by Lori McNulty
I can still feel the heat of those jumping flames venting the Feltimores’ roof that night, thick woollen plumes, then a wind shift, a short break in the clouds, clear enough to see.
Yani in his Jets toque, leaning up against the Feltimores’ maple, his hand curled around the crook of his yellow cane.
The way he just stood there, watching like it was the end of a parade.
Prey
When Myra calls back the second time, I’m bent over the bathroom sink, examining the last floating hair tuft on my shiny sea of forehead in the mirror.
“Why aren’t you driving yet?” Myra asks. “Dinner’s in thirty. Can you pick up a French Syrah on the way? We’re having Breton crêpes.”
We are: Myra, Dave, Michel, Swan, and me; the crunchy nuts and smooth centres Myra likes to collect around the dinner table. I’m the minus-one accompanying the crusty French baguette.
I work the bathroom knob. “On my way.”
At the liquor mart, I grab an Australian Syrah from the middle rack, something with a clown acrobat and a sale tag on it. Then I’m foot-dragging between magazine racks and bulk candy in the grocery store aisles. Into Myra’s I stroll, past the hour of absolution, in my raunchy green hamper sweater, with a sack of hard rolls and my twisted brown paper bag. The group gives me a look that says, You’re the last person who should be bringing the Syrah.
The night Rachel left me, I wound up in an alcohol-fuelled, flat spin on Myra and Dave’s floor, slipping wheat crackers into a dish of chopped liver pâté. The fact that Myra has two cats makes that memory particularly painful. My mouth ran loose and fast all night. Kept hitting replay. Coming home from work, three missing coats on the rack. A lemon scent on the kitchen floor, all the windows cracked, the sound of blinds slapping the sill in our now deserted living room. My knees shook on the march of stairs, the sense of an ending sinking in. Rachel’s big reveal was penned in a stained kitchen-counter note. Her suitcases had been packed for eight months. It took her a full year to summon the courage to go, it read.
Sucker-punched out of my last long-term relationship, I had sworn never to take the plunge again. Then Rachel. Beautiful in the way orchids are — sculptural, delicate, impossible to absorb in a single glance. My brilliant linguist. Also a Scrabble-playing shark, inventing words that started with Q and ended in Azerbaijani, keeping a sly, sexy curl on her upper lip as she scanned the board. My heart was this floating fist of pounded meat whenever she looked my way.
Both wedded for the first time in our mid-thirties, we had been wine, baguette, and brie in the park. Hot streak gamblers on the Vegas strip. The odds were stacked in my favour. Marrying Rachel, I was much more likely to spend eternity happy. Three times more likely to survive to old age. At a far lower risk of depression. Our wedding was held on a vast acreage in a friend’s horse barn, long before rustic barn weddings were spreads in glossy magazines, with quaint Mason jar tea lights and mystic canapés. Before witnesses, we promised to love each other from this day forward — a bumpy dirt road, as it turned out, kicking up bad habits and old battle scars. She had escaped a spiteful man who berated her for returning to school, and spent a long time anticipating the same from me. Our tender places thickened like a coarse hide, pulled us taut, but in different directions.
She savoured small pleasures. Cooking herb-crusted halibut together. Head-clearing marathon runs through the park. I was itchy for a chance to uproot, something in me was always kicking at darkness, trying to shake something loose. She grew frustrated by my inability to hold on to steady work. All my grand schemes to battle climate injustice were just talk.
“Look at the rising sea levels,” I said, “and all these California droughts.” Signs of environmental apocalypse were everywhere, but she refused to look.
Instead, we fought over my bathroom habits and piling bills and the time it took her to prepare al dente pasta. We didn’t have the chance to fight over Dan.
Dan washed up onto a southern California beach in May. After Rachel left me, I was spending weekends alone, trying to rediscover my fucking pride. This led me to wandering the seaside barefoot, a contraband beer in my hands, dragging my tired ass in cut-off sweatpants through miles of silky white sand. One Saturday, I noticed a small group gathering in the shallows in rolled-up jeans, wading out up to their knees. They were all pointing. Turned out it was a squid, with its eight listless arms wrapped in seaweed and two tentacles submerged under the waves. Watching him struggle felt like the worst sorrow I had ever known. One look into those huge, heartbreaking eyes, its body flashing in the water from pinkish to red to white, and I knew. Without me, that squid would die.
