Leaving the Sea: Stories

by Marcus, Ben

  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.

  So he would have found no viable candidates today. A receptionist had died, and he’d have to interview for her replacement, and now he’d need to schedule another day of interviews for this position as well.

  He had to hold up appearances, or else his appearances would turn deranged. “I’m not kidding, no.” Maybe they could keep this short.

  “Are we going to be pretending today?” Hannah asked.

  “Pretending what?”

  Edward looked longingly at his window, wondering if he could get up enough speed for it to shatter if he threw himself against the glass.

  Hannah stood. She spoke calmly, but she was seething. “I seriously question your ability to be fair here, given what happened. Last night I did my job. I did my job. And today when I very much need this position, a position I am ridiculously qualified for, here you are, mister fucking policy dodger, ready to dole out a punishment because I followed instructions in a difficult situation.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Edward. “What punishment have I doled out?”

  “Not hiring me,” she said. “I saw your eyes when you knew it was me. You knew you weren’t going to hire me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  It was, for the most part, true.

  “I wonder if I could interview with someone else. Is there someone else on the hiring committee so I could be assured a fair shake?”

  “Well, it’s only me. There’s no committee. This is my company. If I recuse myself from the interview, for my intense bias, my inability to evaluate your suitability for a position in the company that I created from nothing, a company I understand better than anyone else in the world, you’ll be in this room alone. Shall we do that?”

  Hannah didn’t laugh. “I’d like to continue this interview under protest,” she said.

  Was that a real thing? Was there a form you could fill out?

  “Listen,” said Edward. “I would understand completely if you didn’t feel comfortable going forward, if you maybe wanted to try somewhere else.” Please, please, try somewhere else.

  “You sound like Frederick now. Get the person to believe her rejection is actually her own idea. Classic Frederick. Old school. I bet you’ve been told that before.”

  “Never.”

  “I guess it’s no secret about me and him,” Hannah said, grinning.

  Edward stared at her.

  “That we’re involved. I mean, everyone must know at this point.”

  He wished he didn’t. That was knowledge he’d very much rather not have. He picked up her résumé, waving it at her. “Shall we?” he said. “An actual interview, and to hell with the past?”

  Hannah Glazer was right. She was qualified for the position. Edward was crestfallen. She was smart, articulate, preposterously experienced, and when he challenged her with difficult production scenarios—bottlenecks on the front or back end, human error, acts of nature—she produced a staggering arsenal of troubleshooting strategies, more sophisticated than any he’d ever heard, which she rattled off casually, as if they were too simple to be of interest anymore.

  “You know,” she said, “Frederick is good at this sort of thing, too.”

  This sort of thing? Was his job just a hobby to her, something to perfect in the off-hours?

  “But of course he’s more of a manager/leader/boss type. As you might imagine.”

  “Of course,” said Edward, even though what did he know about Frederick and his life outside the workshop?

  “So…” said Hannah. “I mean, if you ever thought of taking a leave of absence, or retiring or something like that—not that you’re that age yet—Frederick could be a really ideal person to take over.”

  He could only stare at her.

  “I mean, of course, only if, you know, that sort of thing has been on your mind. Taking a break. Succession. Lineage. You know. Just don’t forget about him. About Frederick. He could really do your job, and still have time left over for his other work.”

  On her way out Hannah looked at his couch. “Is that where you do it?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Fuck them.”

  “What?”

  “All of the desperate people who come looking for work. Is that your casting couch?”

  “This isn’t like that. It’s just a couch.”

  “You didn’t think, when I walked in, that within twenty minutes, if everything went well, you’d have me down on it?”

  Edward couldn’t answer. Was that an option that he’d somehow missed? Two minutes into the interview she was yelling at him about his bias. Was that some deeply veiled flirtation?

  “So you’ve fucked no one there? I’m curious.”

  She didn’t seem curious. She was yawning.

  He looked at the brown couch and thought back, and back, and back. The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location—or, in fact, on any couch ever—was, indeed, zero.

  His phone rang that night and this time he wasn’t going to screw it up. He grabbed his bag and headed over to the high school, alone.

  The roads were quiet, streetlights shining so fiercely the neighborhoods were bright as day. A siren issued into the night, deep and low. He’d never heard this before. The closer he got to the high school, the more the sound became like an engine rather than a siren, rumbling beneath the ground. When he reached the turnoff, he came upon a sea of abandoned cars, doors jacked open, hazards flashing.

  Edward stopped fast. The cars racing behind him closed in, trapping him there. He could do nothing but leave his car and walk, as the others must have done. When the drill was over, it would be one hell of a mess driving out of here, but for now he had to get inside.

