Blue Manifesto Letter from the Editor
Playlist
Not Full Enough
Henri Bergson on Possibility and Creation
Ellis, Island
Izzy Ampil
For a while, no one said anything. Ellis showed up to all the same parties wearing all the same clothes—which is to say, a checkered napkin Saran-wrapped to his groin, and little else—and it felt just like being twenty, except easier. A few minutes before midnight he’d show up on the boys’ side of RoZo—the co-ed cliffside cabin at the far end of the lake, which had once been short for the “Erosion Zone,” but which had been recently rechristened by smug revisionists as the “Erogenous Zone”—ready to spend the next four hours lobbing humidified beer caps at whoever’s nipples seemed stickiest with sweat. As soon as he crossed the threshold, the freshman girls would suck him dry with just their eyes.
So this was being twenty three, then being twenty-four. He worried less about getting laid; therefore, he got laid more. He was taller and stronger. He sprouted a thatch of chest hair that one girl told him smelled like ripe red peppers warming in the August sun. It was a weird compliment. In fact, it was more of a flex than anything. He knew the girl just wanted him to ask about the time she’d spent farming in Idaho during her gap year. But he didn’t mind. That was the kind of thing that happened to him now that he was finally gorgeous. He was twenty-five, then twenty-six, and in better shape than ever. When he went paddleboarding through the buttery dawn, he watched himself through the undergrads’ eyes: the long planes of his quads shedding sweat and freshwater, his crosshatched abs glistening in the severity of light. By twenty-seven he had conquered this place, every nook and cranny. By twenty-eight he had begun to think of himself as its curly, well-juiced brain, its vessel of cultural memory.
Then he was twenty-nine, and he got the DUI.
◆
He was on his way back from seeing Monica, who had, for the last nine years, been his solace and his rival. They had arrived at the same time—she a perky, voracious sophomore; he a dumb pinball of a junior, shiny with desperation. After graduation, when everyone left to develop migraines at their obligatory laptop jobs, abandoning their destinies to the whims of vicious, balding bosses, only he and she had stuck around, weathering not only the chaos of the summer but the emptiness of spring and fall. She could be fucking annoying—somehow both dismissive and a narc?—but sometimes, lying in bed, Ellis would look out his window and see her slim, solemn figure blacking out the stars over the dock, and he would feel like they were looking at the moon together, listening to the gentle lap of lake against the plastic-bottomed boats.
More relevant than he would like it to be: she was also beautiful. Mesmerizing nebulae of freckles, densest just off the right side of her nose, curls that made her otherwise skeletal face seem round with joy. It never actually mattered. For nearly all the time he’d known her, she’d lusted oppressively after a volunteer firefighter she’d met at a bar in town one night, with whom she had a summer fling that caused him to divorce his wife.
When she eventually got fired, years later, for a sin so nominally prohibited and seldom prosecuted Ellis always mixed up what it was—drinking on her dishwashing shift? going for a midnight swim?—the only story people ever told was about how she was a homewrecker. Everyone forgot the rest: the summer she taught all the younger girls to free-dive; the week she won the camp-wide sock-wrestling tournament by pinning a baseball player’s face to the floor with one leg; the morning of Ellis’s twenty-fifth birthday, when she covered the entire lodge in blown-up pictures of his face and recruited every last person on the property to write him a letter, so that during his perfunctory mailbox check, all of these construction paper cards in crumpled envelopes came swarming out to give him paper cuts. And she didn’t even like him that much. It was just the way she was. Who would remember that, Ellis wondered, if not for him? Who would anchor her memory to the community’s ongoing meaning; who was left to see what he had seen?
◆
Anyway, right. He’d gone to visit Monica for dinner. Since getting fired two years before, she’d been commuting between a Master’s program in SF and the firefighter’s house in town. But, at long last—her words—she was finally! fucking! done! with! school! Now she was back in town for the long term. She and the firefighter eloped and moved into his house, an A-frame with a door he’d carved and painted the color of butter.
Ellis wasn’t jealous or anything, but when Monica invited him over, she also revealed that the firefighter’s name was Jad, which seemed so self-parodic Ellis needed to know if he could hang. Could a “Jad” laugh at himself? Could he, perhaps, fuck around?
Somehow the logical endpoint of this line of questioning was Ellis showing up to Monica’s with a borrowed/stolen keg in hand, asking before the door was fully open if Jad was too tall to do keg stands—would it be unsafe to funnel such a high volume of blood down into his head? If so, speaking of funnels, maybe they could butt chug instead—but by the time Ellis straightened up, laughing at his own wit, he saw the woman behind the door was not Monica at all but a middle-aged stranger, with low-slung tits and a square, assertive jaw.
