In Which We Fear Going Overboard

Ingleside on the Bay

by JUSTIN ERICKSON

I was walking back from the corner store, my Snickers bar melting in my hand quick as a popsicle, when I met a pirate. She pointed a clothes’ hanger hook at her eyepatch and said, “They call me the Pirate.” I asked her what her name was and she said, “Argh!” and I said, “But what’s your real name?” and she said, “Macy,” so that’s what I called her.

Macy had lost a game of “think fast!” and got hundreds of caterpillar hairs stuck in her eye, so when she showed up at school with a wad of gauze and tape covering it, everyone started calling her the Pirate. And now she was the Pirate. “Ahoy!” she would say, and “Avast ye!” always waving her hook, and sometimes clomping on a peg leg. Sometimes it was her right leg, sometimes her left.

I gave Macy part of my Snickers and licked the other half off my fingers.

“Cool bandana.”

“Blimey!”

The next morning I followed her onto Roger’s boat to steal his dog. The dog’s name was Coon Dog and the boat smelled like a tackle box and Roger snored like a pirate, the same way he swore and drank, which is twice as much as a sailor. He’d been both, Macy told me, so he knew. We found Coon Dog tail-chasing inside the pilot house and she scooped him up and caught tongue all over her face. “Down, boy,” she said, but held him close.

It was the first summer I spent with my father after he left, or after he was told to leave — the story changed with the teller. The arrangement my parents had reached was that I would weather the Iowa cold with Mom during the school year and then sweat it out with my father in Texas over summer break. This was not something I had any say in.

Macy and I slipped off the boat with Coon Dog and walked him up and down the road, and then to the marina, on a lead Macy had bought with scavenged change for just this purpose. Colt was at the marina, not doing anything, just being there, and he wanted to know whose dog it was. He said, “That’s not your dog, Pirate. You don’t have a dog,” and Macy said, “Shiver me timbers.” I said the dog was Coon Dog and it belonged to Roger.

“The boat guy?” he asked.

“He lives on a boat.”

The three of us walked Coon Dog back to the boat after he peed on every roadside vertical object. Also, he crapped twice. “We can use that later,” Colt said. Colt and I waited while Macy clambered onto Roger’s boat and put Coon Dog back.

“Where are you from?” Colt asked.

“Iowa.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s real cold there.”

When Macy got back we went to her house and threw darts at a cardboard target she’d drawn and tacked to one of the house’s stilts. While we were playing, a tan kid on a bike started riding circles on the road in front of the driveway, crunching up the gravel. “Get out of here,” Colt yelled. “Go back to Mexico.” The kid said, “Soy de Cuba, estupido!” and pedaled off. Later Macy’s mom came out and asked who my parents were and when I told her about my father she did this kind of laugh that was also a frown. She said I could stay for dinner, if I wanted. I didn’t, but later I wished I had.

At home, my father’s snores Zzz-ing out of the living room sounded nothing like a pirate’s. And this lady who I’d never seen before was rummaging in the fridge. She was wearing my father’s union t-shirt and her underwear was yellow through the crotch. She looked up from the fridge and wiped a chilled beer bottle across her forehead.

“Linda,” she said. “You eat? I’ll put on some macaroni.” She set a pot of water to boil on the stove. “So Iowa, huh? Pretty cold there?”

I nodded.

“I bet,” she said, and then took her beer into the living room.

I waited in the kitchen and when the water started to boil and she didn’t come back I went to fetch her. She was passed out beside my father on the couch. Water hissed into vapor on the burner as I searched the cupboards for a box of macaroni, and by time I turned off the stove there was nothing in the pot but a roiling foam.

Every morning Colt, Macy, and I would kidnap Coon Dog and walk him to the marina or throw a ball for him in the empty lot next to Roger’s dock. Colt and I would throw the ball, but Coon Dog would only give it up to Macy. “Boyfriend material for you, Pirate,” Colt said. He pitched the ball toward the fat-trunked palms and viscous lines of slobber unspooled as it spun through the air. When the four us got bored with the game we’d go back to Roger’s boat, and if Roger wasn’t up yet we’d take our battle stations. I buckled under the weight of the imaginary cannon balls that I heaved into the breech, and when Macy said, “Fire!” Colt unleashed the broadside against the unsuspecting merchant ship, which was played by the Caldwell’s two-masted sailing yacht on the other side of the dock. Their booty now ours to plunder, Macy picked up Coon Dog and said, “Polly want a cracker?” and gave him a biscuit from the pouch she kept tied to her sash.

