by Joe Meno
Barry spends the rest of the afternoon stoned, walking around Oceanland. For a winter afternoon, the crowds are pretty lousy. So Barry ambles about, pressing his forehead against the cold glass tank of the Porpoise Portal, screeching silently to the dolphins, telling them he knows they are in the wrong display. Some kids are tapping on the glass and Barry turns, inconceivably angry. He grabs one of the kids by the arms and shouts, “How would you like it if I tapped on your head all day? How would you like it?” The kid, terrified, dashes off, calling for his mother. Barry frowns, then hides behind the blackened coral reef.
On his way back to the administration building, the girl with dark eyes, the one who was standing listlessly above the tiger shark tank, leaves her concession booth and moves beside him.
“I wanted to thank you,” she says, staring down at her black shoes. “For this afternoon.”
Barry nods. “Okay,” he says. “Sure.”
“But it doesn’t really matter. I’m still going to kill myself tomorrow.”
“What?”
“I’m still going to kill myself tomorrow.”
“You are?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the world is mediocre. Everything is shit.”
“That’s why you’re going to kill yourself? Because the world is shit?”
“Yes. And my boyfriend is fucking some hoodrat.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t think you should kill yourself because of that.”
“You don’t even know me. I mean, it might be the best thing in the world for me.”
“It’s probably not.”
“Well, it might be. So, well, thanks again for trying anyway.”
“Sure,” Barry says, frowning. The girl nods and scurries away, blurring into the haze of the late afternoon crowd. Barry stands, staring for a while longer, wondering if he should be worried for the girl: He decides he is worried and walks by the concession court trying to find her. But she is already gone and when Barry tries to describe her to the other surly teens operating their greasy concession booths, they just look at him.
After work, Barry sighs as he walks into the tiny apartment. He finds his wife walking around nude again. Marcia is thin, a beautiful woman who is as narrow as a rail, with dark hair and large, hauntingly brown eyes. Barry stops at the door, holding the apartment keys in his hands. Marcia is watering the plants: a few ferns, a peace lily, a gloomy-looking hydrangea that refuses to die. The windows are wide open, the shades completely parted, and Marcia is completely naked, which is her new mode of moving about the world.
“How was work, dear?” she asks, without looking up.
“It was fine. Listen, I thought we talked about this.”
“What is that, dear?”
“Jesus, Marcia, would you please put some clothes on?”
“No. I will not. I am completely comfortable with my body and not ashamed of walking around my house like this. I don’t see why you’re so uptight.”
“Well, could you at least shut the windows or something?”
“Barry,” his wife says, finally looking up. Her eyes are a flash of meanness, dark and soft and lovely. “There is exactly one hour each day when this awful apartment gets sun. If it makes you feel bad seeing me like this, maybe you should start working out again. If you are not happy with yourself, you need to make yourself happy. I am not here to make you happy. Now, what do you want for dinner? All we have is fish.”
Barry stares at his wife for a moment, then turns, still holding the keys in his hands. He exits, closes the apartment door, and walks down the hallway, wanting to die. When he steps out into the parking lot, seven or eight kids, boys with binoculars, one with a telescope, are watching his wife parade around the apartment naked. Barry does not say a word. He climbs into his car and tears out of the lot, wishing something good would come on the radio as the soundtrack to his terrible exit. But there is nothing except static and the sound of seagulls crying in the distance.
He drives around for almost an hour, giving up on trying to find a station that will play a song he knows or wants to hear. He tours around Breakrock, the town he grew up in and promised himself he would never drag himself back to, past the marina with its barnacle-encrusted cigarette boats, past the beaches with their plastic-surgery grandmothers in string bikinis, past the strip of half-empty diners with their flashing neon signs and nautical names: The Clamshell, The Pearl, The Sand Dune. Outside the car’s window, it’s just starting to get dark.
