How to Find a Flock

by Chris Vola

  But I don’t want this to be about that party, how the baroness went through every possible iteration of what-does-Frank-see-in-her before beginning a mostly one-sided dialogue on the need to embrace the chaos of a universe we barely know or maybe just her desire to form a credible online persona (I was too busy following the arrow formed by her partially exposed clavicle, how it pointed to the couch on which Frank was discovering Marnie’s earlobe with his tongue and she was looking into her beer and laughing shyly). How the baroness’s ivory nails fused to my wrist and would guide me, more or less unobstructed, out of the apartment, into a cab, up an elevator manned by an interactive virtual concierge, into a shower featuring a showerhead with a pulsating massage setting (never told you about that one, did I, Frank?), and, much later, onto a sofa bed in a sun-bleached home office as punishment for the apparent nasal discord caused by my deviated septum.

  How Marnie never looked up from her beer.

  *

  What I want is to go back, for a moment, to Marnie sitting on a bench on the 1 train platform, shielded under the rain-smeared streets, smiling at the text I’d just sent her. I can’t remember the exact words I typed, something reassuring about how it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she didn’t get the grant-writing position at the ocean conservation organization, how lobbying to end dolphin hunting in Peru might be like viewing an otherwise arousing piece of obscene media where the performers were wearing protection, the fantasy irreversibly diluted by reminders of an uncomfortable truth, a shattering of ideals so to speak. The analogy’s kind of a stupid one, I know, but I like to think she got it.

  Frank wouldn’t be able to tell you this, lurking squalid in the outer-borough hovel of whoever’s fucked up enough to keep listening to his resin-mouthed lamentations, but Marnie had always wanted to be a cetologist, until she accepted that her lack of proficiency in mathematics and her debilitating fear of defaulting on more student loans meant that several years in a graduate program studying whales and dolphins was an impossibility. The passion was still there, though, strong as ever. She could close her eyes, lean back in one of the patio folding chairs Frank brought with him when he moved in with me, and describe the cunning subterfuge involved in the group mating practices of porpoises or the peach-fuzzy nuzzle of a manatee calf’s flipper with the trancelike cadence of an artist or a monk, trying to reproduce the drama within herself, punctuating her verbal reveries with a guttural sigh that was far more sensual than anything I ever heard beyond the ramshackle wall that separated my room from Frank’s.

  She could transport you to places untouched by the shoreline’s chem-trail and fluoride-tinged sprawl, make you feel like you were totally submerged, a not-quite-initiated interloper absorbing the contours of reefs and the warm modulation of transoceanic currents rather than the corroding jigsaw of fire escapes and tobacco dregs that comprised the view beyond our apartment’s back window; the hulking shadows above us were no longer cast by a precarious water tower whose ladder Frank had often suggested climbing if we were sufficiently tripping our faces off, but by the smooth, intimidating girth of a blue whale’s underbelly as it breached the surface.

  I wonder, when she finally got on the train that afternoon after her failed interview, what aquatic imagery she decided to drape over the rust and plastic confines of the car. Did she see, on the seat next to her, a fortysomething snub-nosed woman in hospital scrubs playing Candy Crush or a fixated otter floating on its back, manipulating a freshly caught sea urchin with its paws? Was the too-young mother across the aisle angrily shoving her hyper toddler back into his stroller or simply shielding her calf from famished polar bears with a pale beluga fin? Did the lock-jawed leather-skin, shoeless and snoring on the handicapped-accessible bench away from the other passengers, transform into an aged bull walrus writhing in beach-scented grime after his final defeat?

  I keep going back to those moments, even though I wasn’t there, even though I can’t pretend to have any true understanding of what she was seeing, even though nothing I’ve described might have actually happened. Not that it matters. Because for me, Marnie on the subway will always represent an embodiment, not of that year, but of that year’s potential, unvarnished by the summer and everything that came after.

  And what did come after?

