Transition MEtals

Invariably, at some point in the day, one of the children in the crowd of tourists that gathers
at the wharf will, tired of merely looking at the seals, hold their arms out straight, twist their
wrists around, and bang the backs of their wrists together. These children raise their heads
and make noises, they go ork ork ork, but the seals on their raft do not respond—mostly, the
seals are sunning themselves, asleep—so the children begin to ork at each other, running
around and delighting their parents, whose guidebooks and friends back home had all insisted
that the seals were a must-see, though the seals were, in the end, not doing much, but the
kids seemed to be having a good time, so there’s that. The orking spreads from one child
to another, passed to new arrivals as others leave, a chain reaction of noise that maintains
throughout the day, waxing and waning with the size of the crowd.
All day, Isaac, nineteen, sits in his stall and listens to the radio.

Isaac sells souvenirs to the tourists in their pastel shorts and boat shoes. He sells figurines
of seals in recline, flippers behind their head; figurines of seal mothers nuzzling seal cubs;
figurines of seals with beach balls on their noses and friction motors in their guts. He sells
sodas and snacks.
Do the seals prefer Cool Ranch or Nacho Cheesier? ask the tourists.
Cool Ranch, Isaac says to some.
Nacho Cheesier, he says to others.
Sometimes he just shrugs. The tourists go and fling junk food at the seals, No
Feeding signs be damned, but the seals lie obstinate and snoring. Some tourists will, at the
insistence of their orking children, go through nearly a dozen bags of chips or Funyuns; some
go through merely half a bag before they start flipping food at their kids, getting them to
balance a Dorito on their nose.
Isaac’s mother never allowed junk food in the house. As a boy, Isaac struggled to
convince his classmates that his raisins or celery sticks (or, on a more indulgent day, celery
sticks with peanut butter) were a fair trade for their Little Debbies, Twinkies, Hostess Cakes,
Fritos, Lays, etc. His classmates made fun of his lunch, calling it squirrel food, calling him
poor. Now, at his stall, Isaac has before him a nearly infinite array of sugar, a constellation
of bliss points, and, also, unrelatedly, most of his classmates are dead. But Isaac does not
touch the candy, and when he makes his little sister’s lunch in the mornings, he dollops peanut
butter onto celery sticks.
But, Izzy sometimes says as she raises her eyes pleadingly, Twinkies?
Absolutely not, says Isaac.

Isaac has memories of his mother. This is important. There are holes in his memory, there
is tungsten in his blood. It’s important to state that, legally, none of this is his fault. In the
hospital, he and Izzy had managed to get beds next to each other. A private room in all that
madness, the bored, bulked-up soldier outside. They sat there and counted the gurneys they
heard squeaking up and down the hall, trying to keep a tally. If the gurney went one way and
coughed the person was alive. If it was quiet and heading the other, well. He remembers that
one time during the period when the doctors and nurses, their eyes red, their voices empty,
came to check on him and Izzy more, reciting to each other the vital statistics, sometimes
touching their foreheads and whispering a prayer—Isaac could hear them do it, from under
the hand—this one time a nurse came in to take his pulse and dropped the Velcro armband
twice and seemed to get caught in it, had to fight her way out, then burst into tears and fled
the room. No one came in after her for a while.
Weird, Izzy had said.

As Isaac hands a woman the change for her third bag of Doritos, she asks him if he’s from
around here.
No, says Isaac.
She asks where he’s from, so he tells her, and she stands there with her mouth open
and her three dollars and eighty-seven cents still lying in the extended palm of her hand, and
she whispers, May the Lord bless you and keep you.
And Isaac says, Okay, sure.

