Love in Doom and Secession: Chapters 1 and 2

1

It was reported, through frantic text messages and haphazardly shared newspaper articles, that the Rehoboth beach tourist trade was in peril. Eager information bearers and reticent foes of social media alike were inclined to recount that the tides at the beach, being higher and higher each year, had finally become too high to dismiss. This year, once summer came, towels could not simply be moved farther inward, as was once done with quiet obliviousness, because the tides, stubborn like unruly children, had pummeled the boardwalk, invaded souvenir shops, and made the seaside ice cream businesses unfeasible, threatening to turn Rehoboth Beach into an Atlantis-style civilization of folklore and ancient imagination.

And who would have thought that it should happen in the winter when the streets were quiet and abandoned, and there were no observers to remark, “It is gone, we have seen it, let us show our respects.”

That no one had seen, as no one was present at the beach in January, that made it harder to accept. It’s a pity, for it was not for a lack of the balmy climes amenable to beach activities, but a deeply rooted belief in the rigidity of proper seasonal activities, and if the people had been willing to ignore that in January it “did not feel right” to lay on the sand and be harassed by the sun, perhaps someone could have seen the beach for the last time in its last hour. To this, the most morose responded, if they had watched the beach disappear, they would have had no reason not to be swept along with it into nothingness.

It seems that in the communal folklore regarding any tragedy, some details resurface again and again, gaining traction upon having touched a common nerve. In this case, it was the ice cream’s sad state of inedibility that most touched the populace, the photographs of murky seawater having rendered both its taste palette and physical integrity beyond recognition. From mouth to mouth reports of the ice cream’s acrid taste, its lack of physical gumption, its loss of once lively color were shared mechanically, representing the greater idea that what was once simple and beautiful had been irrevocably corrupted, and it was expected that the recipient of this piece of information, regardless of how many times they had heard it before, would lower their head in shame and grief.

The DuFrond company, spotting a prized opportunity to make money while improving public morale, offered to begin production of a magic polymer that would maintain ice cream’s taste and texture when inundated with saltwater. The preliminary consumer surveys, however, revealed a lukewarm response on the part of the public, and the idea was tossed out and filed away as unprofitable. So much for making the world a better place, pouted the corporation.

Some, of course, ignored the ice cream hysteria, in favor of another mantra that betrayed their denial: “It’s not that bad.” It was all they could say to ignore the hordes of evidence that the sea had reclaimed the land, that treasured knick-knack shops and pizza establishments were brutalized by nature and had lost their right to exist. Ignorance and denial were the only tools they had to distance themselves from facts, to preserve hope that maybe, upon summer’s arrival, it would all seem like a bad dream, that everyone would make light of upon returning to virgin shores to frolic and make merry.

But over time, the people grew tired of validating the skeptic mania of others, and thus came to reply it was bad, the beach is gone, now please stop, I’m still in mourning.

---

It was a cruel Sunday that January when Juneau Baker herself first heard the news. Though she thought she had no extra room for gloom in the day’s dreariness, life countered her with the reports of the beach’s sudden disappearance act, and so she had to stop her day to accommodate for this new loss. Juneau, as any true Delawarean would be, was deeply troubled by this news, the obliteration of a childhood refuge, and so she poured her energy into the construction of a candlelight vigil.

The black she wore out of respect clashed acutely with the vivid colors of drunk reverie on display on the main boulevard of the university hamlet. Though she often felt isolated, and frankly reluctant to use the possessive pronoun for the institution where she just happened to study, she felt so more intensely on weekends. And even on a day like today, she was appalled by the fact that no one seemed to notice or care that Delaware was losing itself, which she attributed to the fact that most of the people who eyed her on the sidewalk and screamed in collegiate euphoria were not in fact from Delaware.

She entered the convenience store, looking to buy an assortment of candles with which to create an altar. But on the shelves sat only four candles, “deluxe” candles all four, of a price Juneau found ridiculous. And three of them beach-themed: sea breeze, coastal linen, Mediterranean blue, which seemed to be in bad taste. Browsing the scant collection further, she decided on one birthday candle, number 8. She would have chosen her favorite number, 7, but they were out, so she highlighted the beach’s longevity with an infinite 8. Having paid, she rushed back home, fretting to hide and make believe she was somewhere else.

