Free Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus Page A

building. But at least on the way toward oblivion you got to, you know, feed on yourself, suck your best parts free of promise. You got to try the finest of what medicine did not legally have to offer.
    This morning he ducked the stares of shopkeepers, who guarded their doors against him, the pale American who spent no money. They must have come to recognize his sickly figure by now. What was left of it. God knows they’d gawked. To Julian it seemed they could see right through his clothes, and they were not amused. You’d need more than clothing to hide a body like his. You’d need a shovel, a tarp. Tarps were
designed
to cover men like him.
This is what you call a person? This is not a person.
Tombstone inscriptions like this just came to him. He had a certain gift for the form.
    The shopkeepers—little men protected by bibs, youngsters with ghostly mustaches—stood and stared as Julian snuck down the street. Was this friendliness? Was it love? Julian could only walk faster, wincing until they released him from eye contact. Had anyone, he wondered, ever studied the biology of being seen? The ravaging, the way it literally burned when you fetched up in someone’s sight line and they took aim at you with their minds? He wanted to summon a look of kindness and curiosity in return, a look that might forgive his miserly ways, his trespass on their ancient, superior city. But his face, as no one had ever needed to tell him, lacked the power to
convey
. He’d stopped trying to use it for silent communication, the semaphore you performed overseas, absent a shared language, to suggest you were not a murderer. Such facial language was for apes, or some mime troupe in Vermont. Mummenschanz people who emoted for a living. He ate with his face and spoke with it. Sometimes he hid it in his hands. That should have been enough.
    It took him just one sucking sprint on a cigarette to reach the train station, a domed building in rust-colored stone. After a few mornings inside, braving the crush of travelers who reeked of chowder, he figured he didn’t need to enter the dank space just to wait for Hayley. A granite ledge opposite the station offered a perfect view of the decamping passengers. Every morning locals poured from the building wrapped in hemp and straw. The fancier ones wore the waxed canvas coats of hunters. Occasionally an American or two spoiled the tasteful palette with vacation colors, releasing high-strung moods as if by megaphone:
I have arrived in your historic city and I am the happiest person you will ever know! Let me rub my joy on you!
They shot into the town square like clowns fired from a cannon, mugging their snack-smeared faces at some imagined camera, dreaming of paparazzi.
    No one disliked American tourists more than their own kind. Or probably they did. Probably there was widespread competition in this arena, hostility toward the first world animal spreading its lucre abroad. Julian could picture the American tourist problem resolving in a civil war, a snake not eating its own tail, but maybe doing something nastier. Giving it head, its snake jaws popped out of joint to apple bob the shaft.
    It was only upon leaving New Jersey, flying east toward higher civilization, that the demise of his decadent homeland seemed so overdue. But some higher power, or some covert, stateless, ideological power, kept forgetting to stick the pig. America kept charging the horizon, its lancet drawn, a milky substance leaking from the tip, refusing to perish. Now he had to look at these muffin-tops from home ready to speed-learn German culture, their sneakers swollen like parade floats as they bounced around outside the Hauptbanhof, trying to keep warm in the bitter German air.
    Two weeks went by like this. Trains rolled in from Paris, Salzburg, Dresden, Berlin, failing each time to spit from their insides the girl Julian had fought with in Strasbourg. A disappointment of trains. He and Hayley, in fact, had fought in several