Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“—it doesn’t exist anymore except as a horizon line, or like an asymptote, and that is funny, and it is progressively funnier. It gets darker and colder and rainier all the time. The wind bawls and the wind gets bigger. The wind has arms and hands.”

Jim growled in pity and terror.

“It’s like we’re boating into a cold jet engine. The sea is swelling and dropping, swelling and dropping. The boat lurches veryveryfast over the waves, and then the waves recede in a trough, and the boat lands with a massive thump each time. With every thump, a huge pail of salt water lands splat in our faces. With every thump, I clear six inches of air between the boat seat and my butt.”

“Did anybody get boinged out of the boat?” Jim asked.

“Sometimes I think to look around, and everyone in the boat looks like castaways who are resisting rescue. The laughter is getting bigger and more, and it starts to sound like hysteria. Or maybe the hysteria set in before that and we were too hysterical to notice. It only settles down once darkness falls entirely. Then it gets very quiet. We are heading straight into another squall. The other cayes and islands around us — they just disappear.”

“So it’s total darkness now?”

“We have two hundred meters of visibility at most — it’s probably much less. The red blinking light of Caye Caulker is vanishing and flickering and vanishing again. It keeps falling away behind the palm trees. Our boat has just a tiny port-and-starboard light on it. Maybe no one is seeing us. As we’re moving into the parking zone for boats, a huge luxury yacht looms up out of the darkness. The pilot yells at his copilot and the boat steers hard to the right and lurches up on its side and it nearly tips over. The pilots relax and laugh because they’re so relieved the danger has passed. But then they notice that a dinghy is attached to the yacht, and again, they steer hard, lurch to the right, and laugh. Everyone is laughing again now except me.”

“Killjoy,” Jim said.

“I ask them what is so funny, and Unity is laughing and says, ‘We almost died, and then we almost died again.’ ”

“It’s the refrain that’s funny,” Jim said.

“And then Ram says if we had hit that boat we would either have been impaled on pulverized fiberglass or knocked unconscious and drowned, and he starts to say something else, but he’s laughing too hard to continue. As we approach the dock, there’s a small crowd assembled, watching us as the two men whose names I haven’t caught begin roping the boat. Baz is taunting the crowd, yelling, ‘You were gonna call the Coast Guard, weren’t ya! Admit it!’ ”

“Sick burn,” Jim said.

“And Ram is talking about what a great adventure we’ve had and Baz is yelling about primal joy and there’s an officer of some type, in a badge and official hat and jacket, who grabs my hand and helps me onto the dock. My legs are shaking uncontrollably, and I’m kneeling down on the planks, waiting for my thigh and calf muscles to stop spasming, and I’m watching Star and Unity already strolling hand in hand up the dock toward the blinking Christmas lights strung around the back deck of a nightclub that’s built on stilts. Baz says that I need to get up, and Ram asks me if I am quote-unquote ‘ready to sample some Caye Caulker nightlife.’ ”

“Please, please, tell me you are calling from the club right now,” Jim said.

Jen cradled the receiver against her collarbone, wrapped up the comforter around her more tightly, and fell sideways into a fetal position on the bed. “No,” she said, “but — but I did — I went out with them.”

“You did?” Jim asked, his voice tilting upward.

“Yeah,” Jen said. “It was fun. Fun night. Showed them I was a trouper.” Her breath was hot against a flapping fold of the blanket.

“Honey,” Jim said. “That is great. I’m proud of you.”

She tried to remember a time she had ever lied to Jim before, and couldn’t.

“I am not barring — boring far — going to a bar,” Jen had actually said, her eyes fixed on the planks, her legs scrabbling around beneath her on the wet dock. “Not bar now, right now.”

“Back to the mainland, then?” Baz Angler asked. “Ram can make sure you get home safe.”

“I need,” she said, placing the bottom of one foot carefully on the dock and testing her weight. “I need. ”

“Hooh, boy,” Ram said. “We really did a number on you.”

“I need a number, I mean a minute,” Jen said, stumbling backward and placing one hand down for balance. “A minute. What — what am I doing here?”

Baz Angler clapped his hands, beat his chest, and bayed at the full, shrouded moon.

“Why do I need to be here? Why am I here?” Jen asked, pushing down on her hand and flailing upward into a furtive hunched-warrior pose.

Baz cawed like a crow thrice and punched himself in the head.

“I mean not to — I don’t mean existentially,” Jen said.

Baz Angler mirrored Jen’s low-riding warrior pose. “I think Leora wants me to join her board of directors,” he said from his crouched position, then cartwheeled into a one-armed handstand on the dock’s dark slimy surface.

“Okay,” Jen said, sinking into a cross-legged heap. She stared out at the moon. “Would you like to join Leora’s board of directors?” she asked the moon.

That was when everything started to go black, but Jen was fairly certain that Baz Angler said yes.

When Ram returned Jen to the lodge a couple of hours later, Karina and Travis sat closely together on the back patio of the main house. They pulled apart at the sight of Jen and asked her questions about her day. When Jen opened her mouth to speak, nothing came out. She walked through the patio on her rubber legs and on to her bungalow.

The next morning, Jen’s eyes opened slowly, with excruciating care, encased as they were in a drying full-body mold of papier-mâché. Charred flat on her back, she was positive that if she didn’t move quickly, the adhesive would solidify completely and bury her alive in her bed, but at the same time, if she did move quickly, the adhesive would tear her skin from her bones in clumps.

Jen lifted her hands to her face, pressing the pads of her fingers to her cheeks. Some diabolical prosthetics-maker or deranged plastic surgeon had experimented on her in the night, razoring off her flesh and applying some leathery graft in its place. She rolled, grunting, onto her side onto the hot metal of an iron and bolted upright, the flesh of one shoulder searing red. In the bathroom she flipped on the overhead light. What she saw, briefly, was crustaceous, dull red, a blistering exoskeleton. She twisted around to peer at her back and cried aloud, and flipped off the light.

She found a bottle of aloe and a water pitcher, filled the water pitcher with lukewarm water from the tap. She spent the next twenty-four hours sitting on the edge of the enormous canopy bed, naked, watching sitcoms in syndication and Judge Judy, eating salted nuts and M&M’s from the minibar, drinking from and refilling the pitcher, and rubbing the aloe into all the crustaceous regions. Two angry patches on the backs of her calves. An enraged red line that parted her hair.

When she ran out of aloe, she put on first a pair of cutoffs and then a T-shirt, stifling a screech when the flaming tonnage of the T-shirt fabric slammed into one bright-red shoulder, and pushed and slapped the flaming tonnage back over her head, her mouth mewling through the cotton. She took an elastic-banded short skirt and pulled it up over her hips and under her armpits as an ad-hoc halter top. Her hand on the doorknob, she turned back to fish out her bottle of Animexa from her bag.