I’m an absolute sucker for everyday weirdness. Love when things that are familiar push beyond expectations, so when Ruben Cole finds something bizarre under the carpet in his exercise room I was on board. Without giving away too much of a beautiful beginning, I’m crazy about the surreal picture of Ruben crafting giant tools to satisfy his curiosity. But like Ruben’s exercise room, this story has so much more going on underneath. It is a story about obsession, hope, disappointment, about mysterious aunts and dark secrets. Ross takes us on a journey through a discovery that is life changing, and not always in a good way.
—Jessica Dawn
Assistant Editor, Short Story, Long
“The Ecstasy of Marv”
The old, ocean-blue, Cape Cod-style house in decline—a property passed down to somewhat lonely, semi-retired periodontist Ruben Cole from his rumor of an aunt—stood near the bottom of a steep hill descending to a saltwater bay, and when Seattle was blessed with precipitation, the rainwater cascaded down the long, twisting street past the house, gathering mass, pouring a bit of itself into each gutter like how a showy bartender might line up coupe glasses and fill them all with champagne (without stopping the pour). But during rare, fitful, complete-and-utter downpours like this one, when the clouds bulged like Ruben’s belly over the top of his belt, the rain gathered such speed as to hop the gutters to find new routes. One of those routes was over the edge of the Cape Cod’s sloped driveway and down the steps toward the house.
At the bottom of the steps, the rainwater bottlenecked and streamed toward the basement window-well, which filled like a waiting-room aquarium. When the well was three-quarters full, the window cracked and broke altogether, and the water poured down the wallpapered walls into the exercise room, which was fit with a stationary bike, barbells, weighted vests, and so on. More and more water poured in from the street, and the carpet soaked it up like moss would a spring shower. Finally, the rain tapered and the waters returned to their regular course, and the house cat sniffed the soaked carpet but wouldn’t set foot on it.
It was then that Ruben arrived home from physical therapy.
~
Tearing up the wet carpeting was a pain in the ass. He went through four Exacto-knife blades and left the remnants of the carpeting piled haphazardly beneath the raised deck out back. But when he pulled up the final pad, Ruben was surprised to not find the same cold gray foundation concrete as the rest of the room. Instead, he found a perfectly round, five-feet-in-diameter plug of wood, fit tight and flush with the concrete. Its color was tan like Ruben’s hair, but not uniform—it looked a little like particle board. He touched the circle and found it was indeed some kind of wood, but there was the slightest cushy give to it, and its texture was like cork.
On a whim, he went upstairs for his corkscrew and came back down and tried screwing it into the wood. The material was easily pierced, and the corkscrew soon became embedded. He tried yanking and pulling it up, but he couldn’t make any headway, and didn’t want to force the issue and potentially throw out his back.
Ruben was surprised to not find the same cold gray foundation concrete as the rest of the room. Instead, he found a perfectly round, five-feet-in-diameter plug of wood, fit tight and flush with the concrete.
Partly inspired by having the same name, Ruben’s childhood hobby was making Rube Goldberg machines, in which a series of physical chain reactions allowed a small metal ball to coast and hop down fantastical courses toward a satisfying finish. Building these machines and watching the strange logic of their execution gave Ruben the feeling of pleasure—this was important, because he rarely felt any significant emotions at all, other than the aforementioned loneliness and now, as an adult, the occasional guilty thrill at the pain he caused his patients when doing their dental work.
As his childhood moved from his twenties and thirties and on to his forties and fifties, Ruben’s skills at making these machines developed, and he was able to build more extravagant Goldbergs, in large part because he’d begun exploring metalworking. So now, with the question of the floor cork before him, he decided to use his metalworking skills to fashion a giant corkscrew so he might unplug the hole.
~
It took one week to build and outfit the giant corkscrew. He brought it downstairs and began the slow, difficult process of twisting it into the cork. Once he was satisfied with the degree to which it was embedded, he used a hydraulic jack to slowly lift the lever, pulling the cork out inch by inch. Finally, it popped, and the room was filled with a tart scent.
A flashlight revealed that the hole gave way to a chamber filled with some kind of inky liquid. A twenty-five-foot tape measure couldn’t find the bottom of the chamber, so he used a five-ounce mooching weight borrowed from a neighbor’s salmon fishing gear and attached it to a roll of twine and lowered it in. He found that the chamber was just short of fifty feet deep, and who knew how wide.
