Free Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel by Donald Antrim

Surf broke and rolled nearly to our shoes. We warmed our hands above incendiary hieroglyphics soaring aloft on convective heat, tumbling wetly up the beach, and Ray told me, “I want a better world too, Pete.”
    “Then help me. Join my school. Become a teacher.”
    “Me?”
    “You have so much to offer. You can stock an aquarium. Take the kids wading in tidal pools, go snorkling over the reef. The pay’s not great but the rewards are priceless.” I had a feeling, as I said this, of conviction: the home school was more than a kitchen table fancy. By pitching the vision to potential colleagues—first Ben, now Ray—I made intention tangible; and I knew, whether the feral biologist signed on or not—I knew the school would come to pass.
    Ray felt my enthusiasm. “I could teach?”
    “Why not?”
    “I’m a researcher.”
    “You know things, Ray. Look around. The ocean, the sky, this terrible weather. It’s all happening. The world at work. Your world.”
    “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
    I ripped more pages. Lightning struck over the water. I counted slowly to seven before hearing thunder rumble in above waves crashing onto nearby rocks littered with cast-up debris. That meant the storm was seven miles out to sea. So it was moving away. As if that mattered. Everything was drenched. The fire was a lost cause. I raised my hands with palms turned upward and cupped to catch rain, and drank a libation of sweet rainwater. Ray, too, cupped his hands and drank. He exclaimed, “In the beginning of time, this is what there was.”
    “Ray, are you hungry? Break bread with me.”
    That’s when I discovered my fig bars’ contaminated condition. Not by eating one myself but by watching Ray eat one. He spat fig. Talk about your difficult moments. But wasn’t it fitting?—the bereaved taking into his mouth the blood of his wife’s executioner. Ray couldn’t see the elegance of this symmetry, he was too busy going berserk from the putridity of blood and rot that had entered his mouth via a leaked-on fig bar; and he was saying words to me, attempting to anyway—something garbled I couldn’t quite make out but that was, judging from tone and inflection, harshly accusatory. He got up then and started walking away. Staggering, actually, was more like what he was doing; he staggered, retching, down the beach. What could I say? Let him go. I have to admit I was relieved to find myself alone again. But I felt sorry, too, that our evening had come to this distressing close, because, crummy weather aside—wasn’t the weather an integral part of the evening? Hadn’t the weather in some ways defined the evening?—rotten weather aside, our hour together on the beach, watching the world and feeling exposed to elemental forces, had been, as Ray himself had claimed, beautiful.
    At dawn the storm passed. It was half a mile to Midnight Pass and the old humpbacked bridge sportsmen favor for grouper and snook. Walking on sand was tiring; I rested on a bridge railing and let the heat of morning dry me. No one out fishing today, which was odd, seeing as it was a Saturday. Perhaps it was the wrong time of day. Maybe wisdom or fear regarding storms kept the cane-pole fishermen home in their beds. I’m not much of an angler myself. I trekked along the South Main flood canal, checking the black water for nictitating opalescent eyelids of partly submerged gators. South Main intersects with palm-lined Osprey Avenue. Left on Osprey, it was a mile to town. My shoes were full of sand; I took them off and banged them against a tree. After the Tarpon Bank Savings and Loan I crossed an unfortified yard—a few still remained—coming out between two birdbaths onto Water Street. Three blocks away sat the Southshore branch of the public library, opposite which I paused to enter the tall bushes and, checking to make sure no one could see, urinated quickly, before zipping up and coming out to study the library bulletin board advertising poetry clubs, garden