Leaving the Sea: Stories (22 page)

I
t was before I discovered I could survive on potatoes and salted water, before my wife started going for long walks into the thicket, before our house started leaning, started hissing when the wind came up after sunset, a house no different from a gut-shot animal listing into the woods, a woods no different from a spray of wire bursting through the earth, an earth no different from a leaking sack of water, soft in the middle and made of mush, when my children used their spoons to make a noise if I spoke to them, clashed their spoons in my face when I spoke, stood small before me using their utensils like swords, whether my words were hummed or sung or shouted, whether I was kind or cold of voice, which was before I felt the cold finger hanging between my legs, a bit of ice high on my inner thigh, a patch of clammy coolness, instead of a hot and ample limb that could dilate if I so much as smelled her, when smell was a theft of wind, when wind was a clear blood leaking from trees, before my mother began saying it was
so difficult
whenever she tried to navigate so much as some stairs, a sidewalk, the doorway to a home, before I likened waking up to a car crash, equated walking to a free fall, working in the yard to grave digging, cooking food for the family to slathering glue on the walls, dotting the glue with beads, with jewels, when I likened weeping to camouflage, opening mail to defusing a bomb, when my wife began to say “Only if you really want to,” before I developed the habit of pretending I wasn’t looking at her, when the eye was an apology hole, when the face was a piece of wood under the couch, when the couch kept the body from crashing through the floor and beyond, when
beyond
was something I had yet to think about at night, when unspeakable movies played through my head, before I went to such lengths in town meeting situations to cheat my face to show my good side to whomever might be caring to look, to anyone even accidentally looking my way, believing that if only my face was viewed from certain angles then I would win something and something would come true for me and the words that broke the seal of saliva between my lips might mean something to someone and be actually useable, the way a shirt is useable as a barrier, the way a piece of wood is useable as a weapon, before I realized that my good side was competing fearsomely to duplicate my bad side, matching and maybe surpassing it, so that the bad side of my profile appeared to be on the advance, folding over the border presented by my nose and mouth and brow, rising up my head like a tide, when a tide did not refer to the advance of water, when most words had yet to wither, when their meaning was simply not known, before I flexed my arms if my wife happened to pay out the hug I sometimes still suffered to ask for when we encountered each other in the hallway, and then noticed that she noticed me flexing my arms, yet hoped anyway that I could harden myself under her grasp and impress her with my constant readiness, when I tensed my stomach if she gestured to touch it, in case her fingers sank into me as though I were a dough, so that if she was ever near me I would contract, clutch, convulse, at first deliberately, then later out of habit, a set of twitches triggered first by her presence, then her smell, then just evidence of her person: shirts, purse, keys, photos, her name, seizure-inducing, threats to my body, when I had yet to conceal the terrible territory known as my bottom to anyone who might see it, including the children and adults and dogs of this world, whom I pitied by wearing big pants, even to bed, letting my shirts drape over my waistline to serve as a curtain for the area, when clothing served as a medical tent, an emergency service, before the phone started ringing one time only, the doorbell chiming off-key in the morning to reveal no one standing at the door, mail appearing with empty pages inside, little stones clicking against the window, footsteps fading on the lawn, scuffling sounds, rustlings in the hedge, all of us always at the table, in our beds, our rooms, at the door, somewhere, unfortunately always locatable, lost-proof, when there was never any going below the radar or keeping off the map, every person and noise accounted for, before I could hear everybody swallowing the food that I made, could hear the corpse sounds their mouths made, as though everyone were eating a microphone, the food going into their bodies and dropping there in the dark like stones, when I planted objects inside these people who were supposed to be my family, who had conspired to look enough like me to serve as a critique of my appearance, and these objects were not being digested, rather they were eavesdropping, spying for me as I positioned myself elsewhere, sitting on the couch with cookbooks or catalogs or magazines or books, when reading was the same as posing for a picture, modeling yourself for the book so that you will be seen as you wish to appear, when looking at pictures was the same as swimming underwater, before I discovered the flaw with my teeth that I confirmed every time a mirror was near, checked as often with my tongue, whenever I needed a reminder that my chew pattern looked like footprints, discovered others checking it, their eyes never on my eyes but always cast down at my mouth, confirming the flaws of my face, the vein in my nose that looked penciled in, the unfortunate curve to my fingers that blunted my hands