I drop to my knees by the vent, just in time to hear the heart of the compass ricocheting more and more faintly against the metallic walls of the duct, until it gradually dwindles into silence far below.
The furnace takes this cue to start up and blow a scornful blast of air into my face.
The Beast
I OPEN THE CELLAR DOOR and flip the switch, but nothing happens. Another burnt-out light bulb. I have to feel my way along to the next switch. I hesitate to move into the dimness of the staircase. Every time I find myself in an enclosed space, I somehow end up having to deal with bizarre situations.
Joyce looks over my shoulder into the dark. I suggested she wait for me quietly with the teapot and the travel guides, but she insisted on coming along, on the pretext that if I left her alone for two minutes she would fall asleep.
I cautiously advance into the stairway. Behind me, Joyce counts the steps in a low voice. The staircase seems longer than usual. I feel as if we’re diving twenty thousand leagues under the ground floor. The walls become covered with little spiral shells that I never noticed before, and after many minutes—“One hundred and thirty-five steps,” Joyce specifies—the stairs disappear under inky water.
“Shit, the sump pump has broken down again! That’s the second time this fall.”
“Is the water very deep?” Joyce asks.
Probing farther, I take one step too many. I lose my footing, try to catch hold of the banister, hurtle down the remaining steps on my heels and plunge thigh-deep into the icy water. The cold and shock leave me breathless. I turn toward Joyce to inform her that we’re going right back up to the apartment, but too late. She’s come down to join me in the water, apparently impervious to the cold.
She greets my look of astonishment with a quick smile and a shrug.
“I know. I only came to borrow a travel guide. But”—she gestures toward the darkness—“there’s no choice. We have to find your compass, right?”
What is there to say, now that both of us are standing in the freezing water? We plunge into the gloom, moving like deep-sea divers. I grope around for the light switch, but Joyce is one step ahead of me, and I hear her tug on the chain.
The light goes on—an old 20-watt bulb hanging from a stripped wire—and the Beast emerges from the darkness.
The furnace in our building frightens me in a way that is hard to account for. It is, after all, nothing but an ordinary oil furnace of the interwar period, massively corpulent, once painted white but now covered with scars and bumps. Through the grate, thin little strings of soot leak out into the water, and on its huge square brow a pair of screw holes form small, glowing eyes. The screws once fastened a brass plaque, which now lies at the foot of the furnace. Judging from the dust marks, the plaque has not been moved since I last looked at it, eight years ago.
Etched onto the brass plaque is the Beast’s pedigree:
Manufactured in 1921 by
LEVI ATHAN & Co.
Nantucket, Massachusetts
Eight Januarys in this building have allowed me to observe with absolute precision the furnace’s breathing habits. It always begins with a long sigh that then breaks up into a number of short sighs. It doles out about sixty of these sighs over a period of ten minutes, without hurrying, then dives once again into the depths. After an hour and a half of apnea, the cycle starts over again. This respiratory pattern is unchanging, whether the thermometer shows 5 or 55 degrees below zero. As a result, in the middle of winter, the interval between start-ups provides a good demonstration of the climate in northern Siberia.
I never thought that I would have to delve into furnace anatomy tonight. I sidle along the wall to investigate the situation more closely. Flames growl in the belly of the Beast, just a few centimetres from my nose. I would rather turn back, but I think of the Nikolski compass and keep going.
At the back of the machine, a dozen or so hot-air ducts going up toward the inhabited part of the building are intertwined in a complex intestinal network. One look is enough to convince me that a conscientious worker once riveted these tubes in place to last for centuries, thus condemning to a process of slow digestion any object that happened to drop down the air vents of the upper floors.
My whole body begins to shake. The burning proximity of the furnace does nothing to raise the temperature of the water we’re standing in. I think of the steaming teapot three floors up. If we don’t get out of here, we run the risk of hypothermia or pneumonia of the brain. I mumble a quick requiem for the compass and, with my legs gnawed away by the cold, start to climb out of this hole.
