by Oisín Curran
Gunshot. Severn stands in the second boat, my boat, gun smoking.
Lutra turns her giant head and stares at him. The little bullet did nothing but sting her and she’s not happy anymore, she’s mad. She swims close to Severn, who’s busily trying to reload his stupid single-shot pistol while Chisolm screams at him from the other boat to stop.
One swipe from Lutra’s paw knocks him overboard. She grabs him with her claws and takes him down.
Now the water’s flat as ice. Quill wails and falls in the stern. In the other boat Chisolm stares at the water. It explodes.
Lutra’s twisting and turning. Severn’s knife is in her side. He’s holding on to the handle. Water raining off his face, hair flat wet to his forehead, mouth wide, arms white muscle rope. Gone.
Lutra dives again.
Quill’s crying is the only sound except for the gulls. They’re coming, waiting for a kill to eat. Then their calls turn into gull screams and they dive onto something coming up. But the something moves. It’s Severn and he’s alive.
But when we pull him back on board the look on his face surprises me. Not happy, not mad, but what?
Quill towels him off fast and hard, brushing Rook aside when he tries to help. Poor Rook. And over his head I see Severn look at Chisolm and Chisolm look back at him. The strange look on both their faces is the same. Disappointment.
Severn wanted to drown with Lutra. Chisolm wanted the same thing, or at least she wanted Severn to disappear.
Can the others see what’s going on? No, they’re not even looking. They’re all looking off the port side because that’s where Lutra is. The knife didn’t kill her, how could it? It was a pin to her. She dives.
Then our boat flies up and crashes back down, almost flips. It’ll flip next time.
No yelling, no screaming this time. We know what’s coming. She’s enraged now. She’s coming for us and there’s nothing we can do.
Shout from the other boat, and we look over in time to see Chisolm in the water swimming to Lutra. They both dive and when they come back up Chisolm is riding her beast, hands grabbing the neck fur of her giant otter, who is swimming away so fast they’re almost out of sight before we understand what’s happened. Chisolm looks back once, but if she says anything she’s too far away to hear.
Captain Severn calls out to the other boat. I look and see why. They’re following Chisolm and Lutra. They’ll never catch up, the otter’s too fast. But they’re going anyhow. Severn looks at me, face drained of all authority. I shake my head.
We can’t follow them, I say, raising my voice so everyone on board can hear me. It’s the wrong way. They’ve made a bad choice.
There’s no argument. Everybody on board is too tired, too scared to argue.
Quill doesn’t seem to care that her mother is gone. No surprise there, I suppose. I don’t think I ever saw the smallest sign of affection pass between them. If anything, they seemed to physically repel each other. By contrast, Severn’s near death has suddenly made him visible to Quill, or at least present in some new, more valuable way. She holds on to him so tightly there’s no air between them. Rook, looking completely miserable, tends the sail and steers the boat where I point.
My mind’s eye blinked, and I slid back from that subterranean world to the faded pastel carpeting of the hospital waiting room. Despite the presence in my muttered vision of Monsters! Escapes! Jealousy! Myles appeared to have dozed off in the middle of writing it down, and so I jotted a rough outline of the ending before nudging him. He stirred, his eyes opened vaguely, briefly he saw me, and briefly smiled before nodding off again. Well, I would let him sleep. He’d been up early to drive into Boston and here we were at Mass General, waiting for Iris on the stained upholstery of the waiting-room chairs: the gum-stuck, fluorescent interior from which all volition, all humanity, seemed to have been siphoned, leaving only us, drained captives of procedure waiting powerlessly, thoughtlessly, for, at best, a temporary reprieve from inevitable loss. The hours in such places are vast and hollow chambers through which adults pace or slump in mute regret with improved intentions for a future that dwells in a suspended medium awaiting the good, bad, or indifferent word, after which one’s life ends, or limps on or begins again. Mind you, I didn’t feel like that at all, at the time. At that age a waiting room was a place where I was licensed to daydream.
