World Gone Water

by Jaime Clarke

  World Gone Water

  Jaime Clarke

  For my son—

  and for yours

  And if everything is so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse alone?

  —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

  Contents

  Sonoran Rehabilitation Center Entrance Essay

  Exit Interview Report

  Jane

  Sunday

  Essay #1: A Proper Introduction

  Most Likely To

  Aztecka

  Monday

  Essay #2: I Touch Clouds

  From the Deep End

  Essay #3: An Ideal Day Sometime in the Near Future

  Tuesday

  Journal #1

  Wednesday

  Journal #2

  Essay #4: Amends

  We Finish Nice Guys

  Journal #3

  I’m Good for One More

  Journal #4

  Essay #5: Affection

  Thursday

  Essay #6: My First Time

  For a Good Time Just Call

  Journal #5

  I Take Jane on a Hot-Air Balloon Ride

  Journal #6

  Friday

  Friday Night

  Essay #7: The End of Utopia

  Added Up

  Journal #7

  I Give a Handout

  Best Man

  Saving Room for Dessert

  Sylphs

  Essay #8: Free Topic—Impropriety

  Better Man

  Journal #8

  Ceremony

  Essay #9: A Nightmarish Day

  I Give a Lift

  Journal #9

  A Friend of the Groom’s

  A Romantic Interlude

  World Gone Water

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Praise for World Gone Water

  Also by Jaime Clarke

  Sonoran Rehabilitation Center Entrance Essay

  Why I’m Here

  Charlie Martens

  I am not a good person. I don’t need anyone to tell me that I am not a model citizen. People can always improve and I want to be a better person. I want what better people have. In my own defense, though, I do have moments when I reach up and brush my fingers on the brass ring of kindness, charity, and compassion.

  In further defense of myself, I have to say that I am principally proud of who I am, proud that I have navigated so well with what some have called a faulty compass. Before anyone in here judges me, or starts an intense investigation into who I am, first you have to come to grips with the following ten ideas:

  1. I am not a son of privilege, yet I am not an orphan of poverty.

  2. I do not hold degrees from institutions of higher learning.

  3. I am not handsome enough to operate on looks alone.

  4. I have no family traditions.

  5. I have the same dreams everyone else has, dreams whose origins are in the common myths of our time.

  6. I am easygoing but will sometimes tend toward violence, if provoked.

  7. I believe in equality.

  8. I am a protector of those things in life that are smaller and weaker than I am.

  9. I can’t stand ignorance, idiocy, or intolerant behavior.

  10. People talk about me in terms of sweetness and charm.

  I don’t pretend that these ten ideas define me, but they help you get a better view from where you are, looking down on me. The view from here is not one of looking up, I assure you, but merely looking out.

  An eleventh idea is that I do not judge people.

  If you want to know how far I’ve come, you have to understand what I’ve overcome. I don’t just see things, I feel them. You can blame a fascination with appearance and how things seem on any modern thing you like. I did. But I didn’t find any answers in blame, and maybe the only truth I know is this: You have to feel something to understand it.

  You ask me why I’m here, and I’ll tell you that I’m here to feel my way further into the world. I haven’t been remanded to your custody. I simply took Detective Rodriguez’s advice. Your only job is not to judge me based on what you see.

  Exit Interview Report

  I, Jane Ramsey, in my capacity as a clinical psychologist employed by Sonoran Rehabilitation Center, located in Maricopa County, Arizona, do hereby swear that this exit interview report contains my personal evaluation of Charlie Martens. This exit interview is being conducted after the completion of Mr. Martens’s voluntary nine-month stay.

  STATEMENT OF FACTS: Mr. Martens was a person of interest in a sexual assault investigation in the state of Florida, though he was never charged due to the unreliability and ultimate disappearance of the accuser. On the recommendation of Detective Florio Rodriguez of the Boca Raton Police Department, Mr. Martens enrolled in SRC. Upon his successful treatment, Jay Stanton Buckley has guaranteed Mr. Martens’s position as a functioning member of society, gainfully employed by Buckley Cosmetics in a public relations capacity.

  TREATMENT: Mr. Martens participated in every aspect of SRC’s program. His monthly journal entries and essay assignments are appended herewith. At Mr. Martens’s request, his creative writing exercises have not been admitted to the record.

  OBSERVATIONS: Mr. Martens’s rehabilitation at SRC has been a concentrated effort to even out his mind about the opposite sex and relations with women. An unexplained, alternating inborn hostility and passivity toward women has, in my opinion, been leveled, and a truer, more mature personality has been erected in its place. During his stay at SRC, Mr. Martens has displayed mannerly and cordial behavior toward the women here, both on staff and inpatient alike. Personally I find Mr. Martens a pleasant and charming individual. His presence in group and on the campus here shall be missed.

  The following is a complete record and true account of Mr. Martens’s rehabilitation.

  Signed and dated this day——

  Jane

  If you ask me about Jane, I’ll tell you that she is a fine woman. It is true that in the catalog of women in my life, Jane would come under P for “plain,” but she is tender and we go together pretty good. Besides, I prefer not to make aesthetic judgments.