Once home, Juneau knocked on her roommate Victor’s door to request that he participate. As he opened the door, Juneau asked if he was dressed for a funeral, not stopping to notice his eyes fuzzy from midday hibernation. “I’m wearing black already, just need pants,” he said, taking his time to shuffle through his drawer while ignoring the strangeness of her request. He said, “what shall we mourn,” she said, the beach, and thus he followed her to the backyard to go commiserate.

They stood around the flimsy black table on the porch (tossed along by former occupants for 30 bucks, 15 each) as Juneau explained her decorations. The bag, still sandy and reminiscent of her last trip to the beach, languished next to the candle, number 8. “I’ve never been more grateful for stubborn sand,” she said. Victor smiled gently.

Leaning against the naked umbrella pole was a piece of scratch paper with some words written in calligraphy pen: “Delaware has lost its diamond.” Victor tried to convince Juneau for her own sake that Delaware was the diamond, hence its name the Diamond State, and therefore had only lost a small part of itself, not the whole, isn’t that better, but Juneau said he was heartless and that she was in no mood for twists of logic. “Choose your phrasing as you see fit,” Victor murmured in apology.

She asked Victor for his lighter, knowing it would be in his pocket, and he gave the candle a flame. Victor asked if she had any words, to which she said, “the only words I had, I wrote on that paper.” And so there they stood, free of speech and free of time, until Juneau suddenly blew out the candle and proclaimed, “c’est fini.”

---

Wynona Baker was very, very proud of her daughter. She knew, of course, that all moms were proud of their children, or at least the ones that she cared to compare herself to, so her feelings were not unique. In fact, she believed that anyone who had borne the pain and joy of motherhood should be proud, because children earn respect by virtue of birth.

She knew that Juneau always got As, that Juneau always said “thank you” to her professors when she left the room, that she had a force of will without parallel. Her only wonder, then, hearing from Juneau on the phone that all would be well and she would save Delaware yet, was where Juneau had inherited her determination to save their souls.

She knew also that, because her body refused her the privilege of multiple kin, her admiration was sharply focused on Juneau. Yes, she thought, I would have loved more children, but that was not the reality, and it did no good to dwell on what she could not change. If she celebrated every single one of Juneau’s milestones, even when these were more like pebbles or grains of sand, it was only out of the imbalance between her abundance of love and a shortage of recipients.

Yes, Juneau was her only gift to the world, but oh, how she shone.

Thinking of herself, however, Wynona felt decidedly average. She was an average woman, since men had failed her, left her to raise Juneau on her own. An average worker who made precisely the amount of money required for her existence, with little leftover for “silly” expenditures (like new jeans, or a 401k). An average dreamer, for being content in the way that only the dreamless could be.

And maybe it was also average of Wynona to believe that everyone merited a few small pleasures. How dull, she thought, to live life so seriously. However futile or facile, she believed in the gift of pleasure for all beings. In her pleasure, she was extraordinary not in her need for distraction, but her choice of medium. Television, for example, had not interested her for one or two decades now, and so the only programs she would watch were documentaries and love stories she had preserved on videotape. Film, a medium she also had little interest in, did occasionally sway her towards the theater, but her cinematic taste was also of a lost era, and so mostly she satisfied her desires for evidence of past grandeur through her video collection.

One interest she had, however, outshined all of the others in both its intensity and its rarity.

It was so uncommon and so illogical that she hesitated to tell others about her affliction, even though doing so would be quite simple, supposing she had someone to tell: I like coins. Only like isn’t an accurate word, really, because she adored it, could not live without it. “The time I give it,” she would explain to herself, preparing for some imaginary interaction, “like just isn’t the right word.”

Like anyone who devotes grand quantities of time to a single pursuit, she had a personal niche. Wynona fixated on pennies, nickels, and dimes: the less they were worth, the more value she found. This, she thought, was the detail she would be least comfortable explaining, that a woman with so little money to spare would hoard coins that bought so little. Especially considering that her collection had its own costs, just like children, and that she reserved a place in her budget every month for its maintenance and expansion, noting an allotment to “the treasury” on a piece of scrap paper. No, it wasn’t a hobby: it was a primal need, like breathing or eating, one she could not do without, and no one could tell her she had no right to enjoy it.

