Laura van den Berg - Find Me

Wild roosters peck at the sidewalks, their red tail feathers swaying. A calico cat stands on its hind legs and watches the passing bus.

Imagine a world where the animals are slowly taking over.

Imagine a world where the weather does whatever it pleases. Blizzards in summer. Heat waves in winter.

Imagine a world where you can go to a store and pick out a new person to be. You can buy that person off the rack and just become them. A new face, a new name, a new soul. In this world, it is that easy.

Imagine a world where ghosts get to stay real.

Imagine a world without mothers.

The bus stops at Mallory Square, a brick marina lined with skeletal palm trees. A road sign announces MILE MARKER ZERO. We have reached the southernmost tip of the Florida highway. The bus is full. We are not the only ones who wanted to get far away from the mainland, far away from wherever we were before.

The passengers scatter into the streets. The bus speeds away. Above us electrical wires crackle. There is something thrilling about being on the coast, on the edge of the land.

The lone boat at the marina is a party boat, just like the one the man in the semi told us about, only this one has a different name. It’s a white double-decker with BOOZE CRUISE painted across the side in red letters. When we talk to the captain, we learn that we are the only interested passengers. There is no schedule, no set route. You simply pay and tell him where you want to go.

I give the captain a hundred dollars and tell him Shadow Key.

The party boat captain is barefoot. The tops of his feet are tan. His toenails are pitted and yellow. He’s wearing ragged denim shorts and a white captain’s hat and a white shirt with gold buttons. He tucks the money into his shirt pocket and tells us that he used to have a boat called The Lion’s Paw , but he lost it in a storm and now he has this one instead. The old boat was named after a children’s book about three orphans who run away together and live on a sloop.

“Do you know it?”

We shake our heads.

“It’s a beautiful story,” he tells us.

The Booze Cruise does not have a story.

Marcus takes my hand and we climb aboard. The boat sways. We launch from the marina, into a white spray of water, a biting wind. I wonder if there will be whales. We look out at the stony beaches and the rock fingers that jut into the water, dark and pocked like volcanic rock or what I imagine volcanic rock to be.

A child in yellow shorts stands at the end of one of the fingers, waving.

We wave back. We don’t know if we will ever return.

The wind lifts my hair off my shoulders. I lean against the railing and feel the spray on my face. I taste the salt. I listen to the churn of the engine. When I look back toward the marina, the wake is a wide white tail behind us.

A green cooler stands against the helm. Back when the Booze Cruise was a real party boat, I imagine the cooler was filled with ice and beer. When we look inside, it’s empty and dry. Lit up tiki torches have been staked in the deck corners. Sweet smoke curls into the sky. The fire flickers in the wind, but finds a way to keep burning. A song about margaritas plays over a speaker. It is not a song that does justice to the gravity of our moment. I touch the slight roundness under my sweatshirt and think about the months that lie ahead, the ways my body will become alien to me.

I imagine me and Marcus stepping onto my mother’s houseboat, my hands cupping my stomach, and offering her another path. I imagine all of us grabbing this new life and living it and living it and living it.

We wander to the upper level. We sit down. The blue vinyl on the seats is peeling. I pull back a gummy strip and try to see what’s underneath. I feel the vibrations of the engine against my thighs. The margarita music is louder up here and I think about the Pathologist’s voice crackling over the Hospital speakers, dripping into the rooms and hallways, all the lies he told us.

“I can’t stay up here,” I say to Marcus. He touches my forehead like he’s checking for a fever. I want to kiss him. I go back down to the deck, stern side.

A mist rolls across the water. The sky is marble. The clouds look like mountains. Birds hover above. Birds with orange feet and black wings. Birds with white feathers and slim elegant beaks. I feel a pang in my chest, like a muscle is cramping up, and want to believe that one of the birds is Louis, that the end is not really the end but a chance to become something new. The birds make big swooping circles. I watch until I get dizzy.

We enter a pocket of fog and it is like navigating through one of those mountainous clouds. My hair is damp. A cold creeps up my belly. The fog turns thick as smoke. I breathe it in and my heart surges and the world grows empty.

I remember everything I do not want to remember and everything I do.

* * *

I remember the boy I loved and never saw again.

* * *

What is a baby but a ghost turning real inside you?

* * *

I remember the flyer of the missing girl in the T station. I see the masking tape on the post. I see the frayed edges of the paper. I see her face and I see her face turn into my own. I imagine myself picking up a phone and dialing the number. A woman answers. I imagine her voice is familiar.

* * *

This girl you’re looking for? I hear myself say. Yes. Yes. I’ve just seen her.

* * *

I remember my theory of the sickness: for the immune the flaws in our memory protected us. Take me. Already my mind had washed away what it could not stand to remember. The sickness circled me and took a whiff and decided that my own memory was already doing the work it wanted to do, the work of forgetting. That I was already too far gone.

* * *

When the fog lifts, I raise my hand from the railing and point at the thin line of coast ahead. “Land,” I say to no one.

* * *

There is a rumble that sounds like an underwater earthquake. A freezing wind. A sudden purple sky. Lightning that looks like a creature thrashing behind the clouds. An ocean that is blue electric against the darkening horizon.

A curtain of water surrounds the boat. The distant coast disappears. The tiki torches go out with a hiss. The music stops. My body is filled with the drumming of the storm. I turn around and look for the Booze Cruise captain inside the helm. I see a silver spinning wheel and the pale blur of his hands moving over it.

The nose of the boat dips down. My clothes are heavy and dripping. I slip to my knees. I spit water. Ocean gushes from my sneakers. The cooler slides across the deck and crashes into the railing.

A tiki torch leaps from its holster and does a suicide jump into the water.

The roar of the engine mixes with the thunder of the storm, a big hurtling ball of noise. The boat rocks back and forth. Water spreads across the deck, slick as oil. I see myself swimming out in Revere, the waves rising over my head. I see those same waves growing larger and rising over this railing and swallowing us up. I am sure the boat is going under.

* * *

What if the boat disappears inside the storm? What if my mother is the one sent looking? What if the boat sinks to the bottom, never to be seen again? What if we turn into mystery, myth?

* * *

Maybe I wouldn’t mind becoming a myth.

* * *

The storm is a squall, quick and brutal. It leaves me drenched and gasping. I grab the stomach of my sweatshirt and squeeze out the water. The ocean is murky and churning. I imagine sand and seaweed and fragments of shipwrecks being dredged up from the bottom and scattered.

My mother says water is neutral, that it doesn’t have wants, but what about these storms that want you and everything you have? That want your life? I add this to my list of questions to ask her.