This is part one of the serialized novel Try Not To Get Discouraged, which may be purchased from Amazon here
met my wife for the first time at an art installation in Kennedy airport, terminal B. She was thirteen years old, a little black girl from Sierra Leone crowdfunding her education in a glass dome by a moving walkway. There she was, seated at a laminated desk in a yellow floral print dress, flanked on either side by two ivory white animatronic children scribbling circles. Behind them a green-board asked the public to ‘pay for the future.’ Built into the front of the dome was a pin-pad and dollar feed, the transplanted face of a vending machine. For one hundred dollars you could punch in what the captive student would study, video lectures and archival footage winking into reality across the surface of the dome.
This was when I was moving around the galaxy doing investigative insurance claims work, being paid to suggest there was no fault to be had in faulty machinery. New York was on the precipice of becoming a real shithole so the airports were ghost towns. Each time we met it felt staged, like she had been propped up for my guilt or redemption. That was our courtship. It was over a decade for her. For me it was one long binge, one year of planet hopping and special relativity, coming and going through terminal B and writing up reports against policy holders that asphyxiated themselves in the badlands of Mars, of Venus, of really anywhere, it’s really only badlands out there. And I’d see her, and she’d be older and smarter and knowing something she either wanted to know or didn’t, such as the collected works of Marcel Proust or aliens in the bible.
That first time we met, I went to one knee and asked how she was doing, trying to play the kindly stranger, not realizing my bloodshot eyes and crumpled suit made me look like someone who sold drugs from a limo. She looked like a poster child for famine relief, dressed up to stand next to the aged beneficence of Ellen DeGeneres, giving third world puppy eyes in a late-night commercial.
I asked her what she wanted to learn about. She screwed her foot into the ground and said she didn’t know, her English soft, the vowels elongated. I punched a few keys and ended up in Marine Biology, specifically the care and maintenance of large sea mammals in captivity. The curved immensity of the extinct Blue Whale summoned itself onto the glass between us, tinting her with an aquatic dimness that turned her ultramarine.
“How about something with whales honey?” I said, inserting a crumpled bill into the feed. She smiled at me through two fighting walruses; the image of her gap-toothed childhood beamed into my retinas. This is the memory I have the hardest time coming to grips with, mostly because I love it so much, and loving it makes me feel like a fiend.
The next time I saw her was after four months of ‘me’ time, fresh off a jag through the mineral planets, witnessing and notarizing the various small failures in life support equipment and the permanent, large failures in their users. At that point I’d seen pretty much every form of death you could imagine, imploded, and exploded, frozen and fried.
The last incident, a cryogenic failure with a smashed face, had me thinking of quitting but the idea of immobility seemed like death. Nobody with money tried to live in any one place anymore. Most places weren’t very livable when compared to the smooth jazz purgatories of airport living. We were a generation of intransigents mulling end times, spending our lives sleeping on the tiled floors of transit hubs, waiting for the blastoffs that would send us around the solar system to hawk heavy metals and life insurance.
It had been a bad flight, hours of thought directed towards the faults and responsibilities of a smashed face, the sound a flash-frozen body makes when it becomes something you can sweep up. I’d tried working on my novel, the eco-apocalypse trials of gruff Irish PI Danny Temple, and it went all right till I found out that my seatmate, a bloodshot Slavic businessman I dubbed Swiss Robinson, was working on something similar, only with an Icelandic ex-cop. We spent the rest of the flight in a small war, angling to see each other’s monitors and fighting for leg space.
During arrival I spilled the remainder of my ginger ale on Swiss Robinson and watched the deterioration of New York from the window, looking for which neighborhoods had burned down, which had scaffolded back up. The city was constantly on fire, a weather system of grease and scorched stone unfolding between the hurricanes that patrolled the east coast. As the tarry city came up to meet me, I chewed three amphetamine gummies and prepared for whatever dislocation I might feel, energized to measure what was old and new, what had marched on without me. I had missed over four years.
