A Marker to Measure Drift Hardback - 2013

Excerpt

Now it was night.
 
Jacqueline hadn’t eaten since the flattened chocolate bar she’d found on the step outside the pharmacy.
 
God’s will, her mother said.
 
The fortune of finding food just when it was most needed, just when she didn’t think she could stay upright any longer, here was food. 
 
God’s will, her mother had said for the fortune of the airplane.  She’d said it for the man with the truck. And the fruit pickers in Murcia. And the woman who had the brother who drove another truck. And the Senegalese girl in Alicante who helped her up when she rolled off the park bench in her sleep. Who took her home to her family, who fed her rice and chickpeas and gave her water. The grace of God, her mother had said.  For the woman who found her unconscious in the sand on a beach outside of Valencia, who walked her to the sea and wiped Jacqueline’s face with a dishrag that smelled of glass cleaner, who bought her coffee with milk and sugar and two sweet magdalenas. God for the Moroccan men who were arrested while Jacqueline walked undisturbed onto the ferry in Valencia. For the cove in Palma, where she found cardboard boxes and a dirty blue blanket folded on a flat stone. 
 
On and on her fortune went.
 
And for the man who’d beaten her on the beach in Málaga? 
 
For the diarrhea? 
 
For the absence of food? 
 
For the bearded man and his immaculate teeth?   We pay for our sins, for the sins of others, her mother said.  Anyway, we can’t understand. 
 
--
 
She knew she could not stay in that town. Not with all the people streaming off the ferries.  She sat upright on a bench. She watched them eat French fries stuffed into the tops of their gyros. From the bench she watched them being made in a small shop advertising the best in the world.  She watched the man slicing meat from a giant turning pile, could see him painting the bread with oil and tossing it onto the grill, could see him squirt a white sauce from a bottle onto the hot bread.  There were tomatoes and onions.  She watched him roll them and wrap them with white wax paper, and hand them across the counter along with cold cans of Coca-Cola.  The smell of the meat and its fat, the smell of thyme and the grilling bread all blew towards her.  She watched the tourists waiting in line. She watched bits of the meat falling to the ground, the sandwiches thrown away, half-eaten. 
 
What it took for her not to stand up and cross the square and dig for food. 
 
But she was not beyond pride so instead she ate the chocolate bar and tried to appear happy and bored.  This was, she’d decided, the appropriate attitude.  You must not be desperate. 
 
She watched the policemen walk past and tried to appear cheerful as she ate her candy bar. She ate as if she might throw it away at any moment, as if eating were an entertainment, as if it were something to do.  She thought, Perhaps when it’s dark I’ll go to the trash, but she saw that the square would never go dark. 
 
A band was setting up. The tourists kept coming, the lights came on. There were more and more police.  She stood and stretched her legs.  She felt as if she might lose consciousness and sat back down.  She waited until the blood returned to her head, until the feeling of nausea had eased.  She stood up again and left the square, turning onto one of the small streets, thinking she might find a trash bin in a darkened corner.  But every street was burning with white light.  The stores sold gold and t-shirts and alcohol and food.  Everywhere was food.  And the tourists pushed against one other and plodded along, as bored as the shopkeepers, who eyed Jacqueline as she passed.  Everything was shining with light, the narrow stone streets and the white walls, and the food, the drums of ice cream under glass, and the turning meat, and the faultless rows of tall plastic water bottles, cold in the refrigerators, all of it white under the light. 
 
There was a large foam cup of ice cream on a ledge outside the window of a jewelry store.  For a moment she thought it was part of the display, a prop for the gold chains.   Then she saw there was a spoon stuck into it. As if it were hers. As if she’d ordered it.  She moved to the side so that the cup was in front of her, so that she put herself between the street and it.  She pretended to consider the gold.  She shifted Saifa’s red school pack from her shoulder to her hand, hoping it might look something like the purses she’d seen the women carrying up and down these narrow alleys.  It would take one movement—an open palm, a turn of the hips, a sweep of the hand—and then she’d be moving along like the rest of them, eating as she walked. 
 