Daydream, read, sleep, and distract my father from his suppressed dread. Down a long, sunless corridor I saw Iris being wheeled in a gurney from one room to another. She waved anemically in my direction and I waved back, but by the time Myles sat forward to look, she had disappeared. Years later, when I recalled this image, Iris had no memory of it and denied that it had happened, even when I attributed the lapse in her memory to anaesthetic—she swore that she wasn’t even on the same floor as the waiting room. Who then had I waved at? Some mother-double? A hallucination? I maintain that I saw her, whether she was there or not. Or maybe I just saw her out of habit. Afterward, the hours went on ringing hollowly by.
Myles had a single dollar in his wallet, and we debated for some time which items to purchase from the vending machine, deciding eventually, or rather Myles decided, that day-glo orange crackers with peanut butter provided the most nutrition at the lowest cost and with several of these we fortified ourselves sufficiently to carry on waiting. Peering over Myles’s shoulder, I saw that he had flipped the pages of his legal pad away from the record of my pre-birth adventures and was intently constructing a poem. I wandered away and examined the intricate braids of a ficus plant for a time. Of the others waiting in that room I have no memory—a series of multi-hued heads bowed over crossword puzzles or staring vacantly out the window. But what was out the window? That too remains obscure to me—or rather opaque—great squares of plate glass so overexposed by the bright exterior that nothing of the outside world appears to me but vague impressions of buildings flashing in the lengthening afternoon. Idly I picked up an abandoned, tattered National Geographic and looked wistfully at fantastical animals painted on the rock walls of ancient caves. An anthropologist imported a shaman from Botswana to give his professional opinion of the work done in French caves tens of thousands of years ago. Low quality, said the shaman. Its purpose? asked the anthropologist. Stone is the veil between the visible and the invisible, said the shaman confidently, The painting pierces the veil. Would you say, then, the anthropologist went on, That the cave painting is a kind of window through which to view the supernatural? The shaman said, No certainly not, the painting is not an opening in a wall, it is what makes the opening—it is a spear, a knife—No, the shaman interrupted himself, to be precise, the painting is the thrust of the knife. I flipped the pages to a black-and-white photo of two men in hats and jodhpurs posing with some pack mules in a jungle clearing. Percy Fawcett and Raleigh Rimell shortly before they disappeared in the Amazon during one of Fawcett’s doomed expeditions to find his lost city of Z, a fabled pre-Columbian metropolis.
Zed, Myles corrected me when I read the caption to him. The last letter in the alphabet is pronounced zed, not zee, I don’t know why Americans insist on getting it wrong.
I knew very well his position on this, but my name, my looks, my hand-me-downs all marked me as far too eccentric in my grade school to get away with using Commonwealth pronunciations.
But Myles never let go. It was one of the emblems of his difference. Ireland had taught him zed, Canada had reinforced it, and he was not about to succumb to bland Yankee locution just to fit in.
Now an orderly came to lead us by corridors and elevators to Iris’s room. What use to describe this repeating scene? Iris’s pallor, the bloodless room, her wracking pain, the morphine lull. Such hours would come and go again and again, staining that year with patches of clinical green, bleached linoleum, and stool samples—each time the same sentiments and gestures expressed by the same doctors and nurses, the same indecisive prognosis, the same unpayable bil
l added to the others in a growing pile when we returned home. So identical are these scenarios in my memory that the same dark shapes fall swiftly past Iris’s recovery room window, followed by the same commotion and sirens, the same nurse’s voice explaining that two workmen had fallen from a scaffold and perished. But surely it was only once that this could have happened. Only once that Iris sank back into her pillow as though the news were a physical blow. She insisted on leaving immediately and checked herself out against the advice of her doctor.
We drove straight from the hospital to the home of our friends Simone and Jack in a nearby suburb. I say ‘drove straight’ because that was the intention. Navigated by an experienced commuter, the trip should have taken half an hour, but for Myles and Iris it required a minimum of two hours. Accustomed to this delay, I settled down for a long nap, using my coat to muffle the noises of increasing agitation in the front seat. For some reason, my parents were never less than stunned by how lost they became in their efforts to navigate Boston’s suburbs.
