Destination Incorporated

A climate crisis beach read

“Destination Incorporated” is the first story in Litverse’s Summer Sunday Beach Reads Series. (non-beach short stories here and here. It’s a heart-warming tale about a beach town in the middle of a climate crisis.

Every morning when Wendy woke up, she saw blue. Back when beach life had been a dream rather than reality, she had hung a painting of the Atlantic Ocean to the bedroom ceiling so she could start every day looking at it and thinking how life flowed as sure as waves. Now, years later, the same message seemed menacing. The waves looked like a maw brushed the color of cold-blooded ice. The alarm screamed. Wendy waited out the full minute of bleating before grabbing the Marlboro Golds on the filing cabinet she had taken from the street to use as her bedside table.

She lit a cigarette and peeled the curtains by the bed. Tourists wandered the sand-dazzled sidewalk showing cave animal physiques exposed by bathing suits of various ambitions. Beach traffic lined the throat of the street down into the heat-soaked horizon where motels and bread-and-breakfasts slumped. The panting engines and blasting stereos and hollering horns sounding like the desperate mating calls of alien creatures.

Ashing the first cigarette in the sun-bleached pot of the dead plant in the windowsill, Wendy smoked a second and changed into her store uniform. Coughing so hard she spat something spidery and rusty on her wrist, Wendy wiped it on the towel, slipped into sandals, tugged the orange-red Destination Incorporated Dress to her hips.

"Still got it," she said to the mouth in the mirror, and coughed her way down the stairs.

The sun glared white on the dunes. Under the neon sign of the arcade where barefoot kids galloped and teenage couples laughed, melting into each other and sometimes exiting with over-sized stuffed animals carried with triumph. Families branded with angry red sunburn shook in and out of SUVs and sprayed sunscreen. Cars clacked, clicked, and clapped closed surrounded with people holding coolers and umbrellas and towels and tote bags with the forearm ferocity of crusaders carrying sword and shield across a godless threshold, that burning limbo between parking lot and beach.

Wendy passed the motel with folding chairs on the porch where old men drank from noon to dusk and the McDonald's where families munched behind windows wide-eyed and sightless. She passed the mini-golf course where golf balls clustered like dinosaur eggs on top of the pirate ship and walked beneath the shadow of the squirting water feature and shuddering windmill before crossing the street down the boardwalk through the dunes and taking a turn up the sand to slap her sandals back down to the parking lot of the gas station disguised as a tourist shop and the motel with hot tubs where people parked motorcycles out front.

A border wall divided Destination Incorporated Resort #42 across from the gas station and offered an open door where employees for the resort swiped timecards. Wendy thumbed her phone in line next to a man in an Allagash the Alligator costume talking to two maintenance workers in Spanish, the alligator’s tiny arms motioning wildly.

Past the water flume, the carousel, the Snack’n’Swamp Zone, Wendy entered the Gift Center of Destination Incorporated Resort #42, a warehouse with pillars supporting an overhanging rooftop casting shadows over the cotton candy vendor and Swamp Friends cart, the Destination Family merchandise Hut. In the store windows, palm tree t-shirts hung from mannequins standing in old sand with imported seashells.

Wendy slapped her name tag on her heart. 

*

Jack and Mary wandered Gift Center of Destination Incorporated Resort #42 with the loose-limbed confidence of people who had defeated the Destination Welcome Agent at the door by saying they’re “just looking” without thinking about looking back or thinking about looking at what wasn’t in front of them. Mary had encountered Jack in high school with this mindset in the first place: her husband was undeniably handsome and the hard angles of his face were undeniably rugged but the shape of his mind was undeniably square. Jack had gone to a trade school. Mary had a degree in Psychology from a liberal arts college. She had dated college men who approached with foreign fumbling respect as if they didn’t speak the same language. Mary tracked Jack down at a hometown party and found the instincts of his simplistic stereotyping refreshing. One session of drunk sex led to more sessions until the sessions became sober and then some sessions became walks in the woods and/or too many movies. 

They married. Mary accepted that she couldn’t talk to Jack about politics, literature, or philosophy and the way he debased her education as 'unnecessary’ but these charms fell one by one like teeth. Five years into marriage, Mary couldn't see the magic of the man for the machine of him. Some things that annoyed her: Jack's misogynistic comments, how he breathed exclusively from his mouth and ate his food like a cow and his refusal to learn anything new. The way he and his brother got drunk enough not to remember every second Saturday of the month.

