Everyone’s thrown a party the night before they’re butchered. Tonight’s Jannelle’s, and she stands onstage in Mar-a-Lago’s Gold and White Ballroom, holding the karaoke machine’s mic as if it were a weapon. An AI Beyonce song plays from a speaker on a tripod. Jannelle can remember about half the words.
Mark sits alone at a cocktail table. In five days, it’ll be his party. A hardback copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls lies unopen in front of him. Mark bought it because of his father, who always read books about war. He’d enlisted in Florida’s militia during the lead up to succession, even spent a month bivouacked with ten thousand other volunteers north of Jacksonville in a tent he brought himself. The promised confrontation with the Army never came, and his father returned to sticky note on a six-pack of High Life that read, “You’re still a hero to us.” The absence of that confrontation was something he carried with him, like a Canadian quarter he couldn’t spend.
A waiter holding a tray of drinks walks up to Mark and stands still. Mark’s impressed with the waiter’s ability to do this without looking at him. He takes a rum and Coke off the tray while staring at the side of the waiter’s face. “Thank you,” he says. The waiter walks away without speaking.
If it’s your night, you select one cocktail and one beer for the waiters to carry around on their tiny trays. You can, of course, supplement this with anything of your choice purchased from Mar-a-Lago’s bar. Music echoes through the cavernous Gold and White Ballroom. Because they only keep a week’s worth of meat on site, there’s never more than seven people at the parties. This makes them feel desperate and forced, like the hour before a bar closes.
His first night, Mark got drunk in earnest on screwdrivers. His second, cosmopolitans. Tonight, he approached the party with grim resignation. The night he arrived everyone asked him questions. However, there’s nothing about Mark that can’t be exhausted in an hour. He tried to make conversation, but felt like the chatbot that answered questions on a bank website. By his second party, he was largely silent. He’d debated staying in his room tonight but made the compromise of coming to the party on the condition he’d publicly display how miserable he was.
Mark turns the glass in his hands. A Scottish coat of arms is etched into it, a scroll with the word “TRUMP,” instead of a motto unfurls below. Trump died over a decade ago. Despite being sold to settle his debts, the club still used the crest.
Mar-a-Lago is the only place Mark’s been that looks exactly like its pictures. There’s an earnestness to its artificiality: the crystal chandeliers and their tiny light bulbs, the gold-plated sinks, the rocks glasses engraved with a plagiarized coat of arms. It all feels like the set of a porno to Mark. Disgust and embarrassment cycle inside him, matching the systole and diastole of the song’s beat. And, for the second time this year, Mark decides to die.
#
The first time Mark decided to die wasn’t so much a decision as a letting go. The posters had been up in Barefoot Bay for years. In the original park, with its piecemeal modular homes and dirt lawns, you saw a few. But in the expansion, with its maze of converted sea containers strewn about like spilled Legos, you saw them everywhere. The Army was the only other way out of Florida if you lived in a park, and they didn’t have half as many posters. Every day, Mark saw them on his walks to and from work.
Few of the state’s residents officially owned homes. The absence of property taxes popularized investing in Florida real estate. Most homes were, at best, vacation rentals. The rest sat empty, guarded by the REIT’s private security, forcing the displaced natives to coagulate in makeshift parks.
Pools of people in a “state” without taxes, OSHA or the EPA didn’t go unexploited. Textile mills, electronics manufacturing, plastic plants and everything else Americans want but don’t want near them rushed in. This drew Mark here decades ago.
“Seacans,” abundant and durable, were the go-to housing option, with licit and illicit avenues to get one. Each year the park became more littered with them, and Mark’s walk home grew rivulose. People glued advertisements on the sides of them. After awhile, residents tired of pulling the flyers off. They looked like failed craft projects, decoupaged with images from other people’s dreams.
On Mar-a-Lago’s posters, a tanned woman sat at the edge of a pool, legs in the water, laughing. A man with no chest hair stood in the pool, facing her. Behind them was Mar-a-Lago, painted a color between pink and beige. The sky held gothic text saying, “GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT.”
