Ernest thought the ocean would be easier—thought sea air would be better for his lungs, better than black carbon fumes and nicotine smoke. He thought, what the hell, a fresh start would be nice, and he went ahead and did it all himself: booking a beach townhouse, packing his suitcases, making arrangements for someone to look after his cats while he's gone. And for the first few days, it really was everything. People looked at him like he was a breath of fresh air, like he was something new and beautiful because of it, and god, wasn't that nice, to be seen as the blessing and not the mistake.
It wasn't their fault, really. Only his. Ernest gets tired of everything eventually.
It's a pretty shitty house, if he's being honest. Neglected, forlorn, all leaky pipes and water damage and flickering lights; almost certainly abandoned and hastily fixed back up for an unexpected guest. Nothing like what Ernest is used to, but maybe exactly what he needs—or so he tells himself—maybe exactly what he deserves.
Ernest gets up in the morning. He makes coffee. He burns toast, the way he tells his friends that he likes it, and sometimes he tops it with sliced avocado if the groceries haven't all gone bad yet. He takes his notebook, a handful of ballpoint pens, tucked into his jacket where the sea air can't get to them; he brings an umbrella outside, because he no longer trusts any weather report. Every week on the dot, his agent calls in to check on the manuscript, because that's what they all care about, what Ernest can give them, and he lies the way he writes, says everything is well, he's finding good inspiration here. The sequel is slow-going, he says, but at least it's going.
Down by the shoreline past midnight, nose burning with the reek of dead fish, it comes down to this: Ernest has run out of lies to tell himself. He had thought the ocean would be blue, and maybe it can be, maybe it even is in other places, but Sea-Like-Sorrow's horizon stretches out into gray skies and green water, and here he is now. Alone on the pier; holding his notebook, but not his pen. These aren't the words he wants.
Well, Ernest is used to things he doesn't want, and he's gone too far to go crawling back to the city begging his publisher for forgiveness. Fine. Look for what can be salvaged, remake the world until you can call it beautiful; you know the drill, you've done this before.
What words are there for blue? Sapphire. Lazuli. Aquamarine. Those are gemstones, and this is not quite so glamorous. Turquoise. Cerulean. Too beautiful, too serene. Azure—Indigo—Mazarine?
Oh, who is he kidding? It's just blue—choppy with foam, turned steel under rain, churning violently enough to make him queasy just from looking. Ernest is looking for a silver lining to redress this story, but the real world has no metaphors, can only be endured. He's used to blaring neon lights, teenagers dressed in brand names, sports cars so shiny they could be used for mirrors; enough colors to make him dizzy-delirious-delusional, reds and yellows and greens, all luster and light. He's not used to—gray. Drunken skies and icy rain and starless night views.
There's a moon tonight, fat and white, a cat drunk on cream. He names the sky twilight, and for once does not write it down. He wants to know if he'll forget this.
It happens like this:
He hadn't been born a writer. Nobody is. Language has never come naturally to him, merely honed after years of habit. But when he was a kid, he needed a reason to stay alive, so he wrote a manuscript that was meant only for himself. When he is an adult, a book that was never meant to make it to a publishing house ends up a bestseller, and suddenly he is awarded, praised, begged for more. You have a gift, they keep telling him, you're one in a million, we see now, and don't you want to be somebody? Don't you?
Goddamnit, Ernest is lucky. He's so fucking lucky, it makes him sick to think about it. There are people out there who are brave and bright and brilliant and they will never get a chance to prove it, for no real good reason besides uncontrollable unfortunate circumstance, and look at him. Just look at him. People would kill to have what he has, and here he is wasting everything he doesn't deserve.
He'd been barely two weeks out of the hospital when he booked the reservation, the bus tickets, all of it, and the whole time he'd been waiting heart-in-throat for somebody to stop him. Surely one person would realize something wasn't right—would call him, just before he stepped on the bus, would say, Hey, is something wrong? And be would tell them the truth, that he'd crashed that car on purpose. That the something wrong with him is inside somewhere he can't quite carve out. And maybe they'd cry for him, tell him to come home, come home, we'll fix you, and he'll come home, and he'll get better, finally. Happily ever after.
But he got on the bus, made it to the house, unlocked the door. He left voicemails telling his family he was on a break for his health and one for his agent saying he was looking for fresh inspiration. He had made his bed and lied down in it, listening the the skittering of roaches he couldn't find, nothing left but the muted memories of hospital tears and plastic flowers. And he had woken up still in Sea-Like-Sorrow, phone buzzing with his agent's third call of the morning needling him for a manuscript update, and he had realized then that there was nobody coming to save him and he was too tired to get up himself.
There must be something wrong with him. People are not meant to be alive like he's alive, like they're only skin stretched over a frame of brittle bird bones, like they're waiting for the rest of the world to take a closer look and realize they've been talking to a corpse. Something's deeply wrong with you, Ernest's grandfather once told him—a retired God-fearing minister who spent his whole life in the Bible Belt, something that might turn to evil, if y'ain't careful, boy.
They want a story? Fine. Here's a story:
A writer drives drunk, crashes his car, only survives because of a lucky angle of the impact. His parents drive five hours to get to the hospital, his sisters bring flowers and fruit baskets, his friends clamor to see him; they all love him, cry for him, marvel at the miracle. He laughs with them. Yes, what a lucky miracle.
He's tired. Fucking hell, he's so tired. Surely he isn't supposed to live like this. Surely he can't last like this. He puts a pen to paper, tries to salvage at least poetry out of this ache, but there's nothing beautiful about wanting to die. He wishes it was beautiful. He wishes he was beautiful. But even writers run out of words, and his skull has long since bled dry of ink and music.
He keeps trying to carve out new bits of himself for his art but it's not even pretty to look at and he's never known what his audience wants from him. He's never known why they thought he had something they wanted in the first place.
People keep asking for art but the world is drowning-darkening-dying and is this really how they're wasting a lifetime? Being in love with paper and pens? Then again, Ernest is the one giving them what they want. He's being such a hypocrite. The world is ending, and nobody will save it, and whether or not he dies tomorrow, he'll die anyways. Inevitable.
And Christ alive, if you want an example, just look at this town. Look at this godforsaken town. The houses are ruined, the stores are emptied, the shores are flooded more often than they're not; folks are always leaving, never coming back, like a bathtub set to drain. There's solvents poisoning the soil and toxins running through bloodstreams. There's a cancer rate twice as high as the national average. And nobody's doing anything. Not the mayor, not the city council, not the useless government. Not even the people. Ernest wonders if they've all just given up at this point.
What a sad town. What a poor, poor town. And what does that make him, Ernest thinks, that he came here to find a story to save his own life?