When Roger came up from below deck we followed him to the bow and watched as he cast his lines. “See what we get today,” he said, flicking his pole. Sometimes he would let Colt or me try, but Macy couldn’t on account of her hook. We watched for movement in the line while he went back under. When he returned we each took a handful of unshelled peanuts from the bag he offered and sat around littering the deck with stringy shells and flakes of red peanut skin.

“You boys know about riverine warfare?” he asked. “I know the Pirate here does.” He told us about ducking below the gunwales and shooting blind into the jungle beyond the banks, letting the pig go cyclical until the barrel glowed and drooped.

“Was that in ’Nam?” I asked. I’d heard my father talk about ’Nam before.

Roger coughed a laugh and shook his head no. His smile was all gap, no teeth. “Colombia,” he said.

We looked over his frog tattoos and the shiny scar on his neck. We wondered where Colombia might be.

I went home at night, and then straight to the guest room. The bunk bed had only one mattress, up top, but I pulled it down after the first night when I woke with half my body hanging over the edge. The chest of drawers had a swivel frame for a mirror, but no actual mirror. When I unpacked my duffel into the drawers I found a piece of paper with taped corners that said free in big bubble letters. One of the two bulbs in the uncovered light fixture was burned and burned out. At home in Iowa, I’d almost outgrown my race car-shaped bed, but I still liked the solar system wallpaper and the planets that glowed in the dark, the stars on the ceiling.

Colt let the tan kid join us when he found out that he had an extra bicycle I could borrow. His name was Sebastian, but he told us to call him Seb, which sounded like sub. I said it, “Seb,” to test it out, and he said, “Dive, dive, dive!” which was very funny to him. Colt called him Mexico. “Hey Mexico, get the bike already.” The bike turned out to be his sister’s, and was a sun-faded blue with white tassels hanging off the handlebars, but at least it wasn’t pink.

“Will she be mad?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “She is gone away.”

“Back to Mexico?”

Seb glared at Colt. “To heaven.”

The days that Roger’s boat was gone, the four of us would ride around Ingleside on the Bay, from one end to the other, our speed a kind of shade, a kind of fanning. We biked up around the cove and watched giant yellow cranes hoist trusses for new offshore platforms while plumes from the refineries mushroomed in the distance. We rode south past all the stilted houses to the end of Bayshore Drive and stood up our kickstands and watched tugs push linked barges through the narrows. Orange-winged trainers from Naval Air Station Corpus Christi flew loose formations over the bay.

“Aye,” Macy said, “is that your dad?”

Colt said, “No. He flies real jets. He flies F-14 Tomcats. He’s a Top Gun.”

I was still waiting for the movie to come out on VHS. This was impressive.

My father was up and around that evening when I got back. The groceries he was putting in the fridge clinked and chinked and came in six packs.

“You having a good time?”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Maybe we’ll do the Lexington next week, or the aquarium.”

I very much wanted to see the USS Lexington, the aircraft carrier anchored across the bay, but I wasn’t going to hold my breath. When it came to my father, I had no lung capacity.

Seb refused to come aboard when we visited Roger’s boat. He sat on the dock and said “What?” when we laughed and “What?” if we were quiet too long. Macy said, “Ahoy, landlubber!” and threw him Roger’s life preserver. He put it around his waist and bobbed up and down on his tiptoes.

On the boat, Roger told us about Arabia. “Rub al Khali,” he said. “The Empty Quarter. Nothing but sand and pipeline.” He told us about Panama. “Spiders big as dinner plates, mosquitoes thick as nets.” He told us about love. “The important thing is her soul-color,  how it refracts, but the prenup is a close second.” We didn’t even know what we didn’t know. From the dock: “Què?”

The morning Macy was late to snatch Coon Dog we asked her why her eyepatch was on her other eye. “He gave me something to whine about,” she said, without a trace of pirate in her voice. Her dad’s oil platform had just changed shifts, Colt explained. “Four weeks on, four weeks off.” Macy squinted her uncovered eye all day as we walked the neighborhood, collecting shirtfuls of mesquite pods. At home that night, my father complained that the rig monkeys had cleaned out the groceries and, with nothing to do, he went to bed early.

Colt managed to talk Seb onto the boat for the fishing trip. “Chicken, Mexico?” he said. Seb jumped onboard and got right in Colt’s face and said, “I’m Cuban,” and Colt smirked, but he never called him Mexico after that. I asked Roger if he would take us around the bay on the way out, but he made straight for Port Aransas and the Gulf. He only had three life vests, the orange kind you wear like a yoke, so Seb slipped the life preserver back on and stayed in the pilot house.

