TSN: Calm Under The Waves (2/2)
Continued from here.
Calm Under The Waves (2/2)
II
*
When Mark walks into the office, he notices people staring at him when they think he isn't looking and then staring at the ground, or their screen, or into their coffee cups when he does look up. No one tells him why they are staring.
He sees the Google alert as soon as he's on his laptop.
He thinks, for some inexplicable reason, that he should have been at a computer when the alert went out.
Mark goes over to Chris'. All three of them have their own offices on the main floor now, because of their positions and something about representation, and so people don't always walk up to them and bother them with trivialities. And he has learned that some things should not go down in public.
*
Dustin cries a lot. Loud sobs, choked, hitching gulps, tears and snot. It's disgusting, but it feels appropriate. He also talks a lot, or tries to at least. For days whenever Dustin opens his mouth, he doesn't get out more than two syllables before he chokes up again.
Mark can't understand anything he says. He thinks he can make out 'fault' sometimes though, usually right before Dustin breaks off completely and hugs Chris, Mark, or himself.
*
Chris doesn't cry much. His eyes are red and the skin around them puffy and swollen, but he walks around and talks about media fallout and public opinion and how to best express sincere but distant sympathy.
His hands shake though, and where Dustin invades Mark's personal space for hugs that leave slobber on Mark's shirt, Chris keeps to himself and closes off, taking a step back instead of forward when someone walks up to him, and in Dustin's arms he uncharacteristically stands as stiff and uncomfortable as Mark. Chris looks guilty.
*
His father pushes for a quick closing of the investigation and has him declared eight days after they find his clothes. Seven and a half days after it hit the news. The investigation closes, its conclusion is that it was an accident. The unofficial ruling, whispered behind raised hands and printed in black ink and pixels, is suicide. People assume the parents want to deny the pain and shame of knowing their son took his own life. Mark thinks his father was always ashamed of him, why stop now.
*
Mark doesn't go to the funeral. Neither does Dustin. They are not asked to come. You don't go to the funeral of your… whatever he had been, towards the end. A shareholder. You probably could go to the funeral of a shareholder. Or that of someone you used to know in college. But you don't go to the funeral of someone who sued you.
You don't go to the funeral of your ex-best friend and ex-partner. Not when the emphasis on the ex is as strong as it is with them.
Was.
Besides, it's not a real funeral. There is no body. The gesture is as empty as the casket lowered into the ground.
To be fair, though, no one is asked. A small ceremony, only the closest family, away from the public eye. Mark takes this as confirmation of his theory about shame. And that they don't believe it was an accident themselves, because what reason could they have to feel ashamed then. He doesn't think they have enough sense or reflection to realize what they should be ashamed for.
*
Chris meets the father when he is in Palo Alto for business, to pay his condolences or… Mark doesn't know, he has never met the father, but from what he knows of him, he doesn't strike him as a man who has any use for sympathy. Business, as it turns out, being legal paperwork regarding the inheritance - the law firm that handled the suit and has the details of the settlement is here. As is Facebook, but they are six percent silent shares, so there is no need to discuss anything.
When Chris comes back, it is with an envelope with a couple of photos.
"They were going to throw them out," he tells Mark and Dustin. "He said they have no use for them, but I'm in some, and Wardo wrote my name on the back, so. He said if I didn't want them I should throw them away."
Mark kind of wishes Chris didn't offer his condolences.
Neither of them point out that Dustin's and Mark's names are on some of the pictures too.
When Chris packs them back into the envelope and puts that in the top drawer of his desk neither do they mention that it's just print-outs and they've got the digital copies on their computers, or burned on a cd somewhere.
Chris tells them he asked about the funeral.
"A useless farce, he said. A waste of money, to bury an empty casket, but appearance has to be kept, someone in my line of work understands," Chris bites off the end of the sentence, voice tight and high, and swallows before he continues. "He does not care about the body. His son is dead, one way or the other."
The corners of his mouth pull down then unhappily, and Chris either doesn't want to or can't say anything else.
Mark remembers thinking almost the same thing but it sounds so much more crass like this, and for a moment something bubbles up in him, hot and burning and angry, but he can't tell at whom it's aimed, at Wardo's father, at Wardo, or at himself, and it confuses him, He swallows it down, waits until Chris and Dustin have left - Dustin's hand on Chris' arm, supporting or clinging if there was even still a difference - and wires back in.
*
He doesn't feel particularly guilty or ashamed, even though he knows that what happened between them probably played part in his decision. Mark didn't make him do it. He catches himself avoiding his name though, and resolves to stop doing so. He has no reason to feel guilty.
*
He doesn't understand.
They settled.
He knows Wardo was sad. Anyone could see that, everyone, Wardo always did carry his heart on his sleeve, and even if it hadn't been so painfully obvious even Mark's lawyers cringed at it Mark knew all of Wardo's more subtle tells. But it was over, wasn't it, this thing between them, up to and including its finale of alternately tiptoeing around hurt prides and kicking right where they knew it hurt the most, it was over, and he could have.
He could have done anything. Could have had anyone. Could have gone and lived a life of money and success and respect and with cool, attractive friends who had been in a finals club and graduated summa cum laude and were handsome and sociable and knew how to dress and behave and lived as the beautiful people, and he would have been free of everything, of Mark, of Facebook, of his father, of everything he hadn't wanted or needed. He had the brains, the looks, and the money to spit in their faces and start over, do his own thing, live the life he really wanted, for himself.
He was supposed to.
Mark honestly thought he would.
He doesn't understand why he didn't.
He just doesn't understand why.
*
Mark doesn't spend much more time coding than usual.
He's always liked being wired in. Code makes sense. It's not simple per se, but logical. It's reason and possibility and power, to him, the whole world at his fingertips in the form of keys and a blinking cursor. It does what he wants it to, and when he doesn't, he can fix it. Seeing the world through code, breaking it down into base elements, lets him put it into an order he can work with.
But no matter how he looks at this, the end result doesn't change.
Wardo threw away his life. He made a conscious decision to opt out and let the resources at his disposal go to waste, and he did so at a time when he should have gloated at having won, or at least smirked smugly, bitterly, hard-eyed.
Wardo did win. He must have.
Because at no point, from I'm coming back for everything to the moment he was forced to put his signature under the settlement agreement, did Mark feel like he won.
So what was the point of it all? Why drag them both through that farce, rehash all their mistakes (and Mark is willing to admit that he made mistakes too, even though he was right in the end), waste both of their time and money, and then, after everything, just kill himself?
There, he has thought it.
Wardo killed himself, the idiot, the asshole, the stupid fucker, and now Mark, who was just getting comfortable not having to think about him anymore after their ridiculous law suit, is stuck wondering why whenever he's not wired in, and every time he stops working the question is there, waiting for him, working away at the back of his mind whatever he does, a one-word tinnitus, a constant humming background noise throughout dinners and meetings and halo nights, demanding and nagging and frustrating.
Why why why.
*
The press moves on after a few weeks, finding more suitable prey (it's disrespectful to talk bad about a dead person, and retelling Wardo's life as if it were a Greek tragedy isn't as entertaining as god, old juicy gossip), and the dust begins to settle.
*
They pull together, the three of them. Or Chris and Dustin do, and pull Mark with them. They don't talk about Wardo, so Mark doesn't see the point - they don't provide him with new information, so he won't get his answers from them. He assumes they take comfort in the company though, and so he lets them.
*
Dustin is able to look at Mark again, his eyes are no longer red-rimmed and tearing like they were the weekend before they figured out that he was allergic to Chris' new cologne, and he breathes and talks normally.
He slips up one day, at lunch. It's still closer to spring than summer but already hot and sunny, and Chris and Dustin have dragged Mark first out of his office and then onto the roof with a selection of sandwiches and salads and drinks from the cafeteria, because Chris says they need some sunshine before their skin turns completely translucent, and when Mark tries to get back to work using the (valid) excuse that he'll get a sunburn Dustin just cracks. He crumbles in on himself, all hiccupping sobs, and pushes out aborted half-sentences, about Harvard, and having friends, and moving to California and getting too caught up in it all. About how he should have said something, how he knew and didn't say anything, to warn him or to at least clue him in before the party. About being a coward and a bad friend and about how he loved Wardo, he loved him, how Wardo was one of the best people he knew, and Dustin didn't do anything, he just let it happen.
Chris drops to his knees beside him, wraps his arms around him, and tells him it's not his fault, he couldn't have known how bad things were, how Wardo was.
Mark says that it was Wardo's decision, so if Dustin wants to blame anyone that's who.
They look at him then, with something that could be shock or sadness or pity, and this time when he tries to leave no one stops him.
*
That night, Chris asks them to come over for drinks. It's tense and awkward, Mark sipping on his beer, Dustin turning his bottle untouched in his hands, and Chris, uncharacteristically, chugging his down when he was already uncoordinated and distracted when they arrived.
Then he tell them about Harvard, about Wardo growing silent and absent and looking right through people as if they weren't even there (or as if he wasn't there), and about one night when Chris had thought he'd have to jump into the Charles and pull Wardo out. He tells them that he thought Wardo would be fine, in the end. That he was wrong.
