By Matthew J.C. Clark
SATURDAY MORNING:
Rain has been forecast, but it’s only misting. The vehicles parked at the elementary school are from ME, PA, MA, CT, NY, VA, FL, MN, MI, RI, NH, TN, though I haven’t done a complete inventory. Though what is a complete inventory? In less than a week, I will split up with E. Right now, the two of us are in her Honda CR-V, preparing to attend the annual Maine Lobster Festival, aka the MLF. That is, we are considering a small package of honey-pear-flavored pot gummies. Each edible contains 4.65 mg of THC. We are in love, I mean. The Rockland South mascot is a blue starfish named Twinkle. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol is what gets you high. Have you heard of David Foster Wallace? Twenty years ago, in 2004, when David was forty-two—I am also forty-two—his now-famous essay, “Consider the Lobster,” was published in Gourmet magazine. The essay begins as a pretty straightforward reporting piece on the Maine Lobster Festival, and then, rather sneakily, and brilliantly, I think, proceeds to ask if it’s alright for you to boil a lobster alive, solely for your “gustatory pleasure”—David’s words. Gourmet received more mail in response to that essay than they had ever received. It has since been anthologized, satirized, taught in grad-school classrooms. David wrote fiction and nonfiction. He was about as big a literary celebrity as you can be. In 2008, he hung himself, in his garage, above the pages of an unfinished novel. I don’t want to say that David’s lobster essay is really about his own pain and the pain of being an American at the beginning of the 21st century—whatever that is—but if you look for it, it’s in there, “an insect on a dead thing.”
Anyway, when that essay came out, I had just graduated from a small private college with no debt and no idea what I wanted to do, except maybe that I wanted to be a writer, like David, someone who saw the painful truths of this world—the painful truths of this world!—and made them visible by my own particular articulation, someone, I mean, who was admired, envied and adored like I admired, envied and adored David. Basically, I started writing so that you would love me. Though that’s not completely true, though even today it is still a little bit true. The joyful truths would come later. Who knows what comes after. I mean, I don’t smoke, and yet, right now, there’s a beer can half-filled with the butts of recently smoked cigarettes in the woodshed behind my house. Near Acadia National Park, a restaurant has been dosing lobsters with marijuana and valerian root before boiling them alive, allegedly to ease the lobsters’ pain, but maybe it’s for you too. Unfortunately, someone else already reported that story. I’m here today, your “assigned correspondent”—David’s words—because I somehow fooled the editor of this magazine into asking me to be here, and also, I suppose, and probably more importantly, because I’m trying to prove something or other to myself. It’s embarrassing. The parade starts in twenty minutes, at 10 a.m. E, reading from a weather app, says that right now the temperature is 70 degrees and that it also feels like 70 degrees, which makes sense, but seems somehow unverifiable except that, yes, I can verify that this is what it feels like right now, 70 degrees, I mean. Some Maine license plates have chickadees on them, some loons, some sunsets. On the Maine Lobster Specialty License Plate, a bright red Homarus americanus sits on a rock beside a blue ocean bobbing with red buoys and a tiny boat. It’s a quaint and confounding image. Live lobsters aren’t known for sunning themselves, though they can survive out of water. This is why, even after they’ve been in a bag, in your fridge, all afternoon, when you place them in a pot of boiling water, they do everything they can to escape. Also, only about 1 in 10,000,000 live lobsters is bright red, which is to say, they aren’t. Mostly, they are mottled brown and black and orange. They turn red when heat causes the release of astaxanthin, a pigment which absorbs blue light and reflects the red that you see. I turn red sometimes too, in the heat, but also when I’m feeling a lot and, sometimes, despite tons of work in therapy, an awareness of this redness creates a kind of feedback loop, my cheeks burning in an ever-reddening spiral that happens despite my actively trying not to turn redder, which, needless to say, is pretty devastating in terms of shame, etc., and, for me, raises all kinds of questions, like, if this is in fact my face, then why isn’t it doing exactly what I want?
And if it’s not doing exactly what I want, then maybe it’s not my face?
But then, like, whose face is it?
I eat half of one gummy and E eats some too, and then she takes a joint from her hip pack, lights it, hits it, offers me some. Leading up to today, I’ve been saying, kind of as a joke, but also seriously, that I want to be stoned while I do my MLF Research, to ease the pain.
To ease the pain, I say, taking the joint in my damp fingers.
An American flag hangs from a house across the street. So does a GOD GUNS & TRUMP flag. There are cattails before us, leafy branches above. The greenest grass. Ha. I turn red around E sometimes, but it doesn’t hurt like with other people. We walk to the edge of the verdure—a word I’ve never said aloud—and both of us enter a port-a-potty. Peeing is like love. E and I can talk through walls. In my head, I hear a voice that sounds, I hope, distinctly like David’s. “It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.” Just to be clear, I don’t want to shoot myself in the head. I’m not suicidal, never have been, hope never to be. What I am is incredibly insecure. I consider writing this in my notebook. Then I hear the door to E’s port-a-potty open.
A man screams. “Oh my god, oh my god!”
“Sorry!” E says cheerfully.
“It was green!” the man says.
“Wasn’t it green?” the man asks.
“It was green,” I hear a woman confirm.
A bus picks up Festival-goers in front of the school and brings them to the Festival, but we decide not to take the bus. I rode the bus three days ago, on Wednesday. I’ll tell you all about it later—whatever all and it are.
“When he opened the door, the look on his face, it was like he saw a super-scary animal.”
I attempt to conjure an image of E as a super-scary animal: fail.
Rockland’s a nice town. The back streets are leafy, blooming, residential. At an intersection, we learn that the parade has been delayed an hour, because of rain, though currently there is no rain.
E says something about raining on my parade.
“Blind Melon,” I say.
“Jesus.” she gasps, “There it is.”
There’s a U.S. Navy warship in the bay, a destroyer, like the ones that are built in Bath, Maine, where I grew up and where I live now.
Beyond the sailboats and the distant causeway, in the thinning mist, The Destroyer is angled and lurking, potent and bristling and dreadful. Every hour a tour leaves from the dock. I want a tour.
“What’s calling you about that?”
“The juxtaposition of imperialism’s projected might and—”
“It’s an amazing opportunity for families to see a real working Navy destroyer and a great rainy-day activity as well.” That’s what the MLF blog says.
