Leaving the Sea: Stories

by Marcus, Ben

  No doubt there were cool loaves of data on a server somewhere devoted to the subject of architectural annihilation, and the theory was clearly infallible, Thomas thought, lumbering after the colleague, who was bouncing out of sight at the end of the hallway. Yet anyone who likened a building to a coffin, anyone who went public with what every known human in the world already totally accepted to be true, was officially considered an asshole.

  Of course, the Moors must have been built to enable the kind of productivity that architects fantasized about while at work in their hoteliers—whatever those studios were called—where their young assistants, wearing T-shirts and no pants, rendered drawings, bound by contract, by the apprentice’s promise, to relieve impediments to their masters’ creativity. The Moors was probably meant to be a place where people would be thinking and performing at their best, why not, a blueprint premised on the belief that the actual people who would seize this space for their displays of high-performance creativity would not be defeated, tired, unattractive, and sad. Excepting our friend the colleague, of course. Immune to space. Sad-proofed. The Moors was designed for people who couldn’t be bothered to die on time. Architects don’t make buildings for people who are a bloody mess, just soup, really, because then there’d be no buildings, just tureens. Had there been a dissertation on that? Whose fat brother wanted to take that one on? Tenure fucking awaits. Vats would be trucked in from the factories, into which the people would be poured. Architects have somehow gotten away with thinking that people are not already technically dead, dead beyond repair, according to the accepted measurements, while really they are sloshing inside their clothing, walking spills. It is their first mistake, Thomas thought: believing they are not building coffins. Why weren’t architects simply called coffin makers?

  This week there had so far been no birds, but birds would have seemed a mercy compared to the unknowable bundle of something breakable that had replaced them. Instead, the civic timekeeping strategy this week seemed to be a sickly wet thud that shook the entire building, bringing down a sudden hush on the analysis suite at Crawford Labs each time, as though a sack of something, something capable of feeling great pain, Thomas was certain, had plunged down outside, landing badly with what sounded like a sharp moan of grief. Each time he looked to the window today he saw nothing and heard nothing, and if his colleagues met his glance when he sought some kind of communion over this, uh, he wasn’t sure what to call it, they dragged their faces toward him with theatrical fatigue, as if he were a janitor coming to remove their trash: guilt, gratitude, and disgust smoking from their heads. He had taken a night course once and in the minor educational residue that remained he knew there was a word for when a group of people collectively ignored someone’s pain. A very fine word. Even the bland, bread-shaped people in his office, remarkably, had the higher functions of cruelty available to them and could serve up chilling displays of indifference. But whatever that term was for such a moral crime, it was fuzzed out now. Not that having the name for it would really help.

  Thomas walked into the bright flat space, just steps after the colleague, and put his hand to his mouth. There was always this terrible adjustment. The smell was not of coffee so much as a burnt limb. Who knew what got cooked and killed here every night. Somewhere, no doubt, there was footage. This, then, was the Moors, a death space stained in beige, with a lone coffee cart, like a Tudor spacecraft, stuck into the floor. Windows, no sir. Doors, no sir. Octagonal space, check. Or, actually, maybe some other number of walls, one of them, if this was possible, slightly lower than the others: It wasn’t a four-sided room, that was for sure. He had done his romantic time in trick rooms; it was one of his favorite dates with June long ago, but this one fell short of the kind of optical illusions that gave you mild diarrhea or freaked you out or, for some reason, brought out the horn dog. The distorted low wall in the Moors felt more like a mistake, after the fact, and maybe now the Moors was only a trick room for people like him, with overfed faces and eyes so tired that everything they saw seemed crushed, shrunken, and slightly moist. Every room is a fun house if your face is broken.

  He uncovered his mouth and cautiously sampled the air, expecting for a moment to pass out. Ahead of him the colleague slowed, and Thomas nursed the doorway, sipping little breaths with the spazzy orbit of an insect. He was wary of thresholds—some ungodly number of people got their shit handed to them in thresholds—and certainly he had not hovered about at the foot of the Moors like this before, because he had his ways of determining the area was empty before committing himself to the journey (what idiot didn’t?).