Along the tourist traps, just past the private lagoons and exclusive resort beaches, a fireworks show is starting. Barry pulls over and watches for a moment. He starts up the car and heads over to Jack’s, a one-story stucco rental. Before Barry kills the car, he can already hear his young brother wailing on guitar. Jack is playing along to some record, Barry isn’t sure what, and the sounds coming from his brother’s enormous Marshall half-stack are like white-hot wires turning and twisting in the sky. Barry sits in his car and listens, remembering how awful Jack used to be on guitar, but now, now he sounds like a genius.
He never knew. He never knew his brother was good at anything. Barry leans back and closes his eyes and feels awful for ever hating Jack.
Barry drives around for a while more and then finds a pay phone to call his wife, listening to the sad drone of the unanswered ring.
“Please pick up. Come on, honey, please pick up.”
Miraculously, she does.
“Hello?”
“Marcia?”
“Yes.”
“Honey, I’m calling to let you know I’m all right.”
“Great.”
“I’ve been driving around.”
“Wonderful.”
“Honey, I want you to know something.”
“What?”
“I am sorry.”
“What?”
“I am sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m sorry I quit my job without talking to you about it. I’m sorry I dragged you down here and made you leave your job too. I’m sorry we have a crappy place to live now.”
“Barry,” his wife whispers, “where are you?”
“At a pay phone.”
“Barry, I’m going to tell you something, okay?”
“Okay.”
“You are the smartest, hardest-working person I know.”
“Okay.”
“But you are also the most miserable.”
“Okay.”
“So you have to figure out how to be happy in a world that isn’t as good as you think it should be. You need to be less hard on yourself and less hard on Jack and less hard on everybody.”
“Okay.”
“And you have to decide whether you are going to be happy or whether you are going to be miserable. If you want to be miserable, please do not come back home. You are making me crazy.”
“I don’t want to make you crazy.”
“Well, you are.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“Well, that’s fine, but you need to figure some things out. You need to figure out that being the best all the time doesn’t always mean that much.”
“I think it does.”
“Goodnight, Barry,” Marcia says, and hangs up the phone.
Barry sleeps in his car that night, in Oceanland’s parking lot, and when the sun comes up, he is startled by someone’s rotund face in the window above him. It is a family of overweight vacationers, all of them with big round faces, all of them whispering and pointing. Barry opens the passenger’s side door and climbs to his feet, then stumbles through the front gate. He pauses before the moray eel exhibit. He tells them they look ferocious today. He tells them they look like they could do some serious damage with those teeth. He strolls around the park and apologizes to all of the animals, all of them, before heading to his office to do some serious accounting.
About an hour later, as Barry is walking into the administration building to audit the filtratio
n accounts, a woman somewhere begins to scream. Barry follows the high-pitched shriek and sees the dark-eyed girl, the one from the day before, standing on the metal edge of the great white shark tank. A crowd has gathered. Parents shield the eyes of their chubby children. A group of French tourists begin to point and hiss.
“Oh Jesus,” Barry mutters, and then he is running, pushing past the gawking crowd as fast as he can. The girl is looking right at him when she closes her eyes and jumps in. Barry feels the elevator inside his heart plummet down a great fiery shaft. He stands there open-mouthed for a moment, before he springs into action, hurdling the safety bar, kicking off his shoes, and diving in headfirst. The shark darts past in a grayish blur, thumping Barry with its nose. He suddenly remembers the shark has lost its teeth. He suddenly remembers how to breathe. He bursts to the surface, sucks in a mouth of water, then dives down again, grabbing the girl beneath her arms. She is fighting him. He feels the shark dart by once more, its dorsal fins cutting past his legs. The girl is biting his arm, her soft breasts pressing against his chest. Barry howls and kicks, shoving the girl to the edge of the tank, pulling his legs up and out of the water. The girl is still fighting. He holds her down, sitting on top of her as she tries to drag herself back into the water. Somewhere, some insane tourist is taking pictures: Flashbulbs flash and people are clapping. The girl, her black makeup now runny, stares up at Barry, crying.
