Leaving the Sea: Stories Read online

  Hayley wasn’t coming. It was pretty obvious. Julian sat shivering in the chill, listening for the 9:13, the 9:41, the 10:02. He was tired. In winter he sometimes caught a fever. His arms and back burned hot, as if a flame were being held to his skin. This was the dying of the nerves, an Internet confidante had explained. Of course his immune system wanted him dead. It knew. It was making the call on behalf of the wider society. It was taking him out. In the larger project of the universe, of which he must necessarily be kept in the dark, his own existence appeared to be an obstacle. So the species makes an adjustment. Tombstone. It redacts.

  No one else waited outside today. No one else was stupid enough to sit and freeze on a granite ledge in middle Germany, watching the trains come in. People here knew where their loved ones were. A loved one’s coordinates were simply available. Such was the nature, the very definition, of a loved one. People didn’t need to risk exposure and illness waiting outside and wondering, letting their minds work up end-time scenarios. The vanished, dead loved one. The disloyal loved one, licking a stranger in another city. They did not need to dream up future sorrows for themselves, a life lived without the loved one. Slap an ankle bracelet on your loved one if you must, must know where they are at all times, but solve the problem, he told himself. Get it done. Track your fucking people or cut them loose.

  After the first trains of the morning failed to produce her, Julian stood at a café for a scorched espresso, then returned to his lookout to wait. Later, when Hayley still hadn’t come, he took shelter at the crepe stand, where they’d already cloaked the day’s crepes in black jam. A death bread, for two euros. The thousand-year-old remains of an old man, now just a wedge of tar. This is you in the future, you poor, rotting thing.

  He wasn’t hungry. He was never hungry. But some dim sense of duty haunted him, his father’s voice, gentle and girlish, suggesting that food might help. Food, food, food. Please, Julian, eat something, his father was always saying, as if noxious, soon to be spoiled material from the earth was going to do anything but poison him further. For Julian’s whole life his father—small, kind, and so selfless Julian wondered if he had any needs of his own—stood at the stove and made pancakes for him, grilled cheese, oatmeal, eggs, burgers. Later, when the alternative care community had thrust nutritional strategies their way, when the Prednisone and Lyrica, the off-label intravenous immunoglobulin, and the chemotherapy worms had fattened and ruined and bleached and burned and defeated him, his father steamed bushels of kale. But Julian only ever picked at what polluted his plate, as if dissecting roadkill for shards of glass. His father, especially after his mother traveled underground to spend the rest of eternity inside a luxury coffin where no one could disturb her again, removed Julian’s untouched food and scraped it into the trash. Only to try again a few hours later, smiling and kind.

  So now he thought that eating something might be smart, but the tourist’s gesture for plain crepe eluded him. Or the vendor enjoyed watching Julian pretend to scrape something foul from his hand. Scraping it and scraping it, souring his face to indicate his distaste for the jam, while the vendor grinned at him and winked, as if Julian were demonstrating something the two of them might do together later, in private. Why were these gestures always considered sexual, one hand doing something untoward to the other hand? Why wasn’t it seen as semaphore of the beginning of the world, God the creator digging life from the soil and brushing it off, sending it without a headlamp into the darkness? He might finally consent to play charades, maybe, if instead of celebrities the pantomime could be restricted to events surrounding the big bang. Religious scenarios. The cold narrative of physics. Reenactments from the very, very beginning of time. Very fucking very. And on the eighth day, God made his creatures so lonely they wept. Picture that charade, he thought. The people of this world weeping into their hands.

  Julian was early for his transfusion. This was probably good, because he had to navigate a ritual confusion at the clinic front desk. It concerned the very existence of Hayley.

  “You do not come alone?” the receptionist quizzed him, as per fucking usual. She rose from her chair, which gassed, and peered behind him. He stepped aside so she could see the emptiness.

  “I do.”

  As in, regardez how goddamn alone I am. See it once and for all.