The thing is, almost every day on my way to and from work, I pass by the long shipyard in Bath with its tall cranes and monolithic buildings and dry dock and wailing alarms and gates and pickup trucks that all seem brand new and the men and women on the curb smoking and the gray ships pointed silently down the river. It’s hard not to feel some affinity for those things my neighbors build, those unreal wreckers, pride and shame. I went to high school in Bath. Our mascot was a Shipbuilder. We were the only Shipbuilders in the country. It’s weird. Destroyers are basically a part of my hometown, a part of me, I mean, whether I like it or not, but they are a part I’ve never before been inside, that I’ve never really seen, that I don’t know how to understand.
A woman in the Navy’s whitest white uniform walks past.
“You’d look sexy in a sea-woman uniform.”
“Iceberg, straight ahead.”
Kissing when you’re stoned feels different. I don’t ever want to stop. Actually, everything always feels different, though sometimes it feels the same. In the human body, certain cells—neurons—respond to certain stimuli. Plants and fungi don’t have them. Interestingly, there are no specific pain cells in your fingers, knees or toes. What there are are nociceptors, neurons that react to potentially damaging stimuli — intense pressure or heat, for example. Pain is not a stimuli. The pain in your ass is really a pain in your brain. Same with wetness. You feel wetness because of a combination of context and felt sensation, smooth and cool, for instance, and the fact that you’re swimming. Emotional pain is in the brain too, though your body might clench your jaw in response to that distress, or vomit. All of this stuff is super-nuanced and complex, but it’s not inaccurate to say that both emotional and physical pain activate similar regions in the brain—the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, for instance—whatever those are. The first time E and I embraced, she was wearing a red rain coat, the rain coat she’s wearing now, and I was wearing a blue one, not the yellow one that is in my backpack, all of which seems, in retrospect, very primary. For example, E says rain jacket and I say rain coat and you, I imagine, say cheese. I was waiting, feeling the thudding in my extremities, Be cool, I kept thinking, Be cool—lines from a movie—and then I saw her, this pretty woman in red in the delicate rain and I remember hoping it was her, and it was, and she came right up to me and asked if she could hug me, because, she said, she liked to hug at the start of a first date and, because I don’t have a lot of first date experience, I said, Sure, mostly not wanting to do the embarrassingly wrong thing rather than wanting to actually hug, but we did hug, and it wasn’t that back-slappy kind or that love-me kind or that formality-fulfillment kind, which is the worst kind, and I remember in particular the touch of her face, though of course I can’t say for certain that that’s exactly how it happened.
“Look at all the seamen!” E exclaims.
A parade, or more like a gaggle, of sailors, or officers, or seamen, or whatever they’re called, all of them in the purest white, walks by and I’m immediately feeling this low-grade aggression toward them for interrupting our kissing. Destroying it, I mean. Though actually, they look handsome, beautiful really, smooth-faced and so young, jockeying and laughing. I wish I could protect you.
“Are they SEALs?” E asks.
Amazing. So few things in this world are free. Actually, that’s not true. Everything worth anything is free, including entry into the MLF. E and I wander under the big main tent, where the pancake breakfast has just concluded and where the lobster eating will happen, where it smells like syrup and sausage and wharf. Wharf smells like seaweed and diesel and baitfish. Baitfish smells like your mom. Ha. Surprisingly, and disturbingly, honey-pear pot gummies taste exactly like actual pear drizzled with actual honey. Exactly. Mostly the people here are wearing volunteer shirts. Over 1200 volunteers make the five-day event happen. The Volunteer-to-Attendee ratio could not be better, I think: pleasure. There are stainless steel pots, long tables, a puddle we walk around. A volunteer squeezes handfuls of cooked knuckles and claws, seeking bits of shell. A shell in your lobster roll is like broken glass at the beach, unexpected and somehow personal: pain. In retrospect, I wonder if the volunteer’s hands are cold. Between 700 and 1000 rolls will be served today, which is either a lot or—whatever. The MLF donates all the proceeds. They once helped buy a firetruck.
“Have you heard of David Foster Wallace?”
“No.”
(STILL) SATURDAY MORNING:
As we head toward the parade route, we stop at the Aroma Joe’s tent—who knows why—and I find myself eyeballing a stack of bandanas. In many of the iconic images of David, he’s wearing a bandana. He was a big guy, tall, like me—I’m 6’3”—and he was self-conscious about how much he sweated. Me, I get in these loops of just profound doubt about the dumbest things, like, for instance, just taking one example, that I’m constitutionally incapable of loving you, like, this thing that I’m feeling for you and that you’re feeling from me isn’t really love at all but just a really good imitation of love. You know, small stuff. I don’t go to therapy for that. I go to therapy because I’m not worthy of your love, as if love has anything to do with worthiness. God. Jesus was a carpenter. People tell me that all the time when I say what I do for a living. I love people. In January, I published my first book, a nonfiction book about failing to write an essay about floorboards. Actually, that’s not what it’s about. I have no idea what it’s about. I guess I somehow fooled those poor souls who bought a copy, fooled them into thinking they were reading something by a real writer—whatever a real writer is—when all I really am is stoned, though really, I’m serious, I really very rarely actually—say that five times fast—get stoned. Though maybe I should get stoned more often? When you’re stoned, what’s happened is that the THC has gotten all tied up with certain receptors in your brain, though as far as easing the pain, the research isn’t unequivocal that THC is more effective than a placebo. I believe this is commonly referred to as imposter syndrome. I love having a syndrome, belonging. Belonging is like love, but it isn’t love. Is mimicry love? I’m wearing my leather work boots today, for the puddles, but also because David—in those iconic images—wore unlaced Timberlands. I promise I’m not going to pretend to wear David’s depression, not here or anywhere. He struggled his whole life with it. Of course, that’s not exactly true. I’m lucky. I’ve only smashed my finger about a million times with a hammer, but I’ve never cut one off. I mean that both literally and figuratively. Imagine struggling your whole life. Then imagine iconic images of yourself. I dream of hagiography, The World’s expression of love. Anyway, in this country, the numbers on depression and anxiety and mental health generally aren’t great. We all know that. That’s probably why none of us are talking about how we really feel.
What I’ve been basically telling everyone for the past thirty years is that I’m fine.
Which I am.
I am fine.
My dad, he says that fine stands for Frustrated, Irritated, Negative and Empty.
I spin the Aroma Joe’s prize wheel: SURPRISE!
E snaps a picture of me with the blue bandana in my hair. “You look cute,” she says, and gives me a squeeze.
We eat a little more pot, discretely—as if you care—venture onward.