“I’m so sorry, I must have the wrong address,” Ellis said, just as Monica came running up in an apron—in an apron?—exclaiming,
“Ellis, oh! You’re early!” in a squeaky, cleaned-up pitch.
“Haha,” warbled Ellis, motionless.
Monica looked from him to the keg to the older woman; her face compacted like sediment. Still, she lunged heroically for the save: “Oh, wow! The Tamarack IPA—Jad’s favorite! How did you know!”
Then there was Jad: a do-gooder granite hunk looming over Monica’s shoulder. “Hey mom,” he said, kissing the older woman’s drooping cheek. “I didn’t realize we were racing to the door.” He stepped out onto the porch and hefted the keg onto one shoulder. “What a truly epic housewarming gift,” he said, now addressing Ellis. “Monica did mention you have a tendency to go above and beyond.”
Relief trickled through like sap, then dried sticky.
“Would you come in?” asked Monica, so Ellis did.
“Sorry,” he muttered. I thought it would be just us kids.”
Monica nodded, blew through her teeth. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “We all did.”
◆
“You know Monica from that camp, is it?” asked Jad’s mom, fork twirling.
“Oh yeah,” said Ellis. “We go way back.”
“Seems like nonstop fun,” she said, as though allergic.
“Well, yes and no. Plenty of work to be done.”
“Is there?”
“I mean, of course. Every Saturday morning you process the exit of three hundred families and turn over a five-acre property tip to tail to get three hundred more in the door by afternoon—I’m talking check out, clean up, restock, sixty cabins each with a kitchen, bathroom, TV lounge, and a dozen beds—and in between you keep them safe, busy, and alive on the waterfront and in the backcountry, at altitude and into old age, plus a hundred staffers fed, diligent, on time, and excited to keep hucking eighty-hour weeks at the wall til fall, when you get a whole new set of them to train on corporate retreats and wedding banquets, meanwhile guests and staff alike are up past two getting wasted off their asses—”
“All in a good day’s work,” said Jad’s mom.
“I log fifteen-hour days six days a week,” said Ellis. “On the seventh I run ten, twenty miles up the PCT. I earn my fun.”
“And spend it wisely, I see.”
Ellis licked a fleck of bolognese from his upper lip.
“Was that your experience of it, Monica?” asked Jad’s mom.
“What? Oh. Right. I mean, in some ways. He’s not wrong that it’s a lot of labor. Work hard, play hard. That kind of thing.”
“Hm.” Jad’s mom dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “Do you miss it?”
Monica looked down at her plate and up again. “Sometimes,” she admitted. “Probably more than I would have if I had left by choice.”
“You can always come home,” Ellis said. “Any time you want—I’ll take you out for a ski.”
Jad and Monica exchanged a glance. “That’s so sweet,” Monica said. “But I’d probably be too rusty.”
“Nah,” said Ellis. “It’s like riding a bike. You’ll be putting up walls again in no time.”
She smiled. “I guess I used to shred, didn’t I?”
“Like no other. Jesus, Jad—can I call you Jad?”
“What else would you call me?”
“Right.” Ellis snorted. “Anyway, I was saying: You should have seen her in her glory days.”
“I’m sure I will,” Jad said. “They’re coming fast.” He gathered his wife’s fingers into a bouquet and kissed each nail, nibbling her pinky.
“Oh, ha, ha,” drawled Monica, withdrawing. “Are we sure that’s a compliment?”
Ellis contemplated the implications of the first-person plural. “Of course it is,” Jad said, slinging an arm around her shoulder. “You’re like a fine wine; you get better every day.” He touched his nose to hers, blinked his eyelashes against her cheek.
“Flatterer,” Monica accused, but she didn’t pull away. Ellis was tempted to check under the table to see where everyone’s hands were these days.
“But also,” Ellis interjected, limply, “you’ve always been amazing.”
“You’ve certainly achieved a great milestone in your education,” offered Jad’s mom. Which reminds me: We haven’t even toasted your graduation yet.”
“Oh, no, there’s no need—”
“So humble! That’s my girl,” said Jad. He raised a glass. “To Monica. Wife of many wonders; God help me, she’ll be my wife of many years. Absolute shredder”—this with a wink at Ellis—“chef extraordinaire. Sexiest girl this side of the Sierra. And, last but certainly not least, the proud, hardworking—freshly-minted!—owner of a whole-ass Master’s degree.”
“To leaving Neverland,” Jad’s mom offered, holding up a glass of her own.
“Oh, Mom,” said Jad. “Please don’t.” He touched his mother’s shoulder, insinuating force.
“No, no,” said Monica, avoiding Ellis’s exasperated glance. “She’s right. Bottoms up.”
