Leaving the Sea: Stories

by Ben Marcus

  Good for you, Edward thought. This could easily have been the real thing. Wasn’t that the point, that you never knew? You murderous fucks.

  “Does anyone think it’s strange,” Edward ventured, “that our parents weren’t called tonight?”

  “Honestly, Edward,” said Thom. “This is the second time you’ve spoken during your critique. We shouldn’t have to warn you about this. You can’t learn from what happened tonight unless you’re completely silent now.”

  “I thought that what I learn doesn’t matter,” Edward snapped. “Isn’t this about you learning not to be like me?”

  “No chance of that,” said a young woman on the opposite side of the circle, who stared at Edward so defiantly that he looked away.

  On Edward’s way out, Frederick broke from a mob of admirers and grabbed his arm.

  “Edward, a word.”

  He’d never stood so close to Frederick, never had a private audience with him. As much as he disliked him, he couldn’t deny how compelling Frederick was. Impossibly handsome, confident, with the figure of a small gymnast. This was a person for the future.

  “What you did tonight was arguably brave. You demonstrated a priority for love and loyalty. You protected two fragile people who had no other savior, even though technically they were not in danger and would have been much safer at home. Technically, we may have decided that they were a danger to you, and yet you went to them anyway, endangering everyone else. You made a choice, and on the individual level, that choice was courageous and selfless, even if at the level of the group you risked our entire operation. If those had been my parents, may they rest in peace, and I didn’t have my years of training, and I also didn’t have sophisticated instincts and survival habits, it’s possible I would have done the exact same thing. In other words, if I were you, and knew next to nothing about how to keep people alive today, tomorrow, and the next day, I might have brought my parents here tonight as well. It is completely possible. It’s precisely because I can relate, however abstractly, to what you did that you won’t see any lenience from me. Not a trace. On the contrary, you will meet great resistance from me, and if you do anything like that again, I promise I will hurt you. But I want you to know, face-to-face, how much I admire you.”

  When he got outside, his mother was asleep in the car, his father leaning on the door.

  “I bet you’re expecting an apology from me,” said his father.

  Edward was tired. He said that he wasn’t, that he only wanted to get home. He had a big day tomorrow.

  “Because I didn’t do anything wrong,” his father continued.

  “I know that, Dad.”

  “It doesn’t really seem like you know it.”

  “I do. I would like to go home now, that’s all.”

  “Okay, go. You’re the one who screwed up, anyway. We don’t need your help. You should be ashamed of yourself. Go straight home. Your mother and I will walk.”

  “You’re not going to walk.”

  “Katherine! Katherine!” his father shouted into the car, banging on the window. “Wake up! We have to walk home. Eddie refuses to drive us.”

  “Dad, get in. Please. I’m driving you home. Don’t worry.”

  “Because we wouldn’t want to put you out.”

  They waited in the line of cars revving to leave the high school parking lot. Some people took these evening drills—hellish and deeply pointless as they were—as valuable social encounters. So Edward and his parents sat in traffic—his mother asleep, his father grinding his teeth—while athletically attired settlement leaders strolled up to cars and leaned against drivers’ windows, chatting it out. Running the drill backward, doing the blow by blow, reliving the night because the crisis protocol training was all they damn well had in their lives.

  Edward didn’t dare honk. These glad-handing semiprofessional tragedy consumers would turn on him, attack the car, eat his face. Or, worse, they’d stare at him and start to hate him slightly more, if that were possible.

  His father, on the other hand, hadn’t noticed that they weren’t moving.

  “That Hannah is a Nazi cunt,” his father said.

  “Dad, you can’t say things like that about people.”

  “She’s a Nazi cunt with a tiny cock.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “What, you don’t agree? You don’t like her, either. Tell me you don’t agree.”

  “I don’t agree. She’s in a tough position. She’s just doing her job.”

  That set him off.

  “Just doing her job! Gandhi was just doing his job.”

  “Gandhi?”

  “Not Gandhi, that other one. That other one!”

  His father was in a rage.

  “Which other one? Hitler?”

  “The one with the stick. With the blowtorch that reaches across fields down into bunkers. The one who had that huge set of keys! Like a thousand keys on that goddamn monstrous key chain. The one with the small gun they have in the museum in D.C.”

  “Mussolini?” he guessed.

  “Fuck you!” his father yelled. “Goddamn amateur!”

  Edward locked the doors of the car.

  “I’m not sure I know who you’re talking about,” Edward responded carefully, “but I know what you mean. You really don’t like Hannah. I get it.”

  “Bullshit. You know exactly who I’m talking about. You learned about him in school. I remember you coming home one day saying you wanted to be this motherfucker, this dictator, for Halloween. Imagine how your mother reacted to that.”

  His mother. If this had really happened, how would she have reacted? She probably would have cheerfully gone along with it, fitting little Eddie with a large key ring and a blowtorch, sending him off into the neighborhood to gather candy. At the moment, though, his mother had the right idea. She was snoring softly in the backseat.

