Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  What kind of mother dies of a Botox overdose? What kind of mother self-injects that toxin not realizing a vial of the stuff would poison the drinking water of a large city?

  A vain mother, of course. A vain and tender mother. A frail, beautiful creature whose real hair colour had always been a mystery. A mother who once had too many extra dry martinis and confessed that she fell down the stairs when she was pregnant and had always suspected that was why Miles developed his deformed grappling-hook molar. A mother with eyes like watermelons. Green eyes with a mist of orange or pink and the closer you looked the more they deepened, the more they almost seemed to purr. A mother who wore cocktail dresses displaying an embarrassment of cleavage. A mother who caused him to wonder whether they’d be friends if they weren’t family but whose whispered adorations—“my angel, my darling, my baby boy”—had made him feel as if there was something warm and lovely leaking all the way through him. A mother who had come into his bedroom at night when he’d grown suddenly scared of nuclear war and told him that she was weaving a force field around him. Had put up her palms as if holding curry combs and acted it out, brushing gentle ovals into the air. A mother who had moulded a force field that looked just like one of the suspended animation pods from Alien. A mother who had told him that every time he was scared he could reactivate that force field, a ritual he would play out until he was far too old to be scared of the dark. And even today, even that very night on the rack, he had retreated into the darkest cavern of his mind and voicelessly whispered, “Activate.”

  Miles can’t sleep from a cramp in his calf so he drops off the rack and walks the hall. Stalks the hall barefoot until the muscles in his legs begin to loosen and the blood hums through him. Walks off the very possibility of sleep and decides to head into the control room in search of biologics. Does not expect to see Panchaud crouched over the radar. Panchaud alone on the balls to four which means he must have come in and cut some people. Which means maybe he wanted to be alone in here and for a moment he does not see Miles in the doorway. For a moment he does not notice Miles and he brings his fingers to the bridge of his nose and shudders. An intake of breath that may or may not be a sob.

  Miles walks loudly over to the sonar panel and puts on the headphones with his best attempt at a casual “sir.”

  Panchaud straightens. Miles adjusts some dials, feeling Panchaud’s gaze. Then the XO turns to Miles and barks, “What?”

  “Sorry sir?” Miles turns to face the man, notes ocular redness.

  “What are you doing up here, seaman?”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d check for biologics.”

  “Biologics? Up here in the middle of the night listening for whale song?”

  “Aye-aye sir.”

  Panchaud studies him. Seems somehow poised. Poised to spring or crumble.

  Twenty-five days underway and Miles thinks maybe it’s time to make an effort. “Sir, if you’d like to talk about—”

  “Bleegh,” Panchaud groans, miming a puke. “I always knew you were a goddamn pansy.” Panchaud stands and points in the direction of the ladder. “Get your dinosaur toes out of my face.”

  As a boy of seven or eight, Miles’ favourite possession was a hot pink spandex suit, bought originally for a Halloween when he’d dressed as a popsicle. Inspired by some combination of his interest in Power Rangers and his mother’s passion for David Bowie, most afternoons he donned this luxury of magenta and roared around the house shouting “battle stations” and pew pew-ing photonic index fingers.

  The suit pleased him so much that he began to look beyond its limited possibilities, beyond his father’s prohibition against wearing it to school. He figured that if he cut the suit in two he could wear the top half secretly under his sweaters and then, when he felt like it, he could put the bottom and the top on together and patrol superheroically through the house.

  And so he took the scissors to his suit. Cut it into an unexpectedly jagged hem—the waistline toothed like a saw. Miles tried on the top and found that it would no longer cover his midsection. Nor would the bottom, elasticity compromised, grasp his waist.

  He took off the suit and shrivelled onto its melancholy husk. Lay there on the hardwood floor nesting in shredded pink spandex, leaking tears into the ruined garment.

  Which was when his father thumped up the stairs. Drummed loudly across the hardwood and asked what was wrong.

  “The suit,” Miles mustered. “It’s wrecked. I can’t wear it anymore.”

  His father looked at him for a long time. Said, “I always knew you were a Sitzpinkler,” and thudded back down to the kitchen.

