The Road to Amazing

by Brent Hartinger

  "Min?"

  She nodded. "Right, sorry, I went off, didn't I? The point is, those aren't meaningless words, what I said before."

  "Okay," I said, "so Kevin and I get to decide what our marriage means."

  She nodded emphatically.

  "What if we disagree?" I said.

  "Then you compromise. You work it out."

  I didn't say anything. I almost kicked another stack of stones, but at the last second, I decided not to. Down on the water, the seagulls still cawed, but now I heard another sound too: voices. It was Ruby and Nate, probably on the beach over below the deck, laughing about something. So back at the house, everyone else was waking up too.

  "Kevin wants to have kids," I said to Min.

  "Really?" she said, surprised. She knew how I felt about the dream-destroying little monsters. "But I thought you talked that all out."

  "Well, yeah, now he says he doesn't want them. But he used to want them. I think he only says that now because he knows it's what I want."

  "Kevin is a big boy. If he says he's okay not having kids, you should believe him."

  "But the point is," I said, "don't I need to be open to the possibility? Isn't that what being married is all about? And I don't want to be open to that possibility. There are lots of possibilities I don't want to be open to. And there are other possibilities that maybe I do want to be open to that Kevin might not."

  "Are we talking about sex?"

  I had to think about that. Kevin and I had a pretty great sex life, but we were definitely monogamous — that was important to us both. Still, I also knew that we were both reasonable guys, and if one of us was ever truly unhappy, we'd figure something out.

  "We're two guys," I said. "Sex is actually one of the things I'm worried least about."

  "That's totally sexist, what you said there, but I'm going to let it slide for the time being. So it's not sex. Then what are you worried about?"

  "Other than the kid thing? That's it, I'm not quite sure." I thought for another second. "I want to make a difference in the world — help the homeless and cure AIDS, that kind of thing. And I have these vague dreams about traveling. Getting lost in South America, hitchhiking through Europe, living in a remote lighthouse for a year — although I know that last one would probably be a complete disaster, cold and impractical, and not nearly as romantic as it seems."

  Min smiled.

  "And obviously I want to make it as a screenwriter," I said. "I mean, that's why Kevin and I moved to Los Angeles, and I still haven't had any success at all, and the city has turned out to be something of a dystopian hell-hole. But I sure as hell don't want to give up on that dream yet, and maybe not ever."

  Min nodded.

  "You only live once, you can't take it with you, and all that?" I said. "I don't want to be the guy who goes to work, and comes home and sits in my plush media room watching other people do cool things, like the couples on House Hunters who sell everything and move to some great new city. There's a line in The Glass Menagerie where the main character, Tom—"

  "I know who the main character in The Glass Menagerie is."

  "Tom says, 'People go to the movies rather than moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America.' Which I absolutely love. It's, like, my favorite line of all time. I want to move too, not just go to the movies." I thought about it. "Although I do love movies, so I also wouldn't mind a plush media room. I also like House Hunters. Or at least House Hunters International."

  Min rolled her eyes. "Is it my turn now? Can I talk?"

  "I already know what you're going to say. You're going to say that Kevin is a great guy, which he totally is. I mean, I literally just told you how he moved to Los Angeles with me so I could pursue my dream of screenwriting. And all the other things I talked about, I can do them with him. If we do disagree about something, we really will work it out."

  "Wow, I'm absolutely brilliant. So? What's your rebuttal?"

  "I dunno," I said. "It seems too optimistic. Aren't you the one who's always saying the whole world is going to hell?"

  "Oh, sure, in the big picture, the corporations and religious fundamentalists are going to screw us all. But on a micro level, I still have faith."

  I laughed out loud. At this point, I was back to liking how well Min knew me, that we really understood each other.

  "I think I know what the problem is," Min said.

  "You usually do."

  Min ignored me. "You're afraid to grow up. You're afraid of being an adult." She sighed. "Such a Millennial."

  "I am not. I mean, I'm a Millennial, but I'm not afraid of growing up. I'm already grown up. I'm twenty-five years old!" I thought about it for a second. "I'm also sick to death of the whole man-child thing. You know, that you see now in almost every TV show and every movie? Yes, yes, you can't stay home and drink beer and play video games all day, how incredibly tragic. They seriously do need to grow up. But that's not what this is."

  Min kept ignoring me. "And that's what marriage symbolizes: being an adult. So it stands to reason it's giving you pause."

  I'm afraid to grow up? I thought. That couldn't possibly be right. Could it?

  It did have the ring of truth. Min was actually pretty good at this, calling me on my shit. But it usually all worked out in the end, because I'd been known to call her on her shit too.

  "Just so we're clear," I said, "I'm really not having second thoughts about the wedding. I mean, like, at all."

  "I know that."

  "We're just talking."

  "I know that too."

