Leaving the Sea: Stories

by Marcus, Ben

  “How come you’re not, Professor?”

  Did Fleming have this to look forward to every time he came and went? Could he get a new room? He’d sleep in the fucking lifeboat if he had to. He’d play it off cheerfully, using the deep reserves of cheer he stored in his infinitely sized happy place. He had cheer to goddamn spare. Maybe he’d get another room just to stash his extra cheer. How other people, Erin most of all, shook off moods, or, more impressively, pretended not to have them in the first place, was entirely beyond him. Except what wasn’t beyond him? Was there anything?

  “What’s going on with the glove?” he said, like a person to whom this was really happening. “It’s warm out.”

  “Well, I’m glad you asked.”

  Britt gave him a weird smile. There was food in her teeth. He didn’t know her well enough to mention it. Thank God.

  “This, sir, is a brand-new glove. I just took it from its package.” Britt flopped the glove against her face—a gesture of, what, self-harm?—then added, blushing, almost too quiet to hear: “No one has been pleasured with it yet.”

  Fleming studied the glove, leaned in, and pretended to sniff it. “That you know of,” he said, in his scientific voice.

  Britt laughed. “You are funny. We’ve been debating this. I’ve had to defend you. They think you’re so serious. But you’re not! You, my friend, are catching on.”

  She swished the glove at his face and he leaned away from it.

  “I am catching on, Britt. You might try that glove on someone else. Go throughout the longship, trying it on every young oarsman.”

  “But I don’t want to go throughout the longship. I have traveled far, good sir. I am home now. I have found the owner of the glove.”

  She baby-pouted up at him.

  “No thank you, Britt.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing!”

  “True,” he said, walking off.

  And neither did she. What Fleming was missing was a home and family and self that had never quite come to be, which was maybe why he was on a boat now with strangers, pitying himself. How could you miss something that hadn’t happened? There was a certain feeling at home with Erin and Sylvie that sometimes, rarely, despite the prickly ways they fought, swept through them, for reasons he could not understand, little gusts of unexamined happiness when he and Erin smiled at each other for no reason and when they stretched out on the rug and played blocks with Sylvie and when Sylvie would roll over and suddenly yell “Pants!” kicking her naked legs in the air. A serious call for pants from his young daughter that made them laugh so hard. That’s what he missed, but it stood alone. Had it really even happened that way? And if something like it happened again, who knows, Fleming or Erin or both of them would react differently, would look away from each other, embarrassed that they’d suddenly been caught living while poor Sylvie shrieked with joy under the cold gaze of her functionally dead parents.

  From the house phone outside the restaurant Fleming dialed the ship’s operator and asked to be connected to the room of C. L. Levy.

  “I have no such passenger,” said the operator.

  “As of when?” asked Fleming.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Did you ever have a passenger by that name?”

  “You mean ever on the ship? That’s not really something I can look up.”

  Oh, but you fucking can, you master of the database. “I mean up until yesterday. Was there a C. L. Levy yesterday and now there is not one today?”

  “But we haven’t put into port yet. No one has left the ship.”

  Fleming paused. “It does stretch the imagination,” he admitted. He pictured C. L. Levy, just a shadow, standing on the ship’s railing, tilting out of sight. They say you can’t hear the splash. He bet to hell you could hear the splash. Something that awful could never be silent.

  “Sir, I apologize, I’m not sure I can help you.”

  “Thank you,” said Fleming. “I understand.”

  But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t, and he couldn’t. The encounter joined too many others in the bottomless gunnysack he lugged around for situations that didn’t, maybe never would, make sense. He’d become a bit of a collector, but was the material worth anything? Everything unbelievable in his whole life that had nevertheless still happened. It would need to be probed for secrets.

