The Last Island

by Joan J. K. Groves

“From the first there have been lies and greater lies about it. The smile of the Sphinx, the bastard child of a king and queen, October thirteenth, and Nazi submarines were all lies to bury truth in stone, to bury it in flesh, to bury it in a day of the week, and to bury it in steel. I buried it in what was on this island—folklore and water.

  “Yes, before you ask it—it is real and it is true.”

  Then Manta began to question him.“The hot spot, the slaver, and the U-Boat—”

  The Deacon cut him off as he had cut off John Henry.

  “The hot spot was there first. The old slaver fell on top of it and the U-Boat fell on top of the slaver. Just numbers, Manta—not magic or supernatural at all. There is great evil there on the floor of the Deep, for sure. Those poor drowned slaves are out of their misery, yeah, but those slavers are drowning each day in the fires of hell and Herr Schliemann and those Nazis are suffering because in death they now know that they were never alive. The irony of it is so elemental that it plays out the essence of first knowledge.”

  “What the—” I said it, but John Henry and Manta were thinking it, too.

  Ironic! The fire from Hell and the hot spot from the sea of Chaos procreated and bred the drowned ground. Yeah, Manta’s false gods and John Henry’s real fear were there alright—it was on their faces and in their souls. The Deacon was no better, no less than a Sphinx. But, we all knew and grasped the fact that the last elemental portion was missing—the air that was in the breath of our lives. We all inhaled deeply except for the Deacon.

  24

  It was one of those occurrences when words are not the method and means of communication. Without words, our four minds became a single mind. John Henry closed the doors to her dive shop. Manta became the Jack of all Trades.”

  The Deacon was the virtuoso wizard. And I was included into the mix for flavor.

  We were going to dive for it.

  It did not bother me that some Nazi wunderkinder had drowned. I assumed that Nazis were just as evil underwater as above the water and the pressure of the Deep pressed the life from them. The one, John Henry’s friend, was too assured in an unsure environment. But, the Deacon’s friend was the one that I could not come to peace with in my thoughts.

  Then I asked him as he passed me in the LION. “How did your buddy drown?”

  I expected one of those Deacon obfuscations but he immediately paused and began. “Most of the story is inert and meaningless as are most stories and the greater part of our lives. But, now and again, there is motion and meaning. Those are the times when one’s character becomes the variable. Does fate choose us or do we choose our fate?”

  He was talking—but not to me. He was talking to himself. “He had possession of it for a short time and he lost his life forever. You see, it slipped from his clutch and descended through the U-Boat and tumbled through the slaver and came to rest. He chased after it, breathing hard and with little air. Having successfully reached it, he gulped his last. There he died. It was not his choice to become a drowned man but his choice did not allow for any other conclusion. He was not going to breathe his last and live.

  “He made his choice. I made a choice also. I chose to live. There was not enough air for two lives. There was barely enough air for one life. His choice cascaded upon me. Could I have gone after him—No!

  “He was a man grown full and he—not fate—was the decider of his providence.”

  “What the—” I said.

  The Deacon was unmoved by my sentiment but he was correct. One live man plus one dead man was greater than two dead men. I am sure that this was the calculation the Deacon made. There is no law in the deep, just order, and that is: air-breathers drown when breathing in the sea.

  There were meaningful and meaningless things to do. The meaningful depended upon the meaningless.

  I put the LION to rest. John Henry’s dive shop became the womb. The Deacon had developed the dive strategy and Manta was the workman who changed thoughts into things. As a master before his pupils the Deacon taught, manipulated, and governed. The orchestration of our actions was geared to the tolerance of his preference and we accepted our fate as dutiful serfs.

  There was no randomness, there was no wasted energy, there was no disorder, but rather there was a certain awareness that produced a self-consciousness of perception. We developed a singular telescopic sight-line that leads into the deep. We were becoming less of ourselves.

  “In our hands, we will be able pull this off, Vaughnie, and it will be in our hands. Think of it. In our hands. All those years, and all those so-called great people failed. Not us. Just think of it! Us! Some outlanders on the Last Island accomplishing what all others have failed to accomplish. Think of it, just think of it!” John Henry was elated, almost jubilant, as she put her joy into words.

  “No one has had it in peace. Its origin is sin and it has been nothing but evil to anybody connected to it. I do not share your glee,” I said.

  “Do you not see? It is not evil. It is the evil of and in the people who hold it that brings the evil. Their wish and their want is what is evil. Their neediness for it is what is evil. They show their evil when they covet it. Well, we will get it. We are not evil. We will get it and then they will see what it was ordained to do in a good life. Think of it, Vaughnie. We will be the ones who finally hold it and we will hold it for good and we will hold it forever. We will bring a change. Yes, sir, we will bring a change and the others—the others, they will see.”

  She was preaching but there was no choir.

