Leaving the Sea: Stories

by Marcus, Ben

  There was only one small sight hole not covered by a lens, a window that would not translate the world behind it. It was here that my father started passing items through, buttons and photos mostly, some keys, and tiny colorless rags. They glistened and rolled in our wake like old jewels, the key objects of our home donated now to the ocean. Some of them he handed to me first. As I touched every small thing from our old house, I felt a hard drowsiness, as if these objects themselves were drugged and could produce a stupor in me if I so much as looked at them. I handed them out of the boat as fast as I could.

  We slept on and off that way, protected by the canopy of lenses. Beneath them we must have looked like nothing at all, an empty boat adrift at sea. We were not bothered. Even the natural sounds of the sea were repelled by our contraption.

  In the morning I began sewing a eulogy for my brother out of some white thread we had saved. I made the eulogy as thin as typing on a page, crinkled letters stitched together as if the words of a book could be tweezered in a thread as long as a man’s body. I did not know what I wrote. My hands carried all of my feeling, if there was any, but they moved confusingly with the needle and thread, and I preferred not to watch them at work on something I could never describe. I knew that this stretch of water that held us deserved a writing, and that the writing should record the life of maybe the last speaker of Forecast, a person who was quieted by a family metronome and buried at sea. I made a writing of thread to honor my brother and dipped the thread in the water. My father took only a mild interest, stopping briefly from his rowing to hold some of the sentences inside his big work gloves. His visor was down over his face, either as a reading filter or to hide himself from me, I was not sure. I let him hold the writing like that and did not trouble him with a direct gaze. But as our boat began to list and creak, he attached some of the sentences to his belt, sprayed them fast with a hot jet from the Costume Gun, and got back down to his work.

  I wish I could say that my father had a steady size, a stable shape. Something finite to his person. That he did not grow larger when the lens allowed it, a ballooning man at the bow of a long boat. Who used his size as a sign that time had passed. A body not to be touched, to be seen only through glass. I would prefer, if I could choose, to remark on a man such as my father receding from sight instead, going small, losing color and voice and power, as if one could achieve his disappearance through squinting alone, through the scratching of glass, the melting of a costume. Using equipment such as Father Disappearing Goggles. As if not looking at him meant that he could not be looked at.

  I wish I did not have to say the word lens again. Or boat, or water. I would prefer an ocean scenario where certain words were restricted, due to conditions of climate. Where whole grammars were off-limits, due to cloth shortages. A scenario where the mouth operated under quota. Where there was a quota of water as well, to keep it from repeating, from never ending.

  Deep in that next night on the water I heard noises scraping away nearby. The sound of a partition being built. A father at work. The old-fashioned sound of glass being stretched through the middle of a boat. I used the hem of my own garment as a divining lens, but it only enriched the darkness, silenced the clatter, and I decided to wait for a moment of accurate sunlight, if one would come to such a remote zone of ocean—where even the small platforms for men went unoccupied—to discover the operation my father seemed to have set for himself after I had gone to sleep. In the meantime, I chewed on a piece of sweet rope to calm myself.

  It was a small night. Many people must have died for lack of space. The weather was tuned to a Shrink setting. The air was swollen. Beneath us, waves slapped at the hull in a plain, repetitive code. If I squinted, I could make out small, sharp words in the code, English words as if formed by a man with a beak for a mouth, singing through a cotton screen. He was another man I did not want to know. I found it was better not to listen. They were not words I very much cared to hear. But as I slid around inside my oversized costume, the world grew quiet again and soon I could sleep, a darkness over my body as thick and final as one of the very first wools.

  I awoke hard and wrong, beams of heat around me, air that felt suspiciously like my own breath circling my face.

  In the space between us, my father’s nighttime work was revealed. He had erected a new skin of lenses, rendering himself, and everything, a distortion on the other side of the glass. It was not clear which of us was costumed in it. I saw only smudges and blurs, the glass clearly bent in such a way as to translate the objects beyond me out of recognizability. I was encased in lens. A Translation Costume my father had snuck up on me while I slept. A coercive suit of clothing that blinded me. Shadows, at the most, roved the skin of my new suit.

  As much as I carved into the soft glass with a darning needle that my father must have left for me, I could not break the surface. As much as I pressed my face into the soft glass, I could see only smudges of him, a painting of a man melting in the distance. At my feet was a pile of things, among them my brother’s stippled leather box, containing his Forecast sounds, and a sweaty old Costume Gun. I fired a mild jet from the gun at the lens but achieved only a vague pain in my chest, a cramping. I aimed the gun at myself to no effect.

  There is a certain jostling stability beneath me now, though it could be a trick of the costume. I may indeed have been jettisoned to my own platform. It is possible that I can detect certain swells of ocean, a system of waves at work on some task I’ll never understand.

  Or I am meant to detect this, I am meant to feel this.

  There may be a father operating on the other side of the glass. I sometimes imagine him there as a small man chiseling into a solid block of cotton. Carving a head, maybe.

  I do not imagine him often.

