Jake hadn’t been to the pier in ages. It still smelled of fish and of rot. Maybe the wood was a little more decayed than it had been. Jake was always so aware of the wood. It was comforting, in the abstract — the fact of it. It had once been alive, and that energy remained, seeped out of it into his being. Yet as it aged, that life continued to ebb. And it had not aged with dignity. The neglect poured through the cracks and splinters and the squishy bits of pylon, filled with bacteria Jake could hardly stand to imagine. It was such a balance for Jake — the uncleanliness of the place, the sense of death, which on a bad day sat with him like a bad roommate. It was that or the softness, the nature of the place, reassuring him that he was still alive, that the world remained in some small corners real, for all the manufacture imposed upon it. Stop paying attention, and eventually everything returns to its intended state. There’s only so long we can impose our control on the world, on any one thing. For all our vanity, our attempt at codification, nothing can be permanent. It’s that struggle against the inevitable — that’s where we get all our stress. It’s the same stress you get from carrying a lie with you, never knowing when you’ll have to compound it, expand your effort just to maintain your stasis, your artificial construct.

The truth tends to be disgusting on one level or another. On the days when Jake could stand the smell of it, or when the stifling lie of modernity clogged his head — that’s when he came here.

Jake blinked at the screen on his Blackberry, finally processing the text of the email he was reading. How long had he been staring at it? How had the phone climbed out of his pocket and into his hand? Jake tensed his arm as if to pitch the phone off the pier, skip it across the surface of the bay. A shudder flowed across his chest, and with some method Jake slipped the phone into his shoulder bag, zipping the compartment lest the phone claw its way out again.