On the sand, my jacket laid out beneath us, we make love under the silver full moon. The warm gulf water laps languid and sweet. And the shell tree—a fallen tree that reaches out over the water, on which people hang their collected shells to make a wish—seems to sway and glow. Your skin, your hair, your breath, the feel of you in my arms. This, sad to say, is the only thing I ever really wanted. You always kept your eyes on me when we made love, your hands in my hair, on my back. Our legs wound together like wicker.
It’s the first time; we own ourselves now. Choices are ours to make. I’m still unworthy of you. But this time I’m staying anyway.
Afterward, you pull on my shirt and we sit, staring at the black clouds that drift like wraiths in the night sky.
“Now what?” you say.
“I don’t know,” I admit. It’s complicated. Even I can see that, he who has had no complications in his life—just wanting and getting. “We’ll figure it out. Together.”
You smile and issue a little laugh; it’s a sad, knowing sound. Nothing will be easy moving forward. But maybe, when the dust settles, we’ll be happier than we’ve ever been.
“That’s what you always said. As if the world should bend to our will.”
“And why shouldn’t it?” I say. “Eventually.”
This time your smile is wide and free, like it used to be, with a whole new path ahead of us.
I don’t see him until it’s too late, a figure slipping from the darkness. He must have walked up the beach after us. Now he’s a towering shadow, breath labored. A ghoul. A monster.
None of us say a word.
The gun glints in the moonlight as he raises it and fires. I shield your body with mine.
How many shots?
The sound is deafening, drowning out the world. I walk through the blue doorway of your eyes. There’s only silence.
You. Long limbs graceful, pale in the moonlight. The surf, lapping lazy and warm against the sugar shore. The sky. A void. Stars dying, galaxies spinning, light-years ago, their glimmer reaching us only now when it’s far too late. Our toes disappear in the silken sand, salt on our skin. You’re so still, so near. But always out of reach. Even now.
EXTRAORDINARY THINGS
by Sterling Watson
Pass-a-Grille
Lee Taylor had seen extraordinary things. Not wars, earthquakes, or tidal waves, not the biggest things, but the small ones, some of them delights, some so coincidental that they defied all but his own capacity to believe, and some of them dangerous. He had seen the green ray, and manatees mating, and there was the time the two joggers, beautiful young women, had stepped on the corn snake and their tanned skin had gone instantly pale. And the time he’d stood on the bluff above Troy Springs at sunrise and seen the giant alligator gar, a living torpedo, slip out of the dark water of the Sewanee River into the crystalline spring, and then back into the dark.
It had been his fate, he told people, to see these extraordinary things and have no proof of them because he saw them alone. He told the stories. At parties, to friends, sometimes to women he was interested in at least temporarily. Politeness reigns, mostly, so most people listened politely. When he noticed the onset of boredom, a yawn, he’d say, “No, really, this is true. It really happened.” And polite people, good people, would focus on Lee and his tale, and hear him out to the end.
* * *
The woman had called Lee and asked him to meet her. She’d said her name was Helen Trenam, they’d met before, and she thought he’d recognize her when he saw her face. “Would you meet me? Please.”
There was something in that please, a breath of excitement, a hint of come hither.
Excitement had been missing from Lee’s life for some time now, and so, although the strangeness of the woman’s call put him on his guard, as it would any sane man, he said he’d meet her. He made his voice as neutrally pleasant as an excited man could, and said, “Well, sure, all right. I’ll meet you. But . . . I assume you’ll explain all this a little more fully when I see you.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “You have a right to a full and complete explanation.”
With that, she had him. The thing about Lee’s right to an explanation sounded a little lawyerly, and Lee’s country grandfather had told him to fear God, women, and lawyers, but she had him. This was already an extraordinary thing, and it only promised to grow in that direction.
