Which Waterworld Character Are You?

Sam and Mary arrived home at 1:15 in the morning. The garage door opened obediently, the car was parked, and the keys were hung thoughtfully on their designated hook. The lights shot on, blaring and clinical. The first floor felt stagnant with silence, a silence wafting unassumingly, like a foul odor, and making the inanimate feel all the more inanimate.

Sam rifled through the fridge. Mary took off her coat and slumped on the couch. She bit her lower lip trying to think of something to say.

“Fred doesn’t usually drink that much. I’m surprised,” she said to Sam who was picking apart a drumstick. He grunted in response.

“I’m going to check my Facebook,” he announced excitedly spitting minute flecks of turkey on the counter. He shuffled to the computer and planted himself on his desk chair quivering with excitement as the start-up screen loaded slowly and spitefully.

“I drank quite a bit also,” she said soberly.

“He’s a grown man. He can drink as much as he wants,” he retorted contemptuosly.

Mary sighed. Sam grunted. He clicked Firefox repeatedly as various anonymous programs loaded. “C’mon, c’mon.” Finally a flurry of Firefox windows sprang onto the screen. “Restore previous session, restore previous session. No go away. I don’t want you. I just want this one.” He typed in his email and password four times before finally succeeding in signing in.

“What do you need a Facebook for? You’re 42 years old,” she asked more to herself than Sam. “I mean shouldn’t the internet connect you with the new places, new ideas. It just seems so…redundant.”

“Ooo friend request!” he trumpeted. It was Varner from accounting. A real pain in the ass. One of those handsome, perpetually clean-cut, brown-nosing younger guys who are always on top of things. You’ve been working for the company for over 10 years now and he’s going to get promoted before you. His teeth are all aligned perfectly and sparkling white. He just acts so calm and composed all the time. Can’t reproach him for anything. Just makes you hate him all the more. Accept.

“42 friends,” he told his wife proudly. He coveted his horde of “friends” like talismans warding off an impending disaster.

“You’re like talking to a brick wall when you’re on that thing,” his wife said, her annoyance glossing over another emotion which ran deeper and, she feared, would never amount to anything. “Well, I’m going to bed.”

She walked to her room, removed the linens from the hamper, and began folding. Each sheet smoothed carefully, each fold feeling more rueful and desperately symmetrical than the next.

22 years. Maybe she shouldn’t have married so young. She hadn’t even finished college. Sam was always just kind of there. A burly anchor. He had his oafish charm. They had their fun too. That impetuous period of one’s life where consequences, no matter how looming, always seem tangible, finite. Now the choices she made, no matter how trivial, seemed to carry on a cladenstine, subterranean life. Their reverberations were never drastic. Never a disaster, only a pang. It was a choice to marry Sam, but she did not choose the fear which drove her too it. The fear of endless flux, drifting, was too much to bear even at 20. She remembered being on her grandfather’s boat as a child and staring into the water. Late at night, the impenetrable marine blackness, its true nature opaque.

She carried the extra sheets and pillow cases to the closet.

Sam had, quite simply, been there. He felt more “there” than any other man she knew. He wasn’t the most handsome nor was he witty or informed; he could make her laugh but only during those years when he was prone to spontaneity. His spontaneity subsided soon after entering the real world - a hard worker with no real ambition.. He enjoyed what men are supposed to enjoy and did so by rote. And yet, and yet…

“I’m the Mariner! Kevin Costner. I’m the Mariner from Waterworld! What Waterworld character are you! It’s a Facebook quiz. You should take it!” he shouted from the other room startling Mary.

She folded his underwear and pretended not to hear. In that panicked moment she truly hated him, if only for a second. Hatred wasn’t something she thought she was capable of feeling at this point in her life. It was an emotion too pungent to savor for long. Time had bored into her mind the pointlessness of harboring any hatred. Yet it felt exciting for the moment. What a strange, fleeting thrill it was, the memory of it soon suffocated as Mary lyed down on her bed. She closed her eyes and patiently awaited sleep. A few minutes later she felt her husband drop beside her like a bag of sand. She pretended to be asleep. The clink of his belt buckle and a great yawn nauseated her. She felt at ease.

“I had a good time tonight. I had a really good time tonight…Fred was pretty tipsy…You’re still prettier than Danielle. You’ll always be prettier than Danielle,” he assured her, indifferent to whether she was asleep or awake. He kissed her on the cheek and said, “I love you.” She murmured something back.

The day after tomorrow was garbage day. Jessie and Mark would be coming home from the Poconos. She’d hold off grocery shopping for another day; there were eggs and she could make stir-fry for dinner. Bon Jovi was on Ellen and there was a new 30 Rock. Her bed would still be soft and the shower pressure would still be just right. She would never be fully submerged, asleep or awake, and she would never drift. She was protected.