YOUNG RADER

A Bit of Green Apple, a Bit of Rotten Meat

I was sent to Germany for eight weeks, but on my seventh day, at the ruins of yet another castle, I sat on a rusty nail. It impaled my rump, as if it had been destined to do so, and thus I learned to honor the resolve of things honed with time. A salvo of bacteria puzzled the muscles of my jaw and stomach. Horse blood plasma was driven deep into a bundle of my body’s tissue. But the nail had done its damage. I was sent back home.

In Warnemünde, I boarded the newly built Sea Comet. It would be sixteen days before the cruise ship reached its assigned departure port in Miami. I understood this long journey to be a part of my punishment, even though I really wasn’t to blame. It’s not like I went searching for that nail. There weren’t many other passengers on board, and so I knew my windowless stateroom, tucked deep in the ship’s dank innards, was specifically chosen by my father, who’d received the news of my unanticipated homecoming with weary disgruntlement.

Anchors aweigh!

The muscles of my jaw began their slow and tender thaw. Variable pressures rolled through my body. Vested crew members pushed their linen carts up and down the long, carpeted hallways, and even though the ship was nearly empty, they vacuumed these hallways every day at noon. I roamed about, bored out of my mind. I drank tomato juice through a curvy glass straw and munched on pretzel sticks. The bartender, Chico Martín, was very nice. He had a weak bladder, or maybe it was a symptom of his own boredom, but he always excused himself to use the bathroom. He was a Montevideano and wanted to be an esports data scientist and live in Madrid, or Rome. I think we both knew this would never happen. He’d position several plastic olive swords on the bar and challenge me to move just one or two to make a new shape, like a star or a barracuda swimming in the reverse direction. Whenever I solved his brain-teasers, Chico Martín would rest his elbows on the bar and tell me I was a freaking genius.

One day he handed me a yellow mechanical pencil and a pad of paper and said I should sketch something, like the cocktail cherries. I didn’t want to. It felt too much like a school assignment. I had another idea. I slid off my stool. I wanted to learn how to set my own table at mealtimes. The impulse felt necessary. In a small, unused dining room abutting the bar, I plucked everything off a round table and reset it over and over again until I could do it with my eyes shut, leaving no trace of my deliberations behind on the silver, porcelain, or glass. My flair for flawless table setting scared me into thinking that maybe I was a ghost, my body stuffed into an ugly German coffin in the ship’s hold. I’d never accomplished anything before with such perfection, and so naturally, I thought the nail must have killed me. In a panic, I reached out and yanked the tablecloth away without stirring anything but the air around me. Chico Martín applauded.

Every couple of days, the ship moved into a new time zone, reaping an hour. I imagined time to be like an unbothered cat, stretching in a splash of sun. I lurched through the hallways, holding my arms straight out at my sides, breathing in air rank with the whiff of sweat trapped in the pits of an old, beloved t-shirt. I wondered why brand-new things sometimes smelled like old stuff. I appraised the paintings on the walls, their impressionistic contours, cocking my head this way and that like I’d seen people in museums do. I didn’t like the paintings. They were ugly at a distance, and even uglier up close, and for some reason, this put me in a really destructive mood.

Doors detected my advance and slid open. Outside, long slips of steam spewed out the ship’s stack. I rocked a bit at the railing as I observed the moonlight’s outspread static on the water. I thought about what it might be like to be stranded out in the ocean, treading water and waving helplessly at the ship as sea creatures with razor-sharp teeth circled my feet. It gave me the creeps. Sometimes I saw lightning in the distance. The sound of thunder never reached my ears. I thought about the place where this lightning might have struck. Did a small patch of water vaporize with a hiss?

One morning, having just tossed back a sour glass of orange juice, I spotted another guest, a woman whose leonine hair reminded me of my mother’s, on the promenade deck. I stood behind a potted plant with giant leaves like elephant ears. She braced an elbow and a bony hip on a stationary telescope as she shook out the contents of her purse over the side of the ship. Loose change skipped across the deck. Bits of paper spun into her hair. Then a hairbrush, a wallet, and a pair of eyeglasses toppled out. The woman must not have known the eyeglasses were in there. She snapped out her hands to try and pluck them out of the air and watched bitterly as the water swallowed them up.

***

I was crossing the ship’s heart, its atrium, when I heard the tinkling of piano keys. I recognized the woman at the baby grand—that easily combustible hair like my mother’s. She paused when her hands were sliced in half by my shadow. I asked her to please continue.

She threw me a penetrating glance. “It’s you,” she said.

