You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  I was streaming sweat despite the cold. I retrieved the map from my saddlebag and took some bearings with numbed fingers. To the east we could see the great semicircle of a mountain range covered with snow, and through its passes northward a hint, in the haze, of the Caspian jungle and the sea. We were so high that by late afternoon the sunlight had lost its force and our bones seemed to absorb the mountains’ frigidity. Ismail, alarmed, wrapped my bedroll about my shoulders, where it flailed and thrashed. I sank to a sitting position while I wept, and the wind felt as I did about the map, buffeting it to pieces.

  The next morning I woke to clouds from the Caspian Sea pouring like a wave over the distant watershed to the northeast. They sailed toward us and melted away in the sun’s heat before reaching our valley. I had lost the energy to raise my arms and pitched from dehydration to floods of perspiration, and knew immediately that it must be malaria. Ismail examined me and diagnosed that as well as dysentery, two diseases he assured me he was well used to seeing. He prescribed a soup of rice, milk, and almonds that would scrub me out like soap. I reminded him that we had none of those ingredients and he answered that we would make use of them once we did. I instructed him to fetch the quinine from my saddlebag and gave myself a double dose. How far were we from the nearest motor road, or doctor? It was all another world.

  They arranged some of their bedding in a kind of awning to shade me from the sun. I spent the day slipping in and out of consciousness in the wind. Cloud shadows came and went on the iron loophole of the keep. I was given some tea to which the goatskin water had imparted a nauseating smell. My mule gave me a fright when she snuffled beneath my head for my toiletries.

  I woke to a fire and twilight, and an even more bitter cold. Ismail’s eyes wandered from my face to my extra bedding, and he made no effort at conversation. Aziz beside him gazed at my aluminum water bottle. When able to speak I offered it to him, and he seemed alarmed and said he wouldn’t think of depriving me.

  By morning the awning was down and I could see the sky. My companions’ expressions were full of pity and they kept fanning the flies from my face. Where had the flies come from? And on what at this altitude did they live? The sun every so often managed to erase everything from my sight. I remembered myself on the train to San Remo dreaming of owning a little shop somewhere in a Near Eastern town, for its possibilities for observation and meditation. I remembered myself at sixteen, dressed for a dinner party and murmuring that what I should really have liked was to have been pretty.

  The wind seemed to have subsided and round us the white rock grew unbearable in the afternoon heat. Ismail pressed my temples between his palms with a slowly increasing pressure I found to be amazingly restful.

  The August before I first set foot on that Lebanese dock, our mother had taken my sister on another holiday, this time to the seashore at Varazze, and there Vera had had her miscarriage and developed septicemia. My mother and I had sat at her bedside for the five weeks she suffered. The night before she died, I told her I couldn’t help but believe that if she wanted life more, she could hold on to it, and she reassured me that in her time alone with our mother and Mario she had developed certain resources and that she’d been far from only miserable. She had become bright enough through her reading, for example, that he had never grown bored with her. “All you do is weep,” she complained with some weariness and anger later that night. “Aren’t you ever happy to be with me?”

  A family friend at the funeral confided he’d been so appalled at the news of the marriage that he’d refused my mother’s request to use his villa for the reception. Her own eulogy asserted that she and Vera had grown so close that when they were reunited in the next world she doubted Saint Peter would be able to determine one from the other. When I was packed and ready to leave for the station, Mario remarked that my mother and I had only barely spoken and hardly looked at each other. My mother responded at the piano by commencing Berlioz’s “Le Dépit de la bergère.”

  When her note arrived in Brummana deploring my decision to abandon her so soon after our loss, I wrote back that Vera had died bowing to the agendas of others. In response, after some months, she sent the letter from London in which I’d informed Vera that I could not take her in.

  Reading it once more, I recalled another letter to my sister in which I’d enthused about the way my notebooks, with a single word, could save an experience from oblivion, and her response, in which she expressed a lack of surprise that I’d choose the notebook over the diary, since in the former one’s emotions were largely omitted in favor of their causes.