Lee parked on Pass-a-Grille Beach and looked up at the Hurricane roof bar. Up there, the potted sabal palms waved their fronds in the famous gulf breeze, and the copper parapet reflected the gold of another memorable sunset. Memorable because a volcano in the Yucatán had erupted and the airborne debris was doing something to the light. The volcano had been dormant for seven thousand years.
Laughter and music drifted down. The music was easy listening, but the laughter was high and giddy and desperate. It had been bottled in frozen Detroit and windy Chicago and flown to Florida to be released in pricey hotel rooms and restaurants and bars, and now suddenly, late on a Sunday, it had to be rationed. Lee crossed Gulf Way and took the elevator up to the roof.
He didn’t see a woman who looked like she might be looking for him in the naked-as-you-wanna-be crowd. A man the size of a sumo wrestler sat at the bar in a brown polyester suit. Empty seats on both sides of him. Lee took one of them.
The man turned, smiled, extended a meaty hand. “Hey there, buddy, how you doing? My name’s Frank Dross.”
Lee had learned a long time ago that people who sat alone in bars were expected to talk to any and all who might sit near them. Though by no means a chronic habitué of bars, he was often a man alone, and he’d learned the ropes, how to keep it friendly, avoid politics and religion, and offer nothing too personal. He’d told some extraordinary stories to strangers in bars.
Lee shook the man’s nine-pound hand. “I’m fine.” Although not your buddy, not yet anyway. “Name’s Lee Taylor.” He shifted on the barstool so he could keep an eye on the elevator door.
The bartender brought Frank Dross a second bourbon. “What’s your poison?” Dross said to Lee. “Let me stand you one.”
Lee thanked him and ordered Bacardi and lime. It came with a paper umbrella. The bartender was a trim, cheaply handsome kid with a copper-penny tan and a seen-it-all expression. His name tag said, Fred. Tacoma, Washington. The Hurricane’s policy was that everybody in Florida came from somewhere else, and they had a lot of name tags to prove it. Lee’s would have read, Lee Taylor. Vanished, Florida.
Lee and Frank Dross talked small for a while, Lee only half-involved, one eye on the elevator. They stopped talking when a cheer erupted from the crowd. The T-back bikinis and Speedos parted and a guy in a sandwich board—and very little else—moved into the center of the Hurricane. The board was white with black lettering. The shoulder straps could have been old seat belts. The guy was about thirty-five with an average face. He’d spent enough time making love to his NordicTrack to look pretty good in a pair of Calvin Klein silk boxer shorts, a paisley bow tie, flip-flops, and the sandwich board. The boxer shorts still held their packaged-at-the-factory creases and an Inspected by Number 17 sticker.
“It’s like when you go to the doctor,” Lee said to Dross. “You go to the Hurricane in your sandwich board, you wear your new Kleins.”
“Bet you he’s wearing a jockstrap under those shorts,” Dross said. “Bet he ain’t swinging under there.”
Lee said, “Courage has its limits.”
The guy in the sandwich board was pulling it off. His embarrassment was crimson, even in the falling light of a memorable sunset, but he was managing a sort of determined, boyish grin. The grin was killing women all over the roof. Lee could see that plainly enough.
Thongs and sarongs drifted toward the guy, forming a circle. Men were backpedaling toward the copper parapets, looks of confusion or grudging admiration on their faces. Hoping the guy would flame out, but thinking, Hell, he might set a standard we’ll all have to meet.
> A fortyish redhead in a lobster-red bikini was the first to step forward. Her thighs had somersaulted through the pep rallies of yesteryear, but now they’d grown some cottage cheese. She started reading the sandwich board aloud in a Joan Rivers voice.
Dross turned to Lee. “It’s brilliant,” he said. “I pronounce it brilliant.”
Lee had to admit it was the best idea he’d seen in months. Maybe not brilliant, but very damned good.
A hand-lacquered résumé, the sandwich board told the guy’s life story. It was entitled: The Visual Aid of Love. The perfect antidote to the nauseating small talk of life-seeking-life in the temperate zone. The text began: What’s my sign? I’m an Equestrian. If you get the joke, I want to talk to you.