  There seemed to be no way to permanently establish the fact of his solitude. He shrugged at her and showed, via sneer, what he considered to be justified disgust. It made his face ache.

  The receptionist failed to notice.

  “You are not supposed to be coming alone,” she insisted, waving the form.

  It was true. He’d agreed to be accompanied—they didn’t give a shit by whom—because the treatments left you weak, woozy. The treatments left you worse than that. Supine, prone, drooling, horny. Tombstone. Never mind how problematic that was, how much that suggested that treatment was the wrong word. The very, very wrong word. What should you call it when afterward you needed to be led from the premises? When, due to the obliterating immunosuppressants, which preceded the perfectly refreshing speedballs of marrow, the body lacks the power to remove itself? Probably they didn’t care, at this first-class medical establishment, if the body was dumped in the Rhine. Just get it out of the clinic. Did they call it the body? Did they ask each other, peeking from behind their German curtain: has the body gone? It is all clear, Ja?

  He wasn’t racist, he was just tired. Anyway, he’d done fine most days without Hayley, weaving through the granite lobby after his treatment, baby stepping down the broad, white stairway overlooking town. On some days, well, at least once, he’d even felt strong and alert, with a fresh dose of doctored stem cells running through his blood.

  Julian leaned in, showed his teeth. These were the gray teeth, he knew, of someone not threatening to bite you, but to crumble his mouth on your face, leaving bits of horrid ash.

  “Would you like me to leave?” he hissed at her. “Because I will. Is that what you want?”

  Ooh, boy. What a tremendous threat, to not follow through on his own treatment, which his father had already paid for! He really had her now. He’d backed her into a corner!

  The toddler threatens the parent:

  If you don’t give me what I want, I’ll refuse to eat this candy!

  The receptionist sighed. She was a human being after all.

  “This person exists for you?”

  “Not just for me.”

  “And you say she is coming?” The receptionist struck a hopeful tone.

  Oh, God, he thought, let’s not be hopeful anymore. Where has it gotten us, really?

  “No,” Julian said. “I’d say she is not.”

  In the waiting room, once he’d been buzzed in, he shut his eyes against the wheezing shrieks of the ill. Or was that a computer, booting up like a Tasered horse? It was possible that no one within earshot was screaming, but shouldn’t someone be screaming right now? Anyone? In places like this Julian imagined death throes around every corner, a gowned man twitching on the floor while a crowd of doctors leg-blocked your view.

  When he’d first arrived, the clinic wasn’t what he expected. The place lacked a porch with rocking chairs, where dignitaries convalesced deep in thought, staring out over a thundering gorge. Nurses did not come by with blankets to cover your lap. You did not take the clean, healing air, or hike up mossy trails into the mountains. Hadn’t the Germans pretty much popularized convalescence, established it as the solution to life among functional people? What a huge disappointment this place was, and if it weren’t for the illicit product, unavailable stateside, tombstone, he might as well have been home in New Jersey.

  The Bensdorp Clinic seemed free of any kind of Bavarian mountain heritage. Convalescence here was presented as an essentially professional activity, like day-trading. The reception lounge was smartened up like a bank, the treatment rooms hidden in vaults. Photographs of athletic prowess, framed in metal, lined the hallways. Bodies performing impossible man
euvers, glistening, mostly nude. These images were hung, no doubt, to flatter the rumored celebrity clients, who must have had their own entrance, their own goddamn wing, because Julian never saw them. Rich and arthritic American athletes, willing to take injections of liquid horse penis or whatever into their stiff joints, able to afford exceedingly rare and hazardous attacks on their bodies. Sea sponge in the neck, cartilage-fortifying worms, administered via cream.

  In the waiting room patients gazed at their phones or read or looked anywhere but at one another. A certain shame, along with the exhausted indifference of the dying, lingered over people going out of pocket on experimental health care, paying too much to keep feeling worse far from home. How humiliating to be seen like this, failing to rage, rage against the dying of the light. Failing even to fucking complain.