  At Edward’s office the next day, a receptionist fell from her chair and died. The paramedics set up a perimeter around her desk while colleagues from the office looked on, whispering. Edward tried to keep his employees calm. He ran a modest shipping firm where nothing like this ever happened. Why wouldn’t the paramedics touch her, even if it was clear she was dead? Their fear did not bode well. What was the protocol? One of them squinted through a monocle at her body. The others pushed back her cubicle partition. They took pictures and air samples and questioned the coworkers who sat nearby, but they stayed away from her.

  The paramedics consulted a radio, then turned to question Edward and his employees.

  Had anyone touched this woman? Her clothing? Her hair? Her skin?

  No one answered, but of course they had touched her. Edward had still been in his office when she collapsed, but he understood that they’d tried to revive her. They’d loosened her clothing, breathed into her mouth, pounded on her chest. The usual hopeless tricks, taught by sad specialists at adult education centers. And, one year ago, at this very office, for a reasonable discount. Were you not supposed to touch someone who died?

  A few hands went up, and these people were escorted to a private office.

  “What’s going on?” someone yelled. “Where are you taking them? What are you going to do?”

  “Calm down, they’ll be fine,” someone else answered, and this set things off.

  “How do you know? You don’t know anything. You have no idea what’s going on.”

  The paramedics announced that the office would need to be cleared. Everyone out, quickly and safely, and this quieted people down. They were to please follow their evacuation drill. Employees could wait across the street in the park. They wanted to be able to see everyone from the window.

  For what? Edward wondered to himself. So they can take aim?

  It would be a little while before this was resolved, the paramedics explained, so people were free to get coffees if they wanted to. Edward hung back until most of his employees had filed out. It was really not appropriate for a paramedic, or anyone, for that matter, to tell h
is employees to take a coffee break. But he would let it go.

  He introduced himself as the boss and asked what was going on, what did they think?

  They stared at him.

  “Because we thought it was an aneurysm,” he went on. “Except she’s so young. A stroke, maybe? At any rate, it’s horrible. Was it a heart attack? Probably not. What do you guys think?”

  When they didn’t answer he continued to theorize out loud, naming ailments. They were leaving him stranded. He couldn’t handle this conversation by himself.

  “Sir,” said a paramedic, “we’ll have to ask you to leave with the others.”

  “Okay,” Edward said. “But do you know how long this will be? I need to know what to tell my employees. We have kind of a crazy day ahead.”

  It was true. Edward had five job candidates to interview after lunch, and he had been planning to spend the morning in preparation.

  The paramedics shook their heads and stared at him again, as if they were baffled that Edward expected them to stoop to a conversation with someone like him.

  Edward wasn’t finished. This was his office, and they were sprawled out in his chairs, and they’d moved and probably broken office equipment he’d paid for, while completely ignoring him. Or, at the very least, failing to take him seriously.

  “It’s Kristina,” he said.

  Again they looked at him in their odd way, like doctors standing around at a morgue.

  “Kristina is her name,” Edward said, gesturing at the dead woman. “She’s from Ditmars. I hired her about six months ago. She went to college…I forget where. She was a terrific employee. Here’s her emergency contact information, if you want it. But maybe you don’t want it. Maybe you guys don’t care. Maybe this is simply too boring for you and that’s why you can’t speak. You’re bored. Well, her name is Kristina. Show some fucking respect.”

  One of the paramedics stood up.

  “Sir,” he said, gesturing at an officer holding a cell phone. “This is Deputy Arnold Sjogren. His sister was a close friend of Kristina’s. We know exactly who she is, we grieve her passing, and now we are doing our jobs. The longer you stand here yelling at us, without any facts, the greater risk you place yourself in. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I personally do not require a lesson in respect. We are risking our lives today, and you are not. Who should be showing respect to whom?”

  It was cold outside, not yet ten in the morning. Kristina must have only just started work when she died. In truth, Edward reflected, she had been a detached figure in the office, a kind of ghost. When she was trained, including a short session with Edward himself—since he tried to impress upon his new employees the larger aims of the company—she seemed indifferent. He felt obliged to act excited about his life’s work, even if it sometimes exhausted him.

  Across the street stood his employees, shivering and coatless, holding their arms. Others huddled together, crying.

  Edward and his employees—all fifteen of them, or it’d be fourteen now—were not accustomed to being outside together. It was Edward who made them nervous, and he knew it. He shunned the public spaces at work for this very reason, protecting his employees from the destabilizing effect of his presence, keeping to his private office whenever he could. What a kind service to offer, to keep them from having to see him up close. He tried to be nice and cordial, but it was true that in some deep way he had trouble thinking of them as human, with lives outside of the office. Was this bad, especially if he never showed it? He thought of himself as deeply empathic—if mainly toward himself. In theory he held a strong share of empathy in reserve for a stranger he had yet to meet.

  His team was standing in the little patch of dirt that passed for a park. When Edward approached they fell silent. A broad swing set creaked on the other side of the square. As the boss, it seemed that he should speak. He should sum up, or lead them in prayer, or say something, perhaps, cheerful. Maybe it was too soon for that?

  “Well, poor thing,” said Edward, finally.

  “Did you call her family?” someone asked, and the others nodded, leaning in.

