J​oe Baumann
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Donations

     Every Wednesday at four in the morning, Walter offered a gift to the sea.  First: Colin’s CPAP machine, which he heaved over the end of the pier without a thought.  He couldn’t hear the splash, and when he looked down into the water all he saw was black, so he had to imagine what the machine looked like: tubes and cords vines of seaweed, the central machinery the beak of an octopus. 
     Walter spent an entire year donating Colin’s things to the ocean: t-shirts, chinos, sweaters and raincoats, one each week.  Then he moved on to toiletries, special shampoos meant to thicken Colin’s hair, body wash that smelled of this very ocean’s brine, his loofah and toothpaste.  Then the extra cookware Colin brought with him when he moved in, the wine glasses and chipped plates they hadn’t really needed because Walter had his own but didn’t want to make Colin feel like the balance was off between them.  Last: Colin’s favorite blanket, which fluttered out to the open sea like it was waving goodbye.  Walter wondered if any of the things he tossed into the water would wash back up onto the beach, but whenever he walked the shore in daylight he found nothing.  Colin’s life was gone to the deep.
                                                                                *
     Exactly one year and six months after Colin died, Walter was driving down route 17 and saw a new business tucked into the end of a strip mall populated by a Chinese takeout, a masseuse, a vet’s office, and two liquor stores: Symposium de philosophie.  The sign was white with black calligraphied letters, and at first Walter could hardly read the words.  He pulled into the TD Bank parking lot a block up the road and backtracked, staring at the sign until he understood.  The shopfront window was obscured by a thick black curtain.
     The business was a makeshift university of sorts, with a single faculty member, the owner, a man named Vasek who spoke with a slight Eastern European accent.  He had a buzzcut and only wore camo two sizes too large.  The only available coursework was in philosophy, and classes ran on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with sessions at nine, ten, one, and three.  Vasek, who sat behind a behemoth of an old wooden desk in the business’s foyer, offered Walter three sessions for nothing and the rest for next to nothing.  Because he finished work at two, Walter thought, Why not?
    Vasek’s classes didn’t have syllabi or homework or names.  Class took place in the foyer, and Walter was his only student, sitting in a large desk chair that matched Vasek’s.  Each session started with Vasek sitting in his seat, but at some point something would rouse his excitement and he would start pacing.  At first, Walter brought a notebook in which to write ideas down, but then it quickly became clear that there were no tests, no assignments aside from reading material that Vasek mentioned in quick passing at the end of each hour, which Vasek somehow intuitively knew was up despite not wearing a watch or looking at a phone (there was no clock on any of the walls, which were wood-paneled to half-height and then painted a grim beige, the color of shoreline sand when wet).  Walter stopped writing and simply listened.
     He learned about Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Lacan and Jung.  He didn’t understand much about epistemology or ontology.  The little bit he followed about existentialism depressed him.  Walter recognized the name Descartes and the phrase I think, therefore I am.  He nodded along when Vasek pontificated on the question of free will versus predestination, feeling a striking beat in his chest and thinking about Colin and all the ways he might or might not have lived.  Vasek never asked him if he had questions and Walter never raised any.  He had tried community college nearly twenty years ago, when all of his friends were jetting off to universities around the south, but the classroom setting wasn’t for him; Walter felt itchy sitting in a desk all day then being expected to go home and reread what he’d written down so that he could rewrite that information on tests or papers, and then do it all over again for another fifteen weeks, and then another and another.  Somewhere in all of that, at the end of several years, he would accumulate some kind of expertise he would be expected to use for the rest of his life for at least eight hours each day, five days each week.  No thank you.
     He understood that his disinterest must have some name for it, philosophically speaking, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask Vasek what that might be.
