The Most Exclusive Cruise in the Apocalypse
Here’s the pitch.
Pretend you had to sell it, this life you’ve been given. Watch how quickly the term thyroid goiter becomes scenic esophageal overlook. Hypertension becomes a live demonstration of the heart’s amazing high-volume pumping capacities! You must take up embroidering the truth with the same fervor eligible debutantes used to tackle parlor needlework for bachelors: if nothing else, at least you’ll possess one marketable skill. Take me for example. I could offer you early morning anxiety attacks or, if you prefer, passions that unfailingly rouse you from sleep into the horizon of opportunities cresting each new dawn. Necessity makes salesmen of us all. So your bathwater phosphoresces? So your sky wraps its smog fingers around the throats of sparrows, pigeons, starlings to drop them on the sidewalk? Miracles by any other measure! What changes when the year of unemployment becomes the era of unlicensed afternoons from which the very milk of freedom is harvested for nourishment? Would you be more interested in plantar warts or flesh-made pearls? A friend’s betrayal or the dramatic unmasking of a villain that restores the currency of loyalty among companions? You’ve got to practice. You’ve got to sell it, again and again and again and again. This is how you buy it back every time. You buy it back.
Here I go, pitching again.
A man walks into a boatyard and buys enough rusted chaff to build himself an ark, constructed board by board from blueprints but with updates, you understand, narrow enough to squeeze through culverts connecting the Los Angeles River, with enough dystopian flare to feel acceptably ironic in polite company, a little Mad Max, a little Matrix, all the party guests wondering whether he had the whole thing done by 3D printer until— bam. Rapture. Bam. Floodwater. Bam. Everyone with their champagne flutes begging for entry. And here come headaches of a new and different kind. Let’s say the man is me, the ark is mine, my partner and I, suddenly, bouncers to the most exclusive cruise in the apocalypse. Just don’t ask her to guard the door. Did you know she once wept on a city street corner for the palm tree planted alone in its plot? The one leaning, almost as though it were lonely or excluded, toward the adjacent yard overflowing with trees, the whole group of them rubbing their leaves, just flaunting it— that togetherness. This is why a retinal scan will be required to board. Better to mechanize entry to the ever-after. If that sounds cold you’ve never run interference between the person you love and the person they become when overfilling the coffee filter with grounds, clogging the garbage disposal with unfinished rice, stuffing the trunk with clothes for donation, their shirtsleeves dangling dangerously close to the tire well. Leave it to her, the ship would be straining with freight. Some café barista caught in the rain. A dozen stray cats. Every dog in the pound. The guy next door tuning his electric blue Gibson at two in the morning. The Gibson. Rats up from the sewer. A park full of pigeons. Succulents saved from their waterlogged window box. Perhaps I’ve been too stingy with my list, too recalcitrant with my heart, its porch light left dark after hours. Perhaps she understands what I pretend not to know: we’re sailing into an ending. When the time finally arrives, we’ll trust the rickety seams of our craft. I’ll open the doors. She’ll place her hand on the wheel to steer.