Richard Mabry’s Story

Richard Mabry was on a plane headed to Los Angeles and felt strongly that he should be experiencing some kind of emotion.

If he had ever felt strongly about anything, he couldn’t remember what it was. Not that he ever bothered to wonder these kinds of things, but if he had, his mind would probably have settled on his tenth birthday party when someone had lugged a massive box through the door, covered in sea-green wrapping paper, and had let it fall unceremoniously on the living room floor. The box was too big for Richard to know what to do with. His ten-year-old brain ran through a thousand gift possibilities before deciding that none of them were worthy of The Box and thus it must be something as-of-yet unconceived, something too wondrous to be imagined by his young mind. Once the cake was cut and everyone had eaten and it was finally time to open presents, he was so fixated on what magic awaited inside The Box that almost anything was bound to be a crushing disappointment. 

But even had he remembered the birthday present, he would probably still have said that he had never truly felt anything, because Richard believed that true emotions were experienced physically. If something affected you, it would result in some kind of observable physical phenomenon. If one were excited there would be signs, maybe sweaty palms or an elevated heart rate or some kind of involuntary spasms. If someone were truly terrified didn’t they wet themselves or go rigid or something? In movies when people were angry they got red and smashed things and waved their arms. This had simply never happened to Richard. 

But here he was, on a plane for the very first time, headed to a new city, which many people would have associated with excitement, or at least perceptible emotions of some kind. And yet he felt no physical sensations whatsoever. As he sat in his seat (aisle, near the middle of the plane, not bad considering he didn’t realize he could select a seat in advance and was simply assigned one at the counter) he closed his eyes and projected his mind into each part of his body, beginning down at his toes, through his ankles, and then continuing in a determined circuit through what he imagined was every major blood vessel of his body. He was trying to see if he felt something, to understand what sensations his body was taking in. As he settled into the rhythmic breathing he had decided just then to use for this exercise, he allowed his mind to become a tiny spider to crawl through… no that wouldn’t work, a spider in his blood vessels? Unnerving. He raced through a few other options- things that if tiny enough might be used to explore a blood vessel- a tiny fish, a nano submarine, Pacman- eventually he gave that up and decided that his mind was simply some kind of light as it moved through him. This led to a few uncomfortable moments where he imagined an actual light inside him, like a tiny surgery scope, lighting up all the tissue and viscera, and it was all pink of course, a kind of pale pink one sees in close up photographs in surgery manuals. Finally he settled on picturing some kind of emanation of disembodied light energy traveling through his body without any physical light source being present. And with this less-unsettling non-image in his head he was able to start considering whether he in fact felt anything anywhere. 

By the time the stewardess was asking if he would like anything to drink (“Sarah is it? Do you have any cranberry juice?”) Richard had decided that he needed to prepare himself for the possibility that his trip to Los Angeles was a complete mistake, and that he would then have wasted the cost of a plane ticket, several taxi rides, a motel, and supplies for almost 20 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Being the sort of man who attacks a problem from the most logical entry point, Richard pulled out a spiral notebook and began to write, underlining the words What If This Is A Mistake at the top and then poising his pen to write down all the feelings that might pass through him in such an instance, and all the possible negative repercussions of having made such a mistake. He then planned to prepare a rational reaction to each of the potential feelings and outcomes. 

But as his pen hovered over the paper he realized that in fact what was coming to mind was all kinds of negative emotions that an observer might expect someone else to feel, not what he believed he himself would feel. He had been about to write “sad” but realized that sadness would involve some level of emotional investment in what was happening, which he couldn’t bring himself to feel. What he was imagining instead was a fictitious character, someone very like him in some ways, but with the overplayed emotions of a character in some off-off-Broadway play, where an aspiring actor lands a one-line role and pours 14 years of theater training into that one line hoping someone out there feels the profound pathos of the words “Sarah is it? Do you have any cranberry juice?” He then mentally went through an exhaustive thesaurus of words which might characterize how someone could feel had they tried something that proved ill-conceived. As his pen sat unmoving in his hand Richard had the distinct impression that each of these words passing through his head was a word he had learned but did not truly understand, like the time in Spanish class when a teacher had explained that “ahorita” could mean now or right now or later or some day or never or may also have been a type of Bolivian liquor and Richard quit the class and decided to stick to things with definitions he understood. 

