Straight and Level

1

PROLOGUE

John lay in a liminal space between sleep and the confusion that always resulted from being in a bed that was not his own. The feeling wasn’t necessarily unpleasant. In fact sometimes, like tonight, it opened the portal. He chased a thought, letting it lead him to the other side. And in that place -

There was a book. About a kid who loved purple? Or someone whose name contained the color purple? John couldn’t remember. But that thought bloomed into-

Bohemian Rhapsody. It must have been the only song he could remember the words to when his tiny daughter had suddenly asked him to sing. And then it just became part of their bedtime routine. He even remembered eventually playing her the real version and her saying she liked the way he sang it better. That’s how much she must have loved him once. All heart, no taste.

Now, if he sang, like in the car, well, there had been a period where she’d sounded pained, begged him to stop, but even that was already over. These days she just had the headphones in all the time. Tiny. Wireless. He could have a whole conversation and not realize she hadn’t heard a thing. They’d gone from ‘you’re better than Freddie Mercury, Dad’ to ‘what?’.

He was drifting back to himself, on the border of remembering where he actually was. He clung to the other side, begged it to offer him one more glimpse of what had been.

She’d do newscasts from the backseat. He couldn’t remember why, but in the suburban her carseat was all the way in the third row, dead center, so he’d look in the rear view and it was like seeing her in the middle of a television screen. She insisted on that spot. Wanted the ‘way back’ all for herself. Her little brother Ethan would be in the second row. And as John drove she’d anchor these completely improvised little news reports about whatever came into her brain. “Hello, I’m Sloane, and today we’ve got an exclusive for you on the Conner’s dog. Some say he’s fine but others are saying that the licking is gross.” And then she’d throw to her little brother, “and now E is going to give us an update on the weather”.

And the boy would get so excited, he’d sputter to jump in. “Oh, oh, oh. Well, the weather is, right now it’s-”

And then she’d suddenly cut him off. “Thank you for that E. Coming up next….” It drove the boy crazy and she reveled in his frustration. The portal let him see all of this like it was right in front of him. What he couldn’t see was where it had gone.

There was a last time he read her that book. Sang that song. A last time she ever gave a news report from the backseat. And they each passed without note. Things that happened daily, nightly, the wallpaper of their lives, and then somehow not at all.

That’s how last times worked. By the time you thought to be on guard they’d already slipped by.

Sometimes it felt like nothing but endings.

So many endings.

And with that, the portal closed and he was spit out into the present. I know where I am, he thought. And I know what day it is.

FIFTY

As John racewalked across the room, phone pressed to his ear, waiting for someone who spoke English to pick up on the other end, he realized that on his first day at age 50 he was struggling with two problems that he would not have imagined could be problems way back when he was 49. The first was that something called an electric surfboard would not hold a charge for more than twenty minutes and this was very frustrating to his son Ethan and the other teens that he’d rented it for.

The second was that for the last seventeen hours he’d been farting in the closet of the master suite and as he reentered the compact space to release (he hated the word fart, even when it appeared in his thoughts) he found himself with a low level anxiety that he was creating a fire hazard. If this luxurious Mexican villa, which they had rented to celebrate his officially becoming an antique, were to explode, killing his friends and family, he prayed that, at the very least, investigators would never properly diagnose the cause.

“Hello. You are having a problem, sir?” said a voice in his ear. My friend, you have no idea. “Yes. This surfboard thing is defective. We need to get it switched out right away, uh, you know, pronto.”

“Okay. Yes sir. What’s the problem? What is it doing?” John reached down and manually pulled one side of his posterior (he refused to even think the phrase ass cheek) away from the other so that the necessary emission could escape silently. “It just goes dead. Twenty minutes and it’s dead.”

“Okay. That’s okay. Is it electric, no? Battery is good for maybe twenty minutes and then you charge it again, okay? This is very normal.” John felt a jet of heat and a corresponding relief in his stomach and now knew he had a few minutes of feeling normal in which to do battle before his insides reloaded and he would be forced to make the closet more dangerous. He rushed to free himself from the noxious space as he spoke. “No. Twenty minutes is not okay. We don’t even want this stupid thing. We were supposed to get two jet skis.”

“Oh, no no no, sir. The accommodation, it comes with two water toys, not two jet ski. One jet ski, one surfboard. The surfboard is the very latest thing. Very popular right now.”

“I don’t really care how popular it is, we don’t want it.”

As he slammed the closet door behind him like a man trying to keep a depraved criminal trapped on the other side, he saw his wife Sarah standing in the bedroom doorway staring at him. “What are you doing?”

John made a strategic decision to answer the question he strongly preferred her to be asking rather than the one he was almost certain she was asking. “I’m trying to get the goddamned surfboard replaced. But they-”

“Oh my God, please just let it go. The kids have completely forgotten about it. They’re at the beach. There’s plenty of ways to be entertained. Everyone is enjoying themselves except you. Can’t you just relax?”

“I can. I promise. And I will. As soon as I get this taken care of.” But he was already talking to her back as she made a gesture declaring him hopeless and walked out. He detected strain, but it was the strain of long erosion, not fresh damage.