Looking at the poster through his phone’s camera, Mark could see the terms. $100,000 USD, not Florida bitcoin, and a weeklong stay leading up to your processing date. The novelty of cannibalism had driven memberships for years—though the word never appeared on their website.
The site was mindful to ease any fears you’d be wasted: “Our human dishes take center stage. You will be the featured special. Members reserve portions weeks in advance to secure such a rare delicacy. Know every part of you will be savored.”
Rare delicacy? Weekly, he saw at least one dead body, sometimes covered with a bedsheet, sometimes not. They’d lay in the open air until volunteers from the New Catholics picked them up and took them to an incinerator. They pay a hundred thousand dollars to eat what we burn. That’s when you know you’re rich.
It didn’t make sense. Meat was hard to get. Following the carbon tax, the UN resolution against new land for cattle and FDA approval of Real Pink, meat prices soared. Animal meat wasn’t illegal, though, and could easily be afforded by Mar-a-Lago’s members.
“What do you have to lose other than your suffering?” the website concluded.
Mark was disgusted, which is probably why he spent evenings in his rented room, back against the corrugated streel, looking at pictures of Mar-a-Lago on his phone.
There was no definitive moment. Mark worked at the e-waste recovery facility inside the park’s expansion. He fought boredom by listening to eBooks while plying rare metals from circuit boards. He could afford a room to himself. Nights he’d go home and stare into the glowing well of his phone. A lean fifty-two, he could keep it up at least another ten years. He just couldn’t find a reason why.
He had a mother in the memory care partition of an Amazon warehouse refurbished into a skilled nursing facility. Her life savings bought three years there. He’d sit next to her in the common area, holding her hand as a TV cycled through ten-second clips of baby animals as classical music played in the background. The clips were compiled from old documentaries. As Mark watched, he’d wonder how many of those animals were now extinct.
His mom paid into Medicaid before succession. $100,000 would cover a Florida visa and an ambulance to a Medicaid-accepting facility in Georgia, one where the residents weren’t communally bathed in above-ground pools. Mark could tell himself he did it for her.
He filled out the application. After a successful prion disease screening, he received an eCard with Mar-a-Lago’s crest and a QR code for an autobus. So, with a shrug, Mark walked into the deepest part of his shadow.
#
Reading on his deck chair, Mark gets that falling feeling of being watched.
Most of the meats are in the pool, busy keeping three beach balls perpetually aloft. The air’s stuffed with wet cotton balls. A concrete seawall ensures no one on the pool deck will see Lake Worth Lagoon, but Mark can smell the salt in the air. And despite motor noise from the sump stations, he hears water lapping.
The woman doesn’t look away when he spots her. She’s at a table with an older man in the outdoor dining area. They’re seated under an umbrella which periodically mists them. Her hair is short, pink and contrasts with her auburn skin. The man next to her seems quietly ashamed, as if she were a teen he’d picked up from the police station. He holds a Bloody Mary but doesn’t drink it. From the circular outdoor dining area, he could see the lake if he wasn’t looking at his phone. Her white dress allows her tattoos to show. From far away, they look like bruises.
Sebastian pushes himself out of the pool and sits next to Mark without toweling off. In the 110-degree heat, it’s pointless. Sebastian’s breaks Mark’s heart. Every one of the meats wants to think that if they made different choices when they were Sebastian’s age, they could have avoided winding up here. They could’ve studied, scored high enough on the fGRE to attend an online college or get into the Army. They could have learned a trade, gotten a steady job repairing ACs, made enough to own a single-family seacan in a legitimate park where the septic worked and didn’t seep into pools with floating islands of shit.
Sebastian shows such thoughts are lies. Their past selves carried their future failures within them like Russian Dolls. This realization hurts since they can no longer bank on their future selves as being more capable. They sold them for a weeklong stay at a resort which averages three out of five stars on Yelp—though, admittedly, many of the low ratings came from people who will never set foot on the grounds.
Mark likes him. Perhaps because Mark likes to wallow. Sebastian makes it easier for Mark to think there was nothing he could’ve done to make his life worth more than what he’d sold it for.