  Miles is rotating the hydrophone and finding nothing unusual and then suddenly three large blips at a distance of a hundred nautical miles. Two large ones on the surface and something below. He calls Panchaud over and tells him it sounds like two ships and something biologic.

  Panchaud jerks up and says, “Training’s over.” A storm has been building on the surface, the ocean tossing ice around, and the Atlantis has been nestled safely at sixty metres below. Everything had been safe and routine but now Miles feels the wet salt dread bubbling in his throat, pictures the vessel sinking down to crush depth and bursting like a blister.

  Panchaud gives Miles a serious look and gets on the intercom. He calls out “battle stations” and Miles can see that he’s holding back a smile. People start muttering out from the rack and clambering up ladders. The control room fills with groggy bodies. Panchaud radios the captain and tells him three contacts and the captain appears, buttoning his shirt, and begins to call out orders. “Set speed for twenty knots, adjust depth to thirty metres.” The navigator calls out the bearings—“two, four, zero”—and the vessel turns, gathers speed.

  Whispers all around and everyone looking at their screens. What begins to congeal is a picture of two ships on the surface. Ships that have not been reported and aren’t responding to radio and that’s all they can say.

  The captain paces from panel to panel, Panchaud close behind. The captain asks for weather recon and Panchaud reports fifteen-foot swells and the captain keeps trying for radio contact. The blips on the sonar screen are increasing speed but the Atlantis is catching them, gliding smoothly under the alternating chop and ice.

  The captain gets on the intercom and orders the master-at-arms to load torpedoes. Panchaud reporting twenty-foot swells at the surface and the blips still gaining speed. The blips seem to be fleeing, which may or may not be a good sign, and Miles finds himself squeezing the side of his panel, waiting to face all the things that are threatening to go wrong.

  What becomes of a body that’s been poisoned by Botox? It looks much like a body that’s drowned, a body somewhat bloated, frozen into utter stillness, the nerves completely useless. It looks particularly like a drowned body if you imagine it, as Miles always does, floating downwards through the sea. Often, he thinks of his mother as she was—laughing in large Gucci sunglasses, keeping her mouth still because she was worried about wrinkle lines. And later because her mouth and cheeks were chemically frozen. Miles often thinks of her as she was but sometimes he thinks of her another way—sees her as a rigid body drifting through the ocean. Sunlight columning down and a school of mackerel glimmering past. Her arms straight at her side and her face a rigid belligerence. At first Miles found the vision horrific, but gradually he has begun to realize that there is something peaceful about it. Something soothing about the thought of his mother drifting down into the swaying below.

  The surface blips are moving faster and faster along the radar. Blips travelling at eighteen knots through the building storm and gathering velocity but the submerged Atlantis is faster. Then, inexplicably, they come to a stop. All three blips slow and stop and the Atlantis cuts speed, comes up to periscope depth.

  The captain over the radio: “This is the HMCS Atlantis contacting unidentified vessel in Canadian waters. Please identify.
” Static. A typhoon of static. “Unidentified, this is Captain Jack Bernard, Commanding Officer of the Royal Canadian naval craft HMCS Atlantis, commanding you to identify. Over.”

  Below, the torpedoes are loaded into their tubes. The master-at-arms has his key inserted, ready to twist.

  Then a voice. Hoarse and harried over howling winds: “Captain Bernard this is Captain Morley Savage of the SSS Cousteau. We’ve got our propellers tangled with a hostile Icelandic whaling vessel poaching Canadian waters over.”

  A collective gasp. Oxygen seems to pour into the control room and a few of the seamen snicker. The captain radios the Icelandic boat and uses his military officialese to tell it to smarten up. It smartens up. Lines are cut. A large minke whale—the sub-surface blip—is set free, a harpoon wedged above its left flipper. The Cousteau and the Atlantis escort the Icelandic vessel through the swells of a building storm.

