by Chris Dennis
The initial moments after this passed in horrible silence—except for a strange onslaught of pale birds anxiously squawking overhead, scattering across the sky like thin material fluttering toward the coast. These seabirds released a detached panic in Mary Ann. The Cuban reached out and took her hand, immediately gathering her in his hulky arms, tightly pressing her back against the barrel of his chest. He began kissing the back of her head too. His lips were in her hair. This disgusted Mary Ann. She thought he might be crying though, so she allowed it until he whispered, “I will keep you safe, Mary.” He pronounced it “Marie.” As his breath hit her neck she couldn’t help but envision his gruesome death: the boat snapping in half under the force of the coming wave, the deck opening up like a jaw, gnawing him into two purple halves.
Finally the captain called down, instructing them to retrieve their life jackets and buckle themselves onto the bench. “What is it? What’s happening?” Mary Ann demanded, her voice cracking as the Cuban tossed the bench’s wicker throw pillows overboard.
“We’re going to try to outrun the worst of it,” the Cuban said. “He’ll survey the surge,” he assured her, “and should be able to determine with some accuracy the speed at which the water is traveling.”
“If we move fast enough,” the captain yelled, “we will not meet the wave until after it breaks! There will be turbulence,” he said, “but little damage.”
“Damage!” Mary Ann shrieked. Her anxiety mutated into raddled fury.
He’d already turned the boat around and they were heading toward a crooked bundle of islands to the west. Against her better judgment, she turned again to face the rising swell. For a moment the wave blended with the empty sky, making the two barely distinguishable—an ill-focused blue sheet—until it rolled back in on itself, exposing another roaring progression of whitecaps. She looked down at her hands. She’d worn too many rings, she realized, and was still clutching the gaudy drink. The broken glass of the carafe was splayed around her feet, the shards jittering on the polished wood. Many gross fantasies occurred to her as they sped past the rocky islands, every new vision smeared with the image of her companions’ slippery blood.
The Cuban was calling up to the captain, attempting to discuss something that Mary Ann could not bring herself to digest—rules for how best to swim in violent waters. Her mind blinked off way before any of that. If it came down to it, she decided quickly, she would only be able to surrender. She felt her body go slack at the thought. She focused instead on the growing sight of the rolling wall as it stretched out the entire length of the visible sea. It was almost close enough now, she thought, for her to locate objects within it. Each time something came into view, though, she decided it was just the movement of darker water inside the wave. It was still less than a mile away, but shapes continued to appear and recede: a cluster of fins, smaller boats, cumbersome plant life, and then, with a hot glitch of nausea, human bodies. She made a sound, or must have, because the Cuban turned to look at her, putting his heavy arm around her shoulders. “What is it, Marie?” he said. She was certain she’d misunderstood the contents of the wall. When she met his eyes, she noticed the glass inside his flamboyant frames was speckled neatly with condensation. The lenses were as fake as his beautiful teeth. Where the hell was she? She was certain she could detect a helpless dread in his eyes, even as he worked to conceal it.
“Marie, just look at me. You can only look at me. If we have to leave this boat for any reason I will stay by you.”
“Yes,” she said, knowing that if they did go overboard, each of them would immediately be separated by the grinding undercurrent.
Minutes passed with her only looking at the Cuban’s arms and the wiry black hair that escaped his collar. She touched her fingernail to the little dog embroidered on the breast of his bright shirt. She was unable to turn back to the water at all now, though part of her still longed to observe its lagging approach. She understood it might be her only chance, in all her life, to see something so dangerous and extraordinary. It felt foolish not to pay attention, but her body would no longer allow it. The same weakness that had pushed her to abandon the initial prospect of swimming through all that boiling water was the same weakness that kept her from turning to monitor the towering blast. She was vibrating at her very core, and so was the boat. If they had to jump ship, what idiot would attempt to beat out the power of the ocean? Wouldn’t it be smarter to just give in? To hold one’s breath and pray your body bobbed to the surface? Like a corpse.