  This alarmed him. Was he supposed to do that? How could he call Kristina’s family if he didn’t know the facts? At any rate he’d left the emergency contact card with the paramedics.

  “They’re taking care of it,” Edward said, nodding up at the building.

  But were they? He could feel his employees thinking that this was his job. He was supposed to take care of it, not some bland paramedics, inured to calamity. What if one of them had died, he imagined them thinking. Would Edward, their supervisor, neglect to call their families, leaving it to some rookie EMT who might not even be able to pronounce their names? What fucking kind of boss was he? Any one of them could have died today. They could die tomorrow, or next week. Could Edward be trusted to call their spouses or roommates or parents—to at least pretend that he cared?

  After they stood there looking at their feet, someone volunteered that they’d been discussing how Kristina might have died. They focused on Edward again, and again he hated being in charge.

  “Did you learn anything? What did they say?”

  Edward shook his head. “I shouldn’t really comment,” he said, adopting an air of secrecy. “They asked me not to say anything. I’m sorry. I’d better not.”

  Oh, was he something. For a few moments Edward’s employees could—wrongly! wrongly!—see him as a person with exclusive information, entrusted with a secret. An insider. And in exchange, what? What did he get for this lie? Well, for one, Edward would never forget what he’d said here today, how low he’d fallen. That seemed fair. A fair deal. He might as well bask in their awestruck sense of his power. Why not enjoy it for a while?

  People started to drift off. Jonathan took a sandwich order, but when it grew too complicated someone suggested that they all go, and they looked at Edward expectantly. This was going to take a while. He sent them off with his blessing—explaining that he should really stay here in case they needed him—and he was left alone in the park, staring up at the window to his office, where, for some reason, the shade had been drawn.

  The first job candidate showed up right on time, minutes after the hazmat truck and the mayor’s motorcade pulled away. Edward and his employees had only just been cleared to return to the building. The candidate, Elise Mortensen, was announced when Edward returned to his office, where he discovered that his documents had been disturbed. His filing cabinets were open. On his shelves the books had been tossed around. Did they think he was hiding something? A smell ran through the room, too, something floral that he hadn’t noticed in the outer offices. He didn’t have time to take stock of what had changed or to wonder what they were looking for in his office, so far from where Kristina died, when Elise Mortensen came in, adopting an exaggerated tiptoe, as if she were disturbing him, which she kind of fucking was, and asked where to sit.

  Edward fumbled through the interview. He started with the dreaded opener Tell me about yourself, so he could collect his thoughts. Elise Mortensen seemed to have been waiting her whole life to answer this question and she went for it. She delivered a droning memoir that kept rising in tone, which assured Edward that it might not end until she died. He kept his eyes fixed on hers and established a pattern of interested nods, then withdrew his attention to the place where it rightly belonged. On himself.

  Edward tried to piece together the morning’s events. What interest would the mayor have in Kristina’s death, and why would Frederick from the workshop be part of the mayor’s entourage? This was arguably the worst part of the morning, standing across the street watching the mayor exit his car, followed by business-suited staff whispering into their phones, and then, what the fuck, Frederick from the workshop, almost like a government official now, wearing his jumpsuit, carrying a duffel bag.

  At that point Edward figured it was okay to bring his employees across the street so they could wait at the entrance. In truth it offered Edward another chance to di
scuss the situation with officials, perhaps reestablish his authority. This was his office! He paid rent here, and the death had happened during working hours at his business. And he, not that he wanted to broadcast this, was liable for what happened. But of course he was rebuffed at the door by a police officer, even while his employees looked on, knowing—how could they not know?—that Edward had no influence. No role to play. He was a bystander just like they were.

  When the mayor came out, Frederick pointed at Edward in the crowd.

  “There he is!” yelled Frederick, and the mayor’s entire entourage peered into the crowd, as if a rare animal had been sighted.

  Edward froze.

  “That’s the man!”

  Next to Edward stood Philip, who returned Frederick’s greeting, said things were fine, considering, and what the hell, a tragedy, right, to which Frederick shrugged, pointing at the mayor with a knowing look. This wasn’t about him. Edward lowered his hand and stepped behind Philip, where it was warm and safe, waiting for the motorcade to leave.

  There was a final interview that afternoon, and then he could go home. Edward thought he would die. At times like this, when he didn’t want to be seen by anyone in the office, and with the bathroom so conspicuous at the other end of the office, the entire staff watching him go in and come out, Edward peed in a jar that he kept in his drawer. He was sealing the lid when the last candidate was announced: Hannah Glazer. Oh dear God. The same Hannah, the settlement leader, who’d turned away his parents.

  On his desk was her résumé, which he couldn’t focus on, but he willed himself into the conversation. As ever, it was difficult to look at her and be reminded of an enormous segment of life—the segment in which you were naked with a stunning person and she was not repulsed by you—that was not available to him. She wore tailored black clothes, her eyes clear and mean, and her hair was arranged in one of those old-fashioned styles, pasted to her head at the top and then curled out at the bottom. Quite lovely.

  “What interests you about the position?” Edward started.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Hannah said, glaring at him.