The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  Technically, her doctor wasn’t a doctor but a physician’s assistant, and technically not that, since she was still in training, but no one else was taking new patients. The woman had been thoughtful, though, and demonstrated the ability to listen, which was better than most Kirsten had seen.

  “We’ll run tests,” the woman said once Kirsten had laid out her symptoms.

  The woman seemed nervous. Kirsten had wondered if it was her first time with something like this.

  “A full blood panel and screening,” the PA had said.

  “How much will it be?” Kirsten had asked.

  “That depends on your deductible.”

  The first round of tests led to an endoscopy, which led to a biopsy. Several days later Kirsten had to call in sick again and wait in a daisy-flower robe for them to tell her what she suspected by this point, that she had stomach cancer. Now they wanted to know the stage. Taking her back, they made her drink a silvery white metal. It’s for the imaging, the CT tech explained. That’s a shame, said Kirsten, I was hoping it would turn me into a superhero. The CT tech laughed but Kirsten got the sense that the laughter was rote.

  * * *

  —

  Kirsten had to call in sick to work again for the molecular tests. It’s the flu, she’d said. It’s going around, they’d said. You’ll have to make up the hours, they’d said. Then a week later the doctors needed her to come in and talk about the results so she had to call in sick again, using the last of her accrued sick time. Her boss had informed her she would need to bring a doctor’s note if she wanted to keep her job. She could bring the note but that wasn’t going to save her job. She knew the drill. From now on she was going to have to be the perfect worker. Show up early and go home late. Leave those extra hours off her time card. Ingratiate herself to some schlub in human resources.

  A month after her first appointment, the doctors were finally able to fully describe in detail the kind of cancer she had, its profile and prognosis. They were a little less clear on what she was supposed to do with that information.

  “The oncologists say you need to get started on treatment,” said the nurse navigator.

  “I can’t drop below benefited hours.”

  “They can’t fire you for having cancer.”

  “They can fire you for every other made-up reason,” said Kirsten.

  The woman scraped at a piece of paint on her desk. “I wish we’d caught this earlier.”

  “I can’t run to a doctor every time I have a stomachache.”

  “I understand.” She closed her laptop. “We deal with what we’ve got, though, don’t we?”

  “No shit.” Kirsten laughed.

  “Do you have support at home?”

  “My son will be back from boot camp at some point but I don’t think they’ll let him stay.”

  “Do you have other family?”

  “Two daughters.”

  “Do they live here?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You need to find out.”

  Fuck. It rang in Kirsten’s head. Fuck like a mantra. Fuck like a song.

  29 Eagle Ring

  ESSEX HAD BEEN ALLOWED one call when he arrived at the marine depot. He was not to converse but to read the paragraph they handed him and nothing else.

  I HAVE ARRIVED SAFELY AT MCRD SAN DIEGO. PLEASE DO NOT SEND ANY FOOD OR BULKY ITEMS. I WILL CONTACT YOU IN 3 TO 5 DAYS VIA POSTCARD WITH MY NEW MAILING ADDRESS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT. GOODBYE FOR NOW.

  After that, all non-written communication had been cut off. He wanted to tell Kirsten about the whole initiation thing and how the marines were really good at it, mostly because he thought she’d appreciate that (she certainly didn’t appreciate anything else about the marines), but despite his good intentions, when he sat down with pen and paper his stamina for the story flagged. He had never written a long letter.

  After his thirteen weeks of boot camp he was to be sent to Camp Pendleton for the next phase of training. Essex asked his drill sergeant if it was true. You don’t need to know fuck all, recruit! Because it is no longer your job to ask why things happen to you. Things will just happen to you. Then the man pointed to the ground and told him to do push-ups. Essex did as the man asked. A great calm flooded him. There was no decision for him to make. His preferences, his expectations and opinions, they no longer mattered. Kirsten had trained him to be the center of his own story, but he’d never really believed it. Now he was the center of nothing, and it was okay.

