World Gone Water

by Jaime Clarke

  What are probably the facts: Someone introduced William Randolph to sailing, he enjoyed it, and he was killed, accidentally.

  But what I really used to wonder about when I stood in the main hall, and what I often think about, was how easily the chain could’ve been broken. William Randolph might not have met someone who could introduce him to sailing; he might not have enjoyed it, it might have made him so sick he swore never to leave land; sailing might have proven too difficult for Randolph to master. None of the steps that led to Randolph’s death was a conscious decision to do this over that, but if just one thing had gone the other way, his story—his life—might have had a different ending.

  World Gone Water

  I find Dale at Max Maxwell’s, the bar at the Phoenician supplying the beverage service for the World Gone Water party. An hour early and standing around the Mojave Ballroom, its taupe-colored walls producing their own kind of nauseating light, I decided a drink would calm my nervous stomach. I knew one drink might lead to two, three, or four, but the caterers, with their suspicious eyes, forced me out of the ballroom and down to Max Maxwell’s.

  Dale looks like he’s been at the bar since Talie’s funeral.

  “Are you coming to the party?” I ask.

  Dale sips weakly from a glass of bourbon. He looks at me through the mirror behind the bar and sips again. He closes his eyes, as if he’s trying to circle the wagons around a thought, but when he looks up again, this time directly at me, his face is blank. “You should come,” I say. “Talie was a part of Buckley and she’d want you to come.”

  My capacity to say things that may or may not be true has reached the level of artistry, and I feel the full force of this statement’s design.

  “Did I see you at her grave this morning?” Dale asks.

  Suddenly I notice the grass stains on his knees, dirty green swatches painted on his suit pants.

  “I am not particularly fond of you,” I want to say to Dale. “Talie didn’t love you,” I want to say. “Talie was in love with someone else,” I want to say. “I don’t want you hanging out at Talie’s grave,” I want to say.

  “I just got back from picking up the winner and her husband,” I say.

  “The winner?” Dale asks.

  Just mentioning it to Dale brings my anxiety full circle, the anxiety I felt waiting in the ballroom for Carol Bandes, our winner, and her husband, Martin, to arrive, the result of what happened when I made the official gesture of picking her and her husband up at their house in Flagstaff by limo, taking them to a private jet, and flying them to Phoenix for her makeover and the party.

  I want to tell Dale what happened, but then again I don’t, and I let Dale’s question float off into space. I decide to skip the drink. I want to skip the party, too. I’m not even sure that I’m required to show. I was only to be the agent who brought everything to a conclusion (as little as I had to do with that), but nothing was ever said of me seeing it through to the end.

  When I emerge from Max Maxwell’s, the sky is black. There is no trace of the sunset I missed, and the moon makes ghosts of the saguaros on Camelback Mountain.

  As I walk back toward the ballroom, I can see where the resort backs into the mountain, where the cement ends and the rock begins. A rash of stars suddenly appears in the sky and everything glows for a moment, until my eyes adjust and all I see again is cement and rock.

  A caravan of black limousines rolls past me to the chandeliered entrance of the Phoenician. Flashbulbs explode around the limos, making the night blacker. I feel like I’m hiding in the bushes as I watch Belinda and Kyle and Alisha each step out of their own limousine. Jon isn’t among the photographers but is at Alisha’s side, holding her hand, waving at the camera like a movie star.

  The Bandeses’ limousine lumbers up the driveway toward the entrance. Dale suddenly appears, carelessly wandering in the flower beds. He trips and falls to his knees and I move to help him up, but when he sees me, he pulls a dirty pistol from his jacket pocket. The possibilities of just how badly this could end unfold and multiply.

  “Dale, don’t,” I say, but even I am unconvinced by my words, and I’m thinking no matter how it does turn out, all I’ll be reading about in tomorrow’s paper is Dale. What won’t be in the paper, though—the story worth telling—is what happened when I arrived at the Bandeses’.