  Most days I am content to hold my brother’s leather box. I open it occasionally, releasing its Forecast sounds, which slide into my climate like my brother’s very own breath, as if we still shared a costume. And though I do not understand the words, I enjoy their defeat of silence. I can picture the costume the words would make, as big as a family, with soft exits, filled with writing, allergic to glass. A costume you would not know you were wearing. So subtle. So soft. Beyond clear. Made only of his little words.

  Although I do not understand my brother’s words, I know them to be the right ones, the ones that someone had to say. I am happy that they are mine now.

  There are so many words I won’t say again. I will not say “brother.” I will not say “house,” or “kill hole.” Many of the statements I could make could be smothered by the proper combination of cloths. Silence is simply a condition of clothing. My father has seen to a final deaf costume.

  There is little to do now but regard the patches of water, which may really be clouds. Despite their color, despite their size, despite the voice inside them. Clouds which may really be him, my father, moving around out there beyond me, outside of my clothing, where apparently a world still operates. However dim. However feebly.

  First Love

  I could not sleep until I had labored through a regular lust application performed with motion, gesture, and languageflower. There was no script or dance step to the discipline. I administered it to her whether she was home in the head or away, no matter the score between her heart and the world, whether she swooned or cringed when I held her, or if she gazed into space or feigned sleep.

  She received my application with short, gasping tones she made with her own breath. The tones could have been stolen from a song. Every sound she made was borrowed from what was once known as music. It was not clear whether I should have responded with sounds of my own, which I had once used to draw people closer to my body, or any noise I could make to harmonize her noise into something passing for speech, which might then tell us what to do. Her sounds emerged most forcefully when the motion of my lust was pistonlike, an event that often featured my person volleying above hers, as if flying in place, she pinned beneath me, wilting in my shadow; or me behind
her, as though driving a chariot, while she carved a location for herself into the bedclothes.

  When we pursued the discipline, we fought toward the seizure known as nighttime. Nighttime promised a better statistic of invisibility. It was our primary collaboration, to arrive where we wouldn’t be seen. We fantasized about a place where we could be wet and boneless, where no one would dare attribute a feeling to us. The safest thing to say about water is that it has no bones, unless a person has been trapped in it.

  She would announce her seizure some seconds before it occurred. She used American sounds known as phrases. She said: Here I come; and: Good lord. I imagine the sounds she made once passed for words. When I announced my seizure, often by reciting her name, she held my hand. The sun was briefly refuted and I achieved a dark area. At such times I could see the two of us walking through a garden, looking at the world as though for the first time, believing that the flaring, bright obstacles that kept us from seeing deep into the earth were actually only called flowers.

  In daylight she wore motion-limiting weights called shoes. She had a wet mistake buried in her chest. It should never have been put there. Someone had concealed a weapon, which helped her manifest a wound. She tried to sweat it free by performing a function called crying. The five knives of her hand were once called fingers. She stabbed her face every time she tried to eat; the cuts released small blasts of clear air that made the day feel cool. The flag of sadness that concealed her arms was known as a sleeve. The flag flew the colors of her body, which there is no longer another name for. The word body used to refer to the evidence left behind that someone had died.

  The first time you meet a potential partner presents an opportunity that will never come your way again, the chance to handle them freely, to smell their parts, to disrobe or possibly dismantle them, to mount their hind, to bark at them, to pull back their hair or grip at their scruff and whinny, to rope them to a post, to insert a wire into their back and control them through radio, to scull or tack in their perimeter, to kiss them gently, to hold their face and kiss their cheeks and shelter them from the wind with your wide, hard body.

  Your appearance and behavioral strategy play a part in gaining this access to someone new, so it is imperative to keep your person clean and keep his tank and limbs filled with the appropriate fluid, seasonally correct and rich in emotion, to be sure his shoes are hard on top and solid for the long haul, to mind that your own person is posture perfect and can aim his body true, accounting for the possible refractions of light that occur between the people of today, also known as the new wolves.

  The shovels we use to cleave the air in two—and possibly reveal a person we might fail against—were once abbreviated as hands. This was when we had two shovels each, and we apparently used them to scoop up objects we thought we needed, or to toss away those that did not please us. When we faced off with a person, the sound of our four shovels colliding produced a shield of silent, wind-free air known as home. This was when there were only two choices how to behave, on or off. We would apparently put some objects into our mistake tunnel, which was still the main opening in the face, and the tunnel was able to convulse around them and propel them deep into the body’s grave, which was then called, I think, a belly. The tunnel often became wet, but it had dry sticks in front known as teeth, to provide a final reflection of every object we buried in our bodies. Those people who wanted to consume us could then take an inventory of our assets simply by staring us in the mouth or, more obviously, putting their mouths over ours in an investigation known as kissing. Whenever she kissed me, she was prying for secrets.

  My secret was my lucky bone, worn behind my face for good luck. It was an excellent protection against sorrow. Now seldom seen, at least in the daytime, this bone was once worn as an amulet above the neck to ensure a human appearance. Without it, a person might be considered an accident of light. It is a bone that grows in time with the body and achieves a round shape to best support the face. Some cultures call it a “head” and decorate it with paint and stones, or cover it with veils, gels, masks, and helmets.

