The Far Shore Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Paul T. Scheuring

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2017

  One Light Road, Inc.

  Mill Valley, CA

  www.paultscheuring.com

  Twitter: @paultscheuring

  Edited and designed by The Artful Editor, www.artfuleditor.com

  Cover design by James T. Egan

  Interior design by Phillip Gessert

  ISBN 978-0-9984502-0-9 (paperback)

  For Natalie, Henry, and Lily

  I

  The horizon’s 3.1 miles away.

  Someone told her that once.

  If you’re standing at sea level and you look out across the water, that’s all your eyes get: 3.1 miles of the ocean’s surface.

  That’s how far it is to that indistinct line out there that separates sea from sky.

  After that, the slow, furtive curve of the world takes over and the ocean beyond is lost to you.

  She’s on the jetty as she mulls this.

  Lone woman out there, beer in hand.

  Great thinker or dupe, one of the two.

  Impossible to know.

  If it’s really so.

  If it’s really 3.1 miles away.

  He—the one who told her this, a man she’d rather forget—said it was just simple geometry.

  This plus that divided by this got you 3.1 miles.

  She comes out here to forget—a lot of things, including him—but, of course, every time she sees the horizon she thinks of those 3.1 miles and in turn thinks of him.

  Funny how that works, how you can’t actively forget.

  Forgetting’s a passive thing, an incidental thing, an oh-by-the-way thing.

  But invariably the things you want to forget are not even remotely oh-by-the-way.

  She nevertheless comes out here after work and lets the ocean fill her vision most days.

  Amazing how it flattens so quickly toward two dimensions just past the breakers.

  Extends as an ever more indeterminate field toward the horizon.

  Could be a mile, could be 3.1, could be twenty.

  Could be that man’s full of shit.

  It’s because there’s no reference, she thinks.

  No boats or islands out there to give it dimensionality.

  As if by their presence something so vast and unchanging as the ocean could suddenly be comprehensible.

  Mostly she thinks about what lies beyond that 3.1-mile cordon.

  It’s just water, she knows.

  An incalculable expanse of more of the same.

  Unwitnessed by the world, for the most part.

  Which is, of course, what she is too.

  She’s never been past that cordon.

  Never made it further than those 3.1 miles offshore.

  Thirty-nine years on this earth and she’s been bound to her own little swath of the globe this whole time.

  Never too far north, south, west, or east.

  Just here, stuck on her side of the horizon.

  Which is funny, she thinks, because she works for a shipping company.

  Signs from her cubicle the manifests, runs the numbers, makes sure the containers full of Korean golf balls are properly loaded onto 18-wheelers and dispersed across the country.

  The six-inch rubber giraffes from China.

  The twelve-packs of athletic socks from Bangladesh.

  It was all so very exotic when she got the job: import-export.

  But a half dozen years in, she knows it’s really just a computer screen in a cubicle in a dying ’70s office complex with a partial view of the harbor.

  Out there: cranes and cargo ships and containers, all wearing some degree of maritime rust.

  You’d need a time-lapse camera to make it exciting.

  Better to surf the web, escape the cordon that way.

  Only problem with that is the email icon at the bottom of her computer screen.

  The one that sprouts a blood-red dot whenever an email hits her inbox.

  She’s also the senior customer relations representative.

  (Though she’s technically senior to no one, given the department consists of only her, and she has numerous other duties as well.)

  No one emails customer relations unless they’re livid.

  She’s been instructed to open the emails, read them word for word, then take a few breaths and think about how to respond respectfully.

  Hard to do when people call you Fucker.

  (Or, more specifically, Fuckers, as in You Fuckers—it’s always plural when people lay into companies—but she’s the only one who ever reads them, so she is not just one Fucker but multiple Fuckers.)

  (Amazing, too, that people in need—which ultimately is what the people are that contact customer service—employ Shit-stick and Fucker as readily as they would the word Please.)

  O People, how you do coo.

  Her superior, Wes, all boiler and blather, coaches her on proper etiquette, how to best represent the company in such conflicts.

  Or he did once, anyhow.

  When she was first hired and he hastily “trained” her.

  He prefers to avoid the nastiness of the front line otherwise.

  He just wants the view from ten thousand feet.

  Are our accounts good?

  We’re not losing anybody, are we?

  But you made it good, right?

  And ultimately, she can’t say much but Yes.

  Because to say No is to say she failed.

  That she lost the accounts because she didn’t adequately take it in the shorts and get the customer what they wanted.

  She’s the front line.

  She’s the whipping boy.

  That’s the universe.

  Warm fuzzies.

  Here now and forevermore.

  Back to the Net: she can escape the cordon that way.

  Tries, daily.

  Trans-Atlantic flights in the snap of a finger!

  The click of a mouse!

  Her butt’s at work but her brain isn’t!