She was cursing aloud now, though the Cuban tried to keep her calm. It was obvious to her in an instant: Any day of the week the earth could tear you in half like a wet sheet of paper. And yet somehow people continued to assert their authority over it. And often succeeded.
“I never told my family I was going on this trip,” the Cuban whispered.
“What? Where are they? Your mom and dad?” she asked, putting her hand up to his face.
“Florida. But I meant my wife and children.”
“You’re married?” she asked.
“I thought you knew,” he said.
Maybe she did know. She took her hand away. If she didn’t look at the water, it was possible to assume they were merely traveling at a high speed for the sport of it. She didn’t care if he was married, though knowing he was thinking of his wife and children made her feel unsafe. An inherent moral ambivalence had kept her resilient these past few years, if not a little disjointed, at times, from the world around her. If he had informed her of his wife, she’d simply forgotten it, like a middle name or a birthday.
She was somewhere else anyway, dying a little, thinking, somehow, of a massive arch-shaped dam that Bill had taken her to see many years ago.
It must have been late into the pregnancy with Danny. She’d felt beastly and weighed down and groggy the entire trip and after touring the dam’s powerhouse, where the rumbling generators were kept, she’d immediately wanted to return to the hotel. What dickery of mind it’d taken to imagine this monolithic stone cup, halved and slipped right into the mountain’s basin, holding back all that placid water on the other side. Tons! Of water, and dickery. Men were so cocky. Yet it was a perfectly tuned monstrosity, providing electricity to half the state. Why was it so terrifying? When Bill had died in the mines, like so many other stupid men on the western slope, she’d obsessed for months, when she wasn’t catatonic, over how egotistical the entire industry was for even attempting such an extraction in the first place. Years spent gutting the abyss of the ground like a giant gourd. Of course it was going to crush them: much of the work they did was to keep it all from caving back in around them every step of the way. The rage she felt for seemingly commonplace things had only multiplied over the years. It’d always sort of been there. The moment she’d gotten the phone call from Pauline, saying there’d been another accident in the mine, and there were deaths—she knew, somehow. Or maybe she’d thought it before and this time it happened to be true? Either way, it was a hammer striking against her skull, rattling loose some previously unreachable materials. Lost memories lobbed briefly to the surface. Seemingly ancient griefs dislodged themselves. Her unknown self was cracked into countless pieces—she could try to name them now, those separate aspects she’d glimpsed during the initial shock, but the list was so damn long it was hard to keep track. And besides, hadn’t every facet of her self first risen out of an unnamable, primitive darkness?
Even water could be infinitely divided, she thought now, with a blinding pinprick.
It was as if there were no true senses. Every knowable thing was contingent on the next catastrophe, causing all of her ideas to morph into a flat, numb rage toward any system she could not easily comprehend. And there were so many.
She didn’t get to see his body. Recovery efforts were pointless. He was still down there. In what state of decay, or transformation, she often wondered.
And even here speeding on th
e water her head was swamped with morbid visions, one a repeating scene in which she opened her mouth wide enough to lunge savagely at the Cuban’s face, biting off his nose. She clenched her teeth and tried not to imagine the hot, tart blood filling her mouth. The salt water on her lips didn’t help. She thought of the flesh breaking as she bit. It was true she’d grown impulsive, and that the impulsivity had assumed control over her. Every moment had the potential of becoming a gruesome hallucination, and the impending wave confirmed it. She looked out ahead of the yacht to see that they were passing another island. She could see a half-submerged building, shingled roofs, and the upper floor of a meager apartment where the shapes of people shifted in the windows. She called out to the captain to ask where the wave was, but he did not respond. He extended his thin hand instead, insisting she wait.
So much time passed. It was unreal, she thought, how much could be contained in a moment. Just as it occurred to her though, off in the developing distance she could discern a rugged gray sliver of coastline on the horizon.