He removed the mooching weight from the twine and attached small plastic bucket partly filled with weights removed from an exercise vest. He sunk it beneath the surface and pulled it back up. To his surprise, the liquid looked and smelled like wine. Afraid to taste it, he sent a vial to a friend’s sister, who worked as a chemist, for analysis. It was indeed wine, fit for consumption, Syrah to be exact, and though its vintage couldn’t be determined with complete accuracy, the chemist hazarded a guess that it was at least twenty-five years old, which meant the chamber had been filled when his rumor of an aunt lived there, in the fiftieth-or-so year of her life—when she was roughly Ruben’s age. There was an anomaly, though, the chemist said. The test revealed slightly elevated levels of calcium in the wine, which was peculiar, but benign in terms of drinkability.
Ruben drank his first glass that night, alone. It was smoky, full-bodied, peppery on the palate, but went down smooth. He wasn’t a wine enthusiast, but he drank a half a bottle of middle-shelf merlot with his once-a-week red meat dinner, so he could immediately tell its quality was higher than any he’d tasted before. There was something different in the taste, something he’d never noticed in any other glass he’d drunk. He couldn’t quite place it. The only word he could find to describe it was mournful—if mournful meant joy because one had loved but sadness because the loved one was gone. In the days following, he would close his eyes as he drank it, taking deep breaths and feeling the bittersweet tears form in his eyes, which he wiped every so often with a paper towel.
He thought it over and decided not to tell anyone, because he had no reason to, and having a fifty-foot-deep cavern in the foundation of the house might cause it to be condemned. Plus, he didn’t want the attention the mystery would bring. Furthermore, there wasn’t enough wine to sustain a business selling it, so he decided to simply enjoy it himself in moderation, giving the occasional unlabeled bottle to friends and family, telling them a non-existent college roommate—who wished to remain anonymous so as not to be pestered with requests—made it as a hobby and gave Ruben a case or two every year as a kindness for letting him cheat on his physics homework all those years ago.
Ruben began the task of fashioning the various mechanisms needed to remove and prepare the wine.
Six years before, when Ruben was contacted with the news of his inheritance of the Cape Cod house, the lawyer understood nothing more than what the probate documents provided: essentially, the outcome of his rumor-of-an-aunt’s decision but not the reasons for it. Ruben had only met Florence twice, both times in his childhood. The first detail he could remember was at a family reunion, when Florence—chin-length black hair, flat affect, drab sundress, worn Asics—had asked Ruben his favorite popsicle flavor, and he’d answered grape, and the answer seemed to really, really delight her. Then, the second time, when he went to use her bathroom, he sneaked into the den and saw a framed 1930s comic of a Rube Goldberg machine with an exact replica below. He’d picked up the ball, placed it at the top, and watched it go down, over and over, until he felt a nudge to his shoulder. He turned to find Florence squinting at him and tapping on her thin lips.
“For some reason you remind me of Goldberg,” she said. “I don’t know why…maybe it’s your aura.” She reached out her cold hand and held his jaw and turned his head from side to side. “Or no, maybe it’s your chin.” She then ushered him out of the den, and after that, they never spoke or saw each other again.
Florence was sister to Ruben’s father, Fred, but the two were never close. She was twelve years Fred’s junior, so they didn’t develop the rapport that siblings closer in age often do. To boot—his father Fred said over the phone from Sacramento, his voice breathy from years smoking menthols—Florence was mousey and evasive and tough to get to know. Furthermore, she was more than a bit of a luddite, so contact between her and Fred was sparse to begin with and sparser as they aged. However, Fred did know that she was an atheist, deeply interested in farming, an able mechanic, and that she’d spent most of her adult life in a small, isolated farming community east of the Cascade mountains, surrounded by the rolling grasslands of the Palouse—but that was about it.
It took Ruben very little effort to track down her second husband, Gabriel Diaz, who’d run Florence’s farming operations for many years, and whose Facebook profile revealed he played bass guitar in a classic rock cover band and wore dull red cowboy boots. He’d retired across the state border in Lewiston, ID, and lived in spacious rambler with an abundance of lawn ornaments, which he posted pictures of next to silly captions.
