by Rob Hart
Zorg nods. “Magda.”
“Does it make you uncomfortable to talk to us about this?” he asks. “Like you might be betraying her confidence?”
Zorg shakes his head.
“We would like it if this stayed between us,” Aesop says. “Can you do that?”
Zorg nods.
“Where’s the meeting?” I ask.
“The beach,” Zorg says.
“Oh, fuck,” Aesop says. “That makes sense.”
After letting Ford take down my information, and setting out a subdued dinner for the camp, I call it a night. Head back to my bus, whiskey-less, and settle in. I figure I’m worrying too much about it, like maybe it won’t be too bad. I can make it through the night unscathed.
I am wrong.
I’m exhausted but sleep sits a couple of inches outside my grasp. Time feels faulty, like it’s skipping around. Mostly I stare at the roof of the bus but sometimes I find myself standing at the edge of the pit, looking down at Wilson. I alternate between sweating and freezing as my heart revs. I must be coming down with a fever or something. This is not a great time for that.
As the sun comes up I’m in a damp, sweaty fog. Stuck in some weird twilight zone between asleep and awake. And I’ve still got the whole day to run out the clock until tonight’s secret beach rendezvous.
On the way to the shower I pass a cop I don’t recognize. A black guy with a swimmer build and a face like an ancient statue, walking from one place to another. He nods at me and I look away from him. There have been cops in and out, talking to people, checking on the area where Cannabelle died.
Every new face is an opportunity for someone to recognize me.
Even though I’ve been sober more than a full day now, I feel like I’m hung over. It’s not too hot, the clouds holding back the sun. I stand under the shower for a bit, naked and soaked in the breeze, and it helps, but only a little.
After I’m dressed, my brain feeling like it’s full of gravel and wet leaves, I head over to Hospice, the medical dome.
A rainbow curtain hangs from the door. I push it aside and get hit with the thick smell of herbs and incense. The far wall is honeycombed with cubbies that are filled mostly with glass jars, those jars holding variations of leaves or liquids or roots.
To the left is an exam table and a cabinet full of first-aid supplies, everything meticulously gleaming. To the right is an old metal desk covered with stickers. Alex is wearing a floral skirt and a black tank top, her bare feet up on the desk, reading a graphic novel. She was a nurse in a previous life, I think.
Alex looks up and extends one slim finger to me.
“You still owe me night bacon,” she says.
“Soon. I’m feeling feverish. Got anything that might help?”
She places down the graphic novel, swings her legs onto the floor, and folds her hands, suddenly all business. “Symptoms?”
“Sweating, chills, headache. Can’t sleep.”
“Have you lost the will to live? Do you feel the pull of eternal darkness?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Just making sure it’s not nihilism.”
“No, it’s not fucking nihilism.”
“Okay, because it’s been going around.” She sits back in the chair. “Any cough, sore throat, congestion?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Do you prefer the hippie dippie stuff, or something that’s actually going to work?”
“Real stuff, please.”
She opens a drawer in the desk and pulls out a bottle of ibuprofen and tosses it my way. “Take two. Eat some food. Drink a lot of water. I mean a lot. You might be dehydrated. Even if you’re not, you will be soon.”
I open the bottle, shake two into my palm, throw them back, and place the bottle down. “Thanks, doc.”
“And do not forget about my night bacon.”
“Ten-four.”
I head to Eatery, drink a whole bunch of water, some coffee, some more water, until I’m stepping out into the tree line every ten minutes to pee. I feel a little better. Working helps, too. Something to keep my hands occupied. Zorg and Aesop are doing most of the work of cleaning and prepping for the rest of the day, so I take a break every now and again to sit outside in the breeze. Sometimes I doze off. Mostly I stare into the canopy.
After a little while I get bored and head inside to see if there’s something I can do. The dishes from last night are sitting in the drying rack. I go about putting them away, and get most of the glasses away before my hand jerks and I drop one. It shatters across the floor, glass spreading like a wave.