“For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is”—David’s words. I mean, everyone knows what pain is—my words. “As usual, though, there’s much more to know than most of us care about”—David’s words. For instance, parked in a handicap spot, there’s this Subaru decked out in angry slogans. Some of them are actual bumper stickers, and some are printed, like from your ink-jet or whatever. We’ve all seen this car, and yet, this car never ceases to cheer me, though sometimes it makes me sad.
HARRIS HATES MY KIDS, YOURS TOO!
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HATES AMERICA!!!
Beside the gas tank, there’s a lobster claw pinching a hammer and sickle. RESIST, it says. There’s LET’S GO BRANDON #FJB, and NO SHEEP 2024, and IF THIS FLAG OFFENDS YOU, I’LL HELP YOU PACK. Two tattered American flags attached to the roof rack and a couple of black and blue Trump flags.
E—she’s fearless. She’s peering in the windows, trying, I think, to get us killed.
“Baby,” I say, like, comeon!
People go parade-crazy, I guess. A pair of lobster flip-flops walks past. A t-shirt (featuring lobster claws), a lobster on stilts, hair dyed bright red. E and I post up beside Key Bank where, painted on the pavement, a yellow arrow points directly at me. Screaming—a girl runs back and forth through a puddle, shoes on. Bubbles. Kids chasing bubbles. Me chasing bubbles, though not many bubbles, and not very far, because every time I charge after them, I feel as if I’m doing something unforgivable. This is what waiting for a parade is like. Though maybe the parade has already started? My notes are unclear.
A DUNDER MIFFLIN t-shirt walks by.
A black t-shirt with a white pig: I’D SMOKE THAT.
A man wearing a maroon GIRL DAD tee, a girl in his arms.
E explains, but I think I still don’t understand.
We’re eating unrelentingly-orange carrot sticks now.
“How many people at this parade do you think are eating carrot sticks?”
“Good question,” I say. “Two.”
E says, “I like to think three, that there’s someone else out there like us.”
A man wheels a cart of blue balloons shaped like a cartoon character I’ve never seen.
“Bluey,” E says.
The man—Robert Orlando, I learn—gives me his card. You’d think selling balloons at a parade might bring a person plenty of joy, but Robert seems bitter, which also, I suppose, makes sense. For fifteen years he’s been traveling to festivals and fairs from Maine to Alabama. “I’m only here,” he says, “so I don’t have to listen to my wife bitch. The older they get, the harder they are to live with, and after forty years—.”
Forty years! I’m not sure whether to admire him or to feel bad for him, or his wife, though I suppose those aren’t my only options. I got divorced when I turned forty. E is the first woman I’ve been with since that marriage ended. I edge away slowly.
The next thing in my notebook is E saying, “That guy looks like a coal miner.”
The man drapes his very thick and very tan arm out the window of a red pickup. His hand is stained black. His trailer, or float, promotes Wreathes Across America. We both love him, and I don’t just mean our imagination of him. There’s a particular grimace some men have, concentrated, enduring, wishing, it seems to me, that it weren’t so—whatever it is, probably this. Then these guys in maroon hats ride by on fluorescent green tricycles. They’re stoically revving their little engines, drifting donuts, flying American flags—Shriners, good people, probably. Pigeons fly over the Key Bank. What a stupid thing, to say someone is a good person. Who isn’t a good person? And what is good? In fact, to say anyone is anything is a pretty stupid thing, except, at the same time, one must say something.
Was David a jerk?
Probably; though I don’t know.
Was he kind and caring and sensitive?
Same.
And how about you?
“Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics.”
That’s from David’s lobster essay. When I hear things like that, I want to punch you in the teeth. Actually, I don’t want to punch anyone in the teeth. I want to kiss. A story I’ve heard begins billions of years ago, in the sea. Single cells are attracted to and repelled by certain stimuli: life-giving stimuli and life-taking stimuli, pleasant and unpleasant. Then, or rather, eventually, the cells get together and make human beings. The ancient ocean is red and blue inside of you. What I mean is that you are composed of a whole bunch of single-celled organisms. Of course, you are a single organism too. And also a part of a larger organism. A sum, a whole, a part. Cool. Thanks, pot. E and I have been together, partnered, dating, in love, lovers, breathlessly at times—whatever that means—for basically two years. She taught me to dance and to use more salt and to drive faster and—I’m not going to list all the things because it will just make me sad. How long before sadness becomes joy? Can the anterior cingulate cortex do that already, please? E and I, we met through a dating app when she commented on the t-shirt I was wearing—she either said “cool shirt” or “nice shirt” (the fact that I can’t remember is killing me)—and I responded to her by apologizing because, really, that t-shirt, a skiing t-shirt that read, KEEP THE SHRED ALIVE, misrepresented who I was, at least to a degree, because I’m not a skier—whatever a skier is—and the reason I was wearing the shirt was only because I wanted to keep the shred alive. For real. King Neptune, wearing a green robe, with a gray beard and gray hair, crown and scepter, floats by. Beside him is the 2024 Maine Lobster Festival Delegate, formerly known as the Maine Sea Goddess. There’s some history having to do with Neptune and the renaming of the Sea Goddess, but other things interest me more. For instance: that Maritime Energy propane truck. And that Rent-A-Center box truck, though it’s unclear why it’s in the parade, or even if it is. Yet another old car driven by yet another old man carrying yet another young woman wearing yet another sash doing yet another imitation of a beauty queen wave, which—the original beauty queen wave—is itself probably an imitation of something or other, and each of these waves sends a jolt of pain through what I imagine is my spleen and I feel like this whole essay could be about that. Another firetruck. Sirens. Lights. Everything feels so masculine and sad. Though I’m not sure I feel masculine, or sad. I am not sad. I am fine, high, I mean, grinning like a madman. That’s a line I think I’ve written before. Eventually I will have an original thought. Here comes a float carrying and flanked by Special Olympians. E, she manages a non-profit, and she tells me that Republicans donate more to the Special Olympics than Democrats. I believe this, though I haven’t fact-checked it. Democrats are serious jerks, seriously. “Hey!” It’s Robert Orlando, the Bluey guy. He’s yelling at a young Olympian and I sort of duck, expecting epithets. I am so happy to be wrong. Robert peels a few bills from a roll of cash and deposits them in a donations bucket.
A second troupe of bagpipers, bagpiping, piping bags, whatever.
E says, “I can see why David Foster Wallace hated this parade.”
“‘Interminable’ I think he called it.”1,2
We decide we don’t need to see the end.
