Cape Cod Noir by David L. Ulin

Author:David L. Ulin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Noir Fiction, Anthologies (Multiple Authors)
Publisher: Akashic Noir
Published: 2011-05-25T07:00:00+00:00

LA JETÉE

BY DAVID L. ULIN

Harwichport

He had been here before. Countless times before, not the physical space but the emotional space, the roiling space inside. That summer on the Cape, summer he’d turned thirteen, he’d had this … vision was the only word for it, as if it were a movie in his head. Ever since, it had dogged him, like a distant memory: black-and-white, herkyjerky, somewhere between a film and a collage of stills. Always, he was at the center, moving heedlessly along the jetty, around its great stone curve. He was running from something but he didn’t know what, only that it kept coming, relentless, unforgiving, like a simple twist of fate. The jetty made no sense, it was a dead end, a blind alley, but it was where the vision took him, while the big waves crashed against the rocks. He had been drawn here in reality also, drawn to the vastness, to the brackish sweep of steam-drilled boulders, to the tension between industry and nature, the breakwater holding the waves from the harbor and the waves pushing to take it back. They were inevitable, the waves, as inevitable as the vision, in which it was always high tide, and as he tore out past the breakers, the rough water pulled at his feet, until, just beyond the halfway point along the jetty, a big wave crashed across the rocks and swept him out to sea.

Out to sea … and didn’t that describe him, didn’t that get right to where he was? Thirty-eight years old, adrift in a life that didn’t fit him any longer, if indeed it ever had. He’d felt it for a long time, the looping tendrils of dissatisfaction, the sharp pangs of regret. Regret for what? He didn’t know but recognized the longing, the way that, even in the calmest moments, there was an undertone of discontent.

Now, however, he was really in it; now, it was more than dismay. Over the past few months, his life had narrowed to a pinprick, as if he were being pushed through a series of checkpoints, each one stripping away another piece of who he was. If he’d been a philosopher, he might have seen this as some kind of purification ritual, but he wasn’t a philosopher. He was a man.

Or not even a man, not really; not a very good man, anyway. As a kid, he’d sworn that when he grew up, he would pay attention, and here he was living in the fallout of his in attention, a junk bond trader in a collapsing market, laid off and understanding in a whole new way what was meant by out of luck. The day they’d canned him, he had seen the old man in the corridor, but that fucker hadn’t said a word. Instead, he’d disappeared behind the mahogany door of his office—to make lunch plans, to cash out an option, to do God knows what while the HR robots did the dirty work. All morning, people

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