* * *
—
She woke before dawn, her nightmare having stolen the little sleep she had been able to endure. Another omen. But there were no sharks in her dream. No dolphins or spears either. Instead, Emma had dreamt she was a little girl, chasing boys on a beach. And when she caught one, he would turn around and his face would be her father’s face. From the jaw to the hairline, her father’s features, almost painted on. Or maybe she was chasing her father in a boy’s body. The dream embarrassed her, and she made a commitment not to tell her therapist. He was only interested in hearing about Lucy—the famed, failed lesbian flash romance—anyway. He said it had a lot to do with her slumping posture and lack of self-confidence.
From breakfast, Emma noticed commotion outside. The storm had subsided completely by midmorning, having taken a sudden, southern turn. Dozens of people gathered as the waves tamed themselves, combing the beach for residual treasure, anything the storm had deposited in its wake. Emma looked for conch shells, but none interrupted her diligent search. She pocketed a few sea stars the size of her fingernail and continued walking south. She imagined herself lazy then, chasing a storm she never wanted to catch.
The little girl appeared behind Emma, then raced forward, past her, stamping her feet in the incoming tide. She looked nervous, and was holding something Emma couldn’t make out. Peeking behind a jetty, the girl disappeared, then reappeared moments later. Emma knew instantly: She had buried something. The tide rose and took back what the storm and the people did not wish to keep. The little girl continued searching for shells as Emma returned to pack her belongings for her flight back to Michigan that night.
Before her final evening swim, Emma located the patch of sand in which the girl had placed her treasure. Gracelessly stubbing her toe on an outcropping in the rock, she began to paw through the ground. It was buried deep, as if she had experience with this sort of thing, aware that depth would keep things from washing ashore. It was the baseball cap, tattered along the edges, stitched with cursive; the words Happy 7th, Ruby were scratched inside. Emma left it there, in the space between low and high tide, so that the ocean might take it, or Ruby might, if she changed her mind.
Part III
WHO I AM
MASTER’S THESIS
While I’m taking off the mud mask in my bathroom mirror, Brad leaves me a voicemail saying he has a “big idea,” and it concerns me into meeting him. It turns out the big idea is this: He’s going to throw all his childhood stuff into the ocean. No, he’s going to burn it—one big flaming pile. Or dump it off a cliff, drop it from a flying helicopter. He’s going to get rid of it, no question, but what would make for the best shot?
“Also,” he adds, “can I use your things too?”
The tide has receded, exposing a muddy lip of damp sand. We sit a few feet from the lifeguard watch, which feels fitting, as if I heard that voicemail as a whistle. It’s just us, thank God. This is his master’s thesis, he explains. It can’t be some “cheap stunt.”
I think, those are exactly the words.
Back in middle school in Vermont, Brad was the only other gay person I knew, or, I thought I knew. But we’re grown now—“forty-somethings,” he’s started saying, in that uncomfortably ambiguous way. We’ve been with too many feckless men, talked about giving up too much to be doing this. We’re too old to be burning our shit or littering in the ocean.
“Or,” Brad asks, “are we just old enough?”
“Too old,” I say. I draw the vague outline of a mermaid’s tail in the sand.
“What’s that?” he asks.
“A cock,” I say.
“It doesn’t look like a cock.”
“Sure it does.”
“Well what’s that, then?”
“What’s what?”
He hesitates. “Your wrists.” I put two wrists under his face, like I’m being handcuffed, for his inspection. He now knows the question offends me, like he still thinks I’m Old Ken, who called him with my bare feet on the edge of that cold bridge, like he’s the one taking care of me at 5 a.m., talking me off the ledge over a voicemail I ignored. Confronting the moment always kills it, and I can’t tell him I’m fine now because that will clinch his belief I’m not. My outsize mistrust of him is one way of winning, and my awareness of it makes me feel smarter than him. He looks away from my wrists and back out at the sea, and I’m relieved he won’t try to drag the interrogation on. I want to fire back by asking about the size of his loans for this project. Is he even thinking about the future?