The stall where Isaac works is positioned on the wharf between an art gallery and a seafood
restaurant. Both the art and the seafood come from China. The woman who runs the gallery,
who buys one pack of Camel Lights from Isaac every Tuesday, takes pictures of seals,
lighthouses, various seascapes, then uploads them to a website. Workers in a village near
Shenzhen mass-produce the paintings, which she sells at a wild markup. Bored, feeling
friendly one day, the woman tells Isaac her name (Lisa) and the scale of her profit margins.
Isaac whistles. He says, I thought they were all local, with those names up on the
wall.
The woman fingers the ceramic beads that hang around her neck. Oh yeah, she says,
‘James McMannon.’ Right. That’s just branding. The mood I was in when I took the picture.
She takes a drag on her cigarette, then says, as if to herself, Yeah, the Better
Business Bureau really came after me for that. Fuckers.
Isaac is somewhat in awe of this woman, of her savvy business acumen, who spends
most of her day in a folding chair outside the windows of her gallery, smoking and tying and
untying her long salt-and-pepper hair. Isaac’s mother, had she heard all this, would have spat
on the floor as soon as she left.
Lisa is particularly interested in Isaac’s legal situation. No one’s ever asked him
about it before, but Lisa, intrepid and unafraid, does. Such-and-such an amount of weapons-
grade tungsten, she figures, left near groundwater for such-and-such an amount of time, could
mean a lot of money. And yes, the scientific community was both concerned yet delighted
to discover, as they are to discover anything at all, the full extent of the damage. Lisa asks
him how many people had lived in his town. He tells her. She whistles. There’s shittons of
money in it, whole shittons, get those fat-fuck generals for every penny. Money would not,
of course, make up for the terrifying collapse of Isaac’s adolescence, nor would it allow him,
finally, to sleep at night. One time, waiting in line at the post office to mail more documents to
his lawyer, someone behind him coughed, and Isaac found himself running out into the street,
then down it, as fast as he could, though where to he didn’t know.
He does not mention this last part to Lisa. He’s fallen silent. Lisa puts out her
cigarette with the toe of her turquoise flats and turns from him with a wave.
Well, see ya, she says, and goes back into her shop.

School lets out for summer vacation, and within a week Izzy has grown bored of spending all
day at the stall with Isaac. He has struggled to amuse her. She does not like being restricted
to a small portion of the wharf, trapped within the two wooden buttes he has pointed at and
proclaimed her boundaries. She does not play with the other children, is immune to their
orking. Isaac has rigged his phone to his stool so that she can sit on the floor behind the
counter and watch movies, TV, whatever. From time to time Izzy will murmur something
while Isaac is making change and a customer will say, Oh! There’s a little person down there!
or something similar, all the while grinning, expecting Isaac to explain, which he does not.
Isaac opens a pack of cards and teaches Izzy to play solitaire, to build three varieties
of card houses. On the floor of the shop, she assembles neighborhoods and cities, then knocks
them down.
She stomps her feet, says, I’m an earthquake.
She puffs out her cheeks. Fwoosh, she says. I’m a hurricane.
She swipes at the houses with claws. Run! Godzilla!
She jumps up and slams her feet down, putting her whole weight into the floor.
I’m bombs, says Izzy.
Isaac says, No more jumping, okay?

On his day off, Isaac decides to take Izzy to the beach. Izzy wants him to drive (their mother’s car sits under a tarp in their driveway), but Isaac makes her walk with him to the bus stop. It is early in the season, and everywhere is crowded, the sands are packed. Getting off the bus, Isaac is pleased to see that the man in an orange reflective vest at the entrance to the parking lot, leaning on the driver-side windows of the cars that pull up, is now charging fifteen dollars, not ten, carrying the money as a wad in his fist.
Isaac lays out their towels as Izzy begins to play in the sand. She constructs castles
and mountains, she digs deep and winding moats, she channels seawater upwards with
razorline canals. Every half hour or so, Isaac calls her over and applies sunscreen.
Remember that Uncle Stephen had melanoma, Isaac tells her. This is something
his mother had once said to him in a similar situation, rubbing SPF 30 into his back. Isaac,
however, doesn’t actually remember any Uncle Stephen.
Izzy asks if she can go in the water.
Sure, says Isaac. Stay where I can see you.
This isn’t really a problem. Though a strong swimmer for her age, Izzy will not go
out farther than she can touch bottom, and swims parallel to the shoreline, head down in the
surf, breathing at regular intervals as Isaac has taught her.
Isaac watches her buzz back and forth. She has worked out a system: count thirty-
five strokes, stop, turn around, and count thirty-five back. She seems content to repeat this
indefinitely. Isaac worries that she will tire out, but Isaac worries about a lot of things. He
counts with her, there and back, and sees the collision before it actually occurs. The fat man is
floating on his back in the water, his enormous, sun-burnt stomach rising volcanically from the
sea. A blond woman, possibly the fat man’s wife, or girlfriend, is standing in the ocean with a
two-liter bottle of Diet Coke. Twenty-one, twenty-two, and Izzy’s palm slaps down on the fat
man’s belly. By the time she stands, the man is already upright and yelling. Izzy is confused.
She does not know why this obstruction, this man, is so upset at her.
By the time Isaac arrives (at a run), the fat man’s wife-or-girlfriend has joined
in the screaming at Izzy, who is not crying, or reacting, but merely looking at them with
anthropological curiosity. How does one human grow so large? Isaac, for his part, exchanges
words with the couple, words that leave the woman bringing her hand to her chest to say
something like, Well I never! though not that, exactly, but something equally ridiculous and
empty. Isaac carries Izzy back to their towel. Even though she is heavy and he has not carried
her in years, he now cradles her as if she were a much smaller child, and she, as if stunned,
looks up at the sky.