                                                                                *
     Exactly two years after Colin’s death, Amy and Marble were hired at Glen & Tina’s, the bar where Walter had worked for fifteen years.  He’d never poured a single beer or served a single shot, but he had grilled thousands of pounds of bacon and sausage and just as many if not more eggs.  He could butter toast with his eyes closed and knew exactly how long to crisp a bagel for optimum texture.  No one sliced tomatoes and peppers faster or could julienne onions with greater precision.
     Amy was in her mid-forties and wore more make-up than she needed to.  She was nice, always toying with her peroxide-blonde hair.  Marble had an upper New England accent and was barely twenty years old.  They were both good waitresses, not great—Marble often forgot to take refills to her tables, and Amy was a subpar multitasker when she had more than three parties to manage—but they complemented each other nicely, Amy running fresh Cokes and coffees to Marble’s tables, Marble snagging orders for groups in Amy’s purview that had waited more than a few minutes and looked ready to strangle someone for a plate of home fries. 
     One afternoon, Marble asked if Walter wanted to walk on the beach with her.  He was supposed to go to Vasek for a deep-dive on Thomas Hobbes, but he said yes, so they walked across the street, passed a row of vacation rentals, and kicked off their shoes as they approached the sprays of marram grass at the edge of the sand.  Neither said anything as they walked.  Marble looked toward the water, where vacationers waded and children splashed in the low waves.  Near the end of their walk—somehow, they both seemed to know when it was time to make a gentle one-eighty and return from whence they came—he asked what she was thinking.  He thought she might shrug and say, “Nothing,” but instead she uncorked and started rambling: though there were beaches where she came from (Maine), the water was always too chilly for swimming, not that her mother would have let her loose the way these children were free to saunter and splash.  She had never felt that bobbing emptiness beneath her, the expanding, eternal world that scrolled on and on for mileage she could hardly comprehend.  Of course, she could do as she liked now, but the ocean was something different for her as an adult, a colossus to be watched and respected rather than explored and enjoyed; she knew too much about what it could do to you, riptides, jellyfish, sharks—the latter of these unlikely here, but still, the threat hung in the back of her mind—for her to feel that childish freedom, the unfettered ribbon of innocence and exploration.
     When she stopped, she said, “Sorry.”
     “Nothing to be sorry for.”
     “That was so much.  Too much.”
     “No such thing.”
     “That’s nice of you.”
     When they stopped to put their shoes back on after washing their feet at the showerheads along one of the boardwalk entryways, taking turns using the other’s shoulder for stability, he thought about telling her about his classes with Vasek, or even what he did every Wednesday.  But then they were both sneakered up before he could make a decision, and she was saying goodbye, and they were going their separate ways.
                                                                                *
     After Colin’s things, Walter started throwing his own.  He had a roomful of paperback books, cheap mysteries and Penguin classics, all the things he’d been expected to read in grade and high school: Hound of the Baskervilles, The Odyssey, Of Mice and Men.  He launched Lord of the Flies and A Picture of Dorian Gray one week at a time.  Then he threw his extra dish towels and forks and spoons until he had just enough silverware to eat.  He wiped out his closet, removing every button-down shirt he hadn’t worn since Colin’s death—almost all of them; he had nowhere to go—and emptied the kitchen junk drawer of its many USB cords, its useless gadgetry, its unopened packages of toothpicks and wooden skewers and cake decorating tools that Colin had ordered thinking he’d try his hand as an amateur baker.
     He paid particular attention to Vasek the day he lectured on materialism in Bertrand Russell’s The Analysis of Mind. 
     “What is amazing,” Vasek began, “is that he started writing this most seminal of texts”—Vasek loved the word seminal; he called everything and everyone he talked about seminal—“while he was in prison for opposing World War I.  What you need to know is that Russell was a pacifist.”  Vasek tossed out names like Wittgenstein, The Hague, William James, terms like radical empiricism, neutral monism, behaviorism.  By the end of the hour, Walter wasn’t sure where the material part of materialism came into play, but as always, he asked no questions, Vasek nodding with accomplishment as Walter stood to leave.