Macy was still being quiet, but she did brandish her hook at passing vessels, at the freighters and barges and other fishing boats. I looked over the side for fish but only saw the barnacles scabbed on the hull just below the waterline. The sky was a blue shade of white and the clouds out over the Gulf thickened as the land behind us thinned into the horizon.

After a couple hours he said, “This’ll do,” and killed the engine. “There’s a reason the charter boats come out here.” We cast our lines and mounted our poles in the holders. We could see four or five boxy silhouettes out under the darkening clouds. “Spent some time on a rig,” Roger told us. “GOPLAT’s risky business.” We nodded, memorizing his words, trying to absorb this wisdom.

Seb asked about his scar.

“Which one?”

“On your neck, sir.”

“Don’t you ‘sir’ me,” he said. “I work for a living.” He laughed and took a sip of his beer. He tapped his neck. “Got some hot brass caught in the collar of my flak jacket. Stings like a--” He stopped and pointed: the end of my rod arched ever so slightly toward the water. I lifted the pole out of the holder and started to reel in the line, which was angling away from the boat faster than I could remember Roger’s instructions. I panicked and set the bail arm. The line caught and the rod whipped out of my hand, swung over the boat, and lanced into the water. Roger laughed so hard that he spilled his beer on Coon Dog and between gasps of air Seb said, “You almost got fished!” Macy laughed a real laugh, a girl laugh, instead of her normal “har har har.”

No one else got a bite before the storm picked up. We watched the lightning zap the oil platforms, one, two, twenty times as Roger turned the boat toward shore. The lightning just seemed to appear, to flash into existence fully formed, a silvery tether between cloud and rig. Roger made best speed but the storm overtook us before the shore even began to take shape. The waves went all Tilt-o’-Whirl and Colt painted the deck with his breakfast and when my cheeks ballooned Roger waved his hand and said, “Over the side, over the side!” but jellyfish were washing into the boat and I was afraid of being pitched overboard. The lightning fissured the clouds and Roger sent the four us under the deck and told us to keep our shoes on, not to touch anything metal, while he manned the helm. It was dark and muggy and smelled sweetly like skunk. Colt cried. I cried. Macy pirated. Seb got on his knees and started praying in Spanish really fast and then cried, “Papá es con los peces, papá es con los peces,” over and over and over until the rain muted everything.

The next week we held our own Olympics to celebrate the Fourth of July. Colt won the bike race and we ate too much of Seb’s dust in the sprint, but I got silver in fencing with a few pointers from Macy, who tagged each of our hearts in turn. Colt smeared Coon Dog’s poop on the wheelbarrows so that Macy and Seb couldn’t — wouldn’t — actually sit as we ran them down the dirt access road behind the houses. Seb was too wriggly and Colt spilled him in the bushes as I pushed Macy across the finish line.

The speed eating contest was a draw: nobody could finish their Worcestershire and Horsey-sauce-slathered sausage. That night, after the closing ceremony, my father and Linda and Macy’s mom and dad and Colt’s mom and Seb’s mom and baby sister and the Caldwells came out to light off the value-pack fireworks we’d pooled our money for. They gave us sparklers to hold and we watched the fountains spray neon and the strobing flashers cut the night into stills and the Roman Candles volley stars back at the sky. My father lit the fuse on the Black Cat strip and tossed it onto the road and we covered our ears as it popped off in a machine-gun staccato. I asked my father where Roger was.

“Who? The boat guy?”

As a group we walked to the marina to watch the displays over the bay. We hung our feet off the dock and drank melted Freezepops as colorful as the fireworks blooming in the distance. The patterns and dazzle would blink out before the soft report of the explosion reached us. While we watched, Macy handed us each a paper and told us to write a wish on it. She rolled up the notes and slipped them one at a time into a beer bottle and then twisted a stray cap onto it and handed it to me. I sailed the bottle out into the cove. We watched as it splashed and bobbed and then disappeared, and wondered where it might wash up.

Justin Erickson is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.

Photographs by Edward Burtynsky.

"Soggy" - Bedroom Eyes (mp3)

"Big Boo" - Bedroom Eyes (mp3)

In Which We Change Our Mind About Him

You can find the archive of our Saturday fiction series here.

To Each His Own Mafia

by LEON DISCHE BECKER

If S — my high school’s most prolific bully — ever reads this, I'll have to content myself with a life in hiding. Luckily he isn’t a man of letters, and though he tries to phone me every once in a while he isn’t particularly interested in what I have to say. He is more interested in how I can stand living the way I do: drudging along, trying to write. S considers every man that doesn’t at least attempt to live like Genghis Khan a pitiable incrimentalist that should consider himself lucky that he lives at a time in which faggotry isn’t punishable by death. But once in a while he finds a use for us ineffectuals. That's the context in which we first became acquainted.