  Between incendiary emails and phone calls she’s in Madagascar!

  Varanasi!

  In fact, during the more scorching calls, she’ll bring up a webpage showing Vanuatu or Zanzibar, and just stare at it, the white sands and the locals and the food, while the customer’s jackhammering her through the headset.

  You Fuckers!

  You Shit-sticks!

  (Sorry, sir, kind of hard to make out what you’re saying; I’m diving a reef in the Coral Sea right now….)

  We’re missing a gross of Slip-N-Slides, you low-grade Jackass!

  (Condolences, sir, truly, but this bullfight I’m at is a doozy, can I get back to you…?)

  And on it goes.

  The daily ass-kicking.

  The work-arounds to find escape.

  Sometimes she thinks she can endure.

  That Zanzibaran webcam shots can pacify her in her darker moments.

  But you look at an image on a computer screen long enough, the illusion of dimension drops away.

  You see the pixels.

  Three dimensions flatten to two.

  Sort of like the ocean as it nears the horizon.

  And all that remains is that strange, flat dimensionlessness.

  There are, of course, other ways out.

  Her apartment and her TV and her couch.

  And Coors Light and Klondike sandwiches.

  On this “sandwich”:

  the front end of it, a bottle of Coo
rs Light.

  First thing she gets when she walks in the door.

  Before she even puts down her purse.

  She’s into the fridge, phone usually still to her ear as she rolls any unfinished calls from the workday.

  Ah, the satisfying sprish as she uncaps it.

  Half the time she mutes the phone first.

  The other half she doesn’t.

  Lets the Fuckers hear.

  That’s what she thinks when she’s brave.

  But she’s not always brave.

  She’s through that bottle so fast she’s usually into the Klondike bar before she even knows it.

  Not exactly the longevity diet, but she’s not exactly calling the shots.

  Pure autopilot.

  And that’s fine.

  Because sometimes it’s so much nicer just to cede the controls and let the path of least resistance have its way.

  (Wes says people hit the sugary stuff later in the day because they’ve burned up brain glucose through too much stress.

  “But you don’t seem stressed to me,” he says.

  Oh Wes.

  You Fucker.)

  All of this tends to happen in a very glorious fifteen-minute bacchanal once she’s through the door.

  And by the end of it, she can finally breathe.

  For the first time that day.

  She’ll sit on the couch.

  Thumb the same three buttons on the remote.

  And power up another Coors Light.

  The back end of her Coors-Light-and-Klondike sandwich.

  (Though more often than not there’s another Coors Light behind that one.)

  She’ll watch three channels simultaneously.

  And, for a few moments, will enter exalted mind space.

  The mind space of zero.

  The Land of No Shits Given.

  She is numb.

  And absolutely golden.

  She wishes it would last forever, this zero-mind.

  Nothing to run to or from.

  But after backstroking through a few beers and a few moments of ecstatic laze…

  She’s beset by the unconscious mental twitch that always seems to hit her, even if she’s in Buddha-like repose.

  Her phone finds her hand.

  Magically.

  Like Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber finds his hand in Empire Strikes Back.

  Each an extension of the other.

  There’s, of course, no flying involved, though that would be cool.

  It just happens.

  As if the phone has a will of its own.

  As if it has an agenda.

  Because she doesn’t.

  There’s no reason she’s grabbed it.

  No forethought.

  It’s just there.

  To be checked in with.

  (Yes, but did Luke hate his lightsaber 99 percent of the time?)

  There are no calls.

  (Which you should be happy about, Lil—they’re all work.

  And yet, still…)

  No texts.

  No emails.

  No Tweets.

  No Facebook posts.

  ?

  She checks first to see if she still has service.

  Four bars, as always in the apartment.

  But, she guesses it’s been…two hours since she’s been home?

  And no emails?

  She has, unbidden, for a split second, vague Twilight Zone thoughts.

  But then digs into her email junk folder.

  That’ll tell her something.

  Indeed: junk email has arrived in the intervening hours.

  Proving that thermonuclear war has not erased the rest of the population.

  The screen as usual pulls her in.

  It’s less about the content than the screen, sometimes she thinks.

  And on-screen for her now: the hucksters and the touts of the junk mail folder.

  The broken-English miracle sellers.

  Lose 50 Pounds in 60 Days.

  (She could go for that.

  That’d get her to fighting weight.

  But no doubt it’d mean the end of the nightly sandwich.

  Better numb than thin, she thinks, and goes to the next.)

  Get Twice Much Bigger Penis - $200.

  (A dick wouldn’t be bad.

  Well, not all the time.

  Just an on-demand dick.

  With some of the attendant testosterone, she could kick Wes’s ass.

  He-Who-Refuses-to-Give-a-Raise.

  He-Who-Calls-Me-Chubby.

