I imagined all these pubescent perverts holding their cell phones under their flies and stroking their peckers while they stared at her pic. I imagined her life, well into the future, sitting at a job interview, her entire online history clickable and scrollable, and there she’d be, lifting her shirt up at some grainy eighth-grade slumber party. And it made me fear for the world Daisy had inherited and had to walk through, a world full of constant voluntary exposure, a world that worships a lack of privacy, pathological frankness, a world afflicted by the curse of having to show everyone just how good you are at twerking in front of a mirror.

“They’re just my boobs, Dad,” she’d said.

This made me furious, because, of course they weren’t just boobs. The boys didn’t ask for pictures of her feet.

•

I flew to Boston from Chicago and took an Uber out to Salem, where Tom was living the life of an adulterer in a condo all by himself. He waited in the garage next to his Tesla already packed with gear. He wore a white captain’s hat outfitted with a gold rope and laurels. I couldn’t tell if he was serious about this hat. He was one of those guys who always got into something real heavy and then abandoned it once he got bored. One year for Christmas he sent us all scarves he’d knitted. He made at least a thousand birdhouses in his woodshop. He wrote some bad poetry and collected it all in a self-published chapbook he titled Seasons. But a boat was a pretty damn expensive hobby to just toss aside like bad poetry. Or a twenty-year marriage.

On the way to the marina, we stopped at a convenience store and I bought a Styrofoam cooler and loaded it full of beer and ice. Tom didn’t drink, but I liked him anyway. Always had. And not just because he was married to one of my wife’s best friends. He was funny and warm and generous, and every time we’d spend the weekend or go on vacation together they seemed like a model family. They had two sweet and loving kids who listened to their parents, and they all appeared to get along with one another in that tame, white-bread, colloquial sort of way rich New Englanders have of doing everything.

I wanted to pretend we were all the same people we were last year when we’d planned this trip. I wanted to act like nothing had changed, so I took some Dramamine and relaxed as we cruised out to sea, the wind chapping my cheeks, a cold beer cracked open and sudsy. I was afraid the farther out we went I’d lose service. But did anyone ever lose service anymore? Tom’s boat was a Sundancer 350, and according to the manufacturer’s website, it could sleep six comfortably in its first- class cabin, where stylish aesthetics for the jetsetter and power for the explorer combine in perfect harmony. It wasn’t designed to be a fishing boat, but Tom said we could most certainly fish off the swim platform, or at least we were going to try. He kept his eye on some radar-looking device that he claimed was going to drop us on a bunch of fish. It had an orange digital display that projected the undersea terrain, and wherever it promised a mess of fish, a giant orange fish swam into view, like some primitive 8-bit video game.

“I don’t even know what kind of fish are out here,” he said.

I did some research on my phone. Apparently, striped bass or bluefin tuna were popular in this part of the Atlantic. Striped bass were said to be tricky and unpredictable. I found a good-looking recipe on marthastewart.com. I hoped we wouldn’t be the ones to clean them.

“Striped bass,” I said. “And bluefin tuna.”

“Tuna? Those things are huge.”

“You’ve never done this before?”

“No. I mean, yeah. I’ve been fishing. On other people’s boats, but not my own.”

“I guess they just give those captain’s hats to anybody.”

“Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.”

He stopped and dropped anchor, and we cast a couple of rods off the back, which he insisted I correctly call the stern. The rods didn’t look as sturdy as I’d imagined they would, like maybe they were ill-suited for the job. I’d pictured the two of us strapped into a chair bolted to the deck, a two-hour fight on the open sea against some monster of the deep. We would finally haul it in, man and fish both exhausted, man triumphant, only to toss the behemoth back to its inky lair, a reminder that we, mankind, are the true and merciful gods. We used shrimp for bait. I told him that didn’t seem right, and read to him from the site I still had called up on my phone. “Live bait such as herring, menhaden, mackerel, eels, squid, clams, anchovies, bloodworms, shad, nightcrawlers, and sandworms all make great bait for striped bass fishing.”

“Fake news,” he said.

We fished for about an hour or more without any luck. I got hungry and took a break while Tom kept fishing with the wrong bait. I drank a beer and ate a ham and cheese sandwich that had been perfectly melted by the warmth of the sun into a soft, almost grilled cheese-like consistency. The only chips Tom had were salt and vinegar, so I passed.