  The contest was rigged so that someone from Arizona would win, and Carol Bandes was the first name we drew from the mailed entries that qualified. I made the half-hour flight up from Phoenix in the Buckley Cosmetics private jet to pick up Carol and Martin. From the airfield, a limousine shuttled me into the trees, in the direction of the Grand Canyon. The San Francisco Peaks loomed in the sky above. The snowcaps reminded you that even though you could see them, they were somewhere else, in a different place than where you were.

  At a certain point traffic thinned, so that the only cars on the highway were those loaded down with families and crammed floor-to-ceiling with camping gear and luggage. The limo driver, a thin, dark-haired man, announced the address as he turned at the wooden sign bearing the number of the Bandeses’ house.

  I presented a dozen roses to Mrs. Bandes when I told her she had won the Buckley Cosmetics World Gone Water contest. JSB had stressed the importance of surprising the contest winner, if only to prevent the winner from declining, which would be bad publicity.

  “The what?” she asked, leaning forward, squinting. Her close-cropped blond hair hugged her small features, and her smallish frame seemed to be swallowed by the open space behind her.

  “Your name was drawn as the winner,” I repeated.

  “But I didn’t—” Just then a tall, severe-looking man covered the distance in the sparse front room to the front door in two or three steps.

  “Can I help you?” he asked. He stood behind his wife, and the two of them made for an impressive couple.

  I explained myself again, the look on Carol’s face growing increasingly confused, until her husband said, “Oh, I entered you in the contest, honey. It seemed like a lark.”

  Carol’s confusion was replaced by an uncomfortable look, and she peered over my shoulder at the silent limo in her driveway. Finally they invited me inside.

  The wooden floor creaked a minuet as the three of us made our way to the couch. Carol took the roses from me and I explained the day’s plan to her.

  “I don’t know if I’m up for the trip today,” Carol said. “I had some things I was going to do. As a matter of fact, if you were thirty minutes later, you would’ve missed us entirely.”

  Carol shifted on the couch. The silence inside brought every noise from outside right into the amphitheater of their living room.

  “If you don’t want to go,” her husband said, “you don’t have to go. I just thought you might like it.”

  Carol shot him an incredulous look and he glanced down at his shoes.

  “I’m sure they have an alternate,” he said, looking at me.

  “I think you might enjoy yourself,” I said. There was no alternate and I could feel this whole thing slipping into disaster. The idea that winning the contest would be an imposition in someone’s life hadn’t occurred to me, and I was unprepared to make a persuasive argument against it. “A limo ride, a short flight to Phoenix, a party at the Phoenician. Not a bad way to spend a day.”

  “I don’t fly at night,” Carol said.

  “We’ll put you up at the Phoenician for the night,” I said. “We want you to enjoy yourselves.”

  Carol looked at Martin. Martin smiled, and Carol shrugged and said, “Okay, let me change and we’ll go.”

  “There’ll be a makeover in Phoenix,” I said, which came out sounding more offensive than a litany of profanity, but Carol understood my meaning and reappeared unchanged, a small bag in her hand.

  Once we were riding back toward the Flagstaff airport, Carol and Martin relaxed and they seemed to become one person. They laughed about a neighbor who had cut a tree down onto his house, and Mar
tin talked a little bit about his part-time job at Snowbowl, the ski resort nearby. Martin was retired from the railroad—he used to run the logging routes from Washington State to Montana—a business he said was “dying out.” His hands were large and powerful, and I felt myself hiding my own under my legs on the seat.

  Suddenly the limousine sputtered and lost power. The hum of the engine choked off and we glided slower and slower until the driver pulled off the road and we stopped.

  Carol and Martin looked at me, and we waited for the driver to appear at our door.

  “She quit,” the driver said. “Could be the high altitude.”

  Martin looked skeptical. “It sounded like the alternator quit.” He jumped out, and I felt inclined to follow him even though I knew nothing about engines and how they made a car run.