As he sat staring at all the words he had not written (even though he hadn’t put them on the page they were somehow streaming their way across his vision with a kind of slowly revving energy, as if they expected the light to change in 3, 2, 1…) he pictured each one embodied by himself, or at least a version of himself, each self wearing his jeans and belt and untucked shirt and hating how the belt buckle felt cold against his stomach when he sat forward. All the Richards were now arrayed in rows in front of him and he watched as one experienced discomfort, one experienced frustration, one experienced what seemed to be a mounting annoyance and on and on with each Richard moving in ways he had never moved and twisting his perfectly familiar facial features into positions he felt looked ridiculous. 

The plane was still in the air, and now it was obvious there was some kind of agricultural land below them. The different shades of color, green stripes covering huge rectangles, and circles painted against the stark browns of every other piece of land made Richard wonder what forces had carved up the land like this. Maybe giants rumbling through had scraped the land in clever patterns. Or maybe a local mayor had issued a decree that all land must be visually stimulating when viewed from an airplane. As he considered possible causes he grouped them into de facto or de jure causes. Richard liked having ideas that used words like “de facto” and “de jure”. He hoped that the people around him somehow knew that he was thinking thoughts that included words like that. In the distance he could see what must have been an irrigation canal, a perfectly straight dark line making its way through the landscape. It looked much too thin to empty itself into every field surrounding it for tens of miles in every direction. As he watched, the furthest field in his vision breathed in and then sighed deeply and Richard knew that it couldn’t see the irrigation canal, and that it didn’t realize there was something built just to take care of it, just to make sure it had water. Richard imagined the canal water trying to reach that distant field as if it was on an ill-fated quest where expiring along the way was not only assumed, but was largely the point. 

The drink cart came around again. “Last chance for something before we land, what can I get you?” asked a woman who was not Sarah. Richard blinked his eyes a few times and asked if she had any chamomile tea. “No, I have some black tea if you’d like that or if you’re looking for something decaffeinated…” “Black tea is fine, thank you” said Richard in a way that suggested black tea was not fine, and laid back on the headrest with a deep exhale. The tea was too hot to drink so he stirred it and stirred it with the tiny spoon and made a game of trying to put one grain of fake sugar in at a time, thinking that each grain was an iceberg plunging into the boiling North Atlantic. Where were all the fish? Well, they’d be too small to see if this were the whole North Atlantic. And dead if it were boiling. None of these analogies were really working, but Richard was never someone to abandon an analogy just because it wasn’t working. One iceberg at a time went in and each disappeared immediately. Soon he got bored of this and poured in the whole tiny fake sugar bag. This took longer to dissolve, which made sense, since so much ice would cool the surrounding water to temperatures which made the ice melt less quickly. Richard wondered how things would have turned out differently for the Titanic had the ocean been boiling, but the Titanic’s unique hull design would have meant the whole ship was a kind of giant double boiler getting hotter and hotter with all those people inside. This was an admittedly fascinating but disagreeable thought experiment, trying to imagine all those tiny rooms and how each one would have become unbearably hot until the passengers ran up on deck only to be horrified to see the entire ocean boiling away with vapors clouding the sky and dead whales popping to the surface and splitting open with their rendered fat bubbling everywhere in swirling rainbows. The fake sugar all did melt eventually; it had to of course, just like the tea had to cool down, and the plane had to land, which it did. He found the landing to be completely uneventful. 