It was on a recent trip alone to Dallas, in a packed midtown bar, where Mary Ann had joined a group of Egyptian investors in their VIP booth and fallen into a swoon of flashing lights before allowing each of them to dance with her. Their accents had been so charming, and indecipherable. They’d bought her drinks. She followed them to an after-party a few blocks away. In a cramped bedroom Mary Ann took a hit of pot. Her words slurred into drivel. Perhaps one of them had actually carried her to the house? And she had not walked? Another couple, with terrible smiles, came into the bedroom too. It was their house, she understood later. The woman took Mary Ann’s purse and rifled through it. “Candy or gum, sweetie pie?” the woman had asked. Mary Ann found it hard to sit up. The loud hostess bared her rotten set of teeth as she dumped out the contents of Mary Ann’s purse.
When she woke the next morning, in the grassless backyard of the ugly house, there was a fiery discomfort between her legs and the flickering memory of a harsh, duplicitous entering. Also, the unbelievable memory of the hostess sitting heavy and bare-assed on Mary Ann’s face.
Now the woman was standing at the back door, glaring. “What the fuck are you doing in my yard, lady? Do I need to call the cops?”
Mary Ann attempted to stand, but her legs weren’t working. “Why did you let them do that?” she’d asked.
“Excuse me?” the woman said, with a hand cupped to her ear.
Mary Ann hadn’t used her full voice, so she asked again, “Why did you let them do that to me?” Maybe it was the dead look on the woman’s face, or maybe Mary Ann was in shock, but she began to weep hysterically, screaming as loud as she could, “I’m a mother!” She was saying it to the woman, but also to anyone within earshot. Who knows why she did it. Later she would only feel embarrassed, still hearing the sound of her own idiot voice ringing out in the dusty backyard—a desperate moron’s call for compassion: I’m a mother, I’m a mother, I’m a mother!
It had given the woman pause, but only for as long as it lasted. The woman looked around to see if anyone had noticed, then recomposed her empty gaze. “Get out of my yard, you ugly bitch. You’re trespassing,” she said. She’d slammed the door, causing a little, rusted cowbell to fall dully down each step, landing in the dirt.
Mary Ann hung closer to other women for a couple of weeks after that, even invited two baristas from the coffee shop over to her house for a movie night. They’d both cheeringly accepted, then never showed. Something had been lifted from her, and she wanted it back. She even went as far, on a night out with Pauline, as leaning in close on the sidewalk, cheek to cheek, clutching Pauline’s soft hand before impulsively attempting to engage her in an intimate kiss. Pauline had pulled back almost immediately. “Mary Ann! Are you lesbian now?” she’d yelled.
Mary Ann had responded with explosive laughter, which seemed to shock Pauline even further. “I’ve never done it. Have you? It just seems like everyone else is doing it!” Mary Ann cried.
“I have not. I mean, I kissed Claudia Comber once in the bathroom at the Skate Palace in junior high. But not as an adult!”
This statement had caused Mary Ann to fall into a severe crying jag. Pauline had to take her home and put her to bed. Claudia Comber, my God, Mary Ann had thought, what a homely troll.
Occasionally she could hold an entire day like warm liquid in the perfect pool of her palms. Other days crackled under her skin with a fiery static, a nearly intolerable restlessness—those were the moments that seemed to arrest her, to hold her captive like a prisoner in a confusing war.
But this was different. This day wanted to devour her completely.
Maybe thirty minutes after they’d spotted the wave, the yacht was washed ashore—the sleek vessel shoved out of the sea like it was nothing at all, airy driftwood. Mary Ann crouched down in her seat and covered her head. Water came at her from all directions, filling her nose, soaking her clothes. The Cuban held her the entire time, tight as a fist, bruising up her arms. And even though she could not see, she could feel the yacht’s engine cut out and the stomach-dropping shift in momentum that sent them hurtling toward what used to be a beach. There was the racket of debris all around them, street stands and furniture and mopeds and toppled trees. The collision was the truest thing, she thought, when she finally stood up and looked around—it was always the afterward for her, and not the during, where things made sense.