  "All that said," I said, "well, who the hell wants to grow old? As far as I can tell, it's all about not getting enough fiber, and ear wax removal systems, and cracked crowns not being covered by insurance, and how you need some sort of tool to scrape your tongue or you'll get bad breath. Oh, and then you die."

  "There's a slight possibility you're dwelling on the negative."

  "Not to hear my parents tell it. But you want to know the worse part? They don't have friends, they have dinner party guests. I don't know if they ever did, but they don't now. It makes me so sad."

  "So you've said. But that's one thing you're never going to have to worry about — not having friends. As for the bad breath, well, that's a separate issue."

  "I want my life to be special," I said.

  Now I really had gotten down to the nub of it. It wasn't so much that I was worried about growing older, or even that Kevin would one day announce that he desperately wanted kids, so we'd have to work out some kind of compromise and we'd end up getting a corgi.

  It was that the whole marriage thing meant I was getting closer and closer to the point where I had to either put up or shut up about the kind of life I was going to live.

  "I'm being neurotic again," I said glumly, "aren't I?"

  Min beamed. "In all honesty, these might be the least neurotic feelings you've ever had."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  We both fell silent, looking around at the jagged foundations of the ruins around us. Now they reminded me of shark fins sticking up from a roiling ocean of sword ferns. The wind blew, and I smelled something stinky coming from the direction of the beach — more than just seaweed.

  "So," she said, "what do you think happened to them? The people of Amazing."

  "Really?" I said.

  "Are you kidding? A mystery involving a deserted town? This is totally your kind of thing."

  Now I loved how well Min knew me.

  "You know," I said, "it might surprise you, but I'm back to seriously considering the possibility of alien abduction."

  "I think I'm going with a time vortex, like in that old episode of Star Trek. Can you not see it? The vortex opens, and all the people come out to investigate, and then they all get sucked into another dimension?"

  Right then, I got a text from Kevin:

  Where are you? Come back to the house. There's something you need to see. />
  * * *

  A beached whale. That's what Kevin thought I needed to see.

  It was down on the beach below the Amazing Inn, not very far from where we'd had the campfire the night before. We would've seen it then, which meant it must have washed up during the night.

  It wasn't a gigantic whale, like those pictures you see of sperm whales or humpbacks washed up on long sandy beaches. This was a killer whale on a small rocky beach. Killer whales are mostly black with white patches — I'm pretty sure they're not whales at all, but actually a kind of porpoise — and they only ever get about twenty feet long. This one was even smaller than that, maybe ten feet long, which meant it had to be young.

  It was partly still in the water, with gentle waves washing around it. But it was definitely dead, a massive bulk with sagging fins and a gigantic pink tongue hanging halfway out of its mouth, like when Jabba the Hut dies in Return of Jedi.

  "Well, that's a bummer," I said as we all stood around the carcass. I knew whales were really intelligent, so I felt like I should be more sad. Part of it was the bloated tongue, which was disgusting, and part of it was also the teeth, which weren't quite as sharp as a shark's, but gave me a little bit of the creeps anyway, knowing creatures big enough to chomp me down whole were swimming around out in Puget Sound.

  "Killer whales aren't really killers," Min said, somehow reading the expression on my face. "Sometimes they kill other whales, but they mostly eat salmon and seals. They've literally never killed a human being. That's why 'orca' is a much better name for them."

  "I wonder why it beached itself," Ruby said.

  "Whales beach themselves for all kinds of reasons," Min said. "Parasites, genetic mutations, injuries from predators. But I don't think this orca did beach itself. I think it died at sea, probably several days ago, then the tide washed it up. Look at its eyes. Look at the skin."

  Min had a point: its eyes were definitely clouded over, and its fins were drooping.

  "Oh!" Ruby said. "You're right."

  Meanwhile, Vernie looked at me and rolled her eyes. (For all her wonderful qualities, I concede that Min could sometimes be a know-it-all.)

  "What about the smell?" Kevin said.

  No one said anything for a second. The smell had been there all along, but it was only now registering.

  Really registering.

  It's not like it was the worst thing I'd ever smelled, a collapsed cesspool or something like that. But it wasn't roses either. Yes, I know a whale is a mammal not a fish, but it smelled like fish.

  Dead fish.

  A lot of dead fish. Or maybe just one really, really big dead fish.

  Something occurred to me: this whale smelled pretty bad, and it had only been there for a few hours, maybe even less. I hadn't smelled it from the deck earlier that morning, and I had a feeling I would've noticed if it had been down here.

  What's it going to be like in another twenty-four hours? I thought.

  I felt guilty again, confronted by the death of this magnificent, probably-sentient creature, and here I was thinking mostly about the smell. But the fact is, this had the potential to ruin our wedding.

  Sure enough, Kevin said, "We need to move it. Someone help me." He leaned over, and Nate and Gunnar immediately bent down to join him.

  "You can't move it," Min said, horrified.

  "Why not?" Nate said.

  "Because it's illegal! This beached orca is an essential part of the marine ecosystem. As it decomposes, it will support of a whole array of life."