At their towels, Izzy reanimates, busies herself digging a pit. She digs industriously for an
hour or so, scraping back handfuls of sand, then gray mud. Two boys, maybe brothers, come
to wonder at the hole.
Where you digging to? asks one of the boys.
Izzy shrugs. I’m just digging, she says.
This is enough for the boys. They jump in and start helping, but get bored when she
won’t agree to any of their proposed destinations, so they convince Izzy to play tag with them.
Isaac watches them run around the beach. The three of them start to dig up and shape the
sand near a sunbathing couple. Isaac cannot hear their conversation (too many people and too
much wind) but he guesses from the body language of the boys that these sunbathers are their
parents.
Isaac doesn’t realize he’s fallen asleep until he wakes up. A man, the boys’ father, is
standing there with Izzy. Izzy looks at the sand.
Excuse me? the man is saying. Hello?
Hi, Isaac says.
Hi. Yes. Listen, I’m sorry to do this. Your daughter was playing with our boys, and,
well, she started saying some pretty upsetting things.
Sister, says Isaac.
What?
She’s my sister.
Oh, says the man. Sure, your sister, sorry. It’s just, we’re on vacation, and, well—I
don’t know what to call it. Your situation...
Isaac says, My situation.
That’s probably the wrong word. Listen, I’m sorry about what happened to you, it’s
truly awful. Really upsetting. My boys are too young to understand. We’re on vacation, you
see.
Sure, says Isaac. I see. Would you like me to explain our situation to them? More
accurately?
Well, not exactly, says the man. But sure, thanks, yeah, thank you.|
He stands there for a moment. Looking not quite at Isaac or at Izzy, but at several
intermediate points in space between them in rapid succession.
Best of luck, says the man as he turns to go, to you both.
Isaac thinks about saying thanks, doesn’t, just stares.
The man looks over his shoulder as he leaves. Stumbles a bit in the sand. Izzy is still
standing in the spot to which she was brought, hands folded in front of her.
Isaac leans towards her. You want to go home? he asks. She nods.
Ok, he says. Let’s go home.
Isaac starts packing up. Izzy starts filling in her pit, sitting on the sand and kicking
the pile towards the hole.
Isaac watches her a moment.
Leave it, he says.
Someone could fall, Izzy says. Someone could get hurt.
Leave it, Isaac says again.
The bus home is crowded, the air conditioning is broken, so Isaac has Izzy stand on a
seat with her face to an open window while he sits and tries not to throw up from the heat.
When they wheeled him and Izzy out the empty hospital, just the skeleton medical crew left
to keep him and his sister alive, it was like walking through a zoo after dark. He could see
all the rooms, cleaned, where he had heard wailing and screaming and voices, authoritative
but beleaguered, calling for exact amounts of medicine and equipment. The little rolling beds,
Isaac could see, had all been made, but who would ever lie in them now?

The next day, back at his stall, Isaac listens to the radio and catches up on tragedy. Natural
disasters, terrorist attacks, riots and infernos. A mudslide wipes out a village below the
equator. An undiscovered fault shifts beneath a metropolis, tips over a bookshelf, and crushes
a Nobel Laureate. A hurricane floods some subway tunnels; another floods a neighborhood.
A flight, a crash, an explosion. Isaac still sometimes listens for coverage of what happened
to their town, but it’s faded into the cycle. He imagines hearing a retrospective of the
coverage and somewhere in the mix, maybe a line out of a street interview or shouting in the
background, he’d hear it: his mother’s voice.
Lisa comes by for her weekly Camels. You want me to watch her for a bit? she asks
Isaac over the counter, nodding her head at the girl sitting cross-legged in the crawlspace.
Ah, he says.
Wouldn’t be any trouble, she says. You look a little overwhelmed.
He considers her offer. He does not know this woman beyond their brief weekly
conversations, and has no reason to trust her. He remembers his mother’s words: You’re such
(cough) such a careful boy, Isaac. It would, though, be a relief for him to not have to worry
about Izzy for an hour or two. At least the gallery would be a different space, and he knows
that Lisa had two girls of her own at one point, now grown, now gone.
The poor pair of you, Lisa says, shaking her head. That mess. I was talking to my
husband about it last night. It’s no problem for me to look after her for a bit.
No, thank you, Isaac said.
Alright, alright, she says. Suit yourself.
She turns around and goes into her shop.