Sigh. I must be more tired than I thought. I grab a broom and get to work cleaning.
After dinner service, after part of the camp seems to up and vanish, I stop in the main dome to get a flashlight. Sitting next to the flashlight bin is the lost and found bin. It’s usually full but tonight there’s nothing inside but a hat. It’s a green baseball hat, but with a flat top instead of a rounded top, military style. I take it out and find it fits nicely and I am happy to have a new hat.
When I’m sure the coast is clear I head for the back of camp, to meet Aesop on the service road. It takes me a little while to get there, crossing the boardwalk, then dirt paths, and finally the brush. Trying to use my flashlight as little as possible.
The forest is so quiet. All encompassing, like a void I’m falling into.
Aesop is sitting in the car, the engine off, and when he sees the beam of my flashlight cut through the window he starts the engine, but he doesn’t turn on the headlights. I climb in and the radio is off. We drive slowly down the narrow pathway, illuminated barely by the night sky, enough that we can see a few feet in front of us.
Once we get to the road, Aesop clicks on the headlights and slams on the gas.
I have heard of the beach. I’ve never been there, because the beach is a group activity, and I’m not usually down for those. It’s not far from South Village, but far enough you have to drive. We cross marshlands, guardrails on either side to keep cars from falling into the swamps, neither of us speaking, both of us vibrating with anticipation. Things are getting heavy now, and I think we both know we’re taking it to the next level.
We could have told Tibo. We could have told the cops.
We didn’t.
I wonder why he’s doing it. He doesn’t have a horse in this race. No reason to be out looking for trouble. Though, technically, neither do I. Maybe it’s something to make the time go by.
That reminds me: I pull out my phone, turn it on, check my e-mail. Three bookstores wrote back. Two said they don’t have the edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang that I’m looking for. The third, a couple of towns over, says that yes, they do.
“Found the book,” I tell Aesop.
“Good. That’s tomorrow’s task, then.”
“Speaking of tomorrow, we’re going to need an alibi,” I tell him. “Someone might notice we’re gone tonight. So if someone asks we should come up with an excuse about where we were. Just to be safe.”
“Okay,” Aesop says. “We have time to come up with something.”
We cut down a wide street, big houses set back across lawns that slope up and away from us. Along the right it’s dunes, reeds and vegetation sticking out like unruly hair.
“We can stash the car down here and walk along the beach,” Aesop says. “Usually when people come to the beach they use another entrance. This way no one will come across us.”
Aesop finds a little stretch in the dunes to put the car, pushed in far enough from the road that if you were driving, you’d have to turn to get a good look at it, and in the dark you might miss it entirely.
We get out and the air is warm and smells like salt. I’m still a little sweaty, and now a little achy on top of it. My head spinning a bit, probably from the anticipation, which is weird, because I usually don’t get this way. I wish I had more ibuprofen. It sucks but I’m not about to complain in front of a former Marine.
We’re both in dark jeans and dark t-shirts, which I now realize means we’ll stand out against the sand. Should have thought about that. We climb to the top of the dunes and Aesop continues down the other side but I come to a full stop.
In either direction, it looks like the skeletons of a hundred massive beasts have washed up on shore after some apocalyptic event. It takes me a moment to realize they’re trees. They stick out of the sand at severe angles, half-buried. Branches poking out like rib cages, trunks like spines.
I climb down the dune and onto the smooth surface of the sand and I touch the branch of the nearest tree. It’s bleached and worn smooth. The moon is half full and it washes the beach in blue light.
And when I look up, I can see the stars.
Ever since I was a kid I would look at the night sky and wonder what they looked like. You can never really see more than two dozen at a time, with all the light generated by the city, bouncing off the atmosphere and wrapping the sky in a sickly veil of yellow. Which is the trade-off, I guess. Give up something beautiful to live someplace beautiful.
I remember the first time I saw the stars, up in Bear Mountain, camping with my dad. Like someone filled a bucket with diamonds and kicked it across the sky. It was a wide universe of questions and possibility.
