Miniature Seas

Sheila Davis was beginning to think that this was more than just a phase. Her husband, Steven, having been laid off from his job of twenty-seven years buying and transporting unused and unwanted household products for a wholesale buyout company, had spent the last few months playing a video game about a sea explorer charting the ocean. She lost Steven for entire days at a time to this game in the den, bent dead-eyed toward the TV, exploring these miniature seas of his imagination, collecting unemployment checks. Meanwhile, Sheila was working full-time as a sales associate in a department store in the nearby mall. She worked in the housewares department, ironically enough. But her demeanor toward customers was slowly unpeeling, exposing a formerly private, inhabitable layer. She’d become uncharitable in a way she barely recognized. Recently, a customer, clearly distressed, contemplated a blender for at least half an hour before finally working up the nerve to ask, “What can this actually blend?” He was bald and wore a sleeveless t-shirt with a dog driving a pickup truck printed on the front. Sheila felt cornered, as if in the presence of an escaped zoo animal.

She flipped the box around. “I’m sure it can blend anything,” she said.

The customer gave her a look of indeterminate knowledge. “That’s the problem with you people,” the man said. “You say whatever you need to say to sell me something, but when I get home I find out this thing can’t even blend a sock!” Then the man marched out of the store.

Barbara, Sheila’s eighty-year-old coworker, had been watching the entire thing. “Now, he might have seemed strange, but you never know with these people. You never know what their homes are like. I had a customer, many years ago, who bought a piece of luggage from me once a week, every Sunday. He was a very nice man. He wore a tan linen suit every Sunday, as if he had come straight from church to buy luggage. He was tall with reddish blond hair and a neat reddish blond mustache. He was very neat. I found him very handsome, if you want to know the truth. Even though my husband was still alive at the time, and would be alive much longer, I would still imagine, when this man came into my store, what my life might have been like had fate taken different turns and led me to this man before I met my husband. It was the damndest feeling of regret, but the moment he left the store, I almost completely forgot about him until I saw him again the next week. Well, it turned out that this man was a serial murderer and the luggage he bought from me every week was how he stored his victims, whom he dismembered quite thoroughly. The police found piles of my luggage in his basement.”

Sheila found this story incredibly disturbing, yet couldn’t help but be charmed by Barbara, who clearly delighted in the telling of it, reminiscing. Barbara had been working in luggage for over sixty years. But recently luggage had ceased to amount to much. “I’m going to die any day now and you want me to answer questions about luggage,” she reminded her customers, who often left without buying anything at all. Besides, more and more people purchased their luggage online.
Sheila just adored Barbara. Sheila was in her mid-fifties, but almost always felt much older, as if she was on some precipice, looking down. Barbara, on the other hand, flaunted her age. She smoked prodigiously and ate brisket sandwiches for lunch every day. The joy of old age, for Barbara, was that the things she loved could no longer kill her, having already made it as far as one reasonably could.

Lately, Sheila had been thinking more and more about death. A few years earlier her father had died, followed by her mother, weeks later. Sheila was next, she wallowed in this thought, and when her moment arrived she would die having lived her entire life with Steven. They had been married for thirty years. Together they’d raised decent, employable children, which counted for quite a bit, though less and less the more Sheila thought about it. Then the children fled with their mysterious lives. Together, Sheila and Steven felt deflated, as if beloved pets had run away, remembering nothing.

Since Steven had begun playing his game, he had stopped eating regular meals and was becoming gaunt and sallow in front of the TV. His lately uncultivated hair and beard made him look transient. Sheila was unhappy with her circumstances. Her days paced like a funeral dirge. She’d once read a magazine article about a monk who had meditated in the woods for months on end without eating, drinking or sleeping, and this is where she felt her thoughts were—alone, in a forest, joylessly freezing to death. It was not that Sheila wanted another life. She only wanted her life to be better, but she was beginning to think that not all things in life had a way of working out, as she’d previously assumed for over fifty years. This epiphany crept around every corner now.

Their poor loyal house had also been suffering. It grew quieter and even darker with life, like an untended garden. Steven never cleaned, though Sheila felt it was reasonable to expect him to do so, not having a job. Years earlier, she’d taken care to perform these thankless duties when she was the one stranded at home, a mother. Now, Sheila refused them as well, as if staring down her husband on a dark road at night. Before long, newspapers became stacked next to the front door. Dust motes scurried across the floor like dreamy rodents. Rich brown grime circled the toilet bowls and bathtubs. The dishes were crusty and attractive to flies. Their house seemed to have gotten grander and narrower all at once.