I hadn’t heard a peep from anyone else on board, so I was surprised when a girl surfaced from below deck. At first I wondered if I was hallucinating some kind of apparition brought about by our voyage, a siren, a mermaid, a sea maiden, but Tom clearly saw her too, because he went over and kissed her on the lips. Now this was weird to see for a couple of reasons, because for as long as we were all friends I’d never seen him kiss his wife on the lips. But what was even weirder was that she was holding a baby.

“I’m Sally,” she said, and held out her hand. I took it and shook, but didn’t stand up. “And this is Cody,” she said, and bounced the baby in her arms. “We were napping.”

I shook the baby’s hand with my finger.

Faith had called Sally a “skank.” But I took this word with a grain of salt. A woman and her girlfriend scorned and all that. Meeting Sally in person, I wouldn’t say there was anything glaringly skanky about her. She wore a striped, hooded pullover, and her brown hair in a ponytail. Her shorts were a respectable length, and, yes, she had nice, tan legs, but nice, tan legs do not make one a skank. She wore white boat shoes. She was catalogue pretty in the way a lot of girls are pretty, the kind of pretty you recognize in the sidebar ad of your email and think for a second that you might click on the ad just to see if there’s another picture of her somewhere modeling underwear. But you don’t click it.

When my wife told me all about what Tom had done, she never once mentioned that he’d gotten his skanky mistress pregnant and she’d had his kid. So not only was I shocked to find Sally had joined us on our fishing trip, I was also shocked to find a baby on board. The baby wasn’t really a baby, at least not an infant. It could walk unsteadily around the boat and toddle toward the nearest trouble. Sally chased him away from the fishing tackle, the dashboard, the stairs, the cooler full of beer. She opened up a compartment under one of the seats and strapped him into a tiny blue-and-white life jacket that he didn’t like so much. She gave him some chocolate milk, and he sat down and drank it politely like a little, old man. I could see that he kind of, sort of looked like Tom, but then I did the math, and I wasn’t quite sure it could’ve been Tom’s. Unless of course he’d been seeing this woman for a lot longer than any of us had known.

“Did you eat all the sandwiches, babe?” Sally asked.

Tom still had his line in the water hoping for a nibble and must not have heard her, so I handed her the plastic grocery bag where I’d found my sandwich. Sally pulled out two more sandwiches and set them on the table, balled up the plastic bag and stuffed it in the front pocket of her pullover.

“The ocean doesn’t need any more trash,” she said.

Sally ate her sandwich and drank a Diet Coke. She turned on some music from one of the many dashboard controls. Hall & Oates. She was not even alive when Hall & Oates was putting that kiss on their list of the best things in life. I looked it up. 1980.

“Why aren’t you fishing?” she asked.

“Inferior bait.”

She looked at Tom with his line out there in the dark water, then scooted next to where I was sitting. She leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “Tom doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

I laughed. “The captain’s hat is just a ruse.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Woah!” Tom shouted. His rod was arched like an eyebrow. He’d hooked a big one and was turning pink he was straining so hard to work the reel. I thought the whole thing was going to snap. The rod. The line. Tom.

Sally nudged me with her elbow. “Help him.”

I didn’t want to interfere with another man’s catch, even if he was struggling, but I did want to get a closer look, so I went out there and stood behind him on the swim platform.

“I got this,” he said, and grit his teeth.

Cody peeked over the backseat and threw his chocolate milk box into the ocean. Sally put him in her lap and we all watched Tom’s impression of a competent sport fisherman.

“What do you think it is?” I asked.

“Moby Dick,” Tom said.

Just then the line snapped and Tom fell backwards into me, knocking us both off our feet, the two of us careening onto the platform, scrambling not to fall into the water, a pair of seadog buffoons. We lay there looking up at Sally and Cody, who both shared the same look on their faces, the same pretty faces. And that look was pity.

•

That night we had dinner under a star-speckled sky, more stars than I’d probably ever seen in my life. Sally spread out a pink gingham tablecloth and served us all a feast of cured meats, olives, pate, brie, and a baguette. We all cozied up under heavy wool blankets because when the sun went down the sea chilled our bones. Sally had brought some wine, too, a rosé that even Tom felt compelled to sip. Times were changing. Cody was already asleep in the cabin, gently being swayed into his dreams. Sally said he always slept so good on the boat.