Jack didn’t narrate their marriage in this fashion. He only knew Mary nagged him more with every passing year and he dreaded even attempting to speak his mind. He feared informing her of plans that didn't involve her, because it felt like submitting them to a cruel jury. The crime, the motive, the circumstance never seemed to matter in these conversations: it was always the verdict and the verdict was always guilty.

"Who wears the pants?" his brother would ask on their monthly nights out.

"We both do," Jack said, ordering tequila shots.

When they tried to have children and failed, Mary and Jack felt like their lives had come to standstill. The trip to Destination Incorporated Resorts #42 had been an attempt to, as Mary said, get away from “the rush of it all” but what Jack knew to be “the disappointment of it all.”

On the second floor of the Destination Incorporated Gift Center, Jack and Mary found a point of coy contention.

"Check these out!" Jack cried to a set of golf clubs. 

"Very nice." Mary slipped a warning hand on his shoulder.

"How much you think they are?" He thumbed the price tag. 

"Expensive?"

"Not bad. And all the essentials. My birthday's in a month, baby." 

“You already have clubs.”

"It's a good deal." 

Wendy approached Jack and Mary: "Can I help you folks?" 

"We're just—" 

"Can I get a discount on these?"

"Jack. Honestly." 

"Let me ask my boss."

Wendy went down the stairs, fantasizing about smoking.

"Jack, we're not buying these!" 

“Why not?"

“One: our room was already expensive. Two: you don’t even like golf. So, three: you’re never going to use them.”

“Not true. Wrong. Really wrong.”

“Which part?”

“I want to hang out at the beach."

"Didn’t you want to do the Croc Tour?"

"I want these!" Jack shouted at the bag of golf clubs. 

The store went silent with the outburst. Mary flushed.

This time, she decided, she wouldn't back down. 

*

Hearing Mary and Jack shouting at each other was an eight-year old boy named Dennis who was leaning into the railing of the third floor at the Destination Incorporated Gift Center.

"Awful," his mother said.

"Ridiculous," his father said.

Dennis squeezed the posts with sweaty hands as he started to float inside himself with a deep dizziness as strong as the sea watching his feet like they were a million miles below.

His mother knelt beside him. "Dennis. You okay?"

"He needs to go to bed." His father scooped him into his arms. Jack and Mary’s screams followed the family down the stairs to the second floor and down the stairs to the first floor and down to the cash register.

Dennis had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. He had lived half his life in hospitals. The diagnosis hit his mother so hard she sought help from God and hit his father so hard he sought help from hidden whiskey bottles in the basement.

When an aunt sent a card to the family saying she was "sorry for their loss," his mother shoved the card into the trash. Dennis found it and wondered if he was already gone and if pain was the only difference. He watched the school bus pass his house and watched the kids in the windows, feeling-thinking: the future is passing by me and no one is even bothering to wave.

For his eighth birthday, his father filled forms about kids with cancer. Officials drove to the house to talk to Dennis and when they entered the house, he felt like some dark destiny had found him, a doom dressed in white. Chattering.

“They’re here to help you reach your dreams!” his mother said, showing a man and a woman in white-blue uniforms to his room. They saw the posters of crocodiles and asked if he would like to see crocodiles in real life. He nodded, only wanting them to leave. The foundation bought the Dennis and his father and his mother economy tickets and a two-night hotel stay at Destination Incorporated Resorts #42 where the Croc Tour was one of the top five in the country.  

As the father carried Dennis out of the resort, climate activists chanted outside. Destination Incorporated Resorts #42 had been exposed for dumping corporate waste (a lot of it) into the swamps past the beach. Local media covered the story for eight days. Then an actor cheated on his wife. 

*

The climate activists stood bravely outside the Destination Gift Center ignoring the indifference of those who turned away. They knew that if Destination Incorporated was allowed to get away with such flagrant abuse of the environment, there would be no environment left. Crocodile corpses had showed up on shores with sores on their bellies, their mouths rotting. Species of birds had gone missing from the swamps. Fishermen on a small chain of islands to the south could no longer find fish that hadn't been poisoned.

An activist-slash-YouTuber who preyed on people who looked like they disliked confrontation saw the father come out of the store with Dennis in his arms. "You have a young son. How can you be endorsing Destination’s destruction of the planet? Don’t you want your son to have a future?" 

The word “future” made the mother start crying.

"Get the fuck away from me," the father replied.

The activists confused the father's helpless frustration for what they hated most: the Capitalist American Man. They waved their signs and phones at him and yelled that the whole world was watching, or at least the people tuning into the activist group’s Tik-Tok, and followed the father as he tried to get to the hotel holding his son against the world. 