At first, Sheila felt surprised by her own resolve and what she could neglect. Then one day she was getting dressed for work and found a spider suspended from a barely visible web inside her shoe. It shocked her, until the shock subsumed, and it became just another fact of her life, a fact about her shoes, that is, spiders now lived in them.

Her thoughts fizzled and vanished like vapor.

In the den, a digital ocean spread out as far as the game could imagine. Mysteries existed solely to be discovered. The horizon, once the great inducement of exploration, was rendered on screen as a simple line separating shades of blue planes. The world was a little box, but within that box Steven was free. Sheila could certainly see the appeal.

“You hated when Sammy played his games all day,” Sheila said one evening. Their son, Samuel, as a young boy, had played video games for hours on end. This behavior, while regrettable even then, was at least permissible, given the boy’s age.

“I’m sort of in the middle of something,” Steven said, entranced.

“You haven’t looked for even a single job,” Sheila said, feeling desperate. She wrung her hands, standing behind her husband, in the dark.

​

Steven turned his attention to his wife with some effort. His glasses were, predictably, illuminated like screens. “Is that all you care about?” he screamed.

The next day, Sheila recounted this conversation for Barbara at work. The old woman listened with her translucent arms folded one over the other, stoic and pale. Sheila was exhausted by the end and found herself having to catch her breath, wiping the moisture from her cheeks with her palms.

“Oh, honey,” Barbara said, patting Sheila’s hand. “You just let the world have whatever it wants from you, don’t you?”

This question passed through Sheila’s mind like a cloud in a low sky.
 

Barbara leaned closer to Sheila, in confidence. “We could just leave,” the old woman said. Her dentures were large and bright in her mouth and spotted with yellow stains like old tiles. “We could go anywhere, honey. We could make a vacation of it. Trust me, honey. I have money, the worth of sixty years in luggage. I can buy our plane tickets tomorrow. I will need the aisle seat, however.”

The department store appeared cleaner than usual. Down the aisle, a customer, a woman about Sheila’s age, was considering different toaster ovens, her arms crossed, tapping her foot, her dismay thoroughly projected. Deciding which toaster oven to buy clearly plagued this woman, yet she would rarely use it, if ever.

That evening, Sheila packed her suitcase upstairs in her room. Her resolve was dull and blunt like a hammer. After she’d finished packing, she dragged her suitcase bumping down the stairs. Steven was in the den, as usual, the pixel sea splashing like radio static, projecting blue shadows on the wall.

Sheila cleared her throat, with little to no effect. “I don’t know how long you plan to live like this,” she said. Her heart leaned forward. “I’ve waited as long as I possibly could. I’ve put up with more than can reasonably be expected of me.”

“Uh huh,” Steven said. Nothing registered. His eyes were like empty white portals. Light entered them and vanished forever.

 “What if I never come back?” She was seriously asking.

 Steven gave her his attention, with some effort. “You make everything so difficult,” he said. Then he turned back to his game.

The house exhaled as Sheila opened the front door. She could smell the coolness in the air. The neighborhood, wet and dark, spread out in front of her like a black ocean. She navigated her car slickly through the night, to Barbara’s dimly lit apartment building.

Inside, Barbara’s apartment was small and ornate. The pink wallpaper featured a pattern of hummingbirds emerging from the insides of exotic purple flowers, their tiny black eyes squeezed in contemplation. Paintings of shtetl rabbis summoning their haggard followers hung everywhere, and little collectible ceramic figurines, such as a twinkling pigtailed girl milking a small goat, or two boys in overalls and straw hats wrestling in a patch of pearly mud, populated the glass cabinets. Sheila stepped around the living room carefully, as if in a royal sepulcher. The carpet was studded with tiny burns. A diminutive white cat sauntered into the room and stopped immediately upon finding Sheila there. Sheila knelt down and offered her hand, palm out. The cat sniffed her dubiously for a moment.

“I’ve cared for my share of cats, and this one is the biggest snob I’ve ever met,” Barbara declared, lighting a cigarette. She led Sheila to a vacant bedroom. The bed’s sheets were rigorously tucked. An old desk rested in the corner. On it stood a framed picture of a young man and a young woman. The picture, given the lengths of its subjects’ shorts and hair, appeared to have been taken many decades earlier. The man and woman were sitting together on a bench in a park. Behind them, white water, frozen in time, gushed down the side of slick brown rocks. They were handsome, if somewhat unfashionable, even for the time the photograph was assumed to be taken.