“Sorry. Anyway,” he says, “I think it’d be good for us. Healthy.”
This gets me: Brad talking about healthy. Even before he got sick, he was the kind of guy to get up at three in the morning and drive two hours just to “say hi” to a man he was dating, the kind of guy who lied to strangers about where he was from (“We have coconuts just like these in Bora Bora.” “Sir, these are jackfruit.”). Through his skeletal frame, in his glassy eyes, he believed, and still believes, if I’m seeing him right, that things will turn out well if only you follow your instinct, your dumb, hurt heart.
“That doesn’t sound healthy,” I say.
“We hated that part of our life, right?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Who knows! I forget.”
“We did, we hated it.” He draws a pair of balls on my mermaid tail.
We each wait for the other person to speak; it creates a tense silence. The facts of my circumstance bob, half-submerged, on it: I am here with Brad because he finally called me; I did not hate my childhood; I think a lot of gay people say that because they change significantly in their formative years; I have no one else to be around; at this moment, my ex is probably fucking my landlord. I consider that I probably look sad, and then that it might be the kind of sad Brad is bent on capturing in his photos.
“You look sad,” he says.
“A beautiful kind of sad?” I ask. “I get that a lot.”
“No, just like, tissues-sad.”
I laugh and run a hand over the mermaid-cock, blurring the image. I redraw it. I am not a beautiful kind of sad, though I used to be, I think. I just realized it too late. There is a whole population of people, I know now, who have realized they were once attractive too late. Brad is not among them.
I speak to interrupt my own thoughts. “I mean, so this is your project. Which are you gonna do?”
“I’m thinking ocean,” he says. I can sense him spreading out on the sand, relaxing. “I mean, have everything floating out, you know? Maybe at sunset. Nice light.”
“And you’re not going to collect it?”
“Nope.”
“So you’re going to take these photos and then, like, run away.”
“I’m thinking some of the kids will keep some stuff, you know?” Something splashes out in the water, catching its food or being caught.
“Anyway, yeah. I mean, it’s my project.”
“It’s also illegal, right?”
We sit for a while on the sand, which is cool to the touch. I cross my arms and imagine it makes me look defensive, so I smile slightly for no reason. When the mosquitoes come, we stand and walk to the shore. We can’t see where we’re going, which is part of the thrill, he tells me. We follow the sound of the calm surf lapping against the rocks. The moon is barely visible, a light curve in the sky. There is an element of romance that has attached itself like a leech to the night.
For a moment I think, I could just stay here. I could let him explain the shot—what its edges will be lost to, the significance of a sunset, or a sunrise. I could let him tell me what I already know: He’s thinking of moving far away. He wants to be somewhere people say “y’all” and mean it. He missed me, and have I missed him?
The night is still, so unusually quiet I can hear the wind off the waves, the distant call of bells. My phone rests heavy in my sweatshirt. W
hen we take that first step into the water, he says it’s not that bad, and at first I think he’s talking about his life.
TOUCH POOL
The heat of the leather steering wheel on his palms. The stillness of the night. The heaviness of his eyelids. The sudden flash of red lights feet ahead, the sharp turn of the wheel. The smell of burned rubber. The seat belt like a noose around his waist. The screech and thud of the car against the guardrail, then his weight thrown as his body caught up with the speed. The sudden crack of the windshield that he thought was his bones breaking. The push-pull of his shallow breath. The ghost of the deployed airbag in the passenger seat. The white smoke rising, the oval of steam around the rearview mirror. The fogged outline of his hand on the windshield. The torqued force of his heartbeat continuing as the car lurched off the road, crashing into the bushes, rolling under the palm trees and away from him, up into that sky lightening with morning. The far-off traffic light turning green. Nick’s head against the wheel, while I placed mine against my pillow, wishing to never see him again.