He tells them that he knew. That he should have known.
It's a confession.
Dustin grants absolution easily, with a tentative touch on Chris' shoulder and, when Chris melts into his arms, fingers carding through Chris' hair and his mouth next to his ear, whispering comfort.
Mark says nothing, even when Dustin looks at him, expectation and that maybe sadness, maybe pity thing again.
He wonders if that means now it's his turn to fall apart and feel guilty.
*
He just wants to know why.
*
It's not a gut decision. Mark checks flights and hotels, hacks the FLPD and prints himself a list of names and a map, packs a change of clothes and fully charges the battery of his laptop before he also packs the power cable. That he doesn't tell anyone before he is in the plane is deliberate. He sends emails to Chris, Dustin, and his assistant before take-off, and by the time he lands it's too late to do anything, so he doesn't bother even checking his mailbox.
He finds the hotel. He booked a room there - out of convenience, not any morbid desire to feel close to Wardo. It's not as if Wardo even slept there anyway, the police report says he never even used his key card. The bar is half-empty when he comes down from having dropped off his overnight bag and looks through the door. The woman he's looking for is not there, but there's a wifi sign, so he sits down at a table, orders a Red Bull, and powers up his laptop. His assistant is livid and demanding to know when he'll be back (she's getting paid to put up with him so he doesn't feel bad about ignoring her), Dustin just promises to hold the fort down in his absence which doesn't need a reply, and Chris asks if he wants them to come with him, or maybe just Dustin, he'd understand, and him Mark writes back, even if it's just to say he's good, because Chris sounds as if he's still beating himself up.
When a woman comes in and replaces the bartender he knows it's her right away, but he still pulls up the picture of her driver's license to be sure, and then moves to the bar. She seems nice enough, though that could just be part of the job, and he watches her make small talk with customers and mix drinks while reading through her interview on his laptop again. He wants to turn the screen, point at the part where she said Wardo seemed happy, and call her out on in. Wardo looked miserable for two whole years, he couldn't possibly have seemed happy the night he killed himself. And 'going home', what did he mean by that? Wardo never expressed having any particularly warm feelings for Florida, why would he come here, why not Boston or New York or Palo Alto, why not just a handful of pills and a bottle of booze?
He doesn't think she has any answers other than the ones he has already given though. Why would this woman, to whom Wardo was nothing but a stranger who left behind a big tip before the police and press came to ask her questions, have the answers Wardo's friends do not. And Mark was Wardo's best friend, if anyone knows it should be him. (There wasn't another best friend after him, or any friends, according to what Chris has told.)
He leaves without having spoke to her and goes down to the beach.
*
The beach isn't empty that far South, but it's far enough from the main bustle of beach goers and tourists that there are fewer people around here, mostly families and older people. The next lifeguard tower is also a distance away, but Mark knows it wouldn't have made a difference. Mark has the crime scene photos downloaded, yellow tape around a patch of sand and a pile of clothes that didn't seem any more or less familiar than any other suit, but there's nothing there to mark the place anymore, and he ends up using his mobile's GPS to find the spot.
Once there he doesn't know what to do. There's nothing to see, no way to tell this square meter of beach apart from the rest, and he looks around, lost. His plan ends here.
He ends up flopping down and squatting in the sand cross-legged. The sand is hot against the skin of his thighs and it immediately starts to get under his clothes the way it's already grating between his toes, but he still wriggles until the ground stops being bumpy and starts to feel more like a huge, warm beanbag.
The sea is… sea. It smells salty, and he has to squint at because it's as if the sun is coming from two directions. There is absolutely nothing there.
*
There has to be something.
*
Mark wastes the whole afternoon on that beach, and by the time he stands up dizzily his mouth is dry, his eyes burn, and his skin feels hot and tight.
He doesn't walk all the way back to the hotel but instead gets off the beach and takes a cap. In his room he drinks a whole bottle of water and then takes a cold shower. Moving to peel his clothes off hurts, and the water jet hits the back of his neck like nails.
He spreads a towel on the bed and falls asleep on that, still wet.
*
He's sick during the night, and spends the next day in bed mostly sleeping. His head is killing him and his face burns.
*
There was nothing there.
*
Turns out he can order après-sun lotion via room service, too. He doesn't leave the room for another two days and keeps the blinds of his sea view suite closed. He codes instead. There's always so much to do for Facebook.
*
Chris calls on day five and tentatively asks if he'll be staying much longer. Mark shrugs, too late remembering that Chris can't see him, and tells him that he isn't done yet. Then he asks about Facebook, and Chris hands the phone over to Dustin who must have been waiting next to him.
It's only after he hangs up that he realizes he meant it.
The next day he starts to work in the morning, goes down to the restaurant sometime around noon, and is back on the beach in the late afternoon. He knows where to go this time and leaves his laptop at the hotel.
*
There's still nothing there.
There has to be something.
*
He gets another sunburn, but not as bad. Or maybe it's just the old one. Either way, the skin on his nose is peeling off in white flakes. It's disgusting.
He still goes out again the next afternoon.
*
A little boy asks him what he's looking at, if he's looking for sea monsters. Mark tells him he's looking at nothing. The boy wrinkles his nose and then runs away.
He is looking at nothing.
*
The first time he stays out the whole night he's surprised how cold it gets, and by the time the sun comes up again he is hugging his knees and has his feet curled around each other for warmth.
*
He watches the tide come and go. At least that's something.
*
Chris and Dustin keep calling. At some point his mother starts to call, too. He sends code back and forth with Dustin and he knows everything that's going on at the office, so he doesn't see what the big deal is.
*
The water, once he does walk to the edge, is cooler than he expected, contrasting with the heat of the sun-burning sand. The salt burns where he has a cut on the sole of his foot from a broken shell.
Why would anyone do this?
*
For months people keep badgering him to take a vacation, and now that he does they are still complaining.
*
He starts to move back and forth with the tide, that way he's not sitting still all night.
*
The first time he doesn't send Dustin a batch of code in the afternoon and sleeps through his phone they call the hotel and have someone knock on his door. He doesn't get why they are making such a fuss, Mark has never been good at the whole regular sleep thing. They lived with him, they know that.
*
Mark does not tan. But he can keep the sunburn to a minimum.
*
During dawn the water is positively chilling. He knows it's not really colder than during the day, that the difference is only in the air and lack of sun, but it feels that way.
*
The report said between three and seven a.m..
*
There's still nothing.
*
He digs his toes into the sand as the waves lick over his feet, his calves, and slowly bury him, back and forth.
*
It's boring. Hypnotizing at best. Mostly boring.
*
He codes on what Dustin tells him needs to get done and sends it back. Dustin can put it where it has to go.
*
Up to his knees.
*
Maybe he just isn't looking hard enough.
*
Soaking up his shorts and boxers.
*
All those people who wax poetic about the vast endlessness of the ocean have got it all wrong. The sea doesn't have all the answers. It doesn't even have that one answer Mark is looking for. If it does, it's not telling him.
*
Mark doesn't even have to move. He can just stay still and let the tide come to him.
*
He still doesn't get the appeal. It's water. Cold water. With stuff in it, bits of plant and fish and probably garbage and toxic waste. He could get cancer from this.
*
The water burns on his feet.
*
There has to be a reason.
*
Maybe if he goes in deeper he'll understand.
*
It burns on his legs.
*
Waves splash against his body.
*
The surf is a bitch to get through and he has to blink water out of his eyes. Back will be easier, he can let the waves carry him through.
*
Burning on his arms.
*
The water is cold and dark.
*
Just a bit farther.
*
Burning heavy in his legs, in his arms.
*
Burning in his lungs.
*
Cold and dark and burning.
*
Water splutters out of Mark's nose and his mouth, he coughs and swallows and coughs.
Oh God. What is he doing here, what was he thinking, Mark, Mark, Mark!
He coughs and blinks and sinks under water again when he realizes that someone is trying to talk to him. He flails, water and panic burning in his lungs, and remembers reading something about drowning people pulling wannabe-rescuers down with them, but when his hand connects with something he clings, instinctively, pushes himself above water against the purchase, and coughs and retches.
Something wraps around his body, pushing him further up, keeping his head above water, then his other hand finds hold on a shoulder and his fingers dig in, hard, and he coughs and gasps for breath and tries to blink eyes that are stuck closed with water-clumped eyelashes and breathes.
And breathes.
"Hey, Mark. Hey. Look at me, can you, breathe, Mark. That's good, breathe. You are okay, just breathe."
Mark snaps open his eyes trying to see through the streaks.
"Wardo."
*
III
*
Mark coughs and clings and looks.
Wardo.
Wardo, who is supposed to be dead, who is dead, Mark has read it, read the headlines, read the report, read the obituary, Wardo, who is alive. Here and alive and strong, arms wrapped around Mark, holding him up, a thousand tiny moons in the droplets on his skin, and Mark can't help it, he just stares. He almost drowned, he realizes that, his pulse is racing and his lungs are on fire, and for some time he can only stare and gulp in the air and cough.