Here, now, it brings me back to that moment of serenity. Back before my father’s death poisoned me. Because that was it, wasn’t it? He died and I raged at the entropy of the universe.
Aesop is standing next to me, looking into the tableau.
“This is incredible,” I tell him.
“Isn’t it though?”
I look for a minute longer. This same sky covering Crystal and Rose, and my mother and Bombay, and New York and Portland, and the places I’ve loved and the things that I’ve seen. For a moment, it allows me to believe those things aren’t gone from me.
“Which way?” I ask.
Aesop points down the beach, back in the direction of the way we came. “Thataway.”
The trees loom ahead of us in the darkness, scattered randomly, so we have to walk a winding path. One thick jumble of branches forces us to walk closer to the water, into the surf. It comes up around my feet, colder than I would have expected given the August we’ve had. The wave pulls the sand out from under my feet and I sink down into it a little.
I look up and Aesop is standing there.
“What is it?” he asks.
“It’s nothing.”
He takes a step toward me and puts his hand on my shoulder. “What is it?”
Normally I’m no great fan of touching. Personal space is a nice thing. And I want to move away from him, but I’ve got this feeling, completely irrational, that if I move I’m going to slip down into a bottomless pool of water. So I let him leave his hand there. “Just… I have a thing about the water.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Nothing to tell.”
He takes his hand back, waves for me to follow. “Tell me about the water. That’s it. If you don’t feel a little better after getting it off your chest I will never ask you to share anything ever again.”
We walk in silence for a few minutes.
Then I tell him.
A month before my dad died I nearly drowned.
Every summer, the first week of August, my dad’s firehouse would host a day trip to Lido Beach, out on Long Island. Barbecue and volleyball. Beer for the adults, Italian ices for the kids. It ranked up near Christmas on my list of cool shit that happened on an annual basis.
I don’t remember much about Lido. I do remember domes that looked like giant mushrooms, painted teal and maroon. There were picnic tables underneath them. The walking paths were beige stone, nearly the same color as the sand. There was a playground that looked like a pirate ship. The horizon was a hill of sand dunes, red fence posts and thin blades of tall green grass.
There was a footbridge over the dunes that led down to the beach, which was always crowded, but not too crowded, because you had to pay to park there. The sand between the end of the bridge and the water was white hot and I had to run across it as fast as I could to get to the surf.
The year my dad died was the first year my parents thought I was old enough to go down to the water by myself. This was an important milestone. To be old enough to do a thing where they weren’t watching me.
I’ve never been a big fan of the ocean. I don’t like that you can’t see what’s underneath. I don’t like that things live in there. I wouldn’t want someone fucking around in my home in the pursuit of leisure. But some of the bigger kids were wading out and bodysurfing back toward shore. It looked like fun and I wanted to revel in my newfound freedom. I splashed out, up to my waist, then my chest. The deepest I’d ever gone, even with my parents watching.
A big wave came up, like the lip of a giant mouth, and I got ready to leap and ride it to shore. But it smashed into me and I lost my bearing. I tumbled, got spun in a circle, the water roaring over my head, the force of it dragging me under. Saltwater in my mouth and ears and eyes, filling me up and choking me.
I kicked my feet out, trying to find the bottom, but there was nothing. I couldn’t tell which way was the beach and which way was the rest of the ocean. Which way the sand and which the sky.
Another wave hit.
That’s when the fear gripped me like a hand, dragging me deeper. At this point I was sure I’d been swept out to sea, the shoreline disappeared, the ocean floor forever beneath me. I was kicking at the darkness, my eyes stinging, my throat raw and my sinuses full of water. Every time I sputtered or cried out, more water rushed in.
It was the worst thing I ever felt. The deepest, most primal bout I’ve ever had with fear. I was sure I was drowning and I’d be dead soon.
