Everyone hated Tampa Tom. His friends hated him and his enemies hated him. His parents hated him and never called. His wife and his kids hated him and moved to the other side of town. His neighbors definitely hated him and hated his lousy lawn. They made fun of his old car and called him poor. His dog, too, hated him, and ran away frequently, but always came back because no one else would feed it. His boss hated him and his coworkers hated him the most because they had to be around him all day. His school teachers hated him already as a little boy. Crossing guards, police officers, and tax attorneys totally hated him.
The trees hated him. The sun hated him. The water he bathed in, the ground he stood on, in fact, the very air around him hated him and tried to pull away from his lungs. Tampa Tom was always a little bit out of breath. Doctors thought he had asthma but it was just the angry air. His doctors also hated him and wanted him to die.
Even the cells of his own body hated him a little bit, and he was always cancerous.
Tampa Tom was not from Tampa. He went to Tampa once on vacation and rode the rides and slid the slides and saw an egret, which is a kind of bird on two legs, and when he got home he told his coworkers about the trip, so they started calling him Tampa Tom to make fun of him openly. This story has nothing to do with Tampa, so try not to focus on it.
Tampa Tom didn’t know. Sunk in the deep end of mass hatred since before he was even born (his mother hated being pregnant), it was normal to him. It was as normal and tasteless as room temperature tap water. He was never loved and so he never reacted to hate. He lived his life like it was a Tuesday in June.
Despite growing up in a hateful seaside town, set apart a bit from the rest of the world, Tampa Tom was always cheerful. He hummed when he walked, usually an upbeat tune he’d heard on the radio that morning. Everyone hated this most of all. They hated him with all their hateful hearts, they tried and tried to hate him more, to hate him enough, but he always smiled and was nice in return. He gave honest and heartfelt compliments and noticed people’s new haircuts. He said hello to tourists and strangers, who hated him immediately, and he was a good listener when people told him sad stories. They told him a lot of sad stories. No one else would listen to their sad stories, but he would, so they took advantage and poured out everything that was hurting them. Still, Tampa Tom was never sad for himself and everyone hated him for that.
So it was a warm Saturday in the summer, and after making some French toast and reading the newspaper (he never read the opinion page, and good thing too, because they mostly expressed their opinion of Tampa Tom), he put on his favorite hat and walked to the harbor. It was a beautiful day but the day hated him. The warm sidewalk he tread upon recoiled in hatred from his feet but it was concrete and could not move away. Tampa Tom walked slowly down the hill, saying good morning to the shopkeepers and fruit merchants, who all puffed and scowled as he passed. They swept angrily and restocked their shelves angrily after seeing him. One guy punched a wall and hurt his hand.
Gravity helped carry him gently down the hill, but gravity hated Tom too, so Tampa Tom was too light for his size. His clothes hated him and didn’t protect him from the elements. He was always a little too hot or a little too cold or a little too wet. But he was oblivious. That was just life in Tom’s clothes.
Tampa Tom walked down to the harbor to watch the birds and the seals, who hated him. The seals would swim away and the birds would try to peck him. There were longshoremen down on the docks who hated him as they loaded and unloaded crates from a merchant vessel that arrived that morning.
Tampa Tom noticed the lighthouse was open to the public that day and spoke to the old lighthouse keeper, who had maintained the lighthouse for forty years. There had never been an accident on the rocks outside the harbor as long as he had been there. The lighthouse keeper was very proud about that, and also he hated Tampa Tom and he hated that Tampa Tom came to his lighthouse and ruined such a beautiful day at the shore, but his wife had recently passed away and he was lonely and Tampa Tom listened carefully and tried his best to comfort the old man, and even cried a little bit in sympathy with him, but still the lighthouse keeper hated his guts and his stupid hat. The old man walked off to get a fried oyster sandwich grumbling. He even grumbled as he ate the sandwich. It was a hate sandwich.
The lighthouse was the tallest in the state, and could be seen for many miles out to sea. Tampa Tom ducked below the little brick archway and walked up the many spiralling iron steps to the top, pausing to rest a few times because he ran out of breath. But the view at the top was gleeful and the light was spinning slowly around with a faint and reassuring hum which Tom found comforting. The hum hated him.
He looked out at the great expanse of blue-green water and inhaled the salty sea breeze. He loved the sea but the sea hated him. It hated him even more than God did, and God hates many things quite a lot and hates them omnipotently.
The sea hates a lot of people too, but it especially hated Tampa Tom. It began to retreat from the shore, trying to remove itself from his presence. It began slowly—dropping—and the skiffs and skipjacks anchored in the harbor fell slowly to the bottom and listed to one side as they touched down. Tampa Tom could see the oyster beds rising from the ocean floor as the water’s edge ran away from the docks, swallowing the harbor, until the waterline fell into the deep, beyond the harbor’s boundary, and vanished from sight.
The seals were left bouncing and sliding and howling in the sand near the tiny beach at the edge of the harbor. The sea birds tried to chase the ocean as it fled the land, but couldn’t catch it.