I peeked over my shoulder, but no one was there. I turned back to her. Up close, she looked like someone who owned and harbored a deep affection for a skittish mare. I generally didn’t like these sorts of people, but I thought I’d give her a chance. I said the piano reminded me of home.

“Are you traveling by yourself?”

I nodded.

“Hm.” She tilted her head, thinking.

I asked her again to continue playing, deciding that if she didn’t, I’d do something unpleasant, like snap the key lid down onto her hands.

“Fine, I’ll continue, on the condition you show me your room.”

Interesting, I thought. There was something I liked about her right away, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

She straightened her back and launched into a playful melody with a zippy ease that demonstrated her virtuosity. The pearl buttons of her deep-purple cuffs danced deliciously. At the song’s end, she said, “Tell me something unusual about yourself.”

It had been a long time since someone surprised me. I began to tell her what I’d done to be sent to Germany when she cut me off. “Why are you speaking like potato shoots are growing on your gums?”

I told her about the nail.

She took in a big, steadying breath, and smiled sadly. “I see.” Then she told me a long story, something about barley-cakes in Norway, and then she asked to see my stateroom. When I unlocked my door, she poked her head in, made a funny face, and ordered me to pack up my bags. I obeyed without question, something I did only on rare occasions, and hauled my suitcases to her grand suite on deck sixteen, where there was an extra bedroom with a twin bed and a spare bathroom with little white seahorse-valves.

I set my things down. I was surprised by how lived-in it all looked. The black-and-white photographs of pyramids and tranquil marble statues tacked to the walls, the daisy-pressed paper spread over the table, the cloth-bound books and magazines stacked haphazardly on the mini-bar, a line of pink and purple and green and blue crystals and gemstones standing on a wall shelf, the wicker ottoman and the purple knitted throw pillows on the armchairs. It was as though the ship had built itself around her, like how a tree slowly engulfs an object that’s in its way.

“Stay,” she said, and so I did.

***

Every morning, we sat out on the balcony and Mrs. Morlock handed me an issue of Penumbra, a magazine dedicated to Earth mysteries. She’d packed an entire leather suitcase of them. I liked their robust cardstock covers with their striking block-printed patterns and crisp letters. Flipping through the pages vented the smell of fresh paint whisked in a can. A bit of green apple, a bit of rotten meat. She had me read out loud to help slacken the muscles of my jaw, but I knew it was really because she’d lost her eyeglasses.

I read about ley lines, alien spaceships, numerology, and the incarnation of pernicious spirits intent on hindering humanity’s evolution. She listened in quiet rapture. These things didn’t interest me, but I was happy to be of service to Mrs. Morlock. I paused when my jaw pained me, pressing lightly around my chin, and whenever I did so, Mrs. Morlock crossed her legs at the ankles, straightened up, and told me things.

She took me seriously. She spoke to me as an equal, and because of that, I revered her. I found her much more interesting than any other adult I’d ever met, even Chico Martín. Sometimes I made a pretense of suffering pain, when in actuality I just wanted to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Morlock’s face and listen to her speak. She was usually bathed in a bright crinkle of sunlight, and her soft expression filled me with joy.

She told me she was alone. By choice. She preferred it that way. People were an inconvenience, and unreasonably complicated. But not me. I wasn’t yet a person. I was still a child. Well, a youth. Children were usually repulsive things, but I wasn’t like that, she clarified. This was because I, too, was all alone. A loner. To my surprise, she didn’t tell me I was mature for my age like most other adults did. She didn’t say I was precocious. At first, this wounded my pride, but then I experienced a sense of relief. I knew deep down I wasn’t any cleverer than others my age. It was only something assumed of me to better understand my bad behavior. My ideas were never well thought out or premeditated. Sometimes, I was just plain lucky, or, as was the case with the nail, unlucky. I liked being thought of as smart. It was a positive attribute, and I didn’t have too many of those. But I couldn’t pull the wool over Mrs. Morlock’s eyes. She saw who I really was, and because of this, I was able to be myself around her.

Anyways. Money, she told me, was not an issue. She was going to remain on the Sea Comet until Campeche, and then she would disembark and visit the Mayan pyramids and see where it all led her. She didn’t like plans. A plan was a sort of rule, and weren’t rules meant to be broken? All she had ever done was break rule after rule. I wanted to be just like her, and what she wanted was to be moved by something magnificent, by something that had no name. She wanted to feel what couldn’t be described in words. Heavens no, she said when I asked, it has nothing to do with religion. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but hoped, almost achingly, I could be there when it happened.

