Her dear friend, Pauline, insisted there was something wrong. “Deeply wrong,” was how she put it, in that administrative tone of hers. “Grave deep. Abyss deep!” Pauline carried herself with the passive authority of a politician’s wife or a middle-income sex worker.
“Or maybe it’s the moon,” Mary Ann said, with a secret eye-roll. “The moon can have all sorts of odd effects on a person’s psyche, Pauline! And that’s science.”
Pauline was no good at detecting sarcasm though. “I guess,” she said, heading off alone in the dark toward her car.
Pauline was referring to the exotic vacation Mary Ann was about to embark upon. A handsome older gentleman wanted to take Mary Ann to the western coast of Mexico. He was going to teach her how to drive his yacht. Not a euphemism, Pauline! Ha. He actually owned a yacht. And honestly, the moon did hang low, perched like a colossal disk on the horizon, a bizarre amusement park attraction you could walk right up to if you wanted. Except Mary Ann didn’t want to. She sat on the stoop in her knit shawl, watching silently as Pauline attempted for several minutes to unlock the wrong car.
How many times in her life had Mary Ann pretended to be interested in a ridiculous thing? And often for the attention of a ridiculous man. Of course it could all be traced back to her father, the original ridiculous man—more timeless wisdom from Pauline. Mary Ann’s father had worked as a cartoonist, and naturally tended toward the goofier things in life. He’d asked Mary Ann to dress as a penguin while serving cocktails at his retirement party. She’d been the only person in a costume. But she did it for Daddy. He always had such affection for flightless birds, both in his work and personal life. Many family friends (old men) had patted Mary Ann on the ass during the party, fumbling awkwardly against the plush foam of the shortly cropped penguin suit. She was sixteen at the time, and felt obligated to endure most inappropriate attention.
Later, sans shawl, after Pauline had finally found the right car and drove away, the moon appeared blood-soaked—fatty and gristly as a tumor hovering over the twinkling city.
Recently there’d been a list of ridiculous excursions. A multiweek stint hanging around the Pony Palace Adult Theaters off I-70. Mary Ann was trying to be more open! An exhibitionist in charge of her own sexuality. To what improbable film plot did her days belong? A racy rom-com starring Goldie Hawn, that deranged platypus? Mary Ann had given hand jobs to several strangers. Eight. Who was counting? Partly she’d done it on account of her new cowboy friend, who she’d met in line-dancing class. And the whole adult theater idea had been the cowboy’s. He was a total daydream to look at. Those hard arms. That worn-out hat. The shiny little snap buttons on his shirt. The Wranglers! He was a pure sweetheart. Until, of course, their last day together in the adult theater, during a showing of Nympho Housewives III. Mary Ann was performing a sort of two-handed lubricated maneuver on a particularly well-endowed construction worker when the cowboy bent down over her thrusting arm, opening his toothy mouth right as the construction worker began a seemingly endless release of ejaculate. Maybe that was also a sweetheart move. Except it broke her. She heard a popping sound somewhere inside her face. And it wasn’t that the cowboy was interested in drinking semen. No. It was the other, stranger aversion he apparently had to touching a penis. Or telling her beforehand! My God. That this had been the goal all along. He’d encouraged her to perform hand sex on all these men just so he could locate the one with the most aggressive explosion. She had handled the young construction worker a week prior, and afterward, in the truck, the cowboy had gone on and on about it: “Man, what a load. He had it dripping off his chin. He almost got it in his mouth!” This announcement had been followed by an insane fit of laughter from the cowboy that sent chills up her arms.
In hindsight her foresight was terrible. That filthy, contortionist move, all so he could get a little sip. She felt a great sadness (sadness washed in annoyance) for people who longed to do an average thing but could not. Like have children, or get married, or wear a leash in public, or taste semen without ever laying hand or mouth to a penis. She couldn’t bring herself to see him again after that. But she wanted to view it as a final lovely moment, so she decided to imagine him as a nervous baby bird waiting to be fed. She didn’t want to cast herself as a victim either, though at her age it was so hard not to. She’d be forty soon. She was doing a multivitamin now, and it took double the number of squats and crunches to get the same results she’d achieved in her twenties. Growing old was hard, and naturally implied an inevitable state of victimhood.