Do something, I thought, or the seagulls will ravage him by sunset. Move your feet, Mark. Rescue that goddamn squid.
For weeks, I kept Dan at home in a hundred-and-seventy-gallon cylindrical acrylic tank I had rented from an aquarium shop, delivered by three giant men who positioned it on a maple pedestal in my living room. Following the advice of marine science, I kept Dan fed on a steady diet of saltwater feeder fish. His body grew twice in size. Despite an ocean of predators and our cancer chemicals, marine creatures still cling to survival. Believe me, he was suffering. I had time on my hands. Rachel was gone. Had her own needs to fill.
At Myra’s, I settle onto a couch with the other guests, scooping up sticky mounds of her famous baked brie with blackcurrant preserves. Cool jazz swirls in the air, the B-flat blues bubbling over our ears as everyone describes the worst part of their week. Swan suspects her new yoga hire is using her hatchback as a hotbox, giggling as she goes ganja on the child’s pose. And Michel’s big boss, the company’s lead engineer, keeps knocking heads over the weak rivets in the steel struts. Voices bleat while the trumpets sing down our souls. It’s a fire sale of a night — we can’t give away the wretched experiences fast enough. And we should feel delirious here, serenaded by these swinging sounds, the middle-child generation living large on teacher salaries and tech booms.
Except me. Due to my ignominious exit from the Seventh Circle of Hell, otherwise known as senior direct-mail fundraising writer for the Climate Concern Campaign, Sacramento office. We don’t acquire donors, we encircle trust. With your generous help, we’ll help end global warming on this planet. P.S. Get a fucking bicycle, asshole. Clean energy doesn’t need your dirty soul. P.P.S. Yes, you, you selfish, pollutant-pumping, toxic prick.
I couldn’t help myself. You try tapping into green guilt for two decades. Sure we had Gore and his snappy keynotes. But even David Suzuki had finally thrown up his hands, declaring environmentalism dead, because we were still fighting the same goddamn battles we thought we had already won decades ago. Christ, I kept having nightmares about Suzuki eating KFC from a plastic bag on an Arctic drilling site and trading baby sealskin for nukes while farting CO2. Maybe I was unravelling. All it took anymore was an early blizzard and a TV skeptic debunking global warming to lose some of the monthly contributors. My joke rant letter ended up being sent to our entire thirty thousand-strong member list, pre-signed by a famous corporate board member. Next day, I saw doors closing all around me, and I wasn’t behind any of them. On my final day of trust, the foundation had me escorted out via uniformed guard.
It was time to move on. Apparently, Rachel had realized it after only four years of marriage.
Dave, Myra’s husband, fills a lull in the conversation by telling us about the new app he’s building, the Ex-ecutor.
“Kicker is,” he explains, grinning, “you can replace your ex with anything. A sci-fi alien bear with a bad overbite. A half-centaur with a nose like a hairy knuckle.”
“Like that face-swap app?” Michel observes.
“Sort of, but there is also this crazy vibration before the whole screen goes boom for five seconds,” Dave adds, making a mushroom cloud gesture with his hands. “Very gratifying.”
“When the app goes beta,” I chime in, “I’ll swap Rachel out for a gun-toting duck with an inability to embrace uncertainty.”
When the crêpes are served — plump buckwheat triangles oozing gruyère — Dave answers the doorbell, surprising us all by welcoming Myra’s yoga pal Lyle to the table. He’s got a trapeze artist’s gait, a thick part across his full head of wavy hair. Not a trace of mid-gut paunch. Posy bastard.
Jet-lagged and glassy-eyed, he apologizes for his lateness, mumbling something about delays on the slow train to Mumbai.
Ten minutes into the meal, Lyle begins assailing us about the world overseas. Child soldiers. Swamp crossings. Bullet holes pierce his blackcurrant-stained mouth. Guy wears his tourist passport like it’s a purple heart.
“So, you’re back from southern India?” I finally say, picturing his harrowing trip from the airport to his coconut palm-lined lux yoga retreat. I had visited Delhi and some Himalayan villages on a backpack trip with two buddies after college. Rachel had always wanted to see the Taj Mahal’s mosaics and touch the ivory-white marbled walls to experience the perfect Mughal symmetry for herself. We never managed to get closer than Seattle’s hypodermic needle.
