Leaving the Sea: Stories

by Marcus, Ben

  He shot a look around the Moors because this was the kind of thought that would seem so, who knows, detectable. You don’t just think something like that and not show the whole known world what you’re made of. These thoughts steam off of your head, they’re inhaled by everyone around you. He knew that they weren’t Jews, and yet, calling up in his mind the sweaty-headed figurines who passed for his co-employees, the people who might meatily regard him if he ever held the floor (in the contest that had come to be known as Speak Well or Be Killed) and served up a passable, even yeoman performance, he wished he had the sort of acquaintances who would swallow this whole: pretending that the Sooners were Jews and that the Jews had a head start on the Homestead Act, tearing through the dust bowl and planting flags, erecting shtetls, bursting with song as the sun went down on the freaking veld. Was it a veld then, or did velds come later, or from elsewhere?

  Standing in the Moors, the whole image—people, his people? stampeding over unclaimed land, a thunder of Jews—turned oily in his head, and it was good riddance. Acquaintances were precisely the people who cold-warred you when you ventured something borderline. This wasn’t Jew hating, he protested to no one, this was Jew loving, loving the Jew so heartily that you sent him into the past to accomplish great things and save lives. Go forward, or backward, young Jew! But tell that to the acquaintances. Acquaintances operated a bellows that blew over you a cloud of reeking air. To the Jews he knew, Thomas was not really Jewish, and yet to the non-Jews he sure as hell was as Jewish as it ever could possibly get. He had pegged the needle. What was this zone of belongingness called, other than stage three alienation? In their minds, the non-Jews bearded Thomas and gowned him and maybe also had their disgusting way with him on an old abandoned couch in the desert. How many times had others imagined killing him, he wondered, and was there possibly a critical mass at work, where technical death occurred if your death was dreamed of by enough people? Had this colleague killed Thomas in her mind? Chances were. Or who knew, but couldn’t the possibility of his wished-for death account in some way for the unusually cold, blue, rigid way he felt? You’re killing me, he wanted to say to her. In your mind, I can feel it.

  The building shuddered and, for a blinding second, the Moors went dark. Bedtime, thought Thomas. Thank God. A sharp hiss snapped the lights back on and in the strange glare a smell came to him, something far off, like a person being cooked. He blinked into the brightness, rubbed his face, and looked again at the perfectly composed colleague. A bloodbath wouldn’t get her attention, and perhaps this was the top secret these people shared: They were dead as stones and the world could pour over their cold bodies, but to hell if they’d ever notice.

  It was time to push on. Something wasn’t so superfine out there, and the Moors didn’t seem like the very best place to be.

  Thomas met the newly vacant hole in the Moors—the colleague hole—by invoking the insect strategy of progress. He inched forward, ever so carefully, with small dips in reverse, as if he was apologizing backward while steadily gaining ground, an orbit calculated to look like nothing was being achieved. He entered the colleague’s shadow, and even though it was not a real shadow but a dark spill at her feet, as if something awful had flushed from a bag attached to her waist, it was her shadow nonetheless and Thomas was gaining ground. How to get ahead at work: Pretend you’re moving backward. How to get fat: Swallow your own laughter. This was how his parents used to dance, shying away from each other as if to say: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  So it was that he inched into her shadow, and suddenly the air was cool and clean and he found himself breathing in fast little gulping thrills. Had anything more intensely dramatic happened ever?

  This is real life, folks, Thomas wanted to say. Make no mistake, it is on!

  As strategic as Thomas was, the colleague seemed to be choosing that other, uh, unexamined path, and even though she must have smelled and sensed and very nearly goddamn tasted Thomas, she trilled about indifferently and took, if it was possible, even less notice of the ridiculously fine gentleman nearly riding inside her clothing. Do I have to become you, he wanted to ask, for you to notice me? The liberty she took, to effuse in his presence—the simmering pleasure fountain within the colleague that she’d turned up to full—was, what was the word, problematic. Because if indeed a person only succumbs to such biological gurglings alone, she clearly did not yet know he was there, or couldn’t accord him the status of the present. And yet he was living pretty hard not three feet away from her. Was this kind of omission seriously within her power? Was he meant to actually embrace her in order to prove his existence?