  Thomas looked at the fine-suited shoulders of the colleague and wanted to write RIP on her back. It was clear that the designers of the Moors hoped its occupants would die spectacular deaths, and Thomas marveled that the colleague had somehow not spent her good cheer already and been roundly undone by the room. Generally, the people who returned from their adventure to the coffee cart, fitted with beverages, looked gray and dry and past all feeling, even if they had entered the area with a sexual glow, with good ambulation and overly publicized happiness. The most rigorous denial, not that he partook, was brought to its knees in this place. Let’s see the colleague not die a thousand little deaths, starting right now. Thomas found that if he had fountain or specimen work he could sit and watch his colleagues coming out of the Moors, and the experience felt similar to watching a chain of prisoners of war, the kind who had been sucked clean of life and now just shuffled in ill-fitting skin, beyond even any kind of animating pain.

  The colleague, however, seemed shielded from the preordained defeat of the Moors. She swung her mug, and in her carriage was the simplistic bliss of a feeder before the great table of some famous god. She seemed to be indulging a moment of choice, and deep sighs of pleasure gusted from her chest, which from behind seemed to Thomas as though a soft wall was breathing. A soft wall swollen with something almost unbearably luscious underneath. Was that an okay thought to have? Hello, soft wall, he wanted to say. I love you.

  This mug had been waved in his face before, too, and there was perhaps no other piece of pottery in the region used to draw so much rebuke from its witnesses. The colleague whirled it in such loops it seemed she was winding up to hurl it against the wall. And perhaps that would be fitting. Someone’s child had been wrongfully praised for making this mug, and now someone was rigorously putting it to use at work, actually drinking from it, to prove that taste, style, fashion, sense, and even logic itself—the holy quinitude of scrutiny—could be easily dismissed when it came to the astonishing achievements of children.

  Thomas took in the baked, lumpy mess of it as it swung back and forth. What kind of monster couldn’t outright love a mug like that, love it without conditions, love it fully, and maybe, who knows, ejaculate on it out of joy? Are you that despicable? he asked himself silently in a booming voice his father might have adopted when he played the barrister in one of his cringing bouts of summer stage (a reminder arose that he should like to issue to everyone: Never watch your father perform in a play), that you must actually assess this mug with your full adult faculties as if you were a critic? Is there a power surge available to you when you cut down a child? Fine to be a gatekeeper of the fabricated objects of the world produced by lady and gentleman artisans, a mediator of value, as such, but this is a mug shaped by a child, for God’s sake, and what exactly is proven by its dismissal other than high and selfish pettiness, a deep insecurity, and a compulsive desire to alienate anyone in your blast radius?

  The rhetoric flowed easily as Thomas silently attacked himself on the colleague’s behalf, and it was not entirely unpleasant to take on such an easy target, to hector from such a fixed moral point, even as he gazed at the grotesque mug swinging in front of him, rimed with lip junk and who knows what else. Chuff and bilge from the mouth. Speech powder. He puffed and tilted and half wished the colleague would turn around and notice him already, since there was something gallant flooding up. Thomas the Brave
, defender of children, appearing now in the Moors, ladies and gentleman. Wouldn’t she, in some way, have to admire this, his sticking up for her kid? If only she knew my thoughts she would take her pants off. My thoughts should count for something.

  She did not turn around. Willing it with his mind only seemed to make him tired. Thomas surveyed the brown wool length of her as she surveyed the coffee cart, and there was something sorrowful in how undefended she was, at least from this angle. People do not prepare for how they’ll be seen from behind, he thought, and it seemed decidedly unfair, if fairness still had any currency, that anyone could gain such a supreme advantage simply by taking up the rear and looking at a bodily territory that had in no way been readied for this sort of discerning view. Hello, my name is Thomas and I have seen you from behind. I have been granted the lion’s share of what there is to be known here. The colleague had no doubt poured vast resources into the project of her appearance—she was a prim and sharp little project of a person—but had spectacularly failed to engineer a posterior perspective.