  Out on deck it wasn’t dark enough to hide. His students would be roaming the ship, drinking, waiting behind fake bushes so they could jump out at him when he walked by. The stars were close tonight. Not just exquisite pricks of light leaking through a tear in the fabric of some other world, to quote a writer he loved. These stars seemed to have fallen too low. They looked shapeless and dirty. Cast outs, perhaps, from the world of finer stars that knew enough to keep their distance. Or maybe the ship was climbing, lurching straight up out of the water like a slow rocket. He could close his eyes, feel the air rushing down on him, and believe that. Why was that so easy to believe, and it wasn’t true, yet what was true was so finally impossible and unconvincing? The stars—close and dirty and shapeless and false, the sort a child might draw, and what did children even know?—were not credible. The sky, the whole night, his conversations. These things did not fucking ring true anymore, they needed work. What happened to him needed to be revised until he could find it believable. Or, he needed to be revised. Fleming. He needed to change himself so what was real did not seem so alien and wrong. Do you do that with tools, with your hands, with a bag over your head? Do you do that by standing on the ship’s railing at night? Fleming would tuck himself over behind the pool, behind the games floor, where the sun umbrellas were rolled up, stacked, and chained. It was a kind of bed. It wasn’t so bad. The dark night was a kind of room, and it would do better than where he’d been. This was the perfect place to miss out on the next head count, should it come. No one would find him here, at least until morning. They could never check off his name. Maybe that was what was called for, for the next head count to go around, for the ship and its rooms to be searched for its living, viable people—its human beings!—and to be finally, once and for all, counted out.

  The Dark Arts

  On a dark winter morning at the Müllerhaus men’s hostel, Julian Bledstein reached for his dopp kit. At home he could medicate himself blindfolded, but here, across the ocean, it wasn’t so easy. The room stank, and more than one young man was snoring. The beds in the old gymnasium were singles, which hadn’t kept certain of the guests from coupling when the lights went out. Sometimes Julian could hear them going at it, fornicating as if with silencers on. He studied the sounds when he couldn’t sleep, picturing the worst: animals strapped to breathing machines, children smothered under blankets. In the morning he could never tell just who had been making love. The men dressed and left for the day, avoiding eye contact, mesmerized by the glow of their cell phones. The evidence of sex failed to show on their faces.

  Julian held his breath and squeezed the syringe, draining untold dollars’ worth of questionable medicine into the flesh of his thigh. He clipped a bag holding the last of his money to the metal underside of his bed. His father’s hard-earned money. Not enough euros left. Not nearly enough. He’d have to make a call, poor mouth into the phone, until his father’s wallet spit out more bills. Under his mattress he stashed his passport.

  He left the hostel and took the stone path down to nothing good. This morning he was on his way, yet again, to meet Hayley’s train. Sweet, sweet Hayley. She would fail to appear today, no doubt, as she had failed to appear every day for the past two weeks. More and more it seemed that his lovely, explosively angry girlfriend, who only rarely seemed to loathe him, wouldn’t be joining him in Germany. Even though they’d planned the trip for months, googling deep into Julian’s unemployed afternoons back home, Hayley pinging him sexy links from work when she could. A food truck map, day treks along the Königsallee. First they’d destroy England and France, lay waste to the Old World, then drop into freaking Düsseldorf for th
e last, broken leg of the journey.

  It was going to be a romantic medical tourist getaway, a young invalid and his lady friend sampling the experimental medicine of the Rhine. Hayley promised to break bitter pieces of German chocolate over his tongue as he stared at the ceiling and wished his life away. But they’d fought in France, and he’d come to Düsseldorf ahead of her. Now he waited not so hopefully, not so patiently—dragging himself between the hostel, the train station, and the Internet café, checking vainly for messages from Hayley—while seeking treatment up at the clinic on the hill.

  Treatment, well, that might not have been the word. His was one of the doomed conditions. An allergy to his own blood, he not so scientifically thought of it. An allergy to himself, was more like it. His immune system was mistaken, fighting against the home team. Or his immune system knew exactly what it was doing. These days autoimmune diseases were the most sophisticated way to undermine yourself, to be your own worst enemy. In the States, with such pain and such striking blood work, they merely soaked you in opiates and watched the clock. They dug your hole and wrote your name in stone. Not so in Germany, a shining outpost on the medical frontier, where out of wisdom, or denial, or economic opportunity, they tried what was forbidden or unconscionable elsewhere. And for a fee they’d try it on you. Massive doses of it. You could bathe in its miracle waters. You could practically get stem-cell Jell-O shooters at the bar on Thursday nights. So long as, you know, you waived—yes, waived—it good-bye. Your rights, your family, your life.