“You ruined it,” she mutters, spitting up saltwater. “You ruined everything.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“Why couldn’t you just mind your own fucking business, huh? Why couldn’t you just mind your own fucking business?”
“I’m sorry,” Barry mumbles back. “I’m sorry.”
Barry does not try to find his brother to report the tragedy. Instead, he staggers through the marine park, pushing past a retired couple arguing about the price of a disposable camera. On and on, darting through a group of teenagers who are dangling dangerously over the edge of the sea snake tank, past a universe of silent, exhausted, and bored families, until finally he sneaks into the employee entrance of Dolphin Cove, which, of course, like almost all of the exhibits at Oceanland, is permanently but Temporarily Closed. The dolphins have been moved, the tank is now only rippling white waves. The water in the pool is bright and silver and inviting, though the lining of the tank is coated green and gray with some indefinable algae. Barry does not care. He kicks off his shoes, pulls off his shirt, doffs his slacks, and dives into the water, the sharpness, the coolness, the gravity pulling him under. His white briefs become translucent as he cuts across the water, swimming as hard and as fast as he can. Some children are watching, turning from the coral reef exhibit, pointing at the lone man paddling about the dolphin pool.
Barry makes it to the center of the tank and, after gulping a great breath of air, dives down, kicking furiously, until he can reach out and grab the vent, gripping the metal with his fingers, his lungs pounding, his ears screaming, closing his eyes, counting off the seconds he can stay under, his heart saying, We have tried so hard and still we fail, we have tried so hard and still it is all shit, his heart ready to explode, his heart ready to burst from his chest like a beautiful red balloon, before finally, alone at the bottom of the pool, It’s okay, it’s okay, he thinks, and suddenly he begins crying.
GET WELL, SEYMOUR!
illustration by
Paul Hornschemeier
The girl playing badminton is the one. But I don’t want to believe it. It is because her legs are so shapely and long and, in their stunning whiteness, betray a winter spent indoors. Her ankles are well-sculpted, her knees pinkly glowing, and there is something about her slender wrists that suggests the modest charms of aristocracy. I don’t care much about the rest of her. It is the shape of her shadow, the way she stands there bored in the shade of the cruise ship’s upper decks in a green skirt with white tennis socks pulled past her shins; I watch her lean over as she traces something with the edge of her racket, some invisible word or shape in the air. She is daydreaming and the picture she makes in the middle of the ocean liner is one of absolute splendor. I hear the sound of her laughter as the shuttlecock flies her way, her laugh which is not the kind of haughty one you’d expect from a girl who looks the way she does, and suddenly I’ve lost my nerve. I’m no longer red-faced or angry. I forget the direction in which I was walking as soon as I see her standing there, all ease and assurance on the badminton court. I feel the ocean breeze on my face and follow the shape of the shuttlecock as it’s hit back and forth over the wind-blown net and then I begin to wonder how long she has practiced looking so blithe, so poised, so wonderfully self-assured.
“Are you sure that’s her?” I ask, turning to face my sister.
Alexandria nods her head. My younger sister’s face is a collision of odd shapes and silver wire. From her sturdy wire-rimmed glasses to her glimmering metal braces, Alexandria’s features seem both mismatched and regrettable. She is shaped exactly like a pear. When she gets upset, her voice begins to whistle uncontrollably. “Oh, that’s her, all right,” Alexandria says, the metallic glimmer in her lisp high-pitched as she squints knowingly. One of her eyebrows dives below her bifocals lens and is magnified one hundred times to my great terror, as she makes an angry expression. “Well, what are you going to say to her?”
“I don’t know exactly,” I mutter, which at the moment is the absolute truth.
“You don’t know? I thought you said you knew exactly how to handle someone like that.”