  The thing I like most about Jane is that she looks best without makeup. On one of our first dates, right after I left SRC, Jane had put on bright red lipstick, and the whole night I tried not to stare at it, because it looked like she was smiling even when she wasn’t, and by the end of the night I was self-conscious about it. I think she sensed I didn’t like it, or maybe she was uncomfortable with it too. Jane has never worn lipstick again.

  We keep each other at arm’s length most of the time and that is really for the best. (She knows it too.) I guess one could say our relationship is not complicated by love. We are, however, into each other totally. Our relationship is utopian. Utopian relationships last longer than marriages because emotions like jealousy and envy are removed. I never think about anyone but Jane, and Jane always tells me I’m the one for her. It wouldn’t be fair if it weren’t that way, and it is the only real promise we’ve made.

  It wasn’t always like that, though. At first, Jane thought I was dangerous. She didn’t say much, but she warmed up when I showed her what a nice guy I can be. Jane said she’d come off a relationship with a fellow who had probably once been in prison. You have to take the good from your last relationship and put it in future ones, I told her.

  And that’s what we did, creating our present utopian relationship, which provides her with whatever it is she wants. This is the sort of relationship a woman like Jane deserves.
It is the sort of relationship I like to initiate.

  If I could change one thing about Jane, though, I wouldn’t make her such a big Christian. I don’t have a problem with religion per se, but sometimes Jane can really confuse the issue. Besides, like I’ve told her over and over again, there is no religion in Utopia.

  But then, Jane thinks I am the Antichrist. “You’re the devil,” she is always telling me. If she says it too often, I start to get a pinched feeling in my head and I have to yell at her to stop. I won’t yell at her in public, though, and I never take it out on her in bed.

  Jane is moving to California, but I want her to stay. I make a point to say “California is not Utopia” at least once a day, just slipping it into a conversation casually. Jane raises her eyebrows and shrugs in a way that lets me know she is on the fence. I’m convinced I can get her to stay.

  “What’s in California?” I ask her.

  “You could come with me,” she answers. She knows from my sessions with Dr. Hatch that because my parents were killed when we lived in California, it’s a blank spot on my mental map. Even my short stay with my aunt and uncle in San Diego feels like it took place out of time, and out of country. Of my own will, I will never return to California, a fact Jane knows well.

  “But I don’t want to move to California.”

  “Charlie, you could easily come.”

  “But I don’t want to,” I repeat, and this signals Jane that I don’t want to discuss it.

  So I’m in the mood for a good time, and Jane and I are getting ready at her apartment to go out for the usual—dinner and whatever. She sees that I am on the verge of what could almost pass as euphoria, and I see that look on her face that lets me know it won’t be smooth sailing.

  And sure enough on the way to dinner Jane gets me uptight by demanding to know the name of the restaurant. When I don’t tell her—when I say that I want it to be a surprise—she pursues the question about what kind of food this restaurant serves with an irrationality that becomes so frightening I finally do tell her, and though I’m disappointed about the deletion of the only mystery the evening holds, I’m glad this has happened, that the glitch is out of the system, that I can now breathe easy through dinner.

  Sometimes I think I would like to marry Jane, but I know that our relationship couldn’t survive the rules and constraints of a formal institution like marriage. Still, she carries herself in such a way that someone across the room looking at her would think, Hey, that girl crossing the room could make a pretty good wife. Someday someone should marry Jane and I’m pretty sure someday someone will.

  Depending on Jane’s mood after dinner, we will either go to the Sugar Bowl for ice cream or go straight back to her place. I always hope we will go for ice cream because I like to watch Jane coo like a little girl between licks of mint chocolate chip. Not only is it an amazing transformation, but it always signals the start of at least an hour of foreplay that lasts all the way from the Sugar Bowl to her bed.

  Tonight dinner clearly makes Jane pensive, and I can sense that she won’t want mint chocolate chip and indeed the whole rest of the night may be in jeopardy. I dread the thought of going back to my room at the Hotel San Carlos, my temporary encampment courtesy of Buckley Cosmetics, alone. The historic boutique hotel is situated in a part of downtown I hardly know at all, and when I return to my room, I have to pretend that I’m just a tourist to stave off the depression brought on by my small pink room. Regardless of Jane’s mood, her apartment is always preferable to another night in the hotel.

  “I’m going to California,” she says, as if trying to cheer herself up.

  “I’ll go with you,” I say, and wait for her reaction. The skin under her eyes tightens, confirming my suspicion that she doesn’t really want me to.

  “I thought you wanted to stay here.” She tries to act like she hasn’t been caught off guard.

  “I could stay or I could go,” I tell her, shrugging.

  “Well, I’m going,” she says, realizing I am toying with her. My coyness cheers her up and again I am sure I can convince her to stay.

  Sunday

  As the result of a bet I lost concerning how long I could pleasure Jane in bed (although I was just seven minutes shy of the promised thirty minutes, which, Jane assured me, was only average), I have to go to church with her every Sunday this month.