Richard stood on the curb looking for a taxi. He had been told to come here by an unending succession of signs as he made his way off the plane, to baggage claim, to ground transportation, and now to this smoggy half-inside-half-outside kind of place with cars going by. He waited and waited but there were no taxis. Or he was in the wrong place or, wait a minute, a thought occurred to Richard’s admittedly exhausted and not particularly well-functioning mind. What if the signs hadn’t been directing passengers to where to find taxis but had actually been instructing taxis to come this way? Richard used to be fascinated with big machines and he remembered pictures of huge planes with their nose cones open, with vehicles driving straight out of the hollow tube of the plane onto the runway. When he left the plane he had seen signs that said “Taxis” with an arrow indicating the direction to follow. As he stood in the inside-but-sort-of-outside place seeing no taxis whatsoever he wondered if perhaps the signs had been instructing all the taxis coming off the plane to follow this particular route to the road where they could drive away. At this point his long dormant high school philosophy class axioms kicked in and he strung together a series of what his aching head believed to be irrefutable truisms: There was a route that taxis were supposed to follow. He had followed that route. This made him a taxi. Or did it? He wasn’t sure. It sounded compelling but something rankled at the back of his mind. Something seemed off. He sat down on the curb, zipped open his backpack, and took out a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some water. As he sat eating, he attempted to go over the steps that had led him here from the airplane with the goal of conclusively deciding whether or not he was a taxi. The thought crossed his mind that if he were a taxi, that would actually be good news because he had been looking for one. To find out that he himself was, against all odds, what he was looking for seemed improbable. By the time he finished his sandwich and had some water he had decided that he might be a taxi, but that either way it didn’t matter, or at least he could wait awhile before deciding. He still needed to get to his motel, and just as he was standing up, around the corner came a real life for sure taxi. He climbed in and was off in no time at all. He never saw his luggage again, which he’d left behind on the curb, but as he never noticed it was missing it can’t have been much of a loss. 

Once in his motel room Richard carefully arranged the furniture so as to replicate, as much as possible, the layout of the ceremonially important buildings and plazas of Machu Picchu. He had had a deep fascination with the Inca ever since he was assigned the topic as a high school report. While classmates constructed elaborate farming dioramas, Richard was writing what ended up being a 40 page report on Incan cultural hierarchies, with long addendums about their calendars and religious ceremonies and warfare and how they colonized the Pacific Islands. (This last one turned out not to be true, which he realized before handing in the report, but he left it in there because the idea felt right.) He failed the project, given that the explicit directions were to build a diorama showing an Inca farming family, but in any case he had found a lifelong love. Well, at least a lifelong interest. Despite his fascination with the Incas and his constant reading on the topic, even going so far as to learn a modest number of words in Quechua, it had never once occurred to Richard to travel to Peru. Such an action would have involved a chain of steps, each of which on its own would not have crossed his mind as something he could undertake. For one thing, Richard had never owned a passport, always feeling a little uncomfortable with the idea of something called a pass-port which was generally used at an air-port. Ports were places where ships docked, and the idea of a plane using a port, and him passing one, elicited vague associations with airplanes plunging into the water or those cheerful cartoon drawings of a plane floating about while passengers calmly exited into floating stair-rafts. But the main reason that Richard had never visited Peru, or any other foreign country, was because he simply did not think of them as actual places that could be visited by a real person. If asked to think through the proposition he would have intellectually assented to the idea that one could travel to another country, just as the proposition of a human on Mars wasn’t a theoretical impossibility, but the jump to “I should try it myself” was simply not possible. When he read or heard about other countries, or far off corners of the United States (Oahu, Nome, and Fargo were firmly in the same category as Peru) he would experience a sort of disassociation with the place, almost being unable to make sense of why or how it existed. 

Richard was not an unintelligent man, he had simply always instinctively pulled away from things that he did not understand, that came too close for comfort but not close enough to make sense of, often to the extent of finding comfort in the idea that these things were probably imaginary or part of some intangible plane of existence. How could one visit these places without a Virgil-esque guide to lead one down and down into the whirlwinds and the ice? This may be difficult to understand in light of Richard’s fascination with the Inca, but to him the Inca, and Machu Picchu, and Peru, were so far removed from what he considered reality that he enjoyed immersing himself in them as one would a fantasy novel. A news article about political events in Peru would not even catch his attention.  And so that evening he dragged and pushed and hoisted until the furniture was where he wanted it, not out of superstition or compulsion, simply because he liked the idea of arranging this unfamiliar place in a way that felt familiar, and in a way that he knew others would find unfamiliar. 

