Abandon Ship

By Tom Ianelli

Annie saw an attractive man on the other side of the gym. He looked just like her husband Sam but not exactly, and it was the similarity that made him so hot. Annie was in her 50s and hadn’t thought about guys being hot in decades. But this guy had a really cute butt. She wondered if people still said that. Cute butt. He made her feel 40 again.
The man finished a squat set, saw her looking, and smiled back. She raised her eyebrows suggestively. It was like she was meeting Sam for the first time again, and she could do whatever she wanted to him. She felt like she owned this man, and when he walked past her, she gave his tush a squeeze. He smiled and pulled her into the family bathroom, and when they came out 20 minutes later, there was an impatient cleaning woman waiting.
“Everyone could hear you,” she said, and they blushed.
“When can I see you again?” the new Sam asked, in front of the gym.
Annie smiled. “I have a husband,” she said.
“So?” he responded.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
When Annie got back to her houseboat, something felt different. She put her keys on the counter, and they slid three inches to the left. She saw her husband holding a toolbox in the kitchen. The secret knowledge of what she had just done turned her on. She went and wrapped her arms around her husband and brought her hands up in between his thighs.
He jumped in surprise. “What the fuck,” he said, turning around.
She went to kiss him, but as she did, she saw that this wasn’t her Sam but another man who looked just like him.
“Get the hell off me,” he said.
“Oh god I’m so sorry.”
“This isn’t a porno,” he said.
“I thought you were my husband,” Annie said.
“Yeah, well, I’m fucking not and I’m reporting this,” he responded. He stomped out of the house and slammed the door. The ensuing silence was broken by the sound of a paperweight rolling off the desk.
“What the fuck?” Annie said. She had just felt so good, and now she felt taunted, as if her whole world were tilting on an axis. Wait, that’s it, she thought. The house was tilting. She recalled Sam mentioning a buoyancy issue, and maybe that’s what the other Sam, the one she
just groped, was looking at.
Her stepson Jonah rushed into the house and Annie was relieved it wasn’t another man that looked like Sam. He was wearing an old Supersonics jersey and looked high. Jonah was a total idiot. Annie thought so.
Thirty years earlier when she and Sam got together, Jonah was 8, and he was a cute kid, but he grew up to be a burnout loser.
“Annie, I’m so glad you’re here,” he said. “You’ve been to the beach, right?”
“You look like shit, Jonah,” Annie said.
“Thanks,” he responded. “Wait what did you say?”
“I said you look like shit.”
“What? That’s so mean. Why would you say that?”
“Because it’s true.”
“That’s beside the point. The point is… the reason I came here is: Annie, do you realize that you can live at the beach?”
“Sure,” Annie responded.
“No, you don’t get it, Annie,” he said. “You can live at the beach. You can live there. Do you get what I’m saying? Do you understand what that means? It means you don’t have to be so stressed, Annie. You don’t have to be so naggy and uptight all the time. You can just move to the beach. There’s nothing stopping you. You can do that if you want to. Do you understand that, Annie?”
“Yeah, I get it, Jonah.”
“No, you don’t get it. You don’t get that you can just take your car and move to the beach. The beach, Annie. The beach! And you don’t even need a car either! You can walk. Or you can crawl or get someone to carry you there, and if then if they get tired, you can have them hand you off to someone else, and so on and so forth, until you get to the beach and then you can live there. Isn’t that incredible?”
“Jonah, you look sick,” Annie said.
“I’ve never been healthier,” he said. “Listen, I’m trying to help you, okay? Did you know there are cave paintings from 32 thousand years ago? Do you realize how small we are? How little we matter? Don’t you see how liberating that is for us?” Jonah looked around. “Is it me, or are things tilting in here?”
“We need to get you some help,” Annie said.
“I feel great, Annie. I feel like a cat in the sun. I feel like a cheeseburger and french fries. And besides, I’m talking about something bigger than health, Annie. I’m talking about something grand. I’m talking about the eternal ocean of our communal spirit. I’m talking about breaking through the shell of the cosmogonical egg. I’ve cracked it, Annie. And the crack is growing. Can’t you see that? It’s beautiful.” He put his hands up and cupped her face.
“Get the fuck off me.”
“Okay, sorry. Sorry about that. But, Annie, will you do one thing for me?” he asked.
“Sure, Jonah.”
“Do one thing for me. Will you promise?”
“I already said I would.”
“No, but do you promise?”
“Yes. Again, yes.”
“Okay. Good. Just promise me you’ll do that,” Jonah said.
“Do what?”
“Remember what I said,” he said, backing out of the house.
“You didn’t tell me anything.”
He turned and ran out of the house. “You promised, Annie,” he called over his shoulder. “Don’t forget you promised.”
A book fell off the shelf, and then another. The houseboat was really tilting now. Some of the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen clattered open, and plates crashed to the floor. Annie heard stomps on the roof of the home, and then she saw a figure through the window: it was Jonah, jumping off the roof into the water. When he came up, he was floating face down in the lake. He wasn’t moving.
When Sam got home from work an hour later, the house was taking on water. He had had it for 29 years without a problem, and now all the books had fallen off the shelves. All the plates and bowls were broken on the floor. It was chaos.
He walked to the dock on the back of the house, and in the lake there were police boats in the water. They were anchored with caution tape between them, and on the deck of the boats were four detectives in trench coats talking into tape recorders.
“Hey, what the hell?” Sam yelled.
One of them looked up. “Take a step back, sir,” he said, holding his arm out.
Sam stepped back. “What the hell?” he yelled again.
“Step back, sir,” the man said again. “There’s been a murder.”
“A murder?”
“Well, a man is dead,” the detective said. “But we haven’t ruled out murder. Actually, it looks like it was most likely an unsuccessful suicide.”
“Unsuccessful? So he’s not dead?”
“Well not yet. Well maybe now he’s dead but we don’t know yet. Or I don’t know, maybe one of us does,” he said, looking at the other detectives.
“Who was it?”
“Jonah Baldwin.”
“Jonah? That’s my kid,” Sam said, stepping forward.
“Step back, sir,” the detective said. “And he’s a little old to be anyone’s kid.”
“He’s my son. I’m 69, and he’s 38.”
The detective laughed when Sam said 69 but then realized it was inappropriate and composed himself. “Hey, get the fuck out of here,” he said, not to Sam, but to a floating hot tub that was full of drunk Amazon employees that had drifted under the yellow tape. “This is a fucking crime scene,” he said.
“Yeah, it is!” they responded, chugging white claws.
Sam went back into the house. It was completely tilted now, almost 45 degrees. Where the hell was Annie? He noticed a sticky note from Annie on the kitchen table. It read: “I quit. Abandon ship. Good luck.”
The house groaned suddenly, tilting severely now, and Sam bolted outside just before it flipped completely.