  In the barbershop on base there was a sepia photo on the wall of a man long dead with thick lips and big ears in a wool-and-leather hat. With his hide strap across his chest, trim as a mailman, the man in the picture stared past Essex in the barber’s chair. At his neck, a kind of priest’s collar with an eagle, globe, and anchor on either side. A patch with a star holding an Indian inside. Stars on his shoulders too, each button an eagle, globe, and anchor stacking like sefirot down the front of his chest.

  “Who is he?” Essex asked the barber.

  “That’s John A. Lejeune. The ultimate marine’s marine,” said the barber.

  Essex wanted to be a marine’s marine. It wasn’t likely.

  John A. Lejeune entered and left his mind at various points during the day. Sometimes he watched Essex in silent approval. Essex imagined his praise, spoken in code, nothing said, all understood.

  It was week ten, just before the Crucible, his final test before becoming a marine, that the ghost of Lejeune visited Essex. Covered in Indians and eagles, anchors and stars, he waited for Essex to do something, but Essex didn’t know what the man wanted him to do. He asked him, but John A. Lejeune looked through him like he didn’t see him at all. A wicker man of leather, each eye a solar eclipse.

  30 The Mother Narcotic

  LATE IN THE SUMMER, after months of paying Lester a cut of her wages and sleeping on the couch when he Airbnb’d her room, which was rare, Cheyenne was actually deeper in the hole to him than when she started. What she had told herself when she first moved in, that a new direction would present itself, that she would hear something about Justine, that she was in the part of the story just before redemption, all that had faded. She was whatever she was going to become and not at the beginning, middle, or end but past it, living out the part not worth telling because nothing was going to happen.

  Now at her lowest, she took a bus to the meth edge of the city where the plasma donation centers were. Hours later she was in a cubicle lying about lifestyle questions. The woman behind the desk tagged her fingernail with a glow-in-the-dark marker.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll wash off in about a week. It’s so we can tell if someone has donated elsewhere in the past five days. It’s for your safety.”

  Cheyenne wondered if the woman believed that.

  In the waiting room, a man in his forties sat down next to her. He had a black leather jacket, an India ink tear tattoo on his cheekbone, and a bandanna tied around his wrist.

  “New client?” he asked. “That’s an extra fifteen dollars.”

  It was crowded and the chairs were full. A security guard stood by the door with his arms folded, watching the room like any one of them might hatch into a lizard.

  “Don’t you hate that we’re called clients?” she said.

  “Better than ‘population,’ ” he said.

  The man laughed like Santa and unwound his bandanna.

  “It’s good to be new,” he said. “I’m about to be new again myself.”

  Taking out a small nail clipper, he extended the tiny file. Glancing at the guard he began to file the nail with the glow-in-the-dark tag off his index finger. He did it quickly with his hands between his legs so that from a few feet away it just looked like he was twitching.

  It took Cheyenne a second to get what was going on. Looking down at his other hand, she saw
that his middle finger was also missing a nail. She was in awe of the sheer will it took to do that. He had made a decision. He had applied his determination to an idea and done it 100 percent. Livy, Kirsten, Essex—whatever their flaws, they could all do that, whereas Cheyenne could not.

  Soon she was abed with a needle in her arm watching a cop-show marathon. A fat, hairy man in Snoopy scrubs came to check on her progress. The man without fingernails had filled his decanter and was rewarded with a fraternal smile. He would be released. He had done well. The phlebotomist looked at her decanter, sniffed, and turned up the draw.

  “Some people are just slow,” he said.

  When she returned to Neighborsbane, she handed the money she’d earned from the plasma center over to Lester and he gave her the mail he’d been holding hostage. Among the junk circulars marked “Resident” was a letter. She thought it might be from Livy but it was postmarked North Carolina. The return address said Justine. She snatched it out of his hands and went to her room.