“It really changes you,” Lyle says, looking down at his plate. “Saw children wandering barefoot in slums smelling of soot and tar.” He lets his shoulders drop. “Bathing in polluted rivers. Even the sacred Ganges.”
“Ganges has a billion gallons of raw, untreated sewage floating in it,” I tell him. “Birds like to circle above it to catch bodies popping up along the riverbanks because the poor can’t afford cremation.”
It was something I’d seen and couldn’t shake. I still feel waves of grief and shock whenever clean water comes gushing out of my tap.
“The people are beautiful,” Lyle jumps in, ignoring me, because who wants to wade into the corpse-strewn Ganges after a forkful of buckwheat and ham?
“Women in gilded silk saris, all that ancient architecture,” Lyle reminisces for us. “The Gothic Revival railway station they built in the Bori Bunder area of Mumbai took my breath away.”
In my boozy brain, listening to Lyle is like swilling a mouthful of skim milk and scotch, but I swallow hard, then turn to ask Swan about her new condo.
“Open concept. I can count the waves rolling in from my balcony,” she explains with her usual beatific smile.
“Guess we’re sellouts for an ocean view,” I remark, wiping my mouth, because, I don’t know, it’s nine, and stuff with Rachel, and I can be such an asshole after a few glasses.
Dave shakes his head, interrupting. “We’re planning to add a garden path and some kind of deck in the backyard. Anyone know a good landscape designer?”
“Do you know that the ocean has a floating garbage patch?” I snap back, harpooning another crêpe. “An eight million-ton trash vortex in the Pacific, twice the size of Texas.”
Myra reaches out to touch my hand. “Let’s keep it light tonight, okay Mark?”
“Refill?” Swan interjects, holding up her glass.
Myra grabs the empty wine bottle and gestures for me to join her in the kitchen. I hop up on the counter, tapping my heels on the bottom cupboard to the new beat in the living room.
Arms on hips, Myra leers at me.
“What? We’re taking a toxic dump in the ocean, Myra. A three hundred million-ton plastic dump. Every year!”
She pours out a last swallow of Syrah into my glass. “We’ve been here before, right?” she says, raising her eyebrows.
I hold my arms up in surrender mode. When Myra leans in to pat my shoulder, I nuzzle into her soft, citrus-scented skin.
“Dangerous territory,” she says, pushing my face firmly away. She cocks her head. “Rachel?” she asks. It’s never a question.
“Spotted her in a Walmart parking lot,” I say, holding my arms out in front of my waist as if I’m cradling a basketball. “Out to here.”
“That woman has cruel teeth,” Myra pronounces, shaking her head. She swings around to pull her last vintage red from the rosewood wine rack. “Listen, my cousin Beth’s in town,” she says, handing me a corkscrew. “She drives a hybrid.”
“I’ve got a lot going on with Dan,” I say, attempting to un-throttle the cork from its tight neck.
“What’s up?”
I hand her the open bottle. “He died yesterday.”
Myra draws me into one of her soft, swarming hugs. Her bare shoulders smell of sliced peaches. Just then an old Smiths tune comes wafting in from the living room. Morrissey’s liquid baritone slides inside my skull, and I’m remembering one of our wedding dances, the way the nape of Rachel’s neck had lit me on fire.
Morissey is moaning about something irretrievable.
“You managed to keep Dan alive for months,” she says near my ear. “That’s something.”
If I don’t breathe, maybe Myra will hang on longer, but Dave is calling her from the other room.
“So, can I text Beth?” she asks, breaking away.
“Did you know Morrissey’s cat has feline leukemia?”
“Jeeesus, Mark,” Myra replies, throwing up her hands.
Meals on Wheels pulls me out of bed three mornings a week. It keeps me busy. That way no one, not even Myra, has sorted out that I’m underemployed at the moment. Today I am packing up fifteen trays of Salisbury steak and potatoes, mixed greens, plus a tapioca mound compressed beneath crinkly gold foil. The tapioca tastes like boiled Kleenex, so I pick up two-dozen butter tarts to tempt my roster of seniors and shut-ins.