◆
After dinner, once Jad’s mom retreated to her own house “just down the road” and Jad greeted his strictly enforced, self-appointed bedtime with a mug of probiotic tea, Monica deflated.
“You okay?” asked Ellis.
Monica, slumped on the floor, emitted a staticky moan and flung her arm over her face.
“You can talk to me,” said Ellis, from his perch on the couch. “I mean, I know that hasn’t been our thing, like, historically. But now’s as good a time as any to start.”
Monica rolled onto one elbow. “I, uh,” she said. “I wanted.” She plucked at a loose thread in the rug. “I wanted you …” Ellis held his breath. “Just—I know it’s stupid, but I wanted to be a good host, I guess? Like, I wanted you to have fun.”
“Oh,” said Ellis. “Well.” He considered a few possible responses, all lies along the lines of, No, I did! Jad’s mom’s a hoot! I’m gonna talk about her antics for years to come! Monica peered up at him, chewed off a strip of hangnail. Ellis melted. “I mean, the night’s still young.”
She laughed—a fresh, invigorating gust. “Is it?” she asked, waving a hand at the house’s sterile darkness.
“Sure,” Ellis said. “I’ve got another round or three in me.”
Monica pushed up onto her palm. This was good, Ellis thought; soon, she’d be sitting up all on her own.
“You know,” he mused, tapping a thumb against his chin. “I just realized something.” He cracked a grin. Monica’s lips twisted with mischief. Christ, Ellis wondered, had she always been this sexy? She’d always been gorgeous to behold, of course—but remote, stringy and innocent, radiating adolescent earnestness. Now a weighty sense of recklessness played in the new crinkles around her eyes. She seemed dangerous, enthralling, like she had something real to lose.
“Go on,” goaded Monica. “Don’t leave me waiting too long.”
“Well,” said Ellis, descending to join her on the floor. He ran one finger over her ragged cuticle, gently coaxing the white blood cells in to heal it over. She was breathing faster now—or was it just his imagination, his own heart in his ears? “We never did crack that keg open, anyway.”
Her smile faded. “No,” she said, fixing him with a steady gaze—not quite a provocation, but certainly a raising of the stakes. “I guess we didn’t.”
So they decamped to her backyard for a porch beer and debrief, but a few pints in—a few each, more in total—they migrated to the lawn, where Monica pushed Ellis to the grass and motioned for him to lift his legs up. What was happening?, he wondered, suddenly vulnerable. He clenched his asscheeks together, lest she try to penetrate him … though even articulating such a thought felt crass, demeaning. He remembered Monica at nineteen, flapping at him to help her knot a bedsheet over her shoulder like a toga, the way he fucked it up and the drapery cascaded to the ground, revealing her body completely naked—not a sports bra, not a thong, just uneven pubes and a ribcage tattoo—the first but not the last time he’d seen her nude, and the unembarrassed way she’d gathered the fabric up again and handed it back to him, saying in her obnoxious, bossy way, “Start again.” In his dick, this memory competed with the biochemical suppressions of alcohol.
“Ellis,” she ordered, in the present, “Pay attention.” She took off her shirt—what the fuck? what the fuck?—and flexed her bare stomach against the soles of his feet. “Lift me up,” she said, pushing her palms into his, and he did, feeling her weight transfer to his forearms and hamstrings as she ascended over him. “I’m gonna let go,” she said, and he said, “What?”, but she was already flinging out her arms, arching her back so that she levitated there, near-magically. “Come on,” she said, “You’ve never done acro-yoga?”
Her puddled features loomed over his own. When her hair swung down it made a tunnel that connected her face to his. He had this sense memory of kissing her, even though he never had, some automatic response to being this close to some girl, any girl, from back at camp; he tried to study her features, save them for later, but so many half-remembered faces swerved in and out of specificity; he felt her weight quaking in his knees.
“No,” he said, laughing. “When would I have done acro-yoga?”
She waved this question away like it was idiotic. “It’s like you never even worked there,” she said, and he could feel the breath pulsing in her stomach, stiff little pockets of air traversing her diaphragm. “Lani taught it every week for, like, three summers.”
“I wasn’t really a yoga guy.”
“Too bad,” Monica said. “That’s where all the hot moms go.”
Caught in Monica’s hair, brushing her lip, was a very slender twig. Ellis reached to untangle it, gently; she caught the print of his thumb in her mouth and suckled, the pressure so light it was almost imperceptible. “Oh,” he said, but then she shook out her hair, loosing the twig, and launched off his feet into the grass again.
“L, oh my God, you know what I just thought of?” Her face, close again, swimmy, but electric with attention.
“Let’s do a whiskey walk.”
