Leaving the Sea: Stories (24 page)

To some degree, there was something inhuman about her from this angle, the Thomas angle. But when he thought about it, the term
inhuman
seemed wrong, however enjoyable it was to use.
I stood at the Moors with the inhuman colleague.
That sounded rather fine.
It was evening, and I carried the inhuman colleague up the stairs to my rooms.
In truth, this vantage, revealing the colleague’s disheveled back body, showed Thomas a part of the human that he must admit he felt no particular fondness for: the weak, sad, unnoticed part—keep your sadness under a rock, you sweet-boned colleague!—that could not be properly shielded by clothing. The great failing of the fashion industry.
Clothiers, where are your geniuses of disguise?
Posturally the colleague showed no sign (this wasn’t a poker face she had so much as a
poker body
) that she knew some kind of serious assessment of her was under way, but indifference was a subterfuge, of course, and what could she gain, Thomas wondered, by revealing her worry? What did one ever gain? People prep themselves, if they prep themselves at all, in the front and, at most, glance over their shoulders at the mirror to see the grotesque calamity of their backsides, which become pulled long, pulled so terribly long, from the contortion. Should not a person of the colleague’s rank and stature have in her employ an assistant, a perspective manager (bring back the architect’s apprentice!), who might engineer many different views of her, so that her power and clout would not be so easily undermined if someone happened to see her out in the open like this, unprotected, completely vulnerable and, well—Thomas paused and looked around the Moors, wishing someone could appreciate the dramatic pause—killable? He spilled an ugly little laugh at the colleague and swiped at the air as if to erase it. I will be your backside witness, he wanted to whisper. I will see the sorrowful view. Send me, Thomas, first into the sad space. Because what good was the colleague’s power if she could not hide how desolate, nomadic, and freshly assaulted she looked from behind?

But there was no hiding in the Moors, and didn’t he know it. The sole bit of shelter was the beverage cart itself, fashioned to look like a house—a Tudor with chalk-plaster walls and splintered beams painted even darker to appear waterlogged, or possibly to suggest a more authentic species of wood, with predrilled wormholes and hand-painted knots and other calibrated imperfections that someone, somewhere had labored over—a chalk outline of a dead person appeared in Thomas’s mind. As fussy as the cart was, Thomas had never seen it tended to, filled or emptied, adjusted. And the design strategy—a Tudor house pumping coffee by the barrel—always did something sour to his mood.
Depressed
seemed too strong a word—he was saving this word for something really special—and yet something awful did well up in him when he visited the Tudor, even alone, when it was safe, and not being poisoned by a colleague. Because since when was a Tudor house a place to retrieve coffee? Precisely what historical narrative was being trotted out? Would it not be more apt if it was a beheading station, complete with guillotine? Other than the atmosphere of coziness a Tudor supposedly conveyed, which was predicated on one’s being able to hurl up a foreign language with the red-faced inhabitants whose hands were boiled and fat and who probably stank of vinegar, the cart had wheels and offered dehydrating beverages from a stout, flesh-colored spigot punched into its fake wall. If that was one of the mandatory fairy tales barked at the children of his generation—a house is really a sack of hot fluid on wheels, in which a giant, perhaps, swims—then he’d missed it growing up. Shouldn’t the coffee cart have skins, or, what were they called: peelable facades? A seasonal surface was needed, to mottle and fade and turn gray, only to slowly fill with blood, to pulse and throb, to maybe even bleed slightly onto your hands when you touched it. That would be a worthy coffee cart. A life-form in the Moors, with a dark leak of coffee. I would drink death water out of that item, thought Thomas. A thousand percent for sure.

It was late morning and the air in the Moors might as well have been brown. Soon there would be seizures of lunching erupting in the soft spots, bursts of solitary and group eaters from Crawford, their faces glazed with fatigue. Chances were that some colleagues would flood the Moors with their wilderness sounds and smells, blocking Thomas’s path back to his desk. Which meant that Thomas was pinned down, in military terms, between the Moors and his work space. Hadn’t he read that there were always nine ways to escape a trap? Was it nine? Did they all involve death, or was it just most of them? Maybe this had only been in a novel, though. Someone had dreamed this into being—
Nine Ways to Escape Anything
—and now people like Thomas had to suffer by wishing it was true. What good did that do anyone?

Just then the colleague stepped to the cart with a little squeal of pleasure, and Thomas felt nearly sucked into the space she had vacated. Her special noise—colleague noise number nineteen, probably—was the workaday exhaust of a body in search of drink, the kind of natural acoustic shedding that apparently emanates from people when they pursue their biological needs alone. It is only in company—
Look out, shame!
—that we become quiet. Not so the colleague, whose chirping whoop could be, if Thomas only had the technique and speed, rejoined with some equally guttural and possibly joyous chest noise.

