Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

It took him just one sucking sprint on a cigarette to reach the train station, a domed building in rust-colored stone. After a few mornings inside, braving the crush of travelers who reeked of chowder, he figured he didn’t need to enter the dank space just to wait for Hayley. A granite ledge opposite the station offered a perfect view of the decamping passengers. Every morning locals poured from the building wrapped in hemp and straw. The fancier ones wore the waxed canvas coats of hunters. Occasionally an American or two spoiled the tasteful palette with vacation colors, releasing high-strung moods as if by megaphone: I have arrived in your historic city and I am the happiest person you will ever know! Let me rub my joy on you! They shot into the town square like clowns fired from a cannon, mugging their snack-smeared faces at some imagined camera, dreaming of paparazzi.

No one disliked American tourists more than their own kind. Or probably they did. Probably there was widespread competition in this arena, hostility toward the first world animal spreading its lucre abroad. Julian could picture the American tourist problem resolving in a civil war, a snake not eating its own tail, but maybe doing something nastier. Giving it head, its snake jaws popped out of joint to apple bob the shaft.

It was only upon leaving New Jersey, flying east toward higher civilization, that the demise of his decadent homeland seemed so overdue. But some higher power, or some covert, stateless, ideological power, kept forgetting to stick the pig. America kept charging the horizon, its lancet drawn, a milky substance leaking from the tip, refusing to perish. Now he had to look at these muffin-tops from home ready to speed-learn German culture, their sneakers swollen like parade floats as they bounced around outside the Hauptbanhof, trying to keep warm in the bitter German air.

Two weeks went by like this. Trains rolled in from Paris, Salzburg, Dresden, Berlin, failing each time to spit from their insides the girl Julian had fought with in Strasbourg. A disappointment of trains. He and Hayley, in fact, had fought in several cities in the Western Hemisphere on this trip, a road show of freeze-outs and recriminations. For the most part they warred silently, with so much stealth that sometimes Julian wasn’t sure whether or not they were even quarreling. Even in bed, as she hobbyhorsed on top of him in pursuit of her sexual quota, with the focus of a child doing homework, grimacing when her time came, he wondered if she was mad at him. Their mating activity was hardly much sexier than a needle in the back. But at least he got to see her naked. Hayley could look so serious beneath her pixie haircut. She was too stubbornly self-contained, too confident, too okay with it all, which was decidedly not okay with Julian. A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it. But Hayley had built a fire wall around her feelings and moods. There was no knowing her, and fuck you if you tried to pierce her privacy. You were a creep and an invader and you’d be rebuffed, then shamed. Hayley would fall quiet if Julian suddenly touched her hand, when all he wanted was to be touched back. That was the consolation prize available to the bottoms in a relationship, right? The mules, the dinguses, the shitbags? Touchbacks were supposed to be free. And she’d be clearly annoyed at the transparency of Julian’s desire when out of nowhere he pounced. Poking her to be cute, which was not, he knew, cute . Was there a subcategory of shit-eating grin, depending on whose shit you ate? He’d gone to a different school of etiquette, the school of no shame, the school of I need more from you. He’d been fucking homeschooled in emotional helplessness, scoring off the charts. By touching Hayley and waiting for her response, Julian could pursue the kind of emotional research you didn’t get to conduct in graduate school: dissertation-level inquiry into the limits of revulsion regarding people who ostensibly love each other. Which would always turn out to be a really stupid move. Hayley would snap and he’d feel his face burn, getting ready to be rubbed in something. She’d smell his need and it stank, it really, truly stank. Why did he always have to confirm a good thing, asking about it and asking about it, Hayley wanted to know? She told him to put his hellish thermometer away, to stop prodding her with his goddamned thermometer, obsessively trying to gauge how she felt so much that he kept ruining the mood .

Which proved that he loved Hayley. Somewhat. A lot. Awfully. God help him. First of all, she didn’t leave him, even though his salient feature as a man was his leavability. He created occasions for departure in others. Tombstone. And until now Hayley had hung in there. Her loyalty alone was an aphrodisiac, even though his medication sometimes gave him the useless crotch of a mannequin. Hayley also believed in Julian’s illness, found it true and real and even pretty damn interesting, a faith that had turned out to be rare. Julian’s father and Hayley and the occasional stranger on the Internet, where the ill go in search of each other, humping each other’s empathy slots. These were the believers. Even if, sometimes, maybe just a little bit, Julian did not really believe in the illness himself.

Hayley wasn’t coming. It was pretty obvious. Julian sat shivering in the chill, listening for the 9:13, the 9:41, the 10:02. He was tired. In winter he sometimes caught a fever. His arms and back burned hot, as if a flame were being held to his skin. This was the dying of the nerves, an Internet confidante had explained. Of course his immune system wanted him dead. It knew . It was making the call on behalf of the wider society. It was taking him out. In the larger project of the universe, of which he must necessarily be kept in the dark, his own existence appeared to be an obstacle. So the species makes an adjustment. Tombstone. It redacts.

No one else waited outside today. No one else was stupid enough to sit and freeze on a granite ledge in middle Germany, watching the trains come in. People here knew where their loved ones were. A loved one’s coordinates were simply available. Such was the nature, the very definition, of a loved one. People didn’t need to risk exposure and illness waiting outside and wondering, letting their minds work up end-time scenarios. The vanished, dead loved one. The disloyal loved one, licking a stranger in another city. They did not need to dream up future sorrows for themselves, a life lived without the loved one. Slap an ankle bracelet on your loved one if you must, must know where they are at all times, but solve the problem, he told himself. Get it done. Track your fucking people or cut them loose.

After the first trains of the morning failed to produce her, Julian stood at a café for a scorched espresso, then returned to his lookout to wait. Later, when Hayley still hadn’t come, he took shelter at the crepe stand, where they’d already cloaked the day’s crepes in black jam. A death bread, for two euros. The thousand-year-old remains of an old man, now just a wedge of tar. This is you in the future, you poor, rotting thing.

He wasn’t hungry. He was never hungry. But some dim sense of duty haunted him, his father’s voice, gentle and girlish, suggesting that food might help. Food, food, food. Please, Julian, eat something, his father was always saying, as if noxious, soon to be spoiled material from the earth was going to do anything but poison him further. For Julian’s whole life his father—small, kind, and so selfless Julian wondered if he had any needs of his own—stood at the stove and made pancakes for him, grilled cheese, oatmeal, eggs, burgers. Later, when the alternative care community had thrust nutritional strategies their way, when the Prednisone and Lyrica, the off-label intravenous immunoglobulin, and the chemotherapy worms had fattened and ruined and bleached and burned and defeated him, his father steamed bushels of kale. But Julian only ever picked at what polluted his plate, as if dissecting roadkill for shards of glass. His father, especially after his mother traveled underground to spend the rest of eternity inside a luxury coffin where no one could disturb her again, removed Julian’s untouched food and scraped it into the trash. Only to try again a few hours later, smiling and kind.