Leaving the Sea: Stories (9 page)

Julian ate no dinner. He found a wine bar and drank cautiously from a communal bottle of something red and sparkly, a kind of alcoholic soda. He sat in a sea of couches and every now and then some grinning celebrant poured a swallow into his glass and raised it vaguely at the others. A kind of listless cheers, offered to the room. Each time, Julian raised his own glass in response, nodding his head. Cheers indeed. When the bottle was empty, and he’d paid far more than he owed, he walked back down to the station and took his position on the ledge.

There was something fine about not looking out for Hayley tonight, a desire he’d pledged to destroy. He would take an evening off from feeling incomplete without her. Paid vacation. Nobody had to know that he wasn’t pining for her full-time. He’d done this shit on his own so far, and if Hayley had been here he would have tried to scrape her, day and night, for pity and understanding. She would have been empty by now, empty and seething, but he would have kept scraping, using a spoon, digging deep into her sweetest parts until they were long gone, and still he’d scrape at her, maybe until he could see through to the other side. He’d been doing fine without Hayley and he would do fine and he fucking
was
fine. He sat and he froze and he shivered, and it was perfectly terrific. Somehow he’d ended up with nothing to be ashamed of. He didn’t even know the train schedule tonight. A wonderful thing to be ignorant of. The trains could do what they liked. He had no good reason to be down at the station—what day was it anyway, and what time was it, and what was his name again?—and yet so far, since he’d arrived, this was his best night in Germany. He even felt sort of
healthy,
although it made him nervous to think so, and damned if he even knew what healthy meant anymore. He’d long ago lost track of how he was supposed to feel, and on days like this, nights like this, treatment or not, it was hard not to be worried, a little bit, that some of the reactionary, conservative doctors whom Hayley had railed against at home, the ones who’d diagnosed Julian in the merely normal range, might actually have been right. He was fine this whole time. He wasn’t legitimately sick, at least when it came to conventional measurements.

This was just what it felt like, perhaps, to be alive.

Or so these doctors seemed to be saying.

Did other people, he wondered, feel this same way—listless, strange, anxious, dull, scared, you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives—and did everyone else just clench their jaws and endure it? Suit up for the day and fight it out on the streets? Were people barely okay and yet not running, as he did, to the doctor, again and again, and was no one discussing, out of some deep personal bravery, what they were so quietly and politely enduring?

For hours, it seemed, no trains came into the station. The tracks were quiet and the whole city was perfectly still, as if perhaps there’d been some agreement, deep in the brain of the city, that the machines would shut down at this hour, the vehicles grounded. Cars and trains and buses. A scheduled hiatus of activity on this clear, cold evening in Düsseldorf.

Down at the station, commuters still occasionally pushed out through the tall glass doors, locals mostly, pulling dark suitcases across the ice. How they’d come to town without a train was a mystery, until he realized that striding across the square, faceless in the darkening evening, were simply people who had arrived from elsewhere hours ago and waited inside, where it was warm, for someone to come and get them. These were the arrivals. Arrivals wait. Not all of them get met. They’d been staring out at the square all night as the tiny, fuel-efficient cars ripped here and there without them. Finally they must have realized that their rides weren’t coming, so they bundled up, took matters into their own hands, and walked out alone into the cold.

That night at the hostel, a visitor came to Julian’s bed. Some uninvited man crept under his covers,
while he slept,
and Julian woke up—suddenly, rudely, confused. This man was
taking liberties
. Before much could happen—before disgrace and shame and, who knows, the implication that he was even remotely okay with this—he’d fled to the bathroom.

His heart was blasting, his sleep shirt wet and twisted. From the bathroom, looking back out into the gymnasium, the air thick with sleep, there was no sign of anything. No man, no sounds, just beds and bodies and darkness. As if the stranger had vanished. Hands had been on him while he slept, but when he thought about it he kept seeing himself lying there
reciprocating
. He couldn’t piece it together. What in the goddamn hell had happened? He checked his body everywhere, testing. For evidence? Damages?