and promised no hope that they could ever again keep hold of a cup, a bowl, a plate, some money, some hair, before my private limb was diagnosed as crooked, before I ever, as a regular practice, got down on my hands and knees, took myself out of the world of the standing people, surrendered my altitude, dropped down into table position, burying toys and letters in the yard, chipping at asphalt with a spoon, cleaning the hidden parts of the toilet, chasing my children on all fours outside in games where Daddy is a bear or dog, so that they could jump on me and ride on me and kick into the place where I would have gills if I were something better that had never tried to leave the sea, something more beautiful that could glide underwater and breathe easily, on my hands and knees at work looking for files or papers or reports, on my hands and knees crawling up to my wife in the bath, on my hands and knees in the closet, in the kitchen, in places like home where the action seems best viewed from ground level, where the action has ceased and a person can retire from view, right where the dirt starts and the air ends, the last stop for falling things, where things come to rest and get lost, on all fours as a strategy against vertigo, to be someone who has already toppled and can fall no further, is already down, low, at sea level, but not yet underwater, so that someone could come up to me and accurately say, “Man down!” before it was safer to be a person, one who had to go by automobile to view the people known as his parents, before viewing times were established with respect to his parents, days of the week with certain times and restrictions, such as when the two of them would be sleeping, or priming their bodies for sleep, or dragging themselves out of bed for the purpose of sitting there on their couch on display to my children, who could arrive at the location that contained my parents and examine them, a procedure that passed for a conversation, for play, for affection, a deep examination of these old people who were somehow, and dubiously, affiliated to them, which was well before the man came, before the man came, before the man came, knocking at the door one night, a tight report against the wood, letting himself in, sitting with us at the dinner table in the fashion of family, the man a smiler with a better face than mine, getting down from the cupboard a plate for himself, extracting his own place setting from the drawer, which was the first drawer he tried, walking right to it, so familiar, sitting with the kids, talking to the kids, whispering to the kids until they put down their spoons and laughed and used their faces for the man, before he brought his arm up under my jaw one night when I fumbled out of bed to pee, leaving me not even on my hands and knees but on my back, not gasping or hurt or scared, just disappointed, to be on my back in my own house, so that nights thereafter when I groped over to the bathroom to pee even a drop, or stand there with closed eyes and wait until I discovered I had no muscle for the peeing my body was telling me I needed to do, I would keep my arms up to keep from being struck, walked with my guard up, averting my head, waiting to be felled, when even in the daytime around the house I was ready with my arms to block what was coming at me, before I discovered him in my place in bed one evening upon returning from the bathroom, a successor where my body had been, holding on to my sleeping wife, when sleeping refined your argument against your spouse, and looking at me from a face that once might have been mine, still well before our house felt thin, not windproof or lightproof or people-proof, but a removable thing that we could not weigh down enough, because, as the man said, we were hollow, though I might not have heard him, since this was still before I heard the airplane, before everything overhead sounded like an airplane, even when I could locate no airplane, just the most booming sound overhead, which stopped getting louder or quieter, as though an airplane were circling, but doing so invisibly, when invisibility indicated objects so close you felt them to be part of your own body, before I started hearing the big sound in the house when I turned on the faucet, the radio, the lights, when I opened doors or windows or jars of sauce to shush the white and gluey food I was offering everybody, and there came the sound, when everything I did seemed to invite more sound in, my motion itself a kind of volume knob, my body a dial, which if I used it would effect a loudness in the house that made life unsuitable, myself unsuitable, the world too loud to walk through, tasks such as walking, a loudness, washing, a loudness, speaking, a certain loudness produced by the machinery of the mouth, dressing for bed, a loudness like preparing for war, lying in bed, an earsplitting, terrible loudness, the noise of waiting for sleep, asking the children to be quiet, itself too much of a hypocritical loudness, my breathing itself, only my breathing, a loudness I could no longer bear, my breathing, my breathing, too loud for me to keep doing it. I was going to deafen myself if I kept doing it, breathing was going to render my head too packed with hard sound, it was too altogether terribly loud. Something very much permanent needed quickly to be done. A new sort of quiet was required. A kind of final cessation of breathing. A stifling. To be accomplished, no doubt, with those often out-of-reach weapons called the hands.