  Thomas backed away. This sally would be recalled. Her smell, her climate, the so-called sphere of the colleague was too much. Doesn’t one break into pieces in such an atmosphere? There were laws to be invoked, certainly, yet the fuck if he knew what they were. Perhaps that’s what anyone’s personal smell ultimately was: the residue of the people who had shipwrecked against them. Thomas felt he would get sick on the colleague’s past if he stayed too near. This wasn’t worth it, he knew, and he looked at the sad space he’d have to crawl through to get back to his desk, without his rotten coffee, the doorway that had never before delivered such unequivocal disease to his person before. Was this doorway number freaking one, and was there any possible glory behind it?

  The fundamental difference between Thomas and the colleague, a difference in their mistake management protocol, heh heh, was that the colleague was smiling through this disaster (he could tell this even from the back of her head), dipping and dodging and spewing happiness like a strange machine designed to broadcast cheerful moods to people who weren’t sure what to feel. A mood Sherpa. What would you like to feel today, little sir?

  Whereas Thomas, well, he was showing a medium-high capacity for colossal not-so-greatness. He looked around and saw just walls of nothing, smelled the burned body smell, and had to restrain himself from trying to chew his way out of the air. He had to remind himself as he held his ground behind the colleague—wait quietly for your coffee, little sir!—that there was still—thank God—a barrier between his thoughts and the world, and that people could not look at his disheveled, sea-bloated fatitude, his pilled attire that had been washed into sheer roughage, the extra fat mounded on the backs of his hands—in case I have to eat myself someday—and have any blessed idea of his, uh, special thoughts, as such. There was, as yet, no tool to read into the clot of his head, and if he grimaced or smirked or grinned or just looked as shit-crazed as he absolutely, in some objective sense, was, there was no proof of the inside material, and this was sufficient and soothing negation to the chance that a disclosure was occurring without his knowledge.

  Things were calming down. This was good. The mistaken shadow invasion, the day the colleague’s shadow was breached, was now strictly archival, stored for the crowd who would watch this on video someday. Would it be called Mishaps at the Moors? The Day My Ship Caved In? I, Colleague? What a shrill little bit of drama that had been loosed into the labs, but for nothing, and Thomas looked around for someone to blame. This was pretty basic. Things were okay. The colleague would get her coffee. Thomas would wait his turn, like a good little sir. One by one, events in a divine order would bleed into the day. A little seepage of correctitude, that’s all. The noon hour would bring its dose of calm. Thomas would nod at the colleague as she passed him, a weary but confident nod like one of thousands he gifted to people every week. Some mastery would be inferred. A vague suggestion that usually someone would have stood the line for Thomas to get a coffee, but today, why not, let’s see what the regular people do, let’s build empathy. Oh, who knows, maybe Thomas and the colleague would embrace before she departed the Moors. She’d have to find somewhere to put her coffee, though, or else he’d feel that hot mug on his back and their contact would be queered. There’d be too much caution, and what kind of embrace was that? So there were things to work out, details to finalize. But this would be fine.

>   Perhaps, if he was lucky, if he survived this test, which is certainly what it was, his heart wouldn’t blow out of his chest into the Idea Wall that loomed above the beverage cart. Maybe that was the real meaning of the term redshift, thrown endlessly over his head during proof-of-concept meetings: a noiseless exit of the heart from the dehydrated and fat body of a man who was…Why bother finishing the thought. Poof. He could hear the sound his heart would make being sucked clean from its cage of bone and fat. Wasn’t this the time when properly prepared people had some fatherly advice they could squeeze from their pasts to help them fire hose the crisis, so they could roar with laughter, drink a stein of thick foreign beer, and do something unspeakably gratifying in the backwoods to a small animal? Because every so often it feels good to tear a hot warm thing to pieces. The things our parents taught us, those sage lessons from the older set, or something. Father always said…but nothing came to him. He cast around in his background, in his memories, in the finer sayings his parents had condescended to share with him, but it felt like he was sticking his hand in a tank of rotted fish.