***

One morning, the empty purse beside the coffee capsules was blazing vaporously in the sun. It was like a sad, punctured organ, and it entranced me. I was slow to react when Mrs. Morlock asked me to continue reading about the narrowband radio signal detected by the Big Ear. I set the magazine down.

We sat in silence for a moment before she said, “I noticed you watching me that day.”

I looked directly at her.

“Studying me emptying out my purse,” she said conspiratorially, “just as I have been studying you.”

I asked her what she meant.

“You ought not to poke holes in canvases, no matter how unoriginal you deem the paintings to be. It’s bad manners. And with a mechanical pencil!”

Though I bristled inwardly, I calmly shook my head.

“Playing dumb is boring,” she said coolly. “Tell me, why do you sprinkle the hallways with all that pink salt?”

I told her I liked the sound it made in the vacuum’s brush roll and hose pipe, and that the pink salt variety was best because of its size and hardness.

She threw back her head and laughed.

I tried to laugh too, but it hurt to open my mouth like that.

She stopped abruptly and placed an alarmingly warm hand on my knee. “Standing at the railing at night as you do, it’s a bad idea when you’re so drunk.”

I told her that I had never before in my life been drunk.

She crossed her arms and leaned back. “You, at the bar, with your tomato juice. It’s almost endearing,” she said. “But when that handsome bartender unties his apron and dashes away to the toilet, leaving you all alone, you know exactly where he stows the Screaming Eagle. Four thousand dollars a bottle, but doubtless more. Poor guy. You’ll get him sacked.”

I felt bad about Chico Martín, and hoped he wouldn’t get fired. I hadn’t been to the bar since meeting Mrs. Morlock, and I wondered what he was doing in that very exact moment. I told her I’d only taken two bottles, and that I didn’t know they were so expensive. She held my gaze. I told her the real number and she gasped in delight.

“Is it even true, the story about the nail?”

With some indignity, I stood up, turned around, and bared my backside.

***

The Sea Comet, Mrs. Morlock reported, was going to cross the Bermuda Triangle soon, and she was ready.

I asked her what she was ready for.

She gaped at me as though I’d asked an incredibly stupid question. “What is a knife ready for?”

I didn’t know.

“Whatever the hand that wields it wishes it to cut.”

I kept the rest of my questions to myself, feeling ashamed and foolish. Mrs. Morlock rambled on about the vibrating elements of her soul, but all I could think about was not letting her down. The sun came in and illuminated her crystals and gemstones. They looked furious and vicious, and I wanted to knock them all down. But I knew I couldn’t do such a thing because it’d probably upset Mrs. Morlock, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted her to like me. I wanted our friendship to continue on forever.

She was the only person in the world who hadn’t condemned my past impulses, and I hoped this was perhaps because she saw a bit of herself in me. We couldn’t deny our curious bond, but acknowledged it with the chary silence of someone struck with the surprising topography of a face that had been imagined differently when viewed in profile.

Sometimes, I was tempted to poke the pliant, pale underside of my arm with the tip of a steak knife just to see if her arm would jolt in unanticipated pain, as I suspected it might.

***

When, a day or two later, the ship entered the Bermuda Triangle, some delicious expectation spread through Mrs. Morlock. “I can’t possibly eat,” she said, shoving her plate of seared scallops away. And later, she declined my offer to read to her from an issue of Penumbra. She brought out an expensive-looking lavender shawl with fringed edges, draped it over her shoulders, and sat shivering on her balcony all afternoon, kneading something like a tangerine in her hands.

Towards evening, we dressed up and went down to the main deck and stood under a cool drizzle, our lips unstuck but silent. We stood like that for about thirty minutes. I was getting cold and my polo shirt, which my mother must have packed, smelled musty. Finally, I asked Mrs. Morlock if she was expecting something. “Shh,” she said. Her face was oddly blank. “Shh, shh, shh.”

The water lustered strangely.

My stomach was uneasy.

There was—somewhere—a strange splattering sound, one we understood wasn’t rain striking the whitecaps. I grew frightened and was just about to tell Mrs. Morlock that maybe it was a good idea to go back inside when she pointed to a nearby sweep of ocean poppling seditiously like boiling water. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. She put an arm around me and even though it was the first time she’d held me like that and I should have been happy, I felt awkward and trapped. I asked what could be thrashing about in the water, but even Mrs. Morlock couldn’t say. Her fingers were at her mouth and her voice reminded me of a dry, brown sprig. I tried to gently pull away, to step back towards the automatic doors, but she held me fast with a surprising strength. The shape in the water billowed out and moved closer to the ship, and soon we were encircled in an unearthly churn of eels.