Wardo.
"It's okay, you are okay, Mark, I've got you. You are okay. Just breathe."
Mark does and lets himself be held while the sky begins to lighten in the east. The panic subsides, but the shock doesn't, and Wardo falls silent under Mark's stare, and looks back. He doesn't fidget like people often do when Mark stares at them, he just looks back, quietly, waiting for Mark to, what, say something. Mark doesn't know what to say, so he keeps looking
It is Wardo. Mark can see him clearly now, the wet strands of his hair snaking dark around his face, his eyes huge and bottomless in the twilight. They are close enough that Mark could count the drops of water at the tips of his eyelashes and does watch one of them roll down his cheek after he blinks, does watch it sit in the corner of Wardo's mouth for a second before his tongue comes out to lick it away as if he can't abide a stray drop of water even when he is wet all over.
They are close enough that Mark can see how good he looks, even like this, dripping and wet and disordered, that he can tell how good he feels. Mark is a mess, shaky with adrenaline and nerves and cold, his skin raw and red, his hair a tangled mop like a wet poodle, and his face streaked with water and tears and snot. Wardo is composed and solid, a reassuring hold for his eyes and his hands. He's warm. Skin cool from the water, calm-cool, not clammy-cold, but his breaths brush over Mark's face slowly and evenly and warm, and with Mark's hands clutch at his naked shoulders, with Wardo's arms wrap around Mark's body in his thin, wet t-shirt Wardo is warming where they touch. Not that Mark is warm, but Wardo is, as if he's keeping it bottled up in him just waiting for the contact to lure it to the surface. Wardo is always warm. Not like Mark, who walks around in shorts during winter and most of the time doesn't even feel the cold because there's no heat left in him to tell the difference, but warm, the kind of warmth that comes from layers of clothes and scarves he forces around people's necks, from turning on the heat under disapproving mumblings when he comes by, from drinks he shares that feel like they burn Mark's cold lips even though they are barely hot enough to steam anymore. The kind of warmth that escapes through warm smiles and warm looks and warm touches, all of whom linger a bit too long. The kind of warmth you only notice when you haven't felt it in a while, the way you sometimes don't realize how cold you are until you start to feel warm again.
Alive.
Wardo is warm and naked and alive under Mark's hands, smooth skin, and he touches him, lets his hands roam, just to make sure, he doesn't even think about the implications, just lets them wander over naked shoulders, along sinewy corded arms that have no trouble holding Mark up even though he's barely treading water (had no trouble holding him up when he was panicking and struggling), over a chest that rises and falls evenly, down his sides to stroke over skin that warms as his fingers move over it and stumble over patches that stay smooth and cool and slick, and then they are not patches anymore, and Mark's fingers don't understand, they don't -
Mark looks up, and Wardo raises his chin in a move that should be defiant but is just a move, as if this is what he was waiting for and at the same time something that doesn't matter, and Mark sees the lines at the side of his neck, in his neck, and he flinches back and pushes, back and out of Wardo's arms, as his feet kick against something that is not a pair of legs.
"Wardo?" Mark exhales it, wants to ask, demand, but the panic is back and stealing his voice, and there's a distance between them now, an arm's length Mark tries to widen and see through at the same time. It neither grows nor reveals anything, and Mark is left with nowhere to look but Wardo's face.
"What did you think I was doing in the water?" It's a question, but if feels rhetorical, and Wardo looks back at him with a detached sad little half-smile, as if he saw this coming but doesn't really care all that much, and Mark feels out of his depth, figuratively and literally, floundering back and gaping while Wardo keeps floating there, barely even bopping with the waves, head tilted to the side a bit like none of this is of particular interest.
Mark's eyes flick over him, and his brain works, highlights this and that, the strangeness of this meeting, the lines in Wardo's neck, home, connects the dots and excludes the improbable to land on the impossible.
He reaches out a hand, slowly, paddling stronger with the other to keep himself afloat, and raises it to Wardo's neck, to touch, check, make sure, because it can't be, he can't be, but then a wave laps at Wardo's skin and the lines flutter, and Mark pulls back as if burned, as if something just bared a jaw of sharp teeth at him. For all he knows…
But Wardo stays still, hovering on the sidelines of Mark's freak-out, and when he opens his mouth to speak dawn reveals no shark teeth.
"Can you make it back to the beach by yourself?" His voice is so calm, so indifferent, he should be asking Mark what movie they want to watch, or when to meet after classes, but not even Wardo's most everyday question to Mark ever sounded like that.
Mark needs a moment to process, and then he doesn't know the answer, but when Wardo reaches out he pushes back, nods in aborted movements, and says, "Yes. Yes."
A lie, maybe, he doesn't know, the exhaustion is setting back in already at the mention of the beach, the idea of having to swim back, and maybe it was never gone, just forgotten for a moment, but the only other option he can think of is too much for him to handle. So he moves farther back, pulls his eyes away from Wardo long enough to search for the beach - so far away, how did he get all the way out here, looks back again to make sure Wardo hasn't moved even though he has no idea what he'd do if he had, and then turns around and swims. His breath is coming in short, shallow non-bursts, measured and controlled and on the edge, the way he remembers breathing after he tried to withdraw money from a frozen account, after Wardo was escorted out by security, after seeing the Google alert.
When Mark turns around the next time he's alone in the water. He shudders once, uncontrolled and full-bodied, at the thought that maybe it only looks that way.
*
He does reach the beach. The surf is easier to get through on the way back, even though it washes over him and pulls him back almost as much as it pushes him forth, but when his feet find the ground it helps, and eventually he crawls up the sand on his hands and knees.
He doesn't stop until he's well out of the water, and then he collapses.
The sun is still low in the sky and the beach thankfully empty, and Mark just lies there for a while, eyes closed, and doesn't move until he hears a dog bark in the distance. By the time its owner reaches the point where Mark pulled himself out of the water Mark has crossed over to the road and is walking down the sidewalk to his hotel, salt and sand caked to his skin and hair and clothes but his keycard still in his back pocket, slowly dragging himself towards his room with heavy limbs.
When he goes to bed he still has a lump in his throat and faintly burning eyes from trying to breathe and blink in salt water.
*
What wakes him is the ringing of his phone, stubborn and persistent until he picks up. He tells Dustin that he's coming back.
He has his answer.
*
The anger only starts to simmer when he hangs up the phone, hot and churning and unexpectedly righteous.
He thinks of Dustin sounding tired and exhausted on the line, and so relieved when Mark told him he was coming back the next day, and Chris' voice in the background, steady and low, because Dustin has taken to slinking into Chris' office to work and Chris stopped complaining about it the day after he told them about Harvard.
He remembers people staring at him and asking him questions and press statements, and looks in the mirror to see not a programmer but the survivor of a ship wreck, gaunt and burnt, and the image of Wardo rises up in front of his eyes, all untouched nonchalance, until he has to swallow down bile at the thought of people he knows being affected by this, about him having to deal with the fallout and sitting on that beach, neglecting Facebook and wasting his time trying to figure out the answer to a question he couldn't know because he was missing pertinent information, all while Wardo, what, hovered under the surface and watched Mark fall apart for entertainment?
Mark isn't the kind of person to take anything lying down, and while Wardo seems to have removed himself effectively from Mark's reach he can at least give him a piece of his mind before he flies back home. This is nothing Mark can one-up, and Wardo has for all intents and purposes won that reversed game of chicken of theirs that Mark can't remember either of them starting, but it's still Wardo, who can so easily be made to feel bad about things, and so Mark will at least leave him with a sour taste in his mouth instead of that of victory.
*
It's a simple plan he comes up with. Mark spent weeks on that beach and Wardo never so much as raised a hand out of the water, it's safe to assume he won't come near it even if Mark sits in the sand for another month. Maybe he doesn't want to be seen, considering what he isn't (dead) and what he is (not human). Maybe he just can't get too close without getting washed ashore and flopping around uselessly like a beached whale.
Who cares.
Mark follows the signs to the nearest boat rental place, waves his credit card, and after revealing himself to be a billionaire who neither knows nor cares if he needs some kind of license to drive a boat he is handed the keys to a smallish motor boat he's told is perfect for beginners.
He takes his laptop, stocks the fridge with Red Bull and Vines, gets a large seafood pizza to go because it gives him a thrill of satisfaction, and steers his boat out into the ocean, South until he is drifting more or less in front of the place where the world thinks Wardo killed himself.
Then he waits. He toys with bits of code while eating his pizza, but can't send anything to Dustin because there's no wifi. There's no guarantee that Wardo is still around, but Mark doubts he waited around Fort Lauderdale this long only to disappear the day Mark actually goes looking for him. Mark doesn't know for sure though, and thinking about it doesn't get him anywhere, so he sits down on one of the benches framing the wheel and wires in after having found a power outlet in the little cabin and digging out his cable .
*
Mark resurfaces from someone shaking his shoulder. He blinks and mechanically hits ctrl+s, then the memory of where he is sinks in the way the water is sinking into his shirt under Wardo's hand, and he jerks back, but of Wardo's reach, and hugs the laptop to his chest.