  In those last few nights with her, I spent what time we had left trying to recover the irrecoverable with only my presence. I wanted to believe that nothing had been lost of what we had shared so many years before. But we look on everyone’s transformations as fluid except our own. “Dress them up as you like, but they will always run away,” the King of Naples is reported to have said of his inadequate soldiers. The mother I trusted, the Vera I loved, the woman I imagined myself to be: all of those phantoms have clip-clopped away into limbo.

  I told my mother the last time I wrote her that no crime short of murder was comparable to destroying in another the capacity to love. Her silence in response constituted yet another instance of her having behaved with more honor than her surviving daughter had achieved.

  The main thing the traveler carries about with her is herself. There’s my home, and then the world: the sea is much stronger than the anchor. I’ve acted wherever I’ve alighted like a guest for life, or, when at my best, as in that line from the Purgatorio: “We are pilgrims, as you are.”

  Over the horizon to the east, the weather that’s heading toward us lies in a dark line at the end of the world. Ismail washes my face with water from the goatskin while Aziz attends to the mules straying in the dusk. “I have more with which to pay you, once we return,” I manage to tell them. Ismail makes a brief gesture as if to clarify that it needn’t be discussed. “God give you strength,” he murmurs as we exchange smiles: fellow travelers. Aziz appears beside him. My eyes close under the weight of so much sadness and gratitude. And out of courtesy we say goodnight to one another with our hands upon our breasts.

  In Cretaceous Seas

  Dip your foot in the water and here’s what you’re playing with: Xiphactinus, all angry underbite and knitting-needle teeth, with heads oddly humped and eyes enraged with accusation, and ribboned bodies so muscular they fracture coral heads when surging through to bust in on insufficiently alert pods of juvenile Clidastes, who spin around to face an oncoming maw that’s in a perpetual state of homicidal resentment. The smaller Xiphactinus are three times your length and swallow their prey whole. They’re gill-to-gill with Cretoxyrhina, great white sharks fifty feet long with heads the size of Mini Coopers and twelve-inch nightmare triangles of teeth. Mosasaurs big and small, the runts weighing in at two tons and the alphas like tylosaur a stupefying sixty feet. Under the surface, they’re U-boats with crocodiles’ heads. Pliosaurs in their hunting echelons, competing to see who’s the more viciously ill-tempered. Kronosaurs whose jaws provide the kind of leverage that can snap whales’ spines. Thalassomedons, the biggest of the elasmosaurs, with twenty-foot watersnake necks that allow the Venus-flytrap teeth to be everywhere at once. Dakosaurs gliding through the murk of fish parts spewed by their initial thrashing attacks.

  And rising out of the blue gloom like the ridged bottom itself easing up to meet you, Lipleurodon, holdover from the Jurassic, the biggest predator that ever lived. Families could live in its skull. On the move it’s like the continental shelf taking a trip. It feeds everywhere, even in shallow water with the surf breaking over it like a sandbar. Its earth-moving front flippers keep it from stranding. If some of the bigger land predators stand around the shallows trolling for what floats in, that’s their mistake. It takes them off their feet like fruit off a tree.

  This is the Tethys Ocean, huge, shallow, and warmed by its position locked between the
world’s two giant supercontinents. This is the place where the prey could kill a sperm whale. This is all this one guy’s bed. This guy—we’ll call him Conroy, because that’s his fucking name—whose insomnia every night is beyond debilitating, teeming, epic with hostile energy, oceanic. What’s his problem? Well, where to begin? Kick your feet and watch something else surface from below. He’s been a crappy son, a shitty brother, a lousy father, a lazy helpmate, a wreck of a husband. As a pet owner he’s gotten two dogs and a parakeet killed. Some turtles and two other dogs died without his help.