Tampa Tom stood at the top of the lighthouse holding the guardrail without words or rational thought. His inner voice was swallowed up, sunk beneath logic and reason, by this grand mystery. He stared out at the miles of bare ocean floor and the thick glistening oyster beds without any understanding of how an ocean disappears. Perhaps… he thought, but nothing followed. Or perhaps… Still nothing came to him.
Two hundred feet below, the longshoremen were shouting and scrambling. He looked over the edge to see them abandoning their wares and running from the shoreline inland. He shouted down to ask what was happening, but they didn’t call back. They only ran. The seals, too, were scooting their fattened bodies to the shore in a panic. But looking out at the empty sea, he saw nothing but clean sparkling ocean bottom colored by patches of limp sea grass, and great shoals of oysters that extended beyond sight, and faint plumes of sea water evaporating everywhere in the summer sun.
The sea, however it hated Tampa Tom, did not really have this power. It didn’t have the power to fight the physical laws God had created for it, though it tried mightily to delay returning. It held itself in a watery escarpment miles and miles from Tom and the town for as long as it could. But just as a man cannot hold back the sea, the sea cannot hold back itself for much time, and miles out, it surrendered its purchase at once.
The water was miles away, but the harbor was abandoned. Tampa Tom was alone at the top of the lighthouse and watched the horizon. Whatever was coming, whatever the longshoremen had been running from, it was too late to descend the iron stairs to the bottom and flee. And he was high above the ground, and felt safe.
At the edge of the horizon, where the earth conferenced the sky, a sparkling ribbon like a silvered seam splitting his vision lengthwise appeared. It breathed and changed without motion. Gradually, the silver sparkle faded, turned to white, and became a dense spatial fracture. It was the crest of a huge wave, and its approach, at first, was silent. The channel guides were the first to fall.
As the roiling waterline reached the harbor, it crashed over the jetties and piers. It crashed into the skiffs and skipjacks lying at the bottom of the harbor, pulling them off their moorings and sending them into the shore tumbling over the rocky seawalls. The docks were lifted from their pilings and mangled into splinters—the boards split like a gunshot. A merchant vessel was pushed sideways into the base of the lighthouse and the structure shook around him. Tampa Tom gripped the guardrail to not be sent over the edge.
The ocean took all the boats and all the docks and shoved them up the town. The seals were gone. Soon the whitewater leading the tidal wave disappeared behind buildings and trees. Tampa Tom watched the tallest tree in the harbor topple over and get swept away. The water below him was no longer blue-green but black, and the tsunami carried behind it the stench of ocean death from decaying underwater plains far out at sea.
Tampa Tom watched from above as restaurants and homes and shops were swept up the same street he had just walked down, were dashed into one another and crumbled into the heavy currents. Over the roar of the rushing water, he thought he heard screaming from the town, but he wasn’t certain of it. The sound of the flowing tide and the sound of screaming mixed together into a single unbroken note. The water which hated Tom lifted the harbor and carried it a mile over land. It carried the people who hated him farther than he could see and took them all away from him. And then the water slowly receded, back into the harbor, pulling with it the detritus of the entire town, leaving the ground below him covered in mud, bodies, and tangled debris. The natural and the man-made were indistinguishable from one another.
Tampa Tom descended the stairs. The bottom of the lighthouse had been filled seven steps high with salty mud and oyster shells. The door was barricaded with boards and brush. He pushed them aside and slipped out onto an unstable ground. He noticed a foot in a shoe by a tree, and turned away.
Every building in the harbor was gone. The boats were gone, the seals, the birds, the longshoremen, and the lighthouse keeper. Any small tree and all the low-lying brush was uprooted and carried away. The land was gray, jagged, and alien. The village had been shredded and scattered. His dog, surely, was dead. His family too. Only the lighthouse still stood. Only the lighthouse, Tampa Tom, and the sun and the sea and the air in his lungs.
He was rescued soon enough—flown away from the junked remains of his village in a brilliant yellow helicopter and taken to the city far inland. The nation mourned. The village could not be rebuilt. But the lighthouse became a symbol of strength and courage and persistence, as did Tampa Tom. He gave interviews, went on all the talk shows. And even though the sea had hated him, and removed from the world everything he had known or lived for, he remained cheerful. He smiled, and was humble. He sat on a talk show couch next to Veronica Vargo, the most beautiful actress in the world, and told her in front of a live studio audience, without irony, that he thought she was very lovely, even though he didn’t know who she was. The audience roared and the show was rated highly. Tampa Tom shifted in his seat uncomfortably, not sure what to do next.
He was simple, that way, in his cheerfulness and humility. He refused to ever be angry. And they asked him, aren’t you mad? Don’t you hate the sea? Don’t you want REVENGE? On the SEA?! But he didn’t. Of course he felt sad about it and missed his little village, but he couldn’t hate the sea. He couldn’t hate water. He couldn’t hate anything.
His answers to their many questions didn’t satisfy their anger, their thirst for revenge. Tampa Tom could only shrug when they asked him, “Why did this happen?” And before long, the rest of the world began to hate him too, as his old village had, and he moved to a new village where everyone could hate him again forever.