"You came looking for me, Mark." Eduardo pulls back his hand and settles more comfortably on the swim platform. Mark hasn't even noticed when he heaved himself up and rocked the boat. Mark hasn't noticed it getting dark either, but now the only light is coming from the screen of his laptop. He angles it at Wardo, who squints and raises an arm to shadow his face.
Considering the circumstances Mark doesn't feel particularly considerate.
"Are you nocturnal?" It's a valid question. And it gives him time to compose himself. Mark may have been the one seeking Wardo out, but now, faced with him, he can't help but feel unsettled again, even though this time at least he has the advantage of not drowning.
"Am I… That is what you want to know?" Wardo blinks at him, and Mark is not sure if it's a reaction to the light or to the question.
"It's not why I came, but it seems a pertinent question. Yesterday could have been coincidence, but I've been here for hours, and you waited until dark to come." Wardo hasn't made a move to leave the platform and actually get into the boat, and Mark in turn shifts incrementally closer again.
He does open and close his mouth a couple of times (like a fish, and Mark's pulse speeds up again at that thought) before he answers. "I just don't want to be seen and land on the internet or in a lab."
He eyes Mark's laptop suspiciously at that, but Mark ignores his looks and nods instead. This is the most sense anything has made in the last two days. Wardo doesn't say anything more, and instead of starting in on his speech Mark finds himself distracted now that he has Wardo back in front of him, alive and breathing anddifferent, and tries to take him in instead, as far as the dim light of the laptop will let him.
Wardo looks good.
He is relaxed and open in a way Mark doesn't even remember ever seeing him before Facebook, and while he is tempted to blame that just on the way he looks without any product in his hair (barely even wet, he must have sat there for a while and waited for Mark to notice him), unguarded somehow, it's also evident in his posture, in the way he doesn't fidget around or look for something productive to do but sits still the way he only ever used to with a book in front of his nose and eyebrows drawn together in concentration. His upper body is naked, and while he is far from bulky and Mark hasn't ever seen Wardo without a shirt on before he's pretty sure from the way he used to swim in his shirts that the muscle definition he can see now is new, the result of swimming and moving all day, and he wonders if Wardo tans underwater. His lower body is naked too, in the sense of the word. It doesn't feel it to Mark though, to whom naked is skin and not scales. He can see them intermingle with patches of skin until there is nothing but scales. They are not the miniature scales of a shark but still smaller than he would expect of a fish that size, and out of the water they look smooth and dry, snake-like, not at all how he remembers them feeling under his hands. Mark is almost curious enough to want to touch them again, just to check if it's his memory playing tricks on him or the way they look in this light combined with Wardo's awkward position on the platform, sitting up with his weight on one arm and the side of his body where there still seems to be something like a hip but his tail bending behind him in a way legs never would where it hangs off the platform and into the water.
"How is it?" Mark doesn't mean to ask, it just slips out. He's always had a habit of speaking his mind, though, to be honest, most of the time he just doesn't care.
Wardo cocks his head, as if he is surprised but can't find a reason to disapprove of the question, and then he shifts while his gaze turns inwards as if to look for the right words.
The movement reveals a fin at the small of his back, and at the sight it occurs to Mark that there might not be any words to explain how it feels.
"I'm not sure how to… How does it feel when you are wired in?"
For a moment Mark is thrown by this, because aside from the fact that Wardo to anything related to computers is like Mark is to sun - he might not burn too bad with copious amounts of sunscreen but he'll never tan - no one wires in like Mark does, no one gets it, the way Mark can just touch his keyboard and disappear, losing himself until there is nothing left but the essence of who he is, leave all distractions and problems of the so-called real world behind for nothing but code and creativity and simple, stream-lined thought, and people don't get it, it's not lonely and closing himself off, it's peaceful and focused and safe and good and he goes crazy when he can't wire in for too long, and while he doesn't always specifically mind other people and having to interact with them, if he could, if he didn't have to drink and eat and sleep, sometimes he thinks he'd never…
…Oh.
And it makes sense, it does.
The way Wardo has looked at Mark through all this, absent, detached, as if he doesn't really care, as if he's not quite there. How he waited calmly for Mark to freak out, and then just smiled blankly and left to let Mark swim back to the shore by himself instead of fidgeting first and then fussing and insisting he come with Mark and make sure he is okay. How he doesn't look upset or hurt, not one bit, not even when Mark flinches back from him like he's scared or disgusted. There's no accusation in his eyes, they don't bore into Mark huge and painful like they did during the depositions. There's no feeling but half-hearted indulgence. All if this, the news, the reports, the funeral, Chris, Dustin, Mark, , Mark sitting there and staring out at the sea and almost drowning, nothing of it means anything, none of them matter because even while Wardo is sitting here with him now in his mind he's already miles away doing something that's less of a waste of time and more something that actually makes sense, that he wants to do and doesn't has to, that is a challenge and a relaxation and not a social chore.
"Then why are you still here?" Mark all but spits the words at him, because, seriously, what is this, wasn't the lawsuit enough of a waste of time? If Wardo wants to be gone then he can go already and stop wasting Mark's time.
The vehemence in Mark's voice must take Wardo by surprise, because he sits up and blinks at Mark a couple of times with big eyes, and it's the closest to real emotion Mark has seen from him since he showed up with that incomprehensible fishtail, but it's still so untouched, so uncaring he might as well have saved himself the effort and just gone with another headtilt.
"I was just, I wasn't, it's not that simple, I had-" Wardo's words sound flustered enough to almost be familiar, but his voice is even and he doesn't flail, doesn't move, just sits there. Mark can't take it, he never could stand it when Wardo made stupid excuses instead of just going after what he wanted, and he interrupts him.
"Not that simple how? It looks that simple to me, Wardo. You made pretty sure to burn all your bridges behind you, you are dead, okay, you are dead. You don't exist. No job or flat or family or friends, you can't even get a coffee, your face has been all over the news. You are gone. There is nothing here for you anymore. So why are you still here? Just go, what is holding you here. Are you still hung-up and stuck on everything that you'd rather sit here and wallow in self-pity than leave it all behind already? Are you so pathetic that you'd rather hang around this beach instead of going and doing your own thing? What is keeping you here?"
Mark is used to speaking without break, but even he runs out of breath eventually and now he's left glaring at Wardo again, who is still just sitting there watching on as Mark chews him out, not even a flinch, and Mark wants to shove him out and into the water, hey, he'd be helping him out really.
"Nothing." Wardo gives a small shrug at that, more a short tensing of muscles than anything else, an infuriating half-gesture. "Nothing is keeping me here. It's not about that. And it's not about you either. You could say I'm cautious out of habit, I guess, but I'm not afraid. I haven't done this since I was six, and I've never been in the water for more than a couple of hours before now. It just seemed prudent to take it slow. But you are right. I should leave. I've always wondered how far I could go."
With that he slides off the boat and into the water in one smooth movement that barely disrupts the surface.
Mark wants to say something, he should, this feels significant, important, this feels.
"I've always wanted swim to the Antarctic. Just to see if I can. I think I will." Wardo smiles at that, small and dreamy and wondrous, with his chin dipping into the water as he speaks. "See how far I can go before I get cold, and if I can make it to the icebergs."
He looks at Mark then, or seems to, but now Mark knows how many miles away Wardo is already and what he is seeing even though his eyes are on Mark.
"Bye."
The word rises in bubbles as Wardo sinks down, and then the bubbles stop and Wardo doesn't come back up again.
Wardo is gone, and Mark told him to. He said what he came to say, he pushed all of Wardo's buttons and hit all of his weak spots, but the satisfaction just won't set in, and Mark blames Wardo's eerie lack of response, the unsettling fact that Mark did his worst and all Wardo did was shrug and smile and move on. The way Mark had expected him to, after the settlement, had wanted him to. But the ease with which Wardo finally ended up doing so, brushing everything aside because it didn't touch him anymore, none of it, leaves something in Mark displeased.
*
When he sits in the plane the next day and watches the Atlantic disappear he thinks he must be the only person in the world to go to California to get away from the sea.
*
Epilogue
*
They are okay.
Dustin makes stupid jokes no one but him laughs at, Chris is the only one of them with good posture, and Mark works long and emotes little enough that people call him a robot. After Harvard it took them months to find their rhythm again, now everything slides back into place within a couple of weeks.
*
Dustin talks about throwing parties and getting girlfriends (and a boyfriend for Chris), now that they are young hot VIPs in California.
Chris talks about influencing the world and changing it for the better, now that they are wealthy and have all of Facebook at their disposal.
Mark talks about user numbers and new features and growth and moving forward.
*
Dustin more often than not works as late as Mark and then goes home to an empty house, lonely.
Chris runs himself ragged handling petty little problems like privacy complaints and clicks through political websites when he's on the phone.
Mark wires in when he can and does amazing things and three months later invites everybody to a housewarming party. It's a beach house.
*
He wonders at the irony that, staring at another ocean, all he wondered was why, and now that is the only question he has the answer to.
Where.
How.