After that, during an especially inebriated evening out with a real estate agent she’d met through 1-900-FUN-DATE, she badly wished she’d told the cowboy about her son. And her husband. A painful gloominess arrived in her chest as she and the real estate agent enjoyed their fruity cocktails, which had come served inside miniature watermelons. She’d meant to tell him—she’d wanted the cowboy to know he wasn’t the only one with secrets, that she in fact had so many they were beginning to pile up. Sometimes at night she feared she might be buried beneath them. The problem was, with a secret you were alone, and it made her angry to think that he had used her to alleviate that loneliness. Because what was she left with? More secrets. After the cocktails she and the real estate agent went to a nightclub where, at some point during the night, she’d smoked crystal meth in the bathroom. Someone had fingered her too, in the handicapped stall, with the door wide open. And it wasn’t the real estate agent, who, by the time it was all said and done, couldn’t tell his fingers from his toes. She’d left him drooling on the street. Perhaps the whole evening was a wash? Her whole life, even? A wash. In acid.
Apparently Daddy wasn’t the only one who gravitated toward the goofier things.
Why just one of these men couldn’t be bright. Like a star or a headlight. Someone to guide her off the meandering rural route of her life.
But it was always something unsavory with single men these days. There were times—mainly on quiet afternoons, bored and sober in her quiet condo—when she worried the problem might be her. Perhaps some crucial function in her brain had shorted out as a result of . . . a result of what? Being alive?
She desperately needed something simpler, something lighter and brighter than the greedy, black reptile sidewinding through her body most days, that twisted polluted river deep inside her, threatening to drown her nearly every moment of her fucking life.
She lived in Colorado, for God sakes! How did that even happen? Among the flashy mountains and constant pothead tourists. When would she ever need to know how to drive a damn yacht?
Yet, it appealed to her.
She imagined which outfit she would wear while manning the elegant helm. She was leaning toward a pale blue sweater-and-shorts set from Land’s End. Also she was mulling over her little bartender’s handbook, trying to determine which obscure cocktail she might enjoy while sailing those vast glittering waters broken only by the wake of the pristine ship charging to Chile, maybe, or Antarctica.
The man with the yacht was Cuban. He wore large horn-rimmed glasses that framed his milk-gray eyes like two small, sad photos. He also sported a gold watch, and rarely wore socks. He did something with oil and gas, living out of hotels for several months of the year—another thing that appealed to her.
It used to be that, years ago, she’d had a specific type, which was really just any man who reminded her of her dead husband. Apparently Bill had set a kind of precedent, activating in her a predilection for dense body hair, a meaty thickness, a Neanderthal forehead, a stiff gait that didn’t allow the arms to make contact with the body when he walked. Bill had been a foreman in the coal mines at La Plata County. He’d had such an easy laugh, and a clownish tendency of being overly polite. It wasn’t as if she encountered men like this all the time, but any one of those things reminded her of another. The traits seemed related. As if huge foreheads were closely linked to a peculiar ability to laugh, sincerely, even when nothing funny had been said. Biology was weird.
Come back, Bill, she often thought to herself, alone in the bathrooms of the places she attended with these new men, come back now or else I might die too. With my head pressed against the cold, dirty stall of some random public toilet.
But then again, absolutely not. Stay dead, Bill. Please stay dead. It wasn’t uncommon for her to be walking down the street and think, for a burning second, that she saw Bill rushing toward her with some alarming purpose, until the man turned, with that witless smile, to enter some store or side street, slipping out of view again. “Just take a moment to imagine the nightmarish heartache this conjures in me!” she’d exclaimed to Pauline. Each time it happened she felt unhinged for hours. She always likened it, after the fact, to the sensation of some space-age material capable of turning from solid to liquid in an instant. When it occurred she did her best to rush home, pop a Xanax, and lie down face-first on the kitchen tiles.
“Keep an open mind, Mary Ann!” Pauline would say. “Imagine a world where the dead really do live among us. These sightings could be a miraculous thing! Think of it like this: Bill will always be nearby.”
Unfortunately, mental breakdowns ran in both her and Pauline’s families, so neither’s perception could be trusted.
