Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

In the morning, Ross was gone. His water-warped golf scorecard was tucked into Phil’s clenched hand. On it was written: Got rescued! You looked so peaceful I decided not to wake you!

All around Phil was the same still, gray water that had surrounded their boat for days. Weeks? Months? No land peeked out from behind the morning fog. No wake from a passing ship spread itself into thin ripples. Did Ross really get rescued?

Phil groaned an alone kind of groan: deep and howling, a major pitch-shifter. How many more signs did he need? Adrift on a lake for countless days without another soul in sight? No search parties? Friends who got rescued and left him behind, or who’d rather drown than stay in a boat with him? He’d rather drown than stay in a boat with himself. Life was over. He was tired of life. Life sucked. I want to live, he thought. Really live. Let go of the world. Wasn’t there a way to get to the ocean from here? Everything is connected to an ocean somehow. Yeah, he could float up that seaway Dan mentioned, to the Arctic, where no lawyer could get to him. He could find a way to catch fish and just drift through icebergs and shower in whale spouts. Now, that was a life. Not like his. Divorced and forty. No kids. He should have taken that as a sign. She didn’t want to have kids. What woman doesn’t want to have kids? He kept waiting for her to say she wanted them. It’s the guy who’s supposed to not want kids; the wife is supposed to be like, “We’re having kids, you asshole,” until the guy feels pushed into it and resentful. But when they pop out he’s supposed to realize that his kids are the reason life makes sense, and then he’s supposed to love his wife even more, want to get a better job, discover his new life purpose as protector of his family. That’s how it’s supposed to go. Except she didn’t want kids. Didn’t even want to talk about it.

Phil wept. The crust around his eyes melted back to goo. He wept for all the kids he never had. He’d always wanted kids, ever since he was a kid. Since going fishing with his dad down at Pickerel Lake, standing on the shore, casting off. The silence. The stillness. The heat penetrating their baseball caps. Here comes his sister, fast, yelling down the path, and here’s his dad hushing her and then, seeing her little shamed face, picking her up and swinging her upside down over the water until she wails, then cradling her in his arms until she laughs. It made so much sense even back then. That’s what you do. You have a bunch of them and they’re your friends. They look like you. You give them your feelings. It’s animal. It’s basic. What kind of cunt doesn’t want kids? “Stretch marks,” she had said once, laughing it off. His whole life. Wasted.

Phil’s grief pulled him to the bottom of the lifeboat and he curled up. The water there, trapped and warm, pruned him.

The golf pencil wavered by his head. He plucked it and drew a stick figure on the other side of the scorecard, in a small corner that hadn’t already been written on and scratched over by Ross. He made out I love you but could read no more of Ross’s words.

From the figure, Phil drew a thought bubble. Hello , he wrote within its girlish borders.

At first the stick figure was Patricia, but he was silenced by the desire to say the perfect thing to either hurt her or to fix things. Then it was Ross, but he could only think of apologies, and for what, he couldn’t say. He missed his friend. Was the figure a child? He couldn’t see it; it was unfamiliar. A stick figure. It didn’t look like him at all. He stared at his companion mutely. Eventually the paper fell from his fingertips and disintegrated in the rank stew where he lay, fetal.

He roused himself in time for a puke over the side, and in the bile-soured water he saw his own reflection. Who will miss me? he asked himself. No one had. It was real, a fact. The proof — his solitude. He stared, seemed to wait days for the answer. He laid his head down, smelled the hot rubber.

At the next daybreak Phil took notice of, he lifted his head to a new smell. Pine. The morning fog rolled away like a stage curtain to reveal rocky cliffs, evergreened at the top, on either side of him, as the large lake funneled into an ever-narrowing channel. He saw the current quicken around his boat, swirling, tugging, caressing.

He thought of Canada. Of the war. Of beluga whales, their pinked heads breaking through the black surface to breathe, misting everything into a watercolor.

“Don’t shoot,” he yelled to all the hiding rebels. He held up his hands in mock horror, his voice echoing off the bluffs surrounding him, and it sounded as though the hills were full of men begging for the same mercy as he was. He doubled over and laughed until he wheezed like the aged.

The water flattened, and Phil saw the hull of a ship maneuver a bend, miles in the distance.

The current carried him toward the enormous vessel, a tanker of some sort. When finally next to it, he rapped his knuckles on the side. It was metal, and the rumble it threw back was like dungeon doors closing. Water had worn away the blue paint, which now only covered the higher-up walls. He sliced his palm against the large white barnacles stuck to the hull, and blood the color of cartoon apples flowed out.

A real boat.

Just then a rope ladder unfurled down the side, and Phil grabbed hold.

Just before the world got bad, I married for love, a man who was funny and brilliant, but small. He could not pick me up the way I’d watched the men do to women on television. I’d never been twirled as I laughed, my head back, my leg in a kick, all to some lighthearted song. But no matter. I loved him. I rested my chin on the top of his head when I was tired, and when he was, I wrapped my stronger arms around his small body. We were happy.

Then one day I became feverish and was unable to leave our bed, and so he ventured out to find medicine at the pharmacy. He said, “Be right back, my love,” grabbed an umbrella, and left. I’m told that even though he swung the umbrella wildly, he was set upon before he’d even left the front stoop of the building.

My next lover was funny but not as bright. He was much taller, however, and with a little more muscle that showed beneath his flesh, though sometimes it just made him seem hungry rather than strong. I’d seen him in the building; he fixed things. I asked him to fix my leaky faucet, and then I asked him to stay.

He could twirl me, but once when I kicked my leg his back gave and we tumbled to the floor. I brought hot pads to place under him and made a bed for us where he had fallen so he wouldn’t have to move. He told me jokes as we lay there, and he laughed, then grimaced, each time forgetting that it hurt him to laugh. But I liked that about him. We planned to marry.

One night, very late, the door buzzer woke us. He sat up and stepped into his slippers.

I said, “Don’t go out there.”

He said, “But someone’s at the door.”

The buzzer rang again. It’s the kind of shrill buzzer found in old cities full of angry people. The kind that always catches you off guard.

I said, “Don’t go,” and I grabbed his arm.

He shook me free. “What if someone needs help?” Did I mention he was also a very good-hearted man? He was.

“No one needs help,” I said, feeling like an awful person. “It’s a trap.”

He looked at me like he didn’t know who I had become. I was so ashamed I couldn’t look back, even though I knew I was right. I’d heard the stories. I knew better than to answer the door.

“Someone needs help,” he said resolutely, shrugging on his robe. I’m told he fought hard, scrappily, but was dragged to his knees, then dragged down the street. For days afterward bits of his torn pajamas blew around, up in the air, into the naked trees. I watched them through my window.