Thomas had to wonder if this was how it worked in zoos, when a gang of beasts was suddenly shrieking together, dry humping the scratching post, doing flips around the pen. As a boy, standing in front of the oval domes that held such gorgeous creatures, Thomas always felt that the animals had noticed him and were calling him out, in their berserk fashion, and it didn’t seem to be his imagination that the shrieking subsided into hushed tones of relief when he walked away from them. Such power he had. He used to give the matter a lot of thought, because there was time then to worry about how much he sickened those who saw him, and on his most rational days it was clear that his body itself was triggering a frenzy in animals and humans alike, with removal the only solution to hand.
I’m walking away so that you might calm down,
which was something, come to think of it, he often had to say to his own child in present times. But elsewhere, when he indulged the need to argue for his own survival, he had to concede that there was a chance, however slight, that the animals, in shrieking and howling and tearing at their own skins, were, in their special way, approving of him, welcoming him, possibly even inviting him into their midst. Was this another missed opportunity he was supposed to be worrying about now?

No one was waiting behind him in the Moors, so the protocol now was unclear. If he moved forward to fill the colleague’s space, advancing in the queue, not that there was legitimately a queue, it would leverage direct pressure on the colleague, encouraging haste and reminding her that
someone else loomed
. He thought of those times in banks when he walked into the lobby and people seemed suspended in place, as though they had forgotten what they were doing.
My friends, the puppets,
he wanted to say. These people were not clearly in a line, though, nor were they distant enough from the line to seem unaffiliated with it. Menacing business. Artists of affiliation, they should be called. It took talent to make everyone around you start to worry and second-guess their most basic goals. (He saw himself—handsomer, thinner, slightly girlish—at a podium, holding an audience of animals in thrall with his lecture:
In my work, I explore the confusion that results when physical-proximity laws are stretched beyond the breaking point. I seek to destabilize normative pedestrian traffic and queuing strategies by engaging unresolved coordinates with my physical form and holding fucking fast until someone wants to kill me. The setting for this work is the bank or the store, our shared spaces, where I will cause people to ask fundamental questions about my coordinates.
) These hovering people required to be questioned on the matter; they were asking to be addressed—
ask me where I stand!
—and Thomas knew that, no matter what, he did not want to be questioned on this or really any other matter. A credo! Fend off inquiry. How much simpler could it be?
One’s actions should prevent all approaches
. Why weren’t there needlepoint frames for that?

How soon could Thomas move after the colleague moved, and would that not trigger a complaint on her part?
I have the right not to be imitated
. Behavioral goddamn copyright,
right
? Yet he was distant enough from the cart, if he didn’t shadow the colleague, and indeed from anything in the Moors, that it might appear to a newcomer—please God forbid there ever be a newcomer—death to the newcomer!—that he was not waiting in line, but loitering in the center of the Moors with some arcane religious purpose in mind. Or not even arcane. This is a man, others might argue, who is about to sacrifice a child on a pyre. Grab him now before he strikes his match.

Unclaimed space might have been making this worse. The Moors had never developed a specific use by the lab, which was funny when you thought of it, since wasn’t every cubicle acre everywhere else at Crawford Labs fought over by every spazmodia he worked with? They were like Sooners, or Okies, or…Thomas paused as a smile flushed into his face, the sort of smile that required a hand to squeeze down…Jews.

He shot a look around the Moors because this was the kind of thought that would seem so, who knows,
detectable
. You don’t just think something like that and not show the whole known world what you’re made of. These thoughts steam off of your head, they’re inhaled by everyone around you. He knew that they weren’t Jews, and yet, calling up in his mind the sweaty-headed figurines who passed for his co-employees, the people who might meatily regard him if he ever held the floor (in the contest that had come to be known as Speak Well or Be Killed) and served up a passable, even yeoman performance, he wished he had the sort of acquaintances who would swallow this whole: pretending that the Sooners were Jews and that the Jews had a head start on the Homestead Act, tearing through the dust bowl and planting flags, erecting shtetls, bursting with song as the sun went down on the freaking veld. Was it a veld then, or did velds come later, or from elsewhere?

Standing in the Moors, the whole image—people, his people? stampeding over unclaimed land, a thunder of Jews—turned oily in his head, and it was good riddance. Acquaintances were precisely the people who cold-warred you when you ventured something borderline. This wasn’t Jew hating, he protested to no one, this was Jew loving, loving the Jew so heartily that you sent him into the past to accomplish great things and save lives. Go forward, or backward, young Jew! But tell that to the acquaintances. Acquaintances operated a bellows that blew over you a cloud of reeking air. To the Jews he knew, Thomas was not really Jewish, and yet to the non-Jews he sure as hell was as Jewish as it ever could possibly get. He had pegged the needle. What was this zone of belongingness called, other than stage three alienation? In their minds, the non-Jews bearded Thomas and gowned him and maybe also had their disgusting way with him on an old abandoned couch in the desert. How many times had others imagined killing him, he wondered, and was there possibly a critical mass at work, where technical death occurred if your death was dreamed of by enough people? Had this colleague killed Thomas in her mind? Chances were. Or who knew, but couldn’t the possibility of his wished-for death account in some way for the unusually cold, blue, rigid way he felt?
You’re killing me,
he wanted to say to her.
In your mind, I can feel it
.

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?