by Jim Lynch
After I kissed the crown of her head, she leaned back and peered at me over her glasses to get a better read of my face, her expression skidding from hopeful to desperate.
“Einstein never took a day off,” she said abruptly. “Even at the end, he was still working on everything that interested him. And when he died, his chalkboard was full of incomplete equations.”
My stomach fell. After our last chat, I’d found an online crackpot index that differentiated between real scientists and wackos. One warning sign: a preoccupation with the world’s greatest unsolved problems. Another: endless speculation about Einstein’s final theories in progress. In this pale light, I saw the gleam of a full-blown loon in my mother’s face. I saw Grady Rollins and his piano.
“I’ve been reading about Einstein a bit myself,” I told her gently, “and I’m kind of surprised you’ve never mentioned what a bastard he could be.”
I then recited details of how cruel he’d supposedly been to his first wife, demanding that she keep his office tidy, stay silent whenever he requested and never expect any intimacy whatsoever. “After she divorced his cranky ass,” I said, “he married his first cousin and supposedly fooled around on her and never much cared for his own three kids, one of whom went crazy.” I took a breath. “All of which seems to contradict this grand stereotype you keep rolling out.”
She looked amused. “Are people good or bad, Josh? He was a gift to mankind. And not just for reframing our universe. He advocated for Jews and blacks. He condemned McCarthyism when most everybody cowered. He was such a humanist that J. Edgar Hoover tapped his phone. What better badge of honor? If Einstein was an ass, we need so many more. Besides, I’ve never claimed he was a great man. I said he was brilliant. Now, quit changing the subject and tell me what you think.”
I wanted to let her know that it appeared that her firstborn was at last sailing home. But how could I disclose this good news without mentioning that a federal agent wanted to turn Bernard into a snitch, and all of our phones, mailboxes and e-mails were probably being monitored? I stalled, pretending to be fascinated by an EKG-like drawing of this so-called mother wavelet. What could I say to my own mother? I remembered how hard she crashed the last time she thought she’d solved it. But this late at night, I stared woozily at her string of equations and thought, My God, maybe, just maybe…
“You know,” I said, her face still radiantly expectant, “I’m sorry but I really don’t know what to make of any of this. But I can honestly tell you that it looks both beautiful and brave.”
THE TRICKSTER AND THE WHALES
During the years that followed Bernard’s and Ruby’s departures, I read their postcards and e-mails with palpitating anticipation, knowing either of them might say or do something inspiring, foolish or revelatory at any moment. Both seemingly had the potential to either change the world or vanish from it.
Ive been thinking about what you said about how you just try to fix whats in front of you and not overcomplicate what it all amounts to,
Ruby wrote me soon after she returned to her ship in 2002.
Thats so healthy but I cant live like that. I dont resent or regret but I do get the sense we got fooled. What are you gonna give when you grow up? Were we ever asked that? We gave our family everything for so long. Im giving myself to as many different people as I can now while I walk this earth in hopes that it adds up to something bigger than the parts. I dont think Ill be coming back home. Its not personal. We have to make choices or we amount to so little, right? At least thats my fear, that all this hope and energy and emotion is no more than a tornado inside me that only I feel. But this boat is full of people who feel like that. Some have worked on this ship for 25 years. I dont know that Ill ever get off again. Today I hope not. Our time is so short. Ruby
There it was again. My little sister letting me know we were running out of time. Then came a long letter from Bernard which hinted he was headed farther south, the days getting longer and the toilet water spinning counterclockwise. But he also said:
I think of the family a lot. Believe it or not, I miss Captain Asshole and think of him more often than I’d care to admit, though I guess I just did. I measure people by him. Know what I mean? I wonder what he would make of this boat or that man or this transaction. And I see the science of the sea and sky through Mother’s eyes, and the mysterious and inexplicable underbelly of everything through Ruby’s. And I try to view it all through your nonjudgmental lens as well, my brother. Always admired how you take it all in without needing to provoke or seduce. Damn, all this Hinano is making me soft. Oops. A clue! I better shut up. Funny, I can’t recall Slocum or Moitessier going all melancholy and sentimental. Maybe they cut those parts out of their books. Or maybe they were built of harder stones. Or just lying sacks of shit.
I’m making a shaky living of sorts moving merchandise from one place to another. But I can assure you this is the life for me. The freedom I felt on top of mountains is tripled out here. From where I’m sitting, life on land looks like self-inflicted captivity. I drop in on humanity when the time feels right. I showered, shaved and put on my one clean shirt last night. These native ladies kept calling me James Bond. Can you believe it? In case you’re curious, my record remains intact. Haven’t paid for sex yet!