  If he nailed his own head to the Idea Wall, precisely what, uh, idea would he be conveying?

  Another bag—or whatever the awful thing was—dropped outside, and Thomas realized he wasn’t breathing. A sweet shroud of silence had hazed up moments before the thud, or the crunch, or whatever the name was when something made of flesh hit the asphalt with the acoustical resistance of canvas. In hindsight you always knew you heard something falling, it was sort of what you didn’t hear, thought Thomas. He wanted to joke about this, but all he could come up with was hindsight is…not funny. There was a strangled cry after the thud, and he saw too little of the colleague’s face to tell if she was registering this, the hurt, the crunch, the goddamn sound track of cruelty that somehow was getting piped into the lab and that was meant to let them know it was noon.

  Oh, right, he thought. This was one of those times when only fat men named Thomas were privileged to hear death sounds. Some special access was in play, but it didn’t feel exactly, uh, special. Times like these were Punishment Invention times. Thomas saw himself later that night, or as soon as he could square away the details and complete the domestic schedule with June and the child, sitting in a chair at home, pounding one of his hands with a mallet until it finally stopped bleeding and became smeared into the upholstery like gum. The goal was to move beyond the obvious and stereotypical pain of such, uh, appendage hammering, into the prolonged sweetness that came when one’s very nerve endings were doted on until they saw light and air for the first time. That will teach me, he thought. That will show me not to stand up and do anything or go anywhere. Next time you’ll think twice before being alive!

  The colleague, no doubt, was not a connoisseur of the self-punishment, sad to think. This type of hygiene was foreign to her, no doubt. How did one even fraternize with people who could not entertain vivid scenarios of self-mutilation? How was the sexual act even possible if one’s partner could not entertain being crushed under a truck, even as a cathartic exercise?

  What important piece of her brain was missing that deprived her of such, well, deeply necessary acts of physical editing?

  The colleague powered on at the coffee cart, doing God knows what. From behind she appeared like a giant storybook girl at a table of mind-blowing presents. It was amazing how a teaspoon of professional rank authorized people to dance in your face and publish their happiness with such free dispatch. Thomas guessed that this colleague was an associate something or other. If one day you weren’t hourly but salaried, suddenly you radiated joy like one of those children about whom it was politely said had yet to come into their own in terms of, uh, showing signs of an inner life. Stupid but happy was how he always saw it, as if there was a difference, and why not, since part of their brains had been sucked free with a crazy straw and everyone pretended the obvious imbecility was some kind of prototype maverick behavior not yet ratified by the schools. The goddamn careful language they used about kids who drooled in a puddle on the floor. And then to have an adult, the superior colleague, channeling this moronia, a kind of spokesperson for failure to thrive, even inside her smart pantsuit, which could only accomplish so much mitigation of the, the—he wanted to whisper the word out loud, stage-whisper it—so much mitigation of the retarded. The word should be spat, he thought, and spat at her, but that wasn’t going to quite convey what he was thinking, was it, and her formal attire was confusing things anyway. Pantsuit as softener of cretinism. Perhaps that was the solution to the clods of the world. Dress them up in business attire. Had she studied that behavior at a conservatory?

  Thinking this through, watching the colleague attend to her beverage like it was her final act of love, Thomas wished he could say to himself that he’d reached his limit, that it was too much and so and so, and how could he ever, and oh my (the kind of language he loved to hobby with in private, in soliloquies of indignation), but he regularly found himself capable of bearing ever greater insults and grievances, as if he possessed a sort of highly stretchable orifice through which the transgressions of others readily flowed. He marveled at his tolerance for precisely this kind of massacre. He wanted to bow to the power of the colleague, a lady who could stay in character under even the most extreme forms of pressure. There was a fish he recalled with such accommodating features, a blobby kind that simply ate the mistakes of the sea, and yet he knew there was some kind of virtue, ecologically, to what this fish did. Or didn’t there have to be something good here?

  When a species disfigures itself in order to conceal a conflict from its mate, turning itself inside out and soaking deeply in the toxins of a terrible dilemma, all the while shielding a loved one from a crisis, that’s called…Oh, who fucking knows?