In Terminal B, grinding my teeth down the infinitude of motorized walkways, my armpits sweating out mini vodka bottles, I saw her glass bell baking in the white glow of full spectrum wattage. A health interest drink cart had sprouted from the tile next to her installment, a giant neon carrot shaped kiosk throwing orange and green off the polished walls and floor. I didn’t recognize her at first; she was about seventeen then, eyes connected to her display through filaments of concentration that jerked her big brown irises side to side with clockwork precision, hair piled up in a tumble atop her head, thick glasses dominating the oval of her face, neck and shoulders carrying a bazaar of native beads and pan-African metallurgy. She was sitting cross-legged on her plastic classroom chair, green tank top loosely fitting over a developed chest, flannel pajama bottoms rounding out the collegiate activist ensemble. I thought she was someone else, that they’d replaced the student in captivity every so often with a contest or some other pretense for soft abduction.
Swiss Robinson, juice in hand, had his face up against the glass, drawing a dick and balls in the turmeric-ginger tinged fog he expelled. He’d just logged one thousand dollars’ worth of business ethics seminars and was leering through a video of limp and firm handshakes, upset that the captive inside wasn’t over the moon about learning how to make eye contact in the workplace. He started rambling on his novel, when her attention landed on me, the shriveled suit of yesteryear.
“Hey whale man!” she cried with punchy aggression, the elongated vowels of her accent lessened, replaced by adult depth and the clipping of the American sarcasm. Swiss Robinson turned, hissed something vampiric and fled towards the stale-fat waft of the food court, hands clutching the satchel bag he carried his meal ticket in.
“You’re the little African girl,” I managed, conscious of studying her proximity to eighteen. I never said this wasn’t creepy.
Her eyebrows shot up. “Wow. Yes. In a super reductive way yes.” “Sorry.”
She shrugged, having scored her point. “Don’t be. I WAS a little African girl.”
Buzzing at the attention, I made my way to the juice cart, the bright LED friendliness of its touchscreen hijacking my endorphins, displaying an array of beautiful people dancing in bright colors, having small orgasms over liquified vegetables, “And what are you now?” I queried.
“I don’t know. Whatever happens when global-ization fucks philanthropy.” “Airport baby,” I mused, hoping to sound every bit the silver fox I wished I was. A medium blue-moss freeze piddled into a to-go cup and ejected itself towards me, strangely warm.
The carrot thanked me.
“Sounds right enough,” she murmured, picking at a toenail, glasses catching the orange glow of the great carrot, robotic, destroying in an instant my memory of the little girl in yellow with a sinister radiation. The first claws of time-loss panic gurgled in stomach and my vision saturated yellow.
“Hey, listen,” she continued, “Can you spring for some introductory Portuguese lessons? There’s this hunk that cleans the bathrooms, but noa ingles. I’ve missed out on the Latin languages entirely.”
“No more whales?”
“I can’t get an orgasm from a whale,” my first sip of blue-moss came back up, “Also they’re extinct. Except for a suicidal Beluga in Atlanta named Blue-42 and he’s a ticking clock. They force feed him morning and night.”
The combination of panic and whatever was in blue-moss freeze had convinced my bowels that action was imminent. Sweat beaded at my temples, the revolt in my innards torpedoing my brief confidence at impressing this captive underage girl.
“So, they let you out of this thing?” I stammered.
“Is that a real question?” She stopped working at her nail, fixing me with something between pity and annoyance.
“I guess?”
“Where do I pee? Where do I sleep?” She motioned to her surroundings, the two mechanical children at either side had long started losing their bleached skin and had been defaced with permanent marker mustaches and devil horns. The installation had been updated to reflect the inhabitant’s punkish developments, the slice of classroom emanating the appearance of an underfunded after-school prison yard. The word detention was scribbled in chalk across the green board and one of the dummies’ fingers had found its way into a mechanical nostril.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Inside every white dude there’s a captivity fantasy. It’s the product of a negative imagination,” she mused, twirling a finger.
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel.” I stabbed in my pocket for something to turn into Portuguese.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It means nothing.” I stuffed a tired bill into the interface, the archaic vending machine-mouth rejecting it with a gag until it didn’t.
