Awake in the World

by Jason Gurley

  That explained the quarantined room in his house.

  “Landlord keeps promising to fix it,” he finished. “But he never does. I’d do it myself, if we had the money.”

  Which of course should have been obvious. That it wasn’t only made me feel guiltier. “I’m sorry,” I said. I needed better words. All of mine sounded hollow. Breakable.

  Inside the wheelhouse, a sailor’s lantern threw shadows against the walls, each of which had been draped in blankets to mask Zach’s presence. Pinned to the blankets were dozens upon dozens of sketches. Zach sat in the captain’s chair, but I studied the drawings. I tapped one, of a boat pushing out to sea.

  “This boat?” I asked.

  The boat featured in many of the drawings: bobbing in its marina slip, surrounded by the faintest outlines of other vessels; chasing the sun toward the horizon; anchored in deep waters while two figures worked the nets. Often the same figure stood at the wheel, and I recognized Zach’s father immediately: the loose lines of his head and neck, the tighter lines of his brow and boxer’s nose, the whorl of charcoal that formed his steady, dark eyes. The hint of a smile in his lips. I saw Zach there, in those features.

  My first impression upon entering the wheelhouse had been of a museum, but it wasn’t that at all.

  The boat was a shrine to Zach’s father.

  “Dad never took her to sea,” Zach said. He cleared his throat, as if he didn’t trust his voice. “I wanted him to have that.”

  I turned toward him. His eyes were damp in the light.

  “After Dad died, the slip fee was too expensive. The boat didn’t run, so we couldn’t charter it. Derek put a FOR SALE sign on it, but nobody bit. We fell behind on the slip fees, and it wound up here.”

  “Do you ever think of getting it back?”

  “Only every fucking day.” He wiped his eyes with his palms. “I’m sorry. This time of year always wrecks me.” The urge to go to him was powerful, but he wanted to talk. Needed to. So I was quiet, and he started to tell me the story. “I was like Mama. I didn’t want him to have the boat. Not after that storm. Not after what happened on the rig. It was like we both knew it. The sea wanted him, and here he wanted to tempt it.” He cleared his throat. “And now look at me. I practically live here. At least it’s landlocked, I guess.”

  I waited patiently, quietly.

  “He was a saturation diver,” he said. “Spent weeks in a little metal bubble, a thousand feet down. We didn’t see him much near the end. Because of his job.”

  His voice broke then, and my resolve faltered. I sat on his lap and drew him close. His cheeks were damp against my neck. I stroked his hair.

  “But we didn’t know it was the end. We loved his long jobs,” he said, and chuckled bitterly. “Because he always came home with these insane stories about sea monsters.”

  “What happened?” I asked softly.

  “Some part gave out. Or something broke,” he said. “We still don’t really know. Just—there was an explosion.”

  A chill washed over me. What he was describing … I already knew. I’d seen all the signs and somehow missed them: The DepthKor logo on Derek’s truck. The diving gear in Derek’s room. The Bernaco logo on what I was now certain was Zach’s father’s hoodie. This time of year had to be hell. Zach’s birthday, Christmas, both of them defiled by the awful anniversary of his father’s death.

  Zach had some of the details wrong: The habitat was only about 650 feet down. A pipe sleeve split, the pipe ruptured, something ignited, and the whole habitat went up like a submersible Hindenburg. I’d seen photos of the salvage among Aaron’s papers, spread over the kitchen table as he worked. The divers’ habitat looked like a ragged soup can, torn open and twisted. There had been four divers, three working outside the habitat, one asleep inside. The three outside suffered critical injuries: broken bones, collapsed lungs. Decompression sickness and its myriad complications.

  The fourth diver hadn’t survived. They’d never even found his body. Just his dive compass, flung with such force that it had embedded itself in another diver’s air tank.

  There had been lawsuits. Aaron, as Bernaco’s lead counsel, knew them intimately. When the Mays family’s suit—the only one still not settled—landed in court, Zach would sit on one side of the courtroom. And my stepfather would lead the case against them.