The house where Simone and Jack lived was an unremarkable structure on an unremarkable street in an unremarkable neighbourhood. But in a side room was their study, a bohemian lair ornamented with bookshelves that covered every inch of wall, and it was here they received visitors like Myles and Iris, fellow travellers in the the counterculture. With couches draped in exotic caftans low-lit by hanging paper lanterns, the place looked to me like a library from the Arabian Nights. A record player spun the latest LP from Alain Stivell at low volume but rich quality from hi-fi speakers placed strategically about the room. Jack was an audiophile who dressed like an urban fiddler, in leather vest, newsboy cap, trim goatee, and gold earrings, although he played no instrument.
Iris sighed with relief as she sank into an armchair and accepted a pint of homebrew stout. This was her element. All her pain seemed temporarily to ebb as she sat back and listened to Simone spin one yarn after another of her childhood on the beaches of Brittany, playing in the shadow of her family’s ancient chateau, collecting geodes filled with glittering purples and blues that sparkled in the high sunlight when cracked open like stone coconuts using the wooden clogs slung around her neck by her teacher as punishment for speaking Breton instead of French in school. Tragically, she’d had to leave everything behind, along with her collection of first-edition theosophy texts, when her diplomat father was posted to Argentina, but then at least she’d had the chance to learn tango from master dancers, as the near-blind Borges, a great friend of her mother’s, looked on. Yes, sad now that her lupus affliction prevented her from practising those exquisite steps although even if she could there would be no dancing with Jack who was the worst she’d ever met. And here she smiled indulgently at her husband, twenty years her junior, who basked in her gaze.
I was surprised to learn recently that there’s a sizable Zen centre in Buenos Aires, said Myles, gamely leaping into the brief pause, but he was up against a formidable talker with decades more experience in maintaining control over a colloquy, which is what she called such evening conversations, only half in jest, and as she shook her pitch-black locks I caught sight, for the first time, of their white roots.
Zen is everywhere these days, she said, Which means it’s done for, as far as I’m concerned. Orthodoxies are already beginning to hamstring it. Orthodoxies and imbeciles. I read your letter about Willard’s latest tomfoolery. I was suddenly overwhelmed with guilt. It was I who convinced you to join me at New Pond. Only to abandon you to your fate when I could see that it was nothing but another sham—I told you so at the time, do you remember? You laughed—you’re not laughing now... Another sham, another disappointment. I think I can safely say that I have practised with more so-called teachers of Buddhism than any other individual in North American over the past twenty years—and I, for one, am through with it all... Meditation—yes! The dharma—yes! But teachers—no, no, no, and no. If there’s no poison in their hearts at first – and which of us is poison-free?—the trust their students lend them, the trust they demand, is injected into their souls, where it infests… Until they invert from ego-free angels—so they claim—into demons... I’m not exaggerating—I’ve seen the demon-fire in their eyes (I saw it in Willard—I told you so at the time, do you remember? You laughed…). To tell you the truth, I’ve grown suspicious of anyone willing to instruct the souls of others. I see the sinful pride in their hearts—too old not to see it. Hell, I can smell it—smell the evil (and there is evil in the world, no matter what they say). Listen to me, with all my heart I strongly urge you to leave Willard. Leave that place, come to Boston or go to New York. Go anywhere with enough people to jostle your beliefs. That cesspool in the woods will drown you.
Yes, yes! said Iris. We must leave, we must.
But Myles smiled vaguely and shook his head, saying he knew Willard was flawed, deeply flawed, yet he still had good qualities and there was much yet to learn.