It was mid-August, 2001, my first day at the new school — my first lunch break, to be precise. I was meandering across the schoolyard, pretending to receive calls and texts on my mobile, when I saw him pointing at me from the smoker's corner, surrounded by his apparatchiks. Who is this little asshole? he yelped, breaking out in siren laughter. He judged me from thirty yards. I knew better than to respond; I'd heard much about S from my friends at the school. 

A frightening presence, by all accounts: 15 years old (if his documents were to be trusted), 200 pounds, countless priors — a school bully well on his way to becoming a federal issue. And he looked the part. Sitting across from me in chemistry class that afternoon, fidgeting with his phone, eating and sleeping, he seemed at once impulsive and world-weary. His face was a registry of punishments. I found it hard to believe that we were the same age. I had hardly hit puberty — S looked like a veteran of several Balkan wars. At the time I viewed this maturity as an expression of his lifestyle.

His father had recently come to taxable income, chiefly through the undeclared transport of industrial amounts of wood from Tajikistan, and moved his family from the autonomous housing projects of Wedding into a neo-classical mansion in leafy Zehlendorf —  a house commissioned and long inhabited by Alfred von Tirpitz, Grand Admiral of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Navy. They customized it to their liking. Its graying exterior received a new Ivory coat, its antique shutters were splashed in Azure, the crescent moon of Turkey hung from a mast affixed below the balcony. Their neighbors, most of them elderly, welcomed the new household in keeping with local customs: sidewalk evasions, hurried disregard, anonymous complaints to state authorities regarding noise/(potential) building violations. S’s family, usually referenced as Family G. in investigative news pieces about their exploits, were in the process of cleaning up their corporation. Their son was a more difficult matter.

The first conversation I had with him came two weeks or so after my enrollment and concerned Angela, a vivacious girl in the grade below us. S had decided, on a whim, apparently, that she would make a good fit for him, and tapped me to speed up the pursuit —  a pragmatic choice, given that I was going out with her. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

His car pulled up nearby the Kebab stand, around the corner from our school, just as I reached the front of its waiting line.

Sauce? Salad? the proprietor addressed me.

One with garlic & spicy sauce, as many tomatoes as possible. No onions.

No onions? Lucky girl.

S arrived next to me and ordered: Lütfen, sadece et.

Sadece et mi? the proprietor responded. 

As I said! S huffed. The man shrugged and went to work, producing a doner kebab with no salad at all, a heap of lamb slivers in a pouch of flatbread. S paid for us both and we sat down to eat in his car. You are Leon, right? he said, in between mouthfuls. You are from Charlottenburg, aren’t you? Once we’d agreed on the basic aspects of my biography, he got to Angela.

He started by praising my audacity. Me, going for such a girl — he could appreciate that. He regretted that fate had pitted us against each other. The most troubling thing about this monologue, at the time, was that he seemed completely sincere.

But why Angela? Simple, he said. She’s a good girl. I like good girls. He said he meant the kind of girls that do their homework, don’t smoke weed, don’t wear Buffalo shoes; the kind that didn’t let some dirt-Arabs gangbang them. There are not many of these in Germany, he observed. But there are some: German girls with very boring parents — you know, who wear thin-rimmed glasses and no make-up; some Turkish girls, but that’s dangerous; also, Jews. Angela fell into the latter category.

The problem with this foible was that most good girls were afraid of S. (He didn’t much appreciate the girls he did get: more than enough, let me tell you; but always some Pollacks who hate their parents. I like that kind of thing sometimes, but I can’t take them anywhere!) But Angela had spoken to him — the day before, when he sat nearby her on the bus. At the end of the ride, he suggested coffee. She turned him down, but in a manner he deemed encouraging. He’d concluded that I was the small thing keeping them apart. It was only honorable to tell me this, he said, adding that he wanted me to stay away from Angela for as long as it took him to try his luck.

He couldn’t expect me to do that.

I can. Watch me.

But why would I comply?

Because you’re afraid, he said. Aren’t you?

I told him that I was not afraid, though he shouldn’t take that to mean that I didn’t respect him.

Excellent, he said, grinning now. He suggested we continue our conversation elsewhere. One doesn’t just sit in a car, staring at the street. I told him that I had to go home.

That’s fine, he said. You’re from Charlottenburg. I’m heading in that direction.

As he started the engine, I remembered that he was the same age as me and couldn’t possibly have a driver’s license. Contrary to my expectations he drove superbly, albeit not to Charlottenburg.  