Her feet stung and she could see that her heels had been cut by the broken carafe. The wave had met them and sent them rushing over the foam. The wide parking lots and swimming pools and cabanas were all submerged. Much of the coast they had walked along together when they first arrived was now underwater. The yacht was wedged between a small restaurant and a Marriott Hotel. People were screaming down at them from the floors overhead, in another language, but one that she understood, saying, “Are you hurt? How many of you are there?” Terrible things gushed by: the gutted remains of other boats, trash and animals—a person floating, the clothes ballooning out around the open arms, the hair swirling like a burst of ink around a lilac-colored head. She felt a sick sense of relief, and then shame. They had escaped, in a clumsy instant. Other people had not. The way the yacht had been propelled, the way it slid into place among the buildings, the way the Cuban and the captain were searching for objects to stand on so that they might reach a nearby window in the wall of the hotel because water was filling the boat—if you looked at it a certain way, the ocean had merely moved forward a bit, less than a mile. If you looked at it another way, something apocalyptic had occurred, and she had survived. There were several snapped-off planks of wood protruding from the muddy water beside the yacht, like a single row of giant ribs, and in her mind Mary Ann was impaling herself on them over and over.
“We have to climb out right now,” the captain said.
They stacked three metal coolers on top of one another, in order to reach the window where a greasy man waited, his arms outstretched and ready to haul them through. The leaves of the still-standing trees twitched and Mary Ann could see through the lush foliage. Legions of frantic birds crowded the limbs. Their calls were belligerent. The Cuban insisted she enter first. They were all sweating, humidity pressing on them like a hot, pissy blanket as they lifted Mary Ann into the stranger’s arms. Her expensive sandals dropped from her feet as he wrapped himself around her, dragging her into the room, scraping her thighs up on the sill.
The others climbed in while Mary Ann sat panting on the still-made bed, listening to the man explain that there had been an earthquake. Two of them. The first one happened inland, the second one at sea. “The first earthquake broke all the bridges,” he said, once everyone was inside. “And the second one caused the tidal wave.”
“Tsunami,” the Cuban corrected him, loudly, as he searched the bathroom for towels. “Technically speaking!”
They all looked up, and then at the floor. He stuck his head out of the bat
hroom, wiping the dirt and sweat from his face with some tissue paper. “Since it wasn’t caused by the tide?”
“Yes,” the other man said. “Okay. I have Coke from the vending machine. Would you want one? There aren’t many. We are only waiting now, hoping there won’t be more activity.”
“Yes,” they all said.
Mary Ann was extremely thirsty.
The whole event was a forced reconstitution of time, she decided, sitting on the edge of the tub, trying to comprehend. It had been minutes at most, from their first sighting of the wave until it ran them aground. But it stretched out in her mind: a bounty of realities located in a single sideways span. There had been many occasions in the last couple of years when death had seemed so simple and correct. She licked a thumb, trying to wipe dirt from the cuts on her feet and legs. Often, in the stillest hours of evenings before this, staring at the walls in her condo, she felt she could hear the universe buzzing, signaling a glowing hunger to extinguish her. She was only waiting for it. The very particles of her body had sped up in an attempt to process the doom of the wave. She could assess it now, inside the raucous hotel, as the people on the upper floors carried on loudly, waiting for emergency relief to arrive or the water to recede or for other tremors to follow. A man went door to door, saying that the authorities would probably send helicopters or boats to rescue those who’d been trapped. Within hours insects were swarming in droves, covering the windows, their tiny brown bodies flicking ecstatically against the glass. They put a sheet over the door to keep them from crawling in through the cracks. There was no power, but still a constant distressful noise outside. When darkness began to fall, every sound set her on edge. Mary Ann requested a second soda, which she drank slowly, while the men filled plastic cups with water from the back of the toilet tank. The waiting was excruciating, though the captain kept insisting that if there were going to be another earthquake, it would have already occurred.