For this was part of Richard’s unconscious mental machinations as well. There was something deep within him that saw clearly that he did not comprehend some of the most foundational aspects of the lives of the people around him. Their everyday desires, fears, motivations, passions, all of these escaped him, passing him by like dandelion seeds on the wind. He could see them, and he felt somehow like they should pertain to him in some way, but he could not grasp them. He knew this and it felt to him like a hole, not a real, present, dirty hole that you could climb down into, but like a magnetic field he couldn’t push past, like something mysterious and unknowable, and he responded by crafting himself into something he knew others would not understand. He knew it was ridiculous to arrange the furniture like this, or at least he felt it on some level. He would never have put it in so many words, but there was a part of him that wanted someone to stumble into that room, to see the furniture, and to feel what he felt when he saw someone despondent or elated- he wanted them to see his life and feel like they should identify with it, to want to identify with it, but ultimately to fail, and then to watch his life assiduously, wondering what Richard Mabry knew that they didn’t. He was sure that this imaginary person watching his life would not know words like de jure. 

When he woke the next morning, after having dreamed nothing at all, Richard ate a sandwich, left the room, and walked toward the ocean. He had always had a good sense of direction and even on a cloudy morning with no obvious sun-rising-in-the-east to guide him, he made his way in the correct direction. 

He walked all morning and waited for more traffic lights at more crosswalks than he had ever dreamed possible. He kept expecting to find the sea just over the next rise, as he had been conditioned to understand that this is how one arrives at the sea. Unfortunately, there were no rises, just more streets to cross. He briefly considered trying to take a taxi to the ocean but felt embarrassed when he remembered that the previous night he had genuinely entertained the idea that he himself might be a taxi. He felt that the driver would somehow know this and would refuse to pick him up or that the car itself would keep the doors locked, not wanting him inside. He also felt uncomfortable climbing into the cab and saying “Take me to the ocean please” because he considered the ocean, like so many things, more of an idea than a locatable place as common as the closest grocery store. He might as well ask the cab driver to take him to happiness or back to his tenth birthday party.  

Back home Richard lived in a small apartment. He had not arranged it to mimic Machu Picchu because he knew this was silly as a permanent living arrangement. At the motel he had this idea that maybe someone would stumble in by accident, or the maid would come in. She might be there at this moment, cleaning the room. Would she recognize the pattern of streets and plazas? He knew that sounded outlandish, but having traveled on an airplane, anything now seemed possible. He desperately wanted a stranger to see the room and to wonder about him, and to spend their day trying to sort out what kind of person could so accurately recreate one of the wonders of the world with items found in a common motel room. 

Eventually Richard did arrive at the ocean. With his initial trajectory set, there was no way for him not to. From the steps out of his apartment, from the moment the plane took off, from the minute he left the motel, the ocean had been an inevitability, no matter how little he understood it or how long it took him to get there. To his subconscious satisfaction there was even a slight rise immediately preceding the beach. From the top of this rise he stood completely still and stared as the ocean ran on and on and on, noisy closer in near him and profoundly silent further out. It was as if the immensity began as a thrashing toddler and went through all life stages as it slowly settled into an existence of uninterrupted meditation in its old age.  

Standing quietly for what seemed like forever, Richard became aware, very slowly, that for the first time in his life he felt as though there were someone who understood him, someone who was looking at him steadily, not confused or intrigued, but just looking, knowing what is there and what is not and accepting this situation implicitly. He had envisioned what a moment like this would be like, but he had always seen it as happening somewhere full of people, somewhere where all the lives in their ignorance of each other are swirling about, like at a coffee shop where the smells and the soft light and the clinking door opening and closing and all these unknown people would combine into swelling background music as someone would sit across from him and look at him and know him, even in the midst of the thrumming chaos. That it was the ocean that now knew him came as a surprise, but less of a surprise the longer he stood. 