A
t work today, Thomas the Dead, as he had privately named himself, made a grave miscalculation by using baby talk with a colleague. He had not previously stooped, even with his own child, to baby talk. Why give the boy another reason to look at him in that cold, queer way of his? Nor had Thomas indulged in the sweet-toned animal coos that his colleagues babbled at one another when they banked and crashed around the lab on their foolish errands. Thomas preferred last words, the sort of speech to be discharged on one’s deathbed. He guessed that some unpleasant number of decades ago, as a teenager, when he wore a thin beard and sported a tie with his short-sleeved dress shirts, he must have sounded old and tired and bitterly impatient, a youth who had already drawn firm conclusions on the key issues of the day, back when certainty was a young man’s best chance at securing a mate and avoiding a life of hellish solitude, not that this had worked so neatly for him. Thomas was one for whom speech, the bursting, songlike kind that showed the world what an imbecile you were, was an annoyance that also happened to sour his body like a toxin.

Thomas and the colleague had been refilling their coffees at the same time because he had failed to calibrate his advance on the self-service beverage cart. Thomas’s mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that. Entirely avoidable. After all, he had seen the colleague approaching, a hand-painted mug dangling from her finger. Thus the peril of a bald, unpoliced encounter with her could not have been more glaringly clear, and the blame was squarely in his corner. Possibly it was the way the colleague glided shamelessly past Thomas’s desk. What is it called, he wondered, when you provoke feelings of inferiority and general shittiness in others simply by the way you walk? When your mode of personal locomotion, in its devil-may-care mastery, serves as a scold to everyone fat and moist and ingloriously failed, sitting in their chairs, tired, swollen, and angry?

The warnings didn’t matter. The colleague flew past his desk, flaunting how alive she was. He could smell her superiority and sheer you’ll-never-have-me-ness, the bottled freshness that had shrouded her in a twister of perfume. Can one copulate against such a column of wind, he wondered? Are there handholds? And Thomas, triggered by scent and irritated lust, swallowing a powerful urge to dry heave, sprang after her as if she was a vehicle he suddenly needed to board, despite knowing (or not knowing vividly enough) that he’d only have to wait behind her at the coffee cart and worry the air with his oversized body.

Anyway, Thomas couldn’t fathom how a person who hoped to live through the day could subscribe to such a Lego-strewn fantasy of worker relations the word
colleague
implied: as if a group of people whose heads were darkened by the very same hovering ass—something he decidedly never learned in night school was the term for how the human voice sounded when the mouth was smothered by an oily slab of buttock—would ever link arms, sing songs, and be massively productive together, just because they peed against the same wall or starched themselves into a stupor on the salted Breadkins from the vending machine every day.
Colleague
was a dressed-up word for the coworkers who would feast on his chest if they ever found him unconscious in the bathroom, yet she was his colleague, or coworker, or peer, or, well, enemy, and Thomas couldn’t help thinking of England. Really he pictured an old, sodden map of England, which, even as it molted in his undisciplined imagination, he knew could not be prodded for even the most glancing accuracy (who policed, he wondered, just how badly people imagined things to themselves?). It wasn’t so very far away, this England, with its bearded men who fought to the death over Plato, who politely disrobed and entered the sexual transaction without a break in their conversational patter, as if it would be the highest rudeness to gasp or cede rhetorical ground at the moment of penetration, even with a half-ready British piece of genitalia that reeked of potatoes.

The colleague walked gaily down the hallway, while Thomas, drafting in her tunnel of merriment, took up the somber rear. The two of them in procession—like a dashing mom with her slob kid in tow, thought Thomas (a kid who was noticeably
older
than his mother)—past the outlying desks and mail bins and various lab doors that were fitted with, instead of doorknobs, the long chrome lever arms that one normally saw on walk-in freezers. Thomas may as well have called after her:
Mommy, wait,
and he felt a sudden urge to gurgle, fall to the floor, and rub himself for comfort. Chalk that up to another
entirely appropriate response
he would never indulge. If only he had a dead body, or was it money, for all of these, uh, unpursued urges.