  Sitting on her mattress with her back against the wall and knees tucked to her chest, she turned over the envelope. It was thin: It wasn’t a long letter. She couldn’t quite bring herself to open it. She dug her journal out of her backpack and got out the Polaroid they’d gotten from the roshi.

  She traced Justine’s face with her finger. She thought she saw sadness; she hoped that maybe she and Livy had something to do with that sadness, but the longer she looked, the more the woman’s expression shifted until Justine’s face went blank.

  Cheyenne weighed the letter on the flat of her palm. She let her imagination run scripts of what might be in it: declarations, revelations, a check for a million dollars with a note that said, “Sorry.” She wondered if the letter was better unopened. She scooted forward on the bed until her knees were in the square patch of natural light from the window. A jackhammer started outside. The crew on the sewer work yelled over the noise. The jackhammer stopped then started again.

  Cheyenne ran her finger under the seal. Because inside it was change, and any change was good.

  Dear Cheyenne,

  Kirsten said you were looking for me. I believe you and Livy are 33 now? Is that right? I leave for a three-year retreat in Southeast Asia this fall. If you can get yourself here before that, we can talk.

  Justine (formerly Ann)

  Wat Dhamma

  Bolivia, North Carolina

  Cheyenne began to shake. Not because she had finally heard from Justine but because Kirsten had known where she was all along. She’d let Livy and Cheyenne traipse around the country, blowing up their relationship and going broke; she’d seen Cheyenne twice since she’d been back and never said a thing.

  Cheyenne threw her journal at the opposite wall. After the high of righteous anger passed, hopelessness set in. This was worse than not knowing where Justine was because now Cheyenne knew but could do nothing about it. She had no car or credit. She was falling behind every day.

  * * *

  —

  A week later, looking down the row of beds at the plasma donation center, Cheyenne wondered what had gone wrong. She was paralyzed. She couldn’t even go yell at Kirsten. She was stuck. The people in the beds next to her were stuck. The whole place should be a roiling cauldron of revolutionary sentiment but wasn’t. And what if some jail-tatted Norma Rae stood up on a roll-a-bed and held aloft a full decanter of plasma and yelled, You get $25 and they sell it for $2,500! Would they all swarm the receptionists and strike the donation centers nationwide? Would the men in the beds around her write talking points on lottery tickets? But instead of ripping out tubes and emptying their plasma onto the floor, they all lay there. Bickering over the TV channels.

  Nothing was going to deliver any of them. Her plasma wasn’t. Her minimum-wage job wasn’t. Her desire to get to North Carolina wasn’t. She thought about everyone she ever knew. How many worlds can you move through? Make a list of those you love. Do you love them now? The alcoholic and emotionally feeble, the old friends who had vanished into salaried jobs and attachment parenting groups, the academics, the sex workers, the twenty-year-old dishwasher at work and the twenty-five-year-old manager. A curving universe of interactions driving ever toward limits moving closer at higher speeds. The asymptote. The surface tension pulling everything upward. She could see why Justine had bailed. The mother narcotic appeared, still young. With supple movements and a blank expression, she leaned over and checked the plasma decanter and shook her head. Some people are just slow.

  31 Raleigh

  THE BERING SEA had unearthly beauty. The lead-colored water, the glacier-blue sky, the wild grass blown sideways; Livy was in the home of the jackass sublime. She and Michael had hitched a ride to Dutch Harbor on the salmon tender Dinah—Dutch Harbor, a shanghai of boats, a rhetoric crab. Perched at the outer edge of North America, it surpassed all other US ports in fish catch.