When.
If he just keeps looking…
Calm Under The Waves (2/2)
II
*
When Mark walks into the office, he notices people staring at him when they think he isn't looking and then staring at the ground, or their screen, or into their coffee cups when he does look up. No one tells him why they are staring.
He sees the Google alert as soon as he's on his laptop.
He thinks, for some inexplicable reason, that he should have been at a computer when the alert went out.
Mark goes over to Chris'. All three of them have their own offices on the main floor now, because of their positions and something about representation, and so people don't always walk up to them and bother them with trivialities. And he has learned that some things should not go down in public.
*
Dustin cries a lot. Loud sobs, choked, hitching gulps, tears and snot. It's disgusting, but it feels appropriate. He also talks a lot, or tries to at least. For days whenever Dustin opens his mouth, he doesn't get out more than two syllables before he chokes up again.
Mark can't understand anything he says. He thinks he can make out 'fault' sometimes though, usually right before Dustin breaks off completely and hugs Chris, Mark, or himself.
*
Chris doesn't cry much. His eyes are red and the skin around them puffy and swollen, but he walks around and talks about media fallout and public opinion and how to best express sincere but distant sympathy.
His hands shake though, and where Dustin invades Mark's personal space for hugs that leave slobber on Mark's shirt, Chris keeps to himself and closes off, taking a step back instead of forward when someone walks up to him, and in Dustin's arms he uncharacteristically stands as stiff and uncomfortable as Mark. Chris looks guilty.
*
His father pushes for a quick closing of the investigation and has him declared eight days after they find his clothes. Seven and a half days after it hit the news. The investigation closes, its conclusion is that it was an accident. The unofficial ruling, whispered behind raised hands and printed in black ink and pixels, is suicide. People assume the parents want to deny the pain and shame of knowing their son took his own life. Mark thinks his father was always ashamed of him, why stop now.
*
Mark doesn't go to the funeral. Neither does Dustin. They are not asked to come. You don't go to the funeral of your… whatever he had been, towards the end. A shareholder. You probably could go to the funeral of a shareholder. Or that of someone you used to know in college. But you don't go to the funeral of someone who sued you.
You don't go to the funeral of your ex-best friend and ex-partner. Not when the emphasis on the ex is as strong as it is with them.
Was.
Besides, it's not a real funeral. There is no body. The gesture is as empty as the casket lowered into the ground.
To be fair, though, no one is asked. A small ceremony, only the closest family, away from the public eye. Mark takes this as confirmation of his theory about shame. And that they don't believe it was an accident themselves, because what reason could they have to feel ashamed then. He doesn't think they have enough sense or reflection to realize what they should be ashamed for.
*
Chris meets the father when he is in Palo Alto for business, to pay his condolences or… Mark doesn't know, he has never met the father, but from what he knows of him, he doesn't strike him as a man who has any use for sympathy. Business, as it turns out, being legal paperwork regarding the inheritance - the law firm that handled the suit and has the details of the settlement is here. As is Facebook, but they are six percent silent shares, so there is no need to discuss anything.
When Chris comes back, it is with an envelope with a couple of photos.
"They were going to throw them out," he tells Mark and Dustin. "He said they have no use for them, but I'm in some, and Wardo wrote my name on the back, so. He said if I didn't want them I should throw them away."
Mark kind of wishes Chris didn't offer his condolences.
Neither of them point out that Dustin's and Mark's names are on some of the pictures too.
When Chris packs them back into the envelope and puts that in the top drawer of his desk neither do they mention that it's just print-outs and they've got the digital copies on their computers, or burned on a cd somewhere.
Chris tells them he asked about the funeral.
"A useless farce, he said. A waste of money, to bury an empty casket, but appearance has to be kept, someone in my line of work understands," Chris bites off the end of the sentence, voice tight and high, and swallows before he continues. "He does not care about the body. His son is dead, one way or the other."
The corners of his mouth pull down then unhappily, and Chris either doesn't want to or can't say anything else.
Mark remembers thinking almost the same thing but it sounds so much more crass like this, and for a moment something bubbles up in him, hot and burning and angry, but he can't tell at whom it's aimed, at Wardo's father, at Wardo, or at himself, and it confuses him, He swallows it down, waits until Chris and Dustin have left - Dustin's hand on Chris' arm, supporting or clinging if there was even still a difference - and wires back in.
*
He doesn't feel particularly guilty or ashamed, even though he knows that what happened between them probably played part in his decision. Mark didn't make him do it. He catches himself avoiding his name though, and resolves to stop doing so. He has no reason to feel guilty.
*
He doesn't understand.
They settled.
He knows Wardo was sad. Anyone could see that, everyone, Wardo always did carry his heart on his sleeve, and even if it hadn't been so painfully obvious even Mark's lawyers cringed at it Mark knew all of Wardo's more subtle tells. But it was over, wasn't it, this thing between them, up to and including its finale of alternately tiptoeing around hurt prides and kicking right where they knew it hurt the most, it was over, and he could have.
He could have done anything. Could have had anyone. Could have gone and lived a life of money and success and respect and with cool, attractive friends who had been in a finals club and graduated summa cum laude and were handsome and sociable and knew how to dress and behave and lived as the beautiful people, and he would have been free of everything, of Mark, of Facebook, of his father, of everything he hadn't wanted or needed. He had the brains, the looks, and the money to spit in their faces and start over, do his own thing, live the life he really wanted, for himself.
He was supposed to.
Mark honestly thought he would.
He doesn't understand why he didn't.
He just doesn't understand why.
*
Mark doesn't spend much more time coding than usual.
He's always liked being wired in. Code makes sense. It's not simple per se, but logical. It's reason and possibility and power, to him, the whole world at his fingertips in the form of keys and a blinking cursor. It does what he wants it to, and when he doesn't, he can fix it. Seeing the world through code, breaking it down into base elements, lets him put it into an order he can work with.
But no matter how he looks at this, the end result doesn't change.
Wardo threw away his life. He made a conscious decision to opt out and let the resources at his disposal go to waste, and he did so at a time when he should have gloated at having won, or at least smirked smugly, bitterly, hard-eyed.
Wardo did win. He must have.
Because at no point, from I'm coming back for everything to the moment he was forced to put his signature under the settlement agreement, did Mark feel like he won.
So what was the point of it all? Why drag them both through that farce, rehash all their mistakes (and Mark is willing to admit that he made mistakes too, even though he was right in the end), waste both of their time and money, and then, after everything, just kill himself?
There, he has thought it.
Wardo killed himself, the idiot, the asshole, the stupid fucker, and now Mark, who was just getting comfortable not having to think about him anymore after their ridiculous law suit, is stuck wondering why whenever he's not wired in, and every time he stops working the question is there, waiting for him, working away at the back of his mind whatever he does, a one-word tinnitus, a constant humming background noise throughout dinners and meetings and halo nights, demanding and nagging and frustrating.
Why why why.
*
The press moves on after a few weeks, finding more suitable prey (it's disrespectful to talk bad about a dead person, and retelling Wardo's life as if it were a Greek tragedy isn't as entertaining as god, old juicy gossip), and the dust begins to settle.
*
They pull together, the three of them. Or Chris and Dustin do, and pull Mark with them. They don't talk about Wardo, so Mark doesn't see the point - they don't provide him with new information, so he won't get his answers from them. He assumes they take comfort in the company though, and so he lets them.
*
Dustin is able to look at Mark again, his eyes are no longer red-rimmed and tearing like they were the weekend before they figured out that he was allergic to Chris' new cologne, and he breathes and talks normally.
He slips up one day, at lunch. It's still closer to spring than summer but already hot and sunny, and Chris and Dustin have dragged Mark first out of his office and then onto the roof with a selection of sandwiches and salads and drinks from the cafeteria, because Chris says they need some sunshine before their skin turns completely translucent, and when Mark tries to get back to work using the (valid) excuse that he'll get a sunburn Dustin just cracks. He crumbles in on himself, all hiccupping sobs, and pushes out aborted half-sentences, about Harvard, and having friends, and moving to California and getting too caught up in it all. About how he should have said something, how he knew and didn't say anything, to warn him or to at least clue him in before the party. About being a coward and a bad friend and about how he loved Wardo, he loved him, how Wardo was one of the best people he knew, and Dustin didn't do anything, he just let it happen.
Chris drops to his knees beside him, wraps his arms around him, and tells him it's not his fault, he couldn't have known how bad things were, how Wardo was.
Mark says that it was Wardo's decision, so if Dustin wants to blame anyone that's who.
They look at him then, with something that could be shock or sadness or pity, and this time when he tries to leave no one stops him.
*
That night, Chris asks them to come over for drinks. It's tense and awkward, Mark sipping on his beer, Dustin turning his bottle untouched in his hands, and Chris, uncharacteristically, chugging his down when he was already uncoordinated and distracted when they arrived.
Then he tell them about Harvard, about Wardo growing silent and absent and looking right through people as if they weren't even there (or as if he wasn't there), and about one night when Chris had thought he'd have to jump into the Charles and pull Wardo out. He tells them that he thought Wardo would be fine, in the end. That he was wrong.