Sebastian looks up at the members who choose to eat outside. “It creeps me out. I feel like they’re watching us.”
“They are.”
“Why?”
“Did you ever see an old movie or TV show where a character goes to a fancy restaurant and there’s lobsters in a tank?”
“No.”
“Before Real Pink, people wanted to believe the meat they were eating was fresh. So, at places that served lobster, there were aquariums full of lobsters. Some places let you point at which one you wanted. Then, they’d pull it out of the tank in front of you and take it back to the kitchen.”
“What’s a lobster?”
“It was kind of like a combination of a cockroach and a fish.”
“Disgusting. What’d they taste like?”
“Like nothing,” Mark said. “You had to coat them in butter before you ate them.”
“Why did people like them?”
“Because they were expensive.”
The sump engines’ hum was monastic. Mark looked up at the outdoor dining area. Arms folded, the woman looks at the water. What are you telling this child? Mark thinks. This child whose never been to a restaurant where the meat isn’t pulled from one of the limbless balls of Real Pink. What use is this history lesson to a child who is entering the past and being erased from it at the same time?
“At least they aren’t pointing at us.”
“They don’t need to,” Mark says. “Menus are posted a week in advance.”
Mark imagines the woman in the white dress sitting down at a circular table with a white tablecloth. On her plate is a piece of Mark. He imagines a sirloin, floating in a porcelain pool. The mistress picks up the wood-handled steak knife, cuts a piece of him off, and chews. The man next to her, no more interested than he was at lunch, pokes at his phone while Mark’s blood pools over the Trump crest on the plate.
He imagines the meat sewn with maggots. He imagines an eggy smell rising from the plate, expanding like steam, filling the room. And everyone, even the waiters in their ludicrous tuxedos, choke on it.
The first time Mark decided to die, he sold himself. Now, he needs to steal himself. If it was his meat they want, he’ll spoil it. It’s the only thing he can take from them.
#
For his first hunt, Mark’s dad gave him a .243 Winchester. It was the rifle his father’s father learned to shoot with.
Despite being a machinist who woke at four, Mark’s dad was up at the same time on his day off, frying eggs. It was a half hour to the lodge where his father would meet his friends for the deer drive, and he wanted to be there early.
When they got there, everyone was dressed like road workers who’d decided to go hiking. Men ate bacon off paper plates. A row of antlers mounted at eye level lined the big room. A wrinkled leather sectional made an “L” in front of a tube television. Three of the men would be drivers, walking along the trails to startle deer. Mark, his dad and a man everyone called “Skittles,” would be posters, waiting along deer paths in the hope that startled does would use their known trails.
Mark’s father walked along a shallow stream, looking for a worn path intersecting it. When he found it, he looked for a clear line to where the deer path crossed.
After sitting on the ground for ten minutes, Mark pulled out his phone. His father grabbed it and whispered, “I told you not to bring this. Here, read.” He handed Mark a paperback copy of 1776, which he kept in the front pocket of his Carhart. “You want to wind up like the rest of the assholes here who never read a book?”
“You said it could take over an hour for us to see deer. I can’t read for more than a couple minutes.”
“Exactly.”
His father settled back into silence, watching the trail while Mark tried to read.
They heard them before they saw them, a group of four does. The mechanics of their stilt-like legs fascinated Mark. They moved like a wind-up toys. He laid the book on the ground and slid the rifle from his shoulder. One of the does stopped at the stream, quartered towards him.
Mark’s father had walked him through this moment before he’d ever held a rifle. Mark was less focused on the deer than on his father’s watching. He saw himself as his dad saw him. To his father, being a man was comprised of list of things you would and wouldn’t do. Killing this animal as she paused to drink from a stream was on his list. People weren’t close to Mark’s dad. They existed on a continuum somewhere between approve and disapprove. On one side of that continuum, Mark sat and watched the deer as she drank, listening to the soft rumors of the leaves. On the other, he shot her.
He ran the scope up the front leg opposite him ’til he was halfway up her barrow and pulled the trigger.
Does scattered. Mark stood, but his father grabbed him by his blaze orange vest. Mark wanted to run and sit next to the doe as she died. It felt like something he owed her.