“My compass is a lost cause!” I announce dramatically.
Joyce seems not to have heard me. While I was examining the back of the furnace, she has been inspecting the rest of the cellar, as comfortable in standing in ice water as she was in my living room.
“Where does this go?” she asks, pointing to a padlocked door.
“Nowhere. That’s my locker. And to think I have boxes in there. It must be crawling with crabs by now.”
I find the key on my key ring and force it into the rusted lock. The door opens onto a half-dozen spongy cardboard boxes covered with purply urchins. I let out a downhearted sigh and, having ripped open a box, feel around inside with a certain sense of apprehension. My frozen hand recognizes the rough texture of a familiar object.
It’s the old Three-Headed Book.
Distant Early Warning
OUTSIDE, THE STORM RAGES with even greater intensity. This is no time to go anywhere. I lend Joyce some dry clothes: a pair of jeans, an old sweater, woollen socks that don’t match. We separate to get changed—the bathroom for her, the bedroom for me.
As soon as I’m dressed, I hurry to brew some more tea. When I come back to the living room with the teapot, Joyce is sitting on the couch, leafing through the Three-Headed Book. I’m startled for a second, disturbed by the sight of her wearing my things. She looks like my female double, some cousin just arrived from out of nowhere.
“Their names were Anne Bonny and Mary Read,” she announces with a grin. “And you were right. When the English captured Jack Rackham’s crew, they were the only ones to defend the ship.”
“What happened then?”
“The English took the crew away to be tried in Jamaica. They were all hanged, all except for Bonny and Read, who were both pregnant. The English apparently didn’t like to execute unborn human beings, so they threw them in prison while waiting for them to give birth. Mary Read died of a fever not long after.”
“What about Anne Bonny?”
“Anne Bonny escaped and was never heard from again. Vanished into thin air. She may have returned to Providence to have her child.”
I set the teapot down on the coffee table. At the very same moment, the furnace emits a long, provocative belch. For an instant I imagine the compass reappearing, carried aloft on a cloud of steam. I let out a sigh. Joyce closes the book and lays it down near the teapot.
“Don’t you have anything stronger than tea?” she asks. “Your lips are still blue. You could use something with more kick to it.”
After a quick visit to the kitchen, I put two small glasses on the table, along with a bottle of cheap Jamaican rum. “The hanged man’s vintage,” Joyce teases. I fill the glasses to the brim, we lift them in a silent toast and then, down the hatch. The alcohol instantly radiates through my veins.
“Was the compass very valuable?” Joyce asks as she sets her glass back down.
“Not really. It was a five-dollar compass made out of plastic, but it was from my father. He’d given it to me as a birthday present. I never knew my father, so the compass took on symbolic value for me.”
“You never knew your father?”
“My parents met on the West Coast. When my mother became pregnant, she came back to live in the suburbs of Montreal. She exchanged letters with my father for some years, but I never saw him.”
“Not even a photo?” Joyce wonders.
“The only
photograph of him is hanging on the wall behind you, near the map of Puerto Rico.”
Joyce gets up to examine the picture more closely. My mother is alone on a pebble beach, her hair ruffled by the sea breeze, visibly chilled to the bone in spite of her bulky down-filled military parka. Behind her, the landscape is littered with hundreds of bleached whale bones. A little farther back, one can just make out a metal-clad hut and, beside it, a shortwave radio antenna.
“Where’s your father?” asks Joyce, frowning.
“You see that big blurry spot to the right? That’s his finger sticking out over the lens. He was holding the camera.”
Joyce quickly refills the glasses. Toast, down the hatch. I’m starting to feel the rolling waves.
“Did he stay on the West Coast?”
“Yeah. He went as far as Alaska, to a little village called Nikolski. For years, I thought every compass in the world was manufactured there. I pictured a huge compass factory built right at the North Pole. I had some strange ideas.”