She could feel it.  Cup.  Spoon.  The ice cream cold in her mouth.  Bits of chocolate.
 
Then a man appeared in the doorway. 
 
He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and shook one out.
 
He wore a clean blue shirt, collar sharp as knifepoints. 
 
He lit the cigarette and looked at her.  She looked back and smiled. 
 
“Nice,” she said.  The word felt misshapen and dry in her mouth. 
 
He glanced down at her feet, over at the pack, and back to her eyes.  She smiled again.  She could feel her heart.  “Have a nice night,” she said, turned, and walked away toward the square, leaving the ice cream melting in its cup.
 
She followed a road lined with eucalyptus trees and then a sign with the picture of an umbrella and a sequence of rolling waves.  The road was darker and darker.  She was on a hill now and could see the white lights of an airport in the distance, an occasional plane gliding away from the island.  She walked for miles along the dark road, following the signs to the beach. 
 
The beach, this beach, she decided.  She would go and sleep.  She’d sleep and sleep and sleep. 
 
Like the dead, her mother whispered, a little drunk, sitting at the kitchen table in the early morning, looking out across the lawn to the ocean.
 
--
 
There were lights on steel lampposts running along the beach road, and from the hill she saw the pools of white.  At one end a mountain of rock shot upward into the dark.  She walked down the hill, past closed restaurants with hand-painted signs and sandwich boards chained to trees. She descended the few steps to the sand and vanished into the shadow of the mountain, its peak invisible in the blackening sky.
 
She dropped her pack and removed her rubber sandals and pushed her swollen feet into the cool coarse sand.  Now she heard the sea.  Or now she became aware of it. 
 
The wind moved over her skin, cooler than she’d felt since arriving on the island the night before. 
 
She leaned against the wall and listened to the water drawing and breaking, drawing and breaking. Above the beach the first lamppost pressed a coin of light onto the concrete sidewalk.  She watched those coins stretch off in a slow curve along the road in the direction of the discos.  
 
Barefoot, she walked a few feet away toward the sea, pushed down her underwear, and squatted.
 
The urine burned and felt thick, as if it were turning to something solid. She needed water. She finished, waited for the last drops to fall to the sand, and shook her hips the way Saifa used to.  Then she returned to her dark corner. From the pack she withdrew the blanket, unfolded the neat square, and lay down on the cold beach. She drew the fabric over her body and then her face and fell asleep.
 
That night she dreamed of the bearded man. They were holding hands, laughing together on the lawn.
 
--
 
In the morning she woke with coarse dark sand blown across her face and piled up against her back in a smooth slope.  It was in her hair and in her mouth, caught between her lower lip and her gums. She gently removed the grains from her lashes and from the corners of her eyes.  She rose onto her knees. The sand slid down the back of her neck, and caught in the waistband of her skirt.  She shook her head, flinging sand from her hair, spitting it from her mouth, running her tongue over her teeth, along her gums. Then, still kneeling, she opened her eyes.
 
The sun was just rising.  The wind had turned and was blowing hard offshore.  She’d heard laughter in the night.  It had been far away, coming in across the water or drifting from the other end of the road.  Now there was no one.  As far as she could see there was no one anywhere.  But surely the shops would open, and the cafés above the beach with their tables set beneath colored awnings. People would come.  She couldn’t leave anything here.  She would need to be clean.
 
She looked out at the water.  Small waves were suspended in the powerful wind, blown hollow, their peaks torn off before they fell to the sand with a crushing sound.  She walked down the steep beach to the water, where she raised her skirt and slipped her feet into the foam lit white against the black sand. It stung where the glass had sliced her right heel, where the wire had cut her left ankle.  
 
She liked the stinging because it was sharp.
 
The salt will prevent infection, her mother said.
 
She liked her feet against the rough sand and the way the water pulled the sand from beneath her feet.  She watched the waves coming in again and again and again.  She leaned back into the wind and waited to decide.  
 