He’d been touched,
that
he was sure of. He’d been touched, it had happened, and now there was nothing to be done. He caught his breath, paced around the bathroom, splashed water on his face. He could shower, but he had no towel and it was too fucking cold, anyway. Someone had really been touching him. Now it was over.

He crouched in a bathroom stall, trying to think. Some scene in whatever he’d been dreaming—he’d been having some kind of
intense
dream, oh God—had allowed for this to happen, made him stay longer than he should have in bed. A bit too long, as if he’d enjoyed it. At first whatever was happening seemed perfectly okay, just unreal enough. He was holding on to someone. It wasn’t really a sexual dream, per se. It was more like cuddling. He’d been dreaming of cuddling, and not with Hayley, but big deal. That’s how it worked. You could date the whole world in your dreams and it was okay. You could, actually, date-
rape
the whole world in a dream, too. You could kill and clean up after yourself. Or not, you could leave evidence all over the world and get caught and go to jail forever and wake up crying. So fucking what? The point is, he was cuddling someone in his dream, and he was doing it in that squirming way, he had to admit, that he hoped might lead to more, and then he woke against a body and what were you supposed to do? There was
no way
not to respond. Anyone would. He was aroused, technically, but he certainly did have to pee. Usually after a pee that issue resolved. Usually. But he was aroused
before
the man had crawled into bed with him, so this was bullshit.

But was he? Oh, God. He wanted to cry foul.

In the morning he tried to explain the situation to the front desk. He spat his useless English and he gestured and he slammed his hand on the counter. They were only puzzled, behind the glass partition, by what he told them, as if to say: Someone tried to hold you and you fled? But why, sir?

He imagined someone calmly explaining: Don’t you know, sir, that this is why people
stay
at Müllerhaus?

Instead he asked about other accommodations, and they offered him a private room, for twice the money. Then, no, they withdrew that offer, because it seemed those were taken. The only available beds were in the Turnhalle, where he was staying, and if he would like to change beds, he could do that, for a fee. Maybe a bed in another part of the room? Maybe that would be better for Sir?

He lurked outside the hostel, watching the men light their cigarettes and head into town. They filed out silently, squinting against the day. Which one of them had done this? He scanned their faces and wanted to challenge them to have a dream like that, so sweet and comforting, very nearly a wet dream of cuddling, and then to wake up against a body—the heat, the moisture, the smell—this kind of thing is ancient and overpowering and we’re helpless before it—and not feel some slight rush of arousal. Really slight! You couldn’t do it. It could have been a
dog
and he would have nuzzled into it, feeling something. He might have given in and not cared. So what? Because it wasn’t really about the sexual parts of what lived and breathed right next to you. Man or woman or whatever. You were sort of aroused, if you got aroused, by something else. Not the person’s
parts
.

Oh, it was pointless. He realized, standing out on Schützenstrasse, once the men were gone from Müllerhaus and the locals had zoomed into the homes and shops that would keep them during working hours, that he was exaggerating his indignation. The whole thing was a wash. He was worked up for nothing. No one was watching and he was putting on the fucking Ritz, for God’s sake, as if there was something so terribly wrong with someone kissing him at night.

Was he really supposed to care at this late date who kissed him? Wasn’t it enough to be kissed by someone? What was the saying: beggars can’t be complete and total losers?

At a restaurant called Altstadt he ate a full breakfast of cold cuts and long potatoes. It was early but he ordered a beer, and it tasted so good he ordered another. He smoked and had a coffee and sat looking out the window at a small, distant piece of the Rhine. Then, on his way out, he realized he was still hungry and sat down again for a piece of chocolate cake. He pointed at it through the display case and they brought over, instead, a cake that turned out to be citrus and ginger, which he devoured. He had another coffee and could have sat there all day but he had plans to make and if he didn’t get moving, he was going to be late.

After his treatment that afternoon, Julian woke to a surprise.

“Your friend is here,” said the nurse.

