Magdalena’s nerves.
::::::There has never been a Latino named Harvey, either.::::::
Chuck turned about and shouted, “Hey… Harvey!”
Norman chuckled and puffed out his cheeks and brought his arms out to the sides and rounded them at the elbows and made two fists and said to Magdalena, “Chuck’s a monster, isn’t he?… and about the nicest guy in the world.”
When Magdalena saw Norman in that monster pose, it gave her a queasy feeling. ::::::Yes, and you’re brothers, aren’t you?:::::: She wondered whether the two of them, so different in many ways, realized they were members of the same tribe… yes, a queasy feeling. She just wanted to get away from Fisher Island.
Norman led her out onto a narrow wooden dockway and pointed at a boat in one of the slips. “Well, that’s it… It’s not the biggest boat in the marina, but I can guarantee you one thing. It’s the fastest. You’ll see.”
It appeared small next to all the other boats, but it was sleek, modern, very streamlined. It looked like speed. It reminded her of a convertible. It had no top. And the cockpit was small, like a convertible interior. Up front were two bucket seats. What did they call the driver? She didn’t really know. The pilot, maybe? The captain? Behind the driver there were two rows of tan leather seats with white and dark-red piping. Or would they put actual leather in an open boat like that? It looked like leather, anyway. The small cockpit made the hull seem much longer than it was. The hull was white with a six-or-eight-inch tan streamlined stripe outlined in red sweeping from front to back on both sides. Up near the front, within the tan stripe, some bold but no more than three-to-four-inch-high white letters, outlined in the same red, said, HYPOMANIC. The letters were slanted sharply toward the front.
“That’s the name of the ship—the boat—Hypomanic?”
“That’s a kind of an inside joke,” said Norman. “You’ve heard of manic depression, right?”
Tersely: “Yes.” That really ticked her off. ::::::I’m a registered nurse, and he wonders if I know what manic depression is.::::::
“Well,” he said, “I’ve had lots of patients with manic depression, bipolar disorder, and to a man—there’ve been some women, too—they’ll tell you that when they’re in the hypomanic stage—hypo means lower” ::::::Oh, thank you so much for letting me know what hypo means:::::: “when they’re in the stage before they start doing and saying crazy things, they say it’s absolute ecstasy. Every feeling is magnified. Anybody says anything remotely funny, they’re off into gales of laughter. A little sex? One little orgasm, and they think they’ve experienced the kairos, the all-in-one, ultimate bliss. They feel like they can do anything and walk right over anyone who tries to give them grief. They’ll work twenty hours a day and think they’re achieving wonders. They reign in traffic, and the guy behind them starts blowing his horn, and they’ll jump out of the car and shake their fists at the guy and yell, ‘Why don’t you stick that horn up your ass and play “Jingle Bells,” you faggot!’ One of my patients told me he did exactly that, and the guy didn’t dare confront him, because he thought he was dealing with a maniac—which of course he was! The same patient told me that if you could bottle hypomania and sell it, you’d be the richest man on earth overnight.” He gestured toward the lettering on the boat. “And there you have my ‘cigarette boat’… Hypomanic.”
“Cigarette?”
“They’ve been around a long time. There are all these stories about how they used to use them to smuggle cigarettes because they’re so fast. But I don’t know what idiot would go to the trouble of smuggling cigarettes.”
“How fast?”
Norman gave her that smile. He was pleased with himself. “I’m not going to tell you—I’m going to show you. But you see how far the hull extends beyond the cockpit? That houses two Rolls-Royce engines, and each one has a thousand horsepower, for thousands of pounds of thrust.”
Long pause—
::::::But that’s like two thousand pounds, and two thousand pounds is a ton… I wonder if that boat even weighs a ton… and there’s something about Norman that’s… not very stable. Why am I letting myself get into this? But how to ask him… ::::::
—finally: “But doesn’t that make it hard for the… driver?—is that the word?—to handle all that—I mean, so much power?”
Norman gave her the sort of twisted-lip smile that says, “I already know the bottom line. You don’t have