Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus Page B

wouldn’t have been hard for her to figure out. Maybe when she saw him in his big-and-tall sleep shirt, a ring of hair puffing up from where his sleep mask was, maybe then her resolve to seduce a corpse would, as they say,
wane
.
    It wasn’t Britt. At the door stood one of the ship people, a young man in a strange white suit holding a clipboard. The purser, perhaps.
    “Mr. Fleming?” he asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Okay, good,” and he checked off something on his pad. “Is there anyone else in there with you?”
    Peering in, snooping, the little perv.
    “No,” said Fleming, hesitating. Why did he feel nervous if it was true? Oh, because maybe it
wasn’t
? Because maybe Fleming had been up to some evening blood sport without knowing it, partitioning his overdeveloped psyche in order to, uh, tolerate the unbearable moral strain of his secret passions: abduction, captivity, taking his pleasures from people wearing hoods. How amazing if it were true. How dull that it wasn’t. Fleming was fully, finally alone. If he had a secret life it was a complete secret.
    “Do you want to come in and search?” Fleming offered. Come on in my cabin, smell my sleep.
    The man looked at Fleming with alarm. “No, no, that’s fine, thank you.”
    Fleming had behaved like a suspect when there obviously hadn’t been a crime. Maybe he
wanted
to get arrested. Maybe that was the only way off this boat.
    As the purser left, Fleming asked what this was about. You don’t knock on someone’s door in the middle of the night without explaining yourself.
    “Just a head count,” the man said.
    “A head count.”
    “Don’t worry. We’ve counted you. You’re here. We’ve got you.”
    At breakfast the students were buzzing. Someone had gone overboard, they speculated. The ship’s crew had been to their cabins. They were trying to figure out who was missing. Perhaps, Fleming thought, this was the only good thing about the Midwest. You couldn’t go overboard. Except for the lakes. There were the lakes. The virtues of the Midwest shrank back to zero again.
    Franklin was chiding Carl, who sat there grinning, looking otherwise like sheer hell, as if he hadn’t slept. Come to think of it, Carl had on the same outfit as yesterday.
    “I saw you at the bar all covered in sex,” teased Franklin. “How many heads did they count in your cabin, you little faggot?”
    Carl nodded proudly, gave a lazy thumbs-up.
    Fleming must have looked pale, because Franklin grabbed his arm.
    “I can call him that because he’s not one, and I am.”
    Sort of like if I called you a writer, Fleming thought.
Oh,
except that wasn’t fair. Be nice to these people, he reminded himself. And he knew that his assessment of others had never borne out over the years, with the least likely of his students always, always, enjoying the most success. In fact, he had better be nicer to Franklin. Franklin would probably be hiring him someday.
    Class went okay. Britt’s story was disappointingly good. Talented writers can also be sexy little nut jobs who play mind games on boats. Her story described seven or eight different houses, which the narrator had lived in from birth until her death as an old woman. The writing was cold and beautiful, executed with severe control, and Britt leaped through the years of her narrator’s life, changing continents, changing marriages, until the narrator was alone again, inside a house not so different from where she was born, thousands of miles away. It was effortless, formally original, and Fleming was a little bit jealous.
    Rory didn’t get it. “I guess,” he said, uncomfortable, as if he had never said an unkind thing to anyone in the world, “it might have been more interesting if it was the same character who lived in these houses, rather than so many different people of different ages in these different places. I couldn’t keep track of them, and I wasn’t sure what held them together.”
    Shay cracked up laughing.
    “What?” said