I'm Fine, but You Appear to Be Sinking

by Leyna Krow

  On Saturday morning, Aaron will wake feeling unwell. The sensation of being off-balance will have returned to him. In addition to that, an intermittent but severe nausea. At the breakfast table, he’ll notice that Cole has only just picked at the toast in front of him. When he asks Cole if he’s feeling all right, his son will give no more response than a dismissive nod. Aaron will try to eat a slice of Cole’s neglected toast with little success, his stomach turning, tongue seemingly too fat, his teeth too small.

  He’ll suggest to Cole that the two of them go together to visit my grave. This is something they’ll have done only once since my death—for the unveiling of my headstone. Otherwise, both my husband and son will avoid the sprawling cemetery. Although they will never discuss it with one another, they’ll both hold the belief that there is nothing really left of me at Washington Memorial Park.

  But in his increasing anxiety, Aaron will continue to seek tangible reassurances. A grave is indeed the most tangible reminder of the dead. And so for this, I cannot fault him.8

  “Bring Ollie,” Aaron will say to Cole, hoping to make the outing more palatable.

  Cole, already dressed in a suit and tie, will beg off claiming a prior obligation: a Security Council meeting for his Model United Nations club.

  “I can’t just ditch with no explanation,” he’ll say.

  “Visiting your mother’s grave isn’t a valid explanation?”

  “Sure, if I had cleared it with the Secretary General when we set the meeting schedule. But at the time, I assured my fellow delegates I had no personal conflicts on this date. It would be unprofessional for me to cancel at the last minute for a non-emergency situation. Are you saying this is an emergency situation?”

  Aaron will want to tell his son that with the Earth shifting beneath them, night and day blurring into one, and a host of displaced sea creatures residing in the living room, every situation is, in fact, an emergency situation.

  Instead, he’ll offer Cole a ride to school. On the way, they’ll watch the sun sink low in the sky with alarming speed. When they arrive, Aaron will be tempted to kiss Cole on the cheek, but he’ll restrain himself. As Cole gets out of the car, Aaron will hand him his book bag, then his octopus bucket, and wish him good luck in his international negotiations.

  In the day’s second twilight, Aaron will pick through the cemetery with uncertain steps. Because my death will be sudden and early, Aaron and I will have made no prior preparations. In hindsight, Aaron will wish we’d had plans. As it is, I’ll be wedged between two unfamiliar dead people and Aaron will spend the bulk of his cemetery visit looking around for open plots, wondering, if he died that very day, how close in the ground could he get to me?9

  Aaron won’t bring flowers to my grave. Instead, he’ll bring seven small rocks, pilfered from the neighbors’ Zen garden. It’s a tradition in the Jewish faith to leave pebbles when visiting the dead, harkening back to days when the ancient Israelites rolled boulders over graves, either to keep animals out or spirits in. On this point, religious scholars are uncertain. Aaron won’t give the origins of the tradition much consideration. For him, it will be a way to show his grieving has not yet ended. He’ll take the rocks out of his pocket and line them, one by one, across the top of my headstone. As soon as he’s done this, Aaron will feel overcome by dizziness. It will seem to him as if the world below him is literally spinning, as if the rules governing planet Earth have betrayed him and he may at any moment slip from its face and fly off into the air. It will be similar to the way he felt in the synagogue parking lot, but this time, much, much worse. He’ll drop to his knees and press his palms to the recently watered grass, trying to regain balance. The problem, he’ll decide, is a matter of weight. He’ll remove the rocks from my headstone in the reverse order from how he set them down and return them to his pocket. The spinning will subside and Aaron will stand up. But in its wake, the sensation will linger. He’ll stop looking around for vacant plots. Instead, on his way back to his car, Aaron will keep an eye out for pebbles, bending to pocket them each time he sees one.