He tells them that he knew. That he should have known.
It's a confession.
Dustin grants absolution easily, with a tentative touch on Chris' shoulder and, when Chris melts into his arms, fingers carding through Chris' hair and his mouth next to his ear, whispering comfort.
Mark says nothing, even when Dustin looks at him, expectation and that maybe sadness, maybe pity thing again.
He wonders if that means now it's his turn to fall apart and feel guilty.
*
He just wants to know why.
*
It's not a gut decision. Mark checks flights and hotels, hacks the FLPD and prints himself a list of names and a map, packs a change of clothes and fully charges the battery of his laptop before he also packs the power cable. That he doesn't tell anyone before he is in the plane is deliberate. He sends emails to Chris, Dustin, and his assistant before take-off, and by the time he lands it's too late to do anything, so he doesn't bother even checking his mailbox.
He finds the hotel. He booked a room there - out of convenience, not any morbid desire to feel close to Wardo. It's not as if Wardo even slept there anyway, the police report says he never even used his key card. The bar is half-empty when he comes down from having dropped off his overnight bag and looks through the door. The woman he's looking for is not there, but there's a wifi sign, so he sits down at a table, orders a Red Bull, and powers up his laptop. His assistant is livid and demanding to know when he'll be back (she's getting paid to put up with him so he doesn't feel bad about ignoring her), Dustin just promises to hold the fort down in his absence which doesn't need a reply, and Chris asks if he wants them to come with him, or maybe just Dustin, he'd understand, and him Mark writes back, even if it's just to say he's good, because Chris sounds as if he's still beating himself up.
When a woman comes in and replaces the bartender he knows it's her right away, but he still pulls up the picture of her driver's license to be sure, and then moves to the bar. She seems nice enough, though that could just be part of the job, and he watches her make small talk with customers and mix drinks while reading through her interview on his laptop again. He wants to turn the screen, point at the part where she said Wardo seemed happy, and call her out on in. Wardo looked miserable for two whole years, he couldn't possibly have seemed happy the night he killed himself. And 'going home', what did he mean by that? Wardo never expressed having any particularly warm feelings for Florida, why would he come here, why not Boston or New York or Palo Alto, why not just a handful of pills and a bottle of booze?
He doesn't think she has any answers other than the ones he has already given though. Why would this woman, to whom Wardo was nothing but a stranger who left behind a big tip before the police and press came to ask her questions, have the answers Wardo's friends do not. And Mark was Wardo's best friend, if anyone knows it should be him. (There wasn't another best friend after him, or any friends, according to what Chris has told.)
He leaves without having spoke to her and goes down to the beach.
*
The beach isn't empty that far South, but it's far enough from the main bustle of beach goers and tourists that there are fewer people around here, mostly families and older people. The next lifeguard tower is also a distance away, but Mark knows it wouldn't have made a difference. Mark has the crime scene photos downloaded, yellow tape around a patch of sand and a pile of clothes that didn't seem any more or less familiar than any other suit, but there's nothing there to mark the place anymore, and he ends up using his mobile's GPS to find the spot.
Once there he doesn't know what to do. There's nothing to see, no way to tell this square meter of beach apart from the rest, and he looks around, lost. His plan ends here.
He ends up flopping down and squatting in the sand cross-legged. The sand is hot against the skin of his thighs and it immediately starts to get under his clothes the way it's already grating between his toes, but he still wriggles until the ground stops being bumpy and starts to feel more like a huge, warm beanbag.
The sea is… sea. It smells salty, and he has to squint at because it's as if the sun is coming from two directions. There is absolutely nothing there.
*
There has to be something.
*
Mark wastes the whole afternoon on that beach, and by the time he stands up dizzily his mouth is dry, his eyes burn, and his skin feels hot and tight.
He doesn't walk all the way back to the hotel but instead gets off the beach and takes a cap. In his room he drinks a whole bottle of water and then takes a cold shower. Moving to peel his clothes off hurts, and the water jet hits the back of his neck like nails.
He spreads a towel on the bed and falls asleep on that, still wet.
*
He's sick during the night, and spends the next day in bed mostly sleeping. His head is killing him and his face burns.
*
There was nothing there.
*
Turns out he can order après-sun lotion via room service, too. He doesn't leave the room for another two days and keeps the blinds of his sea view suite closed. He codes instead. There's always so much to do for Facebook.
*
Chris calls on day five and tentatively asks if he'll be staying much longer. Mark shrugs, too late remembering that Chris can't see him, and tells him that he isn't done yet. Then he asks about Facebook, and Chris hands the phone over to Dustin who must have been waiting next to him.
It's only after he hangs up that he realizes he meant it.
The next day he starts to work in the morning, goes down to the restaurant sometime around noon, and is back on the beach in the late afternoon. He knows where to go this time and leaves his laptop at the hotel.
*
There's still nothing there.
There has to be something.
*
He gets another sunburn, but not as bad. Or maybe it's just the old one. Either way, the skin on his nose is peeling off in white flakes. It's disgusting.
He still goes out again the next afternoon.
*
A little boy asks him what he's looking at, if he's looking for sea monsters. Mark tells him he's looking at nothing. The boy wrinkles his nose and then runs away.
He is looking at nothing.
*
The first time he stays out the whole night he's surprised how cold it gets, and by the time the sun comes up again he is hugging his knees and has his feet curled around each other for warmth.
*
He watches the tide come and go. At least that's something.
*
Chris and Dustin keep calling. At some point his mother starts to call, too. He sends code back and forth with Dustin and he knows everything that's going on at the office, so he doesn't see what the big deal is.
*
The water, once he does walk to the edge, is cooler than he expected, contrasting with the heat of the sun-burning sand. The salt burns where he has a cut on the sole of his foot from a broken shell.
Why would anyone do this?
*
For months people keep badgering him to take a vacation, and now that he does they are still complaining.
*
He starts to move back and forth with the tide, that way he's not sitting still all night.
*
The first time he doesn't send Dustin a batch of code in the afternoon and sleeps through his phone they call the hotel and have someone knock on his door. He doesn't get why they are making such a fuss, Mark has never been good at the whole regular sleep thing. They lived with him, they know that.
*
Mark does not tan. But he can keep the sunburn to a minimum.
*
During dawn the water is positively chilling. He knows it's not really colder than during the day, that the difference is only in the air and lack of sun, but it feels that way.
*
The report said between three and seven a.m..
*
There's still nothing.
*
He digs his toes into the sand as the waves lick over his feet, his calves, and slowly bury him, back and forth.
*
It's boring. Hypnotizing at best. Mostly boring.
*
He codes on what Dustin tells him needs to get done and sends it back. Dustin can put it where it has to go.
*
Up to his knees.
*
Maybe he just isn't looking hard enough.
*
Soaking up his shorts and boxers.
*
All those people who wax poetic about the vast endlessness of the ocean have got it all wrong. The sea doesn't have all the answers. It doesn't even have that one answer Mark is looking for. If it does, it's not telling him.
*
Mark doesn't even have to move. He can just stay still and let the tide come to him.
*
He still doesn't get the appeal. It's water. Cold water. With stuff in it, bits of plant and fish and probably garbage and toxic waste. He could get cancer from this.
*
The water burns on his feet.
*
There has to be a reason.
*
Maybe if he goes in deeper he'll understand.
*
It burns on his legs.
*
Waves splash against his body.
*
The surf is a bitch to get through and he has to blink water out of his eyes. Back will be easier, he can let the waves carry him through.
*
Burning on his arms.
*
The water is cold and dark.
*
Just a bit farther.
*
Burning heavy in his legs, in his arms.
*
Burning in his lungs.
*
Cold and dark and burning.
*
Water splutters out of Mark's nose and his mouth, he coughs and swallows and coughs.
Oh God. What is he doing here, what was he thinking, Mark, Mark, Mark!
He coughs and blinks and sinks under water again when he realizes that someone is trying to talk to him. He flails, water and panic burning in his lungs, and remembers reading something about drowning people pulling wannabe-rescuers down with them, but when his hand connects with something he clings, instinctively, pushes himself above water against the purchase, and coughs and retches.
Something wraps around his body, pushing him further up, keeping his head above water, then his other hand finds hold on a shoulder and his fingers dig in, hard, and he coughs and gasps for breath and tries to blink eyes that are stuck closed with water-clumped eyelashes and breathes.
And breathes.
"Hey, Mark. Hey. Look at me, can you, breathe, Mark. That's good, breathe. You are okay, just breathe."
Mark snaps open his eyes trying to see through the streaks.
"Wardo."
*
III
*
Mark coughs and clings and looks.
Wardo.
Wardo, who is supposed to be dead, who is dead, Mark has read it, read the headlines, read the report, read the obituary, Wardo, who is alive. Here and alive and strong, arms wrapped around Mark, holding him up, a thousand tiny moons in the droplets on his skin, and Mark can't help it, he just stares. He almost drowned, he realizes that, his pulse is racing and his lungs are on fire, and for some time he can only stare and gulp in the air and cough.