“I’m sorry, sir, but those are the only toys we have available. No other jetski.”

The gas was not a result of the Mexican cuisine, but was in fact a side effect of some pills that, as John understood it, were supposed to help him live forever. Or at least live longer while someone else was figuring out the pill that would let him live forever. He wasn’t even sure which podcast he’d heard about them on and the more he thought about it, it might not have even been a doctor who was recommending them. It might have been a former UFC fighter. Who’d been hit in the head. A lot. Enough to make him retire. And who was now selling life extension pills. That John bought. And took. Ironically John considered the gas they produced to be the chief evidence of their efficacy. This was exactly the sort of Faustian bargain he could believe the universe would offer - live forever, but be cursed to fill Mexican closets with the smell of your immortality. Anyone present when he was in the throes of this gastrointestinal deal with the devil would certainly not believe he was destined for agelessness. They would instead assume he was actively dying. Or at least they would want him to.

At home he had a system. Frequent excursions to the backyard, a sudden enthusiasm for walking the dog. But here, trapped in a beachside villa with four other families, he’d been unable to systematize anything and his guts were in open rebellion at the unpredictability. Last night in the kitchen he’d passed gas without even meaning to and because of the choreography he’d been standing near Aiden, their good friend’s teenage son. Aiden was in the midst of puberty and the source of all sorts of smells, and the boy had been blamed. Not by John. His father had called him out and Aiden had denied it. But a teenage boy with a wispy mustache denying responsibility for a smell was basically an admission of guilt. And John hadn’t stepped in. He’d let that innocent boy own John’s fart. Because John was at war with death. And there would be casualties.

“There have to be other options. When you say there are two of something it implies an equivalency. You know?” There was only silence on the other end. Whether this was because his word choices had not crossed a language barrier or simply because sometimes there is just nothing to say was unclear. But before he could pursue it he heard Ethan yelling from down by the beach.

“Dad! Dad! Come here! You gotta come see this!”

He could hear commotion as Sarah and the other wives were herding away from the balcony, an area they’d recently colonized which is what had forced him to start moving his life extension activities to the closet. He hung up the phone and stepped out to see all the teens and now the wives and other husbands all crowding around Nick. Nick who was standing on the beach gesturing to a newly arrived second jet ski like a model revealing a product at a trade show. “Jesus fucking Christ”, John mumbled to himself.

He watched the excitement from the porch, refusing to rush down and be part of what looked like rabid fans welcoming a celebrity. He waited until Nick and all their friends made their way back up before he engaged.

“I had that taken care of. I mean, I’m getting it taken care of,” was how John greeted Nick, the conquering hero, his long time best friend, and the person he hated more than anyone else alive.

“I know bro, but I couldn’t stand to see you fucking around with something so stupid when we’re here to celebrate. It’s YOUR birthday. You shouldn’t have to think about anything but margaritas and that hammock.”

Nick was a master of this. Of pretending to pick you up while slicing you to shreds. Fucking around with something so stupid translated to I had to save you from yourself. Margaritas and that hammock translated to we all know you like to get drunk and lay around old man. Nevermind that John had run two miles on the beach at sunrise every morning of their stay while Nick slept off the empty bottles of wine until almost ten. Nevermind that Nick had a paunch while John abused himself into a shape that he suspected was causing at least two of the teens to keep their shirts on by the pool to avoid comparison. Well, let’s just wait and see who’s farting next to who’s grave, John thought.

“Where did you get it?” Sarah asked. “They keep telling John they don’t have anything else.”

“I just bought it. There’s a place right down by the marina.”

The shocked laughs. The chorus of ‘you what?’. His innocent what’s everybody freaking out about expression. Classic fucking Nick. This wasn’t problem solving. It was a power play. A gas guzzling, fiberglass fuck you delivered with a smile.

“And how are you going to get it home? Shipping, not to mention import and taxes, it’s probably another fifty percent on top of what you paid.”

“Then I’ll leave it.”

“You plan to frequent this place so you can visit your jetski?”

“I’ll donate it. Fuck, we’ll let the boys set it on fire and put it on Youtube. We’ll probably make it back in views.”

“‘We Set A New Jetski On Fire!’ is the kind of thing you think goes viral?”

“I don’t know, you sound pretty pissed. Isn’t anger what drives clicks these days?”

Sarah sensed this quickly going south and stepped in, a role she’d become all too adept at over the last five years. “Let’s worry about later, later. Right now a problem’s been solved, the kids are excited, and we’re at the beach… for your birthday.” She stressed the your in a way that would have escaped anyone who hadn’t been married to her for two decades, but John heard it and everything it implied. The fact that she could clearly say knock it the fuck off or I’ll murder you by slightly stressing one syllable was as impressive as it was terrifying.

But as John was considering whether to risk his life any further they heard a scream from inside. Not a scream so much as the sound of alarm. Of horror. Of revulsion. John’s eyes did a quick scan of the group. He’d become unconsciously adept at keeping track of all the wolves like a Great Pyrenees charged with protecting a particularly foul chicken coop. But he now realized that one had slipped his defenses. The sound was coming from the Master Suite. And it was Nick’s wife who was unaccounted for.