They were not exactly friends, Thomas and the colleague, but the two of them coffined up in the same stinking diesel elevator enough times—trespassing each other’s borders with wartime regularity and altogether too little overt treachery—that didn’t it, he thought, merit some kind of default marriage in the end? Was there a better working definition of marriage than a weapon-free battle between exhausted adults, with an agreement to gaze above each other’s heads, icing each other out with indifference? Cold War would be the way Ramsey, in equipment, would dismiss it to Thomas, Ramsey who delivered transmissions on married and fathered life whenever Thomas had to sign out gear—a beaker, a tray, and an allergen-percolating tool the office referred to as the Bird’s Face—and who frequently reported the sickeningly early hour he was wrenched awake to monitor his paper-eating, tantrum-spurting kid, a youngster who by eight thirty in the morning was at least four hours deep into his terrible day, according to Ramsey, battle-scarred and as strung out as a torture victim, which, come to think of it, was a pretty adequate description of Ramsey himself. In fact, whenever Thomas tried to picture Ramsey’s boy, he pictured another Ramsey, and saw two red-faced Ramseys chasing each other around an oatmeal-splattered room. Big Ramsey and Little Ramsey, trying to kill each other. A classic story of father and son.

Thomas guessed that at times, maybe in the elevator, the colleague could smell how little he had slept, while in retaliation he could see the sauce stain on her back, or the rumpled tidings of underwear advancing over her waistline. That was a fair piece of intimacy, in the end. Shouldn’t they, by now, have already trucked past the romantic swells and decadent fits of sharing indulged by the other middle-aged marrieds, toward a brisker season of restraint and theatrical indifference regarding each other’s mild but steady pain? If they knew each other at all, that is.

For Thomas there was only one outlet for a journey down this hallway—the coffee cart—since he lacked clearance to any of these rooms or freezers or whatever they were. On bright-lettered signs the doors might have cautioned:
Carcass inside. Turn back!
But turning back would draw too much notice, and he doubted he could rear up and reverse course without some kind of verbal narrative support of his decision—
I’m turning back now because I’m scared!
—and the thought of such a strange and conspicuous outburst, even one more finely stated, made him feel vaguely sick. What kind of idiot does things, then says why?

So off he trotted after her, drugged with regret and adrenaline and the sort of fear that felt like a boring old friend. He had no mug of his own. He’d have to work that out later. And there was an issue with his, uh, pants. Ahem. But for now he was up and at large and he did his best to gather his face and body into an expression of deep purpose, even if there was none he could rightly claim.

The colleague was a long woman, medically attractive, perhaps intensely attractive. But when Thomas, as was his habit, called up in his mind the nude and indeed the coital prospect with her, simply to work out the mental visualization side of things, in place of vaginal goods Thomas could only conjure a charcoal sketch of the area, just a shabby pencil drawing of something he was supposed to want to bury his face in and weep with relief into. This bothered Thomas because although he could not draw, he could imagine all sorts of drawings, an encyclopedic catalog of, uh,
especially rich imagery,
which turned out to be an entirely useless ability.

