trumpesque vanity as he fondled his hair with erratic strokes like it had just sprouted on his head. 

Motionless on the tiny bridge, I scrutinized him, an active wait for him to leave. 

At times he darted up, as if ready to go, put his foot up on the bench and stretched his leg like a guy who had never done any sport in his life before being introduced to Curling. Then he sat down again, this whole time rambling on his phone with who knows who, this whole time stroking his hair in all sorts of choreographies like someone staring at himself in a mirror. Except there was no mirror, just me, polluting his peripheral vision if only he was capable of noticing anything outside of himself.   

Twenty long minutes had now passed while I observed him and fomented my abjection, still clinging to the possibility of his imminent departure.  

Suddenly he stood up, this time with more oomph in his spring, held his tote bag by its dumbo ears and threw it round his shoulder. 

“That’s it”, I thought, and like an excitable toddler I strode in his direction with a renewed lease on life.

As I reached the bench, I hovered, betrayed by a smirk on my face, but he crashed down again, this time so definitively akin to a defeated seal collapsing at the touch of land after a long day in the water.  

Alas my body language had already announced my intention to sit, and so I sat, half-heartedly, right there on the edge of the bench. 

There we were, side by side, The Seal and I. 

Undeterred by my presence, much less by the fact that a third of my body was left dangling, The Seal rooted himself deeper, crossed his legs and took out a book from his bag. He opened it to the very first page where he kept his hand and held his phone in the other, his thumb mellowly caressing its surface. 

The single most distinguishable human feature, I thought, the opposable thumb, which had enabled us to plunder the planet and build rockets to plunder intergallactically, we now used to jerk off a phone. A phone which only climaxes when its battery dies. 

I grinned at my own mental repartee, the thought of a dead, climaxing phone, and stared at the void, weirdly tempted to peep at The Seal’s screen without succumbing.

Instead, I listened to it blurt out a banana bread recipe interrupted by a techno sequence interrupted by four ways to get rid of belly fat (1.Stop eating!). Then the phone was allowed to vomit what felt like a full minute (uninterrupted by The Seal’s jittery opposable thumb) of a political statement by some orange messiah on the loose, the end of which I am relating to you, verbatim: 

“Look, they’re the most evil people on the planet. It’s their genetics, you know, they’re not made like us. But we’re pounding them. We’re pounding them hard.”

With that Hitleresque finisher I glimpsed at the Seal double tap that reel. A smirk had involuntarily formed on one side of his mouth.  

From the corner of my eye I could now delineate his paunch which had not been visible to me up to this point, and I was taken aback by a pang of sympathy laced with a dash of guilt. Despite the full license The Seal had granted me (with admirable detachment) to harbor my resentment, and to my own surprise, my mind took a sudden turn and went against the strong current of expected human behavior. 

While he kept foisting his nasty feed on me, I mustered the goodness in me, because I would like to believe I am a good person, and subjected myself to a long-winded deliberation: 

Why have I already labelled The Seal as obnoxious? 

So what if he's a digital fascist with an out-of-control thumb? 

Why have I allowed myself all this violence, though unvoiced, towards this complete stranger whose only crime was to cajole his own curls like a Roman prince under the returning sun? 

What if my disproportionate contempt for The Seal came from a place of unresolved anger? 

What if he was actually a sweetheart who had been on the phone with his mother whom he loves and calls every day to compensate for the thousands of miles he put between the two of them?  

Perhaps The Seal obsessively strokes his hair not from a place of repulsive narcissism, I converged at last, but from a place of anxiousness and solitude. 

Comforted by my own post-stoic wisdom and now bereft of vindictiveness, I settled my gaze on a duck loitering on an empty stomach, ignoring The Seal almost as convincingly as he was ignoring me.

“Can I tell you something?” he snarked out of the blue. 

In a decibel two notches higher and without my acquiescing, he proceeded, still denying me eye contact:

“You know, people usually ask when they want to sit on a bench that’s already occupied by someone else”. 

Silence. A peckish quack. I did not see that left hook coming. 

In my benign introspection about the good lad he could be, my guards had gone as low as those of a drunkard, pants down, relieving himself in the bush. 

“You’re right, you’re right” I doubly stroked his ego, failing to recognize my own voice. 

“The unwritten bench rule!”

Silence.

“Well here’s another one” I added, startled by my own leap. Life, unbeknownst to me, had prepared me for this moment.

“No one person should monopolize a large, sun-drenched public bench on the first day of spring.”

Those who strike you with spite, strike back with spite.

“Ha Ha!” he roared - a brutal, Bezosian laugh which revealed both his insulting white teeth and his purchasing power. Free from the worry of marking the page, he then slammed the soft cover of his book, which produced an awkward puff of wind but no dramatic effect whatsoever. Decisively, he stood up and bolted away without looking back, wounded demeanor and all.  

As he galumphed farther, I could hear The Seal’s voice one last time:  

“Enjoy the sun!” he yelled incisively, and pointed to the fat star now draped by buildings on its way down to its next shift.  

Alone at last, I let my eyes rest on the slice of world in front of me to take it all in. I had come here to mourn, after all. 

A badling of ducks with emerald green necks and golden beaks glided majestically on the lukewarm surface of the pond. A stone’s throw from me a sparrow whispers to her sister, Come, there are crumbs for us to share. Back home a mother could not bid her sons farewell, no other choice, they’ve stayed behind to defend the land with the nation’s dagger in their backs. Now I think of the little girl taken out like a helpless prey by a famished drone, whose face I don’t want to forget, whose soul will embrace the land and her pillow in her little bed one last time tonight. By dawn she’ll be home, free like the morning bird. 

The twilight fades to a dark shade of purple, table lamps awake in window frames, a shiver prompts me to head back home. 

There is a moribund empire and its demonic pet, I thought, out there on the hunt, their lust for children unimpeded. Rape’em or bomb’em. But perhaps justice stands a chance, now that The Court is dead.

“How was it?” my wife asks. Our 2-year-old confiscates my shoes.  

“The Seal’s a dick.”