Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

The building shuddered and, for a blinding second, the Moors went dark. Bedtime, thought Thomas. Thank God . A sharp hiss snapped the lights back on and in the strange glare a smell came to him, something far off, like a person being cooked. He blinked into the brightness, rubbed his face, and looked again at the perfectly composed colleague. A bloodbath wouldn’t get her attention, and perhaps this was the top secret these people shared: They were dead as stones and the world could pour over their cold bodies, but to hell if they’d ever notice.

It was time to push on. Something wasn’t so superfine out there, and the Moors didn’t seem like the very best place to be.

Thomas met the newly vacant hole in the Moors—the colleague hole—by invoking the insect strategy of progress. He inched forward, ever so carefully, with small dips in reverse, as if he was apologizing backward while steadily gaining ground, an orbit calculated to look like nothing was being achieved. He entered the colleague’s shadow, and even though it was not a real shadow but a dark spill at her feet, as if something awful had flushed from a bag attached to her waist, it was her shadow nonetheless and Thomas was gaining ground. How to get ahead at work: Pretend you’re moving backward. How to get fat: Swallow your own laughter. This was how his parents used to dance, shying away from each other as if to say: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

So it was that he inched into her shadow, and suddenly the air was cool and clean and he found himself breathing in fast little gulping thrills. Had anything more intensely dramatic happened ever?

This is real life, folks, Thomas wanted to say. Make no mistake, it is on!

As strategic as Thomas was, the colleague seemed to be choosing that other, uh, unexamined path, and even though she must have smelled and sensed and very nearly goddamn tasted Thomas, she trilled about indifferently and took, if it was possible, even less notice of the ridiculously fine gentleman nearly riding inside her clothing. Do I have to become you, he wanted to ask, for you to notice me? The liberty she took, to effuse in his presence—the simmering pleasure fountain within the colleague that she’d turned up to full—was, what was the word, problematic . Because if indeed a person only succumbs to such biological gurglings alone, she clearly did not yet know he was there, or couldn’t accord him the status of the present. And yet he was living pretty hard not three feet away from her. Was this kind of omission seriously within her power? Was he meant to actually embrace her in order to prove his existence?

Thomas backed away. This sally would be recalled. Her smell, her climate, the so-called sphere of the colleague was too much. Doesn’t one break into pieces in such an atmosphere? There were laws to be invoked, certainly, yet the fuck if he knew what they were. Perhaps that’s what anyone’s personal smell ultimately was: the residue of the people who had shipwrecked against them. Thomas felt he would get sick on the colleague’s past if he stayed too near. This wasn’t worth it, he knew, and he looked at the sad space he’d have to crawl through to get back to his desk, without his rotten coffee, the doorway that had never before delivered such unequivocal disease to his person before. Was this doorway number freaking one, and was there any possible glory behind it?

The fundamental difference between Thomas and the colleague, a difference in their mistake management protocol, heh heh, was that the colleague was smiling through this disaster (he could tell this even from the back of her head), dipping and dodging and spewing happiness like a strange machine designed to broadcast cheerful moods to people who weren’t sure what to feel. A mood Sherpa . What would you like to feel today, little sir?

Whereas Thomas, well, he was showing a medium-high capacity for colossal not-so-greatness. He looked around and saw just walls of nothing, smelled the burned body smell, and had to restrain himself from trying to chew his way out of the air. He had to remind himself as he held his ground behind the colleague—wait quietly for your coffee, little sir!—that there was still—thank God—a barrier between his thoughts and the world, and that people could not look at his disheveled, sea-bloated fatitude, his pilled attire that had been washed into sheer roughage, the extra fat mounded on the backs of his hands—in case I have to eat myself someday—and have any blessed idea of his, uh, special thoughts, as such. There was, as yet, no tool to read into the clot of his head, and if he grimaced or smirked or grinned or just looked as shit-crazed as he absolutely, in some objective sense, was, there was no proof of the inside material, and this was sufficient and soothing negation to the chance that a disclosure was occurring without his knowledge.

Things were calming down. This was good. The mistaken shadow invasion, the day the colleague’s shadow was breached, was now strictly archival, stored for the crowd who would watch this on video someday. Would it be called Mishaps at the Moors ? The Day My Ship Caved In ? I, Colleague ? What a shrill little bit of drama that had been loosed into the labs, but for nothing, and Thomas looked around for someone to blame. This was pretty basic. Things were okay. The colleague would get her coffee. Thomas would wait his turn, like a good little sir. One by one, events in a divine order would bleed into the day. A little seepage of correctitude, that’s all. The noon hour would bring its dose of calm. Thomas would nod at the colleague as she passed him, a weary but confident nod like one of thousands he gifted to people every week. Some mastery would be inferred. A vague suggestion that usually someone would have stood the line for Thomas to get a coffee, but today, why not, let’s see what the regular people do, let’s build empathy. Oh, who knows, maybe Thomas and the colleague would embrace before she departed the Moors. She’d have to find somewhere to put her coffee, though, or else he’d feel that hot mug on his back and their contact would be queered. There’d be too much caution, and what kind of embrace was that? So there were things to work out, details to finalize. But this would be fine.

Perhaps, if he was lucky, if he survived this test, which is certainly what it was, his heart wouldn’t blow out of his chest into the Idea Wall that loomed above the beverage cart. Maybe that was the real meaning of the term redshift, thrown endlessly over his head during proof-of-concept meetings: a noiseless exit of the heart from the dehydrated and fat body of a man who was…Why bother finishing the thought. Poof . He could hear the sound his heart would make being sucked clean from its cage of bone and fat. Wasn’t this the time when properly prepared people had some fatherly advice they could squeeze from their pasts to help them fire hose the crisis, so they could roar with laughter, drink a stein of thick foreign beer, and do something unspeakably gratifying in the backwoods to a small animal? Because every so often it feels good to tear a hot warm thing to pieces. The things our parents taught us, those sage lessons from the older set, or something. Father always said …but nothing came to him. He cast around in his background, in his memories, in the finer sayings his parents had condescended to share with him, but it felt like he was sticking his hand in a tank of rotted fish.

If he nailed his own head to the Idea Wall, precisely what, uh, idea would he be conveying?

Another bag—or whatever the awful thing was—dropped outside, and Thomas realized he wasn’t breathing. A sweet shroud of silence had hazed up moments before the thud, or the crunch, or whatever the name was when something made of flesh hit the asphalt with the acoustical resistance of canvas. In hindsight you always knew you heard something falling, it was sort of what you didn’t hear, thought Thomas. He wanted to joke about this, but all he could come up with was hindsight is…not funny . There was a strangled cry after the thud, and he saw too little of the colleague’s face to tell if she was registering this, the hurt, the crunch, the goddamn sound track of cruelty that somehow was getting piped into the lab and that was meant to let them know it was noon.