  To some degree, there was something inhuman about her from this angle, the Thomas angle. But when he thought about it, the term inhuman seemed wrong, however enjoyable it was to use. I stood at the Moors with the inhuman colleague. That sounded rather fine. It was evening, and I carried the inhuman colleague up the stairs to my rooms. In truth, this vantage, revealing the colleague’s disheveled back body, showed Thomas a part of the human that he must admit he felt no particular fondness for: the weak, sad, unnoticed part—keep your sadness under a rock, you sweet-boned colleague!—that could not be properly shielded by clothing. The great failing of the fashion industry. Clothiers, where are your geniuses of disguise? Posturally the colleague showed no sign (this wasn’t a poker face she had so much as a poker body) that she knew some kind of serious assessment of her was under way, but indifference was a subterfuge, of course, and what could she gain, Thomas wondered, by revealing her worry? What did one ever gain? People prep themselves, if they prep themselves at all, in the front and, at most, glance over their shoulders at the mirror to see the grotesque calamity of their backsides, which become pulled long, pulled so terribly long, from the contortion. Should not a person of the colleague’s rank and stature have in her employ an assistant, a perspective manager (bring back the architect’s apprentice!), who might engineer many different views of her, so that her power and clout would not be so easily undermined if someone happened to see her out in the open like this, unprotected, completely vulnerable and, well—Thomas paused and looked around the Moors, wishing someone could appreciate the dramatic pause—killable? He spilled an ugly little laugh at the colleague and swiped at the air as if to erase it. I will be your backside witness, he wanted to whisper. I will see the sorrowful view. Send me, Thomas, first into the sad space. Because what good was the colleague’s power if she could not hide how desolate, nomadic, and freshly assaulted she looked from behind?

  But there was no hiding in the Moors, and didn’t he know it. The sole bit of shelter was the beverage cart itself, fashioned to look like a house—a Tudor with chalk-plaster walls and splintered beams painted even darker to appear waterlogged, or possibly to suggest a more authentic species of wood, with predrilled wormholes and hand-painted knots and other calibrated imperfections that someone, somewhere had labored over—a chalk outline of a dead person appeared in Thomas’s mind. As fussy as the cart was, Thomas had never seen it tended to, filled or emptied, adjusted. And the design strategy—a Tudor house pumping coffee by the barrel—always did something sour to his mood. Depressed seemed too strong a word—he was saving this word for something really special—and yet something awful did well up in him when he visited the Tudor, even alone, when it was safe, and not being poisoned by a colleague. Because since when was a Tudor house a place to retrieve coffee? Precisely what historical narrative was being trotted out? Would it not be more apt if it was a beheading station, complete with guillotine? Other than the atmosphere of coziness a Tudor supposedly conveyed, which was predicated on one’s being able to hurl up a foreign language with the red-faced inhabitants whose hands were boiled and fat and who probably stank of vinegar, the cart had wheels and offered dehydrating beverages from a stout, flesh-colored spigot punched into its fake wall. If that was one of the mandatory fairy tales barked at the children of his generation—a house is really a sack of hot fluid on wheels, in which a giant, perhaps, swims—then he’d missed it growing up. Shouldn’t the coffee cart have skins, or, what were they called: peelable facades? A seasonal surface was needed, to mottle and fade and turn gray, only to slowly fill with blood, to pulse and throb, to maybe even bleed slightly onto your hands when you touched it. That would be a worthy coffee cart. A life-form in the Moors, with a dark leak of coffee. I would drink death water out of that item, thought Thomas. A thousand percent for sure.

  It was late morning and the air in the Moors might as well have been brown. Soon there would be seizures of lunching erupting in the soft spots, bursts of solitary and group eaters from Crawford, their faces glazed with fatigue. Chances were that some colleagues would flood the Moors with their wilderness sounds and smells, blocking Thomas’s path back to his desk. Which meant that Thomas was pinned down, in military terms, between the Moors and his work space. Hadn’t he read that there were always nine ways to escape a trap? Was it nine? Did they all involve death, or was it just most of them? Maybe this had only been in a novel, though. Someone had dreamed this into being—Nine Ways to Escape Anything—and now people like Thomas had to suffer by wishing it was true. What good did that do anyone?