  “But, maybe it is better in the Deep. Out of sight and out of mind. It will not take long now for that U-Boat to become a stain on the bottom of the deep. That iron-eating bacteria, Halomonas meridian, will do to that iron hulk what time and tide has done to that slaver. The slaver is gone and the few people here will have to evacuate in thirty or forty years because tidal pressures and time are eating away this last island. All—this island, that iron wreck, and that slaver—will never be found ever again,” I said.

  “No! We have to find it. The Deep can claim everything else but I will not allow it to claim it. I will not allow that to happen, ”she yelled at me.

  “Would not it be better if it were on the bottom and then gulped down into the mantle and destroyed? Would not that be better?”I questioned her.

  “No! No! No! This close. This close and you say it would be better. You think it would be better that after all this time—all this time—that it would be better if it were not used for good. After all the evil and dirty hands that have been on it how can you say that it is not the time for clean and good hands to be on it. Now!” She sermonized.

  I thought.

  Clean, good.

  I was not so persuaded for I knew the state of my morality.

  “Is our quest for it any different, any better, or any worse than all the other quests?” I asked her.

  She answered, “Yes, and not in means or in methods only, but also in motivation. That is the basis, that is the bedrock of why our quest is different from all the other quests that have preceded us. Ours is the noble and righteous quest.”

  “Noble and righteous motivation?” I asked.

  “Certainly, our motivation is good. We will bring the power of good up from the Deep’s dark. Think of it. It will be the power of good and that power will be in my hands—our hands,” she said.

  “Power,” I said.

  She repeated, “Power.”

  25

  Water is meaningless except for the meaningless fact that water is the current that carries all life on Earth. The lithosphere is just dead rock. The atmosphere is just atomized vapors. The hydrosphere is the realm of life.

  On the surface, where the spheres meet, water is transparent and the character of it is innocent. I sat upon the coral head in the shallow tidal pool with my feet dangling in the ava—the cut that fell to the deep. Clear, innocent, and warm—the water baptized me in its simplicity and I was at peace. Then my mind wandered into wate
r’s pressure charts. Sitting here the water pressure was meaningless. Then the changes began. At thirty-three feet, the pressure was the air pressure plus the equivalent of another atmosphere of air pressure and that reality was constant in its increase until the bottom.

  At thirty-five thousand feet the pressure was sixteen thousand pounds per square inch—an increase of one thousand times in pressure.

  It, the water, was not clear, warm, and innocent. It, the water, was black, cold, and evil. It, the water, had at the bottom lost its fluidity and was a syrup at below-freezing temperatures. But, there the world was most organized. For entropy was reduced to a zero state and what had been was, what had been is, and what had been was to be. There was no confusion, no randomness, and no chaos.

  As I was resting there a great leviathan cruised beneath my hanging feet and another, Manta, entered the water. The small air bubbles were always expanding in volume and always decreasing in density until they exploded at the demarcation of the spheres.

  Then I did the math. An air bubble with a one-inch diameter at thirty-five thousand feet—one thousand atmospheres—would have a diameter of one thousand inches on the surface as it expired with only one-thousandth the density of its origin in the Deep.

  Manta, the lesser of the leviathans, swam in the shallow deep as the greater of the leviathans descended downward.

  Upon the belly of the Deep a blob of jellyfish, Cyanea capillata, at 0.077 inches was ascending upward on its single life’s journey from the Deep to the shallow. With each pulse of its bell the blob would, without growing, ever increase in size until at the surface what had been an almost invisible blob would be a seventy-seven inch Lion Mane jellyfish with two hundred thirty feet of invisible tentacles inlaid with billions of deadly poisonous stinging cells. Upon the surface, it would float, glide, drift mindless—but not at the mercy of time and tide.

  26

  They that go down to the sea in ships; that do business in great waters;

  These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

  For He commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

  They mount up to heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.

  They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.

  Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distress.

  He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.

  When and where I grew up it was required that the Bible in the King James Version be memorized. It was not so much a requirement as it was the practiced way of life. I do not know how but I know why Psalm 107: verse 23 to verse 29 was recalled. It was my prayer.

  The shipworms had in silence reduced the slaver to digestive by-products. The iron-eating bacteria was reducing the U-Boat to a rust stain in silence. In silence, the jelly blob of life was trekking. The more we toiled, the more we labored, the more we worked; the more we became evermore wordless. Words were no longer the agents of our communication and for the most part were little more than an archaic artifact of our petrified past. Words had a past which had purification and we were seeking a purified future.

  But the more silent we became; the more the Deep gave voice.

  Manta threw out a question. It was as if a well-spring had been tapped. “Has anyone else noticed the restlessness of the island spirits?”

  I was thinking it but the Deacon said it. “Island spirits?”

  Manta retorted boldly but calmly, “Yes, island spirits.”

  The island environment had been less calm then usual but the season was changing.

  The Deacon commented, “It is just the change of season. Island spirits have nothing to do with what is happening.”