  “If you can prove you’re omnipotent, you don’t have to go,” she teased. But, of course, I am not.

  Jane being the Catholic she is, we sit in one of the back pews, like I used to at mandatory Mass at Randolph Prep, in the Gallery of Heathens. When Mr. Chandler, my guardian’s neighbor, used his pull as an alum to help me transfer to Randolph, he didn’t mention that it was an all-boys Catholic school, though it hardly mattered. I was all but finished at the public school where his foster daughter Talie went.

  The priests march in an impressive parade, dressed in black and red garb, holding long staffs with banners that could have been made during the Crusades, and the head priest—the Pontifex Maximus, the one leading the way—bows prayerfully from side to side.

  The entourage halts in front of the congregation, and the priests assemble in an indeterminate order behind a long counter on a stage. I look over at Jane, who knows I am about to say something snide and ignores me.

  The magic act begins with a bowl on the table belching white powder, and I crane my neck to get a better glimpse. One of the elderly priests on the left of the Pontifex Maximus, dangling a charm on the end of a gold chain, begins swinging the chain back and forth, the audience mesmerized. Some sort of liquid is poured into the bowl and now suddenly all of the priests are busy with their hands, and in my mind I superimpose the title Cooking with Catholics over the whole scene. I lean over to share this with Jane, but she leans away from me.

  After an inordinate amount of standing and sitting, singing and muttering, standing and sitting, I feel the end is near. Anxiety washes over me as I anticipate the benediction, like the anxiety a smoker in a business meeting feels when he senses he will finally get to step outside for a cigarette. There is an unquiet silence and those in the very front pew stand. I groan to myself and fold my hands on the pew in front of me and rest my head in the empty triangle they form. The shuffle of feet and the murmuring of the Eucharist become a drone in my ears as I close my eyes, wondering what I would pray about if I prayed.

  I imagine Jane on her knees, at the foot of her bed. Is she praying that we’ll get married? Or is she praying for things only for herself—her family’s wellness, or for the right decision about California?

  Without warning, an image of Jane and her next boyfriend praying together, heads down, hands together, appears in my mind. The suddenness of seeing them quickens my pulse and a bitter irritability creeps through me. The image is static and overpowering, like a giant poster plastered on the wall of my brain, and the thought occurs to me that Jane probably will pray for me, given her good, religious nature. Privately she asks the Lord to watch over me and protect me from evil. This thought stays with me until we are out in the parking lot, and as we climb into Jane’s car, I say, “Fuck church.”

  “You’re the devil,” Jane says.

  Essay #1: A Proper Introduction

  Before I was anything, I was an Elrod Bullet.

  Ms. Saltonstall, my second-grade teacher at Elrod, told me I was her favorite. I was her helper because I held the spoon full of sugar while she held the flame under it during science, because I read longer passages than anyone else during English, because in math I didn’t have to go to the board, since Ms. Saltonstall knew I hated it. The girls in my class noticed this and began to believe that I was special too. Whatever I didn’t know then, I felt some sort of special force working in my favor—to the exclusion of all the other boys in my class, and it made me a king.

  My main group of friends—Wendy, Ronda, Cheryl, and Sally Ann—and I were always together. We would hang off the monkey bars and squeal, or see who could swing higher on
the swing set. These girls liked to match whatever I did. If I jumped out of the swing, they’d try to jump farther.

  Sometimes Wendy and Ronda went to Cheryl’s house, or Cheryl and Wendy would go to Ronda’s house, or Cheryl and Ronda went to Wendy’s house, or they would all go to Sally Ann’s, but I never went to any of their houses. They would invite me, but my grandmother wouldn’t let me go. I invited them over once, but when my grandmother found the five of us in my room playing a game of Sorry! in our bathing suits, she called their mothers, who said they’d assumed my mother was home when they granted permission for the girls to join me for afternoon snacks. I taught the girls a new phrase, “Never assume. It makes an ass out of you and me,” and we laughed about that until Wendy and Ronda and Cheryl and Sally Ann said they didn’t want to play with me anymore.

  On the last day of school there was a field trip to the Denver Observatory. Even though it was daytime, we were staring at stars through a giant telescope. “How can there be stars?” Wendy asked. None of us understood it, or heard an answer.

  If I ever see Wendy or Ronda or Cheryl or Sally Ann—which seems doubtful now; they appear not real but as ghosts in my mind—I’ll tell them what I know: that if you really look, you can see what others can’t.

  Most Likely To

  My then-best-friend-now-ex-best-friend Jason handles it real cool. He was our high school’s master thespian.

  “How much each?” he negotiates with the one in the faded Michael Jackson Thriller T-shirt.

  “Are you cops?” she asks, reaching inside the passenger window. She gives my soft crotch a squeeze.

  “We’re not cops,” I say. I was against this at first, on principle, but Thriller’s touch is warm and I can feel the wheels in motion. Suddenly I’m gung ho.