“What if it was a giant squid?” she asked. “I just read an awesome book about giant squid.”

“People still read books?” I asked.

She picked up her phone. It was held inside a rubbery case designed with the old-school New England Patriots logo. “I have like 200 books in here.”

“Those aren’t books,” I said.

“Whatever, if we get lost at sea I won’t run out of stuff to read. What’d you bring?”

It was obvious she wanted me to say “beer” and to realize how worthless my cargo was compared to her digital library, but I didn’t bite.

“You don’t catch giant squid out here,” Tom said.

“You don’t catch anything,” Sally said. “So how do you know it wasn’t a giant squid?”

She showed us all a picture of a giant squid on her phone. I was glad the line had snapped. “By your logic it could’ve been an Oldsmobile,” Tom said.

“Sure! Why limit the potential of the unknown?”

“Because there are certain limits,” Tom said. He tossed off the blanket and went downstairs to the head, which is what he kept insisting I call the bathroom.

Sally swiped her thumb across her phone and held it up to the sky. The pattern of the stars beamed on the screen, like she was holding an empty frame that we could see clear through to the heavens.

“Ursa major,” she said, and moved closer to me. She waved the magic screen around the sky where it named everything we were looking at, like a god. Ursa minor. Cepheus. Leo. She smelled like saltwater taffy.

I downloaded the app so I could be my own god.

“Tom’s a romantic,” she said. “But his wife had him doomed to realism. I help him be what he’s always wanted to be.”

I pointed my phone at the sky. The screen told me I was looking at Venus.

“I can tell you really care about people,” she said. “You’re a good friend. He thought you wouldn’t come. But it means a lot to him.”

The toilet flushed, or rather didn’t flush, but sucked itself into some place well within the boat, where our piss and shit were stored until we could get somewhere to have it all pumped out.

My wife texted: catch anything?

I texted back a squid emoji.

*

The first-class cabin was as comfortable as the internet promised, so I was pleased to get a good night sleep behind my privacy curtain. In the morning, Tom and I had instant coffee out on the deck while Sally stayed below feeding the baby. The whole world was crystalized and shimmering. The sun crested off the waves in bright diamonds that would’ve burned my eyes if Tom hadn’t let me borrow some expensive sunglasses he’d bought at Nordstrom.

He told me how much he loved the baby, how this baby had renewed him, rejuvenated him in a way his spoiled teenagers could not. He said he wanted to keep little Cody that small forever, “wide-eyed with terror and wonder.” Those were his words. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ever felt that way.

“You think I’m a bad guy. Don’t you?” Tom asked.

I had thought about the right way to answer this question. If my wife asked me, I’d have to say yes, he was an awful, terrible guy, a total douchebag. But I understood where he was coming from. You live a life with a woman for twenty years. You and your spouse start to realize you really have nothing in common anymore other than the kids. You haven’t had sex in months. And a girl comes along to pay a new kind of attention to you, an attention you haven’t gotten in a long, long time, shows you a side of yourself you thought was missing or never knew was there. “I’m sure you understand why some people might think so,” I said.

“Like Faith.”

“And others.”

“When I went to the grocery store, she used to call and tell me where to find the milk. Don’t you think I could find it myself?”

“What a terrible person.”

“Hey, I know I’ve broken something we all thought would never break, all right, but everything breaks. And it can feel good to break things. You know why? Because it hits you right in the gut. It makes you shiver. Your heart race. You feel that heart pumping inside your chest, and you know you’re alive for just a blip. We live under the illusion of permanence, man.”

Tom had never talked like this before. Tom had never uttered one word to me about his feelings. Tom was the kind of person who refused to dance when everyone else was dancing. Sally had either brought forth something that had long been tamped down or was feeding him lines of bullshit to justify his sins.

“I really am sorry,” he said. “I accept the blame here. But one day they’re all going to thank me for waking them the hell up.”