  "It'll still be an essential part of the marine ecosystem supporting a whole array of life," Kevin said. "It'll just be doing it a little farther down the beach."

  "No, it won't, mate," Nate said. "It's too damn heavy."

  "How much do you think it weighs?" Kevin asked.

  "Probably a thousand pounds," Gunnar said, somehow having already looked it up on his phone. "Huh. Infant mortality is extremely high. Up to fifty percent of all orcas die in the first seven months of life. Oh, and this is cool! Orcas can live to over a hundred years old! But they only live a quarter that long in captivity. Did you guys see that documentary, Blackfish?"

  "Let's all try," Kevin said, ignoring Gunnar, still talking about moving the creature.

  So we all tried (even Min, which I gave her credit for, considering we were probably committing a major crime). The black skin felt really cool to the touch and had this rubbery texture. As for the whale itself, it was almost surreally heavy. It was like trying to push several tons of wet towels all piled in a heap, somehow both loose and solid at the same time. Even all of us together couldn't budge it.

  Finally, we gave up.

  Not far away, seagulls stood on the rocky beach, eyeing the carcass.

  "Maybe the tide'll take it away?" Kevin said hopefully.

  "Maybe," Min said, but I could tell from the stark expression on both her and Gunnar's faces that there was virtually no chance of that.

  "Well, maybe it's not so bad up on the porch," I said, trying to stay positive.

  But if anything, the smell was even worse at the top of the stairs. It was like the breeze off the water lifted it right up to the deck.

  I didn't know what to say to Kevin. I'd said the night before that nothing was going to go wrong with our wedding, but now something had. As long as that whale was down on the beach, there was no way we could get married at the Amazing Inn.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  "This is a disaster," Kevin said.

  We were still on the deck, above the dead killer whale — er, orca — down on the beach.

  "It's not a disaster," I said. "We could get, like, citronella candles."

  "Absolutely," Min said, nodding.

  "A perfect solution!" Vernie said.

  But even as we stood there, the breeze blew, washing another cloud of dead whale stink up around us like an ocean wave. Vernie coughed, almost choking, even as she tried valiantly to suppress it. It didn't seem possible that the smell could have gotten so much worse in the last few minutes, but maybe it was more obvious now that we weren't focused on moving the whale.

  "How is it not disaster?" Kevin said to me. "We can't possibly have the wedding here."

  "So we'll just have everyone stay inside," I said, waltzing toward the house.

  "Totally," Gunnar said.

  "Hells to the yes!" Otto said.

  Everyone followed me into the house.

  You could even smell it inside the house with the doors closed. I also realized the dead whale must have been what I smelled all the way over in Amazing.

  "It's not that bad, mate," Nate said to Kevin.

  "No," Ruby said. "Really not bad at all."

  Everyone was lying. I knew it and Kevin knew it. And the other thing that went unsaid was: This was how bad that dead orca smelled now. How much worse would it be twenty-four hours from now, after sitting in the sun all day?

  I spotted Vernie and something occurred to me.

  I stepped closer. "This is a movie moment," I said. "Isn't it?"

  "What?" she said.

  "The orca down on the beach. And the fact that the smell is so bad that we can't possibly hold the wedding here."

  She thought about it. "I hate to admit it, but I think you're right."

  If this had been a scene in a screenplay I was writing, I considered how I'd have my characters solve the problem.

  "We need to find another wedding venue," I said to the group.

  "Twenty-four hours before the ceremony?" Kevin said, agitated. "On an island? With a budget of zero?"

  He was officially freaking out.

  But that was okay. That was the great thing about being in a couple: if one person freaked out, there was still one person left to stay in control and try to make things right.

  "It's a big island," I said. "There's got to be someplace we can have a wedding."

  "Yes," Min said. "Let's see what we can find."

  "Absolutely," Otto said again, nodding.

 
; We all started moving for the door, but Vernie stayed where she was.

  I looked back at her.

  "You folks go," she said. "I think I'll stay here."

  "Really?" I said, disappointed, but she nodded.

  "I think I'll stay here too," Gunnar said matter-of-factly.

  I looked at Min.

  "I'd say he wants to take pictures of the orca," she muttered under her breath, "but knowing Gunnar, he's probably still more interested in the rain gutters."

  * * *

  Min, Otto, Kevin, Ruby, Nate, and I drove into town together, all jammed into Kevin's and my rental car. Kevin drove, and I called the local caterer we'd hired and explained the situation. I felt weird about mentioning the actual reason — a stinky beached orca — so I decided to leave that part out and say we had a plumbing problem.

  "That's terrible!" she said. "Sure, I can think of a few places you might be able to call."

  "Even with no money?" I said.

  "Oh, don't worry about that," she said. "This is Vashon island! There's a little thing here we like to call the Vashon Groove — everything is always very laid-back. When you explain the situation, I'm sure someone will be happy to help you out."