  Humid happy hours at that one rooftop bar we liked, brain-frozen on slushy margaritas, Frank’s sexualized eye appraising the server’s floral skirt or yoga pants while Marnie would suggest that we could take the city’s money by jumping from a certain height onto (and through) the subway grates. Later, high and giggling, we would listen to the elderly clarinetist a couple floors above us and claim we could do better before jacking up one of Modest Mouse’s early albums and readying our addled bloodstreams for another round. Mornings, the floor jolted and the windows shook and a smell of burning would fill the air in Frank’s room until the two of them groggily emerged. Except for the time it was just her, covering her drooping mouth and bee-lining to the bathroom where she stayed for the better part of the next two days.

  Breakfasts were a suburban memory.

  Sometimes Marnie would start shivering, even in the heat, and Frank would hold her with a metallic aftertaste on his lips. Cabs were rare and there were never stars. One night, standing on the sidewalk where the gum stains speckled the pavement like spots on a robin’s egg, she asked us to lie beside her, to watch the synthetic-orange night and the endless space behind it. Frank looked up from something on his phone, smirking, and asked if we’d known a lot of Jews in high school.

  There were weeks when none of us slept.

  When it started to get really bad, after she’d gotten fired and Frank started spending every third night at the baroness’, I began to believe that Marnie had psychic powers, that she could predict the future. She told me Frank was the worst man in her life who wasn’t really the man in her life and would remain the worst for a long time. That this world, ruled by parents who knew for sure that their God agreed with them, was not and would never be a safe place for children. She would describe apartments she hadn’t moved into yet, the progress of next year’s impending nor’easter.

  She took to sleeping in my bed, the window open, always smelling like salty flowers no matter how long it had been since she’d washed or eaten. When she was lucid enough, I’d read to her from the marine ecology book slash personal memoir – “The Bottlenoses of Biscayne Bay” by Dr. J.R. Mazza – that Frank had stolen from an unlocked U-Haul the morning after they’d met, until she drifted off into the wet, blue world only she could touch. Maybe she’d already been there the whole time, from that day on the subway right until the end, the brilliant mid-October afternoon when her big linebacker cousin with the sorrowful expression and neon track shoes came to carry her out to the car where her sunglassed parents were waiting and Frank tried to lash out at him, halfheartedly, and Marnie just sat there on the futon looking at us, cold and unblinking, frozen, immersed in the facts I’d been reciting from the pages she’d already memorized, the facts she would always know better than any of us pathetic dry-landers.

  In captivity, dolphins have lived as long as forty years. In the wild, though, scientists believe they only live twenty-five to thirty years.

  Some specific whistles, called signaling whistles, are used by dolphins to identify and call each other, and besides immediate family members, imitation of the signature whistle seems to occur only among befriended adult males.

  A bottlenose’s skin feels like rubber due to an absence of any sweat glands and an unusually thick epidermis, ten to twenty times thicker than that of other terrestrial mammals. The skin will peel and flake off in order for new skin cells to replace the older ones. This is similar to how human skin cells are replaced. The layer under the epidermis is where the nerves, connective tissues, and the blood vessels are found.

  If a dolphin’s tooth gets knocked out, it’s never replaced.

  Dams

  She walks down the path that leads from the m
ain building to the stream that runs parallel with the clinic and staff bungalows, a splice of indigo heading southeast through the cloud-hung mountains toward Walmart country. It’s late September and warm, but she can smell wood smoke coming down from the ridge that marks the border with either Tennessee or Kentucky, maybe both. She can’t remember.

  She scans the bank for towels left by housemates or counselors, walks to the end of the rickety dock, kneels on the bare wood, and listens.

  Bird banter, nothing else.

  She dips her hands, ink-smudged from the paperwork she’s been filling out, and watches the current slow through her fingers, then quicken where the stream bisects a sandbar and disappears around a stone-lined bend. She glances back down at her reflection in the water. It’s a trick she’s been saving since the afternoon last week when she started the application to begin outpatient therapy.