“Those people aren’t my children, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Barbara said, tilting the frame this way and that in the light. “They came with the frame and I found them to be a very handsome couple. I could never conceive, medically speaking, though I would not have minded children. As a young girl I would often fantasize about passing my wisdom on to my daughter. What did you want to be when you were younger?”

Sheila’s first reaction was a mother. This alarmed her. Then she remembered with great relief how, as a little girl, maybe five or six, she’d wanted to be a veterinarian. “I’ve always thought that animals knew more than they let on,” Sheila said, “like they knew something we didn’t. Only it was hidden inside their lack of intelligence.”

“We all had our dreams,” Barbara said, smiling brightly. Smoke weaved around her fabulous white head, like moths circling a light bulb. “You know what I wanted to be, besides a mother? A circus clown! Can you imagine? I swear it’s true. I always loved their makeup. I could have been anybody underneath all that makeup. You knew they were just more normal people like you and me, but they couldn’t be normal to carry on like that, in those funny little cars, with their tricks.”
 

After Barbara went to bed, Sheila stood in the middle of the guest room, uncertain how to proceed. The bed, with its taut white sheets, resembled a stone memorial. She lay on top of the sheets and immediately dreamed that some dark creature was upon her. You don’t have to do this, she tried to say, I’ll come quietly, but it was no use. Her mouth was not working, her words refused to coalesce. The creature tore her to shreds.

The next morning Barbara poured a pile of cat food onto a large plate. The cat studied the pile with great incomprehension. Then a taxi picked them up. It was still dark out. The streets were empty and the windows black, the world mostly still asleep. Sheila felt a strange freedom traveling this early, like a spirit passing through.

“O.K.,” Barbara said after they’d found their seats on the plane, “here’s our story. I’m your mother who’s dying of cancer, and this trip is our last hurrah.”

The lights along the runway pulsed. Sheila regarded them, slightly hypnotized. “Why do we need a story?” she wondered. Barbara really did amuse her.

Barbara turned to the wealthy-looking middle-aged couple sitting across the aisle. “Excuse me! Can I ask you where you bought your luggage?”

The man flexed his severe gray eyebrows. “We only have carry-on bags. We’re not going to be there for more than a few days. What’s it any of your business?”

Turning back to Sheila, Barbara said, “You can’t ask anyone anything anymore. Conversation used to be enjoyable in an extracurricular sense. Nowadays every word is required to have a purpose, every minute a transaction. Don’t you feel that way?”

Sheila had not been on a plane in quite some time. At some point, she and Steven simply stopped making trips, probably as their youngest, Sarah, had fled for college. There was no longer a family to take on vacation, Steven had claimed. Outside, the sky disappeared behind the clouds, inside their miraculous bright shadows.

They landed in Las Vegas. It was warm and dry, its emptiness far-reaching. The world around them had departed and then returned in a completely different form.

“I love landing in Las Vegas,” Barbara said. “Everything feels simultaneously dead and alive. I imagine arriving in the afterlife must feel exactly like this.”

Barbara rented them a convertible and Sheila drove them to the hotel. The dusty wind stampeded wordlessly around their heads. The air smelled vaguely of gasoline. Sheila watched in awe as the city emerged from the sand. The hotel where they were staying was immense and white and concave. In front of the building was a large fountain that erupted misty jets of water in intervals, building a tower that dissipated within moments, all in the same moment.

“In this city they even turn water into art,” Barbara said approvingly. They observed the water rise and fall. “Well, maybe it isn’t art,” she said, “but it’s something.”

The lobby was vast and inlaid with a rich, dark marble, or an approximation of marble. Sheila could hardly ever tell the difference. There were smartly dressed people in slacks and sunglasses and crisp polo shirts, and there were other people dressed in bright panama hats and wide-shouldered floral patterns.

“Are you related?” the girl at the front desk asked them while she retrieved their information from her computer. She smiled brightly in a black and gold vest.

“This is my daughter,” Barbara said, squeezing Sheila’s arm. “I have a very serious illness. This is our last hurrah, so to say.” This story, even knowing it was fictive, dragged up in Sheila a dim nostalgia, like a bucket being raised from a well.

​

“Oh,” the woman pouted. “Well, it’s good that you two will have your special moments together. You know, most people come here to forget who they are, but you two are coming here to remember.” She smiled and handed them their keys.