Several miles off the coast of Nayarit, on the bow of the great white ship, she stood next to the Cuban, each of them holding in their hands a shockingly emerald-colored drink. It tasted foul, like licorice mixed with perfume. But, oh, how it looked when held out against the near-blue churning and the smoother sea beyond. Like something from a movie. The Cuban had paid for the whole excursion, thank God. Because even though she’d been prepared to pay her own way, she did not want to—news of the lavish vacation had caused more than one nasty interaction with Pauline, who’d basically begged Mary Ann for money the month before. Mary Ann had respectfully declined, if only because she felt Pauline lived beyond her means, a habit that caused all affection for Pauline to leak like fuel from the iron tank of Mary Ann’s heart. Helping others was so hard sometimes. Even devoted Pauline. Being friends with a person for over twenty years didn’t just entitle them to a portion of your hard-won assets!
While considering this, even perhaps beginning to feel a little guilty, the crystal drink carafe slid off the edge of its little marble table and, before she could manage to catch it, fell and shattered against the smooth wooden deck. She jumped back just in time to avoid getting her new sandals wet. The whole yacht began to pitch itself rapidly, and the small man whom they’d hired to oversee the yachting lesson put his hands up to his leathery face and started screaming. Mary Ann jerked her head in every direction, in front of the ship, and behind, before finally realizing that from the east rose a blistering white wall of water. It was hard to understand what was happening, at first. Was it abnormal activity? Mary Ann removed her expensive sunglasses to get a better look, and all at once it came into focus: A giant shimmering hellscape was charging patiently toward them. “I knew the water was rising!” the tiny bronze captain called out, more to himself than to anyone aboard. “I fucking knew it.”
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 the 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 bathroom, 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.
Mary Ann did not agree. All night the smell of the men in the room woke her. She’d fallen into a less panicked state during sleep, the panic replaced by a circuitous burning that whirred in the pit of her stomach, drowning out every other emotion—her whole existence narrowed to an X-rated pinhole. In her dreams the sweat-drenched men came to her, and she welcomed them, as if fulfilling her anatomical destiny, receiving all three of them at once. They rotated around her like a powerful, slick machine, filling every hole. She woke with her hand in her shorts, the dream still lingering on her as she reached over in the dark, feeling for whoever was next to her. It was the Cuban, she was sure, running her hand through his chest hair. Before the sun came up she’d coaxed him into the bathroom, leaving the door open, hoping the others would come in as well. They did not. But by the time it was over she was grateful they hadn’t. It wasn’t an entirely erotic situation. The room turned sour. Her feet ached from the cuts and a thin horn whined from one of the floors beneath. The Cuban had wept. He’d mentioned his wife again, even though Mary Ann made the considerate gesture of bending herself over the sink so he could get at her from behind. When that didn’t work, she’d finished herself off by grinding against his stubby, shaky fingers. Was she in charge of anything at all? What power did she have over the world? She had wanted to comfort him, in a way, but also it was hard to feel anything but revulsion toward the sobbing.
Lying at the end of the bed, staring at the green-lit window, she felt drugged. She was an animal in distress. Didn’t it always seem like the most natural course of action, though? Until it was over. In hindsight, the majority of her sex longings called to mind the image of a person climbing out of quicksand, or crawling out of her own loose skin in an attempt to escape the hot slop of her messy insides. She could still smell the Cuban on her, and it made her stomach turn. The smell of him reminded her of a food item she’d once eaten and not enjoyed.
After the sun began to streak across the murky room, with its odor and edginess, she started to worry that Pauline would hear the news about the earthquakes and become hysterical. When she was home, Mary Ann decided, she would attempt a more patient friendship with Pauline.
The men went out again to help clear debris from the stairwells and Mary Ann hid in the bathroom with the door locked, dipping a washcloth into the back of the toilet. They’d be upset with her for using the only drinking water, but it felt so good, and eased her, knowing her face and vagina were clean. She used a drop of scented shampoo on the cloth too.
She was certain that Pauline would see the whole ordeal as a kind of punishment. “Don’t you see the relationship?” she’d plead—as if a person’s deeds were balloons pushed underwater, inevitably popping up at crucial points along the surface of a life. Good grief, Pauline, always such a know-it-all, even at the worst of times, when all a person needed was compassion!
Mary Ann would make sure to stress, again, that she had not paid for the trip.
