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

“How’s the garden?” I ask. “Grown any squash the size of bowling pins yet?”

“Is everything okay over there?” I imagine her groping the bedside table for her glasses.

“Everything is kind-of-fine. Does that count as an answer?”

“Jean,” she says. “I’m going back to bed if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

What she really wants to know is what I’m still doing in California and what exactly is this acting role I mentioned in a postcard and how much longer before I come back to Washington. I try to think of a way to explain everything, but I can’t explain Bigfoot or Jimmy or why the reddish color of the water here makes me think of the fear that swallowed our childhood the way a snake swallows mice. All I know is that I’m in what I’m in and I don’t want to leave it, not yet. I hear Sara’s breath, deep and impatient, on the line — my sister the survivor, my sister the pragmatist, an overgrown vegetable garden her sole form of excess. I apologize for calling so late, then hang up the phone.

The house seems smaller in the night and I suddenly want to be outside. I go out the back door and sit on the concrete steps. The sky is black and starless. I’m wearing a pair of Jimmy’s boxers and one of his T-shirts. Both fit me perfectly. Before we went to bed tonight, he came into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. He didn’t say anything at first, just stood in the doorway and stared. And then, as I rinsed the spearmint toothpaste from my mouth, he asked if I would like to have some of his clothes. It was the first time he’d mentioned anything about his belongings and I’d been happy to avoid the subject altogether. I spit green into the sink and watched it swirl into the drain. I mean when we’re not doing this anymore, he continued. After it’s all over. I turned from the sink and told him I’d take whatever he wanted me to have. He didn’t say anything else, just nodded and walked into the bedroom.

A rotten pear sits on the bottom step. I reach down and pick it up. This one is really far gone, dark and sticky in my hand like an exposed organ. A kidney, perhaps. Or some kind of decayed heart. I throw the pear and it smacks the trunk of a tree, exploding with a sound like a muffled gunshot. I sit in the stillness of the yard for a moment longer, then wipe my palm on the steps and go inside.

“You don’t have to stay here,” Jimmy says when I return to bed. “If you’re having trouble sleeping.”

“I’ve been sleeping fine,” I reply. “Something just woke me.”

“I thought I heard you talking to someone.”

“I made a phone call.” I roll onto my side. “Did I ever tell you about my sister?”

“The one in Olympia, with the mutant vegetable garden?”

“The one and only.” I touch the space beneath his collarbone. “Did you know that when we were young, she had these attacks?”

“Attacks?”

“Seizures. She was sick for a long time.”

“Did she get better?”

“Yes,” I say. “She’s fine now.”

“What were you doing in the backyard?”

I tell him about finding the pear and the noise it made when it splattered against the tree. I tell him how I’ve always had good aim, ever since I played in my first softball game as a kid. I flex my arm and he squeezes the small swell of muscle, pretending to be impressed.

“Maybe that’s what I’ll do tomorrow,” he says. “Smash the rest of the pears against the tree.” He flattens my hand against his chest. “Pop, pop, pop.”

I ask if he finished sorting the records in his closet, which ones he ended up sending to his friend.

“I mailed him my Django Reinhardt’s.”

“Why did you pick those?”

“Because Django has the most interesting story,” he says. “Do you know it?”

I shake my head, my hair rustling against the pillow. “Django’s first wife made paper flowers for a living and one night they caught on fire. It’s said Django knocked over a candle, but no one knows for sure. Half his body was badly burned, including his left hand, his guitar hand. His doctors thought he would never play again. But he did. And he became the greatest.”

“What does that have to do with your friend?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to share the story with someone. And he lives too far away to drop by for one of those final visits. All the way out in Hawaii, if you can believe it.”

A light rain begins to fall. We both turn quiet. I hear the barking dog again. I can’t tell which end of the street it’s coming from, the noise at once distant and immediate. Soon Jimmy’s breathing becomes hushed and I know he’s drifted off. I keep my hand on his chest. His bones shift beneath his skin.

When I get to work the next day, the fat man says we need to talk. I stand in front of his desk, my wrists crossed behind my back. The welt on my neck is still large, the color a dark purple. I wonder if he’s giving me another customer with a special request.

“Jean,” he begins and I realize it’s the first time he’s ever said my name. I know right away that this isn’t about a new assignment. It’s always a bad sign when someone who never says your name suddenly starts. “Your last customer wasn’t satisfied with his Bigfoot experience.”

I tell him how difficult it was to wait for so long, how I kept dipping in and out of character, how I was so used to being the attacker, I couldn’t keep the same momentum while pretending to be prey. I promise to work on this angle, to stand in my backyard and imagine I’m being stalked by something awful and wait for it to come.

The fat man shakes his head. “No,” he says. “That’s not the problem.”

“What did the man say?”

“He said you fell like a girl.”

I say that’s impossible, explaining how I deliberately let my torso hit the ground first, the way Bigfoot would, and refrained from shoving out an arm to lessen the impact. “I know how to fall,” I tell him.

“The man said you flailed your arms and squealed. He said the moment you fell, he knew it was a woman in costume, not Bigfoot, and the dream was broken.”

I point at the welt on my neck. “He shot me two more times while I was on the ground.”

The fat man shrugs. “Maybe he doesn’t like women.”

I open the closet and push through the other Bigfoot costumes, looking for mine, the smallest one with my initials on the tag. When I don’t find it, I slam the door and press my lips together.

“I had to give him a refund.” He rises from his chair, lifts my Bigfoot costume from underneath his desk, and hands it to me. “Sorry, Jean.”

He’s being nice enough to not fire me directly, to let me figure it out for myself, so I don’t give him a hard time. I don’t yank the other costumes from the hangers. I don’t swipe my arm across his desk. I don’t strike a match and set the whole place on fire. I take the costume, then open the door and go outside. The sky is a deep, cloudless blue. The winds are high and grey dust rises around me, as though I’m standing in the quiet center of a storm.

I’ve been walking for twenty minutes and haven’t seen a single person on the road. It’s two miles from the park to my house. The costume is light in my arms, the fur soft. The wind keeps blowing specks of dirt into my eyes, so I put on the mask. After getting fired, I’m glad to be walking; parts of my body feel so heavy, I worry if I sat down for too long, I’d never get up.

I find myself thinking of things that haven’t come into my mind for months. Like how I was married once, to a guy from Tacoma, who I met while working as a receptionist at a local theater company in Washington. We eloped to Las Vegas and were married in a tiny white chapel. It lasted less than a year. I always knew when he was seeing another woman. He had such a terrible game face, it was almost charming. After we split, my sister asked me what I’d expected, marrying someone on a whim. I’d already decided to move to Los Angeles and joked that I did it so I’d be able to channel the pain into my acting. Only it turned out that nobody wanted to see real suffering, that no director or casting agent wanted the kind of pain that would, even for an instant, make anyone want to turn away, like the pain I see when I’m with Jimmy.