“Just watch. We’ll track her. You got her through both lungs, maybe the heart,” his father said.
“Why not go now?”
“You need to wait until she beds down. If we chase her, she’ll run out of her first bed to another and be harder to find.”
“What if we can’t find her?”
“We’ll find her.”
“How long do we wait?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“How long do we have?”
“In this weather, she’ll spoil in six hours if we don’t butcher her.”
#
It’s Travis’ party. In four days, it’ll be Marks. A half dozen people seize on the dancefloor to electronic music. The woman Mark saw eating lunch in the outdoor dining area enters the Gold and White Ballroom from the end opposite the stage. She slides onto the stool across from him, scans the party in a way both curious and uninterested before turning to him.
“You’re the reader. I’ve come here for years and have never seen a meat reading.”
“I prefer the term ‘pre-processed person.’”
“Oh, he’s funny too.” She dips her ring finger in Mark’s glass and touches it to her tongue. “Ya’ll are served real alcohol?” Her fiber optic wig waves iridescent neon. Mark guesses she’s at least twenty years younger than him. He sighs and takes a sip.
“Weren’t you told not to play with your food?”
“I’ve only eaten the fish. Promise.”
“You don’t need to lie to me. I wouldn’t blame you for eating half these people.”
“Guess there’s no need to ask why you’re sitting alone …”
What does she want from me? Mark wondered. He was unaccustomed to being approached by women. Existing in the median between handsome and ugly, his face is most notable for how forgettable it is. But this isn’t romantic. It feels more like children meeting at a playground. She’s flirting to hide how timid she is. Mark’s the oldest person in the ballroom. As everyone dances, he works through a Jack and Coke while reading. He’d bought new clothes for the week, and his shirt still holds the rectilinear creases of unworn clothes. She sat here because I’m the safest-looking one.
“Wouldn’t you rather be there?” Mark looks out the windows to the pool deck. The whole area is lit by Windex blue water. Copses of men talk, wearing white pants that are too short and shoes with no socks. The few women are on deck chairs, faces hallowed by the light of their phones.
“I don’t think it’s fair y’all only get to use the pool during the day, when it’s over 110.”
“Your pity is appreciated.”
“You’re pretty sharp for someone whose about to be a hamburger.”
Mark takes another sip of his Jack and Coke. In the window’s reflection, her hair is a jellyfish.
“They pay extra for you because you’re a white guy?”
“We’ve both sold ourselves.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re not a member. I can smell the park on you.”
“I could go,” she says, but sits still. “I wouldn’t want to take you away from your friends.”
Travis is on stage wearing one of the rubber Trump masks they sell at the gift shop. He’s put on “Hail to the Chief,” and the other meats hold their hands to their hearts as they face him from the dance floor.
“Sorry,” Mark says.
Travis climbs off-stage as the meats shout out song names. He puts on an AI Drake track. On your night, you control the playlist. It’s only fair.
“I didn’t know guests could enter the ballroom while we’re in it. We can’t get back to our rooms without having a staff member open the door,” Mark says.
“It’s my phone. They register your number when you check in. I can go anywhere I want.”
“Must be nice.”
“It’s useful when you want to hide.”
Mark extends his hand. Despite getting manicured as part of his makeover from the club spa, his fingernails are outlined in black, his palms dense with callouses.
“Mark.”
“Lena,” she says, with an exaggerated shake.
#
Mark lies by the pool, staring at the sky above the seawall. He’s finished For Whom the Bell Tolls. Even if he ordered today, any book he buys won’t clear Florida customs in three days, and there’s nowhere in-country he can order it. Florida lost its warehousing when Amazon organized, unions having been outlawed following secession. So, he lies on his deck chair, trying to time his exhale to be twice the length of his inhale.
It’s Sebastian’s day, and the other meats have let up on him. Someone gave him a cardboard crown that says, “Happy Birthday,” now soggy with pool water. He’s on a float, playing a game with the rest of the meats where each tries to tip the other off their raft.
Lena lies down in the deck chair next to his, turns on her side and props her head up on her hand.