  He was one of the first to check in with Sharon, and it seemed she almost smiled at him. She looked strange and excited, her face glazed. Maybe he could show her that last night was a fluke.

  From across the gymnasium he watched Hannah’s settlement grow, waiting for a sign of his parents. Now that he had checked in, he wasn’t supposed to leave, and since this was a drill, since it didn’t matter, he resolved not to care. Probably his parents hadn’t been called. This was some new thing they were doing, a test of loyalty he would fail no matter how he responded. Anyway, he’d long ago given up trying to understand the me
thods of the workshop. Even if his parents had been called, the phone was broken, and how would they know? It couldn’t matter. But Edward kept looking over to Hannah, even as the gymnasium filled with bundled-up people, and children, and, of all things, animals—smooth, golden dogs—a few of them wandering sleepily across the hardwood floor, moaning. He’d never seen it so crowded. The generator roared over the chaos—something felt different tonight.

  To be fair, he’d had that feeling before. Maybe he always had that feeling. They were good at making you believe that this was the real thing, at last. No matter how false and strange things were, Edward always thought it was smarter, in the end, to believe they were real. You’d better not get caught thinking something was only make-believe.

  Finally, Edward spotted his father joining Hannah’s settlement. He was alone. Hannah waved him in and he vanished into the crowd. The gymnasium lights never switched on and Frederick never appeared to praise and chastise them, to bark strange phrases about a future none of them could imagine. Instead the settlements headed outside to get in line for buses, which were departing from the back field of the school.

  The siren was so loud that when Edward tried to speak nothing came out. Some terrible noise cancellation was at work. Was this intentional, a trick of Frederick’s to keep them from understanding each other? Edward looked at Thom—who was terminally available for eye contact, lying in wait for it—and Thom smiled, giving a thumbs-up. Thom was excited. He’d wanted to leave for years. He was ready to roll. He had no parents, no wife, and it was as if he was waiting to start a new life somewhere else where they weren’t drilling for escape day and night. Unless in their new location, too, wherever in the world that ended up being, they’d have to pretend to leave all the time, just as they’d done here.

  Only one other time had the drill run this long. To Edward, that night seemed like years ago, when the workshop began, when it was just a few worried citizens finally admitting to each other how little they knew of the future. But probably it was only last winter. It was a viciously cold night and they’d waited in this very spot while the buses warmed up. He’d been so scared! But then Frederick’s girlish voice had rung out through a megaphone and everyone had hurried back for their critiques.

  So there was still time. Frederick could call this off and get them back inside.

  As the settlements gathered behind him, headed to separate buses, Edward waited and waited and waited, until finally Hannah approached, and, behind her, her settlement, mostly old-timers from Wellery Heights. He had only a moment for this, but he had to do it. There was nothing in the protocol about it, anyway. The protocol hadn’t been written this far. It was a blank chapter. They’d spoken so much about how after a certain point nothing could be known, and they were right. Edward grabbed his father, who looked startled, and then the two of them opened their mouths soundlessly at each other. They couldn’t hear anything. It was his mother Edward needed to know about. His mother. He shrugged where and he mimed other things, things to indicate his mother, which anyone else from any country in the world, during any kind of crisis, would understand, but it was no use, it was stupid. Or his father was stupid, because he either did not get it or did not want to, smiling dumbly at Edward, reflecting the mime back at him as if it was a game. Finally Edward grabbed his father’s left hand, isolating the ring finger, and held it up to him, tapping on the ring.

  Do you get it now, you stupid old man? Where is she?

  Edward’s father smiled, put his palms together, closed his eyes, and leaned his head against his hands. A universal sign. His mother was home sleeping. His father had left her there asleep, and don’t worry, she was doing fine.

  His mother was asleep, alone, at home. In a city that might soon be empty. She was fine.

  The buses traveled south. Frederick had been wrong about the highway. It was not an ugly variable. It didn’t even present a problem. Was something supposed to shoot out at them from the trees? He was no longer sure what, exactly, he was supposed to fear. In a caravan the buses climbed the on-ramp, entering a freeway that seemed reserved for them alone. They drove for hours. The driver was in radio communication, but otherwise the bus was quiet. Edward sat by himself in a rear seat, staring from the window. At this point, he reasoned, the drill should have been called. They’d done it. They’d proven they could leave quickly, if necessary. But now what? They’d never rehearsed this far, so what on earth could they be testing? Wasn’t it a pain in the ass now that they were so far from home, and how exactly were they going to get back? The buses, of course, could be ordered to turn around. But as the sun started to rise, and as muffins wrapped in brown paper were sent back, along with juice boxes and clear packs of vitamin pills, that didn’t seem so likely.