Wardo.
"It's okay, you are okay, Mark, I've got you. You are okay. Just breathe."
Mark does and lets himself be held while the sky begins to lighten in the east. The panic subsides, but the shock doesn't, and Wardo falls silent under Mark's stare, and looks back. He doesn't fidget like people often do when Mark stares at them, he just looks back, quietly, waiting for Mark to, what, say something. Mark doesn't know what to say, so he keeps looking
It is Wardo. Mark can see him clearly now, the wet strands of his hair snaking dark around his face, his eyes huge and bottomless in the twilight. They are close enough that Mark could count the drops of water at the tips of his eyelashes and does watch one of them roll down his cheek after he blinks, does watch it sit in the corner of Wardo's mouth for a second before his tongue comes out to lick it away as if he can't abide a stray drop of water even when he is wet all over.
They are close enough that Mark can see how good he looks, even like this, dripping and wet and disordered, that he can tell how good he feels. Mark is a mess, shaky with adrenaline and nerves and cold, his skin raw and red, his hair a tangled mop like a wet poodle, and his face streaked with water and tears and snot. Wardo is composed and solid, a reassuring hold for his eyes and his hands. He's warm. Skin cool from the water, calm-cool, not clammy-cold, but his breaths brush over Mark's face slowly and evenly and warm, and with Mark's hands clutch at his naked shoulders, with Wardo's arms wrap around Mark's body in his thin, wet t-shirt Wardo is warming where they touch. Not that Mark is warm, but Wardo is, as if he's keeping it bottled up in him just waiting for the contact to lure it to the surface. Wardo is always warm. Not like Mark, who walks around in shorts during winter and most of the time doesn't even feel the cold because there's no heat left in him to tell the difference, but warm, the kind of warmth that comes from layers of clothes and scarves he forces around people's necks, from turning on the heat under disapproving mumblings when he comes by, from drinks he shares that feel like they burn Mark's cold lips even though they are barely hot enough to steam anymore. The kind of warmth that escapes through warm smiles and warm looks and warm touches, all of whom linger a bit too long. The kind of warmth you only notice when you haven't felt it in a while, the way you sometimes don't realize how cold you are until you start to feel warm again.
Alive.
Wardo is warm and naked and alive under Mark's hands, smooth skin, and he touches him, lets his hands roam, just to make sure, he doesn't even think about the implications, just lets them wander over naked shoulders, along sinewy corded arms that have no trouble holding Mark up even though he's barely treading water (had no trouble holding him up when he was panicking and struggling), over a chest that rises and falls evenly, down his sides to stroke over skin that warms as his fingers move over it and stumble over patches that stay smooth and cool and slick, and then they are not patches anymore, and Mark's fingers don't understand, they don't -
Mark looks up, and Wardo raises his chin in a move that should be defiant but is just a move, as if this is what he was waiting for and at the same time something that doesn't matter, and Mark sees the lines at the side of his neck, in his neck, and he flinches back and pushes, back and out of Wardo's arms, as his feet kick against something that is not a pair of legs.
"Wardo?" Mark exhales it, wants to ask, demand, but the panic is back and stealing his voice, and there's a distance between them now, an arm's length Mark tries to widen and see through at the same time. It neither grows nor reveals anything, and Mark is left with nowhere to look but Wardo's face.
"What did you think I was doing in the water?" It's a question, but if feels rhetorical, and Wardo looks back at him with a detached sad little half-smile, as if he saw this coming but doesn't really care all that much, and Mark feels out of his depth, figuratively and literally, floundering back and gaping while Wardo keeps floating there, barely even bopping with the waves, head tilted to the side a bit like none of this is of particular interest.
Mark's eyes flick over him, and his brain works, highlights this and that, the strangeness of this meeting, the lines in Wardo's neck, home, connects the dots and excludes the improbable to land on the impossible.
He reaches out a hand, slowly, paddling stronger with the other to keep himself afloat, and raises it to Wardo's neck, to touch, check, make sure, because it can't be, he can't be, but then a wave laps at Wardo's skin and the lines flutter, and Mark pulls back as if burned, as if something just bared a jaw of sharp teeth at him. For all he knows…
But Wardo stays still, hovering on the sidelines of Mark's freak-out, and when he opens his mouth to speak dawn reveals no shark teeth.
"Can you make it back to the beach by yourself?" His voice is so calm, so indifferent, he should be asking Mark what movie they want to watch, or when to meet after classes, but not even Wardo's most everyday question to Mark ever sounded like that.
Mark needs a moment to process, and then he doesn't know the answer, but when Wardo reaches out he pushes back, nods in aborted movements, and says, "Yes. Yes."
A lie, maybe, he doesn't know, the exhaustion is setting back in already at the mention of the beach, the idea of having to swim back, and maybe it was never gone, just forgotten for a moment, but the only other option he can think of is too much for him to handle. So he moves farther back, pulls his eyes away from Wardo long enough to search for the beach - so far away, how did he get all the way out here, looks back again to make sure Wardo hasn't moved even though he has no idea what he'd do if he had, and then turns around and swims. His breath is coming in short, shallow non-bursts, measured and controlled and on the edge, the way he remembers breathing after he tried to withdraw money from a frozen account, after Wardo was escorted out by security, after seeing the Google alert.
When Mark turns around the next time he's alone in the water. He shudders once, uncontrolled and full-bodied, at the thought that maybe it only looks that way.
*
He does reach the beach. The surf is easier to get through on the way back, even though it washes over him and pulls him back almost as much as it pushes him forth, but when his feet find the ground it helps, and eventually he crawls up the sand on his hands and knees.
He doesn't stop until he's well out of the water, and then he collapses.
The sun is still low in the sky and the beach thankfully empty, and Mark just lies there for a while, eyes closed, and doesn't move until he hears a dog bark in the distance. By the time its owner reaches the point where Mark pulled himself out of the water Mark has crossed over to the road and is walking down the sidewalk to his hotel, salt and sand caked to his skin and hair and clothes but his keycard still in his back pocket, slowly dragging himself towards his room with heavy limbs.
When he goes to bed he still has a lump in his throat and faintly burning eyes from trying to breathe and blink in salt water.
*
What wakes him is the ringing of his phone, stubborn and persistent until he picks up. He tells Dustin that he's coming back.
He has his answer.
*
The anger only starts to simmer when he hangs up the phone, hot and churning and unexpectedly righteous.
He thinks of Dustin sounding tired and exhausted on the line, and so relieved when Mark told him he was coming back the next day, and Chris' voice in the background, steady and low, because Dustin has taken to slinking into Chris' office to work and Chris stopped complaining about it the day after he told them about Harvard.
He remembers people staring at him and asking him questions and press statements, and looks in the mirror to see not a programmer but the survivor of a ship wreck, gaunt and burnt, and the image of Wardo rises up in front of his eyes, all untouched nonchalance, until he has to swallow down bile at the thought of people he knows being affected by this, about him having to deal with the fallout and sitting on that beach, neglecting Facebook and wasting his time trying to figure out the answer to a question he couldn't know because he was missing pertinent information, all while Wardo, what, hovered under the surface and watched Mark fall apart for entertainment?
Mark isn't the kind of person to take anything lying down, and while Wardo seems to have removed himself effectively from Mark's reach he can at least give him a piece of his mind before he flies back home. This is nothing Mark can one-up, and Wardo has for all intents and purposes won that reversed game of chicken of theirs that Mark can't remember either of them starting, but it's still Wardo, who can so easily be made to feel bad about things, and so Mark will at least leave him with a sour taste in his mouth instead of that of victory.
*
It's a simple plan he comes up with. Mark spent weeks on that beach and Wardo never so much as raised a hand out of the water, it's safe to assume he won't come near it even if Mark sits in the sand for another month. Maybe he doesn't want to be seen, considering what he isn't (dead) and what he is (not human). Maybe he just can't get too close without getting washed ashore and flopping around uselessly like a beached whale.
Who cares.
Mark follows the signs to the nearest boat rental place, waves his credit card, and after revealing himself to be a billionaire who neither knows nor cares if he needs some kind of license to drive a boat he is handed the keys to a smallish motor boat he's told is perfect for beginners.
He takes his laptop, stocks the fridge with Red Bull and Vines, gets a large seafood pizza to go because it gives him a thrill of satisfaction, and steers his boat out into the ocean, South until he is drifting more or less in front of the place where the world thinks Wardo killed himself.
Then he waits. He toys with bits of code while eating his pizza, but can't send anything to Dustin because there's no wifi. There's no guarantee that Wardo is still around, but Mark doubts he waited around Fort Lauderdale this long only to disappear the day Mark actually goes looking for him. Mark doesn't know for sure though, and thinking about it doesn't get him anywhere, so he sits down on one of the benches framing the wheel and wires in after having found a power outlet in the little cabin and digging out his cable .
*
Mark resurfaces from someone shaking his shoulder. He blinks and mechanically hits ctrl+s, then the memory of where he is sinks in the way the water is sinking into his shirt under Wardo's hand, and he jerks back, but of Wardo's reach, and hugs the laptop to his chest.