“Wait, now?” They’d been on a whole other trajectory.
“Yeah, yeah, look, there’s a hot tub like four streets over in a shed that’s never locked.”
“A shed? Isn’t that kind of gross?”
“Oh, Ellis. What, have you gotten old?”
He swallowed. He imagined her skin hot and dripping, the close smell of her amid the irradiated eros of trespassing. He had to get back—wasn’t he working the line for breakfast the next morning?—but—fuck. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted like this, instead of duly enduring being wanted so that he could scratch out an orgasm into a lumpy double bed.
“Of course not,” he said. “Come on.”
So away they went, careening through the neighborhood, passing a curved glass bottle from palm to palm. At a brown-shingled house with all the lights out, Monica held one finger to her mouth. “This is it,” she whispered. “Help me over the fence.”
He gave her a boost; she landed catlike in the yard and eased the gate open from the inside. Ellis suppressed the question of who else she’d done this with, whether she had ever made Jad cum in this stranger’s tub. The shed was bigger than he’d imagined, and cleaner, too, the walls clearly scoured and pressure-washed this year, the smell of it bleachy rather than raunchy. The water bubbled avidly.
“What, they just leave it on all night?” he hissed.
“Yeah, exactly. If they’re going to waste energy, we might as well take advantage. We’re making this worth their money. It’s utilitarian, in the end.”
“I’m not sure you’re using that word correctly.”
“Shut up and close the door behind you.”
She lowered herself into the tub, shorts and sports bra still on; Ellis hesitated. “I don’t have a towel,” he said.
“You can be naked,” she told him.
“I don’t—”
“Oh, come on. It’s not like I’ve never seen your dick before.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Fine. I just thought it would be weird if you had clothes on but I didn’t.”
“Well, mine are already wet,” she said. “So they’re staying on. Sorry.”
“Do you still have the whiskey?” he asked. He could feel his conviction in the night’s adventure ebbing, replaced by a shiver of doubt. How many nights had he passed like this, young and eager and sloppily expectant, waiting for something to happen to him? Maybe he shouldn’t wait for her cues. Maybe he should just go for it.
She passed him the bottle. He swigged, stripped, and plunged in, the hard water stinging his bare dick. She slid to the opposite side of the tub and rested her head against the rim.
“Pass it back,” she said. Ellis did. He inched a foot along the inside of her calf. She set her legs demurely aside.
“Monica,” he said. “What is this?”
She ignored him. “How is the boss, anyway?”
Ellis gave her a beat to register his question, but she turned her eyes on him, shockingly sober, awaiting his answer. “Uh, he’s good. You know. Oaken as ever.”
Monica smiled, tipped the bottle to her lips. Ellis watched a drop slide down her chin. He longed to surge over to her, to lick it off from where it hung, suspended, before it fell into the tub, his arms around her waist, her lumbar, his teeth on her earlobe. “And Frankie?” she asked.
Ellis looked down at his dick, wormy and defeated under the water’s surface. “In remission again.”
“A miracle,” said Monica.
“Absolutely,” Ellis agreed.
“I told all my grad school friends about them, and they just wish they could visit. See the place for themselves. Meet the legends who run it.”
“You should bring them,” said Ellis. “What’s stopping you?”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“What did I do?”
“I can’t go back to camp, dude—obviously. I got terminated. I’m banned from property.”
“What? Since when? That’s not a thing.”
“Yes, it is. It’s always been.”
“Since when?”
“I mean, I don’t have an exact date, but since I got fired two years ago, at least. Really, Ellis, sometimes you say things and I’m like, did we even work at the same place?”
“But now that you live here—I thought you’d be back all the time.”
“Well, you can always come visit me here.”
“With Sasquatch watching over us? And Sasquatch’s mother?”
“Oh, my God.” She splashed hot water at him. “It won’t be like that every time.”
“Hopefully it will be like that no more times.”
“No promises.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s your mother-in-law I’m talking about now.” Ellis cleared his throat. “Anyway, enough about camp. You’ve got a whole new thing going on—I mean, how the hell is married life?”
Monica shone again, all dimpled innocence. “Honestly, dude? It’s pretty good.”
“Yeah?” said Ellis, suppressing how bereft this left him. “I’m glad to hear.”
“Yeah,” said Monica. “I don’t know, it just got so horrible, all this driving back and forth, either crashing on my friend’s couches or paying rent for a place I never slept. I feel like I was getting sick every other week because I was just exhausted. I didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“Well, now you never have to again, which is amazing. Pretty cool perk of graduating.”
Monica rubbed her fingers in her eye. “Right,” she said. “Yeah, it’s cool.”
“You don’t seem that excited.”
