Sleeping in Nantucket

     The collective sails of Hyannisport had just blurred into a single white mass when a meaty guy sidled up next to me at the head of the ferry, plunked his elbows down on the rail, and jutted his jaw at me like I owed him a conversation. Clean-shaven, forty-five-ish, and big through the middle, with thick forearms like a butcher’s or a baseball player’s. Khaki shorts, pink polo shirt, Cincinnati Reds baseball cap, thousand-dollar watch. A landlubbing fifty-hour-a-week sales type who starts his vacations with big dreams of taking care of himself finally, running or biking or swimming, but ends up eating twice as much as usual because he’s on vacation, dammit, and you only live once. 

    “Ever been to Nantucket before?” he asked me, his voice higher than a big man’s should be. A voice that tried to disarm me, that tried to tell me its owner wasn’t the dirtbag I immediately pegged him for. 

    “Twice,” I lied back. “Never slept there before, though. Think I might tonight.”

    “Oh, it’s great for sleeping. My wife’s family has a place there, and they sleep all the time. ‘Til two in the afternoon sometimes, and they aren’t even hung over.”

    He laughed and stuck his face out over the railing, waiting for the sea to spray him. It refused. Then one tiny, involuntary gesture he made as he turned back to me transformed him from just another asshole tourist into the kind of character I needed to study and learn from. It was the way his lips snarled before they smiled—his true attitude toward the world showing itself before he slathered it over with insincerity. He shared the gesture with my college roommate Gary, who at the time I loathed above all others of my species.

    Until that morning, Gary had been living in my Nantucket beach house for two weeks trying to get over a bad divorce. He’d slept with three women different in my bed—not the one I let him have for nothing—while I was out trying to sell vacation homes to pricks like Mr. Cincinnati Reds guy next to me on the ferry. Only richer, and not such slobs. Gary drank my best bourbon and lied about it, virused my computer by downloading internet porn, let my dog run away and didn’t tell me until five hours later, and ruined my best wool trousers by taking apart a fountain pen while trying them on.

    So next to me was this guy who had the same snarly smile as Gary did, and no doubt the same disease at the core of his being. I figured I’d tell him all the things I never said to Gary when I kicked him out. The things I never said to Gary two hours ago on that very same morning, when I took the ferry to Hyannisport with him so I could give him a proper sendoff into the world of the twice-divorced.

    “That’s who you’re going to visit?” I asked the big guy. “Your wife’s family?”

    “Oh no. She died a couple years back, and they hate me. Don’t even know if they’d say hi if they saw me, you know?”

    “Would you?”

    “Sure. Don’t I seem like the type who says hi to everybody?”

    I nodded and gave him my best snarly smile, which I could imitate quite well after watching Gary do it for two weeks. I’m not sure whether this meant that I shared the disease those two had, though I considered the possibility. Maybe it was waiting to strike, or maybe it was in remission.

    “I had the craziest dream last night, man,” the big guy told me.

    “Really?” I had another Gary flashback, because if I didn’t get out of the house before he woke up, then I had listen to his dreams over breakfast.

    “Yeah, I’ve got to tell somebody. You mind?”

    “Shoot,” I said. “If I make a movie out of it, I’ll give you half my take.”

    “You in the movies?” 

    “No, just a joke.”

    “Okay.” He leaned back against the railing, hunched forward, and wiggled his hands like they could get his mouth going. “I’m on a ship just like this one. Maybe not like this one, but I don’t know one ship from another. Ship, schmip, for all I care. But it’s old times, around 1900, and people dress different, and their faces aren’t all squeaky clean like now. People work their asses off starting when they’re five, and their faces show it. Scars, burns, everything. So I’m in this big crowd of teenage kids, all watching the captain of this ship whip the living hell out of another teenager. Merciless motherfucker. He’s ready to whip this kid till he dies.”

    “Sounds like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, or something.”

    “No way.” The big man waved it off. “Ahab had a goal. This guy just wanted to hurt people. So the kid’s getting whipped to hell, he’s looking out at all us other kids and he knows he’s dying, but he doesn’t blame us for being too scared to save him. Then it zooms to his face in close-up, and he looks just like my dad. Turns out this is some dark story from his past that he never told me, and I get a fake memory of running my hands along these deep, red scars on his back when I was a little kid. Which never happened. No scars from the whip, I mean. My dad’s still alive and his back’s as smooth as your ass.”

    “Don’t count on it,” I said, but it didn’t get him to laugh like I wanted. People like him and Gary take their own dreams so damn seriously. 

    “So he opens his mouth to tell me something, and blood’s trickling out of it, and pretty soon blood’s flying everywhere, splattering all over us teenagers. But nobody moves, we stand there like statues and it gets on our faces, everything. Little chunks of skin too, it’s disguting. Then the ship part’s over. I’m all grown up and in Boston, dressed real fancy like it’s 1925. Before the crash, you know? Tie, jacket, overcoat, umbrella, watch fob. I’m in that cemetery right downtown, by all the stores. You know Boston?”

    “Lived there all my life,” I lied again. “The Granary, on Tremont Street.”