As Richard watched he became aware of a slight swell out beyond the breakers, a lifting of the water that he wouldn’t have noticed had it not been coming directly toward the beach in an unnatural way. It wasn’t a swell becoming a wave, it seemed to be something under the water pushing it up and out of its way. It was clearly something substantial. Despite not yet being able to tell what it was, Richard was immediately sure that it was coming to meet him. This was unusual for Richard, who generally had the opposite sense, that no one was ever coming to meet him, or that nothing was ever intended for him. Even when someone approached him, said his name, and extended their hand to shake, he would initially assume they were going to ask him where they might find someone else, or even that they were looking for someone else named Richard and had stumbled by chance on the wrong Richard. This guiding sense, that no one saw him, or looked for him, or sought him out, was so strong that Richard had often found himself in embarrassing situations simply because he had assumed that no one would see him, even when he was surrounded by people in public places. 

But here, looking down on the beach, he was sure that finally someone, or something, had come to meet him, or had even sought him out. And he began to walk toward it. When he reached the sand, he stopped to take off his shoes. The sand formed to his feet , and as he reached the place where the moist sand became flatter and more firm, he saw that he was reaching the water line at nearly the same time as whatever was coming toward him. At that moment, it moved through the surf right up onto the beach, directly in front of him. It emerged from the surf, somehow having remained submerged until this minute despite being of monumentous size. 

It was an enormous whale. It lay there on its belly and slowly creaked open its mouth. Richard was staring down its gullet and had lost sense of what was happening around him, but had he bothered to look he would have seen that no one else at the beach was reacting to the whale in the slightest way. Children threw sand at each other, dogs ran in manic circles, surfers waited languidly out in the calm water, but no one seemed to notice the massive whale on the beach with its mouth wide open.

But Richard did not see any of this. He saw only this whale, with its mouth wide open, waiting.  He saw that the whale’s dark pink tongue, surprisingly long and thin, had unrolled straight toward him. When he stepped on, the tongue felt like a plush carpet to his tired feet, and he continued walking. Richard paused and closed his eyes. He could suddenly see the back corner booth at Dave’s, the hamburger place where they poured the side order of thick fries over the hamburger to make a visually impressive mountain on your plate. The corner booth was always where the older kids sat until Dave’s got bulldozed for a non-descript medical building which Richard had visited once for a podiatrist visit. But now standing in front of a giant whale with an open mouth he couldn’t remember what exactly had come of that visit. The doctor had told him he needed some kind of shoe that was supposed to cushion his heel or even out his gait which was affecting his hip, or maybe it was something else, he couldn’t remember, but he’d never purchased those shoes. That had been years ago and now here he was in the most extraordinary circumstance of his life and he found himself wondering why he’d never bought the shoes, or why he’d never gone to sit in the corner booth. 

Richard took a step forward, and then another one, and he began a slow climb up the steady rise of the tongue as it made its way to the whale’s mouth. When he reached the great black opening, he stepped over what were presumably its lips, and he saw that the tongue fell precipitously down into the dark interior. He stood looking, trying to make out what was below. Walking into a giant whale felt silly, but it crossed his mind that never in his whole life had he done anything impulsive or silly and that maybe this whale was here to remedy that exact failing. As Richard stared into the blackness he began to see flashes of things throughout his life that he hadn’t done. Some of them were real instances, others were imaginary, and some he couldn’t exactly remember if they were real or not.  He was also aware of a sense that this whale had come for him, that it was for him, and yet he had neglected it. This was a chance, right in front of him, to not let an opportunity go to waste. He felt a sudden sense of obligation mixed with excitement, the coming together of a Venn diagram where what he should do and what he wanted to do and what the great swirling cloud of others wanted him to do; for the first time in his life it all came together at one point. 

The whale closed its mouth, wiggled backwards into the waves, and made its way slowly out to sea. His baggage continued to sit patiently at the lost luggage counter. The maid at the hotel pushed the furniture back to where it should go. Sarah was 30,000 feet above asking someone if they’d like a complimentary beverage. And Richard, for the first time in his life, felt perfectly at home where he was.