Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

On a dark winter morning at the Müllerhaus men’s hostel, Julian Bledstein reached for his dopp kit. At home he could medicate himself blindfolded, but here, across the ocean, it wasn’t so easy. The room stank, and more than one young man was snoring. The beds in the old gymnasium were singles, which hadn’t kept certain of the guests from coupling when the lights went out. Sometimes Julian could hear them going at it, fornicating as if with silencers on. He studied the sounds when he couldn’t sleep, picturing the worst: animals strapped to breathing machines, children smothered under blankets. In the morning he could never tell just who had been making love. The men dressed and left for the day, avoiding eye contact, mesmerized by the glow of their cell phones. The evidence of sex failed to show on their faces.

Julian held his breath and squeezed the syringe, draining untold dollars’ worth of questionable medicine into the flesh of his thigh. He clipped a bag holding the last of his money to the metal underside of his bed. His father’s hard-earned money. Not enough euros left. Not nearly enough. He’d have to make a call, poor mouth into the phone, until his father’s wallet spit out more bills. Under his mattress he stashed his passport.

He left the hostel and took the stone path down to nothing good. This morning he was on his way, yet again, to meet Hayley’s train. Sweet, sweet Hayley. She would fail to appear today, no doubt, as she had failed to appear every day for the past two weeks. More and more it seemed that his lovely, explosively angry girlfriend, who only rarely seemed to loathe him, wouldn’t be joining him in Germany. Even though they’d planned the trip for months, googling deep into Julian’s unemployed afternoons back home, Hayley pinging him sexy links from work when she could. A food truck map, day treks along the Königsallee. First they’d destroy England and France, lay waste to the Old World, then drop into freaking Düsseldorf for the last, broken leg of the journey.

It was going to be a romantic medical tourist getaway, a young invalid and his lady friend sampling the experimental medicine of the Rhine. Hayley promised to break bitter pieces of German chocolate over his tongue as he stared at the ceiling and wished his life away. But they’d fought in France, and he’d come to Düsseldorf ahead of her. Now he waited not so hopefully, not so patiently—dragging himself between the hostel, the train station, and the Internet café, checking vainly for messages from Hayley—while seeking treatment up at the clinic on the hill.

Treatment, well, that might not have been the word. His was one of the doomed conditions. An allergy to his own blood, he not so scientifically thought of it. An allergy to himself, was more like it. His immune system was mistaken, fighting against the home team. Or his immune system knew exactly what it was doing. These days autoimmune diseases were the most sophisticated way to undermine yourself, to be your own worst enemy. In the States, with such pain and such striking blood work, they merely soaked you in opiates and watched the clock. They dug your hole and wrote your name in stone. Not so in Germany, a shining outpost on the medical frontier, where out of wisdom, or denial, or economic opportunity, they tried what was forbidden or unconscionable elsewhere. And for a fee they’d try it on you. Massive doses of it . You could bathe in its miracle waters. You could practically get stem-cell Jell-O shooters at the bar on Thursday nights. So long as, you know, you waived—yes, waived—it good-bye. Your rights, your family, your life.

It was not such a terrible trade. The clinic brandished a very fine needle on Julian’s first day. It gleamed in the cold fluorescent light of the guinea pig room, and they sank it into his back. From his wheezing torso they drew blood and marrow, his deep, private syrup—boiled it, then spoon-fed it back to him until he sizzled, until he just about glowed . Of course the whole thing was more complicated than that, particularly the dark arts they conjured on his marrow once they’d smuggled it out of him. They spun it, cleaned it, damn near weaponized it, then sold it back to him for cash. Zero sum medicine, since he’d grown it himself, in what Hayley, digging into his ribs, had called “The Julian Farm.” Except the sum was a good deal larger than zero. He might as well have eaten his own arm or sucked elixir through a straw punched into his heart.

Back home he’d tried it all and felt no different. The steroids, the nerve blocks, the premium plasma. He ate only green food until it ran down his legs. Then for a long time he tried nothing. He tried school, then tried dropping out. Now he was trying, in his midtwenties, his old room in his father’s house, which Hayley always said impressed her. The courage it must have taken for him to decide to really live there with his father. Maybe. Through it all, though, he was mostly trying Hayley, as in really, really trying her, and he could see how very tired she’d been getting. Imagine that you’re the girlfriend of a long, gray, twentysomething man who is ill in a way that no one understands. Or is he? It was Hayley who’d pushed for this trip, so Julian could finally have a shot at the new medical approach they’d read so much about, a possible breakthrough with rare autoimmune disorders.

In Germany they treated you with yourself. You were guilty of hiding your own cure inside of you, you selfish fuck. They salvaged and upgraded it, then returned it to you with a vicious needle while you trembled in your chair. After a few weeks you’d be better. Hmm. In his wellness fantasies, Julian always pictured himself scrubbed clean, nicely dressed, suddenly funny and charming. All better, in every goddamned way. Maybe even a name change. Of course throughout these treatments, as he’d discovered, your frowning doctors hedged and balked and shat caveats, until the promise of recovery was off the table, out of the room, nowhere near the building. But at least on the way toward oblivion you got to, you know, feed on yourself, suck your best parts free of promise. You got to try the finest of what medicine did not legally have to offer.

This morning he ducked the stares of shopkeepers, who guarded their doors against him, the pale American who spent no money. They must have come to recognize his sickly figure by now. What was left of it. God knows they’d gawked. To Julian it seemed they could see right through his clothes, and they were not amused. You’d need more than clothing to hide a body like his. You’d need a shovel, a tarp. Tarps were designed to cover men like him. This is what you call a person? This is not a person. Tombstone inscriptions like this just came to him. He had a certain gift for the form.

The shopkeepers—little men protected by bibs, youngsters with ghostly mustaches—stood and stared as Julian snuck down the street. Was this friendliness? Was it love? Julian could only walk faster, wincing until they released him from eye contact. Had anyone, he wondered, ever studied the biology of being seen? The ravaging, the way it literally burned when you fetched up in someone’s sight line and they took aim at you with their minds? He wanted to summon a look of kindness and curiosity in return, a look that might forgive his miserly ways, his trespass on their ancient, superior city. But his face, as no one had ever needed to tell him, lacked the power to convey . He’d stopped trying to use it for silent communication, the semaphore you performed overseas, absent a shared language, to suggest you were not a murderer. Such facial language was for apes, or some mime troupe in Vermont. Mummenschanz people who emoted for a living. He ate with his face and spoke with it. Sometimes he hid it in his hands. That should have been enough.