Three years later, Annie was on the top of the Empire State Building with the new Sam.
The one from the gym.
“Hold me,” she said, smiling. He wrapped his arms around her from behind, and Annie reached back and felt for his cute butt. There it was. She squeezed it with both hands, not caring who saw.
Her husband—the old Sam—was on the observation deck too. He was watching them from around a corner. He clenched his butt. For months, he had been doing deadlifts, glute bridges, leg curls. He would build the cheeks that would win her back. No matter what, he had to win her back. He saw them kiss and slapped the wall in anger.
Another man tapped Sam on the shoulder. “Hey, are you Tom Hanks?” he asked.
“Fuck off,” Sam said, and two tears dripped down the two cheeks he wasn’t clenching.
Three thousand miles west, on the Pacific side of Baja, where the road turns to dust and then disappears, a man in his early forties, wearing an old Supersonics jersey, sat above the tide line on an endless plane of sand.
A brown cat with a white belly was settled to his, loafed in the sun, squinting contentedly. To his right, on a plastic cooler, was a paper plate, on top of which a cheeseburger and a pile of fries were immaculately arranged, like a still life.
The tide moved in and out, and if you looked closely, the man’s breath matched the
cadence of the waves.
Before him, the edge of the ocean curved like the inside of something enormous—an egg, perhaps. The man smiled. A gull landed next to him. It didn’t touch the fries.

Tom Ianelli is a fiction writer and street bookseller in Brooklyn. He has written for Quartersnacks, Hobart, the Panacea Review and Animal Blood magazine. He asks the questions for the Lit Chat instagram series at @peterbooksnyc.