  His daughter won’t speak and wears a ski hat in the house and writes stories in which family members are eviscerated as the narrator laughs. She’s an isolate, watched but not approached. We don’t want to make the problem into more than it is. His brother’s alone in Florida, an older version of the same pain, just a phone call away. Whenever Conroy makes his hangup indications in their once-in-a-blue-moon conversations, his brother says it was great talking to him. His father’s ignoring the doctor’s advice—most of that advice having to do with meds, his Dilantin, his Prozac, his everything else—and going downhill because of it, and still they rehearse the same conversational rituals, as though time is standing still instead of vortexing down a drain. His career involves assuring people he’s got the answers and he’s got their back when he doesn’t have the answers and he’s all about craven self-interest: he’s part of the team rolling out a major new pharmaceutical, one of the accomplished tyros vouching for one of the eminences who did the science, and in that capacity he didn’t so much invent his data as cherry-pick it. Will it kill anyone? He hopes not. Because he means well.

  He always means well. He tells himself this, treading water in bed.

  The good news is who’s in this bed with him. His wife, the person he loves most in the world. Here’s the thing about his wife: she travels a lot, in her role as headhunter for the Center for American Progress, and she’s concerned about him, and the conversational form her concern has lately taken has been to suggest, half-jokingly and half-kindly, that he should have a fling. And to him this sounds like “You should get yourself some tenderness somewhere. Because you ain’t getting it here.”

  He could ask if that’s what she means. But he’s the kind of guy given to building tall towers of self-pity and then watching them sway. So he speculates instead.

  In bed he hints around. His wife is all psychological acuity and knows him like she knows her childhood bedroom, but she’s always been impatient with hinting and her requests for clarification sound like demands. Exasperation makes him close up shop like a night-blooming flower.

  Think of the good you’ve done, he counsels. Think of the good you continue to do. A breeze blows over the water’s surface.

  But here’s this letter in which a Sri Lankan says he’s all but sure he’s found some major links between the product and miscarriage. The Sri Lankan wants to know if Conroy didn’t review the same data. And here’s this journal entry from his daughter: My Throat = the Shit Pit. And here’s this dream he keeps having of himself as ringmaster with no acts performing, just a guy holding a hoop looking at him and waiting, and with everyone he’s ever let down scattered in the uncomfortable stands, eager to tell him that all of his forays into selflessness have only made clearer what they’re not, like a thimbleful of cola after a trek across the Kalahari.

  His mode on such nights is the circuit between bed and bathroom and lamplit magazines. But tonight he’s heard his daughter downstairs ahead of him, and the delicate hiccups of the little breath-intakes that are her version of crying when it’s crucial she not be heard. Her favored position is to wedge herself into the wingbacked chair with her knees by sitting Indian-style. He holds himself still, listening, then throws open the sash on their upper-story bedroom window and climbs out on the roof. And his wife stirs and, sleeping, is sad for his unsettlement. The grit stings his knees. Gravity wants to welcome him forward in a rush. The breeze cools his butt. In the moonlight he’s just a naked guy, most of his weight on his hands, his hands bending the front edge of the aluminum gutter, the grass two stories below a blue meridian, zenith and nadir at once.

  How do we help? Throw him a life preserver? How long should anyone survive in that ocean?

  He’s Tethys Man, superhero and supervillain all in one. How much does he sweat at night? His sheets smell mildewy in the morning. If you saw him padding to the toilet, stepping naked in place, and waving off the bad images like the world’s least fetching drum majorette, would you imagine that “inauthenticity” was a term that haunted him? If you saw him bare-assed on his roof, gauging the distance from the sloping dormer to the strain insulators and primary cables of the telephone wires, would you imagine that once he jumped he’d ferry himself hand over hand from house to house? Would you imagine that if he did, he would have proved something to himself, in his own inchoate way, about his desire for change? Would you imagine that he then hated himself less?

  Would you imagine that when he confronted his loved ones’ sadnesses, his vanity knew no bounds? Would you imagine that he thought his problems would solve themselves? Would you imagine that he fancied himself the prey when he was really the apologetic predator? Would you imagine that he’d last very long, much less get through this alive? Would you imagine that his kind should die out once and for all? Would you imagine that even now he was telling you the truth?