Gabriel couldn’t shed much light on the situation, either. He said Florence had never talked about Ruben, and that, like Ruben, he’d only discovered the existence of the Cape Cod house after she’d died. But nothing about her surprised him, Gabriel said. She was cagey and she was weird—in a positive way—but still. He could have found out she’d been sister to the King of England and he wouldn’t have flinched. Florence didn’t share Gabriel’s need to, as she would have put it, bare her soul to the world. She would rather just do what she wanted and not be bothered.
Ruben did learn from Gabriel that along with her wheat, Florence had a small vineyard, and that winemaking was her real passion. Her vineyard produced offbeat varietals, most of which she couldn’t sell—after all, this was before the wine craze that flooded the forgotten heartland of the Pacific Northwest—so instead she bottled it herself. Gabriel hadn’t been to the vineyard in over a decade; it was managed by a collective, and he simply deposited the income checks every six months and signed tax papers when necessary.
Any news of the current whereabouts of Florence’s first husband, Bruce Quimby, was nonexistent. Gabriel had met Florence ten years after she and Bruce had separated, and—no surprise, considering Florence’s displeasure in talking about anything not related to plants—all she’d shared about Bruce was that he was a religious fanatic who one day got it in his head that his calling in life was to find his way to Tibet and climb Mount Everest solo, after which he would return, garner a following, and start a new religious movement based on the vision he assumed he’d experience at the peak. So, one day, Bruce left without notice, and she never heard from him again. When asked whether Bruce’s departure had caused her grief, Gabriel said it was impossible to know for sure. Maybe, maybe not.
There the search ended. Ruben wasn’t satisfied, but neither did he want to take it any further, especially to Tibet. His life had other concerns. The house was his, as was the wine, and that was enough.
He could have found out she’d been sister to the King of England and he wouldn’t have flinched. Florence didn’t share Gabriel’s need to, as she would have put it, bare her soul to the world. She would rather just do what she wanted and not be bothered.
Ruben bought a prefab, climate-controlled shed to store the cases of wine he planned to fill, and spent a somewhat contented, hobby-filled month building the last of the necessary instruments to bottle the wine. On a cool, crisp, winter Saturday, after finishing the preparations, he embarked upon the task of siphoning the entire chamber, filling and corking each bottle, and storing them. It took him a full week to complete the task. When the siphon began coughing—chamber emptied—and the last of the bottles was corked and stored, all that was left to do was close up the chamber and re-carpet the exercise room. But he wanted to try to see the nature of the chamber before sealing it shut.
To do this, he fashioned a fifty-foot-long collapsible steel rod with a power adapter and fastened them to his iPhone and a small, LED flood light. He lowered the contraption and found that, below the opening, the chamber broadened to ten feet square. The walls were oak-paneled and dyed dark by the wine. But as his contraption sunk toward the bottom, he noticed there was some kind of object resting below, upon what looked like a black sediment. As the iPhone drew closer, it revealed a rib cage and then a skull, stained purple, glossy in the glare of the flood light.
~
There was the question of how Ruben should respond to this discovery:
Should he call the police and potentially solve a crime of a missing person? Was he morally and legally obligated to do so?
Should he dredge up the bones himself and bury them?
Should he buy more grapes and begin fermenting more wine, using, for lack of a better term, the same recipe?
Should he just seal it up and try not to think about his new, well, roommate?
And so on. In the end, regardless of the cause of the skeleton being at the bottom of the chamber, his desire to live a peaceful, semi-retired life won out. Going public with the discovery would cause a hullabaloo unlike any seen before, and Ruben would be at the center. A possible murder in a hidden wine chamber below a house? His life would be taken over by it all, he’d have to move, and reporters, filmmakers, and the law would come calling, maybe for the rest of his life. Plus, he figured, the body had been in there twenty-five years, and whatever family it belonged to had probably long since given up finding this person—to cause them to rehash old sorrows and be thrust into a heinous, fantastical murder investigation would be cruel. And don’t forget, there was still the possibility that the person had died well before being thrown into the chamber; the skeleton could be a ten-thousand-year-old Cro Magnon for all Ruben knew. Did he really want his home to become an archaeological site?