She grimaced. “No, I wouldn’t.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Well,” she said, “it means that I didn’t graduate.”
“Wait, what? Why are you back, then?”
“I’m just taking—a break. A year, or maybe two. Then I’ll go back.”
“Was this Jad’s idea?”
“What? No. Like I said, I’m the one who got tired of driving.”
“So? He couldn’t have moved to SF to be with you?”
Monica sighed. “He’s had his place forever; it’s been in the family. I barely had a bedroom in the city to get attached to. It just made sense.”
“Not to me.”
“Well, that’s not really relevant to my decisions, is it?”
“You should go back to school.”
“I am in school.”
“This doesn’t look like school to me.”
“Eh,” she said. “It’s pretty close. This is all we ever did in school, anyway.”
“Monica,” he said, temper rising. “Why did you come back here?”
“Shh,” she hissed. “You can’t yell at me in someone else’s yard, remember?”
“What’s left for you here, if you can’t even come back to camp? What do you think is going to happen—the boss is just gonna change his mind, give you his job, and it will all be like old times?”
She laughed, a high and piercing caw in total defiance of her earlier insistence on staying quiet. “What’s left for me?” she asked. “I don’t know, maybe a house, a career path, a committed marriage—incidentally, to someone age-appropriate, an actual adult to come home to at night, who makes me dinner, and makes me better—more ambitious, more disciplined, more altruistic—and, not to put too fine a point on it, is my whole entire life partner, not just some random girl on an endless roster of nineteen-year-olds I get drunk with and deign to fuck?”
The air stilled. Ellis’s brain glitched with the full range of possible rebuttals. Patience descended, a divine and unexpected gift. He counted down from ten and waited for her to apologize. If she didn’t by the time he got to one, he would rise from the tub, brush off the excess water, put on his boxers and his shorts and his belt and his shirt, and he would walk back to her house and get in the car. He looked down at his hand, flexed his fingers, tested their stability. No blurring, no quivering. He’d get a Gatorade at the gas station and be fine to drive back if he waited in the lot for thirty minutes.
Ten seconds passed. He looked up at Monica, who stopped chewing her lip and lifted her chin.
“Okay,” he said. He got out of the tub. She let him. He conjured an imaginary dialogue—Where are you going?—Home.—You have nothing to say to me?—Not at the moment.—So I got under your skin.—If that’s the way you’d like to interpret this.—You’re being childish.—It’s getting late, and I have a shift in the morning.—that she did not interrupt. He pulled on all his clothes and stood, dripping, beside the tub.
“Are you sure you’re okay to get home?” she asked—a formality of absolution.
A whiskey walk, a whiskey drive: What was the difference? A single syllable.
“M,” Ellis said, “be honest with me. Do you really believe that Jad sees you as more than a random, if overgrown, nineteen-year-old? A girl he once got drunk with and then—what was the word you used—deigned to fuck?”
He left without waiting for her response.
◆
Slamming the gas on the westbound 50, furious with the future, his body and the car and their collective movement one changeless tunnel through the slippery flux of hours become years, Ellis overtook, with less of a berth than he’d expected, what he did not realize was a cop car until he heard himself say, “Fuck.” Beaming an oversized flashlight directly into Ellis’s eyes, the fucker asked him where he was driving at this time of night, and Ellis named the lake, the camp, the boss who, as it turned out, was this cop’s old buddy from back in their search-and-rescue days. Ellis slid down in his seat, pissed off anew. This was always how it turned out; every densely-built, middle-aged authority figure in a fifty-mile radius was somehow beholden to the man who wrote Ellis’s checks—but as he slunk earthward, his foot nudged the gas, causing the car to shriek and rev its discontent. The cop had a hand in his holster before Ellis could say, “Oops.”
The rest was a nervous blur: Out tumbled a crumpled beer can when Ellis rummaged for his registration—from a previous jaunt in town, but still, the optics were pretty shitty; arms out like a jackass artiste, he heel-toed the rubber yellow line along the road’s debris-strewn shoulder; then a hefty fine, a court date, and a humiliating pat-down, legs spread and right cheek pressed against the skin of his squeaking, still-warm car. He stayed bent like that for a long time, long enough to forget whether he’d been told to stay down or had volunteered himself to this submissive position; he even started to discern a hidden message in the engine’s troubled murmuring, and he pressed his ear closer to the hood, digging his heels in to gain leverage. He was so addled he felt geriatric, drooling from chapped lips. By the time the cop pried his face from the car, he was leaking from every orifice: spit and sweat and mucus, possibly tears, probably bile, all of it gone gluey against the hot metal, so that when his cheek met fresh air for the first time in almost an hour, it rasped in agitation.