  Martin lifted the hood and peered into the massive gray intestines underneath. He jiggled a few hoses and touched the metal of the engine. You got the sense you were watching a doctor diagnosing a patient. “It’s not the alternator,” Martin said. “I wonder how old the battery is.”

  We both looked up to hear the driver’s response, but he was leaning on the passenger door, his head tucked away inside the limousine, talking to Carol. Martin scowled and suddenly it was like I wasn’t there.

  “Excuse me,” Martin said.

  The driver’s head popped up.

  “How old is this battery?” Martin asked.

  The driver laughed. “I don’t work on them. I just drive them.” He grinned at his own cleverness.

  Martin’s voice lowered a full octave. “Do you have tools in the trunk?”

  The driver unlocked the trunk and handed Martin a small, red plastic toolbox. The tools inside clanged against one another. The sound carried up the vacant highway.

  I stood back to watch Martin operate, but the sound of the limo driver’s voice chatting up Carol distracted us both, and the fact that the driver wasn’t right there under the hood with us seemed like a fist that just kept pounding and pounding. The driver’s voice grew louder as he laughed at something he’d said. His voice took the high, nervous tone of bar talk, and Martin started tapping a wrench against the metal engine housing. The tapping started intermittently and grew louder until the driver looked over in our direction.

  I could sense an impending explosion and I feared what Martin might do, so I said, “We could use a hand over here,” but before I could finish the sentence, Martin had thrown the wrench to the pavement and was on the driver, asking, “What’s the idea here?”

  “Nothing.” The driver shrugged, unintimidated. “Just chatting.”

  “That’s my wife you’re chatting to,” Martin said.

  “Yeah, she told me,” the driver said, defiant. “So?”

  The driver stepped back from the car and Martin pushed him into the road.

  “Martin,” Carol said, emerging from the limousine. She appeared relieved in a way that made her look like she’d come back from a year’s vacation on a tropical island where the only real concern she’d had was whether to eat coconuts or bananas for breakfast.

  A sound like a clap of thunder echoed and the driver was on the ground, writhing in the middle of the two-lane highway. A look of complete concentration overtook Martin as he kicked the driver in the chest. Carol froze where she stood and then a curious thing happened. Martin’s face changed to real anguish, a deep hurt flashed in his eyes, a look in sharp contrast to the look on Dale’s face when he had Shane right where he wanted him in the parking lot of the County Line. Dale’s look was that of a champion, someone who was enjoying another’s defeat at his hands. Martin, though, seemed truly pained as he continued to hammer his foot into the driver, who was by now curled up like a caterpillar on the road.

  One of the Bandeses’ neighbors happened by, picking us up, and the remainder of the trip was made in silence. I came to believe that Carol and Martin despised me in some way that I could understand and agree with. I parted company with them after we landed in Phoenix, excusing myself on some errand for the company but promising to see them at the Phoenician later that night.

  But the look on Martin’s face haunted me. When the hurt came across his face, you knew that everything his life was about was wrapped up in his life with Carol. He was protecting the source of his happiness, and you had the immediate feeling, watching him, that he understood that that happiness couldn’t be found anywhere else and any threat or challenge to it would be met and extinguished.

  As I watched Martin and his warrior-like battle with the driver, I was transported into the dreams of my youth, dreams where I used to see myself way into the future, married to someone who loved me. I dreamed those dreams as a way of comforting myself, I suppose. Talie had told me she’d had the same dreams. We both dreamed of a house, and a car, and a neighborhood where children would play under the afternoon shadows of elm trees. We could easily see ourselves in the windows of these homes on these tree-lined streets, in these phantom neighborhoods. Talie’s dreams included enough children to people an entire elementary school, and my dream included similar scenarios. I’d imagine myself coming home from a good job, walking up the driveway, anticipating the warmth just inside the front door, where small coats hung on hooks and lunch pails with half-eaten sandwiches had been dropped next to unlaced shoes. Before anyone knew I was home, I could sense my family, anticipate their excitement when they saw me, an excitement matched in pitch only by my own. And inside our home, everything else in the world remained locked out, strange and foreign in the light of family.