It wasn’t the specific armature of nudity that he longed for, anyway (the canals and curves and rough red patches bursting with boiling hair), but something dutiful in him—as if his erotic strategy was being assessed through surveillance by specialists—bowed to an elementary form of sexual speculation, and he customarily launched this material on his inner slide show for their sake. Perhaps these specialists would see that Thomas could hew to the national erotic standard. But, if anything, he was fair-minded about his crotch pictures, courteously rendering them from the hips of nearly everyone he passed. The result was a kind of gallery, the mug shots, he called them, and it calmed him to realize that his central-most imaginative act, the vision work he was called to most consistently and which occupied him more than any other creative task, was to flesh out in his mind the sexual organs of everyone he saw and to catalog this data for later use. Mostly the genitage that colored his gallery was rendered from some distillation of a person’s face, that is, if the face had been squeezed like a sponge or crushed underfoot. The aesthetics here—what Thomas thought of as his functioning design paradigm, because he had read in one of June’s
All About People!
folios that we create our private images out of a deep sense of order, logic, beauty, and inevitability, whether we like it or not—involved the notion that a dog (or spouse or child or anything we care for and, in particular, feed) comes to look like its provider. Or something from the stronger, more powerful face is sprayed over the weaker face, rendering it nearly identical. There was a funny-sounding scientific rule to be invoked here, whatever it was called. An old biological trick, which makes us think, Thomas guessed, that we are really caring for and feeding ourselves. One’s crotch stuff should in some way invoke the face, tell a story about it, Thomas felt, or, rather, one’s face should, in its lines and swollen crags, map the sexual
terroir
. Someone more poetically afflicted could charge up better metaphors about that one. Or maybe it meant that his imagination was severely limited, deriving its ideas from the face. He guessed that artists would laugh at how obviously sourced his material was. Or maybe they’d just be bored. In any case, Thomas was confident that if he saw someone’s face, he could tell exactly what their genitals looked like.
Exactly.

Once they arrived for their coffees, Thomas would have to try to drum up some chitchat with the colleague that would not, when it was analyzed for content and style and delivery, by just whoever gave a shit, get him committed to a home, or tossed in a closet that someone somewhere must keep warm for the miserable and lonely and disturbed. Which is what these people did, wasn’t it? They spoke in cold chunks of wordage and no one ever wept or seized or died. The nearly sexual urge Thomas had to destroy himself through difficult encounters, encounters like these with women who surpassed him in every measurable way, would provide the sweet subject matter for days of mistake analysis, the richest pastime. Now I know what I’m doing this weekend, he thought. It was as though he’d been programmed to do exactly the wrong thing, and not for the first time he pictured a keypad on his back that anyone could access, a sweaty keypad that he couldn’t very well clean without one of those curved brushes. This would be another part of his body that itched and hurt and broke and sometimes bled. Add it to the list. Fat Men with Itchy Backs would be the support group he would join.
Let’s go program Thomas,
the kids might say, and he would lift his shirt so they could have their fun, tucking forward until his belly bulged over his legs. Whose idea was it, this body of his? Do we need yet more reasons to feel disgusting? Or if not a keypad, maybe an embossed alphabet over the rib cage—if you can find my ribs, he thought—raised up in scarred topologies like a cattle brand, so pedestrians and God knows who else could effortlessly dispatch him into crisis and shame
simply by coding him,
even as he spent nights at home trying to fashion a utensil that would allow him to take control of the area, or at least to shield it from typing strangers.

Protection was what Thomas wanted, from people, their words, their bodies, and the storms they kicked up when they came anywhere near him. Couldn’t the office supply a saltwater receptacle for him to hide away and brine in when there was no actual work on his desk? A casket—upright, transparent, so the others could see him suspended in saline—to keep him from harm?

It wouldn’t matter. He’d sniff out the surplus misery anyway and grind his face in it until the itch stopped, but pretty fat chance of that.

It had been a day of no apparent weather, with gray cars hushing by like silent tracers and air so swaddled and wet it seemed filled with foam. Last week a streak of birds had been sent forth to pop and burst against the office window. Thomas figured it to be some pageantry tossed off by the city to stuff the sky with color, but the official word from the listserv was that a new timekeeping system was being tested. He hadn’t bothered to calibrate his watch to it, even as, hourly, birds smeared through the air, struck the office window, and dropped from sight after the impact. A neat poof, a bright cloud of dust, and the bald white clock on the wall clicked off another hour.

No one in the office, so far as he could tell, had even blinked, as if,
oh,
this kind of slaughter was just a matter of course. And if Thomas never actually saw a pile of birds rotting in the courtyard, such a pile was inferred, wasn’t it, which was quite enough of a worry to nurse until the office lights were browned down at sunset and the employees were released into the streets so they could stagger home, hump their wooden comfort dolls, and moan into their blankets all night. Or whatever Thomas imagined them doing when they weren’t construing allergic thresholds, putting the beaker to a theory, or tearing into sandwiches with a single, angry finger.