“You look lost in thought.”
“Just lost. He’s not upset you keep disappearing?”
“He’s relieved. If I didn’t have to be accompanied by a member, he’d happily go home. Feelings aren’t his thing.”
“What’s his thing?” Mark asked.
“Youth. I grew up in Dixie County. I was sixteen when we met. The schools closed or went private by then, so I waitressed. He was in for an alligator hunt at Lower Sewanee and came to my diner. He left a tip that was more than our rent, wrote his phone number instead of a signature. I called it.”
“He comes to Florida often enough to have a girlfriend here?”
“He’s one of the few members who lives in the secession. You said you worked e-waste?”
“Yeah. In Barefoot Bay.”
“That’s his. He saw the potential for a state exempt from the EPA. The US was paying millions to send e-waste overseas. He insourced it.”
“Your sugar daddy is Sean McCleary?”
Lena nodded.
“Now, I’m the same age his wife was when we met.” Lena looked at a diamond ring on her pinky finger. “I knew the ride would end. It was fun. It was like being a woman in a commercial when we were together. I think he loved me. I know he stopped loving me.”
“There’s people who want him to be the next president of Florida,” Mark says. “If there ever was an election.”
“Sean’s working on it. Can we count on your vote if it comes to pass?”
Gulls were the only wild birds left in Florida. Their knife-edged laughter cuts through the humming of the sumps.
“Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” Lena said.
#
It’s Queenie’s party. Her favorite color’s red, and red balloons cling to each other in small islands, making it look like the Gold and White Ballroom has broken out in a rash. Mark worries she spent her last afternoon alive inflating them.
Queenie’s wailing. The other meats form a circle around her, but Mark can still hear her. An AI Taylor Swift sings from the speakers, empowered and oblivious.
In two days, it’ll be Mark’s party. He looks out the windows to see if any club members in the pool area are watching. He isn’t sure if he’s angered by the possibility they’re watching or the possibility they aren’t.
Lena sits down at his table.
“This is grim.”
“Why do you keep coming around?”
“I’m not going to sleep with you, if that’s what you’re hoping.”
“I think we could both do better,” Mark says.
Queenie continues crying, but softer. One of the meats circling her says something about the gift Queenie is giving her children, and the others repeat it.
“I’ll leave if you tell me to.”
“I would, but I think you’re the only person here lonelier than me.”
Lena isn’t wearing her wig. Her face is without wrinkles, but you can see where they will be, like a path in the grass only a few people have walked on.
“I thought, for rich people, the mistress was the one you couldn’t keep your hands off and the wife was the one you politely ignored.”
“I broke the rules.”
“How so?”
“I’m pregnant. It was a test. I’m not sure which one of us failed. This trip’s his goodbye. After this, we’re going ‘camping’ outside Florida for a couple days to take care of it. Then, no more Florida for me.”
“You won’t come back after?”
“If Florida found out I left the state to terminate a pregnancy, they’d sell me as labor.”
“So, what happens?”
“I start over in Sheboygan, ‘Malibu of the Midwest.’”
“Why there?”
“The name makes me laugh,” Lena says, though her face is expressionless. “He taught me how to dispatch his trucks. I already work remotely.”
“You have people there?”
“Oh yeah, I’m practically the mayor.”
Queenie quiets down and begins dancing, reluctantly, as if she’s a doll and a large invisible child is moving her limbs. Everyone kicks at the balloons as they dance.
“I’m sorry,” Mark says.
“Your pity is appreciated.”
“When do you leave?”
“Two days after your party.”
A silence unbuckles between them.
Mark imagines running away with Lena. He could work warehousing. She’d keep the baby. They’d get an apartment building with wall-to-wall carpeting. He’d save enough to move his mother. The baby could sit on her lap as she watched TV with Mark. It’d be like the premise of a sitcom.
The thought of his mother brought him back. She’d already burned through two of her three years of savings. After that, they’d euthanize her. She’d be incinerated, her ashes dumped in a garden on the side of the facility. If he worked at Amazon a decade, he wouldn’t have enough to move her. He wouldn’t make enough to put it on a credit card either. Even in his fantasies, he was too poor for middle-class debt. Without a visa or medical transport, there was no way she’d leave the facility in anything other than a Ziplock bag. If he was able to kill himself, he’d be killing his mother. If he chose to live, he’d be killing her too. What kind of world gives you these choices.