Thousands upon thousands, perhaps even millions, of eels. Their slippery, slithering bodies slapped and squelched together, and to our horror, dozens of the more intrepid ones began to undulate up the ship’s hull. Their momentum sent them over the railing. They whacked onto deck and squiggled about in all directions, knocking into the sun loungers, and zigzagging into the pool. All I could think was that I didn’t want to die and that I wanted to make it back home and sleep in my own bed and sit at the kitchen table and do my homework and maybe even practice the piano. I started to scream and wave my hands hysterically in front of my face like I’d seen people do in horror movies. I’d always thought it was so stupid and unrealistic to respond to fear like that, but as the eels assailed us, I understood there to be no truer form of expression. Mrs. Morlock’s arm fell away from me. She staggered backwards against the railing.

Then I saw an eel, soaring high above all the others, wriggling like a wild smudge in the air. Mrs. Morlock snapped her head back to track its course. She let out an untamed scream, and that’s when the eel plunged right down into her throat.

***

I helped Mrs. Morlock to her bed, and set a glass of sparkling water on the nightstand. I was terrified and unsure of what I’d actually seen. I couldn’t fall asleep, so I sat outside her bedroom door, which I’d left open a crack, and concentrated on the diamonds patterned in the carpet. Every now and then, I heard a soft groan, but couldn’t be sure if it was coming from me or from her. “Nils,” she called out occasionally. It was a name I’d never heard mentioned before.

The vacuum was whirring in the hallway when I finally found the courage to stand up and slide open Mrs. Morlock’s door. The smell of onions and fecund fields cuffed me, and I was surprised to see her propped up, her moist and brutal face nested in a giant pillow, and the naked soles of her feet sticking out from beneath the puffy duvet. It embarrassed me to glimpse all her toes, and to notice how much longer and thinner her second toes were than the rest, and so I pointed my eyes to the painting above her bed. Her stomach rumbled terrifically, but I kept my eyes trained on the painting. I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it before. I paused on the cat’s yellow-green eyes before moving on to the jug of milk and then sweeping across the wheel of cheese until I hit the gilt frame. Mrs. Morlock assured me she was fine. “Take a walk,” she said weakly. “I need to rest.” I noticed she hadn’t touched the water I’d set out for her. “Please,” she said calmly.

It was sunny and warm and the ocean sparkled so brightly it made my eyes ache. The decks had been swept clean with wide dust mops. There was no sign of the eels. Everything was so ordinary it gave me a feeling of profound terror. I sat in a deep, bowl-shaped armchair and quickly ate a cheese sandwich and two slices of pineapple before I fell asleep. The sky was a dusky pink when I woke up. I wriggled against the white cushion, sticky with sweat and a tingling numbness in my left arm. My eyes felt like they needed a moment to rise to the surface. I heard some people laughing and talking and imagined a candle flame stretching up tall, taller than me, into a bright and quivering point. That’s what happiness sounds like, I thought, and then it was as if someone pulled the curtains inside my brain apart and pushed open a big window. I looked out that window. The flame was snuffed out and, in its place, stood Mrs. Morlock.

***

Mrs. Morlock rolled out of her ponging bedsheets and took a long, hot shower. She wore earrings that looked like little brown frying pans. Her hair was restrained in pins and she’d rouged her cheeks brain pink. She looked so completely different, I almost burst into laughter. I thought about broaching the subject of the eels and asking if she’d actually swallowed one, but the whole thing seemed too crazy and reprehensible to ever mention again, and so instead, I squeezed a strange little wavy sound from my lips. “Tonight,” she said, “is our last evening together. So, let’s dine like royalty.” She took my arm, and we sauntered down the hallway.

Food, an astonishing amount, was set on the largest table in the dining room. There were so many different sounds and smells and colors and shapes and textures, I could hardly take it all in. Mrs. Morlock demanded our glasses be topped up to their brims. She sat on the other end of the table with her head tilted a little to the side. “Tomorrow, we part ways,” she said, her eyelids still a bit swollen. “It’s been nice spending all this time together. I feel that I’ve truly met a like-minded individual.”

I felt a surge of happiness and pride at her words. Every particle of my body sent out a little shower of sparks. It was almost intolerable. I found myself wanting to stand up and run around the table ten times, but instead, I thanked her shyly and lifted up my fork.

