Authors: David Gilbert
"Jesus, how long has it been?"
"I don't know, a couple of minutes."
"Some lungs he must have."
Chester pats his left pocket and feels a brief panic at not feeling his house keys, that they are lost somewhere, then he
remembers that they're in his duffel bag, hidden in an unused money belt with his wallet and passport and traveler's checks.
He snorts at himself.
"What?" asks Deb.
"Nothing. Thought I'd been pickpocketed or something. Like this is Times Square or something."
"Give it time. All these people. Shoulder to shoulder."
"Well," Chester says, "we're here as well."
"True. Pangaea busted no more. Where is he?"
"Down there."
"Aquaman."
"Or a drowned man."
"How long has it been now?"
Chester checked his watch. "About four minutes. Maybe."
"Should we worry, should we get Edmund?"
"That son of a bitch."
Debbie laughs. "That bastard."
"Maybe a shark got him."
"Or he's caught in kelp. I've seen that before. In a movie. Are you worried?"
Chester shakes his head. "Not yet. Not really." He cups his hands around his eyes. "Should I try to be a hero?"
"I don't know."
"Now is the summer of our discontent," says Chester.
"Where the hell did that come from?"
"I have no idea. I don't even know what it means." Chester kicks off his sandals. "Okay, maybe this is serious."
"You going in?" Debbie asks, her voice noncommittal.
"Uhm, probably not."
Then, about twenty yards from starboard-side, a shape surfaces, a bump in the blue, a hand waving, the glass of the mask glinting
the sun like a Cyclopean monster. "Benito! Benito!" he cries, his breathy voice finding the long
h
in the pronunciation.
Chester and Debbie both say, "There he is," and they both point at the same time, codiscoverers of a new species of man.
Miguel swims to the boat, still crying, "Benito! Benito!"
"What does that mean?"
"Don't know."
"Is it good?"
Chester once again says, "I don't know."
Miguel grabs ahold of the ladder and climbs up onto the deck. Trailing behind him, in the reticule, is a large green thing,
about a foot and a half long, as thick as a loaf of moldy bread, the skin plagued with warty growths. Miguel peels off his
mask; a red oval remains behind, a dent of the pressure felt below. "Trepang," he says, digging his hands into the mesh and
bringing out this underwater slug. He holds it forth like an offering. "Beche-de-mer," he tells them.
Debbie says, "Wow," as if complementing a harelipped baby. Chester nods his approval.
"Lick it," says Miguel, smiling, and just in case he hasn't been understood, he pantomimes the action.
"Lick it?"
"Si. Lick." Miguel steps forward so that now the sea cucumber is right in front of them. On one end is a mossy beard of tentacles.
"Special," he confides.
Chester makes a face of dissent. "I don't know about that. No. No," he says with a Spanish accent.
But Debbie wants to partake, seeing this mystery in front of her, this living creature that is not beautiful and not complex
and not worthy to be loved by sightseers. Instead, it is part of the freak show of nature, kept in the tent where barkers
dare you to proceed. The truly ugly are saved from the judgments of good or bad; only the deformed are free. Debbie leans
forward, eyes closed, tongue out. She moves closer, waiting to make contact with the awfulness, and when she does, the skin
waters her mouth. She runs her tongue along the soft bumpy exterior. A hint of salt, but mostly a tartness which tingles the
taste buds and seems to open them to such a degree that they turn her mouth inside out en route to turning her whole body
inside out. "Hmmmm," she says.
"What's it like, honey?"
She opens her eyes, the cucumber disfiguring her peripheral vision. She stares off to the side at Chester, at his wide face
and his boxer's grin, at his dreams of family writ large in the sky above his head. Such a solid man. Dutiful and consistent.
Understanding. Nowhere near the grotesque, but still lovely.
Miguel turns to Chester. "Try," he says. "Por favor."
Chester goes over to Debbie's side. "Here I come," he says, and he puts his arm around her waist and bends down, his tongue
tensed and ready. But he stops. "What does this do?" he asks Miguel.
"You'll see."
"Nothing bad, right?"
"No. Benito, Mestizo. Benito, Mestizo."
"Okay." The spongy mass is throbbing, searching for the water in the air. Disgusting. An animated vegetable, crudites with
a digestive tract, salad with teeth. But Chester begins sampling anyway, wanting to join his wife, to participate in the unknown,
in the uncertain. He starts with just the tip of his tongue but soon he's lapping with the entire length of his median lingual
sulcus.
"Mmmmm," Chester hums. And something rises in Debbie, a pheromonal phoneme in the "Mmmmm," a vibration and resonance that
goes beyond the purely linguistic and pokes into prosody, a meaning, a connection, a rhythmic impulse for its own ends. A
human art. It's like her husband is Rock Hudson—a thing, a place, a person.
When one side is finished, Miguel turns the sea cucumber like a father feeding his children.
In his bunk, the air heavy with funky heat, Edmund dreams not the dream about his family—that's the bad dream—but the dream
about the fifteen-year-old girls, the good dream, where he is guiding Clarissa or Meaghan or Vanessa or Stacey or Penny to
his cabin on
The Princess Beagle,
and they are holding hands, his index finger hooked within her rope bracelet, her shoulder bumping against his shoulder in
charged incidental contact, and she is slightly drunk from illicit Tequila Sunrises and nicely scented from overenthused disco
dancing, while he's hoping that his erection isn't protuberating khaki; they stop in front of his door; he digs for keys;
she slumps against the wall . . . Edmund normally wakes up at this moment, wakes up before he gets into his cabin, and when
he wakes up he usually has a concrete hard-on. Oftentimes, like right now, he'll quickly masturbate so as to relieve this
lingering memory, stroking himself, continuing the abbreviated dream: the waltz to the bed, the undressing, the thrill of
seeing a naked body for the first time, the tits, the pussy—those words, animal-related, now turned into adolescent slang.
And as he imagines tan lines he hears a noise on the other side of the wall, a moaning male and female, speaking muffled phrases
of "Fuck my cunt" and "Suck my cock," classic porno dialogue, and Edmund wonders if he might still be dreaming, if in the
next room he's finally making love with one of these schoolgirls, finishing the dream yet not able to participate, hearing
what sounds like frantic birds caught in a room, banging walls, dashing their brains in search of the passage that brought
them here, the wood hollering as if it cannot hold much longer, as if every second might be the last second before whatever
it is comes rushing through.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much thanks to Gillian Blake, Alexa
Brandenberg, Bill Clegg, Charis Conn,
Rhian Ellis, Nan Graham, Andy Greer, Mark
Holthoff, Charlie Howard, John Lennon,
Cressida Leyshon, Jeff Odefey, Kathy
Robbins, Ed Skoog, and especially
Susie Leness.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
David Gilbert is the author of the novel
The Normals.
His stories have appeared in the
New Yorker, Harper's, GQ,
and
Bomb.
He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
Linotype Garamond Three is based on seventeenth-century copies of Claude Garamond's types cut by Jean Jannon. This version
was designed for American Type Founders in 1917 by Morris Fuller Benton and Thomas Maitland Cleland, and adapted for mechanical
composition by Linotype in 1936.