Barbara grabbed Sheila’s arm in the elevator. “Did you hear that?” she barked. “What a riot. ‘Our last hurrah.’ What a hoot.”

Their room was as spacious and well-composed as its picture on the hotel's website. Everything, even their white fluffy towels, seemed to shimmer faintly. Sheila stared longingly at her bed. She understood that whatever force had brought her this far was, moment by moment, beginning to fade. Barbara, meanwhile, insisted they hit the casino.

“I’ll be more fun with a rest than without,” Sheila bargained, unconvinced.
 

“You’ll have plenty of time to sleep,” Barbara said, gathering her purse. “Gambling is good for you. You find out what you’re worth. My husband never let me gamble. He viewed it as irresponsible. I do miss him, but sometimes I’m happier now that he’s dead. Well, I better see you down there soon, sweetie.” Then she blew Sheila a kiss and waddled merrily out of the room.

Sheila got into bed and closed her eyes, but now that she was finally being given the opportunity she couldn’t fall asleep. Sitting up in bed, the blankets around her waist, Sheila propped her back with pillows and turned on the TV. She landed on a movie about an elite group of handsome thieves robbing a casino. This movie ended and another began, this one featuring two seemingly incompatible sexagenarians falling in love. This movie passed by Sheila too, and when it ended she took a bath and dressed and went downstairs to the casino to find Barbara.

The casino was cavernous, the domed ceiling high and dark above her. Rows and rows of colorful machines lit up and made their little noises. Different colors of lights zoomed around in the dark, bouncing off one another. There were people in cowboy hats and expensive gym suits and denim shirts inlaid with roses sitting at tables, being dealt cards. Sheila shuffled along, tucking her arms at her sides, peering like a tourist.

Sheila apprehended a waitress in a black vest and bowtie, who was balancing a tray of colorful drinks, her wrist gracefully bent. “I’m not sure where to go,” Sheila said, though this wasn’t exactly what she meant.

“I hear that,” the waitress said. She handed Sheila a bright blue drink from her tray and departed. Sheila stared at the shapely glass, reticent. She ate the pineapple garnish, then placed the glass on a nearby slot machine and continued on, licking her lips. The pineapple had been fairly sour.

Sheila traveled down every aisle, surveying, the slot machines on either side of her like rows and rows of tiny riverboats. Finally, she spotted Barbara, who was sitting stiffly in her seat while coins poured out of the slot machine in front of her. Sheila ran to help her and found the old woman pressed back into her chair, dead, her clawlike hands clutching the armrests, her eyes and mouth wide open, as if she’d been traveling at a great speed. Other gamblers ruthlessly began scooping Barbara’s winnings into large red paper cups.

“This woman is dead,” Sheila screamed. “You’re stealing from a dead woman.” But no one seemed to hear her. The coins were very loud, falling to the floor.

By the time the ambulance arrived, Barbara’s coins were all gone. The EMTs took Barbara away on a stretcher. The girl from the front desk approached Sheila, her small hands clasped together like a flower bud. “Your mother died happy,” the girl said— rather presumptuously, Sheila felt. “You can feel good about that,” the girl went on. “You came here together and she died a winner.”

Sheila went back up to her room and stared at the blank TV screen. The girl from the front desk had informed Sheila that Barbara had already paid to have the room for the entire week. Sheila was more than welcome to stay at the hotel for as long as the reservation allowed. Then she gave Sheila the phone number for the hospital and a ticket to the magic show that was occurring in the hotel’s theater that evening. “You know, take your mind off things,” the girl had said. “You can make your arrangements tomorrow.”

Sheila sat down on her bed and picked up the phone. Barbara’s luggage seemed to watch her expectantly. Sheila dialed her son Samuel’s cell number and waited. They hadn’t spoken in quite some time, though nothing bad had happened. There was no fight or anything like that. He was just busy, he claimed, with his own life. Samuel was the older child and, though Sheila slightly resented herself for it, he was also her favorite. She loved Sarah of course, but Sarah became less patient with her mother as she grew older, more critical. Not to mention Sarah called Steven when she needed something, never Sheila. Samuel, however, had always been a loving and good-humored son to Sheila, even as he grew older. It was only that he and Sheila began to speak less and less as time went on, first only once a week, then once a month, and so on. Sheila crinkled the ticket to the magic show while she listened to the phone ring, then laid the ticket on the bedside table and smoothed it back out with her flat, short hand. She walked over to her window and spotted a street performer in an elaborate blue costume pretending to be a swan for money. A thin layer of dust seemed to cover everything.

