Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

“Don’t act like you know what’s going on,” his father whispered as they trekked out. “You’re as much in the dark as we are. You have no idea what’s really happening. None. Fucking hotshot. Tell me one fact. I dare you.”

When they reached the hill and had to navigate the decline, his mother kept falling. She’d fall and cry out, landing on her rear end in the grass. He’d never heard her cry in pain before. His father was beside her holding her arm, but she was the larger of his parents and when she stumbled his father strained and couldn’t hold her up. He lost his temper and kept yelling at her, and finally, softly, she said she was doing her best. She really was.

“Well, I can’t carry you!” he yelled.

“Then don’t,” she replied, and she stood up and tried to walk on her own, but she went down again, with an awful cry, sliding through the mud.

In the car she wept and Edward felt ashamed. This was supposedly the easy part.

The gymnasium was crowded. A motor roared, which must have been the generator, because they would have lost power at this point. They signed in, then looked for their settlements, divided by neighborhood. This was the drill. Edward would have a different settlement from his parents, which he’d tried to explain to them, but his father had trouble with the terminology.

“It’s not a settlement,” he’d said.

“Okay, I agree, but that’s what they’re calling it.”

“It’s ridiculous. We’ll be staying there for what, a few hours, not even, and they call it a settlement? A settlement is a place where people stop and stay. You know, people live in a settlement.”

“Dad, I don’t think it really matters. I think what matters is you find the area where you’re supposed to be and then go there.”

“But it won’t be the area where you will be, am I right?”

“That’s right. But I’ll be nearby. I’ll be able to check on you and Mom.”

“You don’t know that, though, Eddie. How could you know that?”

When Edward brought his parents to their settlement, he could not get them admitted. A young woman he knew as Hannah had the clipboard. After scanning her pages, she shook her head.

“They’re not on my list.”

“They live in this neighborhood.” He gave her their address, their apartment number. For no real reason he gave her their zip code, the solitary zip code for all of them.

In the crowd that had already registered were several of his parents’ neighbors, huddled against a wall. There were retirees from his parents’ building. Neighbors who knew his parents. This was the right place. He waved, but no one saw him.

Hannah stared from behind her clipboard. He could sense the protocol overwhelming her mind. A street address, recited anecdotally, was no kind of evidence. Anyone could deliver that information. Edward was only a man talking.

“Do you want to see their driver’s licenses?” he asked, a bit too curtly. Not that he’d brought them.

“No. I want to see their names on this list, and since I don’t, I can’t admit them. I have the most straightforward job in the world. If you have a problem you should discuss it with Frederick, but something tells me I know what he’ll say.”

From under her shawl Edward’s mother said, “Eddie, it’s okay, we’ll go with you to yours.” She sounded relieved. That would solve everything and they could be together.

Edward looked at Hannah, who simply raised her eyebrows. She and Edward had once been on a team together at the beginning. She had seemed nice. Very smart, too, which explained her promotion. Unfortunately, Hannah was impossibly striking. He had been so desperately compelled by her face that he had instantly resolved never to look at her or show her any kind of attention. Everything would be much easier that way. It was troubling now to discover that Hannah ran his parents’ settlement. Was this how things were now? Had everything shifted again? It meant he’d have to see more of her and regularly be reminded that she would never be his. She would never kiss him or get undressed for him or relieve his needs before work or stop trying to look pretty for him, which was the part he liked best, at least when he played out futures with women he’d never speak to. When someone like Hannah, not that there’d ever been someone like Hannah, let herself go and showed up on the couch after dinner in sweatpants and a long, chewed-up sweater. It was unbearable.

Edward knew that he shouldn’t do this, but Hannah would have to understand. He broke character and pleaded with her.

“There’s nowhere else to go. Can you please take them? Please? Is someone really going to come by later and match each person to a name on your list?”

She hardened her face. She wasn’t going to drop the act, and she seemed disgusted with Edward for having done so himself.

“Did they get a phone call?” she asked. Even this question seemed beneath her.

He started to answer, figuring he could lie, when his father blurted out that their phone was broken. How could you get a phone call with a broken phone?

“I assumed they did,” he confided to Hannah. “That’s the truth. Why wouldn’t they get a call? Look, their neighbors are here. People from the same building. Why would my parents have been left out?”

At this last question she looked at him flatly. Why indeed.

“They’re not supposed to be here,” Hannah said. “You shouldn’t have brought them. You might consider…” She seemed reluctant to say what she was thinking. “At this point you’ve made a serious mistake and you need to decide how to fix it with minimal impact on the community.”

She glanced pitilessly at his parents, then muttered, “I know what I would do.”

Edward figured that he knew what she would do, too.

He leaned in so he could speak into her ear. “Are you carrying?” he whispered. “Because if you are, and I could borrow it, I could kill them right here, and it would be a lesson for everyone.”

She was stone-faced. That wasn’t funny. “There are people behind you. I have a protocol to run.”

Don’t we all, Edward thought. But his protocol, to keep his parents safe, could not be achieved here.

“Okay, well, thanks for your help,” he said, sneering. “Good teamwork. Way to go.”

She kept her cool. “So you want me to make a mistake, arguably a bigger one, because you did? Let’s say your mistake was an accident, which possibly it was, although I can’t say. I’m guessing you’re not an imbecile, although this is only a guess. You want me to consciously break the rules. You want your error, a stupid error, if you ask me, to beget other errors so we’re both somehow to blame, even though I do not know you and have no responsibility for you? How does that do you a favor? How does that help you? At this point you need to fall on your sword. I don’t understand what’s so hard about that.”

Why was it so much worse to be shamed by an attractive person? Somehow he felt he could handle this critique from anyone else in the world.

Just then the lights switched on in the gymnasium and a hush fell. Frederick, leader of the readiness workshop, walked in with his wireless microphone. Everyone watched him. He stood at center court, tucked the microphone under his arm, and started to clap methodically, as if he were killing something between his hands. Soon everyone was applauding, moving in close to hear what Frederick would say. The drill, apparently, was over.

He thumped his mic, said Hello, Hello, and everyone fell silent. He was such a cock, Edward thought. An impossible cock.

“So,” he said, in his quick, high voice. “Fair work tonight. Not terrible. We made okay time. Maybe we’re a half hour slow, and I don’t need to tell you what that means.”