“I live in the Sheraton with two other girls. North Korean poor and rust belt poor. We rotate.”
“You take turns being poor?” Even in my growing sickness I couldn’t help conjuring an international pillow fight.
“Being the student,” she sighed.
“Well, take it easy,” I stammered amid a retreat to the bathroom. I took a final look at her as I went, a girl on the cusp of a strange adulthood, raised on technology and passing interests.
“They named him after a football thing,” she called after me. “What?”
“The whale. Blue-42. It’s something a quarterback says. Blue-42! Hut! Hut!”
Her words chased me as I moved, trying to run and keep my butt cheeks clenched at the same time. I have no idea why she married me.
I spent the night in the city, rejuvenated by the recent evacuation of trans galaxy mid- flight cuisine and airport smoothies. Outside a storm was in mid explosion, the churning sky veined with lightning, gale force winds slapping the low slung, heavy vehicles built to withstand their force, movable bunkers. My cab took the Ellen DeGeneres memorial expressway to the FDR bridge, the lights of the great Atlantic Seawall a necklace of red dots looped around the circumference of the horizon. Manhattan spilled itself in front of me, an oil slick of light and water, the twinkling infinitude of skyscraper lights and bodega neon doubled in the brackish moats and canals. We took the elevated superhighway to the newly renovated Port Authority, proud home to Carnival Cruises. I waited for the storm to die with the cackling bums, till three A.M, when the angry weather turned into an eerie stillness irradiated with leftover ozone.
A water taxi took me to my mom’s place, the building I grew up in. The boatman, an ancient grey-beard who pleadingly introduced himself as Kim Stanley Robinson, hummed Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town with hymnal reverence, the shimmering corridors of the aquatic avenues around us stirred by fingers of wind that left delicate grooves in the quicksilver water. He told me he’d predicted all of this, kind of, in a best-selling novel written in 2017. He asked if I could believe that. I said that I could and when I didn’t follow up, he started babbling about communes. When that didn’t take, he asked me if I thought it was possible that he was a ghost.
We cruised around the edge of the park, the dead branches of the saline-choked oaks and maples reaching through the boggy surface like arthritic hands, a home to the veritable thousands of manatees that had moved in since the city went to the sea. Eventually the palace of my youth trundled into view, a giant stone fortress crowned with three oxidized brass towers, its sandy exterior gangrenous with hungry growths of sea scum crawling up its flanks, clouds of mosquitos and other bloodsuckers pixelating the searchlights that defended the lobby canopy from darkness. Kim Stanley Robinson dropped me off and took a look.
“Would’ve made a nice commune,” he said.
The building had been turned into a capsule hotel; the spacious luxury apartments rendered into bite size cells of 20th century New York glamour. Only the towers remained in their entirety, penthouse homes to two former presidents and one Russian oligarch-in-exile who spent his twilight madness shooting at the central park manatees from an open window. I was given a room on the thirteenth floor, ending up in two-hundred square feet of my former living room, encroached upon by an island kitchenette and one-eighth of a chandelier. The gleaming wood floor remained unchanged from the days of my childhood. A section of wood grain that swirled into a pig’s snout marked my familiarity. It had been a distant seventy-eight years for this place, a confusing twelve for me. My mom had been alive the last time I’d been here, the day I announced my intentions to set upon the adventure of cosmic insurance investigation with all the fervor and gusto of joining a rebellion. She died sometime between my first transit between Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, washed away with the rest of the Hamptons when hurricane season stopped ending.
I dozed on the floor, staring at the pig’s snout in the wood grain, convinced that my life could expand nor reduce further, having somehow achieved an impossible equilibrium without my knowledge or permission. The tortured Beluga, Blue-42, swam through my half-conscious thoughts, fantasy nightmares of how one would force feed a Beluga. I saw its pudgy, embryonic body strapped to a laboratory gurney while aquarium tourists formed an infinity queue to force feed it books. I was in the line, balling up the pages of my finished novel into a digestible mass. When it was my turn the Beluga regarded me with shiny eyes, black orbs lubed with tears lodged into a curious white ridge. And then I started shoving.
