We stood at the guardrail as the vessel pulled away from the harbor. Surprisingly, people had actually shown up to wave at us from the docks.
“What it must have been like for people simply to have gone off on a trip,” Marian said, watching as the land became a distant smudge on the horizon. “Just to go, you know?”
“Aren’t we doing that?”
“This? This is what we do so that we can forget that we can’t do what we used to do.”
The vessel hit full speed, rising slightly above the water. I crashed into Marian, clutching wildly at her hips as I collapsed. “You’re such a dear,” she shouted over the ocean spray, petting my head as I knelt before her.
The first night we were herded into a narrow lounge. There was a magic show, in which a man in a white mask pulled cards from the air. From our vantage point his secrets were revealed. The rest of the audience sat mesmerized. They were old, most of them in their seventies. “They want to be tricked,” Marian said.
Later, we went up on the sun deck, but there was no sun, only the dim yellow light given off by the incandescent bulbs that ran along the perimeter of the vinyl buffet table canopy and the infinite deadness of the night sky. Somewhere in the ship, a band was playing old songs — we heard tender strains of something drifting up through the narrow mouth of the staircase. I drew Marian close to me, turning her body so that we could assume the Eating stances that had brought us together. We fell into a rapturous, tandem dance.
“This is,” I said, pressing her as close to my body as I could, “you are so much of a surprise — I didn’t think. What I did think was that — you were — so young. We could help each other be together, couldn’t we?” The band finished the number. A great crowd of people applauded, and they started in again with another bleating, primitive waltz. In several of the most important ways, I had the distinct sensation of already having attached Marian to the rest of my life.
“Oh my God,” she whispered between sharp, heavy breaths. “Oh Jesus God.” Standing behind her, I did not see when she started to cry, but felt her body sag and lurch.
“What — do you?”
“I need to. Get back —” It was difficult to tell whether this last fragment was a proclamation or a directive. She slipped out of the Eating stance we’d attained, Pride of the Alaskan Pipeline, and broke away to the stairwell. I followed her into the belly of the vessel, back to our cabin, which looked, suddenly, as though it had been made with a crayon and a napkin. She was sitting on the bed, satin dress half off, hands pressed to her face.
“Jesus, what’s — wrong?”
She did not look at me, but slowly capsized onto the bed, like the victim of a slow-motion shoot-out.
“Marian. What’s —”
There was a television monitor bolted high on the wall opposite the bed, which broadcast the view from the bridge all day and all night. It was what we had in place of a window. The screen was a deep black then, save for a single, tiny string of bulbs that ran down the middle of the vessel, lights that hardly put a dent in the night.
She took her hands from her face, where mascara had pooled in heavy, expressive crescents. “Geoffrey, I — you’re an old person. Your skin is so — it’s like a sequoia — you’re like an antique chicken. I’m sorry — you’re very kind and I might even love you in some awkward manner, but I’m sickened by the presumption your body makes to the world. When you hold me, I think of my father, of the brutal Indian rope burns he would give me during summer break at night after my mother passed out. He’d press himself up behind me, and it was like being lowered into a tub of thick dough. I let him do it again and again because I knew that someday I was going to be one of him — my body was going to be wrecked and pinched off like an ancient, desiccated fruit. I felt as if I needed practice at being sick with myself. The sickness of it got inside me — whenever they were away, I tried to make myself old, brushing school glue on my face and arms and letting it dry there. I would sit in front of my bedroom mirror for hours, masturbating to the image of my own wasted body. But now it’s actually happening to me. Here, this boat — I’m already there. This is old. I’m going to be old. So soon I can already feel it. I don’t want to be an old person, Geoffrey. I don’t want to be an old person. Jesus.” She started to sob uncontrollably — the whole room seemed to shake with each violent contraction of her body.
“Please oh please, Marian, don’t — you shouldn’t —”
“Just, just go.”
“You want me to —”
“Go.”