At home that night, Isaac makes spaghetti. Izzy is in her room, amusing herself somehow. He
can hear her playing. He has all the windows and doors open, is sweating from the summer
heat and the water that boils, now, on the stove.
Their apartment is the top floor of an old woman’s house. The old woman gets
subsidies from the government, since the government has classified Izzy and him, at least
temporarily, as refugees. From time to time, he finds the old woman in the stairwell with
a broom. Just doing a little sweeping! she says. Then her eyes narrow, and she asks, And
how are you two doing, these days? The walls and floors are thin, and Isaac has overheard
his landlady telling her friends and her mailman and her plumber how she came to house
the two of them.
And well, I decided, heck, it’s just the right thing to do, is how the woman’s story
always ends.
Isaac sometimes considers dropping cinderblocks through the floor as his landlady
sleeps. Or, maybe, he’d start vacuuming after midnight, or leave milk to rot in the closet
under the stairs. He dreams up a hundred ways to test the tensile strength of her sympathies
(so-called). Isaac watches the water bubble, and wonders: isn’t sympathy a way of creating
distance? It pushes away, draws the boundary between a person and a tragedy, labels one
person a helper, the other helpless; the story is thereby taken up, passed along, and diluted.
By the time it’s news, it’s nothing. Isaac promises himself, again, that he will never grow
angry. What he will do instead he doesn’t really know. He takes the pot of spaghetti off the
hob and pours it into the strainer in the sink. Steam rises into his face, and he turns his head
away.

They are at the stall, waiting through the hot and stupid day, when Isaac’s phone rings. Izzy
hands it up to him. The voice on the other end is the lawyer. The Army has decided to settle,
and as the sole survivors, the amount is astounding.
He hangs up and sits silently for a while, watching new families replaying the scene
from the day before. He considers for a moment the possibility of forgiving them.
C’mon, Izzy, he says. She looks up at him, confused. She knows that this is not the
end of his day. She has made an easy peace with the idea of being there for hours, which she
readily unmakes in this moment of excitement.
He and Izzy leave the souvenir stand. Just walk out. Isaac might not even tell his
boss he’s quit. Maybe he’ll mail the key back at some point. At home, he pulls the tarp off their
mother’s car. He pauses, tarp in hand. He had driven her to the hospital, his mother, sprawled
over the back seat and coughing blood. He remembers he got mad at Izzy because she kept
turning around. Some flashes at the hospital, then he and Izzy pulling into this driveway, a
government person in a sand-colored suit hunched over and trying to smile into the wind.
Isaac drives to a big box store. When he says yes to the first thing Izzy points at, she
gathers steam, starts running around at breakneck speed, flinging herself back into the aisles
with each uttered approval. Isaac walks the store and tries to drum up some excitement within
himself for power tools, video games, new sheets (well, maybe). When they run into each
other again, he’s carrying a 3-gallon jug of cheese puffs, new boots, and an expensive box
of steak, while Izzy’s in some kind of ice-skating costume, wearing lipstick and googly-eyed
crocodile slippers, and carrying a sizeable chocolate cake.
On the ride home, he tells her she can eat in the car if she wants to.
No! she shouts. I’m saving it for home!
At home they eat. Fists of cheese balls and forkfuls of cake. They burp and giggle.
Izzy begins to feel sick and so they lie down on the couch to watch TV. He asks about the
lipstick.
I keep getting treated like I’m a little girl, says his sister. I haven’t been a little girl
in a long, long time.
That’s true, says Isaac. His sister is falling asleep already, he can hear it in her
breathing, sense the growing lightness of her body. He’ll have to carry her to her bedroom if
she konks out here. His eyes feel heavy. He imagines what her next bedroom will look like.
He’s dreaming, now, on the couch, and he knows it. In the dream he’s back at the
stand. Lisa’s there, so are the children at the edge, the feeders. The water behind them is deep
cobalt. The sky is slate. The cobalt water rises above the dock. It splits an angle overhead, out
of which, onto the dock, runs a woman, who picks up the children who’ve begun backing away.
She puts one in each arm, takes the hand of another. The woman is Isaac’s mother. She runs
into the cobalt water, which snaps shut like a trap door, and the sound—or something like it—
wakes Isaac up.

Originally published in Bat City Review Issue 16

Adam Roux is a writer and translator whose work can be found in American Literary Review and Litro. He has an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was editor-in-chief of Meridian. He is at work on a novel.