We pulled over nearby the dreary Pankstrasse, in Wedding. Come, he said, and we climbed out.

My parents are expecting me, I said. I’ll take the train home; it’s no problem.

He said that he just wanted to show me his place, have a mocca. He went on to make the reasonable argument that he was actually saving me time by driving me.

But I thought you lived in Zehlendorf.

Still have a flat here.

We shuffled through a passageway into a good square mile of courtyard — a metropolis of parking lots, garbage collection sites and playgrounds, encircled by ashy tenements.

He turned to me and I noticed that he looked a bit nauseous: You aren’t really planning on seeing Angela any longer, are you? I told him that I liked her a lot, and apologized. He nodded and we trotted on; he tended to a phone call. We arrived at a bright-red entrance and were received there by a wiry middle-aged gentleman, in a crisply ironed jogging suit, wearing a nervous, exhausted look between his wooly hat and beard. S introduced us: Leon, this is Neighbor. Neighbor, this is Leon. Neighbor glanced down at me, squinted as if I didn’t quite fit his existing categories. Leon is making me very sad, Neighbor. S paused and smiled fondly at his friend, who felt compelled to respond so he shook his head at me in condemnation.

Tell me Neighbor, would you kill this boy me for me?

The man stared at S to detect serious intent, turned back to me, shrugged and then nodded confidently. I thought of dashing but then considered that such a move would provoke a change of pace on their part, might make them do something thoughtless. S asked for my phone, and though I don’t remember handing it to him he managed to remove her number. Meanwhile Neighbor ran inside to collect our moccas.

Over the following week, S conducted an intensive recruitment campaign, wooing Angela by call and text message, though she ceased to respond after his initial offer (security of various kinds). I saw him stage a final attempt in person, by the school bus stop. She dodged his gaze. He described a romantic scenario involving the both of them and mountains of caviar…sand imported from Namibia. She giggled at this. He looked around at us, sweaty, red-eyed, and, with a jolt, drew something from his pocket with which he walloped her in the face face. She shrieked, he stomped away; she bent down and picked it up, sobbing, gulping, then howling more: a wad of small bills.

Thankfully none of this spoiled my relationship with S. He hounded me until he dropped out of our school, a few months before graduation.

II

Eleven years later, a few weeks ago, S once again found a use for me. He started messaging me on Facebook every few hours and sending me chats whenever my icon popped up. Apparently he’d been deported to Turkey.

Always disappear when I send you a chat

you cheap jew. 

Somehow he got his hands on my phone number. The moment I heard the heavy breathing I knew it was him. I expected abuse, but instead heard a plea for assistance. 

S wailed about the bad luck that had shadowed him since we’d last seen each other — the cases, the jails, the extradition process. He swore that though he’d been a violent person at times, he’d never sold drugs. I interjected that I’d witnessed him throwing pillowcases of stuff around his flat. He snickered fondly: I never liked them. I never took them myself. 

He started to mumble as he reached the tragic crux of his story. The woman that had stuck with him through his five-year sentence, who he’d married upon release, had now left him and moved to New York City, where I lived. He could not travel because of his crimes and needed my help getting her back. I was, after all, his friend.

We’re not.

He’d considered this and responded confidently: you are wrong. 

I reminded him that:

1. look at this little asshole! were the first words he’d ever said to me.
2. he’d called me Jew more often than Leon.
3. Angela refused to talk to me after his intervention.
4. he’d asked his friend to kill me.
5. he’d beaten up several friends of mine, often kicked me as a greeting.

He responded that:

1. he calls everybody asshole; that, in his vernacular, it’s a term of endearment.
2. he admires our keen business sense and always has.
3. where he was from it was customary to stand up for one’s women.
4. I was gullible for believing that the threat was sincere.
5. he’d never beaten me up.

All this was true; but stopping short of hospitalizing me wasn’t my sole criterion for friendship. I remembered him primarily as a source of annoyance and hounding.

That’s ungrateful, he said.

He reminded me that he’d annoyed and hounded everyone, that roughness was part of his public persona but that he’d always been very nice to me outside of school, away from our classmates. I responded that I’d found him particularly annoying in those instances.

He mentioned the clubs he’d taken me and my friends to, the standout suits that he’d lent us. I had forgotten about these establishments. I had repressed Metropolis, that blue smoky room where cake-faced eastern European girls tore at each other over their shiny boyfriends. I remembered Superlights, that pseudo-1960s-USA-diner-bar with the small dance floor in the back and the coke den upstairs, a place that gave the awful impression that it wouldn’t require much reshuffling to convert into a functioning brothel. Sometimes we were joined by his friends: scruffy men with wide stances, fake tans and short hair gelled into pyramid constellations. They hung on his every word and bore the brunt of his invective. 