It gave the guy’s job (CPA, small firm, specializing in corporate tax accounts), his salary (middle six figures), his car (Lexus, understated off-white), his hobbies (board sailing, jet skiing, jogging, good literature—Patterson, Ludlum, Nora Roberts—and long walks on the beach at sunset with YOU . . .). There was some stuff about his philosophy of life. (I believe in maximizing my potential, minimizing my negative effect on others, and letting YOU do the same thing. I believe we can work this out together.) It ended with his address and phone number and . . . (I’m secure in my masculinity. Anyone want to buy me a drink?)
The bouncy redhead finished reading the résumé aloud, and the crowd cheered again, even the guys.
Frank Dross turned back around and faced the rows of glittering bottles. “Thing is,” he said, “you can only use it once. Guy comes in here tomorrow night in that thing, the women’ll throw his ass over the side. What’s he gonna do for an encore?”
“He’s got imagination,” Lee said, watching three women offer to buy the guy a drink. “He’ll think of something.”
“Expecting somebody?” Dross raised his glass and gestured at the elevator. “The way you keep looking over there.”
“Maybe,” Lee said. She was late. He was beginning to think maybe not.
Across the bar, a whippet-faced brunette lifted her chin sharply when Lee said maybe. Dross shot the cuffs of his brown polyester coat and winked at her. She peered at him like she might have to speak to the management. Then Dross said, “Look at that one,” gesturing his glass again at the elevator door.
Lee looked. She was beautiful in ways that only a few women could ever be, and she was the type who kept it forever. Someday she’d be ninety-five, and all of the women in the assisted-living facility would hate her for the glory of her bone structure. But that would come later. Now she looked late thirties, about Lee’s age, with honey-brown hair, long legs, and big brown eyes. And she was staring right at Lee Taylor. “I’m looking,” Lee said as the woman walked toward him through the maelstrom of sex, alcohol, and thwarted expectation that was the Hurricane roof bar on a Sunday at sundown.
Lee gave Dross a last glance as the big guy lifted himself to offer the woman his pew. Lee heard ice clatter against Dross’s front teeth but didn’t see him fade away into the crowd.
The woman sat next to Lee and delicately pushed Dross’s empty glass aside. The cheaply handsome bartender asked her what she’d have.
“White wine, Chardonnay,” she said without looking at Lee.
The youth glanced at Lee’s umbrella. Only partly cloudy. “Come on, man,” he said, “justify my existence back here.” Lee smiled, gave the umbrella a nose nudge, and poured the sweet hot Bacardi onto his tongue.
The woman turned her wineglass on the bar in the wet ring left by Frank Dross’s bourbon. Still not looking at Lee, she said, “Don’t you recognize me?”
Lee examined the side of her face. From any angle, she amazed. The polite thing to say was, “Well, you do look sort of familiar.”
And then a door opened in his mind, opened just enough so that a little light shone on the past, and then opened wider. In full brightness Lee saw his chemistry class, freshman year. It was one of his extraordinary stories.
The lectures were held in an amphitheater that seated two hundred. Numbers were painted in ominous black on the backs of the seats. Each number represented a student. A bored graduate assistant sat at the front of the room taking the roll by recording numbers not obscured by the bodies of aspiring young chemical geniuses. In chemistry, Lee was far from a genius.
At the University of Florida you had to have a major, or at least you had to answer the question, “What’s your major?” when asked by a fellow student. As a freshman, with no idea when or how he’d actually declare a major, Lee had understood one thing: “I’m majoring in premed” sounded good to girls.
He’d made the mistake of announcing this to an academic adviser at registration and the guy had put him in this teeming chemistry class. The guy had Lee’s high school transcript in front of him, and he’d explained to Lee with a stern and worldly expression on his face that Lee’s record was spotty at best. So the guy had stuck Lee in this cattle-call chemistry class where Louis Pasteur could not have found a legitimate premed major.