  At home, Aaron will sit cross-legged on the living room floor in front of the coffee table just as he did the evening after he met the holy man in the robe. He will take the rocks from his pocket and set them in a row across the coffee table. Then another row of rocks along the arm of the sofa. Somehow, this will feel right: to weigh down our household objects and undo the effects of what he believes is Earth’s new gravity upon them. Or perhaps it’s to grieve for them. For the life the three of us shared in their presence. Aaron won’t know for certain the reason, only that the action is important in that moment. He’ll go once again to collect rocks from the neighbors’ neglected Zen garden. These particular neighbors—the McEwans—will have moved out a number of weeks before to join family in Minneapolis. In fact, most of the block will have left for places away from fault lines and volcanoes, away from the coast. Aaron will take his time putting rocks on each piece of furniture, across doorframes, along windowsills, returning to the McEwans’ yard as needed.

  When Cole gets home, Aaron won’t try to hide what he’s doing. In fact, he won’t even look up from his task to greet his son until he runs out of rocks and has to go next door for more. Cole will stand in the doorway and watch as Aaron gathers a double handful of pebbles. He’ll continue to watch as Aaron finishes with that batch and goes to fetch another. Only then will Cole stop him, pressing his hand against his father’s chest as he tries to pass.

  “This will go quicker if we bring all the rocks inside at once,” Cole will say.

  He’ll take two garbage bags and go out to the McEwans’ yard and fill them to carrying capacity. He’ll drag the bags one by one back into the house. Then he’ll set about helping his father line every surface of our modest home with rocks.

  When I think about him doing this, I am filled with pride, more so even than when I think of him rescuing sea creatures, or shepherding grade school children across darkened streets.10

  Cole will remove his jacket and roll up the sleeves of his dress shirt, tie thrown over his right shoulder. He’ll join Aaron in arranging the rocks. He’ll set them across radiators. He’ll set them on the keyboard and printer. He’ll set them on family photographs. He’ll slip them into medicine cabinets and dresser drawers. He’ll make his bed and put three rocks on his pillow. He’ll create neat circles of rocks around each burner on the stove. One rock on top of every spice in the spice rack. Cole will place rocks on the shelves of bookcases and along the rims of each fish tank. He’ll drop a handful into Oliver’s bucket. Then he’ll crawl on hands and knees toward his father. Aaron will be sitting on the floor, legs splayed out to one side, laying rocks along the baseboards in the living room. It will be slow going. When he reaches Aaron, Cole will take a rock from Aaron’s pile and balance it near the ankle of the older man’s left leg. Aaron will not notice. Cole will set another rock beside it. Then another. The line of rocks will creep up Aaron’s calf. Aaron will stop his own work to watch his son’s progress. Aaron will smile at his son who will in turn smile back. Is this a ritual or a game? Mourning or play? Aaron will try to think of something to say to solidify this moment—something they can both refer back to in the future. But nothing will come. He will feel the spinning sensation again and have to lie down, careful not to disturb Cole’s rocks on his leg. Unbidden, Cole will lie beside him, piling rocks along his own torso, from sternum to belt buckle.

  That’s when the beeping will start.

  July 15, 2090, Bainbridge Island, Washington

  Parker Timothy Olstead II

  The dog follows him down to the beach. The morning is a thick fog and he can barely see through to the water. The beach has no sand, just rocks and he sits cross-legged, searching out the bigger rocks around him and pitching them into the water. He pretends the world’s rock supply is out of balance—too many on land and not enough underwater. It’s his job to correct the problem, to even things out for the good of all Earth’s crea
tures. He likes when the rocks land too far out in the fog for him to see the splash. He just has to trust the sound. The dog lies by his side, waiting.

  He believes the dog is his father. He believes the apple tree in the front yard is his mother. He has read that Buddhists say their parents are infinite. Plants, animals, rocks, air—these things are all parents. He does not actually take any comfort in the idea, but he wants to. He reads a lot, checking out as many books as he’s allowed from the molding public library. He is trying on different theories and concepts, looking to see what fits. He knows Catholics believe in one god split up into three parts. He knows sometimes Hindus burn their dead along the banks of the river Ganges. He knows at thirteen, a boy in the Jewish faith is considered a man. He wants very much to be a man. He feels like he’s ready for that. Not that he wants to be bigger, or stronger, or to live on his own. What he thinks of when he thinks of being a man is to be free of his childish needs: his squirming, nervous desire to be loved; his orphan’s remorse; his constant wondering about who his parents were, what were they like, and what would they think of him. He’s thirteen now, and he vows to be a man—to be done with all that. After all, his father is a dog. His mother is an apple tree. What more could a man need?