  It was not such a terrible trade. The clinic brandished a very fine needle on Julian’s first day. It gleamed in the cold fluorescent light of the guinea pig room, and they sank it into his back. From his wheezing torso they drew blood and marrow, his deep, private syrup—boiled it, then spoon-fed it back to him until he sizzled, until he just about glowed. Of course the whole thing was more complicated than that, particularly the dark arts they conjured on his marrow once they’d smuggled it out of him. They spun it, cleaned it, damn near weaponized it, then sold it back to him for cash. Zero sum medicine, since he’d grown it himself, in what Hayley, digging into his ribs, had called “The Julian Farm.” Except the sum was a good deal larger than zero. He might as well have eaten his own arm or sucked elixir through a straw punched into his heart.

  Back home he’d tried it all and felt no different. The steroids, the nerve blocks, the premium plasma. He ate only green food until it ran down his legs. Then for a long time he tried nothing. He tried school, then tried dropping out. Now he was trying, in his midtwenties, his old room in his father’s house, which Hayley always said impressed her. The courage it must have taken for him to decide to really live there with his father. Maybe. Through it all, though, he was mostly trying Hayley, as in really, really trying her, and he could see how very tired she’d been getting. Imagine that you’re the girlfriend of a long, gray, twentysomething man who is ill in a way that no one understands. Or is he? It was Hayley who’d pushed for this trip, so Julian could finally have a shot at the new medical approach they’d read so much about, a possible breakthrough with rare autoimmune disorders.

  In Germany they treated you with yourself. You were guilty of hiding your own cure inside of you, you selfish fuck. They salvaged and upgraded it, then returned it to you with a vicious needle while you trembled in your chair. After a few weeks you’d be better. Hmm. In his wellness fantasies, Julian always pictured himself scrubbed clean, nicely dressed, suddenly funny and charming. All better, in every goddamned way. Maybe even a name change. Of course throughout these treatments, as he’d discovered, your frowning doctors hedged and balked and shat caveats, until the promise of recovery was off the table, out of the room, nowhere near the building. But at least on the way toward oblivion you got to, you know, feed on yourself, suck your best parts free of promise. You got to try the finest of what medicine did not legally have to offer.

  This morning he ducked the stares of shopkeepers, who guarded their doors against him, the pale American who spent no money. They must have come to recognize his sickly figure by now. What was left of it. God knows they’d gawked. To Julian it seemed they could see right through his clothes, and they were not amused. You’d need more than clothing to hide a body like his. You’d need a shovel, a tarp. Tarps were designed to cover men like him. This is what you call a person? This is not a person. Tombstone inscriptions like this just came to him. He had a certain gift for the form.

  The shopkeepers—little men protected by bibs, youngsters with ghostly mustaches—stood and stared as Julian snuck down the street. Was this friendliness? Was it love? Julian could only walk faster, wincing until they released him from eye contact. Had anyone, he wondered, ever studied the biology of being seen? The ravaging, the way it literally burned when you fetched up in someone’s sight line and they took aim at you with their minds? He wanted to summon a look of kindness and curiosity in return, a look that might forgive his miserly ways, his trespass on their ancient, superior city. But his face, as no one had ever needed to tell him, lacked the power to convey. He’d stopped trying to use it for silent communication, the semaphore you performed overseas, absent a shared language, to suggest you were not a murderer. Such facial language was for apes, or some mime troupe in Vermont. Mummenschanz people who emoted for a living. He ate with his face and spoke with it. Sometimes he hid it in his hands. That should have been enough.