  New Bedford. Former whaling capital of the world. Still recognized as the premier US port. In the dawn of the American self-concept, New Bedford had made its name hunting right and sperm whales. Drawn by bodies so full of oil and lamplight, sailors rounded the Horn for a lay ever longer, sailing into the vast Pacific. But as the whale populations dwindled and fossil fuels were discovered, the market collapsed. Who can compete with an endless supply of fuel? New Bedford was forced to turn its attention to other fish, but the port continued to decline as those populations also plummeted. Then borrowing on the genius of incentivizing depletion while stoking desire, a different economic driver could be engaged: rarity. It was the scarcity of sea scallops that helped revive the port—because who does not want what is about to be gone for good? As the price of sea scallops went up, so did the number of fishermen. It was a perfect solution. Profits soared. New Bedford could now rest secure in the knowledge that her last scallop would be worth more than all other scallops put together.

  But how do you measure the wealth of a port? By volume of catch or by price per pound? Dutch Harbor or New Bedford? The National Marine Fisheries chose New Bedford as the top US port, siding with the fourteenth-century Islamic scholar and jihadist Ibn Taymiyyah, first to describe the law of supply and demand: If your desire for something goes up while your chance of getting it goes down, you’ll be willing to spend…but if there’s a lot of it, who cares?

  Dutch Harbor would have to wait. When its catch plummeted, it, too, could achieve greatness. A plethora of labor and a sea full of fish was only halfway there.

  Livy knew she wasn’t the only one looking for work on a crab boat. After all, goldfish are as cheap as pennies and bad jobs get measured in parts per million. But money could be made as long as there was something to catch. Like all hustlers, cabbies, and strippers, she believed in her own luck. That faith had not been destroyed by recent months, only shaken. There had to be a job for someone who could work without sleep. She’d failed so far, but her future was her own.

  * * *

  —

  Livy was on the deck of the Dinah when she first saw the Makushin Volcano, a presage of arrival in Dutch Harbor. A man in an Elizabethan ruff flickered into view next to her. It was the same man she’d seen when she was on the highway with her sister. This time he introduced himself as explorer and venture capitalist Sir Walter Raleigh. Doffing his feathered cap, he looked over the rail of the Dinah.

  “You look different than you do on cigarette packs,” she said.

  “I feel different,” he said.

  Raleigh squinted at the island shore then dismissed it with a sniff. “I would advise you not to plant,” he said. “This is a terrible place to grow tobacco. Hold off until we get to El Dorado.”

  “How do you measure wealth? Fish or money?” asked Livy.

  Raleigh pointed to a sounding whale. “Perfume! It’s in their heads and bellies. A fortune!”

  But the whale he pointed to was not a sperm whale and its head was not full of perfum
e.

  “I lost my investment,” said Livy. “I owe people money that I cannot pay.”

  Raleigh shrugged. “I lost an entire colony.” Reaching into his doublet he retrieved a cigarette rolling paper on which was drawn a pencil sketch of a three-year-old. “Have you seen this girl?”

  Livy shook her head. He folded the paper then clapped her on the back.

  “Speculation! It’s how money dreams of itself. You owe nothing!” he said.

  Livy was not sure she agreed.

  Raleigh flickered again.

  “Be bold!” he boomed. “Be a citizen of the world!”

  Then fading more than flickering, he held the fragile slip of paper above his head and let the wind take it; turning, about to say something else, he disappeared.

  Looking at the shore, Livy saw glaciers and green shoulders folded and cut by fjords. She felt a rise in her sense of the possible. Maybe Raleigh was right. Maybe she owed nothing. She was not the first person in the world to lose money on a gamble. She would make it back. Three or four times over. She was here and Dutch Harbor was the home of the crab fleet. A billion dollars moved through this port every year. Surely she could catch some of it.

  Coming into the port, though, her confidence fled. She took in the beaten little town of Unalaska. Whatever wealth had moved through there had kept on swimming.

  * * *

  —

  Livy and Michael holed up for a week at an inn that looked like an abandoned grain shed. Every day they dock-stomped for work. Rumor had it that a boat called Eliana might need crew, but she wouldn’t be there until mid-September. In the interim, they squeaked by on day labor and Bisquick.