He spent two years drinking the perfect wine in moderation, tracking his remaining bottles on a spreadsheet, and sharing it here and there with friends and family, as was the original plan. Whenever he drank it, he thought of the skeleton, and even when not drinking it, he sometimes thought of the skeleton, but he discovered that it didn’t bother him as much as he thought it would, both when tasting the wine and when donning a weighted vest and working out in the exercise room above the chamber.
For all intents and purposes, Ruben was an atheist, though he respected religious people, and in some cases was attracted to them, more so than to people with a viewpoint resembling his own. In his mind, they had an illogical passion, which deep down he wished to have himself. So, when he met Marvin Garvey-Chen in the cereal-and-granola-bar aisle at the Albertson’s near his home, and they began flirting with each other, it didn’t bother him when, later that night, they made out in Marv’s Volvo, which had an array of religious symbols hanging above them from the rearview mirror.
Marv was indeed a very religious person—he went to various services throughout the week, prayed a lot on his own, gave much of his spending money to the poor, and spent most of his vacation time in Tijuana building houses for people who needed them. More importantly, he was the most attractive man Ruben had ever seen: his skin was pale as tissue paper, he only wore white, and with his crow-black eyes, hair, and goatee, one could imagine him playing the part of a wizard in a fantasy movie.
Their relationship grew quickly, in part because Marv’s apartment had burned down, an unsolved arson that Ruben didn’t commit but nonetheless was grateful for because it allowed him to casually invite Marv to stay with him at the Cape Cod until he found a new place. In the interim, they discovered their relationship living together to be stable and satisfactory. The Cape Cod could comfortably house a family of six, so there was plenty of room. They got into a rhythm: breakfast together—work—dinner together (sometimes)— romantic interludes (sometimes)—bedtime. It was a wonderful change for Ruben, but he could tell that Marv still had his eyes out for something more, because he occasionally made remarks that Ruben’s outlook on life lacked depth, and—though Marv never said it—their lovemaking was well short of euphoric. So, though initially Ruben felt it best not to share his skeleton wine with Marv—so as not to have to answer any uncomfortable questions—on a red-meat Friday, Ruben gave in and took out a bottle to share, if only to see if it might lead them both to a deeper connection.
While Ruben was used to Marv discussing matters of spirituality after he’d had a couple glasses of mediocre merlot, the skeleton wine seemed to open an ecstatic doorway to his soul. He paced, preaching love to Ruben, and knelt before him to pray, tears in his eyes, voice shaky, with insight and gentleness that astounded Ruben. Then, after the last dregs of the bottle had been finished, Marv entered some kind of trance and begin speaking in rapid-fire mishmash of prophecy and adoration toward all beings, spiritual and otherwise. The evening ended with sweat-drenched sex of a tenderness and ferocity that neither Ruben nor Marv had ever experienced before—it was nothing short of transcendent, and that night of the first skeleton bottle, they slept in the same bed, curled around each other for the first time like clasped hands.
Ruben was in love, and being in love, for Ruben, meant he felt things like yearning and saw patterns that he’d never seen before. There might, just might, be something larger at work, something pulling people together, something that meant for Marv and him to meet at Albertson’s. During his daily walks around the neighborhood, he stopped to chat with neighbors and praise their flower beds. He left large tips whenever he went out for coffee or food and wrote friendly notes for the servers on his receipts. He put Marv’s water glasses in the freezer so that when he was thirsty, they would be ice cold. When drilling into someone’s teeth, he no longer felt a cruel joy, only a satisfaction for ultimately bringing about better health. He rehearsed versions of wedding proposals to Marv and made blueprints of tiny metalwork Rube Goldbergs he could fashion for table decorations at their reception—only instead of metal balls they’d use mints, because the guests would need them, because their wedding reception would be so romantic that every single guest would end the night making out with a stranger.
More importantly, he was the most attractive man Ruben had ever seen: his skin was pale as tissue paper, he only wore white, and with his crow-black eyes, hair, and goatee, one could imagine him playing the part of a wizard in a fantasy movie.