  Behind him, he hears the crunch of sandals over rocks. He looks and it’s Camden, gnawing on a big chocolate chip cookie, the kind they sell at the coffee shop. He turns back to the water, half hoping she’ll pass by without stopping to talk to him, half hoping she won’t.

  “Do you know what a blowjob is, Spud?” Camden asks. She has paused directly behind him, with one knee bent so it’s pressing between his shoulder blades.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to give you one?”

  “No.”

  “Then you must not know what one is. If you knew what one was, you wouldn’t say ‘no.’ Everybody who knows what blowjobs are wants one. All the time, all anyone wants is blowjobs once they know. This is why you’re no good at school. Too dumb to admit when you don’t know something.”

  “I’m just fine at school.”

  “Your aunt told my mom you get terrible grades. And you have no friends.”

  “My aunt and your mom can go fuck each other.”

  At school, the kids call him Crater Head. They say, “Your daddy saw your ugly head and was so sad he drove his rocket into a black hole.” They ask, “Did your daddy die because he crashed into your giant face?” “When you were born, did your mother get sucked up your nose?” At home, his aunt says, “Don’t mind them, Spud, kids are always cruel,” then she goes next door to spend all her time with Twila. Once, he walked into her room to find the two of them on the bed, Caroline’s hand up Twila’s skirt. They’d panicked and scrambled apart, but he’d just closed the door. None of his concern what two grown women do.

  “If you let me give you a blowjob, I’ll show you something about your dad,” Camden says, kneeling beside him. Sometimes Spud is certain she is the devil, come to waylay all his plans as soon as he makes them. He wants to stay strong in his resolve not to dwell on his parents any longer. He wants to tell her he doesn’t care in the slightest.

  “What about my dad?”

  “Your aunt’s got files in our house. One of the files has your dad’s name on it.”

  “His name’s the same as my name.”

  “Your name’s Lieutenant Colonel Olstead?”

  He doesn’t say anything. He finds a flat rock under his knee and throws it into the water. Camden leans closer. He can smell the cookie on her breath. She should have at least offered to share it with him, he thinks. It’s his birthday, after all.

  “It looks important,” she says. “A big important file. It might have your mom’s name in it, too.”

  Camden’s got her hand on the fly of his jeans. She undoes the button and slips her fingers over the top of his boxer shorts. Her hand feels cold and damp, like she’s part of the fog.

  “Show me the file, then we’ll do what you want,” he says.

  Katie Eats

  Boston

  Cream Pie

  at a Motel

  Diner in

  Southeast

  Portland

  The people in the room next door are fucking. Katie hears not just the moans and the squeaking bedsprings, but other things too like the rubbing of thighs, the biting of ears, and the clenching of starchy sheets between fists. It’s nights like these, Katie wishes she was an astronaut.

  This wish has nothing to do with the people next door.

  Katie’s cell phone rings and it’s Darryl. She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t want Darryl to think she’s in the kind of place where people are fucking and she can hear it.

  It occurs to her that she probably doesn’t really hear the clenching of starchy sheets between fists, probably not the ear biting and thigh rubbing as well. Those parts, she’s imagining. Probably. But she can hear a lot. She worries Darryl would be able to hear a lot too, over the phone. “Are you okay?” he’d ask.

  He’d ask that anyway, but if he heard the fucking, he’d ask with a different inflection. And also “Where are you right now?” And also “When are you coming back?”

  He’d ask those things anyway too. Katie decides the fucking actually has little bearing on what Darryl would say. The fucking is not the reason Katie doesn’t answer.