  If she catches herself from the right angle and with just the right amount of distortion from the ripples, the stream might show her something new, something she might want to look at.

  *

  When she’s ten or eleven, her father’s brother and his family come to visit, the only time she can remember meeting them. They’ve been traveling through coastal suburbs in their crummy minivan on what her uncle calls “field service,” which seems to consist of handing out poorly photocopied booklets with a lighthouse on the cover to mostly indifferent and occasionally aggressive strangers. Her parents keep a stack of the booklets they’ve been mailed over the years in the garage for when it’s raining or snowing and the dogs need to be wiped down.

  This is Uncle Randall and brood’s last pit stop before returning home to a village somewhere near Canada that her father refers to as Cultsville, USA, which causes her mother to snort out sangria if it’s late enough in the afternoon.

  Everyone’s sitting on the back deck sipping iced tea except for her parents and her father is fiddling with a cigarillo he hasn’t lit yet. Her cousin Darryl, a few years older and more worm-necked than the pictures she’s seen of him, has been staring at her since exiting the rust-scarred Dodge Caravan, sullen and not saying anything. She thinks he might have an embarrassing speech impediment or maybe teenagers in Cultsville aren’t allowed to talk, until he turns to her aunt and whispers, loud enough to hear, “She’s going to be a dyke, isn’t she?”

  Her uncle tugs at the edge of a thicker version of the lighthouse booklet in his stick-figure lap, looking in the direction of the driveway. Her aunt, red-faced and full with fetus, starts sputtering until her father cuts her off.

  “You never know, the kid may be right,” he says, wheezing out a smoker’s giggle. “That’s the first rational observation I’ve heard today. You should let him take the lead on your next pilgrimage or whatever.”

  After her relatives leave, she searches for “dyke” in the CD-ROM encyclopedia on her desktop. From the Dutch: a dirt-made embankment that regulates water levels. She’s showered recently and her parents are Serbian and Irish. She isn’t tall, fat, or barricade-like. Darryl, she assumes, is just bitter because he has to wear tucked-in Goodwill polos and black Velcro sneakers that contribute to an existence plentiful of schoolyard beatdowns (in a town where people still say “schoolyard”), if he isn’t homeschooled.

  She watches herself brush her pixie-chopped hair in the bathroom mirror, black-polished fingernails smoothing the tides of frizz like inverse moons. The boys in her class always compliment her thrift store flannels and the Nirvana tee shirt featuring a squiggle-mouthed smiley face with Xed-out eyes that she wears biweekly and is wearing now despite being unfamiliar with most of the band’s oeuvre besides a dubbed cassette of the acoustic album. And the girls, though she knows they’d never admit it, gawk at her hands and wish their mothers were pill-despondent or hungover enough to let them out of the house in anything but their mall-bought, middle-school-bland sweaters and skirts that never seem to hug tight enough.

  Maybe Darryl has a point.

  She likes to control the flow.

  A couple years later the internet – and an unintentionally hilarious dude with Tourette’s in her biology lab – teaches her alternate definitions of words that aren’t in her encyclopedia, definitions you don’t want to carry around as an appendage. She would keep her black nails but construct her own version of an acceptable archetype, not quite another pre-melanoma Abercrombie princess but close enough to silence her father and the guys who don’t listen to Nirvana and who consider a fifth of Mad Dog, a bottle of Sprite, and a post-party ride in a bass-riddled Yukon Denali as appropriate currency for a half-remembered skin-prying.

  Nights splayed across SUV back seats are fine, as long as the buzz is adequate, but she admits long before her first semester at a small “nonjudgmental” college in her metropolitan area’s largest city that her cousin was probably right, regardless of his intended definition. She beds flat-chested and septum-pierced Caroline during Orientation Week (a source of endless bad puns), then a couple of rugby butches, a theater hipster who identifies herself as “pan-curious,” the klepto with the Hoover-mouth from Georgia who cries about her missionary fiancé in Yemen, Caroline again.