“If you don’t like the hand you were dealt, kick over the table,” Mark says.
“What?”
“It’s something my mom used to say.”
“That’s nice, I guess.”
“I have a favor to ask.”
#
Despite gray clouds bringing the temperature to below 100, most of the meats chose to stay inside during their two-hour pool share. Undeveloped light makes everything look vintage. Lena sits at the foot of Mark’s lounger, feet close to her butt, arms wrapped around her shins. Mark sits with his knees bent to make room. His party’s tonight.
“So, you’re dead in a bathroom. What happens to me?”
“I don’t know. They’ll have someone look at the security footage when they find me.”
“So I’m fucked.”
“What crime did you commit? You got drunk and went to my room to watch TV. After you passed out, I stole your phone and broke into the lounge. Mar-a-Lago pays a private police fee to avoid having them come. I doubt Florida’s next president is interested in scrutiny either. My guess, your ‘camping’ trip will start a couple days early.” The sump motors continue their ceaseless meditation. Mark looks away from Lena to the seawall. “I can’t promise you’ll keep the job, though.”
“I’ll keep my job because I’m really goddamn good at it. Sean’s an asshole, not an idiot. Besides, he’ll want me to owe him. Why have a liability when you can have an employee?” Lena put two fingers under Mark’s chin and pulled his head back towards her. “Are you sure about this?”
“I’ll take suicide over slaughter.”
“Maybe they’ll revoke his membership.”
“That’s the spirit.”
“Why’d you do it?” Lena asks.
“Come here?”
“Yeah.”
“The same reason you did. I wanted to know what it feels like.”
“What what feels like?” Lena asks.
“To be the kind of person who belongs to a private club. The kind person who can treat the world as one giant Walmart, where even the employees are for sale.”
#
Even though it’s his party, Mark sits at a cocktail table with Lena watching the other meats dance. He let Lena pick the music. She chose Tom Petty. A favorite of the diner’s owner, who played him as Lena swept at the end of her shift.
A waiter walks up to the table with a tray of vodka martinis. Mark never drank one before tonight. They seemed expensive, so he picked them as his drink. None of the other meats like them, and they sprout like elegant mushrooms out of the cocktail tables and stage. Mark reaches out and takes one from the waiter’s tray. He looks at the waiter and says, “Thank you.” The waiter looks him in the eyes when he says, “You’re welcome.” Some emotion waves across the waiter’s face before he stiffens against it. Pity? Mark wonders. Perhaps. Perhaps something deeper. I hope he’s not the one who finds me.
Before he was butchered, Sebastian got Mark a t-shirt saying, “I’m not anti-social, I just don’t like you,” and Mark wears it on his last day alive. Two Trump masks lie deflated on the table. “Even the Losers,” drains out of the speaker, and Mark hands Lena his phone.
“Don’t make me play another song,” she says.
“Everyone likes your picks.”
“I don’t want any more songs I’ll have to remember having listened to tonight.”
The other meats face him, yelling what they want to hear. Some are even jumping up and down like dogs when their owner comes home from work. Mark’s glad to be going. He doesn’t think he can take another party.
“I’m sorry,” Lena says.
“It’s all right. It’s time anyway.”
Mark picks his Trump mask up and pulls it over his face. Lena does the same. He puts on “Hail to the Chief,” and slides off the stool. The meats as they hold their hands to their hearts. Waving, he walks with Lena out of the ballroom, the song becoming muffled as the door closes behind them. He doesn’t realize he’s holding Lena’s hand until they can’t hear the music anymore.
Mark is certain the masks will fool any AI monitoring the security camera. It must be programmed not to signal a meat is missing whenever someone puts on a Trump mask or it’d be going off every night.