  I’d gone stiff, and Zach had noticed. Confused, he asked, “What is it?”

  I tried to smile. But I wanted to throw up.

  25

  Zach

  She looked like she wanted to bolt. I’d scared her. Said too much, been too vulnerable.

  I led her to the deck, and we shared a blanket, draped around our shoulders. “I’m changing the subject,” I said.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to say that.”

  “Like you’ve never said it. Subject change: You’re stuck on a desert island, and you—”

  “How’d I get there?”

  I thought about this. “You’ve been on a cruise ship. Real extravagant. Bonbons and virgin appletinis. But the boat sank. And you swam to the nearest bit of land.”

  “And it’s a desert island? Why are they always deserted?”

  “Because … being stranded is supposed to suck? I don’t know.”

  “Fine.” She blew hair out of her eyes. “And what’s the question?”

  “You can bring only one book.”

  “My book got drenched. Now it’s ruined.”

  “You lay all the pages in the sun to dry,” I said.

  “The wind scattered them into the sea.”

  “The tide turns, and they wash right back up,” I insisted. “And you dry them. Again. And you put a rock on each one so it won’t blow away.”

  “What books did I have with me on the boat?”

  “Between you and all the other tourists, every book ever printed was on the boat.”

  “Every book?”

  “Every last one.” The subject change had worked.

  “Even the weird ones bound in human skin?”

  I made a face. “If you say so.”

  “I’m just saying, if I brought one of those, at least I’d have a food source.”

  “Subject change has failed,” I declared. “I quit, on grounds of I’m gonna be sick.”

  She swung her legs over the edge of the deck and rested her head on my shoulder. I could smell her shampoo, feel the warmth radiating from her skin. “You know,” she said. “I missed my father, too. But in a totally different way.”

  “Different how?”

  “Different as in I hated him. Hate. Present tense. So … okay, maybe not really the same. More like: I lived through the aftermath. I was never not aware of what he’d done to my mom, or to me. To us.”

  “Why did he leave?”

  “I still don’t know.” She sighed. “You know, for a long time, I blamed myself. Mom said it was normal, but then she said he didn’t have to leave. He chose to.”

  “Your mom sounds killer.”

  “She is. We were on our own a long time. She wasn’t just my mom. She was, like, my best friend. Sometimes she still got all up in my shit, and we had disagreements. Sometimes she was my nemesis, too. But if this were a video game, she’d have been my sidekick, not one of the bosses you have to fight. Not even the weakest one, and definitely not the big, evil ones.”

  “That’s your dad,” I ventured.

  “That’s my father,” she corrected. “He’s not my fucking dad.”

  She pressed her hand against my chest, eased me onto my back. Just like that, we were lying side by side on the deck. She was so close. She lifted my arm and put it around her, then laid her head on my chest.

  “Um,” I said.

  She peered up at me. “Why, Zachary, your face is as red as your hair.”

  “Shut up.”

  She laughed, and after a moment, she said, “This is nice.”

  “What is?”

  “This. Being with you, on this boat. Under
these stars.”

  “You like the stars.”

  “Mostly. Now and then they remind me of him, and I hate that I love them. He almost ruined the most important thing in the world for me.” She sighed. “They make me feel small. I used to like to feel small. But then he made me feel small, too, and all I wanted after that was to be as big as I could.”

  “The stars made me feel small, sometimes. Like I didn’t matter.”

  “Oh, we matter,” she said. Her voice became distant, a little reverent. “We’re exceptional. Cosmic accidents. Even if we aren’t totally alone in the universe, we might as well be. We’re unthinkably far from anything else. We’re on our own. Nobody’s going to save us.”

  “From what?”

  “From ourselves.”

  “Oh.” Hesitantly, I touched her hair; she didn’t stop me. In fact, it seemed as if she pushed her head upward, ever so gently, against my hand. “Do … you feel alone?”