I had never been so close to a person in this condition. Most of the people I knew who didn’t want to become old had simply killed themselves. Myself, I tried to but was unable to fully remove myself from the act. I kept making incisions and then reneging, so that after two hours or so, with blood everywhere in my small, dingy kitchen, I gave up and fell into a deep sleep on the floor.
I left Marian in the cabin, curled around herself, clutching a fistful of toilet paper. She looked like a stuffed puppet, something I could fit inside a cereal bowl. Her face was white, charged with cold sweat. It was true that she was going to be old — there was little I could do.
I was alone on the sun deck. The sound the brackish pool water made as it lapped gently against the porcelain ledge merely intensified the terror that the ocean invoked. That there was a start and a finish to it was inconceivable, but there
was
a start and a finish, surely, because how could something just be there, infinitely? There in the darkness, in the cold, whole periods of my own life made themselves suddenly and shamelessly apparent, but they, too, were always the middle part, never a beginning or ending. I remembered having been an altar boy, for instance, but could not remember when I had stopped being one. Did I draft a letter of resignation, or had I simply stopped showing up? Because, surely, some church representative would have called my parents, or would they? And what had happened to those hours I had unmoored myself from? What part of me started there, in that dark hole I had ripped for myself?
I stayed on the deck throughout the night. The world around the boat was the darkest, densest possible thing. It just ended there over the railing. There ought to have been some lights blinking somewhere, if only to defeat the suggestion that people had not been out there before. I thought about the darkness as a sort of blindness, but it was really nothing like blindness, which is when there is actually something in front of you to see.
At dawn, the sky turned brown, then yellow, then brown again. The elderly passengers began lining up at the buffet table, cupping their plastic bowls eagerly while staff members carefully served steaming ladlefuls of cream of beef. If I’d been able to drive a robot, I would be far away from this place, sailing quietly above some heaving city, hovering over all of the pointless, overwrought lives metastasizing below in crowded rooms.
Marian came up beside me.
“What are you —”
She was feeling better, and suggested that we sit in the stern of the vessel, as far back as possible, where there couldn’t be any more people.
There were some deck chairs, and a model of an old captain’s wheel. The sun was half out, mincing behind an obsidian cloud mass. We stood at the rail for a while, leaning far out enough so that the only trace of the vessel we could see was a small, tattered flag hanging off the back. Marian’s face was puffy and splotched. I put my arm around her waist. The ship cut a deep, ragged swath through the water. We felt its motion most clearly there, felt it go up, then down. On each downstroke, the ship seemed to say, “Damn.”
We sat. “This doesn’t mean I don’t hate this, every bit of it,” she said, reaching over for my hand. An older couple came up right next to us, a man and a woman. The man had on a captain’s outfit, bought from the gift shop, complete with a hat and false beard. He handed the woman a camera. “Try and get some of the ocean in the background,” he told her. She fingered the buttons on the camera while he took the wheel, posing stoically, stiff-armed. The woman edged herself against the metal stairwell. We watched the whole thing.
“Let’s not stay out here long,” Marian said, and I agreed. It hardly mattered what we would miss by going inside; there wasn’t a trace of land in sight. The man and the woman took their photographs and left. I chose a spot in the ocean with my eyes, a swirling eddy, bright with foam, and focused on it as we bore on through the morning. Marian slipped a foot out of her sandal and ran it over my calf. I watched the little eddy until it was nothing, until it was water again.
W
e were in the sky tent, harvesting air.
“Push off, guv’ner,” said the terse, black-veiled Minister, and the hard, black cloud lurched underneath us. “Push off, push off. On to the next we go.” The bellows heaved with the sudden current, swelling with the dilapidated gusts of colored air we gathered into the tent.
Chunk finished his cigarette and tossed it off the side of the cloud. We leaned on our harvesting wands — long poles with soft, absorbent swab tips — and watched the tiny embers of the butt sail away from us toward the awkward, disheartening cityscape, a cheesy gridwork of dilapidated factories and town houses that from our vantage point seemed only to map out the hysterical flight pattern of the people who threw themselves into it on a daily basis. We were intractably beside ourselves.