Friend, thought Julian. Not possible. The word made him picture animals. Pets he’d never had.

“Your friend waits there now,” said the nurse, pointing up.

If he followed that direction, he’d leave the building and float through the sky before crashing to the ground. Head in this direction, sir, even if it takes you over a cliff. Waiting for you, maybe, will be someone who cares. Trust us.

Julian cleaned up in the patients’ bathroom. On the way out a nurse flagged him over to the doctor’s office, where his very own doctor, who he hadn’t seen for days, was hanging film in a light box.

The doctor greeted Julian and waved him over to a stool.

Julian, instead, stepped up to the light box. The scan was mostly black, a portrait of darkness.

“Is this me?” Julian asked. “My head?”

The doctor nodded.

“We are looking at your scan while you are here this day.”

Julian studied the doctor. He was trim and his skin glowed. Like most doctors, the fanciest ones, he seemed offensively healthy, as if he kept the real secret of vitality to himself. He would live forever and people would crumble and die around him. You were supposed to feel like death after seeing him, in terms of your complexion, your posture, your whole body. If necessary, this doctor would eat you to survive.

“Well, we see something sometimes,” the doctor was saying, “in this kind of white blood person. The scan is really. This is why we scan. And,” the doctor continued, “we have this discovery to show you.”

The doctor pointed his pen at a scuff in the film.

“A little discovery. You can discover it here.”

The doctor traced the outline of nothing that was, perhaps, a shade lighter than the nothing around it.

Maybe Julian could see it. A very small shape, like a cloud.
In his brain
. Weather passing through. If you could draw a headache, this is what you would draw.

“This is a concern,” said the doctor, looking at Julian hopefully.

“Okay,” said Julian. “Where is it?”

That mattered, right? His entire personality could be explained by this cloud. A cluster of rogue cells pushes on a nerve, blocks a vessel supplying blood to the deep limbic system, and suddenly you’re funny, witty, and charming. That’s what a personality was, the blood thirst of rogue cells, a growth in the mind.

The doctor pointed again at the cloud.

“It is here,” he said, more slowly.

“No, I mean in
me
. Where is this thing?”

Julian tapped his head. Maybe it wasn’t in the brain itself.

“This is not our work.”

“You didn’t make this tumor?” Julian grinned.

“Well, tumor,” the doctor said, as if there might be some doubt. “We see a shape, yes? We do not make that name for it. We do not work on this kind of area? We do not fix this.”

“Does anyone?”

“Someone who must know what this is. Who treats the brain where you live.”

Yes, someone must.

“We will be sending this scan to your American doctor. And we think that the stem cell transfusions is not, for now, a good idea. Until this.”

The doctor pointed at the cloud and tried, again, to look stumped.

“This first. To understand this. Then, maybe.”

Julian was impressed. The doctor had devised a pretty good tombstone.

This first. To understand this. Then, maybe.

Julian laughed.

“What is it?” asked the doctor. As in, thank God this moron is going into denial now. He’s going to be one of those people who cracks jokes after getting news of a tumor. I will not need to wash his tears from my doctor’s coat.

“It’s just that, if you tell me it’s all in my head now,” said Julian, “you won’t be lying.”

“Aha. I see what you say. This is truly funny. But we will not be lying to you ever, Mr. Bledstein.”

Oh, feel free, Julian didn’t say. Lie to me all you want.

The nurse brought in the papers to terminate his treatment, seal off liability, severing connections between Julian and the clinic. He signed and signed and signed. His writing surprised him, his ability to do it. It wasn’t a language-blocking cloud, but, then, what was it blocking? What was it allowing? And how long had it been there?

The doctor, frowning thoughtfully, trying to make conversation, stood by.

“I am sorry we do not have a way to give you your money back,” the doctor was saying.

“I could help you,” Julian said, “if you want.”

“Excuse me?”

“I could show you a way to give me my money back,” explained Julian. “You know, how to transfer it back to my credit card. It’s not so hard.”