Somebody pulled me out. I don’t remember who, somebody else who was in the water. Not a lifeguard, which thinking back on it now, makes me think I wasn’t in there too long. I probably wasn’t in all that much trouble. It was panic warping the experience.
When I got to the sand I was crying. I fell to my hands and knees, coughing the sea out of my lungs. I bumped into someone’s leg and looked up and it was my dad.
It’s been so long, I’m starting to forget what he looked like. I have pictures, and I remember what the pictures look like. But how he sat in the kitchen, or drove the car, or worked in the yard. It’s like he’s drifting off into a fog. I can see him, but the finer details are slipping away.
I remember how he looked that day. Graying hair slicked back, Hawaiian shirt open, red bathing suit, leather sandals. Aviator sunglasses and a cigar clenched between his teeth.
I remember suddenly being less afraid of the water and more afraid of him. He’d granted me this freedom and I’d ruined it. He whipped off his glasses and looked down at me. I had no idea what he was going to do, but I was bracing for the worst. Formulating an apology. Before I could speak he said, “C’mon kid, after that you need a cherry ice.”
He reached his hand out to me and pulled me to my feet, and we walked back across the hot sand, up to the bridge. I looked back, at the wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, thinking that it had almost killed me.
I’ve done my best to stay out of the water since.
There’s a flicker of orange light in the distance. Aesop crosses over to the dunes and climbs to the other side. I follow. We make our way along the road for a little, with the dunes on our left and trees on the right, until we get to where we can smell the smoke.
Aesop stops and holds his hand out flat and lowers it toward the ground, then drops onto his stomach. I follow and we crawl through the brush until we’re overlooking the fire. The road has gone up and the beach has dipped down so we’re pretty high up at this point, and the steep sand looks treacherous. I stay far from the edge.
There’s a clearing in the middle of the skeleton trees, lit harshly in orange. The fire is given life by a pile of driftwood, and Marx is standing next to it, wearing jeans, an open tuxedo vest, and
combat boots. Still wearing that stupid bowler hat, too.
There are people sitting in a circle around him. I can see some of their faces, but not all, with the way the light is moving around, and the people who are facing away from me. I see Magda and Gideon. Doesn’t look like Sunny or Moony or Alex or Katashi are there. No Job either, which is surprising, because I thought he and Marx were tight. Katie the Trigger Warning Girl is here. Some of the guests, too. People whose names I don’t know. I’m glad Aesop is here. He’ll know them. I count nine people in total.
With Marx that’s ten. Ten troublesome dickbags.
Marx is stalking around the fire, using his fist to punctuate his words. Looks like we came in a little late.
“Petitions don’t change anything,” he says. “Do you know why? No one cares. Who the fuck cares about signatures on a piece of paper? Give it to your local politician, and what does he think? He already carved up his district. He picked his voters. Someone else gave him the money he needed to get elected. You may as well be handing him toilet paper.”
There are nods from the audience.
“The time for peaceful engagement is over,” he says. “What has that ever solved? These projects go through. They rape the planet. The earth’s temperature rises two more degrees, and we are fucked. We’ll be killing each other for fresh water. And we don’t have a Plan B. There’s no place else to go. But it doesn’t matter to the coal company. They got rich. They can’t see beyond their next Lexus. It doesn’t matter to the worker. They have a job, and they’ve been bred to believe they ought to be thankful for that, even if it’s back-breaking, shit-paying labor. It doesn’t matter to the local government because somewhere, somehow, they’re getting something out of it. Campaign contributions. Poll workers. Fuck, a nice dinner. The government is already protecting them.”
Feels like something is crawling up my leg. I shake it out, try not to think about whatever horrible thing is trying to eat me.
“You saw that when the FBI stormed into our camp and pulled us out,” Marx tells the crowd. “We were taken to a remote location. We were beaten. Interrogated for hours. And then left there, like nothing happened. No recourse. They did it because they wanted to scare us. Because they think we’re weak. Because they’ve been bought and paid for, the same as everyone else.”