  She didn’t answer right away. “Sometimes. Maybe. Not right now.” Then she added, “I think the stars are what you put into them. An optimist looks at them and feels excitement; they’re only full of possibility. But to a sad person, they can be hypothermic.”

  I liked listening to her, and I didn’t want to interrupt her flow, but I had to. “Hypothermic?”

  “You know. Like they just make you feel cold and small and alone. But you know what I think?” she went on. “We’re never really alone. Sometimes I can’t sleep, you know? And I like to imagine that no matter how lost or different or lonely I feel, there’s always at least one other person who feels the same way at the same moment. Someone’s always awake somewhere else in the world.”

  “Like me.” All those nights I’d come to this very spot. Not realizing she was awake, too.

  She sat up. “Dude. Have you seen—”

  “Did you just call me ‘dude’?”

  “Dude,” she repeated. “Have you ever seen—”

  “I really don’t think you should call me ‘dude.’”

  She ignored me. “—the greatest photograph ever taken?”

  “The one with the little girl in the yellow coat, running away from—”

  “Ha. Not a meme, you jackass. The ultra-deep field photograph.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “For kicks, NASA pointed the Hubble—You know what the Hubble is, right?”

  “Yes, I know what the Hubble is.”

  “Okay. Well, NASA—”

  “I chewed it when I was little. Hubble-Bubble.”

  She thumped me in the chest. “They pointed the telescope at this one small corner of the sky. Just a couple stars there, right? And they left it there for a few months and assembled a sort of picture of what it saw. And they zoomed in on the picture, over and over and over, and every time, the picture revealed thousands upon thousands upon thousands more—”

  “Bananas,” I suggested.

  “Galaxies. Some were so old they were around just a few hundred million years after the big bang. They still might be, but we won’t know for a really long time.”

  “Wow,” I said, filling my voice with awe. “Vanessa, you’re a … a nerd.”

  She punched me this time. “Shut up.”

  “Also, you punch me a lot. I’m not sure how I feel—”

  She swung again, but I grabbed her hand and let her momentum pull her close to me. Suddenly her face was near enough that the fog of her breath enveloped us both. She fell quiet, and in that moment I felt every vibrating nerve, every ridge of her fingerprints, like a pattern of glowing coils upon my skin. Her face was in shadow, and the moon turned her hair translucent. I raised my hand to her cheek, expecting cold skin. But it was superheated, flushed beneath my touch. I brushed my thumb over her lower lip; I couldn’t imagine a more intimate thing to have done.

  “I, uh—should get home,” she said. Softly. Shakily.

  I didn’t want to let go. But I heard myself reply, just as quietly, “Okay.”

  She pushed against me and got to her knees, then her feet, and helped me up. Her breath came quick and ragged. I knew how she felt; my heart kicked against my ribs in just the same way.

  * * *

  “New subject,” Vanessa said. Her hand was warm in mine as we walked back. “If you could have lived in any era, when would you have been born?”

  “You mean, like, do I secretly wish I was a pioneer or something?”

  “Yeah. Like, sometimes I think I was born too late. Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Because you wish you were born in the Bronze Age?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I mean, this era sucks, don’t get me wrong. But it might also be the best our family’s ever had it. Which isn’t saying much. And that’s pretty sad. My great-grandparents came here from … I forget. Cullen? Cullentown? Somewhere in Ireland. We’re Irish, or at least a little bit.”

  She eyed my hair. “Never would’ve guessed.”

  “Do you wish you lived in a different era?”

  “I would’ve been born in the seventies,” she said. “But not before. I’d rather not be burned at the stake just because I know how the solar system works.”

  “The seventies,” I repeated. “Not to see Star Wars opening day, I’m guessing.”

  “You know about Voyager, right?”

  “Satellite,” I said. “Right?” She made a face, and I corrected myself: “Okay. Not a satellite.”