Months passed. They talked of marriage, but Marv didn’t feel the need to formalize what couldn’t be conceptualized; their relationship was beyond understanding, so to give it a matrimonial definition shared by so many who loved far less was an affront to the nature of true love itself. This frustrated Ruben, and he even suffered bouts of pure sadness, but he didn’t argue the point, over fear that doing so would push Marv away and cause him to seek someone else’s arms. Feeding this fear was the uptick of Marv’s charisma and enthusiasm, which had led him to lead late night vigils around the city. On most nights, Marv would still drink the skeleton wine with Ruben, and they would still make love, but instead of immediately falling asleep together like they used to, Marv would drive downtown or to adjacent neighborhoods and walk the streets, finding outcasts to pray for, giving out money and hope to the poor souls who needed it. Ruben never went with Marv because he was never asked. He had no choice but to accept it as being a part of the overall delightful package that was Marv, who now described his calling as to be not just a lover to Ruben, but an offering of love to the entire world.
~
While they drank one bottle—no more—of the skeleton wine every night, soon Ruben began to fear that when the wine ran out, their passionate relationship might disappear as well. His spreadsheet showed that the stores would last three years at the current rate of consumption. What would happen if they no longer had the skeleton wine to fuel their relationship? Would Marv grow restless and leave? And what about himself? Would he return to being that somewhat lonely, somewhat retired, somewhat everything man?
He made the calculations of how many grapes he would need, then called Gabriel Diaz, asking if he might buy some of the Syrah grapes from Florence’s vineyard. Gabriel said no prob—he’d even give Ruben a family discount. Ruben made plans to rent a cargo truck and drive east of the mountains to pick up the grapes after harvest that fall. In the meantime, using his metalworking skills, he would fashion the equipment to crush and press the grapes in the garage and then and transport it to the cavern. No rush. He had until fall.
~
Though Marv sometimes asked, Ruben never told him about what was in the prefab storage unit, nor about the true origins of the wine, the cavern, and the skeleton, nor his plan to make another batch. Sure, Marv probably suspected the storage unit held the wine, but Ruben didn’t engage. He didn’t want to complicate things unnecessarily, and Marv was not a man who responded to life with simplicity—even less so now that he had his nightly skeleton wine. Marv’s eccentricity seemed to grow by the day, and it wouldn’t be out of character for Marv to call the cavern a miracle and tell the whole world about it, effectively bringing an end to what was left of their quiet life together.
In the end, Ruben didn’t have to tell him of his plans, because Marv informed him of his own plans to travel south for six weeks, for what he called a mission, driving from city to city through Oregon and California, spreading the news about the universe, all its blessed inhabitants, and the gentle hand that held it all. His absence would be all but unbearable to Ruben, but it would give him time to craft the wine in secret.
It took nearly the full six weeks to process the juice and siphon it into the aging chamber below the exercise room. As the last drops fell in, he received a phone call from Marv, who had just arrived back in town, three days early. Marv asked Ruben to meet him at upscale Olafsson’s on the Pier downtown for lunch. I have something very important to tell you, Marv said. Ruben couldn’t help but thinking this might be the moment he’d been waiting for: Marv had realized while away so long that he couldn’t live without Ruben, and he’d bought a ring and wanted to propose over a fancy meal. They never went out for food—why the sudden change? Ruben tried to temper his hopes, but still felt anticipatory joy. He donned his best suit and drove downtown.
~
At Olafsson’s, the host led Ruben to a table overlooking the calm salt waters of Elliot Bay, but something was wrong. There was a younger man—sharp jaw, brown-spotted beginnings of a beard, ratty faux-vintage Rolling Stones t-shirt—he was gorgeous—sitting at the table with Marv, who wore his typical white polo, trousers, and shoes. The young man wasn’t sitting across from Marv, he was sitting next to him, close, closer than any friend would sit. Both stood up when Ruben approached, and they shook hands. Ruben made sure his handshake was firmer than the young man’s.
“Ruben, my love, this is Peter.” Marv put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze—you could see the young man’s t-shirt bunch as he did it. “But his new name is Wharf because that is where we found each other in San Francisco. Wharf, this is my roommate, Ruben.”
Roommate. “Hi…I…”
“Something wonderful has happened,” Marv interrupted, gesturing for them to sit down. “A miracle.”