  Once the whaler has reached international waters, the Atlantis slows and watches her until it’s clear she’s not doubling back. The Cousteau says thank you and heads back into the Arctic, en route to the North Pacific. The Atlantis sits at periscope depth, gathering air, and then dives back down to eighty metres below. Miles goes to the head, sits down on the toilet, and lets go. Pees, for the first time he can remember, sitting down. A full bladder and a sense of relief as if all these years of standing to pee there was something pinched in the core of him. Miles listens to his urine splash on the stainless-steel flap. Then he flushes. Flushes and, although he knows the waste goes into a tank to be drained later, he imagines the urine going straight out into the Arctic Ocean. And then he is there again, cruising the currents with the sea lions and narwhals, with that fortunate minke—harpoon-scarred but healing—and the other quietly bobbing giants of the deep.

  The summer before his father left for good, Miles stayed up listening to a screaming match—his father bellowing “Bitch!” into the ceiling like the name of some profane god and his mother hissing “why don’t you hit me then you big man.” Miles alone in his bedroom weeping as cupboards rattled and plates clanged and then in the morning his father walked into the living room with a big white box in a semi-opaque Sears bag, the beautiful Nintendo oval showing through.

  Miles revelled in Super Mario. Spent his nights dreaming of giant mushrooms, made snowballs fancying that he would jiep-jiep-jiep up a size and begin tossing fireballs. But it was his father who grew to be consumed by the game. Became a terrible TV-room vampire, began to spend his nights with a glass of scotch he never seemed to drink from and the music blaring about the dark and flickering walls. Within weeks the man had beaten the game several times and knew all the shortcuts. But he kept playing, began playing for points. Trying to beat the game as fast as he could without losing a life. His face growing paler and paler and Miles’ mother coming in to cut him off, her voice low and urgent. The awful music looping through the night until their dreams were filled with flying fish and gombas travelling blue underworlds. Until Miles would get up and stagger through the dark halls, lit with slanted red and blue, glancing into the TV room to see if the tinny synthesizer symphony was in fact coming from there or if it was just looping—boing, boing, boing—through the twisting pseudo-tropical funhouse that had become his mind.

  In the early days, before Miles’ father got fully addicted to Super Mario, he and Miles had once beaten a level together. A level that had always been Miles’ favourite—the underwater level, where Mario is a strange sea-creature, a human body with a fishtail. Seven-year-old Miles and his father sat there playing level life and the gruff old Nazi was momentatily gentle. Gentle and patient and tender as they blooped through the pixelated blue.

  When they finally won, his father stood up and turned the TV off. Said it was always best to end on a good note, and walked out into the kitchen to make them both a Nutella sandwich but don’t tell your mother. His father eating his sandwich with his mouth closed and a grin in his eyes, a grin Miles had never seen before. A smear of hazelnut butter in his white moustache.

  Miles walks into the torpedo room and finds Panchaud doing crunches, stomach twitching through his blue navy shirt. A row of teeth under a layer of chewing gum. The XO looks up at Miles, not pausing his workout. His feet locked under the rail below the torpedo tube and his elbows twisting one way then the other, gently kissing the opposite knee before gliding back down to rest. His elbows like wings.

  Miles lies down beside the XO. Hooks his feet under the same rail but does not rise into a crunch. Instead, he listens to the man’s breathing. The hush and shush of its rise and fall. He feels the heat swelling out from that hard body and he listens for the song in the man’s breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The breaths getting shorter, thicker, and finally stopping as Panchaud collapses onto the floor.

  Miles leans onto his side and puts a palm on the XO’s stomach. Feels the firm ridges and valleys of that waffle-like grid. A stomach like a flattened city.

  “It’s tough,” Miles says. “Down here.”

  Panchaud looking back at him, his brown eyes a hatred. A confusion. A longing.

  “All of this—it’s really hard.”

  Panchaud keeps looking back at him. Miles reaches out and the two men take each other’s hands. Miles can feel Panchaud’s rapid pulse through his fingertips. Can feel the slight lilt of his hand as Panchaud’s chest rises and falls—the struggle in his breath slowing, slowing, done.