  This would be his role, and all blessings to the clarity that afforded. Thomas, meet Thomas, he wanted to say: You two should make love tonight. He did not enjoy, at least not fully or not without some regret, picturing himself getting bottomly impaled, but he worked these pictures up in any case, and they were among the more vivid of what he called his mule cartoons. Thomas as mule to the competent, confident, attractive overachievers, with a few middling stragglers as well, who might be surprised to learn that they had been cast as, well, as rapists, really, in Thomas’s overworked scenario machine, humping him until he wept, breaking him in half, drop-kicking him off a roof. They shucked his pants and stepped up to his area and they repeatedly defiled him. They shot him, they dumped him in the sea, they led him to alleys where they dug holes and sometimes scraped what was left of him into a pit.

  There was an oeuvre of material in these mule cartoons, but no clear way to render it down so others could see it. How did one share such imaginings? Thinking himself dead was his special skill, he knew, and maybe the antidote was not to feature his own feelings so heavily, to accord them meaning and weight, since they didn’t officially matter (now there was a bit of parental advice he could juice: “No one has to know what you’re thinking,” a chestnut shared once by his mother after Thomas experimented with an afternoon silence project during what he called his junior year at home), because in abstract terms what was so wrong with chancing into a coworker at the coffee cart—Hi there, Colleague! some finer version of Thomas might say—and, who knows, sharing a pretty intense bit of quickfire, meant to flush the groins with blood, misting a bit of sex into the air? There were worse places to meet, and couldn’t the coffee cart be the best location to lay waste to the awkwardness that interfered whenever Thomas began to smell the possibility of the good, craven congress with unhospitalized women the world had yet to fully pay him?

  Never mind the logistics that would make such, hmm, congress unlikely. They were at work, they were fully dressed, they did not specifically know each other, they could not exactly go to his house, because even if Juney wouldn’t notice, well, the nurse certainly would. Now, if the colleague were hidden in a sack, for instance, and he lugged her into the house, the nurse
would have to personally check the sack, which she would not, and Thomas might then wait for her to depart before releasing the colleague from the sack and, if necessary, working to revive her.

  None of this would be very, ha ha, collegial, though, would it?

  The coffee flushed into the colleague’s mug with the violence of an industrial toilet, and then she pivoted to the fixings table. It was a nimble move, adorned with a sweet little grace note that impressed Thomas. She was, in her way, sort of elegant, and the gesture suggested that even late in life they could have sex standing up against the closet door. Was there an overture here? A dip of her shoulder and a slight tilt in the hips, like a kind of curtsy. It was customary, of course, to respond to such flirtation. One flirted back. One did not look cross or bothered, and one certainly didn’t pretend not to notice that a clear message had been sent, because that suggested a radar-deficient head, a head rotted out and insensate. Not me. Not my head. He would be alive to the possibilities here. These were bridge gestures from the colleague. They resonated with aching desire. Or if they did not, they should, which is what mattered from a legal perspective, and he could now safely argue that she initiated the intimacy, sir. Was there a pose he could strike, so he might reflect his desire back to her and perhaps boost the abstract flirtation into actual congress? A conversion tool was needed. Somewhere a book might instruct him how to flip his mood and adapt. How quickly could a person, without having a stroke, shift from a feverish state of vicious resentment to a soft and vulnerable romantic coquetry?

  Underfoot was a carpet the color of absolutely nothing, and in any case Thomas too often found that the shoe-gazing posture—staring at your feet and lost in thought—was a glistening invite to be questioned and entreated or otherwise involved in something quite outside the bounds of one’s reasonable and well-earned solitude. Hang that shingle and be fucked, he knew. He would not be caught staring at his feet, and the busy nature of the colleague—the weevil show she had chosen to stage—gave him a perfect spectacle to rubberneck. If he was being watched—if?—then he could aver to the instincts of that short-haired, single-toothed animal he had read about, whose eyes will follow motion and color, which was bursting in front of him and which he’d be a fool to ignore (not because what the woman was doing was even remotely interesting, but because to overlook the frenzy would seem highly suspicious and, to repeat a phrase from the quarterly review of his performance at work, dangerously insular).