Read Online Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus - Free Book Online Page B

could jump out at him when he walked by. The stars were close tonight. Not just exquisite pricks of light leaking through a tear in the fabric of some other world, to quote a writer he loved. These stars seemed to have fallen too low. They looked shapeless and dirty. Cast outs, perhaps, from the world of finer stars that knew enough to keep their distance. Or maybe the ship was climbing, lurching straight up out of the water like a slow rocket. He could close his eyes, feel the air rushing down on him, and believe that. Why was that so easy to believe, and it wasn’t true, yet what was true was so finally impossible and unconvincing? The stars—close and dirty and shapeless and false, the sort a child might draw, and what did children even know?—were not credible. The sky, the whole night, his conversations. These things did not fucking ring
true
anymore, they needed
work
. What happened to him needed to be revised until he could find it believable. Or,
he
needed to be revised. Fleming. He needed to change himself so what was real did not seem so alien and wrong. Do you do that with tools, with your hands, with a bag over your head? Do you do that by standing on the ship’s railing at night? Fleming would tuck himself over behind the pool, behind the games floor, where the sun umbrellas were rolled up, stacked, and chained. It was a kind of bed. It wasn’t so bad. The dark night was a kind of room, and it would do better than where he’d been. This was the perfect place to miss out on the next head count, should it come. No one would find him here, at least until morning. They could never check off his name. Maybe that was what was called for, for the next head count to go around, for the ship and its rooms to be searched for its living, viable people—its human beings!—and to be finally, once and for all, counted out.

The Dark Arts
     
    O n a dark winter morning at the Müllerhaus men’s hostel, Julian Bledstein reached for his dopp kit. At home he could medicate himself blindfolded, but here, across the ocean, it wasn’t so easy. The room stank, and more than one young man was snoring. The beds in the old gymnasium were singles, which hadn’t kept certain of the guests from coupling when the lights went out. Sometimes Julian could hear them going at it, fornicating as if with silencers on. He studied the sounds when he couldn’t sleep, picturing the worst: animals strapped to breathing machines, children smothered under blankets. In the morning he could never tell just who had been making love. The men dressed and left for the day, avoiding eye contact, mesmerized by the glow of their cell phones. The evidence of sex failed to show on their faces.
    Julian held his breath and squeezed the syringe, draining untold dollars’ worth of questionable medicine into the flesh of his thigh. He clipped a bag holding the last of his money to the metal underside of his bed. His father’s hard-earned money. Not enough euros left. Not nearly enough. He’d have to make a call, poor mouth into the phone, until his father’s wallet spit out more bills. Under his mattress he stashed his passport.
    He left the hostel and took the stone path down to nothing good. This morning he was on his way, yet again, to meet Hayley’s train. Sweet, sweet Hayley. She would fail to appear today, no doubt, as she had failed to appear every day for the past two weeks. More and more it seemed that his lovely, explosively angry girlfriend, who only rarely seemed to loathe him, wouldn’t be joining him in Germany. Even though they’d planned the trip for months, googling deep into Julian’s unemployed afternoons back home, Hayley pinging him sexy links from work when she could. A food truck map, day treks along the Königsallee. First they’d destroy England and France, lay waste to the Old World, then drop into freaking Düsseldorf for the last, broken leg of the journey.
    It was going to be a romantic medical tourist getaway, a young