“Baby,” I say. “We’ve got to get on The Destroyer. This can’t turn out to be another one of those essays where I never get where I’m going.”
“This isn’t an essay,” E says.
That’s true, though she never actually says it.
WEDNESDAY (APPROACH):
Four days before E and I watch the parade, I spend the night with my brother and his family at a house on the Sheepscot River. There are boulders in the river and sunshine in the morning and in the afternoon the water looks black. We go for a swim before I leave, and my two young nephews take turns riding their father’s back in the sun. Bucking bronco rides. Screams and laughter. My brother and I, as kids, we rode our uncle’s back in the same manner, in the same river. His back was so big, and each buck was somehow as exhilarating as the last. Maybe I should have offered my back to my nephews, but I’m shy around them, for all kinds of inexcusable reasons. I don’t have kids.
My brother points to a spider suspended from a hemlock branch, a big spider hanging by its filament, kind of curled up, unmoving.
“Suicide,” I say.
I’m trying to be macabre—whatever that is—and also knowing of my upcoming research—David’s essay was originally slated to be published as “To Die For,” and before that, David was calling it “Lobster, Preference, and Various Kinds of Pain”—but I immediately regret what I’ve said. Over the years, several of my close male friends have committed suicide. And then, after leaving my brother and his family and the river behind, on the drive to Rockland, I start feeling things, my whole body signaling alarm, and I stop at a gas station and buy a pack of cigarettes, something I haven’t done in years.
The cashier is pretty upset. “The bitch said I gave her the wrong change. She fucking watched me count it and then she said it was wrong.”
I keep thinking I’ll chuck the cigarette, half-smoked, out the truck window, but at the same time, I am determined to finish it.
There’s a nice breeze when I arrive. Leaves are flipped up, pale underbellies fluttering. It’s one of those coastal mid-summer days where the sky is a gray sea and the sun is a white spotlight, and the only word for the feeling of it all is liquid.
ALSO WEDNESDAY, FEATURING GEORGE (AND KEVIN), THE DESTROYER, AND A BRIEF (NOT STONED) VISIT TO THE FUTURE:
“Did you have fun down there?”
“How was it, good?”
“Good-looking shirts this year, aren’t they?”
A t-shirt that reads: RED WHITE AND BEER.
BEER BBQ FREEDOM.
BLESSED.
George is the driver of the school bus. All day, three buses do continuous loops. After the drop-off-slash-pick-up at the Festival Entrance, we drive behind the Trade Winds On The Bay Hotel, which appears to be under construction, and then go left past Hamilton Marine where, carved into the fins of an air conditioning unit is the word “FUCK.” We turn right onto Main Street and drive through the fashionable little downtown, passing the Key Bank before forking onto North Main which angles away from the water and then we’re turning left on Broadway and making a quick right into the High School lot where no one gets off or on, and then leafy Broadway again and a stop at the light where the fireman may or may not be wearing yellow suspenders and after a few more blocks, we pull into the South lot.
That’s one loop.
When people get on the bus, I see their right hands. When they get off, I see their left. When I look down to write in my notebook, I see feet, shoes, a prosthetic leg, an ankle bracelet.
When you look up, The Destroyer takes your breath away, its sudden abstract potential.
Some (sort of) facts (sort of) about the USS Delbert D. Black (DDG-119):
DDG-119 wasn’t built in Bath by Bath Iron Works (BIW), the subsidiary of General Dynamics (NYSE: GD, if you’re wondering), but in Pascagoula, Mississippi, by Huntington Ingalls Industries (NYSE: HII). These are the only two shipyards in the country that build destroyers.
BIW is the fourth largest employer in the state, employing 6900 Mainers—Yardbirds, shipbuilders are sometimes called.
MaineHealth is Maine’s largest employer.
Juxtapose that.
Anyway, DDG-119 is one of 75 or so active Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, “capable, multi-mission ships…capable of simultaneously fighting air, surface, and subsurface battles.”
In the “Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act,” $1.43 billion was allotted to BIW to build a single destroyer.
DDG-119 is 513 feet long, displaces 9,200 tons, drafts 31 feet and can travel at speeds above 30 knots.
At 20 knots, it might burn 1,000 gallons of fuel in an hour.
The fuel is some special Navy blend, and burning it probably releases an extra special amount of greenhouse gases.3
Recently, DDG-119 returned from a “three-month surge deployment to the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group” in the eastern Mediterranean to “bolster deterrence efforts in the region following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October.”
People are dying in the cruelest ways, suffering by the billions.
Around 300 people serve on The Destroyer.
“We[…] maintained high morale while answering our nation’s call,” Master Chief Kona Johnson says. “This crew was able to maximize qualifications and become stronger warfighters.”
In 2019, the Pentagon reported that U.S. soldiers are nine times more likely to die by suicide than in combat.
On an average day in 2021, seventeen U.S. military veterans killed themselves.
Anchored in arms—that’s the ship’s “motto.”
