Watersports
Madeline Cash
The actor wanted to be famous but more than fame, the actor wanted to torture his girlfriend. He nudged her underwear with his toe—a wisp of fabric crumpled beyond recognition like a dehydrated jellyfish. He thought of stuffing it down his girlfriend’s pretty throat, using her own garment against her. He thought of carving up her pretty skin with increasingly dull and unsterile instruments.
He fought this urge. One week, demanded his agent. One routine week without incident. He could not risk another blow to his precarious stardom. He was already on thin cultural ice after what he did to a statue of Bell Hooks. Plus his girlfriend was away, getting college credit for removing single-use plastic from the Atlantic Ocean.
The actor scrolled dual monitors for his name. The first AI-piloted heart transplant patient was recovering successfully. A new virus was spreading that only affected lesbians and immigrants. An album was released from a rapper who possessed the negative physical qualities of both genders. An aging literary critic was being chastised for the twenty-three-year-old company he kept. Ads for Coin.fession leapt over the screen; decentralize your sins, mint eternity. Excluded from yet another news cycle, the actor sank deeper into a state of fear. Fear that he would fall from social prominence as quickly as he had ascended. SOMETIMES IT’S GOOD TO LIVE IN FEAR said an ad for unpasteurized milk.
He slowly dressed for that night’s fete; a museum benefit that took place on the catamaran of a wealthy benefactor—the Basquiyacht quipped the invitation. He hated boats. He hated water generally unless holding his girlfriend under it.
*
The critic nursed a cigarette and watched the gentle pulse of the Greenpoint pier. He observed the cynosure of the moment glide onto the ship. Noah’s social arc, he thought and filed the thought away for later use. The kids and their looks of Wow, I didn’t expect to run into anyone while on this media-frequented cruise amused the critic until it came time for him to board and he felt a pang of school-yard fear. Fear he might be chided for his exploits with this or that model. Fear of being ridiculed for his senescence. His iconoclasm, obsolete profession and oversized Dockers. Fear of being another fossil in the maritime Met. SOMETIMES IT’S GOOD TO LIVE IN FEAR said a billboard advertising tourism in Somalia.
The critic had been subsiding off royalties from his last essay, a palatable rumination on generational differences in the technological age, lauded for its exploration of politics and morality without the imperatives of capitalism. He thought about his next piece. What if Starbucks had been named after a different character in Moby Dick? He filed that thought away for later inspection.
His agent called as the critic plodded down the dock. “You don’t make my job easy.”
The girls that passed did not have the crepe paper skin of his female peers. Each debutante to flit by the critic was more radiant than the last, more youthful, more apt at employing the aesthetics of great famine. One—perhaps they’d met before, perhaps she’d enjoyed his rumination on generational differences—smiled at him, beckoning him onto the barge. His agent still:
“Did you hear me?”
“Say it again.”
“I said it’s funny that you write so much about time and yet are always late.”
“I’m going to have to cancel our lunch. I’m getting on a boat.”
“Please don’t talk to anyone. Especially women.”
*
The young writer waded through the congested ship, mentally comparing the swaying bodies to wind-blown cattails like the ones that grew in Colorado, her place of origin which a friend had disparagingly referred to as a “fly-over state” recently and in response the writer had laughed because being self-aware, she decided, was more important than being proud of one’s heritage.
Breaking through, as it were, proved difficult for the young writer who had written little more than ad copy since arriving in the city. That said, her LIVING IN FEAR campaign albeit soul-sucking had been quite lucrative. When her break did finally reveal itself, it was in the form of an aging literary critic whose corrugated skin the writer mentally compared to the hide of the cattle she tended back home.
Her friend assured the writer that the aging critic did not want to read her musings on rural Colorado. But the critic might like to sleep with her and she could perhaps benefit off the sexual reciprocity. “Lie about your age,” advised her friend. The writer, age twenty-three, did not know in which direction she should lie. She spent an evening the week prior at the critic’s favorite bar, hanging on his every word, laughing when appropriate and nodding sage-like when wisdom was bestowed. “I love how you explore politics and morality without the imperatives of capitalism,” she had said in a breathy, suggestive tone. She had even picked up the bill because the critic had forgotten his wallet.
When arriving on the boat, the writer’s friend lent her a bottle of Korean hair oil that was “the best” but also “really flammable” with which the writer lathered her hair until it was flaxen and lustrous like, she compared mentally, the mane of her childhood Clydesdale. A photographer in a revealing Hawaiian shirt snapped her portrait confirming the efficacy of the oil. She looked out over the party, through the cargoed bodies, and into the breakwater waiting for the aging critic and the subsequent advancement of her literary career.
*
The photographer wanted one thing, and one thing only: multiple titties shoved in his mouth. He did not have a preference in size, shape or color. There was no quenching his libidinal thirst without fondling every fledgling model in downtown New York. Just today he had awoken with two girls he met the night prior, spent the morning sucking and palpating, performing his erotic mammograms. But he still was not satisfied and now, on the boat, it took every ounce of his discipline to mind the popular adage eyes up here.
Oh the innovations late-feminism made in women’s clothing, or lack there of, liberating the nipple, the freedom for which he had been a long-time advocate. He learned early on in his career—his hayday, the ‘90s—that if you wear a camera around your neck, girls will often expose themselves to you as an act of playful rebellion. And he could only hope that if breasts were flashed in the first act of the boat party, they would be mashed in his face by the third.
An hour off shore and the glitterati were getting queasy. The girls steadied themselves on their dates, their pallor turning from white to green. As the sun began its descent and the ship circled the greenest girl of them all, Lady Liberty, the crowd fell into a state of collective seasickness. The photographer watched in revulsion as one by one the women began ejecting their meager dinners onto the bow, each inspiring the next like nauseated dominos.
He was immune to the mal de mer because, before becoming a famed party paparazzo, he had served three years in the naval academy, once notably telling Page 6 that it was “so clutch” to be in the navy during a ground war. He had spent most of his active service playing Halo. Now chaos mounted. With vomit came slippage, followed by injury. Blood and bile. The city’s finest were falling into their own foul messes. Clothing was removed and engaged tactically; tube top as tourniquet, etc. Utilitarian nudity. The photographer got his wish, against all odds, of seeing some cleavage.
He made his way to safety on the boat’s lower deck, scraping the dregs of some congealed cocaine out of a glass vial. In his haste, the photographer bumped into a couple—a young girl draped coquettishly over an old man whom the photographer recognized from tabloids exposing the man for doing exactly this—spilling what appeared to be a bottle of Korean hair product. Startled, the old man dropped his lit cigarette into the puddling oil.
*
A beautiful young activist donning a yellow life preserver stabbed at the briny shell of Trash Island. She’d save this gentle planet yet, spreading the word of her benevolent God to even the most jaded and impenetrable of communities. She wandered off from her cohort of volunteers for a moment of solitary prayer. Oh Jesus, if only she could remove the plastic bags and six-pack ringlets from her relationship. It had become more volatile of late during her boyfriend’s social acclivity. Sometimes verging on violent. A light in his eyes, thought the activist, had been snuffed.
Tears filled the activist’s eyes at the realization of her own helplessness. She knelt in a nest of disposable straws and wept. She could not be a hero to everyone—the o-zone, the oceans, the inbred chickens—least of all herself, without making some difficult choices. “God, give me a sign,” she pleaded, when out in the distance her miracle appeared. Her burning bush. The Lord incarnate: in the middle of the sea, a tiny fire sat on the horizon, appearing no bigger than the plume of a lighter.