"You came looking for me, Mark." Eduardo pulls back his hand and settles more comfortably on the swim platform. Mark hasn't even noticed when he heaved himself up and rocked the boat. Mark hasn't noticed it getting dark either, but now the only light is coming from the screen of his laptop. He angles it at Wardo, who squints and raises an arm to shadow his face.
Considering the circumstances Mark doesn't feel particularly considerate.
"Are you nocturnal?" It's a valid question. And it gives him time to compose himself. Mark may have been the one seeking Wardo out, but now, faced with him, he can't help but feel unsettled again, even though this time at least he has the advantage of not drowning.
"Am I… That is what you want to know?" Wardo blinks at him, and Mark is not sure if it's a reaction to the light or to the question.
"It's not why I came, but it seems a pertinent question. Yesterday could have been coincidence, but I've been here for hours, and you waited until dark to come." Wardo hasn't made a move to leave the platform and actually get into the boat, and Mark in turn shifts incrementally closer again.
He does open and close his mouth a couple of times (like a fish, and Mark's pulse speeds up again at that thought) before he answers. "I just don't want to be seen and land on the internet or in a lab."
He eyes Mark's laptop suspiciously at that, but Mark ignores his looks and nods instead. This is the most sense anything has made in the last two days. Wardo doesn't say anything more, and instead of starting in on his speech Mark finds himself distracted now that he has Wardo back in front of him, alive and breathing anddifferent, and tries to take him in instead, as far as the dim light of the laptop will let him.
Wardo looks good.
He is relaxed and open in a way Mark doesn't even remember ever seeing him before Facebook, and while he is tempted to blame that just on the way he looks without any product in his hair (barely even wet, he must have sat there for a while and waited for Mark to notice him), unguarded somehow, it's also evident in his posture, in the way he doesn't fidget around or look for something productive to do but sits still the way he only ever used to with a book in front of his nose and eyebrows drawn together in concentration. His upper body is naked, and while he is far from bulky and Mark hasn't ever seen Wardo without a shirt on before he's pretty sure from the way he used to swim in his shirts that the muscle definition he can see now is new, the result of swimming and moving all day, and he wonders if Wardo tans underwater. His lower body is naked too, in the sense of the word. It doesn't feel it to Mark though, to whom naked is skin and not scales. He can see them intermingle with patches of skin until there is nothing but scales. They are not the miniature scales of a shark but still smaller than he would expect of a fish that size, and out of the water they look smooth and dry, snake-like, not at all how he remembers them feeling under his hands. Mark is almost curious enough to want to touch them again, just to check if it's his memory playing tricks on him or the way they look in this light combined with Wardo's awkward position on the platform, sitting up with his weight on one arm and the side of his body where there still seems to be something like a hip but his tail bending behind him in a way legs never would where it hangs off the platform and into the water.
"How is it?" Mark doesn't mean to ask, it just slips out. He's always had a habit of speaking his mind, though, to be honest, most of the time he just doesn't care.
Wardo cocks his head, as if he is surprised but can't find a reason to disapprove of the question, and then he shifts while his gaze turns inwards as if to look for the right words.
The movement reveals a fin at the small of his back, and at the sight it occurs to Mark that there might not be any words to explain how it feels.
"I'm not sure how to… How does it feel when you are wired in?"
For a moment Mark is thrown by this, because aside from the fact that Wardo to anything related to computers is like Mark is to sun - he might not burn too bad with copious amounts of sunscreen but he'll never tan - no one wires in like Mark does, no one gets it, the way Mark can just touch his keyboard and disappear, losing himself until there is nothing left but the essence of who he is, leave all distractions and problems of the so-called real world behind for nothing but code and creativity and simple, stream-lined thought, and people don't get it, it's not lonely and closing himself off, it's peaceful and focused and safe and good and he goes crazy when he can't wire in for too long, and while he doesn't always specifically mind other people and having to interact with them, if he could, if he didn't have to drink and eat and sleep, sometimes he thinks he'd never…
…Oh.
And it makes sense, it does.
The way Wardo has looked at Mark through all this, absent, detached, as if he doesn't really care, as if he's not quite there. How he waited calmly for Mark to freak out, and then just smiled blankly and left to let Mark swim back to the shore by himself instead of fidgeting first and then fussing and insisting he come with Mark and make sure he is okay. How he doesn't look upset or hurt, not one bit, not even when Mark flinches back from him like he's scared or disgusted. There's no accusation in his eyes, they don't bore into Mark huge and painful like they did during the depositions. There's no feeling but half-hearted indulgence. All if this, the news, the reports, the funeral, Chris, Dustin, Mark, , Mark sitting there and staring out at the sea and almost drowning, nothing of it means anything, none of them matter because even while Wardo is sitting here with him now in his mind he's already miles away doing something that's less of a waste of time and more something that actually makes sense, that he wants to do and doesn't has to, that is a challenge and a relaxation and not a social chore.
"Then why are you still here?" Mark all but spits the words at him, because, seriously, what is this, wasn't the lawsuit enough of a waste of time? If Wardo wants to be gone then he can go already and stop wasting Mark's time.
The vehemence in Mark's voice must take Wardo by surprise, because he sits up and blinks at Mark a couple of times with big eyes, and it's the closest to real emotion Mark has seen from him since he showed up with that incomprehensible fishtail, but it's still so untouched, so uncaring he might as well have saved himself the effort and just gone with another headtilt.
"I was just, I wasn't, it's not that simple, I had-" Wardo's words sound flustered enough to almost be familiar, but his voice is even and he doesn't flail, doesn't move, just sits there. Mark can't take it, he never could stand it when Wardo made stupid excuses instead of just going after what he wanted, and he interrupts him.
"Not that simple how? It looks that simple to me, Wardo. You made pretty sure to burn all your bridges behind you, you are dead, okay, you are dead. You don't exist. No job or flat or family or friends, you can't even get a coffee, your face has been all over the news. You are gone. There is nothing here for you anymore. So why are you still here? Just go, what is holding you here. Are you still hung-up and stuck on everything that you'd rather sit here and wallow in self-pity than leave it all behind already? Are you so pathetic that you'd rather hang around this beach instead of going and doing your own thing? What is keeping you here?"
Mark is used to speaking without break, but even he runs out of breath eventually and now he's left glaring at Wardo again, who is still just sitting there watching on as Mark chews him out, not even a flinch, and Mark wants to shove him out and into the water, hey, he'd be helping him out really.
"Nothing." Wardo gives a small shrug at that, more a short tensing of muscles than anything else, an infuriating half-gesture. "Nothing is keeping me here. It's not about that. And it's not about you either. You could say I'm cautious out of habit, I guess, but I'm not afraid. I haven't done this since I was six, and I've never been in the water for more than a couple of hours before now. It just seemed prudent to take it slow. But you are right. I should leave. I've always wondered how far I could go."
With that he slides off the boat and into the water in one smooth movement that barely disrupts the surface.
Mark wants to say something, he should, this feels significant, important, this feels.
"I've always wanted swim to the Antarctic. Just to see if I can. I think I will." Wardo smiles at that, small and dreamy and wondrous, with his chin dipping into the water as he speaks. "See how far I can go before I get cold, and if I can make it to the icebergs."
He looks at Mark then, or seems to, but now Mark knows how many miles away Wardo is already and what he is seeing even though his eyes are on Mark.
"Bye."
The word rises in bubbles as Wardo sinks down, and then the bubbles stop and Wardo doesn't come back up again.
Wardo is gone, and Mark told him to. He said what he came to say, he pushed all of Wardo's buttons and hit all of his weak spots, but the satisfaction just won't set in, and Mark blames Wardo's eerie lack of response, the unsettling fact that Mark did his worst and all Wardo did was shrug and smile and move on. The way Mark had expected him to, after the settlement, had wanted him to. But the ease with which Wardo finally ended up doing so, brushing everything aside because it didn't touch him anymore, none of it, leaves something in Mark displeased.
*
When he sits in the plane the next day and watches the Atlantic disappear he thinks he must be the only person in the world to go to California to get away from the sea.
*
Epilogue
*
They are okay.
Dustin makes stupid jokes no one but him laughs at, Chris is the only one of them with good posture, and Mark works long and emotes little enough that people call him a robot. After Harvard it took them months to find their rhythm again, now everything slides back into place within a couple of weeks.
*
Dustin talks about throwing parties and getting girlfriends (and a boyfriend for Chris), now that they are young hot VIPs in California.
Chris talks about influencing the world and changing it for the better, now that they are wealthy and have all of Facebook at their disposal.
Mark talks about user numbers and new features and growth and moving forward.
*
Dustin more often than not works as late as Mark and then goes home to an empty house, lonely.
Chris runs himself ragged handling petty little problems like privacy complaints and clicks through political websites when he's on the phone.
Mark wires in when he can and does amazing things and three months later invites everybody to a housewarming party. It's a beach house.
*
He wonders at the irony that, staring at another ocean, all he wondered was why, and now that is the only question he has the answer to.
Where.
How.
When.
If he just keeps looking…