  When his name was called, the technician led him to the semiprivate room where patients reclined in blue vinyl chairs, watching television they could not understand. Here they pretended, or didn’t, that their procedures were going to work. Even the hopeful tilted over their own graves, a boot at their back.

  In transfusion chair number 3, Julian submitted to the usual pretreatment shenanigans. He confirmed his name and birth date, signing, yet again, a German-language consent form. A nurse-practitioner arrived to stick him for blood, filling a vial from his leg until it shined like a long, black bullet. She waved it at him and it foamed.

  “You are okay,” she said.

  “I am?”

  “Yes,” she smirked. “I know this.” She tapped her head. A universal sign of certainty. He needed to remember to tap his head when he spoke, no matter what. He should always tap his head.

  Yesterday he’d had a scan and some other tests, so today he was relatively in the clear, time wise. Today’s transfusion would only take an hour, the nurse told him, and then he was free. He’d have some daylight when he got out and maybe he’d wait at the train station. He didn’t have to pay for his seat on the ledge, licking his wounds, pretending to watch for Hayley. And if he returned to the hostel too early, he’d have to hide under his sheets until the blinding overhead lights were shut off for the night.

  “Ready?” asked the nurse, and he nodded to her. He wasn’t.

  She wheeled up the apparatus and switched it on. Inside its wire frame rested the clear bag sloshing with his new life, frothy and pink, and it produced a not-unpleasant hum.

  He let his arm fall into the syringe basket and closed his eyes, waiting for the dreams that sometimes came on when the long needle, loaded with marrow, was raised over his body.

  After his treatment, Julian’s father assured him from the lobby pay phone that money was not a problem. He’d wire it over on his lunch break, which meant Julian could get it later tonight. But how was he feeling, his father wanted to know, and how were his side effects, and was he able to sleep? Because you don’t get better if you don’t sleep well—tombstone—that’s just common sense, and of course the city must be tempting, the museums and the old opera house and the Latin food festival that opened last night, according to what his father had read online—what an exciting thing for Germany to be doing! his father said—but he shouldn’t go crazy, even though the delights of Düsseldorf must be so tempting. The delights! Is his hotel clean? He should take care of himself, and money seriously was not a problem.

  This, Julian knew, was his father’s way of not saying that money was a problem, a very big problem, and that his father worried about it night and day, but never spoke of it. Never. Julian was simply allowed to lick money from his father’s body whenever he wanted to and his father had pledged to never cry out in pain.

  They would find a way, his father said. He’d send more than Julian asked for, because worrying about money was the last thing Julian needed right now. He needed to heal. Was he healing?

  Julian glanced at his needle-kissed arm. He pictured the German blood product sluicing through his body, trouncing free radicals, convincing his white blood cells not to eat through bone.

  He guessed that he was healing. Quite.

  “How’s Hayley?” his father asked. “She keeping you fed?”

  Julian pictured Hayley prying his mouth open with her fist, pouring sauce down his throat.

  “She’s fine,” Julian answered. No doubt this was true. Hayley was probably having a glass of wine, smoking, sitting at an outdoor café somewhere north of here. France, still? Berlin?

  They’d spoken of Berlin in a vaguely flirty way, as if they might like each other more there.

  “Is she with you now? Can you put her on?”

  His father and Hayley and their whisper time. They were his armchair doctors, his medical curators, who earned their authority because they cared more about his health than he did. Julian was supposed to walk away after handing over the phone, to give them privacy, usually at Hayley’s place when he hadn’t come home for a while and his father was starting to worry. His caregivers needed to huddle and the patient was a nuisance.

  “Oh, she went ahead to scout a good place for dinner. I’m starving.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” his father said.

