BY PAT FORAN
A language precision coach on the USS Desire, Effie can’t find the words, the best words, the right ones, to express what she’s been feeling. To explain it. To herself. Even in a roundabout way.
The ocean’s roar isn’t helping. The hum of the Desire’s engine room doesn’t help, either. She doesn’t feel grounded, she can’t hear herself think, she isn’t sure what she’s feeling. If she’s feeling.
According to Terror Management Theory, there’s an inherent conflict between our self-preservation instinct and the realization that we’re all going to die, she reads in a Facebook “Death and Certainty and the Non-Denial Denial of Same” discussion group post.
But it’s more simple than that, Effie says aloud to herself, or maybe to the engine room hum (it’s hard, so very hard, to hear inside that brain of hers). I want, she says, to NOT want.
The engine room hums and hums and hums in reply.
Effie’s not-want list is not long. Or not too long, she believes.
Effie wants to not laugh, just once, at a t-shirt offered for sale by The Funny T-Shirt Company.
To not want to touch the hem of a former lover’s garment — only the epaulet, a light tap on the shoulder in a show of false pride.
To not want to see the little heart her former lover draws at the end of the fabulous postcards they used to send.
Is this what I mean? she says to the hum. Am I expressing it right? Am I being precise?
The engine room hums. The ocean whistles like a whale. The bob and weave and sink and swell of the USS Desire gently rocks Effie to sleep.
The next morning, Effie tells Ensign Helvetica about the not-wanting thing.
I get that, says Ensign Helvetica, the ship’s primal scream therapist. I want to not think about how, in orphanages, babies sometimes aren’t held enough. How being held also can be traumatic. I also want to not think about the idea of “me.”
I’m sorry? Effie says to Helvetica. Could you be more precise?
No, Helvetica says. According to Articulation Management Theory, there are times when the best way, perhaps the only way, to articulate what you are thinking or not thinking, feeling or not feeling, is to say whatever comes. Sing whatever song. Paint whatever picture. Scream first, ask the boring, self-referential questions later.
But words matter, Effie says. I mean, FIRST words matter. I mean, the clarity of a call, the exacting of an instant, the burst of a heart and precisely how it hurts when it is or isn’t beating. I mean — the guarantee of the sun! The solution of us! The certainty of me!
Helvetica hisses before unleashing a sonic boom of a depth charge of a shout that sends the USS Desire crew reeling. The sonar technician team hurries toward the hum of the engine room.
That night, on the Desire’s promenade deck, Effie studies the shooting-star light of the moon, how it reaches with arms that could hold you, hold you without thinking. Imagine that, Effie says to the ship’s wake.
The engine room hums and hums, and hums and hums. The ocean roars, a lionized goddess of hurt and love. The USS Desire screams, silently, into a pillow of moonlight.
According to the Identity Theory Flashcards I bought in the ship’s gift shop, a Facebook discussion group is a beginning, Effie says to the shooting-star moonlight, or maybe to herself (it is so hard to hear).
In this liminal space of identity, you can post about seeing the forest and the trees, Effie says. You can wear or not wear funny and not-funny t-shirts that say things like Kiss The Cook and Kiss Me I’m Irish and What Exactly is a Kiss Again? (no don’t tell me I don’t want to hear what you or anybody says about what a kiss is or isn’t).
Precisely, the moonlight says, gently reaching out to brush Effie’s cheek before thinking better of it. The sea spray shrouds the ghosts of certainty and shallows of a wish.
Gotta leave ‘em wanting more, huh, Effie says.
Pat Foran doesn’t know much about the sea, or about smoke, but he is kind of obsessed with Arctic sea smoke. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Okay Donkey and elsewhere. Find him at http://neutralspaces.co/your_patforan/ and on Twitter at @pdforan.