  “It was a probe. Though I’ll grant you, it does look a bit like a backyard satellite dish with legs. But that was the seventies for you.”

  “If you were born in the seventies, you’d still be too young to work on Voyager.”

  “Oh, no. I was born at the perfect time for a Voyager junkie,” she said. “We’ll be hearing about its discoveries for our whole lives. You know it’s supposed to exit the heliosphere soon?”

  “The … what?”

  She let go of my hand, formed a circle with hers. “Pretend there’s a huge bubble around the solar system, right? We’ll never go outside that bubble. At least not in our lifetimes.” She was glowing. “But Voyager will. We have no idea what it’ll see. And—it’s got this thing on board, the—”

  “Golden Record,” I finished.

  She stopped walking. “You already know all this.”

  “Are there people who don’t?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “I just know what it is,” I said. “Not what you were going to say.”

  “Well—okay. So Carl Sagan worked on the project, right? He fell in love while he worked on it. With this brilliant woman named Annie. That’s a whole other story. A beautiful one, but not my point. My point: Voyager is going places we might never go. It’s taking our story with it. How is that not romantic?” She studied my face. “You really do know all this already.”

  “Not the falling in love part. I just like to hear you gush about stuff.”

  “My father was like that,” she said. “Gushy about space things. Except he hated Carl Sagan. And everything he stood for.”

  “Well, he’s not here, is he.”

  “Thank god,” she said, and we started walking again. She looped her arm through mine. “I’d be born back then because he taught astronomy at Cornell. I could have studied under him.”

  “Your father,” I said.

  “Sagan.”

  “Oh. Science guy, right?”

  She took another playful swing at me, and I tickled her, and we staggered onto someone’s lawn, laughing. After I caught my breath, I said, “So you wish you could have learned from him. Like, actually sat in a classroom with him. That’s why Cornell.”

  “Yes. Exactly that. That’s exactly what I dream of.”

  “So you’d learn, like, everything you don’t already know—”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know.”

  “—from a substitute father figure.”

  “Ye—” She took a hard step back. “That wasn’t nice.�
��

  “I didn’t mean it meanly.” I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away. “No, see, I just meant … Shit. No, okay. You’re right. That was mean. It could only have been mean. I’m sorry.”

  Vanessa bit her lip. I could see her working over her options: stay or go. In the end, she stayed … but something had changed. Her mood had darkened.

  Fuck.

  She walked a few paces behind me for the next block, and then she said, in a much smaller voice, “You’re not wrong, though.”

  I turned back to face her.

  “I’d never thought of it … that way.”

  I wasn’t even certain she was talking to me.

  “I legitimately hate him,” she said. “I hate him for poisoning the stars. I can’t look at them without thinking of him, even just in the back of my mind, you know? And I hate him for this,” she said, circling her face with her index finger. “You know my mom is part Japanese?”

  I remembered the night at the football game. Her mother’s face mostly hidden away behind that scarf.

  “Not that you’d know by looking at me.” She was angry now, but not at me. Angry at someone who wasn’t even here. I knew how that felt. That kind of anger always just beneath the surface, never predictable. Just coming out when you didn’t want it to. Like now. She raged on: “I have her hair, see? But plenty of white girls have dark hair. The rest of me, all this”—that finger around her face again—“it’s him. His eyes, his mouth. He had a stupid baby tooth, too. All these fucking reminders of him, and almost nothing from my mom. She’s the one who stayed. He was the one who didn’t even want…”

  She trailed off, stopped walking.

  I reached for her hand, and this time she let me.

  “I’d go all the way back,” I said. “If I could.”

  She looked at me, still lost in her frustration. “What?”

  “If I could have been born sometime else. I’d go right back to the beginning.”

  She blinked, not understanding. “To the … big bang? I mean … you’d just die. Instantly.”

  “No,” I said. “To my all-the-way-back.”

  She saw it then. “Your dad.”