geometry and other past failures
Andrew Bertaina
I had hit rock bottom, down where the fish all have lanterns on their heads like coal miners, far below where even the largest whales can go. I was thirty-two, living with an ornery cat, working at a small bookstore at the edge of a narrow beach town where people took their children to mini-golf, eat ice cream and run from the small Atlantic waves before eating overpriced meals in frigid restaurants blasting AC so hard you could practically see the earth warming. A place where thinking hadn’t gone to die, so much as it had never taken root.
I worked at a bookstore just outside the city sprawl, shepherding crates of beach reads in and out of the store according to the whims of a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet dictated everything I did, and it was based on a computer program in an office building far far away. It was not the sort of life I had dreamed of, but I suppose that didn’t make my life unique. Disappointment was, like gut bacteria, omnipresent.
The bookstore was managed by an elderly woman, Marge, who wore spectacles and who probably had political views I’d find offensive. But then, I was rather taken with her. She treated me like a wayward son, asking after my interests and carefully monitoring my mental health, encouraging me to drink more water or love more carefully. She was the sort of parent I’d always hoped my properly liberal parents could have been. This sort of human complexity cropped up all the time and didn’t bother me in the slightest.
ANDREW BERTAINA 107
Most days, I’d stock books in the morning, and then spend time reading in the afternoon, a mixture of classics—Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment—and leftist magazines—Jacobin, Dissent that articulated our future utopia and imminent downfall. I was in favor of both. Almost no one ever asked me about the books I read. I’d prepared a nice treatise about reading Natasha and Andrew in War and Peace through a contemporary lens of romance, but no one, save a few professors in my undergraduate program, and certainly not beer swilling beach enthusiasts, was interested in that line of thought.
Every once in a while, probably to punish me for holding out hope, a gawky teen would appear and ask what sort of book I’d recommend. A wild bloom of flowers would burst forth in my heart, but I’d try to play it cool, slowly walking toward the laughably small section labeled literature. There, I’d point to a book or two, The Brothers Karamazov, Beloved, briefly extolling their virtues before letting the teens browse.
Then I’d stand at the counter, wondering which book they’d choose from the pitiable section, holding out hope they might choose two. However, as animals left to graze without fences, the teens would wander out of the literature section, and they’d come back to the counter, holding a thriller about a series of violent murders in Boston, and a little part of me would slip off into the ocean, down into that deep trench.
I get it, I’d say. The book I showed you is a pain to fit into a beach bag.
The truth is, I couldn’t blame them. By that point in my life I’d learned not to trust my instincts for what makes people happy anyway either.
Did you sell any of your beloved Russians today? Marge would ask.
Not today, Marge. The plebians are out in force this summer.
You’re too young to be so glum, Marge answered. The look of concern in her eyes nearly unmade me. Why did my boss care so much more about my well-being than my family? Tears welled, and the slender edifice of self almost gave way, and I excused myself to find reinforcement.
In the distance, waves curled and ran into the small coastline, removing grains of sand. For years, people had warned a big storm could wash the city away. And each year, the storms would take away bits of the beach, carrying pieces of the barrier island to the ocean floor as a mother retrieving children. But then the city would send trucks inland, and they’d haul back miles of sand, reinforcing the slender edifice to keep the island intact.
I texted my best friend, asking if she wanted to get coffee. Above, sea gulls circled, a funeral procession in the sky. Bits of trash blew along the sandy beach, glimmering in the light before disappearing into the crash of waves. Last week, a wave of jellyfish had appeared, chasing everyone from the water, a bloom of stinging white monsters, gliding into shore. Everyone said the warming was hospitable to the jellyfish, that one day, the ocean would be full of mindless stinging ghosts.
In truth, there wasn’t really anything special about me, just another disaffected person in late-stage capitalism, eking out a living between student loan debt and the crushing loneliness of contemporary existence. I felt comfortable with this knowledge and began to walk the hot streets towards the coffee place to meet my friend and the day was so warm, I could smell the tar on the streets beginning to melt. I wondered what jellyfish dreamed.