  Outside, there are no stars. Katie doesn’t have to look out the window to confirm this. It rained all day. It’s rained all day everyday since Katie got to Oregon four days ago—not the good kind of rain either, not the pounding, purifying, consuming kind of rain. This is more of an insistent drizzle. Her impressions of the state so far involve perpetual dampness, a sky the color of concrete, and nights that glow an eerie yellow from the city light trapped in heavy atmosphere. There are no stars.

  Katie does not want to talk to Darryl. She does not want to listen to his message. She also does not want to listen to the fucking, both the parts she can hear for real and the parts she is more and more sure she is imagining. She does not want to imagine the fucking. She gathers her room key, a credit card, and her cell phone into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and leaves her room.

  This isn’t the first night Darryl has called. He also called last night, and the night before that, sounding worried. Darryl is not Katie’s boyfriend. He is also not Katie’s father or her brother or her boss or her landlord. He inhabits none of the male roles Katie would normally accept worry from. Of course, Katie doesn’t have a brother or a boss. She had a boyfriend, but not anymore. Her father does not know she’s left Reno and therefore has no reason to worry. She and her landlord are not particularly close. So, if someone is going to be worried, why not Darryl?

  In the lobby, nobody is fucking. There is free coffee and some floral print couches, but Katie doesn’t feel like sitting alone on a floral print couch and drinking crummy coffee. The lobby is attached to a diner by a double set of glass doors. Katie walks through one door and stands in the tiny vestibule between the motel and the diner. For a moment, she pretends she is on the space shuttle, in the airlock. She breathes slow, like she would if she were in a space suit with the helmet on. She reaches through zero gravity for the second door. Inside the diner is nothing like the inside of the space shuttle. A teenage waiter asks her if she’d like to sit at the counter or a booth. Katie requests a booth.

  Darryl is a retired civil engineer. He is sixty-five years old and has a long gray ponytail and large, callused hands. Darryl is the president of the Reno Amateur Astronomers Club—an organization in which Katie is a member. This relationship does not, in Katie’s mind, necessitate Darryl’s calling every night she is out of town to check on her. Except it’s clear to Katie that Darryl thinks of himself as more than just the president of a club in which she is a member. Katie can’t tell if the role Darryl is aiming for is that of father, or brother, or boyfriend. He has recently started being very nice to Katie. He invites her over to use his telescope on clear nights and often gi
ves her small errands to do for the club. Katie admits to herself that she likes this extra attention.

  The teenage waiter comes back and offers coffee. Katie accepts even though it is probably the exact same coffee she passed up in the lobby.

  Katie decides her business in Portland is, in a way, a club errand. She’s here to collect the rest of Alex’s star maps—to rescue them. Everyone in the club loves Alex’s maps and when there is a meeting addressing parts of the night’s sky for which Katie does not have a corresponding Alex map, the mood in the room is decidedly dour. Katie is tired of dour meetings, so she is rescuing the missing maps. But when Darryl calls, he doesn’t even ask about the maps. He asks about Katie.

  On the kids’ menu, Katie notices an item called the Spaceman Waffle. It is described as a Belgian waffle topped with vanilla ice cream and strawberry syrup. If Katie were a little kid in this diner with her parents, she would have begged them to let her get a Spaceman Waffle and they would have said “No.”

  When Katie met Alex, he was in the process of drawing maps of the entire sky as visible from the Northern Hemisphere at different times of the year. Each map was a masterpiece, intricately detailed with a swirling, multi-colored sky, white stars and yellow planets. The constellations were marked out with the barest of white lines, labeled in Alex’s impeccable script. The maps were both gently surreal and very accurate. At the time, Alex was finishing up a Master’s degree in visual art, but the maps weren’t for school. Each one he finished while they were together, he gave to Katie. He claimed, for him, the beauty was in the process, not the product. Once he was done, he didn’t enjoy the maps nearly so much as when he was working on them. So he gave them to her. Katie affixed these maps to the ceiling of her bedroom and only ever took them down when she went to meetings of the Reno Amateur Astronomers Club.