Josh Roseman - The Clockwork Russian and Other Stories

The story itself was born of some relationship issues I was having, and my worries about how my daughter would feel when I became a single father. A lot of my work from the past ten years was influenced by that, and I think stories like “Greener” helped me work through them and get me to where I needed to be, mentally and emotionally. When I wrote this, I was weighing the adage “the grass is always greener on the other side” and wondering just how true it would be. Everyone has a different answer to that question, and I hope I captured that with Scott’s dilemma.

In the past three years, there’s been a lot of discussion around consent, some of which I’ve participated in. Now that I have that knowledge, I feel very different reading the last scene of this story. And not necessarily in a good way.

“This is a really bad idea, Elle,” Barry says.

“You didn’t have to come.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he snaps. “Phil would kill me if I didn’t come with you.”

Barry is fiftyish, portly and gray-haired. Seeing him take off his shirt is an experience I wish I’d never had.

“I have friends with certifications,” I say. “It’s not like I couldn’t have asked one of them.”

“How many of them have actually been down there?” It’s almost a growl, and I’m actually cowed a little. “That’s what I thought.”

I sit on the hard bench, wood planks covered in thin, all-weather carpet, and fiddle with my regulator.

“How far away do you think we are?” he asks.

“Don’t know. Ask the captain.”

Barry looks up at the bridge, where Al — the captain — stands, driving the boat. Al is even older than Barry, narrow and hard and tanned almost leathery with decades of exposure to the sun. Instead of going up to talk to him, though, Barry goes around the cabin to stand by the bow, leaving me bouncing up and down on the bench as the boat zips across the water. The light chop makes the horizon rise and fall faster than is comfortable. I can take it, though, and if I get sick enough to throw up, at least I know enough to do it over the side.

My guess is that we’re ten minutes from the dive site. Maybe fifteen.

After waiting seven years to get my answers, fifteen minutes isn’t much of a wait at all.

I was seven when I first realized my dad was doing more than just studying the life cycle of coral reefs. I’d been in the ocean with Grandpa; I knew what they looked like. I knew there were natural ones and artificial ones; I knew that if you touched a reef, part of it could die, and that if you touched fire coral, you’d burn.

The big tank at Dad’s office had plenty of coral inside. I separated myself from him — it was easy; he was so focused on his work that when I said I had to go to the bathroom he didn’t even notice — and went off on my own.

No one watched me climb up on a chair. No one noticed my nose was so close to the water that all I could smell was salt. No one saw me reach in and brush the back of my hand on the bright-orange coral flower.

The scream made Dad come running. He picked me up as I cried and shouted, carried me to a chair, and told me to hold out my arm. Then he poured clear liquid over my skin: vinegar, like what Mom used to clean the floor. It didn’t make the burn stop hurting, but it helped, and after a few minutes I started to calm down.

“What happened?”

When I looked at Dad, it was through a blur of tears. “I reached in the tank,” I said. “I touched the coral.”

“Oh, come on!” Dad said — almost yelled. “I’ve told you before: this isn’t a game! It’s not a place to play! This is my job, and if you can’t behave, you can stay home with your brother next time. You got that?”

I stared at him for a second, then burst into fresh tears. Dad shook his head and crouched in front of me. “I’m sorry, Eleanora. I didn’t mean to shout. You just… worried me. And you know you shouldn’t have touched something that was going to hurt you, right?”

“I…” A hiccup. “I’m… I’m sorry, Daddy…”

He leaned forward and hugged me, rubbing my back. “Come on. I’ll get my things, and we can go home.”

“’Kay.”

He asked me to sit in his desk chair and wait while he called Mom. He’d left his computer turned on, and I read some of what was on the screen. I didn’t understand all the big words, but I was pretty sure it didn’t have anything to do with coral reefs.

I come out of the cabin after exchanging my t-shirt and shorts for a wetsuit. Barry’s on the bench, buckling his vest. Al is by the ladder to the bridge. “How long will we be out here?”

“We brought enough air for two dives,” I tell him, checking my watch. “Figure a couple of hours.”

“It’s more than 100 feet down,” Barry says. “Be real, Elle. How long do you think we’ll be able to stay?”

I glare at him. “You can stay up here. I’ll dive alone if I have to.”

He mouths something nasty before going to work on his fins; I sit across from him and do the same. I’m faster than him, though; before he’s even finished buckling on his vest I’m already on my feet, hanging onto the railing at the stern. I hold my mask to my face and, as the boat rises on a small wave, I step off and into the water.

I was ten the first time I got into Dad’s files. He got fired the summer after second grade; we had to move, and I had to change schools. But Dad got a new job, and Mom did too, and we were doing okay. I was aware, I suppose, that our circumstances had changed, that we didn’t have enough money to live like we used to, but I was a kid. I didn’t really care about it the way an adult might.

Jason noticed. He was fifteen, moody and broody. My parents yelled at him a lot, and he yelled back. I tried to stay out of the way.

I also tried to stay out of sight when Mom and Dad went out and Jason had someone over. It wasn’t hard; they’d sit in the living room and watch one of my parents’ R-rated tapes, and I’d hide in my bedroom from the explosions and the adult stuff.

Dad usually locked his office door, but he must have forgotten this time. I always tried the door, just in case, just out of curiosity, and when it opened I couldn’t help but go inside. Jason and I were never allowed in there when he wasn’t around.

I clicked on the lamp and sat in Dad’s big leather chair. The desk was very neat, very organized, and I made sure to put his folders back when I finished reading them. Or, I should say, skimming them: I might have been good in school, but there were some big words — like “transdimensionality” — that I didn’t understand. I stuck to sentences that said things like “portal”, “rift”, “coordinates”, and so on.

Dad had been doing this research for a long time; there were notes dated before I was born. I remembered times when he’d been away for a week or longer, times he’d come home from those long trips with his arm in a sling, or limping, or bruised. How dangerous was this stuff?

The noises from the living room stopped after an hour, and I quickly cleaned up and ducked out, locking the door behind me and stealing off to my room to try and make sense of what I’d read. From what I could understand, Dad believed there were portals somewhere in the ocean. One was close to where we lived. He used to work for the government. He had a hypothesis — I knew that word, thanks to Science Fair — that the portals were “beyond our current level of technology.” Dad’s notes had wondered who made the portals. And, over and over, he’d written “where do they go?”

That had given me chills, enough that I’d tucked myself into bed and tried not to think about it.