The boss rolled up in his faded red truck, its windows smeared blue with the glare of the moon—waning now, just a night or two past full. He cranked the windows down to eye level; Ellis studied the brute topography of the boss’s brow through the crack in the glass. “Get in,” said the boss in a disembodied baritone, like he was the Wizard of Oz, or a canyon’s omnipresent echo. “I’ll tow yours tomorrow.”
◆
They were both silent on the drive in, Ellis nauseous and grim. Was the mountain steeper tonight, Ellis wondered, or was that just the acute slosh of his stomach, untethered from his inner ear? He swallowed hard, hallucinating bile. Out the window, the moon sliced through the burnt forest with its brittle, renegade trees.
They reached the lakeside, leveled out. Dim stars spun and dilated in the water’s mirrored surface. Cathedral—the mountain, aptly named—rose heavy and green over the cabins. They were close now, twenty minutes out, gliding over the lopsided road whose every asymmetry Ellis knew in his bones; he settled into the familiar gravity of home. Landmarks accumulated: Beer Rock, the T, the neighbor’s automatic floodlight with its violent, strobing arrhythmia. Ellis breathed more deeply now; he could distinguish in from out.
The boss, who’d swerved every pothole thus far, missed one, which startled Ellis into farting. “Sorry,” he blurted, and just uttering the word he felt it all come trammeling out of him, this hot gush of remorse. The boss said nothing.
They crawled past the marina, the firehouse, the great stone gate. When they pulled into the staff parking lot—silent but for the churn of gravel under coarse-tread tires—the boss turned the car off and sat for a minute, jangling the keys. A density accumulated between them, languorous, uneasy.
The boss clicked open his door and lumbered into the night’s new chill; Ellis absorbed the darker quiet in his absence. But after a moment the passenger door opened, and the boss yanked Ellis out of his seat. Ellis’s skull erupted into a pre-hangover headache, catalyzed by so many simultaneous shifts in pressure, motion, temperature.
“Get some sleep,” grunted the boss, pivoting on his heel to leave. A split-second’s hesitation; then he turned back and tucked Ellis into a taut hug. His shirt smelled like forty years of being here—sun-baked cotton and greasy sunscreen, mildew embedded in the canvas sails’ seams, the scratched plastic of the kayaks, standing water unbailed from the motorboats, ozone sanitizer and Murphy’s oil soap, burnt coffee and yellow-green hot dog juice, unlaundered fur blankets crusted with semen, lacy vestiges of eggs caught in the Hobart drain—a hundred scents which had cemented and could no longer be rinsed out. Ellis mashed his nose against the boss’s sinewy shoulder, marveling that he could distinguish every one.
The boss’s cool palm, steady on his neck. “See you in the morning,” he said. “My office, nine o’clock.” Then he left, for real this time; his back shrank into the middle distance. On the wind, Ellis tasted the butterscotch fervor of Jeffrey pinecones. He was alone again. He felt hopelessly, gratefully young.
◆
The next morning, when Ellis stepped into the main office, the boss asked him to close the door.
“I see a lot of myself in you, Ellis,” he said. Or maybe: “I see a lot of selfishness in you.”
“Oh?” seemed like the only safe reply.
“You’ve done great work here.” (“You’ve gone berserk here.”)
It continued like this: either Ellis was a pillar or a pillager of the community, a role model or a whole lot of work. Either way, by the end, the big boss laid out his destiny. This time next year, when Ellis turned thirty, the two of them would have a talk. If by then Ellis had cleaned up his act, he would stay, and they would give him a promotion, let him run the spring and autumn seasons on his own. They could even start to map the first inklings of a succession plan—if Ellis wanted to give his life to this, if he was serious, he could start to learn the boss’s job within five to ten years. But if a year passed and Ellis could not stop running so rakishly around, he would have to leave. For his own good, as much as anyone else’s.
“Also,” said the boss. “Ellis? Arriving at the party in only your underwear … always being the last person to leave. Ring any bells?”
“Ah,” said Ellis, because it was a different sound than “Oh.” It was gracious of the boss not to put air quotes around “underwear”—this they both knew.
“It’s making some of the younger girls uncomfortable. They feel like you’re watching them. They don’t know if you’re staff or management.”
Relieved that was the crux of the issue, Ellis laughed. “Sure, sure. Can’t get too drunk around the guy who
schedules shifts for you.”
“Especially if you think that guy will pull something over you—do you get my meaning?”
Ellis straightened. “Right. Right. Can I just …? I would never—”
“Yes,” said the boss. “You would.”