Aboard the USS Delbert D. are a variety of torpedoes and missiles and guns—whatever those are—one of which is a 62 Mk 45 Mod 4 (lightweight gun), which is mounted on the center of the bow and looks to me, as I drive by the ships in Bath, sort of like a Darth Vader helmet (My nephews know everything about Darth Vader. “He wasn’t always bad,” they say.), though probably it’s not the exact center, though maybe it is the exact center, though as far as I can tell, exact is a trick of language, though what isn’t a trick of language, and what isn’t a trick, like, what actually is, and if we, or at least I, can know what actually is—whatever is is, whatever knowing is—will that make me feel any better?4
George grew up in Waldoboro, which is west of Warren, which is west of Thomaston, which is west of Rockland—Route 1 threading them all together. He’s driven school buses for twenty years, long enough that some of the school kids he’s driving today are the kids of the school kids he drove yesterday, though not literally yesterday. Glasses, gray hair, sixty-four years old. There’s something a little quivery in his movements and voice, maybe age, maybe bashfulness, some history of suffering. Actually, maybe I’m imagining that quivering now as I write this. E and I haven’t spoken since I started this essay, since I found that the best place to cry with a cigarette is in the sunshine, at the front of an open woodshed, and that the rain is definitely pain, but also sometimes the pain is okay. I want to feel everything, but at the same time, I want to feel nothing. E rhymes with release. I’m serious. I know from experience that the best place to cry is in her arms. Once, in bed, I told her that I thought she was my guardian angel—that’s what I said, guardian angel—and that I thought she was here with me, or there, to save me from something, probably myself, and maybe she is, or was, or did. “So then why’d you do it? There’s never no reason. What was it? Set the scene for me. Where? How? What did you say?” These questions a few weeks after the Festival from Ethan DeBerry, an old high-school friend of mine. We are on his lobster boat, the Miss Lindsay, named for his wife. I help Ethan about once a year, banding claws, threading bait needles through the eyeballs of frozen red fish. We are smoking cigarettes, on our way to a seven-hundred-pound day. I like thinking of days having weight. It’s funny, how men talk about certain things, and don’t talk about them, but also not funny. In Maine, there are bumper stickers that read: SAVE THE LOBSTERMAN. This is because there are fewer than 360 North Atlantic right whales alive today—or maybe it’s fewer than 340. In 2022, nearly 3 million lobster traps were licensed in the State of Maine. That’s a lot of rope. It’s unclear, exactly, the impact of those lines on the right whale—“They obviously aren’t helping,” Ethan says—but major changes aimed at mitigating right whale entanglements in lobster gear may soon be coming to the Maine lobster industry. There is, understandably, a lot of fear about these proposed changes. Perhaps it would be easier to kill the remaining right whales. Then we won’t have to save them. I should be clear, Ethan doesn’t say that. A right whale is not a white whale. Fact: the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than most of the rest of the ocean. Lobsters, seeking cooler, more habitable water, are fleeing to Canada. “Put it this way, if my kids wanted to drop out of school to lobster, I’d tell them to have a backup plan, like finish school, you little punk.” The eyes of red fish are like large black overripe grapes. Sometimes they pop. We’re listening to rope coming through the hauler, to seagulls and waves and hip-hop. The perception that consciousness resides behind your eyeballs is a misperception. Of course, some history of suffering you don’t have to imagine. Consciousness is in the ocean. At the end of the day, as I lie in bed, I feel as if I am still being rocked by the waves, and maybe, in fact, I am. Of course, misperception is probably the most accurate way to describe all perception, though most accurate is not necessarily best—whatever best is. Of course, I’m not saying that the lobster’s pain isn’t real. Or the whale’s. Or the lobsterman’s (and woman’s). Or David’s. I’m just saying that you might be in more pain than you presently perceive, not only more now, but more later also, or less too, of course.
I keep wanting to ask George if he ever refers to the MLF as The Milf, like E and I do, or did, but something, thankfully, keeps preventing me.
Short shorts, wedgies, flip flops, flamingos, lobster-claw tiaras.
I also do a few loops on another bus, the electric bus, with Kevin, who, for brevity’s sake I’ve jammed in here with George, though of course he isn’t any less worthy. Kevin is thirty-six years old, his shiny orange hair stiffly parted. He’s been “driving bus”—that’s what he calls it—for thirteen years.
“I’ve slowly been falling in love,” Kevin says.
102.5 KISS FM: a Tracy Chapman cover, sung, I think, by Luke Combs.
A man struggles to lift a wheelchair onto the bus. The wheelchair is for his mom, who is sitting behind me.
“You ok, mom?”
“I think I’m ok.”
“Did you hear about the bank robbery?”
Well, Kevin’s mom works at Hong Kong Island, which is just down the street from Bangor Savings, and she said there were cops literally crawling all over down there. This was a couple hours ago, around 2 p.m. The Rockland police dog, Marek, is on the scent of the suspect: white bandana, brown ball cap, blue gloves, blue jeans, black boots, shades.
Red Crocs, white Crocs, blue Crocs, rhinestones.
“Time goes pretty good. You just keep going round and around and around.”
“Round and round the merry-go-round.”
“My mother and father took us to the Festival. Back then they had rides all down there.”
“Back when I was a kid, they had rides and stuff. It was pretty fun.”
“Oh, I love lobster. I absolutely love it.”
“I don’t hanker for it.”
Have you heard of David Foster Wallace?
“Nope.”
Is it ok to boil a lobster alive, just to eat it?
“I have no problem with it.”
“We steam with beer.”
But what did David Foster Wallace think? This inquiry from the Knoxville woman seated across the aisle from me. The diamond on her finger is as big as a kernel of popped popcorn. She remembers, maybe in seventh grade, a lobster bake on a beach in Connecticut. She could hear the lobsters screaming in the pot. She is insistent about this. She makes a hissing sound.
A HOLE IN YOUR HEART (STILL WEDNESDAY, BUT AT THE MLF NOW):
I’d imagined, from David’s essay, that “the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker” was a giant boiling pot, but it’s really just a row of eight metal boxes in a brick shelter. The steam is generated from Rockland Harbor water. Metal pipes rise from each boxy cooker. Eventually, this year, in this cooker, at the MLF, over 20,000 pounds of lobster will be cooked.5 When you’re downwind, you smell it.
Here, the volunteers wear red t-shirts that say LOBSTER COOKER on the back. Vern Mossman is in charge. Imagine a Maine accent. Vern’s is so much better. “I’ll tell you everything I know. Nineteen seventy-nine I was down here. I’m sixty-four now. Nineteen fifty-nine I was born. I worked my whole life. I used to come down and set up these little booths they have. So I done it for quite a long time. What you gotta do is you gotta build that steam up. You see the baskets over there? The big ones. Now if you fill that all the way up I guarantee you could probably cook seven, eight, maybe nine hundred pounds, but it’s gonna take you more than thirteen minutes. When I do mine at home, I put a little lemon in the water. My wife loves ‘em. No doubt. But since I been workin on ‘em, I don’t eat ‘em. I might nibble on ‘em, once in a while, but I’m not really that crazy over ‘em.”
A red LOBSTER COOKER hat floats atop Vern’s head. Tugging the collar of his red shirt is some kind of radio. Bushy eyebrows going silver, silver sideburns, a smooth tan face. Fat on one finger is a Rockland High School ring.
“But I never graduated. I dropped out. Then I done it. All those years I growed up right here. I can remember when I was a kid comin’ down, you couldn’t hardly get through, they had rides up there and rides over there and now the rides have disappeared.”
The bricks in the shelf we lean against are stamped with the names of sponsors.
Vern’s got one.
VERN MOSSMAN
DIRECTOR
LOBSTER COOKER
“I had to fight for that brick. After all these years, they wanted me to pay three hundred bucks. I said, Excuse me. I’m losing money, ‘cause I have a job at Walmart, and I come down here to volunteer, and they want me to pay three hundred bucks. I don’t think so.”
Another man, speaking more softly than Vern, stands nearby. Raised veins on his forearms, wrinkles on his face, soft ear lobes.