  The Netherlands Lives with Water

  A long time ago a man had a dog that went down to the shoreline every day and howled. When she returned the man would look at her blankly. Eventually the dog got exasperated. “Hey,” the dog said. “There’s a shitstorm of biblical proportions headed your way.” “Please. I’m busy,” the man said. “Hey,” the dog said the next day, and told him the same thing. This went on for a week. Finally the man said, “If you say that once more I’m going to take you out to sea and dump you overboard.” The next morning the dog went down to the shoreline again, and the man followed. “Hey,” the dog said, after a minute. “Yeah?” the man said. “Oh, I think you know,” she told him.

  “Or here’s another one,” Cato says to me. “Adam goes to God, ‘Why’d you make Eve so beautiful?’ And God says, ‘So you would love her.’ And Adam says, ‘Well, why’d you make her so stupid?’ And God says, ‘So she would love you.’ ”

  Henk laughs.

  “Well, he thinks it’s funny,” Cato says.

  “He’s eleven years old,” I tell her.

  “And very precocious,” she reminds me. Henk makes an overly jovial face and holds two thumbs up. His mother takes her napkin and wipes some egg from his chin.

  We met in the same pre-university track. I was a year older but hadn’t passed Dutch, so I took it again with her.

  “You failed Dutch?” she whispered from her seat behind me. She’d seen me gaping at her when I came in. The teacher had already announced that’s what those of us who were older were doing there.

  “It’s your own language,” she told me later that week. She was holding my penis upright so she could run the edge of her lip along the shaft. I felt like I was about to touch the ceiling.

  “You’re not very articulate,” she remarked later, on the subject of the sounds I’d produced.

  She acted as though I were a spot of sun in an otherwise rainy month. We always met at her house, a short bicycle ride away, and her parents seemed to be perpetually asleep or dead. In three months I saw her father only once, from behind. She explained that she’d been raised by depressives who’d made her one of those girls who’d sit on the playground with the tools of happiness all around her and refuse to play. Her last boyfriend had walked out the week before we’d met. His diagnosis had been that she imposed on everyone else the gloom her family had taught her to expect.

  “Do I sadden you?” she’d ask me late at night before taking me in her mouth.

  “Will you have children with me?” I started asking her back.

  And she was flattered and
seemed pleased without being particularly fooled. “I’ve been thinking about how hard it is to pull information out of you,” she told me one night when we’d pitched our clothes out from under her comforter. I asked what she wanted to know, and she said that was the kind of thing she was talking about. While she was speaking I watched her front teeth, glazed from our kissing. When she had a cold and her nose was blocked up, she looked a little dazed in profile.

  “I ask a question and you ask another one,” she complained. “If I ask what your old girlfriend was like, you ask what anyone’s old girlfriend is like.”

  “So ask what you want to ask,” I told her.

  “Do you think,” she said, “that someone like you and someone like me should be together?”

  “Because we’re so different?” I asked.

  “Do you think that someone like you and someone like me should be together?” she repeated.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “That’s helpful. Thanks,” she responded. And then she wouldn’t see me for a week. When I felt I’d waited long enough, I intercepted her outside her home and asked, “Was the right answer no?” And she smiled and kissed me as though hunting up some compensation for diminished expectations. After that it was as if we’d agreed to give ourselves over to what we had. When I put my mouth on her, her hands would bend back at the wrists as if miming helplessness. I disappeared for minutes at a time from my classes, envisioning the trancelike way her lips would part after so much kissing.

  The next time she asked me to tell her something about myself I had some candidates lined up. She held my hands away from her, which tented the comforter and provided some cooling air. I told her I still remembered how my older sister always replaced her indigo hair bow with an orange one on royal birthdays. And how I followed her everywhere, chanting that she was a pig, which I was always unjustly punished for. How I fed her staggeringly complicated lies that went on for weeks and ended in disaster with my parents or teachers. How I slept in her bed the last three nights before she died of the flu epidemic.