The Seas Read Online Free PDF Page A

vision.” He looks to the left. He looks to the right. He clears his throat. He steps outside the examining room to perhaps consult a medical journal. He takes the opportunity to visit the patient in Examination Room A. I pick up the magazine where I left off. Inside, there is a story of an overweight hemophiliac and the danger his own weight poses. The hemophiliac bleeds without ever breaking his skin, bruises that slip loose and navigate between his skin and his flesh as though through the Erie Canal at night.
    The article is breathtaking and so I see a blue afterimage of it crawl across the leather case of lenses. In ten minutes the doctor returns. I ask him, “Doctor, how is a hemophiliac like blue?”
    He looks extremely puzzled. “Look, I’m an opthalmologist,” he says.
    It is easy. Neither can stop letting go of red.
    “We’ll just keep an eye on this situation,” he says. “See me in a month. My girl will make an appointment for you.”
    I think the trouble with my eyes started because they don’t have enough pigment. They are no more colorful than ice with a little blue in them. Eyes are an exception to ocean, sky, and blood. Eyes can be blue where there is oxygen. That is a theory concerning my condition that I have yet to discuss with my opthalmologist.

ROGUES
    The Seas, a motel where I sometimes chambermaid, sits a bit higher than the other motels so that its broad and weathered sign dominates much of its landscape. This motel is not popular with tourists because the largeness of its sign seems desperate and creepy.
    The woman who owns the Seas named the rooms after different famous hurricanes and leaves cards in each room to describe the storm. It is creepy. So even if a French-Canadian couple wound up at the motel accidentally, chances are they would find it weird and not return the following summer.
    The woman who owns the motel could sleep in a different room every night if she wanted to, but usually she stays close to Andrew or the Galveston Hurricane. That way, she told me, if the office phone rings she can hear the answering machine pick up through the walls. So much stillness through the day, she sits on the curb outside the line of empty rooms. She smokes. She’s not very old but the cigarettes help her to feel like she is.
    She is gloomy like that because both her brother and her father were tuna fishermen who never came back. “They weren’t even on the same vessel,” she tells me while I am roller-brooming a room, Hugo, and she is smoking, watching me sweep. “But it was one of those storms where a hole opens up in the ocean and seven vessels were lost in that one day.
    “Hmm,” I say and continue cleaning.
    “Why do you think the ocean would do that?” she asks me.
    “Well,” I pull out some science. “I think that it has to do with wind speed, fetch, and the curvature of the globe,” I say.
    She looks at me as though I had just dumped a pile of insult onto the carpeted floor I am cleaning and rubbed it in good with the heel of my shoe. I stop roller-sweeping. “Why? Why do you think the ocean would do that?” I ask her.
    She has some more of her cigarette, “I always thought it was because the ocean is like a one-of-a-kind thing, like there is nothing else similar to it in the entire world and so the ocean feels no love, no mother, no father or husband, like a space alien. I always thought that just made it an extremely nasty and greedy thing, like an only child.”
    “Hmm,” I say and nothing else. I am an only child but I need my job so I keep my mouth shut.
    There is a lot of this kind of sadness here. It slips in like the fog at night. The fog that creeps out of the ocean to survey the land that one day she thinks will eventually be hers.
    Later, after I get home from work, my mother wants to know what I am doing since it is Saturday night and I am a young woman. If she pesters me and makes me go out, I’ll go to Jude’s. He has an old stethoscope. I’ll listen to