Vern says, “Garold’s helped me for many many years.”
Garold has a brick too, though his is stamped with one too many R’s. He’s seventy years old, has been working the Festival since he was seventeen. He leads me to the tailgate of a Ryder box truck—EVEN BETTER, it says on the side—climbs a ladder, heaves open the door. The lobsters are in those baskets Vern mentioned. Each contains about 90 pounds of living lobsters, soft shells between a pound and a pound and a quarter, barely moving, feeling things, presumably.
Garold’s retired now, but he also still works as a handyman. “I like coming down here. I do. I love the people. Average people don’t know anything about lobster. Male and female. How many eggs they carry. Matin’ season. But to be honest with you, in two thousand nineteen, I had a heart attack down here.”
Right there, behind the cooker.
“ONE SINGLE!”
“It was bad. My heart went way below.” He pauses, hints at a smile. “So, someone’s keeping me alive for some reason.”
A basket of lobsters, the one single, has been maneuvered from the Ryder truck and is on a piece of plywood now, escorted by Lobster Cooker Apprentices, parading toward destiny. The basket is hitched and hoisted and then, slowly, the lobsters descend into steam.
Garold says, “I was frightened. They went in my groin. You got a lot of veins going up through, and if they miss one, you’re done. I was born with a hole in my heart. They went through the hole. It could be small, it could be big, but mine happened to be just the right size.”
“But what does that mean? A hole in your heart?”
“Five minutes!” Garold shouts. “Five minutes!”
Vern is doing a little performance with a live lobster. He must seem like a quintessential Mainer to the gathering crowd, and maybe he is. Everyone has their phone out. “When my wife comes to bed, what I do to her is I pick her up like this. I take her arms and set her down like this. Then I bend her over.”
The lobster is kind of on its head, claws outstretched, tail curled, very gymnastic.
“Then what I do is I sing her a lullaby song.” Vern stokes the lobster with a finger. “See! Now she’s sleeping. That’s what I do to my wife.”
An apprentice hoses down the steaming basket of red lobsters.
Vern says, “I done that joke for a long long time. Matter of fact, our anniversary is coming up. We been married almost 52 years.”
I mean, math is math. But if Vern is in fact 64 years old, then—
“Fresh cooked lobster, coming through! Fresh cooked lobster!” A cart escorted by three volunteers jogs through the crowd, which I am now a part of, sort of.
Somewhere, King Neptune is presiding over a coronation.
At the Domino’s Pizza tent, there is no lobster pizza.
At the Verizon tent, there is no Lobster Plan.
Ditto: T-Mobile.
“I lost my shoe!”
“Show them the starfish!”
“That seagull’s wing is messed up!”
“For a Festival that honors people who make their living on the ocean, hosting a Navy ship is the perfect fit.”
Two girls and a boy are holding hands, leaping in a circle, chanting,
“Lobstahs, lobstahs, lobstahs.”
SATURDAY (ZERO PAIN):
To tour The Destroyer, you must wear closed-toed shoes. E is wearing pink Birkenstocks, her perfect toes not enclosed. Back at the CR-V for a footwear swap, she says, “If we’re going to do this, I definitely want to be high.” I have by this point eaten more pot gummy in a single day than I have ever eaten.
Destroyer?
Hardly knew ‘er!
Yikes. Maine jokes. Do we need another example of David behaving badly, to women, or just in general? Or how about another example of his genius? People go into fits over that word, genius, but let’s give it to him. Though of course the only true geniuses are lovers. I mean, there are lines of geniuses everywhere at the Festival now, waiting. A genius dressed as Spiderman, though maybe he actually is Spiderman? Pirate geniuses. Volunteer geniuses sorting compost. Geniuses misting themselves in the misting tent. Geniuses tearing into chelipeds and pereiopods and uropods. Lobsters can regrow amputated limbs. They cast off outgrown shells like outgrown clothes, getting bigger and bigger until you eat them.
“Be appraised though, that the Main Eating Tent’s suppers come in Styrofoam trays, and the soft drinks are iceless and flat, and the coffee is convenience store coffee in yet more Styrofoam, and the utensils are plastic […] And so on. Any one example is no more than a petty inconvenience, of course, but the MLF turns out to be full of irksome little downers like this.”
These words from David’s essay. However, David’s two lobster dinners were not served on Styrofoam.6 Styrofoam is a trademarked brand of closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam. In fact, most of the containers we think of as Styrofoam are actually a form of expanded polystyrene.
An email from Beth Kracklauer, the fact-checker of David’s original essay reads, in part:
I admire Wallace the writer. With some distance on “Consider the Lobster,” I admire it too. My experience working with the man was not great.
[…]
I worked with many writers over my years as a fact-checker at Gourmet. Some of them were experienced journalists who valued fact-checking; others were more-literary types or simply less-experienced writers who were not accustomed to being fact-checked; Wallace was, by leagues, the most hostile to the process.
[…]
Wallace seemed to take it personally when I pointed out his mistakes. For instance, at one point in the essay he claimed that at the festival, attendees ate off of Styrofoam trays. I fact-checked that with the festival’s organizers. I got photos of the very tent and tables he describes. The trays were not Styrofoam. They were a kind of cardboard (recycled, if I recall correctly, but you’d have to fact-check that). When the editor, Jocelyn Zuckerman, put that change to Wallace, he blew up. He demanded, “Are you going to believe me or this fucking minimum-wage fact-checker?!”7 (For the record, I was paid a little better than that.)8
David refused to communicate with the fact-checker, as would have been customary, and instead left (the footnoted) late-night voicemails for Jocelyn. There was also some kind of hullabaloo about a particular colon and the Nazi “angel of death,” Joseph Mengele, but I won’t get into any of that here. David threatened to pull the essay. Maybe Gourmet also threatened to ax it.9 Jocelyn had a fine line to walk, and she walked it; she let the Styrofoam float, carried out to the ever-widening Pacific Gyre. But like I said earlier, I don’t think it’s any big revelation to suggest that David’s essay subsumed his own pain—there’s more of us in our writing than we know—though what do I know of David’s pain? That’s why I’m telling you this. Iceberg, straight ahead. The 62 Mk 45 Mod 4 (lightweight gun) rotates, levels, aims. When I’m high—I swear, I don’t get high that much—I sometimes imagine an arrow pointed at me, flashing, STONED, and as a result, I know you consider me unserious, a liar, a clown, etc. Part of me even thinks I deserve that judgment, though what it means to deserve judgment is an essay unto itself, probably an essay I’ll never write, the one that will finally prompt you to love me. In a pot of boiling water, a lobster might survive for 30-45 seconds. A human might last a little longer. I always thought the bubbles in the boiling water were made of oxygen, but they’re not. They’re water vapor. Water vapor is H2O in a gaseous state, a collection of highly energized water molecules. In the atmosphere, it is a potent greenhouse gas. Turn up the heat. A more energized molecule takes up more space. In a pot, as energized molecules bump into each other, they create tiny pockets of gas, micro-bubbles. But we aren’t boiling yet. Almost as soon as a micro-bubble forms, the pressure of the surrounding liquid crushes it. That’s the noise before the roll: thousands of bursting bubbles. Water boils at sea level (in Rockland, Maine) when it reaches a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). Blood boils at basically the same temperature, though just a little hotter, which has something to do with salt. Evaporation describes liquid becoming gas one molecule at a time.