What was school like after I left?

He had gone into hiding after stabbing his way out of a brawl and injuring a high-ranking member of a large Allevite family. I had rejoiced at the time, something I was ashamed about now.

He described our last meeting in detail. It too had slipped my mind — a summer night in Schöneberg, between my freshman and sophomore college semesters. I walked into a subterranean slot machine hall, the kind of seedy, smoky, neon establishment that hasn’t been remodeled or aired out since the early 1980s, with my old friend Ilan, another of his victims. He was sitting by a slot machine, with a woman next to him, solemnly chucking in coins while she smoked and stoically observed the results.

I tapped him on the back. He didn’t recognize me at first, but then let off a small squeal and gave me the customary three pecks on the cheek. This was a very different S, sluggish and devoid of the frantic energy that had so long been his signature. "I’m going away. For a long, long time,” he said to me and I could tell he was afraid. He told me that he’d killed someone. 

To prevent an uncomfortable silence, he called over his female companion from the slot machine. “This is my wife, Serda,” he said, looking at her with grandfatherly pride. She acknowledged their nuptuals with a sober nod and shook my hand as if it was the ultimate inconvenience. 

I tried to rouse his spirits by framing prison as an opportunity to get his life in order. He shook his head at me with a painful smile, “I am never going to change, Leon.” In that moment I felt ashamed for despising him. After hushing Ilan away, he told me about his conviction, reconstructing the turn of events that lead to him speeding his car into a crowd of armed men. I had no choice, he said. You have no idea what sons of whores these guys are! They had ambushed him in an attempt to abscond with his merchandise.

The trial was a farce (the two parties had already settled in a private court overseen by local elders). No witnesses appeared. The prosecutor complained about the victim’s family. The evidence he presented was purely biological. He could only speculate why two Turkish residents of Berlin had encountered eight Lebanese residents of Berlin at 4 a.m. in an obscure town near the Polish border. Going by the public record, it was a random occurrence.

S chucked another coin into the slot machine.

What did you get?

Manslaughter: 8 years.

I promised him not to tell my friends and - for fear of being found out - I never did. I wasn’t the only one he’d told: the news made the rounds. Eventually I forgot where I’d heard it first.

S coughed into the phone. He took a long sip of something, coughed a couple more times, and cleared his throat:

You forgot about that night, didn’t you? I remember that kind of thing because I never ever did drugs. You smoked too much weed back then. You probably still do. 

You moved to America to remake yourself. I spoke to Ahmed, Ilan and them on the phone. Mesut even came to visit me here in Antalya. They all say that you never call.

He lit a cigarette. You and I were friends all right. You said that the last time we spoke, the night before I went into prison. You said: goodbye, my friend.

That was the kind of thing I said to everyone back then; such was my pretension after one year of college. But that wasn’t his fault. I’d treated him like an idiot. But he was smart. I told him I’d changed my mind about him.

You thought I was dumb? He huffed into the phone. How dumb were you to think that?

I agreed; I chuckled. He was right. I’d been childish.

But that’s how you are, he spat. I have seen enough of you to know. You all think you’re the smartest, but let me tell you something. Some of you are very clever. More than anyone maybe! But those of you who aren’t are really fucking dumb. And you my friend are fucking dumb. You couldn’t do anything for yourself back then! 

He steadied his breath for a moment and then laughed instructively.

I have to get back to work, I said.

He apologized, a first between us, and asked me whether I could, perhaps, please, deliver flowers to his wife next week while she visited a certain theatre. I suspected that he was trying to get around a restraining order, so I found him a delivery service. He thanked me and observed with some measure of contentment that I was still completely without honor.

Leon Dische Becker is a writer living in Brooklyn.

"You Need To Work Your Heart Out" - Tom Vek (mp3)

"Aroused" - Tom Vek (mp3)

In Which We Devote Our Life To Making The World Exist

photo by dasha gaian

Another Question of Viability

by JACKIE DELAMATRE

Samuel Feinstein was in The Office. Brown leather padded walls, an auction-purchased Heisman trophy, an actual banana tree sprouting bunches, a British flag floating from the ceiling, a group portrait of all the Ford models of 1983 with their signatures drifting somewhere below their waists, and hanging above the Roccoco desk, a portrait of George Washington in gilded frame because The Office’s owner had determined through a kind of PI for genetics that they were close relations (only eight generations removed).