I snuck by her on my way to Titan the next night, riding the moving walkway to avoid any verbal interaction. Kennedy was deserted aside from a small fleet of janitors and the occasional lump of a sleeping traveler, passed out on the floor, unable to reach a lounge before giving out.
A Japanese businessman was in the process of breaking down in front of her, sliding against her dome to his knees and wailing. She tapped the glass that separated his head from her, petted him through her forcefield as he spat out words I couldn’t understand and paid her to learn introductory Japanese. This teenager who would become my wife existed entirely for me in these moments of cinema, mental impressions, collected and filled by the things I thought she was, implicitly.
My time on Titan gave me an eye twitch, some psychosomatic response to the bobbing corpse of a gasoline farmer who died in a way nobody scientifically understood after a faulty railing deposited him into a lake of methane. I ruled, ‘No Fault.’ On my way home, a word that had started giving me panic attacks, I bought myself a postcard of a cat riding a dog and scribbled, “It has not been a very good day. No fault of mine!” on the back. I no longer had a permanent residence, so I addressed the post card to the Atlanta Aquarium, special attention Blue-42, and put it to the mercy of the intergalactic postal service.
Time bled from my body on the flight back in, the reality of my situation and future written across the somber faces of the families that traveled together to stay together, to not be carried away apart on the temporal eddies. The idea that I had never loved anything as much as myself crossed my mind, a thought I quickly pushed away knowing that I had never loved myself that much to begin with.
Then it was Terminal B again. Only this time with my twitching eye and growing sense of self-debasement and memory of a floating corpse. The Japanese businessman had turned my future wife’s learning experiment into a pan-religious shrine, thronged by a gaggle of acolytes dressed in Sheraton bathrobes and spa sandals, all kneeling within concentric circles of burning incense bought from the duty-free sprawl. An idyllic green landscape speckled with songbirds flitted over the glass, obscuring the woman inside into a dark shape. When I attempted to approach, the gowned loons closed ranks and asked me if I was there for the traveling business- man recovery session. I said I was not. The Japanese man emerged from the crowd, cheeks wet and peeling, as if his fit of weepiness had lasted the entire Earth year I had been away.
“You don’t have to go back out there,” he chanted, encouraging the crowd to join, “You don’t have to go back.”
From deep within the impenetrable dome, I saw her dark shape wave at me.
“What’s going on?” I cried out, louder than I wanted, waving back with two jazz-fingered hands. The outline of her shrugged and the chanting grew. I ran when the hugging started.
That night was a layover. I tried sleeping at a Sbarro’s pizza but found myself unable to drift away, my mind colonized by an imagined scenario in which Blue-42’s right to suicide had gone all the way to the supreme court. I gave up on sleep, stole a bathrobe from the Aer Lingus lounge and crept back to terminal B through the emptied concourse. The flock of traveling businessmen were dozing in an un-athletic pile, their voluminous bathrobes sprawled amongst the burning fragrances. The bubble lit the wide corridor with the scrolling topography of the night sky, a half-globe bright with the nodes of constellations pulsing and connecting with filaments of silver glow, the canned voice of Neil deGrasse Tyson purring out cosmic platitudes into the recycled air.
I belly-crawled through the businessmen and knocked on the dome. Her dark shape came to meet me, sliding into a matching prone position. Her hair was down, giving her silhouette a crazed, thunderstruck quality.
“Hey,” I whispered, “It’s me!”
“Hay is for horses,” she whispered back, “Also, why are we whispering.” A nearby fart froze me in terror.
“Take this seriously!” I hissed, ready for the clawed hand of a businessman to tear at my disguise, “These people are nuts.”
“A little off yes, but in a harmless way. The incense does seem like a fire hazard though. How’ve you been?” she offered, her smoky voice dislodging something nostalgic in my chest.
“I saw a guy who somehow boiled and froze at the same time,” I muttered, the image of mottled pink and blue flesh flashing across my mind.
“Gross.”
“How about you?” I asked.
“I’ve been mostly learning about Shinto and Via Negativa on a loop. Mr. Iwata is trying to create a sort of ashram for space-travelers. I think I’m an oracle of something.”