Juneau asked her if she could pay her a visit that evening, to tell Wynona of her plans to save her home, their home, and Wynona confirmed that nothing could make her happier.

---

Juneau arrived around 7:30, still mourning in her black. Wynona was delighted, as much as she was left stunned by the beach’s disappearance and the grim circumstances that had finally prompted Juneau to come visit. But she could forget all that, yes, so long as she could see her daughter. She offered Juneau something to eat, which she refused, saying eating while mourning would be bad for her digestion. Wynona tried to convince her otherwise, to tell her that widows need food to have the energy to persevere, but Juneau could not be convinced, and instead requested that Wynona tell her a story about the beach that was no more.

Struck by this request, Wynona thought and thought and thought, and finally decided that if the loss of the beach was a sign of the inevitable, there was a story Juneau should hear. Juneau managed a crooked semi-smile when her mother said, “it’s all about a quarter.”

She rehashed the information Juneau had heard countless times: that some state coins were trickier to find than others, but proximity or distance from the state did not always determine which were commonplace and which were rare. Of course, she had a surplus of coins from Pennsylvania, from New York, from New Jersey, which she could not get rid of no matter how many times she offered to leave them to Juneau, but some coins made themselves appear in the strangest of places. Juneau had heard it before.

What Juneau did not know was what quarter she was referring to that had been so easy to find. She had never been told that the coin that started the collection was a quarter from Alaska, even though she never been to Alaska, much less far away from Middletown than New York City, where she once saw a play on Broadway as a girl. “And I found it here, in Delaware.”

“Your father and I, the bastard” (Wynona could never refer to Juneau’s father, said to be “out in Las Vegas”, without his suffix “the bastard”), “we went to the beach. It was summer, so we said we would go, even though I was sick to my stomach, had been for more than a week, and our relationship at that point was 90% theater.”

“I had a feeling, you know…call it motherly intuition. So I got a pregnancy test and took it in the bathroom after we got there. It was one of those public bathrooms, the ones that always feel damp, you know the ones. I found out it was positive, but at the time I couldn’t find it in me to tell your father…the bastard.”

“We didn’t stay too long. It was hot as hell. We stopped at a gas station, somewhere near Milford, and I went in to get some water because he neglected to bring any. So I paid with a five, which back then was a good deal more than the water itself, so I got back a bunch of dollars and coins, one of which was the state quarter of Alaska from 1967. I looked at the attendant and I said, have you ever seen a coin like that? I guess he probably had, he wasn’t very amused. I got in the car, he was taking his time to fill up the tank, and as I waited I thought, Alaska’s gotta be beautiful this time of year.”

And she said that right then and there, she knew she would have a daughter and call her Juneau. “I didn’t need a doctor to tell me. I just knew.” And in the passenger seat of that 1987 Volvo, fixated on the quarter’s dull brilliance, she had said the word, tasted it, “Juneau,” and thought, how beautiful a name, how powerful a name, maybe this one will give her the wings and the strength to fly far, far away.

Feeling heavy, Wynona arose from the table where Juneau sat listening calmly, and disappeared down the hallway, to return with a small jewelry box of smooth green velvet. She sat down, placed it in her daughter’s hands with a firm clasp, and said, “If you keep one coin of mine, let it be this one, so you’ll always know where you came from and where you can go.”

Juneau held it to her chest, her cheeks shiny with fresh tears, and hearing this story once knew she would never forget it for as long as she lived.

2

Shortly after it was time for Delaware to come to terms with the beach’s death, it was also made clear that another Delaware institution was on its last legs. The Christiana Mall, its grandiose parking facilities once overflowing like roofs impregnated with heavy snowfall, began to lose its pulse. One by one, Delawareans came to terms with this second fissure of existence.

From the arch that graces Pennsylvania to the mathematical frontiers of Maryland, rumors spread. People took to whispering about an “inadvertent redistribution of assets” within the New Jersey state government, which with a wink and poke they suggested the truth, which was essentially that private bank account dollars had flowed in great waves into the hands of prominent members of the “waste industry”, better known as the Mafia. And people mocked the governmental response, some public officials having responded with now-infamous faked amazement, others with a resigned “caught me” attitude. Despite the delight Delawareans took in recounting this tale of their great neighbor’s decadence, they also were inwardly quite worried that the sudden lack of out-of-state revenue would bring them ruin.