“Please take a seat,” said the owner of The Office. 

Samuel took a seat.  The leather squeaked under his weight. 

“I have some questions for you about your viability.”

Viability. The vocabulary of death. He hadn’t worked at the best branding firm in the world for two years not to understand how one’s choice of words meant everything.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s this Transnistria account that’s bothering me.  You’ve had how long for this account, son?” asked The Office owner, Mr. Rohrersire, the original Brander himself, responsible for nearly every chain restaurant’s brand in the country, every hotel, for at least 95% of the graphics and words gracing every rest stop highway sign in the USofA, three-time winner of the McNally-Sommers First Prize in Commercial Diction and two-time sweeper of the Grand Prix in the International Capitalistic Logo Imagineering Contest. Mr. R squinted his eyes in as regal a way as he could.  He did not like dirtying his hands in this business of hiring and firing but here was an early protégée who he’d entrusted with a significant account, an emerging country no less, and he could not leave this to HR or even his underlings. He should’ve kept him in New Water Products (Individual, Bottled) where there was money to be made but not a nation hanging in the balance.

“Sir, I’ve had three months, one week, and four days.”

“That’s a long time, don’t you think?”

“I think so, yes, sir. That is a long time.”

“Especially considering, don’t you think, that this was a one-month project and at the one-month mark you assured me that it would be done within the two-month mark?” Mr. Rohrershire knew the answer.

(But did his protégée, Samuel Feinstein, Stanton graduate, secretly aspiring novelist, recently dumped by Tennis-playing Samantha ostensibly due to his extended travels in the outback of the former Soviet territory for his work at a branding firm no less, so embarrassing, to Samantha at least who wondered why, if he were going to devote his life to poverty, he hadn’t gone into the newspaper business like the other English majors, the other former James Rudolph Barnesians (an eponymy they’d earned through their hand-picked selection by the most notoriously mentor-happy professor-writer on campus) who were now racking up awards for war reporting not painstakingly sketching potential flags for disputed countries established solely to aide drug and human trafficking? He was helping these post-Soviet illegal organ traders (for that salary?) not busting them like all of their friends especially Nathaniel Westwood, Pulitzer Prize nominee who also by chance, liked to play Tennis.  She’d always thought he had potential, Samantha had said, blonde hair pendulum-swinging, the door closing that night, and now it was the only thing left playing in his head, even as Mr. Rohrershire his mentor, white hair from the top of his head, to his eyebrows, to his thick moustache down, discussed with him his Viability.

And how was his novel going, Samuel could ask himself. Another question of Viability. Another stagnating, deadline-pushing example of the way his potential had burst, running down the drains of his future.)

“Samuel,” said Mr. Rohrershire whose protégée would not cease staring into his hands and nodding his head, “You know that I like your work. Remember that first account, the tennis shoes? All you had was that measly B-list Cicely Swanson celebrity endorsement and you made those shoes the hottest thing since Vitamin Water (one of mine, of course).” Should he go over to him, Mr. R thought? Pat him on the back?  Should he say something kind?  No, he had to stay on track or he would never be able to look Eileen in HR in the too-close eyes again. “You have true talent, son, but there is not room in this company for a man who drags his feet.  Our work is too important to the functioning of this society and other emerging ones! I truly believe,” he was moving full force into one of his speeches, knee jerk, so much easier than new words, “that when the history books are written, it will become clear to many that one of the signs of the advanced state of our culture will be the excellence of our Branding. It will be considered in the same esteem as tools for the Neanderthals or theatre for the Greeks: a marker of the promise and inventiveness of mankind!”

Samuel Feinstein was feeling sick.

Mr. R punctuated the speech: “Is this, son, how you feel about Branding too?” 

This was the heart of the matter. Samuel hesitated, his first mistake. He was like this with words: too deliberate. He had written several drafts of his first attempt to ask a girl out, sophomore year of high school, Forestville, Indiana, Midwestern United States. That had been his primal experience with words.  Since that, the words had begun to move farther and farther away from him, representing things, ideas, thoughts he hadn’t even had or wanted to have.  This account, for instance. How could he continue to feel close to words when he was bending them to benefit the monstrous acts of a former-Soviet human-trafficking nation?  Words were ripping free of their ballast.

“Well, yes, sure, I guess, sir. But I’ve always thought technology might surpass language as the marker or perhaps a melding of technology and language.  Robotics maybe?  Voice automation? Have you heard of the Singularity?”

His death knell. “Samuel,” Mr. R gave him the serious look. “I’m afraid you no longer have any Viability with Rohrershire and Rohrershire, Inc.”