“And how’s that working out?”
She shrugged. “It’s a thing that happens to me.
A stirring bathrobe caught my attention, and I froze as the owner staggered to the nearby men’s room, leading my eye to the glass wall that revealed the airfield and distant city lights. I could see our reflection in the glass, a pile of worshipers huddled around a giant nightlight.
“You want to know something weird? I remember you as a child. Can you remember that about yourself? Being a child? A totally different you? You were much more African then.”
“Can you see my eyes?” “No.”
“I’m rolling my eyes.”
“I don’t know, it just seems profound. To me.”
“Well, every time I see you, you’re wearing the same suit and jacket. Is that profound?” The shape of her paused, as if the observation brokered some unrealized depth.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Naima,” her shape answered. She didn’t ask mine and I didn’t offer it. My name has never been important. I curled up against the dome and watched its projection of the firmament, the pieces of Gemini softly tinkling across Naima’s shadow, pleased to have pursued a pleasant conversation to its termination.
“I’m going to go to sleep now Airport Man,” She whispered, and then she was gone, back into her curve of firmament, a spirit receded into its element.
A group of poisoned miners on an Alpha Centauri comet marked the end of my career in insurance. I’m not sure what happened. I’m really not. But I believe the cumulative negative stresses of dead miners and smashed faces triggered a nervous episode in which I stamped ‘fault’ all over my report, even though the deceased were clearly incorrect in installing their rebreathers backwards. The way I rationalize it, a human mind can only internalize the extent of the world’s scariness to a point, after which it breaks. I had reached my threshold long before I’d realized it, probably on the floor of my childhood home after it had reached its own form of psychosis.
As a form of severance, I was transported to a psychiatric facility on the oceanic moon of Europa called the Deep Empathy for Persona Trauma Healing clinic, refreshingly anagrammed as D.E.P.T.H, where I was held under my own recognizance as all my relatives had died in hurricanes. I do not recall all my time at D.E.P.T.H due to the constant stream of Haldol, although I can recall the sterile, regenerative landscape of white pressure ridges and deep blue that unfurled from my window, the great banded orb of Jupiter observing my recovery.
They released me when I stopped hunger striking and trying to escape with Blue-42, who I occasionally hallucinated slumped in the bleach white visitation room, pondering the impossibility of a game of solitaire. We quickly became accomplices, my imaginary Beluga and me, secreting away utensils to dig through the walls, drawing up hypothetical floor plans, biting the nurses’ fingers when they checked to see if we swallowed out medication.
We got out once. After knocking out an orderly with a metal chair we escaped to the frozen sprawl of mile deep ice that sealed away the ocean of that strange arctic world. The plan was to dig until we reached liquid, to dive and hide amongst the volcanic vents near the moon’s core till our pursuers gave up the search. I was nearly dead when they found me, for a while I was very upset that they had.
At the end of my time at D.E.P.T.H. I received a reply to my wayward postcard, a glossy print of Blue-42 staring into the camera, pudgy face screwed up into what a human would call a smile. His name was signed in illegible cursive at the bottom. I also got a coupon for half-off admission to the Atlanta Aquarium. I’m not crazy anymore, but I have to say, being crazy has its perks.
Five years later I returned to terminal B. It had been sixth months for me. Fate or comedy had once again conspired to seat me next to Swiss Robinson on the flight into Kennedy. The smoldering remains of Simon and Schuster had just given him a seven-figure book deal, part of which he had promptly turned into a blue-velvet tuxedo and a side swipe haircut. He was magnanimous for the most part, offering me industry tips and writerly advice when he wasn’t being patronizing. I trapped him in a lavatory with a drink cart after we taxied to the gate.
I let the tidal draw of the moving walkway pull me towards her, tumbling over the railing to the ground when I wanted to get off. The bubble was broken, clear and cracked, the vintage vending machine dollar slot smashed off its axis, mangled android students turned to face the green board with hands permanently raised. A lopsided desk and old swivel chair had found their way inside and she was seated there, twenty-four, a silk blouse and black skirt completing the image of professorial serenity. Her hair was still massive, woven into thick braids that toppled to the small of her back.