◆
As it turned out, Ellis couldn’t make much trouble over the next year, anyway. He got his license suspended. There wasn’t much to do but work. At first he wallowed in self-pity; poor me; too old, too boring. But then he came to trust the steady rhythms of the week: Sunday evening splitting firewood, Wednesday morning stacking towels; the endless atonements of Saturday afternoons spent rinsing shit out of the toilets. Ellis bussed tables at turbo speed and greeted every guest by name. When the bike trail needed maintenance, he volunteered to apprentice. When the proposed staff cabin needed permits, he hitched a ride to town hall. Waking up at five a.m. to take volunteer EMT classes, he felt like Monica: indefatigable, energized by the pure fact of being here. He ran hours at a time over unforgiving stones, chasing the itch that lined his lungs at elevation in the cold. He channeled her relentlessness; although she’d lost it, he could find it. He could need this place again if he rebuilt the ski hut from the dock up.
◆
In June, almost a year after he got the DUI, a fire truck came to rescue a guest with a fractured leg, then tumbled over on the narrow road in. The staff was in a frenzy until Ellis arrived to take care of everything: He splinted the bone, loaded the gurney, called the tow truck, and wheeled the guest out by hand to meet the ambulance, stuck in traffic a mile out from camp. When he returned, some gorgeous girl poked him in the pec, an inch from his nipple, crooning about how impressive he had been, what a frenzy he’d made, how nobody had stopped talking about it for the whole day.
“Thanks,” he said, rotely, preparing himself to walk away. But cortisol swarmed his bloodstream, and when she grazed her finger down his chest, toward his stomach, approaching the hair that licked from his navel down toward his dick, he felt himself crush inward, a dying star; maybe it was time—for want of a better phrase—to go out with a bang. He twitched toward her; she flinched back.
“Anyway,” she said, voice already receding. “I’m late for my shift. But, yeah, just saying—it was cool—what you did.”
◆
Which is how Ellis came to be thirty, and for the first time in his life driving into town to date. It was truly awful—losing at pool on purpose, choking through karaoke. He watched movies with a fierce awareness of the distance between his and her elbows. He had so much mediocre sex that after a certain point he couldn’t blame it on getting sober. He was shocked by the volume of time he could spend wishing he was somewhere else.
◆
Five to ten years passed, as promised. The boss invited Ellis back into his office. “Have you thought about my offer?” he asked, but Ellis hadn’t. It was like mainlining TV instead of choosing a movie; Ellis could waste fifteen hours binging if only no one asked him to commit to three.
“You don’t want to pass the place on to your daughter?”
The boss swiveled, tapped his knee. “I think she’d rather let the place die with me.” Outside, two long pulls on the boathouse horn; the guests had fifteen minutes to sail back in. Ellis saw the boss see him.
“It would be an honor,” Ellis said after a while. “I can’t imagine any better place for me to be.”
◆
So okay, he’d signed his life away based on a split-second decision. In the weeks after their little chat, what haunted Ellis was that he’d really meant it: He couldn’t imagine being anywhere else, starting from square one again, thrashing through years of incompetence on the way to such meager wisdom. That took him by the gut; that was the worst-case scenario.
But anyway, there was the perfect silver lining; as the incoming director, he could give the gift of redemption. He could invite Monica back to give a talk to the elder summer staff; she’d teach them about how to build a good life after camp. After all, she had gotten her Master’s in public health, just like she’d always promised. She’d left Jad and opened an urgent care on her own, with the help of a couple doctor friends whose services she kept on loan. If it did well enough that she could hand off the management, she thought she might move up to the north side, probably Truckee, though her mangled animal heart kept entertaining the idea of Reno. But in the meantime, she was still in town, just across the 50. He’d text her as soon as he was back in service; he almost couldn’t believe his own magnanimity.
◆
Monica’s talk was that evening; she still had an hour or so to go. Ellis handed her a coffee—decaf, with cinnamon and undyed cayenne. She dangled her freckled legs over his balcony and nursed it.
“Who gave me the right to give these smartass kids life advice?” she lamented, rubbing her shin.
“Well, that’s awkward for me to answer, because I guess, technically, I did.”
She laughed. “Oh, sure. I guess I meant it more rhetorically.”
“No, I—phrased that wrong.” Ellis cleared his throat. “I meant, honestly, M, it’s been weighing on me. I have to say—I’m sorry. It’s not fair.”
Monica blew into her coffee; the spices riffled like lake-surface pollen. “What isn’t?”
“Just—I shouldn’t get to be here, extending this invitation to you like it’s so gracious. That whole firing fiasco—such bullshit that you were banned from property for, what, smoking weed with a guest? Meanwhile, I have an actual permanent record, and the boss went ahead and made me his successor.”
