Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

So now he thought that eating something might be smart, but the tourist’s gesture for plain crepe eluded him. Or the vendor enjoyed watching Julian pretend to scrape something foul from his hand. Scraping it and scraping it, souring his face to indicate his distaste for the jam, while the vendor grinned at him and winked, as if Julian were demonstrating something the two of them might do together later, in private. Why were these gestures always considered sexual, one hand doing something untoward to the other hand? Why wasn’t it seen as semaphore of the beginning of the world, God the creator digging life from the soil and brushing it off, sending it without a headlamp into the darkness? He might finally consent to play charades, maybe, if instead of celebrities the pantomime could be restricted to events surrounding the big bang. Religious scenarios. The cold narrative of physics. Reenactments from the very, very beginning of time. Very fucking very. And on the eighth day, God made his creatures so lonely they wept. Picture that charade, he thought. The people of this world weeping into their hands.

Julian was early for his transfusion. This was probably good, because he had to navigate a ritual confusion at the clinic front desk. It concerned the very existence of Hayley.

“You do not come alone?” the receptionist quizzed him, as per fucking usual. She rose from her chair, which gassed, and peered behind him. He stepped aside so she could see the emptiness.

“I do.”

As in, regardez how goddamn alone I am. See it once and for all.

There seemed to be no way to permanently establish the fact of his solitude. He shrugged at her and showed, via sneer, what he considered to be justified disgust. It made his face ache.

The receptionist failed to notice.

“You are not supposed to be coming alone,” she insisted, waving the form.

It was true. He’d agreed to be accompanied—they didn’t give a shit by whom—because the treatments left you weak, woozy. The treatments left you worse than that. Supine, prone, drooling, horny. Tombstone. Never mind how problematic that was, how much that suggested that treatment was the wrong word. The very, very wrong word. What should you call it when afterward you needed to be led from the premises? When, due to the obliterating immunosuppressants, which preceded the perfectly refreshing speedballs of marrow, the body lacks the power to remove itself? Probably they didn’t care, at this first-class medical establishment, if the body was dumped in the Rhine. Just get it out of the clinic. Did they call it the body ? Did they ask each other, peeking from behind their German curtain: has the body gone? It is all clear, Ja ?

He wasn’t racist, he was just tired. Anyway, he’d done fine most days without Hayley, weaving through the granite lobby after his treatment, baby stepping down the broad, white stairway overlooking town. On some days, well, at least once, he’d even felt strong and alert, with a fresh dose of doctored stem cells running through his blood.

Julian leaned in, showed his teeth. These were the gray teeth, he knew, of someone not threatening to bite you, but to crumble his mouth on your face, leaving bits of horrid ash.

“Would you like me to leave?” he hissed at her. “Because I will. Is that what you want?”

Ooh, boy. What a tremendous threat, to not follow through on his own treatment, which his father had already paid for! He really had her now. He’d backed her into a corner!

The toddler threatens the parent:

If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll refuse to eat this candy!

The receptionist sighed. She was a human being after all.

“This person exists for you?”

“Not just for me.”

“And you say she is coming?” The receptionist struck a hopeful tone.

Oh, God, he thought, let’s not be hopeful anymore. Where has it gotten us, really?

“No,” Julian said. “I’d say she is not.”

In the waiting room, once he’d been buzzed in, he shut his eyes against the wheezing shrieks of the ill. Or was that a computer, booting up like a Tasered horse? It was possible that no one within earshot was screaming, but shouldn’t someone be screaming right now? Anyone? In places like this Julian imagined death throes around every corner, a gowned man twitching on the floor while a crowd of doctors leg-blocked your view.

When he’d first arrived, the clinic wasn’t what he expected. The place lacked a porch with rocking chairs, where dignitaries convalesced deep in thought, staring out over a thundering gorge. Nurses did not come by with blankets to cover your lap. You did not take the clean, healing air, or hike up mossy trails into the mountains. Hadn’t the Germans pretty much popularized convalescence, established it as the solution to life among functional people? What a huge disappointment this place was, and if it weren’t for the illicit product, unavailable stateside, tombstone, he might as well have been home in New Jersey.

The Bensdorp Clinic seemed free of any kind of Bavarian mountain heritage. Convalescence here was presented as an essentially professional activity, like day-trading. The reception lounge was smartened up like a bank, the treatment rooms hidden in vaults. Photographs of athletic prowess, framed in metal, lined the hallways. Bodies performing impossible maneuvers, glistening, mostly nude. These images were hung, no doubt, to flatter the rumored celebrity clients, who must have had their own entrance, their own goddamn wing, because Julian never saw them. Rich and arthritic American athletes, willing to take injections of liquid horse penis or whatever into their stiff joints, able to afford exceedingly rare and hazardous attacks on their bodies. Sea sponge in the neck, cartilage-fortifying worms, administered via cream.

In the waiting room patients gazed at their phones or read or looked anywhere but at one another. A certain shame, along with the exhausted indifference of the dying, lingered over people going out of pocket on experimental health care, paying too much to keep feeling worse far from home. How humiliating to be seen like this, failing to rage, rage against the dying of the light. Failing even to fucking complain .

When his name was called, the technician led him to the semiprivate room where patients reclined in blue vinyl chairs, watching television they could not understand. Here they pretended, or didn’t, that their procedures were going to work. Even the hopeful tilted over their own graves, a boot at their back.

In transfusion chair number 3, Julian submitted to the usual pretreatment shenanigans. He confirmed his name and birth date, signing, yet again, a German-language consent form. A nurse-practitioner arrived to stick him for blood, filling a vial from his leg until it shined like a long, black bullet. She waved it at him and it foamed.

“You are okay,” she said.

“I am?”

“Yes,” she smirked. “I know this.” She tapped her head. A universal sign of certainty. He needed to remember to tap his head when he spoke, no matter what. He should always tap his head.

Yesterday he’d had a scan and some other tests, so today he was relatively in the clear, time wise. Today’s transfusion would only take an hour, the nurse told him, and then he was free. He’d have some daylight when he got out and maybe he’d wait at the train station. He didn’t have to pay for his seat on the ledge, licking his wounds, pretending to watch for Hayley. And if he returned to the hostel too early, he’d have to hide under his sheets until the blinding overhead lights were shut off for the night.

“Ready?” asked the nurse, and he nodded to her. He wasn’t.

She wheeled up the apparatus and switched it on. Inside its wire frame rested the clear bag sloshing with his new life, frothy and pink, and it produced a not-unpleasant hum.