She did not know how to decide. She’d come to this point.  That was undeniable.  She was here, while before she’d been somewhere else. She’d come here by deciding.  She could not remember how she’d decided.  Or even the moment of decision or the consideration.  But she must have.  Logic insisted. Still, now she did not know how to decide.  So she waited.  And when the sun had been up over the low hills for a few minutes and already, this early, she could feel the heat of it, she decided to stay.  
 
Yes. She’d stop here.  
 
Perhaps it was because of the water on her feet.  Perhaps it was because she was tired.
 
Look, her mother said. Look at the sparkling water. Look at the color.  The sun in the sky, the orange morning, all of it evidence of intervention, everything, all of it, a convergence, the will of God. 
 
And this ugly yellow dog?
 
Jacqueline watched as it passed by on the road above, clicking its nails along the sidewalk, tongue lolling out. What? He is also God?
 
Her mother only smiled and looked away.
 
Jacqueline returned to her camp. She shook the sand from the blanket and folded it in half, then into quarters.  She slid the square into the thin white grocery bag and smoothed the plastic flat and gathered it together and turned it three times before tying a loose knot.  She fit it into her pack.  She leaned against the wall with the sun on her face and brushed the sand from her feet and slipped them into her sandals.
 
--
 
The tide was going out, leaving behind pools of clear water and small spits of wet black sand.  She climbed up onto the rocks and followed them away from the wide beach.  It only took a few minutes before she could no longer see the stretch of hotels behind her. 
 
She was looking for a place to live. 
 
She hadn’t thought about it this way when she’d pulled her skirt to her knees and walked through the water around the dark and giant outcropping.  But that’s what it amounted to. 
 
There were many caves in the rock, but all too low.  They’d take on water with the rising tide.  But she could see they were deep, and soon she found one above the sand at the very back of a beach like a long tongue with its tip pressed flush against the edge of the dark cliff.  She climbed up the rocks to just below the entrance and looked down at the sand still shining.  The mouth of the cave, only a few feet above her now, pronounced not an O, but an M. Three pale swallows rested on its bottom lip, a narrow ledge of rock.
 
You must be careful, her mother said. To break an ankle would be to destroy your life. Better to fall and crack your skull open and die. 
 
Jacqueline made her way to the edge of the cave.  The birds screamed and flew off to a nearby boulder, where they stood and watched her.
 
She swung her pack up harder than she’d meant to. It skidded across the floor and vanished into the darkness.  Then she brought her body up onto the ledge.  This was the only move, a step, two steps, that posed any threat.  The rock was damp and not quite flat.  Her right foot, which would require all of her weight, could slip out from under her and if that happened she would fall.  
 
Her foot held. She leaned forward onto her hands and drew herself into the cave. She turned and sat and looked out from the shadows at the sea.  She was lightheaded and felt for a long moment that she might lose consciousness.  She slid deeper into the cool cave, so that only her feet were in the sun.
 
She smelled crushed ginger in a hot, dry pan.
 
Hours passed and it was late afternoon when she woke.  She would have to eat.  It was no longer possible to ignore it.  She was nauseated and weak and cold.  Sunlight cut deeper into the cave.  She’d been sleeping on her back, but now rolled onto her stomach and turned so that she faced the sea.  She rested her chin on her interlaced fingers.  She watched the tide coming in, swallowing the narrow beach.  The light was turning soft and for the smallest moment it reminded her of the yellow sand at Robertsport. But now there was only her body.  There was nothing left for memory except for the memory of food.  She might have fallen back to sleep if not for the nausea and her cramping stomach.  
 
But you must not sleep, her mother said.  
 
Jacqueline knew this problem.  
 
Your mind knows you need food, but your body has abandoned the idea. This is when you must eat.  It is your last chance.  When your mind agrees with your body, you will die.
 