“Well, she looks kind of busy,” I murmur. I direct my attention back toward the girl in question. She is now whispering to another blond girl beside her, a younger sibling most probably, and just then the shuttlecock veers over the girl’s head. She laughs—a kind of obvious laugh directed at her audience in the deck chairs before her, meant to demonstrate how much fun she is having—before swinging wildly at the birdie. The shuttlecock tumbles out of her reach and bounces in the soft artificial grass. When she bends over to retrieve it, without a thought, in a graceful and automatic gesture, she places her left hand at the back of her skirt, demurely keeping it in place. I suddenly feel the heat of the tropical sun traveling upon my cheeks. The girl snatches the birdie in her left hand and gives it a solid whack with the racket—serving it high over the net—and it drops daintily at her opponent’s feet. Pleased with herself, the girl takes a small bow, neatly leaning forward from the waist as someone in the nearby deck chairs claps. When the girl rises, she looks up at Alexandria and then over at me. I watch as she goes through the momentary, involuntary calculations—trying to identify us, trying to remember if perhaps we have recently been introduced—and failing to see us as social equals, she happily goes back to the contest.
“Well?” Alexandria asks.
“We’ll wait. We’ll wait until dinner,” I whisper. “When her parents will be there.”
Alexandria nods, giving the girl one final, snotty look, before we both turn our backs and stalk below to our cabin.
It is February, and as such, we are on vacation, though we have not seen our parents in many days. They are once again in love, as both of them have exclaimed multiple times already. There is an inordinate amount of love-pecking, giggles, and hand-holding. We prefer to enjoy a leisurely existence aboard the cruise ship without them as they, more often than not, only leave us regretting their company. They do not come out of their cabin anymore anyway. There is room service on the ship and so they have been taking their meals at odd hours. We know of their habits only by the discarded silver trays left piled up in front of their door, charge slips signed blindly with black ink in my father’s name.
The rest of the ship is old people with money and spoiled brats with regal- sounding last names. I am reminded again and again that I do not belong here. I am a freshman in college at Princeton. I am a Political Science major. I am seriously considering a minor in World Philosophy. I embarked on this loathsome little journey at my mother and father�
��s desperate request—both of them claimed that it had been almost five years since we had all taken a vacation together—but now it is clear that they invited me along merely as a ploy, and that their invitation was only to ensure that Alexandria, who is twelve years old this month, would have an adult chaperone while they were busy re-exploring the odious physical aspects of their successful marriage. To that, I would have said thanks but no thanks, yet we have just passed Cancun and already it is too late.
I have brought a bundle of books with me, fortunately, and although I do enjoy the briny smell of the ocean and the tremendous profundity of the unfettered sky, it is in the solitude of enjoying Plato and Hegel that I find myself most pleasantly restored. It has been almost impossible to catch up on any reading, however, with Alexandria as an amusing distraction and constant ward. We have made a game of the last few days and I am happy to admit how agreeable I find her company, as she has matured rapidly and is unlike any other twelve-year-old I have ever known. Her interests in science and mathematics are quite astounding. She has begun collecting feathers from the variety of seaborne birds that hover about the upper decks, carefully cataloguing them in a journal devoted to her ongoing projects. She is also quite fond of crossword puzzles. She is unafraid of seeking out words she does not know in my college thesaurus. I only wish Alexandria was not so quick to tears and had a better social sense. At school, away at college the last few months, learning when to offer an opinion and when—even though you might have a very detailed knowledge of a particular subject—you choose to appear diffident, is a skill I have had some difficulty grasping. I am often at odds with my dorm-mate Brice, who believes I want to remain a virgin for all eternity. “Don’t quote ancient Greeks so often,” has been one of his vital instructions. “And stop talking like you’re somebody’s rich grandfather,” is another one, just as important apparently.
On the portside deck, in a pair of lounge chairs, later that very afternoon, Alexandria asks me why I use the vocabulary I do. “If you’re composing a symphony,” I say, “you want to have access to as many different instruments as you can. Consider that. Also, in ancient Greece and as late as the nineteenth century in England, men would often settle their disputes through engaged verbal clashes. I would prefer to handle my own trials with a sharp tongue and a quick wit, than have to resort to violence. And also,” I add, “I don’t believe in talking more simply just to put other people at ease.”