  How about that, having something you like to hear. For Julian it would be, what, exactly? Maybe something Hayley-related. Hayley saying something un-Hayley-like:

  Hey, Jules, it’s me. I miss you and I’m on my way.

  Would it be possible to hear that, or something like it, soon?

  “Okay, Dad, well, thank you.”

  His father breathed into the phone. He could tell, all the way from Germany, that at home in New Jersey his father was okay, maybe even smiling. He could feel it. This was something nice, too. It was very nice. It would do.

  Shouldn’t he never, until the very second he died, stop thinking and thinking and thinking that he had a father who would do anything for him? What a crime to forget this. He was a criminal if he ever stopped thinking this for even a minute.

  Julian thanked him again and tried very hard to sound sincere.

  “I love you, honey,” his father said, and they hung up.

  Julian took a shortcut to Old Town, up along Adersstrasse, dipping around the Graf-Adolf-Platz. Germany was deadly cold this time of year, the trees slick with ice, the grass so scarce it seemed the whole country had been poured in cement. The weathered stone, the weathered people, even the language was weathered. All around him flowed the gravest-sounding speech. It was genius, Julian thought, to create a language from strangled cries, deathbed wheezing. There was perhaps no truer way to communicate. If he spoke German he could sound solemn and serious. His inanities would escalate into parable. Everything out of his mouth would be a eulogy. German was the end-time language, the only tongue worth speaking on the last days. If the sun shrank and went cold, the world falling dark, everyone should squirm in the soil intoning German phrases. To honor the final minutes of the world.

  Instead, Julian was stuck with whiny, nasal English, in which every word was a spoiled complaint, a bit of pouting, like children’s music sped up on the record player. In English, no matter what you said, you sounded like a coddled human mascot with a giant head asking to have his wiener petted. Because you were lonely. Because you were scared. And your wiener would feel so much better if someone petted it. How freakishly impolite, how shameful, to let these things be revealed by one’s language. English, a whiner’s tongue, a language for people who had to beg for sexual favors. At least overseas he didn’t speak much English. He didn’t speak much anything.

  Julian ate no dinner. He found a wine bar and drank cautiously from a communal bottle of something red and sparkly, a kind of alcoholic soda. He sat in a sea of couches and every now and then some grinning celebrant poured a swallow into his glass and raised it vaguely at the others. A kind of listless cheers, offered to the room. Each time, Julian raised his own glass in response, nodding his head. Cheers indeed. When the bottle was empty, and he’d paid far more than he owed, he walked back down to the station and took his posi
tion on the ledge.

  There was something fine about not looking out for Hayley tonight, a desire he’d pledged to destroy. He would take an evening off from feeling incomplete without her. Paid vacation. Nobody had to know that he wasn’t pining for her full-time. He’d done this shit on his own so far, and if Hayley had been here he would have tried to scrape her, day and night, for pity and understanding. She would have been empty by now, empty and seething, but he would have kept scraping, using a spoon, digging deep into her sweetest parts until they were long gone, and still he’d scrape at her, maybe until he could see through to the other side. He’d been doing fine without Hayley and he would do fine and he fucking was fine. He sat and he froze and he shivered, and it was perfectly terrific. Somehow he’d ended up with nothing to be ashamed of. He didn’t even know the train schedule tonight. A wonderful thing to be ignorant of. The trains could do what they liked. He had no good reason to be down at the station—what day was it anyway, and what time was it, and what was his name again?—and yet so far, since he’d arrived, this was his best night in Germany. He even felt sort of healthy, although it made him nervous to think so, and damned if he even knew what healthy meant anymore. He’d long ago lost track of how he was supposed to feel, and on days like this, nights like this, treatment or not, it was hard not to be worried, a little bit, that some of the reactionary, conservative doctors whom Hayley had railed against at home, the ones who’d diagnosed Julian in the merely normal range, might actually have been right. He was fine this whole time. He wasn’t legitimately sick, at least when it came to conventional measurements.