It was true that Pauline had been extremely willing during those stupefying months after Bill’s death. She’d been the only one helping Mary Ann care for Danny. He was four years old and cried almost constantly. Somehow Bill and Pauline had never minded spoon-feeding the boy, but Mary Ann refused. What sort of precedent did it set, she’d ask, as Danny flung himself on the floor, smearing his body in oatmeal.
After Bill’s funeral the fantasies arrived. Like a sack of soothing demons on the doorstep, transmitting images into her brain for hours on end. The worst of them: snatching Danny from his playpen and throwing him against the living room wall. Also, on the days when Pauline was gone, filling the child’s drink cup with sedatives. What had stopped her? The thought of being ostracized, or imprisoned?
She’d made a habit of observing the starlings on the power lines outside the bathroom window, after several whiskey and waters. All day, whiskey and water. This had helped. With all of the kid’s problems, being alone with him, without Bill, her body switched off, like a fuse in a house with too many appliances running at once. A baby, a child at all, was never something she’d wanted. She knew this like she knew all of her aversions—that she hated bluegrass music, and eggplant, and badly behaved dogs. He’d been for Bill. And with Bill gone, what was the point? Suddenly the idea of an animal eating its offspring seemed perfectly natural. She was surprised it didn’t occur more often. But how to say this, in a world full of women dying to be somebody’s mother?
Where was there room for her to grieve? There was a savage in her midst. He’d swallow small toys whole, hardly blinking. The looks of the emergency room staff became intolerable. For someone else, maybe, this kind of calamity could have been a distraction, but for her the two nightmares played out in unison, folding over each other, enclosing her. She hid in the garage, pretending to search for some lost thing while Danny howled on the kitchen floor, lost in the frenzy of a tantrum. If she did try to approach him, he’d kick her, spit in her face. If she went to another room to escape, he’d follow her, beating his head and fists on the door until she let him in, so that he could continue the fit at her feet. He demanded a witness. Once she found him on the neighbor’s outdoor patio, smacking himself in the mouth, blood dripping down his chin. During a family barbecue! He rarely spoke to her. Only a universe that prided itself on manifold sicknesses, on its own ironic design, would offer something so unlovable to someone so unmaternal.
Rather than bashing in his head, though, she retired to the bathroom, where she crushed up her anxiety medication into smooth, perfect lines that she snorted off the bathroom sink with a straw.
“Come out of that bad place, Mother!” she would say to herself in the mirror. “Transform! Wake up!”
But she couldn’t.
When she had truly given up and arranged for Danny to move into a facility, the world, begrudgingly perhaps, seemed to right itself. There was shame, sort of, but also peace. The peace was louder. The house droned in commiseration. It was as if a hole had opened, causing a great pressure to escape her. A giant cork had been removed. And there was a place for everything now, for everyone, to come in and fill her up again. She did visit him, on some weekends, at first, until the director of the facility advised her to stop.
People who you loved were simply with you and alive, and then they were not. How does one move forward? It depended on who you were, she guessed, as to which method one might use. At first, her only desire was to lie down on a clean sofa somewhere, one that didn’t reek of human urine. But then other things presented themselves, generously.
On the afternoon following the day of the earthquakes, as Mary Ann and the others sweated it out in their room, announcements of an official rescue began to circulate. Mary Ann and the men shared a small bag of pork rinds, even played tic-tac-toe, passing the sheet of paper and the snack around in a circle. They could hear what sounded like instructions over a megaphone, being given to the occupants of an apartment building farther up the beach. The captain kept going to the window, hanging his head out, trying to hear. The smells unleashed each time he lifted the glass were ripe with salt and rot.
Maybe, in the end, she was grateful for Danny’s condition. It had given her a reason to flee. Ages later, it felt, she’d risen from that disgusting season, that double nightmare, into a new body, replete with a stylish condo from all the insurance money.
Right before she’d left on the trip, hours before she was scheduled to be at the airport, she and Pauline had met for lunch, to say goodbye and for Mary Ann to leave a key to the condo. Pauline was going to turn on some lights at night and water the only houseplant—a bromeliad that tolerated neglect so well Mary Ann hardly watered it herself. It was unnecessary, but Pauline wanted to be useful. Good old Pauline.
