Super Flat Times by Matthew Derby Read Free Book Online Page A

came off, everyone had forgotten I ever worked there.
    Marian started to make a face, gnashing her lips like a child cradling some disagreeable food in its mouth.
    “Don’t — oh, don’t. You don’t have,” I said, drawing her close. I held her head to my chest, away from the mirror on the opposite wall to shield her from her own pale, burst visage.
    “What do I — do.”
    “Let’s go — we can go away from here. You can forget. It.” “What do you mean. Go,” she said, straightening up a little. “I’m not — that is — we could easily. That is, leave. On a flying object — one of those —”
    “Airplane.”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh. I would very. Much like that,” she said, grinding a mashed tissue into one eye socket.
    “Right then.”
    “Will it actually. Leave — the ground because? I can’t leave the ground because? Of a fake lung. A plastic lung. That will inflate in the — air.”
    I booked us on an ocean cruise instead. We would pass through Oceans Three and Four over the course of two weeks in a luxury vessel, the Travel Administrator informed me, one of the large, air-buoyed ones with wide glass fins.
    “Which package would you prefer?” she asked.
    “Whatever costs the most of — that object drawn from an employer, a paper item. Colorful — that is — how does one call this?”
    “Money. The one that costs the most money?” answered the small, distant voice through the speech bead.
    “Yes. Please remove as much money as possible. From myself.”
    “This is truly — it’s something I’ll never forget,” she said when we saw the vessel for real. Holding a wide-brimmed hat close to her head against the gusting bay breeze, she ushered me on with great enthusiasm.
    “You’re walking me too fast,” I said, stumbling to keep pace. “That’s the point, dear.” Her sentences were getting more elaborate and vivid. My own speech had always left something to be desired, so often had I abused it with silence. Even more so with Marian, though — I dreaded saying something that might offend her, terrified that she might simply disappear in retaliation.
    Neither of us had ever been on a cruise — I hadn’t ever had a proper vacation before, save for the series of private debasements that passed as family trips. The idea of a cruise was appealing. It was the only way you could get far away from people and stay there, suspended in the amniotic grace of the ocean.
    We stood at the guardrail as the vessel pulled away from the harbor. Surprisingly, people had actually shown up to wave at us from the docks.
    “What it must have been like for people simply to have gone off on a trip,” Marian said, watching as the land became a distant smudge on the horizon. “Just to go, you know?”
    “Aren’t we doing that?”
    “This? This is what we do so that we can forget that we can’t do what we used to do.”
    The vessel hit full speed, rising slightly above the water. I crashed into Marian, clutching wildly at her hips as I collapsed. “You’re such a dear,” she shouted over the ocean spray, petting my head as I knelt before her.
    The first night we were herded into a narrow lounge. There was a magic show, in which a man in a white mask pulled cards from the air. From our vantage point his secrets were revealed. The rest of the audience sat mesmerized. They were old, most of them in their seventies. “They want to be tricked,” Marian said.
    Later, we went up on the sun deck, but there was no sun, only the dim yellow light given off by the incandescent bulbs that ran along the perimeter of the vinyl buffet table canopy and the infinite deadness of the night sky. Somewhere in the ship, a band was playing old songs — we heard tender strains of something drifting up through the narrow mouth of the staircase. I drew Marian close to me, turning her body so that we could assume the Eating stances that had brought us together. We fell into a rapturous, tandem dance.
    “This is,” I said,