Mark and Lena walk down a long hallway and take a right. Mark prays Lena’s phone will open the security door to the meat’s housing area. When they approach, there’s a sharp, metal click as the lock disengages. Of course, Mark thinks. Guests can enjoy all of what Mar-a-Lago has to offer.
They walk to Mark’s room and open the door. “Lights, evening,” Mark says, and both end table lights as well as a standing lamp next to a paisley patterned settee turn on and dim. The room is immaculate. Mark takes care to keep it looking like no one lives there.
“I’m hoping now is when you tell me all of this has been about your very particular Trump fetish,” Lena says.
“It’s going to be OK,” Mark says.
“I wish that’s what your t-shirt said. That’d be a good one to find you in.”
“I’m sorry. I know you picked me because you thought I was the safe one.”
“Well, at least you didn’t hurt me on purpose.”
Mark pulls back the duvet, takes off his shoes and gets in the bed. Lena slides off her flats and gets in as well. Mark stuffs pillows around them.
“You worried I’m going to get handsy?” Lena said.
“When I leave, the AI needs to be able to think I could be the one in bed.”
Mark takes out his phone, shakes it once in the direction of the TV. It turns on, mirroring Mark’s home screen. He opens Netflix.
“What do you want to watch?” he asks.
“Jesus, I’ve got to pick the show too? I don’t know. Find something with anything other than people.”
Mark searches for the “docuseries” they play at his mother’s facility, “Animal Babies,” and puts it on. Lynx kittens fade into hippo calves fade into sloth pups.
“It feels like I’m watching a screensaver,” Lena says.
“You are.”
“You’re not quite as deep as I thought.”
“A friend turned me on it. She’s dead now.”
#
Mark steps into the hallway. He can still hear Lena breathing on the bed. He’s sure she’s awake, that this pretend sleep is a gift. He closes the door behind him slowly anyway. It makes a sweeping sound as it brushes the high pile carpet.
He walks to the end of the hallway with Lena’s phone in his pocket. When he’s three feet from the metal security door, he hears the click. He pushes the door open and walks down a semicircle of four stairs. It ends in an empty foyer with Spanish tile. He’s wearing socks without shoes, and the tile feels cool against the soles of his feet. He opens a glass door onto the semicircular portico behind the outdoor dining area. There is the quiet of shared spaces at night, like the inside of a seashell. Mark stops in the middle of the portico and looks out. From the second story, he can finally see the lake. The Trump mask frames everything in a black oval. The water doesn’t impress him as much as the grass. Before Mar-a-Lago, he’d never seen this much grass outside of an ad. He’d gotten to live here, in this commercial the wealthy made of their own lives. Mark draws a long, slow breath. What it like, to look at the land extending from sea to lake and know it’s yours? What kind of person would that make you?
This silly sacrifice solves nothing. But Robert Jordan’s didn’t solve anything either. The communists didn’t win. Mar-a-Lago’s proof of that. Like all advertisements, Mar-a-Lago exists in a space outside of time and consequence. Mark can’t change that. But he can make that world real, if only for a moment.
Mark continues through a set of double doors until he finds the bathroom Lena told him about. It’s plainer than he’d hoped. Wood-paneled walls absorb the light and return only a low gloss. The toilet’s just a toilet, no gold plating. Mark locks the door. He looks in the mirror for what feels like a long time, trying to remember himself. He pulls two shards of a broken rocks glass from his side pocket and sits on the toilet.
It’s easier than he expected.
His vision smears. When he closes his eyes, he sees a doe. She is walking along a trail to a stream running with blood. She’s been shot through the heart. Blood drips from her at an even pace. She stops to drink. Mark walks next to her, gets on his knees and makes a bowl with his hands.
Matt McBride’s work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Action, Spectacle, Collidescope, Conduit, The Cortland Review, Figure 1, Guernica, Heavy Feather Review, Impossible Task, The Laurel Review, The Rupture, Rust+Moth, and Zone 3, among others. He is the author of one full-length poetry collection, City of Incandescent Light, published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018, and four chapbooks. His most recent, Prerecorded Weather, co-written with Noah Falck, won the 2022 James Tate Prize and is available at SurVision Books.
Image: kansas.com
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Heavy Feather Review 