Tom clearly wanted me to be his messenger. This was why Sally and the baby were on the trip. I was supposed to like her, which I did. We’d bonded under the stars. And I was supposed to go home and tell my wife that Sally had come along with us and she was a peach. And I was supposed to tell her that Tom felt bad for everything he’d done, but was really a romantic, and that he knew he’d broken something, but that was part of the thrill. He’d actually done them all a favor. The kids. His wife. Himself. He’d made them all realize that nothing is permanent, and because nothing is permanent, we should take nothing for granted. This was what he’d learned, and it had allowed him to live his life in a way he had not been able to before. Oh, and another thing, he’s got a baby.

I Googled the phrases illusion of permanence and wide-eyed with terror and wonder. I found a TED talk from a dude who designed self- driving cars.

I asked Tom if the baby was his.

“It’s not not my baby,” he said.

•

I didn’t feel like fishing, so I let Sally use my rod. I drank the beer I’d brought and kept an eye on Cody so he wouldn’t fall overboard. If he did, could things go back to the way they were before? It was a terrible thought, but one I had nonetheless. The kid had on his blue-and-white life jacket anyway.

I didn’t know Sally’d caught anything, until she lifted up the tip of the rod and I saw what was dangling from it, not thrashing or freaking out like most fish out of water, but calmly succumbing to its lot, like, yeah, you got me, I was so stupid and greedy to go after that piece of shrimp, oh, well, bon appétit!

Cody toddled after the fish.

“Don’t touch!” Tom said, and scooped up the baby in his arms. “It could be poisonous.” Something about that hat he was wearing made this all believable.

“What is it?” Sally asked.

The fish was long and thin, about the size and shape of a machete blade, and the sun bounced off its scales in rainbows. It had an unheard of number of fins, like it had sprouted extras as a status symbol, and the fin on top of its spine, whatever that one’s called, was sharp and saw-toothed. Its gills widened as it suffocated, and I could see inside its body something purple and vital, losing its color. It had giant eyes that locked in on me, almost like a person’s eyes. Not the usual dead eyes of sea life. They were green and pleading.

“Toss it back,” I said.

Tom held Cody in one arm and took a picture of Sally and her catch with his free hand. “Put it in your cooler,” Tom said, and raced down the stairs with Cody.

“I’ve still got some beer.”

Sally let the rod fall to the deck and the fish did one flop as if it was turning itself on the grill, which the Sundancer 350 came equipped with. The lid squeaked when she took the top off my cooler. She pulled out the cans of beer in a hurry.

“This is a freaking yacht,” I reminded her. “Isn’t there some well or something where you’re supposed to keep fish?”

“You can put your beer in the fridge,” she said.

Tom came back with a steak knife and an empty Costco-sized carton of animal crackers. Cody shrieked from the cabin. Tom handed me the empty carton and told me to fill it with seawater, then he lifted up the fishing line, held the fish above the cooler, and cut the line with the steak knife so the fish dropped right in with a squeak and a thud. By now I could smell the fish, something metallic and fearful, like a car accident. I went to the stern and scooped up some water in the animal cracker carton and poured the water in the cooler. I swear the fish smiled at me. I got some more water and filled up the cooler, until all those fins were working and its gills were sucking in its sustenance. This was one crazy-looking fish. I took a picture. It was still looking at me, all curled up in its tight quarters. It had a long, thin snout, and maybe some teeth, and maybe a brood of caviar in the sea, waiting to blossom into a family of thin-snouted, green-eyed fish full of extravagant fins. They were probably all missing this guy. For some reason it looked like it should be wearing glasses. I used the picture I took to search for the fish on my phone. I got a lot of different results and showed them all to Tom. We both agreed. None of them were quite like this fish. I searched for Atlantic fish full of fins and got a bunch of pictures of tuna and an article about how fins evolved into feet. I searched Fish wearing glasses. Mr. Limpet and that Star-Kist guy.

“Doesn’t exist,” Tom said. “We’ve discovered a new species.”

Sally picked up her own phone, kneeled beside the cooler, and snapped pictures of the fish, being sure to include herself, posed with a peace sign, in almost every shot.

•

Later that afternoon, when the beer was all gone and we were getting ready to head home, I took the lid off the cooler and poured the fish back in the ocean.