  During the second day of driving, after he’d slept and woken and then slept a little bit more, he heard a commotion at the front of the bus and the bus steamed and seized and buckled as it started to slow down and pull off the highway.

  Thom slid into the seat next to him.

  “Holy fuck, right?”

  “What happened?” asked Edward, still waking up.

  “Sharon.”

  As the bus lurched to a stop, Edward tried to look, but there were too many people mobbed together.

  “Is she okay?” he asked.

  Thom shook his head. “I don’t think so. She fell out of her seat. All of a sudden. I only got a quick look. But, fuck, man, I think she’s dead.”

  It was a pretty sight. Ten—or was it more—glittering yellow buses pulled over on the side of the highway. Edward’s was the only bus that had discharged its passengers, and this was spoiling a lovely image: ragged, tired travelers wandering up and down the embankment while the passengers from the other buses, from behind darkened glass, looked on. Edward found a soft, dry place to sit. What a drill this was! Something for the record books. In a strange way he was excited for the critique. How would you begin to pick this apart? He wondered, surveying the fleet, which of the buses carried his father. Sharon had been removed, conveyed on a stretcher by some younger fellows, who’d hiked her into the woods and returned already. Without Sharon. Without even the stretcher. They were sharing a thermos down in the grass. One of them sang something. Edward wasn’t sure what the holdup was now, even while Frederick and some others, including the mayor, huddled in conference down in the shadow of the last bus.

  It wasn’t long before a signal was given and the buses revved up again. Edward stood and joined the orderly line his settlement had formed to board their bus, but the door didn’t open and their driver never appeared. Where was he, and who was supposed to drive them now?

  Frederick and his crew had already boarded their buses. One by one the other buses wheezed into motion, crawling from the side of the road to join the highway. His neighbors reacted differently to the situation that dawned on them, but Edward stood out on the shoulder to watch. Of course the windows of the buses were dark, so he couldn’t see, but in one of them, perhaps pressed against the glass, perhaps waving at him this very moment, waving hello and, of course, good-bye, was his father. So Edward, just in case, raised his own hand, too. Raised it and waved—thinking, Good-bye, Dad, at least for now—as the other buses built up speed down the highway and disappeared from sight, leaving the rest of them alone in the grass by the side of the road.

  The Father Costume

  My father’s costumes were gray and long and of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see through, though there was no reason to look too closely at that man’s body. He preferred not to move. He was not one for excursions. My brother and I accomplished most of the required motion for him: we collected and described the daily food, oiled the Costume Gun, gathered yarn each morning after a storm, and donated any leftover swatches of fabric into our mother’s kill hole out on the back platform.

  My father threw handfuls of our mother’s fabrics in the morning and studied how they fell, diagrams in cloth that could have meant anything. His
body was hunched and foreign. He grimaced with each gesture, his face often decorated with cotton bracings. When the disarray proved baffling to him, he brought in my brother for consultations. I sat on the bench and watched them crouch at their work. I could not read fabric. I had a language problem. My brother spoke a language called Forecast. It consisted of sounds he barked into a stippled leather box. When my father wrapped my brother’s hands in cotton waffling, my brother could tap out a low-altitude language on the floor, short thuds of speech that my father held his listening jar to. On those evenings when the sky was stretched too tight and the birds struck against it like pebbles on our roof, my brother slept off his Forecast expulsions in a sling hanging from our door. He cried softly inside his mesh bag while I dotted our windowsills with listening utensils, in case a message came in the night.

  It would be so nice to think that a boat was not involved, that instead we lugged our things overland in wagons. At least overland we might have been sighted from the air. We would at least have not encountered so many empty platforms, floating alone at sea. My father might have been less tempted to perform so many jettisons.

  If I could choose, I would picture my family stopping for small circles of bread in a safe location by a lake. Trapdoors would be carved into the soil there. We would spread our blankets and curtsy down to the food. I would send my father out on a scouting mission while my brother and I ate our bread. He would return to us with a bag of sharp utensils, his mouth sore and bleeding. He would report of mountains in the distance, a possible road. If I could control the outcome, we would not have believed him as he stood there telling his story. We would have remained near the safety of the lake, performing elaborate superstitions under cloth. My brother and I would have attacked my father with chopping motions until he had been silenced. Keeping maybe some of his hair, just in case. Keeping his costume, should we need to become him one day. When the time came. When my father’s space was hollow enough for another body, possibly one of our own, to fit into it.