                                                                                *
     Two and a half years after Colin’s death, Marble said, “She likes you,” on one of their beach walks.  The wind was whippy, the water choppy.  Few people were laid out because the temperature had taken an overnight dip into the fifties.  Marble wore a pink sweater.
     “Who?  What?”
     “Amy.  You haven’t noticed?”
     Marble was, for once, looking at Walter instead of the water as they walked.  Her face was scrubbed clean, her hair pulled back.  She had blue eyes that matched the ocean’s seafoam, and now they were locked on him.  He looked away first, and she said, “Oh, come on.  You’re not stupid, Walter.”
     He shrugged.  “Maybe I am.  You don’t know.”
     This made her laugh.  “Of course I do.  And you’re not.”
     In all his years at Glen & Tina’s, he’d never once mentioned Colin, never once been asked.  People probably assumed that a forty-something with a salt-and-pepper goatee and shaved head wasn’t tied down, especially not to someone like Colin.  Walter had never worn a wedding band because he and Colin hadn’t ever seen the point in getting married, despite the potential dangers of South Carolina should the wrong people get the wrong kinds of power.  But then again, talking about Colin wouldn’t explain anything, at least not truthfully: he’d slept with women before meeting Colin, had dated several, lived, briefly, with one.  The fact that he wouldn’t date another woman after Colin had less to do with Walter as a person with particular tastes than the fact that, after Colin, there was no taste to speak of.
     “You should give her a chance,” Marble said.  “She deserves it.”
     “Don’t we all,” Walter said, looking up at the pier in the distance, jutting out toward the water, waiting, maybe, for his next gift.
                                                                                *
                                               
      Colin had been a snorer who suffered from sleep apnea—thus the CPAP machine—and so when his breathing started getting wonky, he just assumed it was a symptom of that and ignored it, forging through the pain, the kind of thing he always did, like suffering the flu or sprained ankles from miscalculated steps on his runs with silent masculinity.
     He assumed wrong.
     The mass in his chest sprouted and spread, vines that stretched from his lung into his bones and blood, at which point the evitable became inevitable.  It happened, at least, quickly.
     A week before Christmas, Vasek gave a lecture on Kierkegaard, ending his pontificating by pointing to the drop ceiling and saying, as if reciting a quote, “Death is something that renders all life meaningless and insufferable, so that to be the one left alive is the greatest misfortune.  That is what he believed.”  Vasek lowered his hand and said, “We’ll be closing for Christmas break.”
     “Oh,” Walter said.  “Right.”
     Vasek knotted his hands together in front of him.  “Have a good break.”
                                                                                *
     Walter asked Amy if she wanted to get a drink sometime.  He caught sight of Marble, pretending to key in an order, bouncing on the balls of her feet and clapping. 
     They went next door that afternoon (“Why wait?” Amy said) to Chimi Limi.  Walter ordered a Corona, Amy a skinny margarita.  Her face was bleary; his feet hurt.  They sat outside, the only ones on the patio.  Christmas lights were strung up along the boardwalks. 
     “Do you like it here?” Walter asked.
     “This restaurant?  It’s fine.”
     “I meant here.  The beach.”
     “Oh.  Yeah.  What’s not to like?”
     Walter was facing the water.  He couldn’t see the pier because it was blocked by the Surfside Beach Hotel, a five-story monster of balconies and orange curtains.  The ocean seemed to rise against the horizon, a wall of water, a tsunami, an ending.  He imagined all of the things he’d thrown in swirling and lifting from the depths. 
     “You’re right,” Walter said.  “There’s not much that can go wrong.”
     Amy ordered a second skinny marg and propped her elbow on the table, cupping her chin in her hand.  “So.  Tell me about you, Walter.  Man of mystery.”
     “Mystery?”
     “Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
     “I don’t.  Really.”  The waitress brought Amy’s drink and another beer for Walter even though he hadn’t asked for one.  She also dropped off the check, which neither had requested, sticking it underneath a rack of hot sauces at the end of the table.  Both Walter and Amy watched it flap in the breeze.