The call went to voicemail. Sheila paused for a moment, frightened, when she heard a deep voice rattle off a message, but she realized that this was the voice that belonged to her son, after all.  Then she called Sarah, who also did not answer. Then she called Steven. When Steven was still working, before his company went bankrupt, he would often have to travel to Las Vegas for some sort of business expo, where he would meet with vendors to discuss their needs. Sheila would often ask him to take her, but Steven flatly rejected this notion. “You won’t like it there,” he had said. “It’s loud. The people are weird. Everything’s expensive. Besides, did you know it’s the city with the highest suicide rate in the country?” At the time this statistic seemed significant.

“Who is this?” Steven answered.

“It’s your wife!” Sheila said, blushing.

 “Oh,” Steven said. Sheila could hear the phone rustling around, the distant rising hush of waves breaking. “Are you calling from work?” he said.

“I’m in Las Vegas,” she said. “I told you that.”

“Vegas?” Steven said. “Huh.”

“What are you doing?” Sheila said, annoyed. Outside, the orange light was falling on everything and disappearing into the alleyways. The people were getting drunker.

“Nothing,” Steven said.

There was a long pause. Sheila listened to her husband breathing heavily, his attention drifting away from his own body, like a small child lost in a mall.

“Do you think I should come home?” she said, meaning to sound more casual.

“You should have fun. Vegas is great,” he said. “I love Vegas.”

“You always said you hated it here.”

“Huh,” he said. “Oh, wow,” he said. “Wow, wow, wow.”

“What are you doing,” she cried.

​

“It’s nothing,” Steven said. “It’s just that I found this haunted island I’ve been searching out for at least a week. Whoa,” he said, “this is amazing . . .”

Sheila hung up the phone. Night arrived and the city became brighter with its arrival. When she was little, her family would go to the boardwalk in the summers, and this is what Vegas reminded her of: a never-ending boardwalk, minus the ocean.

Sheila plucked the ticket for the magic show from the table. She found it vaguely upsetting that people still performed magic. Anymore, magic lacked mystery. It was too usual. The tricks were fairly transparent, and even when they weren’t, such as with the magician that had made the Statue of Liberty disappear, it was obvious that nothing had really changed. The grand lady had never gone anywhere. Yet, Barbara would have wanted her to go, Sheila decided, despite the fact that Sheila hated magic.

The hotel’s theater was small and claustrophobic and covered entirely in purple velvet like the inside of a coffin. The usher showed her to her seat near the aisle. She sat there with her hands folded over her lap, looking around at the people filing in. The theater was filling up. Sheila sensed the darkness resting over her.

The lights dimmed and the magician came out in a black shirt and black pants, strutting around the stage, the spotlight following him. The magician utilized many differently colored boxes and scarves and capes for his magic. His beautiful assistant, dressed in heels and stockings and tuxedo tails, vanished from one part of the stage and appeared at another. The audience applauded and the magician bowed deeply. Sheila craned her head, looking for the exits, but was too timid to leave. Ruefully, she wondered how she ended up there. The young couple next to her squealed like babies.

Partway through his act, the magician announced that he needed a volunteer from the audience. The spotlight scanned the seats and Sheila found herself bathed in a blue light. The people in their seats cheered. Sheila stood and walked into the light, entranced. When she reached the stage, the magician, much uglier up close, leaned closer to her and whispered, “We here at the hotel all very sorry for your loss.” Then he grabbed her wrist and led her to an upright box that resembled a solid wood telephone booth.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Barbara,” Shelia replied, swept up.

“O.K.,” the magician said. “Barbara here is going to be my temporary assistant. I’m going to have her step into this box.” The heavy door of the box opened. Sheila stepped inside and looked out to the dark lumpy shapes in the audience.

The magician grinned like an old-timey movie villain. “We’ll see you soon, Barbara,” he said, adding, “I hope.” The audience’s laughter gradually disappeared behind the closing door, and soon Sheila was completely in the dark.

Activity was occurring outside the box. She could hear latches clicking and the magician stomping around the stage. In the box, Sheila felt as though she was underwater and above the surface a great storm was descending.

Then, nothing happened. She could hear no more latches clicking, no more stomping, no more held breath or laughter or applause. Sheila began banging on the door. Hold on, she thought she heard a voice say. Hold on. Don’t panic. We’ll get you out.

END