The ladies at the door always want to invite me in, grateful for a five-minute friendship. They tell me about their pills and toxic potions, as if each one has a personality. Their kids are away in Dallas or Sydney or New York or some place that doesn’t smell of antiseptic bacon, coal tar, and hallway rot. Their faces tell the life stories they struggle to remember for me. Living through wars, they save everything, twist ties, old shopping carts, half of yesterday’s meal they will wrap up for later. Sometimes, I can hardly get through my ten thirty a.m. to one p.m. delivery window. I ache for the men. Hair sprouting from their soft, slack orifices, sitting in front of their small TVs, forks shaking over slivers of wet meat. Hunched over at the door, they take their tray with a vague smile and lock up after me. They never last as long as the ladies.
When I return my insulated bags to the Meals on Wheels kitchen, it’s after two p.m., and I’m in need of a mood changer. Time for YouTube and my last imported beer on the couch.
Walking in my front door, I stop dead in my tracks. Dan is flopping around the living room next to his tank, halfway out of the huge bag in which I had placed him for funereal disposal.
“Jezushchrist! You’re alive?” I literally lunge toward him.
Sitting in a viscous puddle in the middle of my living room, his bulbous head pokes up from the punctured, fourteen-gallon kitchen bag. I soak up the stringy fluids around his body, which is turning a translucent pomegranate colour. His wide, misty eyes stare back at me.
You were gonna pitch me out like garbage? his drooping expression seems to say. A single Dan arm begins to curl around my couch leg.
“I thought you were dead!” I shout, fetching more towels, feeling dizzy and a little exhilarated as I return to sop up more fluids. Dan remains listless and silent, watching me. So I try to explain that the fresh krill I had bought him was supposed to keep him fed, full, and happy. That I was going to return him to the ocean, but then he took an unexpected turn for the worse.
Dan emits a kind of glurp sound. Goddamn it, he doesn’t believe me. So I tell him the truth. That the acid seas were belching him out. That he was probably going extinct anyway. Then I hear a sort of gluck-choke-suck sound coming from his mantle. He needs an urgent sea-water flush through his gills. I grab him, slippery tentacles and mantle dribbling through my arms, and haul him off to the main bathroom down the hall. When I deposit him in the tub, he sprawls across the porcelain bottom, resembling a stringy grey mop, one arm tip slipping below the st
ainless steel stopper. He’s growing paler by the minute so I race out and retrieve a bucket of salt water from the rented cylindrical tank I haven’t yet had the stomach to return.
Sitting alongside the tub, I hold Dan’s clammy body in the crook of my arm, bathing his mantle and gills, urging him to hang on. Absently, I start humming that Smiths tune about the pleasure of dying by your side. Dan slips away from me, poking his mantle up over the side of the tub. Across my black-and-white floor tile, he spews a cloud of indigo ink.
Shut up and save me, it reads.
“Myra!” I shout into my dumbphone. “Get over here now! Please.”
A half hour later, Myra shows up with two specialty coffees, wagging a telling finger at me in the doorway.
“Who is she?” she says, on tiptoe, trying to get a look over my shoulder. “It’s that folk guitarist with the Free Burma bandana from college isn’t it?” she jokes.
“It was Tibet!” I shriek, my autonomic nerves shredding.
Breathing deeply, I place a hand on my chest to settle down.
I whisper to her in the doorway. “Look, I need to show you something inside, but you gotta be cool, okay?”
Myra grins as I lead her on toward the kitchen.
Before I can warn her, Dan pokes his head up from the double sink. In slow, deliberate movements, he drapes a long, spiked tentacle over the lip of the stainless steel basin.
Myra jumps back.
Dan crawls out. Drawing closer, he extends an arm pair that he manages to slip around her wrist before she realizes it and tries to shake him off.
Hello, I’m pretty sure he’s saying. You the girlfriend?
His powerful suckers glance off her upper lip. Myra screams as Dan’s arms quickly tighten around her throat. Neither of us can pry him off.
“What the fuck!” I shout, when Myra turns and grabs a carving knife from the cutlery block, swinging out wildly. With a reckless vertical swish, she manages to excise part of Dan’s tentacle.
Dan slides back down onto the counter, retreating toward the backsplash, where he curls up into a tiny pain ball. Fluids, the colour of toilet bowl cleanser, begin to puddle around him, pouring off the counter’s edge to the floor.