     “Huh,” Amy said.  “Weird place.”
     “Yeah.”
     “Tell me something.  Anything will do.”
     Once again Walter thought of bringing up Colin, but he could feel the chord-strike in his chest at the prospect.  Instead, he told her about Vasek and Symposium de philosophie.
     “I’ve always wondered about that place!  I can’t believe you went in.”  She held her other hand up to her cheek and made a pillow for her face so she was looking at him with her head tilted.  “It sounds wild.  How does he make any money?”
     “I don’t think he does.  I think it’s mostly pro bono.”
     “Maybe he’s rich.”
     “Possibly.”
     “I could marry him for his money.”  She sipped her drink.  “Or you could.”
     Walter laughed, but he felt the falseness of it.  Their waitress reappeared, hovering silently.  Before he could do so, Amy grabbed the check and fished around in her purse on the seat next to her, extracting a credit card.  When their waitress returned, Amy thanked Walter for the drink but said she had to get home.  He nodded but didn’t stand, and she didn’t seem to mind.  Walter watched her walk away until she was gone.
                                                                                *
     Three years after he disposed of the CPAP machine, one year after they’d started working together, Marble said she wanted to buy Walter an ice cream cone.
     “It’s so hot,” she said.  “We can sit inside instead of walking around.”
     But they ended up walking, to the end of the pier, Marble leading the way, licking her cone of swirl.  Walter had ordered a cup of plain vanilla, which was turning to soup even though they’d only been outside for a few minutes.  The pier was packed with families leaning against the wooden railing, staring down at the foaming green water.  Fishermen in their bucket hats hovered over their lines.  Walter wondered if they ever caught anything, then wondered if maybe one of his shoes or one of Colin’s socks had ever gotten tangled in their hooks. 
     Marble said, “It was good what you did.”
     “Huh?”
     “For Amy.”
     “Amy,” Walter said.  She’d disappeared from Glen & Tina’s two months ago.
     “Don’t you know?”
     “Know what?”
     Marble laughed.  “You gave her confidence.”
     “I what?”
     Marble explained: although Walter had clearly not been interested in her, the fact that he’d sat with her for a drink had made Amy feel powerful and sure (somehow, Walter added silently as Marble spoke).  She’d gone out to another bar down the block a few nights later and met the man who would soon be her husband.
     “Fast,” Walter said.
     “You mean sure.  Confident.  Powerful, you mean.”
     “I guess that, too.”
     “He’s got cash.  She doesn’t need to work,” Marble said.
     “Good for her.”
     “Don’t you get it, Walter?  You did that.”
     “I didn’t do anything.”
     “Well, you did something.  You gave her something she didn’t have.”
     “Oh,” Walter said.
     Marble stopped walking.  “Tell me what you’re thinking.  Anything, I mean.  Just, whatever.  You seem down.”
     How to explain anything, Walter wondered.  Three years of castings-off, and still all this weight.  Vasek had not returned after the holidays despite his assurances.  The Symposium de philosophie sign was gone, though the black curtain was still there.  Whatever Vasek had been after, he had not found it.  Or, Walter thought, maybe he’d given away what he needed to dispose of. 
     Walter leaned against the railing and looked down at the water.  Marble sighed, licking her cone.  He imagined he could see piles of his life, of Colin’s, heaped up against the ocean floor.  But of course not.  All of that would have been swept away, taken by the tide to some other place for someone else to find, to have, to hold, to love and cherish all the rest of their days.  Or, at the very least, as a story, a memento, a passing thrill to remember at a party full of laughter and joy.
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Joe Baumann is the author of five collections of short fiction, most recently Tell Me, from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, and the novels I Know You’re Out There Somewhere and Lake, Drive. His fiction and essays have appeared in Third Coast, Passages North, Phantom Drift, and many others. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction.