Laura van den Berg - What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

“Do you ever worry about the people you sell masks to?” Joyce asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What if a mask brought them bad luck?”

“Then they’d have to buy another one that brought them better luck.”

She could tell he was getting restless from the way he was shifting around on the bed.

“I should leave,” Darnel said, sitting up. “Andrea has a morning appointment.”

“Tell me one thing about Bali before you go,” she said. He leaned over her and brushed hair from the side of her face. She felt his breath against her ear. He told her about Mount Agung, Bali’s highest summit. The Balinese believed gods lived on the mountaintop. If you climbed to the peak of the mountain, you were supposed to be able to see into your own soul, and because of this most people who reached the top never returned.

In the middle of the night, Joyce was woken by a ringing phone. It took her some time to realize the sound was coming from her own apartment. She kicked away the covers and lurched into the kitchen, her mind sticky with sleep, and answered.

“Am I speaking to the primary resident?” It was a woman, the voice high-pitched and strange.

“Yes.”

“Are there any other residents?”

“No.”

“Not even a cat or a dog?”

“No.”

“A goldfish?”

“Actually, yes.” Joyce rested a hand on the counter. The rain was still falling outside. It pained her to think of how long it had been since she’d had a phone conversation with someone besides Darnel. “As of today, there is a goldfish.”

“Still,” the caller said. “You must be lonely.”

She looked around the kitchen, which was barely large enough to hold a mini-refrigerator and a microwave. The sink had been clogged for a week, but she hadn’t taken any steps to repair it, ordering most of her meals from the Chinese restaurant below her apartment and eating out of the cardboard containers.

“Hello, sole resident,” the woman said. “Are you still with me?”

“If you’ll tell me what you want.” As a teenager, she had played phone games with neighborhood girls on Saturday nights. They would open the phone book, close their eyes, and point to a name. Joyce knew this call was probably just a prank, just kids looking to make fun of a woman alone in the city, but maybe, she allowed herself to believe for a moment, it was something else entirely.

“The rain is melting the city,” the woman said. “Are you melted yet?”

“Not yet,” Joyce replied. “Maybe I’m a penguin.”

“You’re no penguin. Not a polar bear either.”

“How do you know?” She walked to the window and pulled back the curtains. The street was quiet. It was dawning on her that a strange call in the middle of the night should be making her nervous. “You’re just a stranger on the phone.”

“I’m a specialist.”

“In what?”

“All things.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“To offer you something.”

“And what’s that?” Her voice sharpened. “What could you offer me?” There was a burst of laughter in the background, followed by a low thump. Perhaps, she thought, it was one of the teenagers who waited tables downstairs, playing some kind of joke.

“We are calling,” the woman said, “to offer you a fabulous life.”

Joyce heard a click, the buzz of the dial tone. She looked out the window again before unplugging the phone. She put the noise machine on Roaring River, then turned on all the lights in her apartment and sat on the floor. She didn’t understand what had just happened, why she had kept talking, what the woman had meant by all the things she said. She felt dazed. She watched the goldfish swim from one side of the bowl to the other.

“I don’t understand this world,” Joyce said to her fish.

The next afternoon, Darnel came to the shop and told Joyce they needed to talk. She was on a stepladder, straightening one of the masks. She had never gone back to sleep after the phone call and felt exhausted.

“About what?” she asked, not looking at him.

“Let’s get some lunch,” Darnel said.

Joyce got off the ladder and turned to Darnel. He held a large white envelope in his arms. The top three buttons of his dark blue silk shirt were undone, which Joyce thought looked a little ridiculous. She could hardly believe this was the same man who’d whispered in her ear the night before.

“What’s in the envelope?” she asked.

“I’ll show you when we’re sitting down,” he said.

He did not kiss her on the lips, did not hug her and dig his fingers into the muscle of her back or suggest they swing by her apartment after lunch. She locked up the store and then they walked to a café down the street. It was humid outside, the clouds rimmed with black.

At the café, they sat outside. She stared at the envelope, the unlikeliest of possibilities flooding her mind: it contained travel brochures, two tickets to Bali, he was about to propose their escape.

After the waitress took their order, Darnel placed the envelope on the table. Joyce tugged one of her pearl earrings and watched the sidewalk. The pearls were tiny and fake and pinched her skin if she wore them for too long. A man passed the café, shouting into his cell phone. A woman walked by seconds later, a hardcover book pressed against her chest, as though she was holding a child.

“Are you ready to show me what’s in the envelope?” she asked.

“Are you ready to see it?”

She shrugged. The waitress reappeared with their order. Joyce added cream to her coffee and took a sip. One of her favorite moments of the day was watching the splash of cream dissolve into her coffee, the little white swirl, a small luxury.

He pulled out a large photograph and handed it to Joyce. The background was dark, with a fan of paleness in the center and a figure trapped inside the light.

“The first picture,” he said. “A boy.”

“Great,” she said. “That’s all the world needs.”

The shape of the baby resembled a giant olive, the features and limbs fuzzy. Thoughts of Bali evaporated like mist being burned away by a rising sun. She wanted to tear the picture in half, to dump her coffee over that tunnel of light. But she could not stop staring into the waves of black and gray and the lump in the center. Finally, Darnel took the sonogram from her and returned it to the envelope. They were both quiet for a while. She finished her coffee. He drank his beer and ate his cheeseburger.

“I’ll give you as long as you need to find another job,” he said.

“I’ll only need a few days,” she said. “To find something else.” She was already dreading facing the Bali pages she’d pinned to her refrigerator, evidence of her stupidity, of her inevitable humiliation. She asked Darnel if he wanted his books back. He did not.

“I’d appreciate a quick exit,” he said. “But I understand your position.”

“You couldn’t possibly.”

“I’ll get lunch.”

“How noble of you.” Joyce tried to think of the Evening Surf setting on her noise machine, the lulling sound of water hitting sand. Then she told Darnel something she’d never said to anyone before, that the thing she missed most about being married was the actual word “marriage,” being able to say she was “in a marriage” or “working on her marriage.” It gave her the feeling of being a part of something that mattered, something vital and alive.

“But I wasn’t a part of something that mattered,” she said. “And neither are you.”

“I was worried you might cry,” he said. “But I think the way you’re acting now is even worse.”