  But-Then-Tries-to-Climb-Inside-My-Pants-at-the-Office-Christmas-Party every year.)

  The latest one, from BSherwood, easily wins the award for best composed:

  Liliana Allen - You Could Be Worth $16.4 Million - Click Here.

  They got the spelling of her name right, put it right there in the subject line.

  Nice work, BSherwood.

  She thinks she should reward BSherwood for that alone, and click through to see what their spiel is.

  Maybe they’ll sell her the winning Powerball numbers for next week.

  But then she thinks better of it.

  There are stories, aren’t there?

  That if you click on the spam links, you open the gates of Hell.

  And all sorts of viruses stream into your phone, murder it, taking all your credit card data in the process.

  Not today, BSherwood.

  But 16.4 mill.

  She’d take that most days.

  If there’s one thing Lily won’t be, she knows, it’s a millionaire.

  The shipping company will kill her just like it killed her father.

  Him: a longshoreman, a million years ago.

  When she was lost in the rosy oblivion of toddlerhood.

  He bought in foolishly like she would three decades later.

  Giving away their daylight hours to the company and the commute.

  Knowing their homes only by early morning light and late evening darkness.

  During lap-swim time.

  Where she backstrokes through Coors Light, he backstroked through Maker’s Mark.

  She can remember that yellow ochre label—how it somehow embodied in sickly yellow that god-awful whiskey smell once it was uncapped.

  Oh man, how do people do that, drink whiskey right out of the bottle?

  Don’t you know you’re in bad at that point?

  And yet maybe in some ways he knew what he was doing.

  Knew the piper was never going to have to be paid for all the booze.

  Because it was the asbestos that would kill him.

  The wonderful bounty found inside the ships he was tasked with cleaning.

  The old World War Two transports and monohull oilers that the rest of the world didn’t want.

  But were catnip to the bargain-hunting “magnates” that operated on the lower rungs of the global shipping trade.

  They were polluted, decaying things: more trouble than they were worth to the big, legitimate companies that originally purchased them decades before.

  Pennies on the dollar they came for; the contaminated walls and holds and ventilation systems were tossed in at no charge.

  All those strains of petroleum sloshing permanently in the bilges and ballasts: the Nigerian crude, the Norwegian sweet, the synthetic for the engines, the solvents, the lubricants—free!

  So too the lead paint generously applied in a dozen layers to the walls.

  The mercury spilled from level switches, light fixtures.

  And the asbestos, liberally applied to boiler casings, exhaust pipes, sandwich panels, fireproof doors.

  It must be said that there was no malice in this.

  This was how things were, how you built a ship back then.

  There wasn’t enough information in the ’40s and ’50s.

  Nobody knew.

  If you wanted to insulate your ship from fire, you put in asbestos.

  It worked, anyone could see that.

/>   It was the ones who trafficked in the ships later, the second-hand buyers and dealers, those pennies-on-the-dollar guys—they were the ones who started to have real information—and they still went forward with things.

  They knew.

  Her dad knew too.

  After a few years.

  And she only started to realize he knew because the wry joke started coming out, that one told with the same rhythm and tone every time, the one he intoned at backyard barbecues and school fundraisers whenever anyone asked about the ship business: the only healthy thing on a ship was the gangway that got you the hell off it.

  The process went something like this, she’d learn: cleanup crews went in with buffers and blowtorches and did their best to rid the ship of the Old Technologies, but in doing so, agitated them, stirred up the heavy metals and toxins like long dormant ghosts, and unbeknownst to the crew (at least most of the time), filled the air with microscopic evil spirits called things like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls.

  Nickel-a-syllable words that were way too much for her to absorb at the trial.

  The lawyer was the one who told her to think of them as evil spirits instead.

  Evil spirits that climbed inside the lungs of men like her father, and hid there, waiting.

  All the while, supping on the lung tissue.

  A cell at a time.

  A cell for breakfast, a cell for lunch, a cell for dinner.

  Day after day, week after week.

  And that’s why your father no longer looks like he used to in the old pictures.

  Why his coughs come like gurgling run-ons, a horror show every time.

  (Comparatively, these cigarettes are a breath of fresh air, her dad would joke.

  Might even heal me.

  Said with a big crooked smile as he mushroomed a plume of smoke ceilingward.)

  Twenty years later, they hired her.

  Because most of the old guard was gone, the ones who would remember her last name and what it meant to the company.

  There were, after all, a lot of Allens in the world, and there was no reason to think this Allen had anything to do with that Allen.

  She’d have applied somewhere else, but there was nowhere else, nowhere paying in the hourly double-digits.

  And she’d gleaned enough over the years to speak intelligently about shipping.

  So it was sort of a chip shot, really.

  She walked into the interview and talked casually about the difference between bulk carriers and container ships, how liners have regular schedules and tramps don’t.