  Just then the colleague stepped to the cart with a little squeal of pleasure, and Thomas felt nearly sucked into the space she had vacated. Her special noise—colleague noise number nineteen, probably—was the workaday exhaust of a body in search of drink, the kind of natural acoustic shedding that apparently emanates from people when they pursue their biological needs alone. It is only in company—Look out, shame!—that we become quiet. Not so the colleague, whose chirping whoop could be, if Thomas only had the technique and speed, rejoined with some equally guttural and possibly joyous chest noise.

  Thomas had to wonder if this was how it worked in zoos, when a gang of beasts was suddenly shrieking together, dry humping the scratching post, doing flips around the pen. As a boy, standing in front of the oval domes that held such gorgeous creatures, Thomas always felt that the animals had noticed him and were calling him out, in their berserk fashion, and it didn’t seem to be his imagination that the shrieking subsided into hushed tones of relief when he walked away from them. Such power he had. He used to give the matter a lot of thought, because there was time then to worry about how much he sickened those who saw him, and on his most rational days it was clear that his body itself was triggering a frenzy in animals and humans alike, with removal the only solution to hand. I’m walking away so that you might calm down, which was something, come to think of it, he often had to say to his own child in present times. But elsewhere, when he indulged the need to argue for his own survival, he had to concede that there was a chance, however slight, that the animals, in shrieking and howling and tearing at their own skins, were, in their special way, approving of him, welcoming him, possibly even inviting him into their midst. Was this another missed opportunity he was supposed to be worrying about now?

  No one was waiting behind him in the Moors, so the protocol now was unclear. If he moved forward to fill the colleague’s space, advancing in the queue, not that there was legitimately a queue, it would leverage direct pressure on the colleague, encouraging haste and reminding her that someone else loomed. He thought of those times in banks when he walked into the lobby and people seemed suspended in place, as though they had forgotten what they were doing. My friends, the puppets, he wanted to say. These people were not clearly in a line, though, nor were they distant enough from the line to seem unaffiliated with it. Menacing business. Artists of affiliation, they should be called. It took
talent to make everyone around you start to worry and second-guess their most basic goals. (He saw himself—handsomer, thinner, slightly girlish—at a podium, holding an audience of animals in thrall with his lecture: In my work, I explore the confusion that results when physical-proximity laws are stretched beyond the breaking point. I seek to destabilize normative pedestrian traffic and queuing strategies by engaging unresolved coordinates with my physical form and holding fucking fast until someone wants to kill me. The setting for this work is the bank or the store, our shared spaces, where I will cause people to ask fundamental questions about my coordinates.) These hovering people required to be questioned on the matter; they were asking to be addressed—ask me where I stand!—and Thomas knew that, no matter what, he did not want to be questioned on this or really any other matter. A credo! Fend off inquiry. How much simpler could it be? One’s actions should prevent all approaches. Why weren’t there needlepoint frames for that?

  How soon could Thomas move after the colleague moved, and would that not trigger a complaint on her part? I have the right not to be imitated. Behavioral goddamn copyright, right? Yet he was distant enough from the cart, if he didn’t shadow the colleague, and indeed from anything in the Moors, that it might appear to a newcomer—please God forbid there ever be a newcomer—death to the newcomer!—that he was not waiting in line, but loitering in the center of the Moors with some arcane religious purpose in mind. Or not even arcane. This is a man, others might argue, who is about to sacrifice a child on a pyre. Grab him now before he strikes his match.

  Unclaimed space might have been making this worse. The Moors had never developed a specific use by the lab, which was funny when you thought of it, since wasn’t every cubicle acre everywhere else at Crawford Labs fought over by every spazmodia he worked with? They were like Sooners, or Okies, or…Thomas paused as a smile flushed into his face, the sort of smile that required a hand to squeeze down…Jews.