In a park in Alicante, she’d heard stories from three Tunisian women. Stories of people falling asleep in northern cities.  Fall asleep in the cold and you die of cold, they said.  They told her about drunken men who pissed themselves, their wet pants freezing to the sidewalk.  In Paris or Berlin or Prague or Amsterdam or London.  Wherever it was those women were going.  They said, there you die and people step over your body until the police come and tear you off the sidewalk and take you away.
 
Jacqueline had said nothing. She listened and remembered the grey cashmere coat her mother had sent for Christmas. It lay on her bed folded in its white box. And while the women whispered their warnings Jacqueline could feel the soft wool in her fingers, could see herself, collar up against the vicious wind, as she crossed Blackfriars Bridge. She could remember no one on the sidewalks.
 
She left the pack in the dark and made her way, taking tentative steps, out of the cave and down.  It was difficult to balance.  There was so much noise.  The wind and the small waves crashing and the rising tide. There was all the light reflecting off of the sand and the water.  
 
 
As she moved through tide pools and across the worn rocks, she forgot where she was walking, and then where she was on the earth.  She remembered that she’d made a decision to stay in this place but could not say what this place was, so she reminded herself that if she were to fall she might split her head open, or drown, or break an ankle and that she’d have to be cautious wherever she was, that she did not want to die yet, after all the opportunities she’d had to die, she would not die here of all places.  Then she felt her feet touch the coarse sand of the black beach where she’d spent the first night. She sat down with her back to the rocks and again watched the sidewalk curve away from her. 

Media reviews

Praise for A Marker to Measure Drift

“Bold . . . Undaunted . . . Maksik writes, credibly, across the boundaries of gender and race . . . A study of scarred consciousness struggling to come to terms with the violence done to it in a moment of cataclysmic horror . . . The sustained representation of Jacqueline’s search for release, for haven, has moments of bleak poetry . . . Maksik has illuminated for us, with force and art, an all too common species of suffering—grievous, ugly, and, unfortunately, a perennial.”
            —The New York Times

“Immensely powerful . . . Beautifully written . . . Jacqueline is a mesmerizing heroine . . . She is alive on the page from the outset, and with each paragraph she deepens, grows more complicated. Clearer and yet more mysterious . . . Maksik brings Jacqueline’s tale to a devastating finale . . . giving her quest an awful and moving dignity.”
            —The Boston Globe
 
"It will leave you breathless and speechless; it will send you reeling." 
            —The San Francisco Chronicle

“A fever dream of a novel . . . One might linger over most of this book, rereading particularly beautiful passages. Yet the ending is so compelling and visceral that one rushes until the fever breaks, dazed and haunted by its power.”
            —Chicago Tribune, “Editor’s Choice”

“A masterpiece . . . Maksik manages to accomplish in Marker something next to no one has managed to do, namely, to strip the world down to naked life, life in all its glory and all its agony and terror, and death . . . Maksik’s prose floats weightlessly and then falls like a fist on the table.”
            —The Buenos Aires Review
 
“Assured, intent . . . Through a catalogue of sensations, Maksik charts the cruelty and the hope of Jacqueline’s new life, while slowly approaching the horrors of her past . . . Maksik’s world is reaching out to touch. The task he’s set for himself is to record the impression of that touch, be it caress or jab.”
            —Guernica
 
“The starving body, as it turns to its own fat and tissue for energy, enters a state called ketosis; Maksik’s lean, affecting prose burns this way—stripped of any excess, entirely attuned to the prospect of survival, beautifying the simple things that sustain life.”
            —The Atlantic 

“Haunting and sensual, Maksik’s prose deftly intertwines the tenderness and torment of memory with the hard reality of searching for sustenance and shelter.”
             —Harper’s

“Stark and essential . . . With A Marker to Measure Drift, Alexander Maksik’s deep belief proves warranted: he has succeeded.”
            —The Millions
 
“A deeply invested character exploration of a young woman who is undergoing a transition to a life of alienation, whose memories are just beginning to operate with a newly installed consciousness of past events . . . Glimmers with reflection and lyricism.”
            —The Coffin Factory 