  It took him just one sucking sprint on a cigarette to reach the train station, a domed building in rust-colored stone. After a few mornings inside, braving the crush of travelers who reeked of chowder, he figured he didn’t need to enter the dank space just to wait for Hayley. A granite ledge opposite the station offered a perfect view of the decamping passengers. Every morning locals poured from the building wrapped in hemp and straw. The fancier ones wore the waxed canvas coats of hunters. Occasionally an American or two spoiled the tasteful palette with vacation colors, releasing high-strung moods as if by megaphone: I have arrived in your historic city and I am the happiest person you will ever know! Let me rub my joy on you! They shot into the town square like clowns fired from a cannon, mugging their snack-smeared faces at some imagined camera, dreaming of paparazzi.

  No one disliked American tourists more than their own kind. Or probably they did. Probably there was widespread competition in this arena, hostility toward the first world animal spreading its lucre abroad. Julian could picture the American tourist problem resolving in a civil war, a snake not eating its own tail, but maybe doing something nastier. Giving it head, its snake jaws popped out of joint to apple bob the shaft.

  It was only upon leaving New Jersey, flying east toward higher civilization, that the demise of his decadent homeland seemed so overdue. But some higher power, or some covert, stateless, ideological power, kept forgetting to stick the pig. America kept charging the horizon, its lancet drawn, a milky substance leaking from the tip, refusing to perish. Now he had to look at these muffin-tops from home ready to speed-learn German culture, their sneakers swollen like parade floats as they bounced around outside the Hauptbanhof, trying to keep warm in the bitter German air.

  Two weeks went by like this. Trains rolled in from Paris, Salzburg, Dresden, Berlin, failing each time to spit from their insides the girl Julian had fought with in Strasbourg. A disappointment of trains. He and Hayley, in fact, had fought in several cities in the Western Hemisphere on this trip, a road show of freeze-outs and recriminations. For the most part they warred silently, with so much stealth that sometimes Julian wasn’t sure whether or not they were even quarreling. Even in bed, as she hobbyhorsed on top of him in pursuit of her sexual quota, with the focus of a child doing homework, grimacing when her time came, he wondered if she was mad at him. Their mating activity was hardly much sexier than a needle in the back. But at least he got to see her naked. Hayley could look so serious beneath her pixie haircut. She was too stubbornly self-contained, too confident, too okay with it all, which was decidedly not okay with Julian. A self
needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it. But Hayley had built a fire wall around her feelings and moods. There was no knowing her, and fuck you if you tried to pierce her privacy. You were a creep and an invader and you’d be rebuffed, then shamed. Hayley would fall quiet if Julian suddenly touched her hand, when all he wanted was to be touched back. That was the consolation prize available to the bottoms in a relationship, right? The mules, the dinguses, the shitbags? Touchbacks were supposed to be free. And she’d be clearly annoyed at the transparency of Julian’s desire when out of nowhere he pounced. Poking her to be cute, which was not, he knew, cute. Was there a subcategory of shit-eating grin, depending on whose shit you ate? He’d gone to a different school of etiquette, the school of no shame, the school of I need more from you. He’d been fucking homeschooled in emotional helplessness, scoring off the charts. By touching Hayley and waiting for her response, Julian could pursue the kind of emotional research you didn’t get to conduct in graduate school: dissertation-level inquiry into the limits of revulsion regarding people who ostensibly love each other. Which would always turn out to be a really stupid move. Hayley would snap and he’d feel his face burn, getting ready to be rubbed in something. She’d smell his need and it stank, it really, truly stank. Why did he always have to confirm a good thing, asking about it and asking about it, Hayley wanted to know? She told him to put his hellish thermometer away, to stop prodding her with his goddamned thermometer, obsessively trying to gauge how she felt so much that he kept ruining the mood.

  Which proved that he loved Hayley. Somewhat. A lot. Awfully. God help him. First of all, she didn’t leave him, even though his salient feature as a man was his leavability. He created occasions for departure in others. Tombstone. And until now Hayley had hung in there. Her loyalty alone was an aphrodisiac, even though his medication sometimes gave him the useless crotch of a mannequin. Hayley also believed in Julian’s illness, found it true and real and even pretty damn interesting, a faith that had turned out to be rare. Julian’s father and Hayley and the occasional stranger on the Internet, where the ill go in search of each other, humping each other’s empathy slots. These were the believers. Even if, sometimes, maybe just a little bit, Julian did not really believe in the illness himself.