  Then Manta added what he knew. “Yeah, how can you argue against hygrometers, thermometers, and seismometers? They put black numbers on white charts and so each day we have a new truth. Right, Deacon?”

  The Deacon was put off by this slap. Then he said, “Truth or no, that is not the point. The point is there ain’t no living spirit in the water or in the air on this island. And, there ain’t no spirit living between or among the three elements. The air is changing because of the migration of the direct rays of the sun, the water is counter-current because of the seasonal change of the Antarctic Circum-Polar Current, and the land is heaving because of deep-water seismic activity. It ain’t truth but it is fact by the numbers.”

  “What lies between the numbers?” Manta asked.

  They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end.

  I was praying.

  “Do you think that we can get this dive completed before the season’s change? We are coming close to the end of the good weather,” John Henry said.

  “The easy dive weather is about over but you can dive in any weather, it just may not be easy diving,” Manta answered.

  “I agree. We may not get optimum dive conditions but the dive can be accomplished. Also, other than weather there is time. If we do not get to it first, somebody may just stumble upon it and blunder into our plans. It may end up on a fireplace mantle, as a spittoon, a meaningless gift, or an evil icon. This dive has to be weatherproof and it can be made so.” The Deacon declared his opinion.

  For He commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

  I prayed.

  Just then there was a low bass rumble that seemed to push the already high tide higher.

  John Henry looked over her left shoulder and a wave had piled on top of another wave and was breaking over the coral reef.

  Then she spoke. “I don’t know which of you has the correct understanding grasp of all of this or any of this, but come what may, there are going to be impediments that are within us, large and small, and impediments outside of us, large and small, that we have no insight into and never will see until it is before us in our adventure. That higher-than-normal breaker was the last event consequence in a series of unknown sequences. In what we are about to do, that is what we must be concerned with in order to be successful. We will never know the before and must not be concerned with the after. The moment, each moment, is our only concern. Each moment has to be our objective. The tides will be less, the tides will be greater—it matters not.”

  The broken wave crest weakly rippled to shore.

  They mount up to heaven, they go down again to the depths; their soul is melted because of trouble.

  I prayed.

  The ship was being ever more perfected for the sojourn.

  We worked and refitted the ship. We retooled the facilities of the ship. The ship and the ship’s equipment were not only made perfect to the most stringent maritime specifications but were made to exceed the specifications by exponential factors of ten. It was unspoken but it was known by all that this was going to a last dive.

  The Deacon began talking to all of us. “The ship looks good and it looks tight. We have put a lot of good hard work into this. It is as if we have a new ship. Except for head and mess there just ain’t that much there that was there to start with from the beginning.

  “The last thing we have to do is to install and get this digital visual system up and working. If we can get eyes under the water before we splash and if we can have a scout topside during the dive we will have two tactical advantages.

  “We have all seen and have fore-knowledge of what is down there and yet it has eluded acquisition and the main reason is time over target. The laws of the dive have always been the same and sighting has always been the joker in the deck. Not this time, pilgrims. Many have dived, many have drowned—but not this time, pilgrims of the Deep. We are going to be the first to dive into what we have seen. We are going to dive into what we know. We are going to dive into charted waters. The dive will lead directly to it and then the dive will lead directly here from whence we began our pilgrimage.”

  He had converted
John Henry and Manta. None of the three saw the dive. They all saw it.

  Manta saw a reestablishment of the original unity. John Henry saw the establishment of a new unity. The Deacon saw the dead one.

  They that go down to the sea in ships; that do business in great waters;

  These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

  I prayed.

  This I knew: in the great waters most of the works of the Lord are not seeable. Below a few feet, the great waters eat up the light. In the great waters, most of what is there is transparent and at best only translucent. The rest is encased, hidden, or indistinguishable.

  The great meaningless ones—whales, sharks, and seals—are only upper orders of disorder on the great water. And, in the midst of such technology and empirical wonder, I knew two and certain truths at this moment. The Deacon, John Henry, Manta, and I were the highest order of disorder and crying pleads of mercy cannot be heard in the Deep.

  Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and He bringeth them out of their distress.

  I prayed.

  Manta added his ideas. “The sooner we commence the better. There is a silence between the wrath of the spirits and the stillness. I think we are being granted a gift of kindness. We are between the seasons. There is none that control the ocean, now. That will change, if we do not commit to our feat. If we delay we will be cursed with defeat. And, if we are defeated, let us wear our defeat with pride.”

  John Henry agreed. “It is getting on to that point when we should stop talking and preparing to dive and just do the dive. Dive or don’t dive—one or the other, I say. And, not to dive would be too severe a consequence to endure. We are as ready as we are going to be at any time. Tell me: is ninety-nine point nine percent any different than one hundred percent?”

  The Deacon spoke his peace, “Yes, we are going to dive. We are going to dive not because the water gives us allowance. Yes, we are going to dive. We are going to dive not because the percentage gives us allowance. We are going to dive because we have willfully decided to dive.