The argument, if you’d even call it that, came out of nowhere, right after the food was served. Pauline laid both of her hands on the table and said, “He tells me things.”
“What?” Mary Ann had said, still chewing. She truly despised Pauline the most for things like this. “Who? Who tells you things, Pauline?”
“Danny, when I go to the facility to see him, or when we talk on the phone, which isn’t often really, on the phone, because he gets excited. Oh, his speech has improved, Mary Ann, enormously.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Mary Ann had hissed, driving her knife deep into the meat on her plate, causing the pink juice to puddle around her steamed vegetables.
“Mary Ann, you wanted to know and so I’m telling you.”
“I did? When did I ever say such a thing?”
“The loan would have been for him,” Pauline said, looking down at her tuna cakes. This was how Pauline approached every difficult situation, lowering herself, pretending to be humble in all her endless judgement. “It’s getting so expensive to drive out there, Mary Ann, and you know they don’t provide for everything he needs. They send me home with a list every time. But it’s not like I mind. I do not mind. I just haven’t been working as much.”
“I hope you understand,” Mary Ann had said, clutching her cutlery, “that I see this as a total betrayal. Who told you to visit him? It goes against policy.”
“Oh, stop.” Now Pauline was waving a hand, acting like it was nothing. “A child just needs familiars. That’s all. You know? I couldn’t stand the thought of him not seeing a friend. He’s taking classes now. Math, science. The other day he called just to tell me about Mars! Isn’t that funny? Like I’d never heard of Mars. He gets excited. He actually said, ‘Do you know about Mars?’ I laughed and laughed. Fascinating stuff. You never get too old to learn!”
Mary Ann could only hone in on the blood floating across her plate, how it made islands out of her side dishes. The steak was too rare. Sweat was pouring down her spine, dampening the back of her blouse. The knife upon the soiled napkin suddenly seemed to her like the most poignant thing she’d ever witnessed.
“It was the seasons on Mars that really got him. Did you know other planets have seasons? It’s common knowledge, I guess. And I mean, it makes sense, but maybe it wouldn’t occur to everyone. ‘I’ll spend summers on Mars!’ he said. He knows that isn’t possible. He just liked saying it. He does that, repeating things. I had to get off the phone because he wouldn’t stop yelling.”
Apropos of the whole ordeal, a light snow had begun to fall outside the restaurant. Mary Ann’s seat was facing the window. The weather enraged her. It wasn’t even winter yet. Much of the snow melted before it hit the pavement.
“I can’t wait for the damn sunshine,” Mary Ann said, nodding toward the street. “I’ve always felt I was more suited to a tropical climate.”
“A Martian summer is still just dead-cold. Cold upon cold,” Pauline continued.
Mary Ann could not bring herself to entertain another word. She thought of Mexico instead, of the Cuban and his expensive yacht.
“Not as cold as it is the rest of the time, though. It’s the strange mixture of gases, I think, that do it. You think you’ve got it bad, Mary Ann? Those are seriously harsh conditions!”
Mary Ann was certain she already knew this information. From school? From Bill? Something about how there were no bodies of water to retain the heat? No oceans, no beaches. Regions of Mars, even in summer, were still cold enough to crack your bones. Pauline could be such a condescending bitch. “Pauline, you condescending bitch,” Mary Ann finally said, the knife somehow back in her hand, thrusting forward. “Everyone knows all of this.” She had to put Pauline in her place. She had to stop the onslaught of hostility!
“Please put down the knife,” Pauline had said.
But before Mary Ann had walked outside to wait for her cab in the snow, leaving Pauline alone at the table with her fish, she’d added, harshly, “You’re not a mother, Pauline. But just imagine you were, and imagine you could choose to do something else instead. And suddenly the world opened its arms to you! And strangers wanted to take you to explore remote and exotic locations. It’d be a sweet, wonderful day and I’d be happy for you. I’d celebrate!”
Of course now, in the rank hotel, she wished she hadn’t said any of that, and not just because the days that had followed seemed like a kind of punishment after all, like a snarky reckoning. But because it wasn’t the point. In the sickening hotel room, waiting and waiting, she played the conversation over in her head, wishing she’d said something else entirely, something like, “Listen, old friend, there is no way in hell a Martian summer is harsher than all of this!”