I’d lived in two of the houses down there, when “down there” was actually a place I lived. I willed the cigarette’s trajectory down the chimney of the first house I’d lived in, a building that still paid lip service to my first and only husband. Down the chimney and into the chemical vase, I prayed, where, if I were lucky, the resultant flash fire would scorch beyond recognition not only his rueful face but also the couch where I’d combed his hair each morning, the hallway mirror against which I’d pressed him countless times, plugging his tight fissure with two trembling fingers, and the collection of lurid photographs we’d made in the dusky light of a drive-thru arch — pictures that failed, like everything else we did, to amount to anything but evidence of drunken hubris. He was a straw-armed man, willfully spindly, who made his presence known only when he was not around, so that in living with him I was most alone when we shared the same room, sucked on the same withered airspace.
The second house, my first wife’s, would be far enough away to survive the blast.
“Chirrup, chirrup.” This was Wendell. He had on a Dutch shirt and slight, noisome huaraches.
Chunk cursed in a low voice, ducking behind the bellows. “I have nothing to say to you, Wendell.” I had nothing to say to Wendell.
Wendell was the new husband to my first wife, the first male husband she’d had. He was chubby, his skin stretched tight like a plastic garbage bag. I thought about her hand on his chest, how small it would appear, how dark, next to this man’s heaving whiteness.
“I can put some words in your mouth for you,” he said. “I have some spare lines in the speech tube.” He patted his lumbar satchel. Wendell was a person who required some sort of dialogue to make it through a day. Most people did, especially in the sky tent, where the only other thing to do was watch the crawling progression of the dirty earth below. I avoided conversation not for what it did to me but for what it did to
them,
how improbably vulnerable it rendered anyone who gave it a shot.
“Whatever makes you feel better,” I said, and knelt to receive the mouthpiece, because what else does one do in circumstances such as this? Why should I have denied this man yet another chance to dangle his trumped-up life over my own?
He inserted the mouthpiece. I could taste the lives of men and other women, could sense, though surely it must have been my own creation, the pungent, confectionary muck of my first wife’s slobber, worked permanently into the chomped, matted tooth grooves.
I let my mouth go slack. He toggled the twin sticks of the remote, filling my oral cavity with rich, suggestive air. My face said the things he wanted it to.
“Chirrup, chirrup.” This was his steel lung, which whirred and gasped as the multitudes of tiny cogs toiled away, generating a false, tittering air of hope. “I’m glad, you know, that we could talk,” he said.
My mouth was limp, numb.
It was time to get back to work. Wendell coiled the apparatus and slipped it back into his bag. “Thanks. I —”
“No. Don’t,” I said. I was drooling evenly into my palm. “Just tell me — can she walk?”
“She can write and hold a cup. She can look at things. We’re working on a puzzle together.”
“A puzzle? With your salary you can’t do better than that?” “Afraid not, ma’am. She has to
want
to walk first. She has to develop that first, well, spark, you could say. That motivational, you know, thing.”
“There’s no reason for her to walk.”
“Well, no,” Wendell said, partly to his own chest. He spoke softly, solemnly, as if he were trying to mat down the wiry hairs on his torso with soothing words.
He took his position toward the stern with the other young men. We stirred the thin air with the staffs, coating the swabs with a coarse sheet of oxygen. We coaxed the air down into the citybound transport valves, our ululating wands like the shuddering cilia of some great animal.
I had a letter in my pocket. It said “Dear Prell.” This was my ex-wife’s first name. “Dear PRELL,” it said again — I wanted the name to spring out from the page, to molest her sensibility, to hazard the slightest ripple in the hazy periphery of her life. Under her name I drew a picture of a small animal, a figure that, drawn by a more experienced hand, might begin to resemble a tapir but that in my own curlish, misinformed penmanship looked like a mangy dog. I did not know what this meant at the time — the act of sketching was nothing more than a way to calm my nerves as I fashioned the note, a method of maintaining some sort of bodily restraint. But over days the animal started to mean something else entirely. Smudged haphazardly from pocketwear, the creature became animated, the sharp fur along its back bristling in preparation for some imminent attack.