Free Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus Page B

cities in the Western Hemisphere on this trip, a road show of freeze-outs and recriminations. For the most part they warred silently, with so much stealth that sometimes Julian wasn’t sure whether or not they were even quarreling. Even in bed, as she hobbyhorsed on top of him in pursuit of her sexual quota, with the focus of a child doing homework, grimacing when her time came, he wondered if she was mad at him. Their mating activity was hardly much sexier than a needle in the back. But at least he got to see her naked. Hayley could look so serious beneath her pixie haircut. She was too stubbornly self-contained, too confident, too okay with it all, which was decidedly not okay with Julian. A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it. But Hayley had built a fire wall around her feelings and moods. There was no knowing her, and fuck you if you tried to pierce her privacy. You were a creep and an invader and you’d be rebuffed, then shamed. Hayley would fall quiet if Julian suddenly touched her hand, when all he wanted was to be touched back. That was the consolation prize available to the bottoms in a relationship, right? The mules, the dinguses, the shitbags? Touchbacks were supposed to be free. And she’d be clearly annoyed at the transparency of Julian’s desire when out of nowhere he pounced. Poking her to be cute, which was not, he knew,
cute
. Was there a subcategory of shit-eating grin, depending on whose shit you ate? He’d gone to a different school of etiquette, the school of no shame, the school of I need
more
from you. He’d been fucking homeschooled in emotional helplessness, scoring off the charts. By touching Hayley and waiting for her response, Julian could pursue the kind of emotional research you didn’t get to conduct in graduate school: dissertation-level inquiry into the limits of revulsion regarding people who ostensibly love each other. Which would always turn out to be a really stupid move. Hayley would snap and he’d feel his face burn, getting ready to be rubbed in something. She’d smell his need and it stank, it really, truly stank. Why did he always have to
confirm
a good thing, asking about it and asking about it, Hayley wanted to know? She told him to put his hellish thermometer away, to stop prodding her with his goddamned thermometer, obsessively trying to gauge how she felt so much that he kept
ruining the mood
.
    Which proved that he loved Hayley. Somewhat. A lot. Awfully. God help him. First of all, she didn’t leave him, even though his salient feature as a man was his leavability. He created occasions for departure in others. Tombstone. And until now Hayley had hung in there. Her loyalty alone was an aphrodisiac, even though his medication sometimes gave him the useless crotch of a mannequin. Hayley also believed in Julian’s illness, found it true and real and even pretty damn interesting, a faith that had turned out to be rare. Julian’s father and Hayley and the occasional stranger on the Internet, where the ill go in search of each other, humping each other’s empathy slots. These were the believers. Even if, sometimes, maybe just a little bit, Julian did not really believe in the illness himself.
    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