* * *
—
“Come on,” Nick said, and his hand slipped from mine.
Nick was leading me across the wide porch, through a group of shirtless men, their chests lightly shining with sweat. Music blared from somewhere below the hardwood, the bass vibrating in my sneakers. Inside the house, dim light flickered in the foyer. Nick and I were doing this “to prepare for college,” where we had it in our minds people knew how to handle themselves in situations like these. Already I could sense the men around us figuring out we weren’t invited. Nick had heard about the party from his only other gay friend, a guy named Micah who worked at a kind of upscale outlet mall across the street from our school. The night was shrouded gray with rising smoke from a bonfire out back. Nick breathed it in deep as we walked in, like he’d never smelled air so fresh. Someone behind me fell down the steps, so I turned around. Everyone surrounding the man laughed, and even Nick smiled. “God,” he said, pulling me forward by the wrist, “even I can tell you’ve never been to one of these before.”
“One of these” was referring to the gay Halloween party that we had invited ourselves to. That Nick had invited us to. He had driven us there, an hour outside Orlando, to a four-story home on the coast, the kind of home not normally populated by plastic red cups and dozens of men in togas and loincloths, lines of ash under their eyes. In T-shirts and shorts we were especially, embarrassingly clothed. But Nick was right; I had never been to one of these before. We made it through gold-lit hallways to the kitchen, which was empty, the counters reflecting a few spills. It occurred to me that didn’t make sense, that that was where people should have been, but then I realized it was late, that we got there five hours after the thing had started, and everyone was on the porch, dancing, talking about their boyfriends, or their ex-boyfriends. They seemed like the kind of men to be lucky enough to have them.
“Whose is this?” Nick said, stopping at the green marble counter, piled with half-full bottles of rum and red wine. He wasn’t asking anyone and didn’t wait for a response. He lifted the Pinot, shrugged, and started to pour. I’d have called him out on stealing—something I’ve actually done before—but it seemed like the kind of place where “stealing” and “borrowing” could be easily confused, so I didn’t. Nick squinted, a discerning look appraising the wine made instantly ridiculous by his T-shirt, which read, ALCATRAZ SWIM TEAM.
The screen door opened behind us, the wind reminding me how hot the house was, how few windows were open. A bald man in a Speedo walked past us, not even stopping to look.
“See, it’s like I told you in the car,” Nick said. He watched the man disappear upstairs, and finished his cup. He picked up the bottle and poured in the rest, offering it to me. “It’s just what you wanted, Matt.” He hopped up on the counter and sighed. “We’re invisible.”
* * *
—
Everyone knows Lia is going to be fired. A few months back, she accidentally broke the seahorse exhibit—knocked the glass with a feeding pole. Two weeks ago she killed twenty pounds of urchins after emptying an antiseptic into the kids’ touch pool. She had mistaken the white tub of cleaner for a gallon of brine shrimp. We know it was twenty pounds because Sam, the shift supervisor, weighed them all in front of us on the scale used to chart the sea lions’ growth. “Nineteen and a half pounds, folks,” he said, trying to look all fifteen of us in the eye at once. He looked down to the urchins, piled in a purple pyramid on that metal block. “Slow clap for Lia, everyone.”
AquaLand promises “a fun time for all,” which is for the most part wrong, because, for the most part, we all hate it here. But it’s hard to say, exactly—there’s so much staff turnover. Lia, who’s one of two senior biologists; Betsy, the gift shop girl; Ryan, who gives the demonstrations on how to feed the dolphins; and me—the guy who runs the stingray touch pool—we’re the only ones who have been here longer than the span of a summer, the ones who have seen exhibits change and change back, the empty winter days and crowded summer nights: fireworks over the Octocoaster, the lights clicking off—one by one—down the entry walk to the turnstiles.