The miracle was this: during the mission down the coast, Marv had found Wharf, who had been sleeping on couches after a series of unavoidable mishaps and a resulting fentanyl addiction that wouldn’t quit. On a hunch—a holy intuition, Marv said—he’d shared the wine he’d brought along with him, and Wharf’s cravings had stopped completely. What’s more, the two of them had fallen in love—a different, more insistent love than he had with Ruben, but no more profound because of it.
“Ruben, my love, I want to invite Wharf into our fold,” Marv said. “He can come live with us at the Cape Cod, and the wine will keep him off drugs.” He reached over and held both Wharf and Ruben’s hands. “Here, you guys hold hands, too.”
Marv did so, reluctant but obedient. He looked at Wharf and felt the urge to drill into his teeth and gums.
“There,” Marv said. “Can you feel it? Can you feel the energy? We can learn what it means to love each other as a trio. Maybe there will be more believers to add as the days go on. This is the will of the all-powerful—we shall expand, just like the universe. I know I wasn’t supposed to share the wine, but Ruben, we can reach people like Wharf. Who knows how many of the lost shall be found? We know this. We’ve known it all along. We can heal the world with it!”
Ruben looked at them both and, like a screw piercing cork, it occurred to him that the skeleton in the chamber could be none other than Bruce Quimby, religious fanatic, drowned by his wife Florence all those years ago. The trip to Tibet was a ruse—plausible, but nearly impossible to confirm or deny. Ruben nodded and spoke, “I see…it’s what’s meant to happen.” He thought of Rube Goldberg machines, and how the ball inevitably at some point comes to rest until another soul lifts it back to the top to start again. “I have something important to show you when you get home. You’ll have to see it to believe it.”
Maybe there will be more believers to add as the days go on. This is the will of the all-powerful—we shall expand, just like the universe.
A few hours later, Ruben lay sprawled on the floor of the exercise room in the downstairs of the Cape Cod, sweating, having just finished pulling up the carpet again. A bottle of the skeleton wine lay empty near the elliptical. He wept, feeling crushed, like the grapes from the vineyard, and empty, like their skins left behind to be thrown into the compost. Wharf, who’d gone to visit a friend on Cap Hill before coming to the Cape Cod, might succumb to fentanyl without more of the wine, but in the end, it didn’t matter enough to Ruben to change what he’d planned.
The door squeaked open above him, then, after a moment, thumped shut. “Ruben?” asked the voice of Marv. “Where are you, my love?”
Ruben rose from his knees, wiped his eyes, and called out, “Come down to the exercise room. I have something to show you.” He lifted a weighted vest from a hanger on the wall. Above, footsteps creaked. In his mind Ruben could see Marv ducking beneath the low ceiling, graceful and austere, then making his way down the stairs. As he was descending, Marv said, “Wharf said that he so, so appreciated…” But then, there in the doorway, Marv—dressed in all white, face glowing like an ice-winter moon—stopped short. He looked around at the bare foundation floors, empty of carpeting, and the large corkscrew and hydraulic jack. Then, near the middle of the room, was the five-feet-in-diameter plug resting halfway in the hole. “What is this, love?”
“You’ll never believe it. Here, take this and put it on backward.” He held out the vest. “Trust me. It will all make sense here in a minute. Our next journey together awaits.”
Marv took the vest in his hand and laughed. “Your workout vest? Why, my love…”
“I had a vision at Olafsson’s,” Ruben interrupted, “like the one you had with Wharf. I finally know what’s meant to happen. You are a gift to me, and will be so until the end of my days.”
Marv pulled on the vest backward and Ruben zipped it up from behind.
“There,” Ruben said. “Perfect. Now go, pull back that cork. Take a look.”
Marv did so, rolling the cork aside. The juice rested inside, as still as a mournful pond. “What is this?” He leaned over the cavern to look then took a deep breath.
STORY:
Ross McMeekin is author of the novel Pepperleaf (Thirty West), as well as a recent story collection, Below the Falls (Thirty West, 2024). His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol.1 Brooklyn, Shenandoah, and Redivider. He’s a recipient of writing fellowships from Hugo House and Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle.
*
ART:
Erin Dorney is the author of Yes I Am Human I Know You Were Wondering (Autofocus).
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Ross about this story.
Such an utter delight!! Thank you!! Marv and Ruben will stay with me for a long time!
Fantastic story! Loved every twist and turn.