“Wait,” Mrs. Morlock said. “Before we dig in, show me that you’re ready.”

I asked her what she meant.

She laughed, but not joyfully. I pictured her bare feet, her long second toes, and the millions of tiny sparks in my body were extinguished. “Show me that you’re ready to leave.”

I asked her how, suddenly aware of the dining room’s cold air falling on my arms. “Pull the tablecloth away.”

It was such a strange thing to ask and I didn’t see how it would prove anything. I cleared my throat and told her politely that I didn’t want to. And besides, I wanted to add, it was an absurd thing to do, given the size of the table and the extraordinary tableau of dishes and bowls and ramekins that crackled and steamed between us.

She set her lips in a way I’d seen before on other adults. It told me she was disappointed, nettled, offended, or all three. “I’ve seen you do it before.” I’d only done it because I believed it was just me and Chico Martín, but I didn’t dare tell her that. “Show me,” Mrs. Morlock said. Maybe, I thought, the eel inside her was governing her jaw with its jaw, its slippery body protracted long through her guts and slowly swilling up her soul. “Now!” she shouted, bringing her fists down onto the table and drawing an elderly couple, dismantling canapés in their mouths, to turn in our direction.

I stood up and was surprised to find that on my feet, all the different dishes smelled like one single thing: French fries. This realization made me feel sick. Everything inside my body, all my organs and bones, bucked and shivered. I wanted to hide in the German coffin I’d imagined before. I tried one last time to convince Mrs. Morlock that we should carry on with dinner, but she only shook her head, and so I reluctantly took up a corner of the tablecloth.

I closed my eyes, thought remorsefully of the things I’d done to upset others, and pulled.

Nothing stirred but my steak knife, which, when I opened my eyes, was spinning slowly. It clinked still against my water glass. Mrs. Morlock could hardly suppress her smile. She applauded, but I’d had enough. I was ready. I couldn’t wait to disembark the Sea Comet, and in my heart, I promised to become nothing, nothing at all, like her.

I think she called after me, but I’d already run out of the dining room.

***

His face lit up. “Hey there, stranger.”

I sat at the empty bar, happy to see Chico Martín.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Nowhere,” I said. He smiled and wiped the bar down fastidiously with a spotless rag. I liked watching his hand move in tight circles, the wadded-up rag reminding me of a head of cauliflower.

“Must have been nice there.” He stopped and held up his arms. “As you can see, I’ve been up to my eyebrows here.”

I’d missed him so much! I felt bad for stealing all that wine and then for disappearing and not coming back sooner. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

I shrugged. I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eye.

“Oh that,” he said, folding his hands together and leaning forward. “Don’t worry about it.” I couldn’t tell if he really knew what I was sorry for, but before I could ask, he poured me a glass of tomato juice and set out a bowl of pretzel sticks. I caught my milky reflection staring back at me in the wall of windows behind him. That ghostly creature was floating before a flat, black backdrop.

“Do you ever get creeped out?” I asked, nodding towards the windows. “It’s like there’s nothing out there.”

Chico Martín thought about my question. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t really notice it until the sun rises. And when that happens, it’s not creepy at all. It’s beautiful.” He knocked gently on the bar. “It’s so beautiful.”

“Can I stay until that happens?”

***

“Bug, Bug!” my little sister called out beside a listing palm tree, flinging her arms above her head.

I waved back, happy and relieved, breaking away from the plodding pack. I tried to pick up the pace, but my legs were wobbly. I wasn’t used to the hard, unwavering ground. I felt like I’d been dramatically changed. I blinked slowly and swayed about. The rainbow smear of oil on the tarmac was trying to reach up and smack me upside the head.

Finally, my mother embraced me, tickling my ears with her mazy hair. “Oh Bug,” she said. She smelled like a big bowl of warm fruit. I swallowed a powerful emotion. I didn’t want them to see me cry. My father stared down his nose at me. He looked like an indignant gargoyle and the veins in his hands were bulging, but he didn’t scare me. I was familiar with his store of faces and hands and knew they’d appear gentler later on. He took my bags and, with my sister and mother in tow, strode towards the parking garage. I glanced back over my shoulder at the Sea Comet. I tried in vain to spot Mrs. Morlock’s balcony. I thought about her, and then about Chico Martín, and his hopes and dreams. I wished him good luck, Good luck, Chico Martín, good luck! before my sister called out for me.

I turned around. My legs grew steady. My mouth hinged wide open, and to my delight, my jaw did not pain me. And so, I sprinted ahead. And so, I laughed.