Wendy watched by the dumpsters, stubbing her cigarette. Through the window, she saw Mr. Brundy at the cash register, then saw the cashier point in her direction. Her heart sank. "Wendy, get in here!" Mr. Brundy shouted over the chanting activists. 

*

Mr. Warren, regional vice-president of Destination Incorporated, got ready for his surprise visit to Destination Incorporated Resort #42. The trip had been organized by the ancient Mr. Kindle, Destination's founder, because he had seen a television segment about the activists and envisioned a meeting between Mr. Warren and the activists as an opportunity for public relations that would resonate with the younger consumers they needed to target for the lower-budget resorts.

"Announce The Green Initiative when you see them," he told Mr. Warren on the phone. 

"I haven't heard of that program," Mr. Warren said. 

"It doesn't exist yet," Mr. Kindle said. “Just say the words.”

Mr. Warren drove to the airport from the office, forgetting his daughter's summer dance recital, the second one he had missed in the two weeks since she had started the program. She called as he sat in his first-class seat, bursting: "I reserved a seat for you, Dad. I remember you forgot to get one the last time and I just kept looking at it and it was empty and… and..." 

Mr. Warren’s heart squirmed like a worm in the hot sun. “Honey… I’m sorry.”

"You have to turn that off, sir. For take-off.”  

"I’ll be at the next one," he said.

“I promise,” he said.

He looked at the phone to see that she had hung up and turned it on airplane mode and put on his eyemask and listened to the crew’s safety instructions. Secure your own mask first, they said.

Mr. Warren and his wife were divorced. They maintained a cold silence punctuated by the exchanges of their daughter to and from his apartment for every other weekend and Wednesday night dinners. He imagined his wife pumped her fist in triumph when time he forgot the dance recitals and soccer games. He kicked off the sheet of his twin bed every night staring at the ceiling in the agony of the fact that so much of his paycheck went to someone who could just as well be spending the money on herself. (Reality check: Mr. Warren’s wife had moved on. She only felt a deep disappointment when he betrayed their daughter but she knew him too well, now, to even feel resentment. But the lesson of not trusting someone but still respecting their was too complex for Mr. Warren’s ex-wife to pass to their daughter. And, she would wonder while staring at the empty seat in the front row beside her and her boyfriend, who should ever learn that forgiveness came from feeling nothing from betrayals until it was necessary? Absence and silence were natural for people who lost themselves to the world, she wanted to tell her daughter when she had wept hot heavy tears into her shoulder after the recital still. They would resurface when they could but never when they should.)

Mr. Warren stepped out of his airport taxi and adjusted his tie. He looked for uncomfortable tourists and followed the chants. Inside the Destination Gift Center, he saw Mr. Barndy shouting at Wendy. He saw Mary and Jack on the staircase. Jack hugged the bag of golf clubs close to his chest and shouted from the cover of the nine iron.

"This is supposed to be a peaceful retreat for people," Mr. Warren sighed. He looked back at the activists out front and wondered: What was so evil about Destination Incorporated? Sure, some of the business practices wandered into morally ambiguous territory, but Mr. Warren wasn't interested in ethics involving environments or the structure of society. He was only interested in people's comfort, because people paid for comfort. They didn't pay for companies who nobly strove to change social orders, they didn't pay for companies who cleaned forests and cleaned the air. People paid for luxuries. Life was a given, why would anyone pay for the guarantee?

As Mr. Warren went out to make these points to the activists, Wendy decided to quit her job. She stormed out of the gift center, leaving Mr. Barndy behind. She wouldn't be well off financially, she thought, but she would be well off spiritually. Wasn't that what mattered? She made a point of shoving Mr. Warren as she exited, not knowing who he was but hating his suit. Mr. Warren fell in front of the activists. They surrounded him and filmed him from above while chanting climate change slogans. Jack and Mary started to cry on the stairs, realizing their marriage was doomed and they still loved each other and both these facts could be true at the same time. 

Shifting Dennis to his shoulder, the father punched the activist who had pursued him down the street. The phones went up and two bearded activists charged into him. The father dropped Dennis. Dennis cracked his head against a fire hydrant and lay crumpled at the curb. His mother dropped to her knees next to him, weeping. The father swung at an activist, missed, and got punched in the stomach. Someone kicked Mr. Warren in the face. The whole world is watching, the activists said to their phones.

*

While all of this happened, the ocean had been churning, the tide receding. A tidal wave looming five times as tall as the tallest ride in Destination Incorporated Resorts #42 rose from the beach. The shadow fell over the resort and people looked up in a pure moment of common human awe. The wave dropped to earth. Every single person drowned. The resort fell in on itself. Everything became debris.

News teams rushed to the spot and covered the story for three weeks.