“Not at all,” Joyce objects. “The magnetic north travels around. It may have moved through Nikolski, right?”
“An appealing theory, but Nikolski is too far south.”
I go to get the cardboard tube where I keep my maps. After pushing the coffee table out of the way, I unfurl the maps on the floor, and anchor the corners with the bottle of rum, the teapot and two stacks of travel guides. Joyce kneels down beside me, which fills me with a dizziness I try to blame on the rum rather than the heady closeness of her knee to my hand.
The first map is of the Arctic Ocean.
“So. Right now, the magnetic north is located on Ellef Ringnes Island, here. It’s gradually approaching the geographic North Pole. At the beginning of the century it was situated in the corner of Boothia Peninsula, almost two thousand kilometres to the south.”
“And Nikolski?”
“It’s on another map.”
As I pull out the map of Alaska and place it on top, the teapot and bottle of rum come dangerously close to tipping over. Joyce catches the bottle and, while she’s at it, refreshes our libations. Toast, down the hatch. The living room is starting to pitch.
“You see? Nikolski is on the island of Umnak, smack in the middle of the Aleutians—the archipelago shaped like a spinal column.”
“Like a spinal column?” Joyce replies, sniffing the bottom of her glass. “I always found the Aleutians resembled the West Indies.”
Really? I open the guide to the Dominican Republic and juxtapose the map of the West Indies on that of the Aleutians. The second archipelago looks exactly like the first, but mischievously rotated through 180 degrees.
“So your father lived in Nikolski …,” she says, studying the map. “Talk about a hole.”
“Thirty-six humans, five thousand sheep and a small crabmeat packing plant.”
“What did he do there?”
“I have no idea. His letters weren’t very clear. All I know is, he worked on a Distant Early Warning base.”
“Distant Early Warning … I’ve heard of that somewhere.”
“During the Cold War, the American army set up some sixty radar bases in the Arctic. The line started in Greenland, cut through the middle of the tundra and ended in Nikolski. It was called the Distant Early Warning Line. My mother put together a whole file on the subject: newspaper clippings, photos, old copies of Life magazine … Can’t remember where I put it.”
“Probably in the cellar, with the urchins.”
“Probably.”
“And how long did he stay in Nikolski?”
“He died there, not long after he arrived. They found him at the bottom of a platform on Christmas Eve. The town doctor diagnosed a broken neck. The American army couldn’t locate the family, so the body was buried there.”
“So how did you find out?”
“His co-workers found a bundle of letters in his closet and they decided to write to each of the addresses to explain what had happened. They must have been hoping some distant nephew would ask for the body to be sent home. My mother answered, but her letter was returned to sender six months later. The U.S. Air Force had just shut down the base at Nikolski. I guess my father is still buried there, at the foot of a radar antenna.”
“What about the other letters?” Joyce asks, pouring some more rum. “Do you know who they were from?”
I drain my glass with a grimace. “Who knows? My father was a sailor. Probably had a girl in every port— Hamburg, Shanghai, Callao … In which case I’ve got dozens of brothers and sisters scattered all over the planet. But I’ll never know, because the letters have disappeared. They may have been burned, or chucked in a garbage dump, or buried with my father. Or maybe even classified Top Secret in the military archives of Anchorage.”
Joyce lifts the bottle of rum from the corner of the map—which curls up slightly—fills the glasses, puts the bottle back and raises her glass ceremoniously.
“Well, then let’s drink to the memory of your father, your mother, your scattered family and your old five-dollar compass, which valiantly kept pointing north until the very end.”
I refrain from specifying that my compass did not point north but toward Nikolski—the story is already convoluted enough, thanks very much. We noisily slurp down our drinks and place the glasses back on the map, mine at Fairbanks and hers right in the middle of the Beaufort Sea. Well, that’s it: I’m drunk, bowled over by the mixture of freezing water, childhood memories and cheap rum, not to mention Joyce’s knee next to my hand.
I close my eyes and let myself sink headfirst into the Bering Sea.