  Entering the next screen, Miles and his aqueous cartoon father encounter something strange: a tall rectangle swaying gently in the digital current. A rectangle that, as they bloop closer, reveals itself to be a skyscraper. A once-glorious skyscraper of human construction, rising up from the ocean floor. Empty windows clogged with algae and the once-gleaming stones studded with barnacles. Ancient roadways spiralling upwards and cluttered with the rusted remnants of cars, all of it less sinister than it should be, gleaming with the primary palate of cartoons.

  They are just about to reach the underwater city when a bad guy emerges from behind one of the buildings. A giant human-squid hybrid with a stump leg and a pirate’s eye patch. Puffing a cigar, a swirl of oil rising up where the smoke should be.

  The squid produces a rocket launcher. Sets it on his shoulder and fires. The missile soars impossibly through the black water. Twists and lurches and careers as only a video game heat-seeker could and Miles can see that the weapon has smelled him. The missile hot and snarling and near and then Miles says it:

  “Activate.”

  He says “Activate” and everything goes still. The heat-seeker goes flaccid, disperses into sea. The squid squirts a swirling jet stream of black ink and shrinks into its vortex. The water ceases to warble and all sound effects stop. His father tells him he is sorry. Not, as usual, sorry about the Botox humiliation or ever agreeing to christen his only son “Miles.” He is sorry, now, for withholding. Sorry he could not have been nicer to Miles or his mother. Sorry and he often wished he could but he simply couldn’t do it. Says all this and then he too vanishes into the squid’s inky whirlpool.

  His father wilts into liquid nothing and Miles finds himself alone in the cavernous dark thinking about crush depth, about the pressure clutching this ship like a great fist, a whole ocean waiting to squash this arrogant vessel and send fifty-eight seamen drifting through the deep. Which is when he conjures his mother. Remembers his mother and knows that although she is gone she also remains. And so he sits there on the toilet and says it again: “Activate.” Holds his palms up to brush the air around him and feels the power of this little bubble of safety in a world always threatening to infiltrate. For what else is life but a fragile island in the chaos, a bulwark against the storms and oceans always gathering to subsume us?

  LIMOUSINES

  Dale kept asking are you sure about going through with it and I kept telling him they said level one cyclone which means it’ll be downgraded to dry-heaving tropical s
torm. I didn’t imagine myself standing here sluicing liquid reek in front of all my loved ones while the deadstock truck squeaks and teeters towards me, dust wafting about its crown of pretzelled limbs. Dad didn’t want a preacher on his property and so it’s just the judge and me and Dale and the deadstock truck creaking over the horizon like a goblin chariot roofed with a thatch of cadavers.

  Dad springs out of his lawn chair and starts waving fury at the truck until it turns around. The truck he’d told not to come if it couldn’t make it by two p.m. and it’s 5:30 now. The truck that was supposed to pick up two Holsteins who died of septic infection yesterday and are now reeking and gas-bloated behind Uncle Stan’s pig barn. The vehicle’s three-point turn full of reet-reet-reets and everyone watching that knot of carcasses wobble and lurch as the judge speaks about the ancient covenant of matrimony. The corset of my strapless dress bunched tight up top to maximize cleavage and I never noticed until I looked into the mirror five minutes before walking the grass-and-mud aisle but the squeezing means there’s a slit like a butt crack down the middle of my upper back, a gob of sweat cradled in its uppermost estuary.

  As the judge drones her spiel—legal stuff plus something about harmony and a never-ending web—I watch the deadstock truck bounce back down the farm drive, a stiff menagerie strapped to its back. Above that tangle of fur and hoof and rigor mortis, the sky is thick with the promise of storm. But the storm still seems to be holding. Holding meaning no wind or rain yet, just a slick and vicious heat, a humidity rare in this grid of hayfields and ocean breeze.

  We say “I do,” walk past the front pasture towards the old barn.

  We do cocktails and dinner in the old barn. Sit with the smell of hay and dead mice, drinking dark and stormies. Or as Dale calls them, stark and dormies. Salty smoke wafts in from outside where Uncle Stan slings pork-related innuendos in his bikini-bod apron while tending to the gilt he’s been roasting over coal for what seems like a week.