  Then the year of the Ex that starts with a hash-oil vaporizer at 3am outside of IHOP and ends in volcanic shards and a couple hundred dollars of pawned electronics.

  A week or so after the breakup, the bearded, sag-jawed bartender she’s been crashing with for the past three nights mentions her nails. Still painted the same way, automatic reflex, taken for granted and absorbed into the rest of the mess.

  “Ten mini black daggers harvesting my essence,” he jokes, pointing at his chest, at the welts she doesn’t remember making.

  He’s using a health insurance card to combine crushed Adderall pills and the coke he says is mostly speed and baby powder, creating “generational hybrids.” Sitting on the edge of his bed, feeling the sinus heat from the first session, she braces for a punch line that never comes. Instead, he hums along to the 80s synth pop playlist – titled “The Decade(nce) That Never Dies” – pulsing from his desktop, swivels in his office chair, picks her up and positions her in his lap, in front of the glass slab where he’s been chopping.

  When she wakes up she’s back in bed on her side and he’s pecking at the space behind her earlobe. Rubbing his half-boner against her knee. She pulls away, buries her face into the duvet cover.

  “It’s okay,” he’s saying, rubbing, “you’re okay. You stuffed your fist into your mouth and were like choking or gnawing on your fingers or something. Once I saw that you weren’t having a seizure I assumed you just needed to relax. You were sleeping. I helped.”

  “Did you finish all the lines?”

  She tells herself to find nail polish remover.

  *

  Reeling, bloodshot, she flings Kandi’s miniskirt and bra at the detritus that’s partially blocking their shared toilet, a compost of night sweat and perfumed smudge that might fester intact until the end of the semester. Her roommate’s sty of a life (another Ex-ism) is only redeemed by her innate ability not to notice anything.

  She opens her window to let in a wash of air, to let out the lingering odor of charred rubber.

  *

  The goodbye – expectedly stiff, quick and almost wordless.

  The Ex uses a copied key to enter her dorm room without knocking, without giving her enough time to hide the baggies. She hops on the futon, the plastic fusing to the side of her be-thonged ass and thigh.

  She wants it to be like the beginning when The Ex would burst in Kramer-style while she was reading and they would bullshit about mutual friends, overdraft fees, The Pixies, lucid dreams. Or they’d make out a little, and before they fell asleep The Ex would do her best George Clooney, Good night, and…good luck…

  “You look like fucking garbage,” The Ex says, sniffing the room, dead-voiced. “I heard you were at O’Connell’s last Friday. Jason said you were buying shots and left with an older guy with a weird scar on his neck or something.”


  She wants to remind The Ex about the nights they’d philosophized about what they would be doing and where they would be in a few years. Freelancers, institutional mules, ski lodge waitresses. She would forge college admission essays for clients she would find on Craigslist. The Ex would manage a sperm bank. There would be deadlines, alumni events, memorials to attend, vibrators, clubs, nipple slips, and brunches. And later, probiotic baby food, Hers and Hers bidets, nurses at four in the morning.

  “Would you like some spah-kaling water?” she says, the inside joke falling flat before it exits her bark-thin lips.

  The Ex walks toward her, lifts her face with cupped hands. Her eyeliner-tears slide down the Ex’s forearms, forming inky tributaries at the elbows. The Ex brushes the salty blackness off before it reaches her prized Pearl Jam tee shirt and steps back, nearly tripping over some of Kandi’s ranker thongs and a couple tampon wrappers.

  She wants to talk about the last few months. She doesn’t.

  “You owe me a watch and an iPad,” The Ex says. “I don’t give a shit about the earbuds, I’d be surprised you were even able to get anything for them.” She starts walking toward the hallway.

  “When?”

  “Whenever. You have my PayPal. Oh, and I’m transferring.”

  “When?”