Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 61 - Desperation

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As soon as Becca had suggested rummaging through homes, breaking down doors to gain access to junky microwaves, Charlie knew her idea was a lost cause to the point of ridiculousness. Her makeshift plan of salvaging enough weakened magnets to cobble together electromagnets of significant force to do something meaningful with them was a pipe dream, busy work, a distraction meant to prevent her from facing the fact that she had no viable solution to the absolute fiasco she’d forced upon the world in one of the most selfish acts ever known to humanity. His first suspicion was that a woman of her intelligence couldn’t possibly believe the very recommendation she was making. Still, she wasn’t operating off of intelligence anymore, no matter how desperately she painted on fake layers of confidence.

She was desperate, is what it was. Charlie knew that much, and he thought himself a fool for taking her in. Gordon he quite liked. After a long military career, Charlie likened himself to a solid character judge. He fancied himself as one who could detect valor and virtue in another man’s eyes, and he could detect a liar as he came walking.

Gordon was solid. This he knew right away, undeniably. He could see it in Gordon’s eyes, the light that shone through them not like some slick-haired and cologne-clouded salesman seeking a quick score from overpriced automobile upgrades but of a man who’d loved deeply, honestly, and entirely. Who’d felt hurt that cut through the facade men wear like chain-mail, protective, and experienced pain at that core that bleeds out and exposes a man for who he is by how that man responds to the pain.

He saw honor in Gordon and was not surprised to learn the man had not only held his wife’s hand as she drew her final breaths but had also done the same for his wife’s mother. Charlie could see in Gordon’s eyes that it pained him to recall those facts even after so many years, but he did so without regret, without desperation. He did so with nothing but love that shone out of Gordon as clearly as first light over the ocean, gleaming and calm and real.

Charlie once thought of himself as someone who could love with complete abandon. But all that had changed.

With Becca, he saw something else entirely, something utterly different than Gordon’s honor.

She was a pretty woman, yes. Beautiful. But desperation shadows the eyes because it paints everything in faded, darkened colors, starting at one’s very center, the same as love, but worse and deadly. When you want something badly enough, Charlie knew all too well, especially when you wanted something not to be the way it had become, when you want something for your betterment rather than someone else’s, when days became not something to look forward to but merely something to endure, it begins to thicken your soul from the inside out, starting at the core, and then seeping outward, tainting everything.

And now here was this pretty woman, Becca, standing with her sundress on the pier as they came into the harbor just last week, just after Charlie met Gordon and thought, well, here is a man I would call a friend. But he didn’t feel the same when he met Becca. And the first time she removed her sunglasses from her eyes, Charlie saw right into her that something sad, deep, and dark was at play. He wondered what she must have looked like in her older body, before all this time travel nonsense, if her eyes could make her so downtrodden now in such a beautiful younger face.

He’d seen it before, this desperation that tore away at one’s veneer like wallpaper being stripped from an old kitchen, revealing grease stains, blotches, and strands of wallpaper paste that had hardened so completely to stone that you’d have to cut around it, tear into the drywall, and toss it away like a tumor, then fill it and patch it before sanding it smooth and pretending nothing wrong had ever happened there.

Perhaps if he were honest, he’d admit he’d seen a look like Becca’s, that solid desperation hidden beneath a mask of selfishness, on Josephine’s face during the last months they were together years ago before she finally abandoned him for good. Like Becca, Josephine was a pretty woman who was highly attractive, but something deep inside her refused to let her see it herself. Instead, her confidence was nothing but a charade and a thin one at that, and it manifested itself in occasional bouts of desperate attempts of overcompensating, of acting hardened and unbreakable, of espousing statements as if they were fact when they were nothing but hopeful guesses.

“If we sold my car, we could buy a condo and rent it out,” Josephine once suggested. They were overdrawn again, Charlie’s meager Naval paycheck barely enough to sustain their off-base apartment, let alone Josephine’s secret purchases that she tried to keep hidden from Charlie: her fashion magazines that led to expensive lotions and things for the kitchen that were used once and then pushed back, hidden, relegated to the recesses of a bottom cabinet behind the never-used slow cooker.

“And with any profits,” she’d insist, “we could buy another condo and another, and we’d rent them out, and I bet you could retire five years.”

“You honestly think we could buy a condo for the three hundred dollars that car is worth?” Charlie had asked her.

“It could be a down payment, then,” she’d said, trying to convince herself of her plan, desperate.

So maybe he took Becca in not because it was a kindness but because Charlie saw something in her that reminded him of Josephine. And while he was being honest about things, maybe it was also because a small part of himself, the minuscule area where pride had not taken up complete residence, allowed him to see his own desperation reflected in Becca’s eyes, for he was no better than either of those women and certainly not as good-hearted as Gordon.

He fought, though, with the desire to do something meaningful. Even when he gambled with his life, running his boat far out in the coastline, evading patrol boats to rendezvous with Cuban drug caravans, he yearned to fancy himself as something different, something better than what he was — someone worth something, but not in some superficial way. Not in the way Josephine had considered worth. But in a way that would make an impact, rather than living from job to job, charter to charter.

So Charlie found himself in the very place he knew he should have directed Becca when she began her quest for scavenged microwave parts.

He hadn’t seen a single person throughout Key West in the twenty-four hours since Gordon and Becca slipped out of town. He watched through the kitchen window as they went and never said goodbye. Instead, he sought distraction by heading out in his boat toward the horizon, scoping the water for the floating black holes and finding several clusters, at one time upwards of twenty - the most he’d seen all at once - but as the day drew on, they eventually fizzled out and dissipated completely.

Curious the following day, he continued his search for more of them. The thought of the magnets Becca searched for repeatedly reemerged in his mind, but the black holes seemed to have disappeared entirely, and the morning passed without Charlie spotting a single one, which hadn’t happened since this whole thing began. Were things stabilizing? Was the world perhaps settling into its new reality and accepting it? Accepting all this change and loss and second chances?

He knew they were heading for Chicago—Becca and Gordon. He wasn’t surprised by the woman’s leaving but was saddened by Gordon’s decision to follow her. He wanted to help. He wanted to do something honorable and right. That’s what men like Gordon do.

By noon that next day, Charlie found himself at the shipyard on the island’s northern part, abandoned like the rest of the city. He hadn’t seen a cruise ship or charter boat down near the aquarium in all the time since the town had gone vacant, and further north up the island, he docked his boat without conflict or question in the inlet at the now relinquished Coast Guard station.

It was eerie, the way his steps seemed to make no sound on the concrete pier as he passed the Coast Guard ships in dock, the entire area all to himself, a ghost town with more seagull inhabitants than people. He couldn’t understand how anyone could have abandoned their posts, how any petty officer could leave his post in good conscience. However, he suspected anyone in charge now most likely had long been retired or dead before any of this black hole business started. But still, Charlie’s dedication and connection to the Navy made it challenging to understand how anyone could ever turn their back on that commitment.

Making his way down the empty walkway, past the forklifts left out in the sun and salt-tinged air to rust and whither, he stopped beneath the massive crane suspended outstretched just above the water. At its end, hung by three-inch thick chains, was a massive scrap metal lifting magnet, still engaged with a massive metal beam stuck to its surface as it hovered over Charlie’s head.

“Now,” Charlie whispered to himself, “I just have to figure out how to get that thing down.”

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