“Beautifully written . . . Through an impressionistic stream of consciousness, Maksik slowly reveals Jacqueline’s ordeal . . . A novel that measures the ripple effect of trauma and violence.”
            —The Daily Beast, “Hot Reads”
 
“Small events—a coffee, a gyro—take on monumental significance, and Maksik is deft and patient as he teases out Jacqueline’s recovery . . . In creating a well-drawn character so far removed from his own life, Maksik has written a novel that stands solidly on its own merits.”
            —Portland Mercury
 
“Remarkable . . . Conjures the horror of war almost entirely without describing its events . . . As the novel unspools it becomes clear that the truth is far more complicated and heartbreaking than it first appears . . . Deeply compelling.”
            —Kirkus

“Maksik has wonderful instincts for delivering just enough insight into Jacqueline’s character to keep us turning the pages. He manages to raise the stakes to the highest possible level without blinking . . . Marker is a book where the ‘big questions’ are stripped to their essential core: What is necessary to sustain life? The answers Maksik leads us to are touching, and the book ends on a hopeful note. Rating: 9/10”
            —Chicago Center for Literature and Photography 
 
“A story about a woman coping—a woman reconciling her newly manufactured life with her reality . . . Resonates on many levels: the impermanence of life, the perils of solitude, the futility of running from the past . . . Explores where memory and madness collide.”
            —Idaho Mountain Express
 
“Luminous . . . Maksik is both deft and lyrical, a master of tense—his shifts from past to present and back again are nearly invisible, so appropriate do they feel—and a sensualist, and it is impossible to read Marker with less than total attention . . . Maksik’s brilliance is evident in his ability to keep the novel’s stripped-down cast and plot so riveting.”
            —Winnipeg Free Press
 
“Palpable and affecting . . . Maksik has infused his tale of suffering with the loveliness of his prose . . . The desperate rhythms of thought intended to hold deeper desperation at bay are on display throughout this beautiful book that plumbs the depths of misery both mental and physical.”
            —The Gazette
 
“Thoughtful, often dreamy . . . A Marker to Measure Drift draws portraits of simple but honest kindness, offered in the form of conversation, a free meal, a ride across the island or a hand on a shoulder. In this way Maksik displays both realism and hopefulness about human nature without being unrealistic about either.”
            —Washington Independent Review of Books

“Gorgeously written, tightly wound, with language as precise as cut glass, Alexander Maksik’s A Marker to Measure Drift is a tour de force. Maksik renders the soul of his heroine, a Liberian refugee, with stark honesty so that we understand both the brutality of what she has run from and the terror she experiences as she tries to build her life back. I was undone by this novel. I challenge anyone to read it and not come away profoundly changed.”
            —Marisa Silver, author of Mary Coin and The God of War

“This novel is spellbinding. In its tenderness, grandeur and austerity, it reminds us that there is no country on earth as foreign, as unreachable, as the frantic soul of another human being.”
            —Susanna Sonnenberg
 
“A Marker to Measure Drift is a haunting, haunted novel. Things get stripped down to essentials—food, water, where to sleep for the night, a state of solitary desperation brought on by the most profound kind of loss. Every line of this excellent novel rings true as Maksik leads us toward the catastrophe at the story’s core. This is one of those books that leaves you staring into space when you finish, dazed from the sheer power of what’s been said.”  
            —Ben Fountain

“Arresting . . . Here is a human, detached from humanity, in pain and need. The world swirls around, the past lingers, but this human is at the center, small and yet deep. Maksik’s prose brilliantly delivers—I think he has fully realized what this story could be, and has told it in the best way possible. An amazing accomplishment.”
            —Lydia Netzer, author of Shine Shine Shine

“A moving, deeply felt and lyrical novel about past and present.”
            —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A vivid depiction of disillusionment, shock, and resilience . . . Sheds light on a setting great in both its beauty and violence . . . An exploration of terrible brutality and the effort it takes to survive.”
            —Library Journal

“Readers will be rewarded by Maksik’s gorgeous and evocative prose.”
            —Publishers Weekly