  The dream comes back to me with a clarity that is startling, mined from the darkness where dreams stir. Even if the details are the fantasies of youth, buried and forgotten in time, the truth of the dream remains. Dusted off, it gleams anew, and I’m embarrassed at how much I want to believe in it now, how much I want to believe it is something still worth trying for.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to:

  Josephine Bergin

  Rebecca Boyd

  Stephanie Duncan

  Heather E. Fisher

  Tim Parrish

  Michael Rosovsky

  David Ryan

  Elizabeth Searle

  Lavinia Spalding

  Dan Pope and everyone at Roundabout

  Clarkes, Gilkeys, Kaliens, and Cottons

  Mary Cotton and Max

  A Note on the Author

  Jaime Clarke is a graduate of the University of Arizona and holds an MFA from Bennington College. He is the author of the novels We’re So Famous and Vernon Downs; editor of the anthologies Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show: On the Couch with Contemporary Writers; and co-editor of the anthologies No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from “Post Road” Magazine (with Mary Cotton) and Boston Noir 2: The Classics (with Dennis Lehane and Mary Cotton). He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner, with his wife, of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.

  www.jaimeclarke.com

  www.postroadmag.com

  www.baumsbazaar.com

  www.newtonvillebooks.com

  Praise for World Gone Water

  “Jaime Clarke’s World Gone Water is so fresh and daring, a necessary book, a barbaric yawp that revels in its taboo: the sexual and emotional desires of today’s hetero young man. Clarke is a sure and sensitive writer, his lines are clean and carry us right to the tender heart of his lovelorn hero, Charlie Martens. This is the book Hemingway and Kerouac would want to read. It’s the sort of honesty in this climate that many of us aren’t brave enough to write.”

  –TONY D’SOUZA, author of The Konkans

  “This unsettling novel ponders human morality and sexuality, and the murky interplay between the two. Charlie Martens is a compelling antihero with a voice that can turn on a dime, from shrugging naiveté to chilling frankness. World Gone Water is
a candid, often startling portrait of an unconventional life.”

  – J. ROBERT LENNON, author of Familiar

  “Funny and surprising, World Gone Water is terrific fun to read and, as a spectacle of bad behavior, pretty terrifying to contemplate.”

  –ADRIENNE MILLER, author of The Coast of Akron

  “Charlie Martens is my favorite kind of narrator, an obsessive yearner whose commitment to his worldview is so overwhelming that the distance between his words and the reader’s usual thinking gets clouded fast. World Gone Water will draw you in, make you complicit, and finally leave you both discomfited and thrilled.”

  –MATT BELL, author of

  In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

  Also by Jaime Clarke

  VERNON DOWNS

  “Vernon Downs is a gripping, hypnotically written, and unnerving look at the dark side of literary adulation. Jaime Clarke’s tautly suspenseful novel is a cautionary tale for writers and readers alike—after finishing it, you may start to think that J. D. Salinger had the right idea after all.”

  – TOM PERROTTA, author of Election, Little Children, and The Leftovers

  “Moving and edgy in just the right way. Love (or lack of) and Family (or lack of) is at the heart of this wonderfully obsessive novel.”

  – GARY SHTEYNGART, author of Super Sad True Love Story

  “All strong literature stems from obsession. Vernon Downs belongs to a tradition that includes Nicholson Baker’s U and I, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, and—for that matter—Pale Fire. What makes Clarke’s excellent novel stand out isn’t just its rueful intelligence, or its playful semi-veiling of certain notorious literary figures, but its startling sadness. Vernon Downs is first rate.”

  – MATTHEW SPECKTOR, author of American Dream Machine

  “Vernon Downs is a brilliant meditation on obsession, art, and celebrity. Charlie Martens’s mounting fixation with the titular Vernon is not only driven by the burn of heartbreak and the lure of fame, but also a lost young man’s struggle to locate his place in the world. Vernon Downs is an intoxicating novel, and Clarke is a dazzling literary talent.”