Visa
AT FIRST GLANCE, the Burgos Lorenzo family library appears to be rooted in the house, as though it had embedded itself in the walls little by little over the centuries. On certain afternoons, when the light pours like gold through the windows, one can easily imagine a distant owner studying ponderous treatises on pearl cultivation, or Simón Bolívar drafting a fiery dispatch.
But this in fact is one of the house’s many impostures. For the books actually arrived all at once, when Eduardo Burgos Lorenzo sold his properties in Caracas. The cargo—altogether some fifty massive wooden crates—was lowered into a ship’s hold in the spring of 1977, unloaded at the Punta de Piedras dock, and then hauled to the top of the island with the help of three trucks and ten robust, underpaid islanders.
This commotion was an abiding source of amazement for the family. Why, after liquidating his houses without the slightest hint of sentimentality, was Eduardo Burgos Lorenzo so determined to hold on to this mound of books? Was he perhaps afraid of selling off a work that might eventually fetch a tidy sum? In spite of its size and the spectacular attention it received when it was moved, the library contained very little of great value. It was composed essentially of worthless theological monographs, outmoded military dissertations, outdated history textbooks, compilations of colonial poetry and anthologies of published authors, as well as an astonishing assortment of yellowed encyclopedias not recent enough to be useful as references but not old enough to qualify as antiques. It also housed a ravenous strain of mould, which swiftly took advantage of Margarita’s maritime climate to flourish. Since then, billions of spores have been floating in the atmosphere of the house, like silent and malodorous witnesses to the library’s strange journey.
The lesson of this story boils down to only one thing: Don Eduardo, who was never much of a reader, had quite simply overlooked the egregious insignificance of his books.
Noah is alone in the dark, sitting at the long mahogany table that divides the library in two. The antique copper reading lamp throws a circle of light around him. A bundle of tricoloured Air Mail/Correo Aereo envelopes, a strip of stamps bearing a marine tortoise design, and a road map of Saskatchewan are spread out within reach.
It has been raining constantly now for twelve days and twelve nights, as though a deluge threatened to swamp Margarita Island and disperse the passengers of this house to the four corners of
the globe. Noah has shut himself up in the library with his letter-writing paraphernalia and, muttering the whole time, tries to ward off claustrophobia by blindly tossing the blue-and-red envelopes over the Canadian plains, as if involved in a vast game of naval warfare.
Bending over the road map, he performs an esoteric variety of algebra. The prairies are covered with hundreds of little circles, dates, postal codes, doodles and fingerprints. For years, Noah has recorded each letter with an x next to which he has scrawled when and from where the letter was sent. If a line were drawn connecting these x’s in chronological order, it would reproduce his itinerary from 1989 through 1999, which took him from Saskatchewan to Montreal Island, from Montreal Island to Stevenson Island, and from Stevenson Island to Margarita Island, all of it superimposed (with the distortion this inevitably entails) on the curve of the Souris River, on the sprawl of Saskatoon and on the Chipewyan reservations.
“Am I disturbing you?”
Noah starts. Arizna has come into the library without a sound.
“I was writing a letter. You can come in. I’m almost done.”
She walks over to the table, not saying a word. Noah has just chosen an address (Rouleau, Saskatchewan S0G 3V7) and hurriedly marks it on the envelope. This is the ninth letter to his mother this week, a direct result of the foul weather plaguing Margarita.
Arizna sits down facing him, on the opposite side of the table. She seems tired—that is, much more tired than usual.
Noah is concerned. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“So-so. I’ve received some bad news about my grandfather.”
“What’s the matter? Is he ill?”
“Ill? My grandfather? That would be a surprise. He’s unsinkable, the old fox. No—he’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“The police have put out a warrant for his arrest. Something to do with a scam. I haven’t been given the details yet. They raided his house this morning but they can’t find him anywhere: not at home, not at his job, not at his country house.”
Nikolski Page 16