“No!” He was awake now. If nothing else, he needed the money. It wasn’t much but if he stuck with it, it would be. And if he wasn’t going to be a novelist, he at least needed a rising salary. “No, I mean, one more chance, Mr. Rohrershire.  I’ll get it right this time. I’m just going through a tough time.” Clichés, he knew Mr. R would not like.  He thought of being fired, sitting at home with his writing scraps downgraded now to post-it notes, scribbles in the dark so he couldn’t see them and judge sharply, and his memories of college glory – how his obsession with words had finally served him well. “My Viability is revivable. Mine was a momentary lapse in a long arch of a career that will bring much glory to R and R.  I have been researching historically successful national brandings, and I have almost found the formula for direct consumer indications.”

Mr. R perked up, his egg-white eyebrows raising his forehead. “You’re speaking my language now, boy.”

“Iceland, for instance. It has recently seen a meteoric rise in popularity. And why is that? A version of Celebrity Sponsorship in fact. Bjork has inadvertently become the poster girl. Music videos, exotic look, sexy ingénue.   And really Iceland and Greenland are the first instances of intentional touristic branding I’ve found.  Name the green country Iceland and you avoid the tourists and vice versa.” He was grasping at straws. He glanced at Mr. R.  Surprisingly, it seemed to be working.

“Uh huh, uh huh.”

“And we should really keep our eyes on Israel which is currently planning to center its entire tourist campaign around its Breakfasts.”

“No!”

“Shakshuka, hummus, buffets, yep. Targeting 18 to 25 year old American males. It’s the word on the international branding street.”

Mr. Rohrershire laughed. “That’s good stuff, son, good stuff. I see that you’re doing some background work there.” He fidgeted in his seat, thinking of Eileen in HR. Oh fuck her, the old windbag.  “Maybe this kind of job does require longer. OK, one more week, one more week, now that you have that background, that research.  But this is no dissertation! Don’t overdo it in the library stacks, son. Let’s buckle down now and get the job done, shall we?”

“We shall, Mr. R.  Mr. Rohrershire.”

Samuel Feinstein felt an infusion of adrenaline in his blood. A much-needed spike. A fight or flight response; he had fought for this job. Yes, he was going to make it. He left The Office, pawing first at the brown leather padding on the door, glancing back with a smile to see Mr. R glowing with paternal pride, a restoration of their previous relationship, a relationship Samuel Feinstein was guilty of pursuing with many men due to the (hackneyed psychology is often the truest) lack of father in his own life.

He opened the door and strode out into the fresh, energized air of the carpeted cubicle park. He would make this account legendary, one for the history books, especially if Mr. R was right, if Branding was the crown of our civilization. He felt newly-purposed.  Before he had been flailing about, searching for something to believe in, but of course, Mr. R was right. He was part of something greater than himself.

He walked to his own office, the kind of glassed-in affair only the middle-aged ladder-climbers had, feeling like he had gotten back on track.  He waved to his co-workers as if they were co-eds in his Dining Club watching him ascend a platform to accept an award.  He was ready to prove that his admittance to Stanton, his potential, had not been for naught.

Which was exactly when he caught a glimpse of Blonde.  Just a patch of golden hair.  He sucked in his breath.  His eyes followed the strands as they inched along above the cubicle walls. Samantha? He imagined it was true. Samantha would soon emerge and tell him she had faith: he would be famous some day. For what?  Maybe not for the novel, which he had lost interest in, it was true, ever since college when the Barnesian Cult and their secret meetings (the way you were tapped, the in-built friends) had held the appeal moreso than the actual writing. Maybe this time she would see the merit of this R and R mission: the branding of the world. It was like Mr. R always said: the world doesn’t exist until we brand it. He would devote his life to making the world exist. What better purpose could there be? And she would buy it. He waited for the owner of the hair to emerge from behind the cubicles. He held his breath. The reunion was imminent.

“Pastry?” came a voice.

But it was not to be. For it was only Tanya, the gum-smacking mother of four, making the rounds with the morning’s pastries. Dyed blonde hair no less – in charge of the Hair Dye accounts for over 20 years now.  And just like that, the much-needed spike, the purpose, switched its direction and began to shoot straight down into his vital organs, making him squirm from the pressure on his intestines.

Jackie Delamatre is a writer living in Brooklyn. Another Question of Viability is an excerpt from her forthcoming novel, entitled Neodynamix.

Selected images by Dasha Gaian.

"Here Comes The Snow" - Matthew Ryan (mp3)

"All Of That Means Nothing Now" - Matthew Ryan (mp3)

photo by dasha gaian