When they saw the empty cooler, I tried to claim it was a miracle, that the fish could fly, or had evolved quickly, sprouted feet from one of its many fins and leapt right on back to the sea where it belonged.

“You’re drunk,” Tom said.

“You’re a douchebag,” I said.

Sally scrolled through her phone. “Somebody on Insta says it’s a prasinamata. It’s prehistoric. Thought to be extinct.”

Tom looked at me like he wanted to toss me overboard with the fish.

Just what the hell did he think he was doing out here anyway?

“Fake news,” I said.

•

When I got home I didn’t say anything to Faith about the baby or the supposed dinosaur Sally had lifted from extinction. I knew I was going to have to say something eventually, because she’d find out eventually— if she didn’t already know—but I was tired and didn’t want to deal with it all right away.

“How’s Tom?” she asked.

“He’s a romantic now,” I said.

“Give me a fucking break,” she said.

That night my daughter and I watched an episode of Seinfeld. This was something we did a lot, watch old shows together. Daisy preferred Friends, so most of the time we’d watch at least one episode of each. We hadn’t spoken much since I took her phone away and lectured her about the picture and about life online and about how nothing disappears anymore and how everything we’re doing, everything she’s doing, is being collected, and there is no erasing history anymore, which makes it ever more difficult to make mistakes, or ask for forgiveness.

The episode was the one with the bubble boy, where everyone gets split up on the way to Susan’s family cabin, and Kramer gets there first and accidentally burns it down. I read an article on the internet that talked about how every Seinfeld plot would’ve never been possible if they’d had smartphones. You know the one where they wander around the parking garage? Somebody’s phone would’ve remembered where the car was parked. When Jerry forgot the name of his girlfriend but knew it rhymed with a female body part, Not-Mulva, he could’ve Googled her, looked her up on Facebook or LinkedIn. He probably would’ve met her on Tinder. The odds were that if they’d had phones there would’ve been a record somewhere of their meeting, some digital trail between the two of them. Just like the digital trail Daisy streaked across the screens of all her middle school classmates.

“If they had smartphones nobody would’ve been lost,” I said.

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Daisy said.

I took out my phone and showed her the app. The one with the stars.

“I’ve seen that,” she said.

“Let’s give it a try.”

“Too much light pollution.”

“Stop being so negative.”

I paused the episode and we went outside in the backyard. I held my phone up to the sky, and the screen told me all the stars that were supposed to be there, but in the city they weren’t there. Daisy was right. Too much light pollution.

“When do I get my phone back?” she asked.

I didn’t have an exact answer for that. Faith and I hadn’t discussed it.

“Tom and his receptionist have a baby.”

“No way!”

“Yeah.”

“Did you tell Mom?”

“Not yet. She may already know. I don’t know.”

“That’s so messed up.”

I showed her the picture of the fish in the cooler. “That’s her.”

She laughed, a sound I didn’t know I’d been missing. “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Please don’t fuck your receptionist.”

I’d never heard her say that word before. It felt so childish coming out of her mouth, like she was playing the role of an adult only by adopting our vulgarity. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Let the kids try all our bullshit out for themselves while it’s still safe, before anybody can get too hurt, while they all have so much life left to heal. I didn’t have a receptionist, but that was beside the point.

I put my phone away. “Out in the ocean I could see Venus.”

“Are we seriously outside looking at stars right now?”

“Venus is a planet.”

“I know that you’re really trying real hard to have a moment here. Looking at stars. Telling me secrets and all.”

“I won’t fuck my receptionist.”

“So can I have my phone back?” She gave me a giant, pleading fake smile.

I nodded. “It’s in the—”

“I know where it is.”

She shut the door behind her and went upstairs to her room. I stayed out in the yard looking for stars. The only lights I could make out were from the planes taking off and landing at O’Hare. I wished there was an app I could hold to the sky that would tell me where they’d all come from, or where they might be going.

---

Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the short story collection Adult Teeth (Tortoise Books) and a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction. His stories have appeared in literary magazines such as The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast and other publications. He holds an MFA from Northwestern University and teaches creative writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts.

---

WANT to support HMS’s programming mission to empower Chicago-area adults using storytelling techniques to give them a voice and publishing to give their words a visible home? You can donate HERE or buy a journal HERE.