  In America the head sprouts either soft or coarse hair, features small apologies called eyes, and has a round mistake tunnel known as a mouth. The mouth asks for help by carving wind into short breaks in silence called languageflower. During escape tactics such as walking, the head precedes the person and falsely advertises his mood and what he might say. One of its functions is a decoy event called a smile. The head is better known as a flare for trouble. Some areas called cities feature millions of these flares hovering at eye level, and the effect is blinding. The Spanish word for this is crowd. In America there is a phrase—Bury your Head—which originates from the Dutch and translates, roughly, as: to marry.

  In some parts of America the little bone above a man’s neck is considered to possess skills such as pain storage and escape strategies; the bone is suspended above the man as a charm against other people, who would otherwise seize his body and pour themselves into it, a self-camouflaging sacrifice known as a relationship. But other people also use the little bone as a buoy that one should not approach, because someone will die in the space it covers. If you get too close to the buoy, you will be trapped as a mourner. Circling the head is referred to as courtship. It is like chalk around a body before that body has died. It hovers in place and appears attached to the fear spout that was once called a neck. In truth, every man’s body is an announcement of a future disappearance. Just by being in the room with her, I was foreshadowing our separation. My head was simply the point where that disappearance would occur. If we ever need to know what will go away, we need only to look at a person. Anyone.

  Sometimes the disappearance can be traced. We conceal a part of the world and it’s called swallowing. Many of the best objects, including the world’s first engine, a fault called the heart, are hidden in the body. It is a competition to hide as much as we can, a form of ballooning that is believed, in some languages, to make us more attractive. We say we love someone, which means we covet the hoard they might be storing in their bodies. While they sleep we reach at their hoard with our hands, an excavation better known as caressing. That is why lovers often say things to each other like: X marks the spot, Come and get me, I have a secret. Having a secret means: I have swallowed part of you and that is why you feel incomplete. Massaging the skin is another way to feel for a secret entry. It is unfortunate that most people do not come equipped with a map and some cutting tools. So much time would be saved. Instead of saying, “Pleased to meet you,” we might make a small incision in the chest, wide enough for us to slip inside if the air will no longer tolerate our presence, if the population in the room is just asking for our omission.

  In the current era, the male treasure hoarder uses someone else as storage space for his spoils, in case his own body is looted while he sleeps, a violation certain Americans still refer to as dreaming. There will then be bodies that carry his assets after he has been found out. This grouping was once known as a family. People produced families to disperse the treasure and keep the sniper, who was once mistaken for a bird, guessing. In some American dialects, the word family means “scatter.” Having a family increases the number of targets, cuts down on the father’s risk. With more people for the sniper to shoot at, the father has a better chance of getting out alive. His wife and children function as his bodyguards. This is also probably why relationships are referred to as “bulletproof vests.”

  I had been advised by the Authority that a ritual at the outset of our union would create a relationship, which was then seen as a preferable condition. So I sent her some of the water I had blessed for the dedication of our relationship, telling her to have some of it to drink and to apply some as a lotion to the place she least wanted me to discover, so long as this place occurred on or near her own body. The water might protect her, even if I repeatedly touched her or looked at her, which was admittedly going to be my early plan. But if she spilled the water on her father, there w
ould be a chance that I would kill him. It was a favor to warn her against my worst intentions. I wanted to show her my unsatisfiable side, to get the worst part out of the way, but it turned out that it wasn’t just a side, but my entire body, and even the space around it that was unsatisfiable. Wherever I put my body, I left behind areas that could not be fixed. In a relationship every person gives a gift, usually by leaving something out. The best and most cherished gift is to give her the first clue as to why she should begin plotting her escape.

  There are men blessed by water, whom women cannot see. This is the only favor water can grant, to cloak our mistakes by adding a layer of reflection to our skin, which helps other people take more responsibility for us, once they see how horrible they can look when we reflect them. We have bodies of water, known also as failures of land, to show us where mistakes are made, because water gathers near error, to magnify it and make everyone feel responsible. This quite natural atmospheric process was once understood as guilt. The apologetic men are laid out flat, ashamed to have ended up a mirror to other men. Dry men have made no mistakes. To look at water is to admit the possibility of error. Some men are still shy around water.

  It was her belief that water, taken in drink form, would provide the necessary ballast for her to remain with me. But Americans believe it is unlucky to drink water, because those who do so will live. The body will thrive and grow; and growth, particularly in English, implies movement away from others. The first word for it was escape.

  Commitment, on the other hand, is an abbreviation for an inability to move, which is why couples often become heavy together, stiff and slow-moving, eating pounds of food to ensure each other’s immobility. Feeding a lover is like making her swallow an anchor. This is why getting married is described as swallowing iron. Marrying is never referred to as “casting off,” although sometimes the phrase “taking on a passenger” is used.