The Delawareans tried sincerely to reinvigorate the mall, and they would let no one believe they had not tried. The governor promoted the “resettlement of goods” in a troubled press release, hoping to convince his constituents that displacement of inventory from the mall into the depths of closets, garages, and backseats could prevent the mall from closure. Citizens patted themselves on the back with charity, wielding their wallets and stretching far beyond their purchasing powers, but despite these noble efforts, the rise in revenue was “embarrassingly below 0.1%”, and so lacking the New Jersey super-shoppers (as well as those from Pennsylvania and Maryland and elsewhere who, sniffing retail decline, figured it would be best to support their own establishments anyways), the mall slipped into an inescapable red. Mall management declared the mall dead just days after the beach had also passed away, avoiding any mention of the impotence of the Delaware consumer.

Cultural critics went to the papers to laud the elimination of the “Snooki diaspora” from Delaware’s borders and to celebrate the demolition of all of Delaware’s bagel establishments, which had served exclusively New Jerseyans too obstinate to return to their state to fulfill their daily carbohydrate quota. The citizenry, however, was in denial, unable to fathom a world without greasy pretzels and bookstores to buy electronic bookshelves they would set up to use once. Many of them insisted on bringing up the topic in daily speech, as if their constant refrains could release an incantation that would bring the mall back to life. One by one, they all came to realize their fantasies could not save them, as those who had recently accepted this reality would plead with the clingers, find your peace, please, it’s been dead for months and we must move on.

Juneau was indifferent. She who had never claimed to have felt the presence of Jesus in a Forever 21, could not understand those who claimed to be “reborn” in the food court waiting to be admitted entrance to this or that chain restaurant. Although she had no room to be overjoyed, she was at least optimistic to hear that the mall would soon be bulldozed over to make room for “novel development.” As the civic servant she envisioned herself to be, she clung to this vacancy, fantasizing about its possible benefit to the community. Emboldened by goodwill, she asked Victor what he figured it would be: “A playground? A school? A national park?”

“Perhaps a landfill,” Victor responded, blasé.

And then one day, developers announced with great ostentation that the bare lot would be converted into a “Refugee Camp for the Treasures of Yesteryear.” Victor investigated the bureaucratese to find that this “safe space” for “items that were difficult to rehouse” would be a junkyard for cumbersome refuse, like decrepit cars and batteries with all the juice squeezed out. The announcement also raved of the land’s potential for industrial use, emphasizing that any noxious fumes “would certainly rise only slightly above toxic levels.”

Juneau did not hold a vigil.

---

Wynona heard it at work that day: the Christiana Mall’s kicking the bucket. That night, she was polishing, as she always did before bed, her extensive collection of currencies: her pennies, her dimes, quarters from every state. Thinking of the giant coin fountain, she found herself at a loss when suddenly she wondered where on earth she would go to now to fish for coins.

No longer would she travel to the mall once a week, full of glee untainted by retail ambitions, hoping to excavate a rare treasure.

No longer would she cling to the idea that each day held the possibility for greatness, the signature piece that could fulfill her indefinitely.

Though she understood on one level that her collection could never be complete and that, conversely, it would never complete her, another part of her did not know how she would continue to live or breathe, confronted with such meaninglessness. Perhaps it’s time for bed, she thought.

As she tried to sleep, she wept, led to despair by the realization that all could end for no good reason at all.

---

“I think it’s an omen,” Victor declared, taking a critical lens to what he called the “waste disposal situation”. Juneau thought about the possibility that Victor was right, that such destruction could bode poorly for the future. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But an omen of what?”

“Well, that I could not say.” Or, maybe he could. Maybe he was not truly incapable of completing his thought, just simply scared that words from the brain might inadvertently become the truth in twirling through the air in sound waves.

“Why so secret?”

Victor had never stopped to ask if his secrecy was destructive. But it made sense. If, being true, traveling words can portend evil, can’t they also bring salvation by being proven false? He lived in an in-between, he recognized that: that his speechlessness was a way to avoid the danger of altering reality. An omen of what, he could not say, not for lack of lexical abilities, but because of his reluctance to be reckless with words.

“Victor?”

He embraced the cigarette’s touch, taking a clean drag, nodding to let Juneau know she had his attention.

“Maybe there’s room for hope.”

Victor said nothing.