But soon Lia is going to be fired. Sam will call her into his office, the walls lined with vintage posters of muscle cars. She probably won’t cry as much as not understand. She’ll turn in her embroidered blue AquaLand smock and drive off into the Orlando traffic, up the searing hot turnpike, and disappear into the slanting saw grass, the bright sun off the shallow water in the Everglades, the small boarded house where she once lived with Lisa, the place she calls home.
It wouldn’t bother me, her being fired. It wouldn’t bother me under two conditions. If she weren’t my aunt. And if she weren’t dying.
* * *
—
The sound of boots hitting the pavement. The warm finger against his wrist. The gurney unfolding like a bear trap. The cool wind entering the car, the thickening ribbon of blood on his leg. The shards of fallen glass loosening and scattering onto the cement. The sun like a stoplight behind the glowing line of horizon.
* * *
—
When there wasn’t any Pinot, he went looking through a cupboard. Nick is used to getting what he wants. For instance, he always gets the leads in the school musicals, is on the varsity diving team, and owns a dozen pet cockroaches despite his mother’s hatred for insects, the traps she keeps for the same roaches Nick cares for in the basement boiler room. He has sharp, sculpted brows and makes bad puns in precalculus. (“Mathematical puns,” he once said, “are the first sine of madness.”) We met in sixth grade bio, became friends sitting at the front of the class. The nerds. Jump forward to senior year of high school, and we were still the same, mostly, except he turned into one of the theater nerds and I turned into one of the art nerds. A little more cleaning up, a little more shutting up, and he could have been the most popular guy in school. Of course—he didn’t know it. So when another man walked in, opening the screen door and shaking sand off his feet, looking like the other from a few minutes ago, Nick had no problem talking to him.
“What’s going on out there?” Nick nodded toward the porch.
The man looked at us, confused—maybe trying to figure out who we were. He crossed his arms. It occurred to me that he might be drunk.
“Dancing,” he said, and furrowed his brow, as if the answer were obvious. Something glass and heavy shattered on the wood outside, and a high voice yelled, “That was Adam’s, asshole!”
“That’s it?” Nick asked. “Just dancing?”
“Some people are swimming,” he responded.
We both paused. For a moment, Nick seemed vaguely confrontational, as if he needed to prove he was worthy of the conversation. He sat up on the counter, straightening his back. I detected a mean glint in his eye.
“I dive,” Nick said. “On a team. We might go for a swim.” It took me a moment to realize
“we” included me, who hadn’t actually swum since middle school gym.
The man looked to me. His nose appeared like a hawk’s beak, slim and pointed, and cast a small shadow across his mouth. I could feel myself being noticed, judged, and looked away. The song outside changed, the starting pulse of “Material Girl,” and a fresh wave of energy moved through the crowd. I tried to imagine what I’d do differently in college next year, how I would know when to get excited. When to ask about what’s going on.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” the man said, squinting his eyes, then leaving.
“So how’s work?” Nick asked. “Everything good at the touch pool?” He peeled back the golden film on a bottle of cheap champagne he’d found above the fridge. My head was starting to warm, a pleasant push in my temples. I held out my cup for Nick to pour.
“It’s okay, I guess,” I said. “Some of the kids, though. They get so rough with the rays. One of them caught one by both flippers. He was trying to dance with it.” I looked out the kitchen window. I could see the flaming eyes of tiki torches, hear the noise seeming to grow wildly and then calm to a muted lull—shouting followed by a sudden stillness that felt planned. I could sense Nick watching me, expecting more of a response. I got the sense I sometimes do that he wanted to finish up with me so that we could start on him. “It’s just kind of like,” I think aloud, “it grosses me out. All these kids have their hands in the tank. The rays don’t have any say.” The wine flushes my face. “It’s like some metaphor.”
“I guess. They do have a say, though,” Nick said. He poked me on my arm, with one finger, like he was giving me a shot.
I Know You Know Who I Am Page 13