Which you could learn anywhere, said Simone, interrupting sharply, I learn more from the Transcendentalists—remember them? Sometimes what you’re looking for is right in your backyard—than I ever learned from Willard. Find a Native American elder to teach you about happiness, hatred, love. Have you read Black Elk Speaks yet? You must. How to be a human being—that’s the question. Who cares about attaining nirvana if it means you go on being an asshole? Or go back to your faith—investigate the Gnostic Gospels, Origen, Eriugena, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila… Have you read The Cloud of Unknowing…
And as she spoke, Jack roamed the shelves, pulling down the books in question and stacking them on the coffee table in front of Myles and Iris, who leafed through them with beer-infused delight.
Do you, Simone asked, suddenly looking at me, Want something to eat? A book to read? A game to play? You’ll be bored here listening to us jaw all evening.
No thanks, I said, I’m fine.
He’s a sponge, said Myles. He likes to listen.
And I did. Although I also liked to talk and had something to add on the subject of geodes, or rather a question to ask, as in where could one find them? And what exactly were they? But by the time there was enough of an ebb in the word flow to insert a phrase, the subject had drifted so far from the beaches of Brittany that it would’ve been disruptive to bring them up. Instead I maintained my hush and drew a cloak of silence around me so as not to be noticed again, and sat and listened to the torrent of talking and talking with occasional eddies and now and then a contribution from a tributary brook (my parents or Jack) that served only to raise the waters of the flood even further.
Yes, even Myles was (mostly) silenced by Simone. Here both he and Iris disappeared, and I could feel their relief in doing so. Simone’s deluge of words calmed them, washing away their distress for the time being. And I could see that this was part of Jack’s attraction to her. Her speech was a balm to whatever personal wounds he suffered from. And in being neutralized by her, the three of them joined me in my natural state. For I had already learned years earlier that people who can disappear and disperse themselves into the surrounding atmosphere, tailoring their wants and worries and wonderings to the direction of flow, are highly valued (if subconsciously) by the authors of the flood. I did my best to go along, for to voice objection, to resist, was to invite notice and critique. I wanted neither. I was too lazy. In any case, there wasn’t any room for me, qua individual, either in this conversation or any other held by my parents and their friends. And why should there be? Who wants to hear the inner life of an eleven-year-old? Siblings can develop their own subcultures separate from their parents wherein they can forge their selves. An only child with a passive temperament assimilates to the parental culture or rebels utterly. I chose the former path, a willing prisoner. But none of that was on my mind then, I hadn’t a glimmer of self-knowledge at that age as best I can remember. No, back then the anaesthetizing effect of Simone’s talk and my parents’ temporary happiness, made me happy.
And drowsy.
It’s late afternoon when we see an island on the horizon over our port bows. It’s off our course but not by much. City pulls me straight ahead, but the crew is tired. They want land under their feet. I can’t force them on.
After I saved everybody from Nolan, Rook started talking to me. But after Lutra came he whispered that it was my fault. My fault she’d turned into a giant and almost killed us. My fault we’d lost Chisolm and half the crew. What he really means, I know, is that it’s my fault Quill and Severn are together. Now he says we have to go ashore. He says we need water, we need supplies, we need a rest.
Okay, I say, For one night.
Severn points the boat at the island. It gets bigger, and the bigger it gets, the stranger it looks.
It’s a fortress, says Severn.
He’s right. The whole island has a big wall all around it made of dark red stone, and high on top of the wall there are crowds of people.
We see a bright flash at the top of the wall, and a few seconds later we hear a bang, followed by a strange whistling sound. Then the water explodes near us. Waves throw the boat up, up, over. No, not quite over. We’re back down, full of water. We’re bailing, we’re yelling.
Another flash, another bang, more whistling, exploding water. Flash, bang, whistle, boom. Flash, bang, whistle, boom.
They’re shooting at us! says Captain Severn, and he slams the rudder starboard. We come about and head away from the island. In a few minutes we’re out of range of their cannonballs, or whatever they’re shooting.
Why? Everybody on the boat wants to know why. Who cares? They don’t like strangers. Or they don’t like our boat. Or they’re in a bad mood today. We have to go on. There’s a thing coming. My Follower is still after me. I can feel it back there but can’t see it. Night falls.