    “Sure, the Granary. Office buildings on three sides, and the other side’s the street. I’m in there dressed to kill, and the whole cemetery’s full of yellow daffodils. But it’s a weird yellow, way too bright, a shade you can’t even find in paint stores.” He pinches his thumb and index finger together in front of his face, like he’s trying to pluck the right word out of the air. “Luminescent. I’m scared half to death, because I know right away the daffodils are the souls of the dead people in that cemetery, and they’re coming out for this once-a-year thing when they show themselves to the world again. Like recharging their batteries with sunlight, you know? Usually it happens when there’s nobody around, but for some reason they don’t notice me.”

    “Or maybe you’ve got something they need.” I held my hand out just like him, plucking at nothing. “Maybe you’re the only one they can show themselves to.”

    “C’mon, man. It’s my dream, let me tell it. So right then I feel this woman next to me, and I can’t remember what she has on exactly, but I know she’s dressed up for the same big formal thing I am. My neck hairs stand up and I turn to see her, and it’s my mother! This younger, more beautiful than she ever was in real life version of my mother, maybe nineteen or twenty. My heart’s pounding with love for her—not mother love, I’m talking have-my-babies love. The ground starts wobbling and I kiss her like you do at a wedding, in front of a big crowd, even though it’s just the two of us. Then all the daffodils in the cemetery start growing way over our heads, till they cover us up like a cave, and that’s pitch black inside.”

    The big guy looked down at the water, hoping again that it would spray him, and he wagged a finger at me when it didn’t.

    “Doesn’t stop there. It goes out to a wide shot, like the Boston skyline, and there’s this thing in the middle that looks like a giant garlic bulb or the Taj Mahal, and it turns out to be my big cave of daffodils from the outside. It keeps growing higher, gets pointier ‘til it looks like the Eiffel Tower, and then the dream’s back inside the daffodil cave. There’s light in it now, so I can see, and my mother’s frozen in the middle like a wax statue. Her lips are sort of parted, like that kiss of ours was just about to happen, and she’ll be waiting for it forever. I’m freaking, ‘cause I don’t want to marry my mother, and there’s no way out—by then the daffodils have stalks the size of oak trees. I try pushing my way through, squeezing through, but nothing’s doing. I look back at my wax mom, and bam!—I realize this is all punishment for not saving my father from getting whipped to death.”

    He closed his eyes, snorted through his mouth once, and kept on going. “Then the ground starts shaking and the tower of daffodils tips over. All the sudden I’m climbing up a wall, trying to get back to my mom. And I’m getting there, real slow, but pretty soon my legs won’t move ‘cause I’m turning into wax too. So I’m spending eternity as this wax statue who’s trying to crawl back to his mother, who he’s trying to marry. Weird, huh?”

    “It’s got to be from your wife,” I told him. Very authoritative, because nothing irritates a guy who thinks he’s deep more than somebody acting like he’s easy to read. “A subliminal message.”

    “Nah. She’s dead, remember? I told you, like, two minutes ago.”

    “She could still be sending you messages from the afterlife. You talked about the souls of the people in the cemetery, so part of you has to believe in it.”

    “C’mon, it’s a dream. You believe all the shit in your dreams? Jackie didn’t believe in that afterlife garbage. She was just a live body, then she was a dead body. She didn’t care if they used her for training med students, crash tests, whatever. It was in her will.”

    “What if she was wrong?” I said. “What if she sent you the dream to tell you there really is an afterlife?”

    “What are you, Jews for Jesus or something?”

    “Oh, so now I’m a Jew?”

    “Don’t act like you never heard it before.” He swiped the question away with the back of his hand. “Whatever you are, you’re crazy if you need an afterlife to figure yourself out.”

    “So the time I’m here on earth is all I need, is that it? Doesn’t make a difference whether I figure life out before I die, so why bother. Right?”

    “Right, it doesn’t matter. Born, live, die, and it’s over. None of this heaven and hell crap. No dicking around in some afterlife wondering why you couldn’t get your shit together when it mattered. Born, live, die. Get with it, pal.”

    He bumped me hard with his shoulder and stormed off, flipping me the bird with both hands. A couple who saw it asked if I was okay, so I nodded and said, “Yeah, fine.” When the adrenaline wore off, it finally felt like Gary was out of my life. Instead of me having things I never could tell Gary, it looked like Gary had things he never could tell me. So he sent me Mr. Cincinnati Reds guy instead, with his summer tan and fake Rolex.  Once I realized that, whatever pieces of The Gary Disease I had in my bloodstream before I heard that tacky dream, and whatever spores of it the Reds guy breathed onto me, were gone.

    Maybe not gone. But at least they’d risen to the surface of my skin and crusted over, so I could scrub them off the next time I took a shower. I’d throw that washcloth away when I finished using it, so I wouldn’t have to risk getting The Gary Disease on all my other laundry. Then I’d have the house fumigated so it wouldn’t seep into my rugs and furniture, and I’d stay up nights vacuuming every damn thing I owned, getting my world halfway clean again.

    So thanks, Mr. Cincinnati Reds guy. Mr. Cheap-Ass Freudian Dreams guy. You saved me from having to listen to anybody like you ever again, because I can smell your kind now. Smell you coming and turn the other cheek.