Boiling is a special form of evaporation. I think why bubbles rise is similar to why a dead body floats, or a boat. Another thing I love is that the temperature of boiling water—no matter how high you set the flame—will never increase. The faster the water boils, the faster the water cools, like sweat and your body, equilibrium maintained. Though that’s not totally true. Pressure is involved too. On a submarine, water might boil at 120 degrees, and on the top of Mount Everest, it might boil at 70. This is why a lobster cooks so quickly underwater and why it takes forever in the clouds. Actually, a bubble of water vapor doesn’t form so easily. Think about how difficult it is to get that first breath of air into a balloon. This initial difficulty has something to do with the relationship of surface area and volume. For bubbles to form and survive—as if bubbles can survive—they need a tiny protective cavity in the liquid, a nucleation site. A speck of dust might provide this shelter, or a microscopic scratch on the container. But what if the pot is flawless and the water pure? Think about a thought bubble. Heaven, I’d say. In heaven, water never boils. The water’s temperature surpasses 100 degrees C. It becomes super-heated. Be careful. A bug dropped into this pot, or a heavy step on the floor, a dash of salt—anything really might cause the water to flash boil. One liter of water heated to 101 degrees Celsius (at sea level) can produce 3 liters of water vapor. That’s a dramatic expansion of volume, and if it happens suddenly, it’s basically an explosion. “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”10,11 Sometimes there are a million reasons and no certainty. And sometimes there are no reasons and the most certain certainty. And sometimes there is no certainty like pain, no pain like certainty. Ditto: uncertainty. Ditto fucking ditto. I understand that understanding is not my guardian angel, but I don’t know where else to turn. E, she’s beside me as we take our lobster rolls on our biodegradable trays and sit by the harbor under the squatting sun, and she is still there as I write this, and yet, I don’t know where she is. Have you seen her? Will you tell her that I miss her terribly? That all of it was true and still is. I just want to take my shirt off, which, actually, doesn’t feel like it would be totally inappropriate, though there are no shirtless attendees here, only geniuses that desperately want to take their shirts off, like me. The pavement is literally steaming now. Steam is water vapor and mist. Mist is a visible aerosol of water droplets. E puts on sunscreen. Then I put on sunscreen, the zinc kind, as if we aren’t white enough already. In the gray bay, The Destroyer looks even bigger now, badder. Actually, that’s not true. It looks small out there, trivial even, though in fact it is neither of those things, though in fact it is also both of those things. On the bench beside me, a dad assesses the lobster dinner in his lap. He’s wearing the bib over a polo shirt. The mom and two daughters huddle close. The dad seems to take an inventory—butter, coleslaw, corn, lobster—then calculate the best way to proceed. He twists off a claw. Sets it aside. He twists off the other claw. The crusher claw has larger rounded teeth and can break the shells of muscles and oysters. The cutter is slimmer and has sharper teeth and can close much more quickly. The dad snaps the thumb (dactyl) from one claw. Juice sprays and dribbles.
“Ewww,” one of the daughters puts up her hands, like no more.
“This is ridiculous,” says the mom.
I feel so proud of the father, getting into something messy he’s clearly never done before, without gloves or guidance, and doing it despite his family’s loud disgust, and the fact that I’m basically staring at him, taking notes. He breaks the tail from the body and examines the weird drooping tendrils of flesh. They’re covered in this green goo called tomalley. Inside a lobster, the tomalley functions like the pancreas and the liver—however those function—and because it can accumulate toxins, the State of Maine cautions against eating it. Dads are notorious for loving tomalley. My dad, he collects it from all the other lobster eaters at the table and spreads the fishy stuff on toast.
“Is this what it’s supposed to be like?” one of the daughters asks.
“This is so ridiculous,” the mom says again.
There’s a specific way to get the meat out of the tail. Actually, there are lots of ways to do it, but I like to break off the five little flipper shells, the uropods and telson, and push into that opening, forcing out the big solid curl of meat. Thumbs up. This genius isn’t doing that. He’s picking at the shell like you might pick your way into a hard-boiled egg. The thing about a soft-shell lobster though is that it contains a lot of water. The more efficiently you can remove the shell, the more efficiently you can manage that water. He is not managing the water, but no matter. He’s holding that big curl of meat, hands dripping. What he doesn’t know—I’m sure of it—is that the lobster’s digestive track, the poop chute, we used to call it, runs the length of the tail. The thin tube is hidden just beneath a flap of stringy meat.
Of course you can eat the poop chute—you can eat anything—but I’ve never watched anyone do it.
“I’m sure there’s a more elegant way to do this.”
Maybe it’s the pot that makes me do it. I kind of clear my throat and explain about the poop chute, and the dad, he looks at me helplessly, so I stand up and reach in there and actually touch his lobster and he sees what I’m saying, or rather pointing to, and he pinches the meat flap, tomalley all over his thumb, and peels the meat back like a pro, and there, sure enough, is that dark greenish hose.
When a woman wearing a bright red MAGA hat pushes a child in stroller past us, E says, “I just had a reaction to that woman.”
The woman is pretty, blonde. Her husband looks like a big success.
E says, “I wanted to ask her, How the fuck do you respect yourself?”
I envy everyone, your bravery, your endurance, your lack of shells. You all terrify me. What are we going to do? The line for The Destroyer stretches to the animal petting tent now. It’s rumored that those of us at the back of the line won’t make it onto the final tours of the day. A guy walks by wearing a white shirt with a red cross. Or maybe it’s a red shirt with a white cross. The shirt says, ORGASM DONOR.