Lee was never sure if his adviser had reposed faith in Lee’s ability to mature in his understanding of the periodical chart of the elements or if the guy had just played a little joke on the freshman from Panacea, Florida. Whatever it was, soon enough Lee saw that he had no particular aptitude for chemistry. The lectures were showy demonstrations of explosions and beakers of liquids that changed colors dramatically when they were mixed. The showman lecturer was, Lee later learned, a drudge whose research career had fizzled years ago, but the guy knew how to dazzle.
Lee and the other two hundred students were assigned to discussion groups taught by grad students. So it was the big show on Mondays, and then the small group meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays where the mysteries of explosions and lurid liquids were analyzed in detail. Lee never caught the analysis, failed the weekly quizzes, and barely made the deadline to drop the class before receiving a well-earned failing grade.
After that, dropping things was easier, and he drifted through classes he didn’t get, some he got but cared nothing about, and discovered Gainesville’s bars and strip joints. In the middle of the spring semester, he left Gainesville after declaring himself a building-construction major, and with that credential in hand, went home, then drifted down to St. Pete Beach to work as a carpenter’s helper in the construction trade.
But the extraordinary thing was what happened one day early in the fall down in the pit of the big amphitheater where the students gathered after the lectures, some to ask questions of the lecturer, most to chat with friends or, lacking friends, to try to meet someone.
Lee was standing in the crowd of fifty or so eighteen-year-olds when a girl approached him. She was pretty, well dressed in the mode of those days, and should have been happy for all she had won in the genetic raffle. She was not happy. Her first angry words to Lee were, “You said you weren’t coming.”
After all these years, Lee did not recall much of what he had said during their brief encounter. He recalled his embarrassment, his face reddening, his palms suddenly moist, as the girl came closer until her face was inches from his and he could feel her sweet breath on his lips. He’d probably managed only fragments of sentences that, had he finished them, would have meant, I have no idea what is happening right now. I have no idea who you are. I am beginning to think I have no idea who I am.
Her fists clenching and unclenching at her sides, the girl kept saying to him, “You promised me you wouldn’t come! You promised!”
The girl’s anger and the volume of her voice had cleared a space around them so that, like two dancers of exceptional skill, they stood at the center of a circle, their faces close together while the girl repeated her strange accusation, and Lee backed away sputtering his confused innocence. He remembered searching faces in the crowd for the sly smile or laughing eyes of an accomplice. Some gesture that would tell him that others were in on this, that it was some kind of prank. Maybe this was some sorority or fraternity foolery. But even as Lee considered
this, his young mind objected that it was too early in the semester for the traditional rush. If this was a prank, it was the invention of freelance deviants.
The girl repeated her complaint—that Lee should not be here, that he had broken a promise—for what seemed a long time but really could not have been more than a few minutes. Then she stopped as abruptly as she had started and, face bright red, eyes streaming tears, turned and shoved her way through the crowd.
Lee never saw her again. Not in the chemistry class or anywhere else.
Later, back in his dorm room reflecting on the incident, he had rung through the possibilities.
There was the prank option.
Or the girl was just, well, nuts.
Or he was nuts. His fevered mind had sent him on a trip to a mad fantasyland.
Or this was some sort of acting exercise designed by the theater department.
If it was theater, the girl was the best teenage actress in America. Lee had heard that actors lived their roles, but he couldn’t convince himself that the girl was acting. Her anger and her fear were real, and someone had caused them, someone she had cared about a great deal. Lee’s reflections always led him to the same conclusion. There really was a boy out there somewhere who had promised this girl he would not be here, and she had believed Lee Taylor was that boy. The most extraordinary and the most frightening explanation was that Lee Taylor had a double.
Years later, when late one night he had told this extraordinary story to a stranger in a bar, the man, a scholarly type with the weary manner of those who had looked unabashed into the mysteries of the universe, had pulled off his glasses and rubbed his tired eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “My friend,” the scholar said, “you ought to look into the myth of the doppelgänger.”
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