“Oh,” Monica said. “No, L, that whole night was my fault. I shouldn’t have let you leave in the state you were in; I’ve actually meant—I’ve been wanting to apologize for the trouble I got you in. You could have died because I was being too petty to stop you from driving; I never would have forgiven myself if you’d gotten hurt.”
“No, M, you couldn’t have stopped me. I was being an asshole. I made a bad fucking decision—all by myself. But the boss forgave me. He believed I’d grow up to be better, and he was patient, letting me change—I’m so—I can’t even say how grateful. But it’s fucked up—and maybe sexist?—that he couldn’t forgive you, too.”
Monica set her mug aside. “That’s really sweet. And I honestly do appreciate it. Like, that’s all I would have ever wanted to hear, however many years ago. But I didn’t get fired for doing drugs in the laundry room, or whatever it was they told people in the end.” She waited to see if Ellis already knew this; he didn’t. “The boss found me and Jad having sex in an empty guest bed.”
“Okay, still, everyone does that—”
Monica shook her head. “I was on a supervision shift—you know how it is. You can kind of get away with anything if you just turn up the volume on your walkie. But I didn’t hear him call me. A bear wandered into the amphitheater during the play—a mother, with a cub not far behind—and one of the little kids went right up to it, safety talk be damned. New families. They never listen to anything. Anyway, the mama bear got mad. It almost charged, but the boss got there first with a paintball gun. Actually, I think, because nobody got hurt in the end, he almost didn’t fire me. He was going to let me off with a warning, since I’d been there for so many years. But the next week the mama cub came back and got in the boss’s dumpster. And the week after that she broke into Frankie’s car. He had to put it down after it started getting rowdy—menacing the kids groups over by the beach. More than anything, that’s what disappointed him, I think. ‘Now there’s a motherless cub in those mountains,’ he told me when he fired me. ‘Without its mom, it will probably die within the year.’ I cried, on the spot; I felt so guilty. It sounds melodramatic now, I know, but that just completely gutted me.”
There was a long pause while Ellis shook a pebble from his sandal. “It doesn’t sound melodramatic.”
“It’s just crazy to think about the snowball effect, though, you know? I was just being a stupid fucking kid. I thought if I showed Jad I’d break the rules for him, he’d love me. He was always goading me to prove to him that I was bigger than this place, that it couldn’t constrain me. I was trying to show him I was a real grown-up—and then it all spun out of control. And I still goddamn went and married him! To, what, prove to myself it was all worth it so I could be with my soulmate? God. It’s honestly funny, when I think about it—how long I lived in the shadow of this place.”
Ellis didn’t laugh. “You know,” he said. “It wasn’t the boss. Who shot the bear.”
“What?”
“I mean, the boss shot it with the paintball gun the first night. But I was the one who had to kill it—I can’t remember why.”
“Oh,” said Monica. “I didn’t know—”
“Maybe the boss was off the property. I don’t remember. Frankie handed the gun to me and said, ‘It’s just like paintball; it’ll be easy.’ And I didn’t even think; I barely aimed; I took two shots. One to the shoulder to bring the thing down, and another one through both the lungs. I didn’t know I had it in me until I did it. And then Frankie put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt this schism: before and after. Do you know what that feels like?”
Monica was very quiet. For a while she gazed across the lake, where the dusk was sewing up the ridgeline. The lone pine atop Angora shivered in the waning sun. “I work in healthcare,” she said. “I get it; it’s horrible. I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve watched die, but of course it’s seared into my brain—I remember, so vividly, every single time.”
“No,” said Ellis, swelling with indignation. “I’m not talking about that. It’s one thing if you fail to save a life, but ending one? All by yourself? You know, it actually matters—what we do here. I know you think it’s all just sex and drugs and debauchery; you’re all grown up now, your life is elsewhere, this shit was just a game you played for too long in your twenties—”
“I don’t think that,” said Monica. “That’s not what I meant.”
“You get to blame Jad and write it off as some slutty little accident, and I had to—”
She laughed, a bankrupt sound, and Ellis froze, remembering: a day when they’d been twenty-three, and she’d flipped a sailboat with him in it, how she surfaced before he did, but even underwater, he could hear the precious ring of her belly laugh, resounding into the distance, the way it seemed to bestow a universal, saving innocence. A perfect sound, and here, after many years, was its corrupted inverse: so mirthless it was punishing. His breath hitched.
Monica pinched the handle of her mug and stood. “I’m going to be late for my own talk if I stick around. And I need to drop this off in the kitchen.”
Ellis grabbed at her nearer hand. “Wait, no, M, let me try again—”
Monica looked at his face, then at the snarl of both their fingers. “Really, Ellis,” she said, withdrawing into the shadow of the eave, “don’t worry. This is how it works, isn’t it? I get to blame Jad, and you get to blame me.”