E and I decide to return tomorrow. We drive to a small beach in Camden and kiss standing in the water that is cold but not icy, the late-afternoon sun warm on our shoulders. There are other people there too, not kissing, but that’s ok. Everybody doesn’t have to be kissing all the time, though kissing all the time might be nice. We find the place where we’re spending the night, share some wine, eat some gummy, walk to dinner.
“Does it just taste better because we’re high?” E asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “But maybe it’s also really good.”
As we walk home in the mist, on a leafy street, E pees in an unlit driveway. I am so happy hearing that flood.
In the night, I wake to the sound of rain.12
FOOTNOTES
- Not true. He called it “kind of cheesy and boring.” ↩︎
- “What the Maine Lobster Festival really is is a mid-level county fair with a culinary hook”—great line of David’s there: concise, cutting, pleasantly colloquial—and I’m not saying he’s wrong, but I’m not saying he’s right either. The mid-level county fair stuff includes live music, a road race, a race across floating lobster traps, tent games, military recruitment, local artists displaying local art, bouncy houses for the kids—it’s “Five Days Of Feasting And Fun On The Fabulous Coast of Maine!”—etc., etc., and then of course there’s all the other stuff that no one ever writes about, though David did write about some of that stuff in another of his essays, “Ticket to the Fair.” What I am saying is that I’m not trying to say anything about what the MLF is, or isn’t, but at the same time, I am, kind of like David. It’s just, what more can I say? ↩︎
- The Navy is developing a way to convert sea water into fuel (hydrogen) during deployments. ↩︎
- I feel the sadness behind my eyeballs, in my chest, in my throat, in a curling of my lips, all the way out my limbs at my fingertips, singing, in the grocery store, on the highway, on a ladder, at the beach, in the morning, in the evening, now. ↩︎
- An email from the publicity or marketing or promotional team at the MLF reads, in part: “In terms of numbers for this year, I can tell you we greeted tens of thousands of guests from all over the world, representing every state in the US (including Alaska and Hawaii) and more than 40 other countries. We served more than 20K lbs. of lobster and thousands of pounds of lobster meat in lobster rolls.”
How many thousands?
“You’ve got the numbers we’ve issued and they should work for your piece!”
My piece!
And, “Matthew, you’ve talked to our leadership and we really aren’t going to comment on a 20-year-old article, especially one that is inflammatory about the lobster we’re serving. Wishing you the best in your project!”
Project!
And, “That’s a 20 year old article, and this is the first we’ve heard of it since it came out.”
And, “I’m confident there was a ton of controversy around the article, because it is full of inaccuracies, but it was so long ago we’ve all moved on.”
And, “There are so many false things in it that it’s totally laughable.”
Sometimes it feels like no comment is the best comment. I never hear about the false things. And I suppose, from one perspective, there is no difference between 20 and 29 or 10 and 99, though from another perspective, there is nothing other than the specific. ↩︎ - In his essay, in a remarkable assertion of ambiguity-by-omission, David never mentions the fact that he ate two lobsters at the MLF. See D. T. Max’s biography of David, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. ↩︎
- Jocelyn also confirmed this with me. “I don’t know why David was so fixated on the styrofoam.” I think it was a combination of the fact that he was a careful reporter, and he didn’t think he would have gotten such a thing wrong. Also, styrofoam just worked better in the context of this tacky spectacle he was writing about…Beth reminded me of the “fucking minimum-wage-fact-checker” comment, which I had forgotten. But yes, he said that to me when we were going back and forth (I believe that was a live conversation, and not in a voicemail, though I may be mistaken). I related the conversation to Beth. ↩︎
- “In the simplest terms and from the perspective of [this] fact-checker: A fact is a statement that can be verified.” ↩︎
- There is some confusion about this. ↩︎
- This from David’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement, which, after he delivered it, quickly went a little viral. In 2009, Little, Brown and Company published a 137-page hardcover edition, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. You can buy a copy on eBay for $150. Or, you might listen to David giving the speech on your phone, perhaps in the wood shed behind your house, where you might find the effect similar to wringing out a towel that’s been left to dry in the rain. ↩︎
- An earlier quote in this essay, the one about “wanting to shoot yourself in the head,” that was also taken from David’s speech. ↩︎
- SUNDAY, OR WHY DID THE TURTLE CROSS THE ROAD?
It’s down-pouring in the morning. The windows are open and the sheets are cool and smooth and the air is cool too and we have our sweet version of sex.
E says, “I think I don’t want to go on The Destroyer.”
Who wouldn’t love her? I mean, how is it that love can ever be wrong? Or rather, how can love be not right? Or rather, how can it feel so right, so good, so fucking perfect, and then, in less than a week, I will suddenly, thunderously, know that this love—and it is love, I am capable of it—isn’t right, and that it is imperative to get out of the proverbial or figurative or metaphorical or whatever pot—not pot—and I will tell E, or rather sob it to her, on her yellow couch with the blue blanket and her knees pulled beneath her and my face I’m sure bright red though why does it matter what color it is and no words but this look that is wild and pained and understands completely and we’ll hold this look, blue eyes, blue eyes, and maybe it is the truest thing I have ever felt, the most lovely and the most painful. You can fact check all that. Funny, in Camden now it’s not raining anymore. We return to the beach and E wades up to her knees and I float on my back in the shallow salty water, the sun shining through my closed eyes, orange, unrelenting. So, this is water. So, this is water. And then we’re back in the CR-V, on our way out of town, and at an intersection, we see a big snapping turtle in the grass. At least, I think it’s a snapping turtle. In any case, it is definitely not a lobster: of course it isn’t: why would it be? Its feet swing over the grass. Its long neck stretches and turns. Red clover. Goldenrod. Green light. I desperately don’t want the turtle to try to cross the road, to get run over as it crosses the road, I mean, and I imagine herding it back to the woods, but then I think that this will probably traumatize the turtle, or just delay it getting to wherever it’s going to go on the other side of the road anyway. Plus, the turtle would probably bite me, which would really be a bummer, losing your finger to a turtle, though maybe if you have to lose a finger, the best way to lose it is to a turtle, because then you would have that turtle-took-my-finger story, though who cares about stories. On both sides of the road it is the brightest green. I think I can’t look as we drive away, headed to Port Clyde, for ice cream, but I do look, stretching to see—So long, Turtle, So long. ↩︎
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATTHEW J.C. CLARK is a writer and carpenter living in Bath, Maine. His first book, Bjarki, Not Bjarki (University of Iowa Press) was published in 2024.