Christine arrived before I did, and I was able to observe her as she sipped coffee and looked into space, the angular nose, her brown-blond hair tied back in a ponytail. We’d remained friends
after college, a rarity for me, in part because I couldn’t afford a therapist, but mainly because she’d been dating my friend during college when he’d been killed in a car crash. In the aftermath, she and I had bonded, spending several evenings drinking wine coolers and telling each other stories about him, the jokes we’d loved, his high-pitched giggle, the way he was always touching people on the shoulder, how he couldn’t help himself when he liked you and how we couldn’t help loving him in return.
She and I had stayed in touch through the occasional email as we both moved between cities, chasing jobs or relationships until we’d both miraculously landed in the same place a year ago. But we were there for different reasons. For me, the city was a terminus, an acknowledgement that whatever I’d been searching for wasn’t to be found. While everyone headed West to find something new, my station on the East coast was an admission the journey was over.
For Christine, her work at a small environmental organization, seeking to keep the bay clean, was a brief stopover as she waited for her governmental clearance. She was headed further east, trying to make the world a better place by studying cities in Eastern Europe. I was biding time until my death, thinking of clever things to put on my tombstone.
In recent weeks, something had shifted between us, as currents coming together in the ocean. I found myself hanging on her every word, noticing small things I’d missed before, a spray of freckles on the bridge of her nose, and the way her face was slightly asymmetrical. And then, lying in bed, I found myself waiting for her text, an anxiousness I’d never felt before.
However, I’d learned to distrust these sorts of feelings, which I’d discovered, as an adult, could arise for nearly anyone without rhyme or reason. I’d read somewhere it had to do with scent, a particular smell that drew us to our mates as bees to nectar. Though I wondered how I’d missed her scent until now. What I
knew is I’d never found love to be useful. When it ebbed, all you were left with was wreckage. Most of the movies I’d watched as an impressionable teen had hinged on this precise moment, when love was finally made manifest in a friendship, when things suddenly shifted.
My life was ruled by indecisiveness, by almosts. If I revealed my feelings to Christine, and she didn’t reciprocate them, the imaginary life I’d been constructing with her would crumble. The same was true at the bookstore. I imagined if I was ever in charge, I’d convert the literature section into something that would divert the tourist energy into meaningful thought, and I knew if I ever left this backwater of a city, things would be better. And I clung to these ideas as barnacles to rock, all of these imagined futures, while the current of life pushed me along.
Christine noticed me and her face lifted in a smile.
How’s saving the world today, I asked.
More or less the same as yesterday, but most things have gotten a little worse, she answered.
Story of my life, I said.
She took a sip of her coffee and then a long draught from the Nalgene bottle she carried everywhere.
You know those have small plastics in them that leach into the water?
Where did you read that? I forget.
Sounds like a reliable source, she answered. The sky was white hot, and the clouds were light and ineffectual. A plane flew overhead with a banner behind it trying to sell auto insurance. Moments later, another plane passed through the sky, with another banner, wishing Jennifer a happy birthday.
Why don’t you ever get a plane with a banner for my birthday? I asked.
ANDREW BERTAINA 111
I respect you too much for that, she said. Now why did you want to get coffee?
I looked back in mock offense. What do you mean? I just wanted to see you.
She smiled. We both knew it wasn’t true. What I wanted was someone to listen to me, to help me sort through the problems in my life. I called her when I was in need, and she almost always said yes out of a sense of obligation, of how I’d been there after her boyfriend’s death. I never listened to her advice, but I liked to hear it, to know some other version of me, Christine’s version, could get it together and live well.
She idly turned the coffee in her mug, which she brought everywhere to avoid contributing more plastic to the mass that floated around in the ocean, larger than a thousand blue whales if any of them were left.
Sincerity pains me, I said.
I know, she answered, but try.
I told her I felt like I didn’t belong to the world lately as though I was almost watching myself live my life. I said it could be any number of things: my job, my tepid love life, climate change. Who knew? Sometimes it was hard to quantify a self against the disaster of life.
Mmm . . . hmmm.
I sat back in my chair and mused. She said I was famous for my musing.
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