I crawled towards my future wife, hoping that I wouldn’t have to fight a despondent Japanese man for her attention. I didn’t have to, a certain Mr. Iwata had died in an incense related fire within the calendar year, his demise memorialized by a dark smudge on the tile that refused to be scrubbed away. He left a modest fortune to the girl he’d come to love as a divine emissary, providing her the freedom to live a life anywhere in the galaxy, an opportunity Naima was reluctant to take for reasons she would never articulate, which I intuited to be fear.
She studied me over the top of a dog-eared copy of The Left Hand of Darkness.
“Airport Man,” she said, licking her forefinger to turn a page. “That’s reductive,” I said, prompting a snort of laughter from her.
“You’ve got a good memory. I thought those solar winds baked that away.”
“Only my testicles,” I conceded.
“Mmm-hmm,” she sighed lowering us into a moment of easy silence. Which I broke. “Can I come in there?” I asked.
She peeked over her book and watched me, our first time in a long time, or maybe ever, of full mutual eye contact, her irises were hazel. “Are you going to attack me?” “I don’t think so.”
A panic button under her desk unlocked a waist high glass panel that slid upwards with a pneumatic hiss. I ducked into the classroom and deposited one of the dummies to the floor with a clatter, claiming its seat as my own.
She turned her pages in silence, once every forty seconds or so.
“What happened to the Beluga?” I asked, something vital bobbing in my throat. “Hold on I’m getting to the good part,” she murmured.
“There is no good part. They get snuck in the snow and don’t have sex,” I replied. She stuck her tongue out at me over the top of the book and went back to reading.
“He died of acute depression,” she thew out casually a page later, “About eight years ago.”
“Goodbye Blue-42,” I said, trying to recall my exact position in the universe when my chosen spirit animal swam off his mortal coil.
As she read, I watched the outside word, the rolling blackouts of the city’s dark spread, bright penumbras of conflagrations producing soft glows on the shoulders of buildings, a scattering of sunrises.
“You know something weird?” I said, “I remember you as a child. I remember when you where this big.” I raised my arm to measure out her younger self.
“Yeah, you told me that.” She said,
“Well,” I said, “let me tell you again.”
It was mostly a matter of persistence. Of sitting at her bubble every day and being friends.
Of waiting out her year-and-a-half, on and off relationship with that Brazilian janitor. Of relearning what a year felt like. She taught classes from her bubble, charging whatever someone wanted to give, and I was there every day till I had given everything I owned. Even when we did get together it took us a long time to catch up, for the distance not to matter. But eventually we loved each other enough to regret what we missed in those years, which is okay, because you’re going to regret something. I’m happy, and I think she is too, although I will always doubt her happiness more than my own.
We moved out to the badlands of Utah, an underground moisture farm in the expanse of a salt flat where, at night, the ground reflects the stars in a perfect mirror. Sometimes I slip out of bed and wander this strange mirage, this impressive doubling of the visible universe where I count the constellations I learned so long ago. Sometimes she does too, and I know nothing of what spurs her twilight walkabouts.
We split time on Europa, spending more and more of our lives there with each trip. I don’t work on my novel anymore, whatever observations I had about the ending of things seems exhausted. Instead, I’ve shifted my focus to a chronicling of the extinct Beluga whale, the canary of the sea, the only cetacean to ever have a neck. And sometimes I listen to the sounds in Europa’s one great ocean, underneath the ice, to see if I can hear anything that sounds familiar.
I’m sometimes hit over the head with the fact that I met
my wife when she was a child and I was a man. It got less weird, because she grew up, but I still have that memory, of seeing
her for the first time, because how could I forget. Yet it still jumps into my brain when we’re intimate, when I imagine the daughter we’re not able to have, because the starlight cooked my soldiers. I don’t like that. She says not to worry. She says thoughts have many faces. But still, I wonder and worry, because after I saw her, that first time, in my head I said, who wouldn’t want to have a kid like that.