Ruby’s next letters shared her increasing discomfort with her reputation on the ship as a healer. She stopped giving massages, but word had spread in Ghana that they should ask for the redhead in the room when their procedures were done. She liked to hold hands, and some Africans speculated the real healing occurred in the redhead’s hands.
Wierd things continue to happen when I have migranes, Josh. And I have no explanation beyond coincadince. How would I know if Im special? How could anybody know what it feels like to be anybody else? If Gods coming thru me it isnt at my request. Nor have I heard HER voice. I still dont pray, at least not on perpose and never aloud. I havent asked for any of this. There is a couple here who kept calling me Saint Ruby. I finally told them I dont even really believe in God. That went straight to the chaplin who came to talk to me. I told him I dont dislike religon but that my mothers probably my only spiritual adviser and shes a scientist. Isnt this terrific? The one area of life I know so little about is right in my face now. And the chaplins a talker. He worries me. But if I just sing along arent I a fraud? I didnt ask for any of this did I?
Meanwhile Bernard’s postcards and letters to the boatyard piled up. One in early 2003 ended like this:
The Pacific is my home now. From my bunk I hear the humpbacks conversing. I live among them now. And my nose is getting so good I can smell land five miles away. When the air pressure drops my sinuses drain and I know a storm is afoot hours before it shows up. There are scary moments but you don’t have to be Leif Eriksson to survive out here. I passed one of those avocado-green houseboats that were so popular in the ’70s. This one was full of hungry stoners who asked me, in all seriousness, “Which way to California, man?”
Sounds weird to say it, Josh, but the Rubester is a regular in my dreams. Some nights she’s just laughing at me but usually she’s the trickster. A few nights ago, she flew alongside while I was under sail. Or maybe it was an albatross with her face. Regardless, she tried to play it straight but when she saw my reaction she started laughing. I don’t want to know what a shrink would make of that. And I won’t say it aloud, Josh, but maybe she is closer to God. I know that’s not kosher speculation in an agnostic household, especially coming from me, but maybe. Perhaps sailing brings us all closer! Though something close to nothing is still nothing, eh? But in this spirit of full disclosure, I will admit I’m increasingly of the opinion that if there are any gods, they must all be whales.
NAKED BELIEVERS
Arriving in a wooden crate on a flatbed truck, the black keel looked like the dorsal fin of a killer whale with a small torpedo welded to its narrow tip. In the midday glare, sitting next to this old and tired Joho 39, Father’s design gamble looked like a preposterous
upgrade incapable of its desired effect, like a boob job on an old lady.
With the Swiftsure race just nineteen days away, I bribed the boys with beer to help me with the keel transplant after work. We crowbarred and sledgehammered the old keel until it finally let go of the hull and fell noisily into the shuddering arms of a forklift while the boat swung overhead like a fresh amputee.
We cleaned and sanded the Joho bottom before measuring the exact location for the bolts sticking out of the top of the new keel. After filling the old holes, we drilled new ones with an inch-and-a-half bit. Then Tommy gently lowered the boat toward the studs, double checking the alignment before raising her again. After reboring two holes, I broke out the case of 3M 5200 I’d been warming in Jack’s office for days and passed out Uzi-like pneumatic glue guns. Then we slathered the marine world’s strongest adhesive to both the hull bottom and the keel bolts. With Tommy manning the lift, four of us helped guide the big boat down onto the threaded studs. Then Mick and I crawled inside the boat and down into the bilge and evenly tightened eight nuts the size of hockey pucks. Afterwards we stood around outside the boat, killed some beers and marveled at how bizarre the end result looked.
My gut told me that messing with the old design would ruin its delicate balance. But given ideal conditions, the remodeled boat also might dramatically outperform its former self. This new L-shaped keel, though nearly a half ton lighter, sank a full foot and a half deeper, with most of its mass stored in the lead bulb at the bottom. According to Father’s calculations, swapping keels and rudders reduced weight by almost 10 percent without decreasing righting force, a reasonable, if unusual, upgrade as long as you told race handicappers exactly what you’d done so they could adjust the boat’s rating. Father assured me again that he’d be taking care of all that. In the meantime, he insisted, keep a skirt around her till she splashes.
Number 33, I told the boys, talked me into the Procession of the Species Parade. “She went as a praying mantis on stilts,” I said. “You wouldn’t think an insect could be flirty, but, man, did she work the crowd.”
“Don’t you have any normal dates?” Mick wondered.
“What was your costume?” Noah asked.
“She found me a sea turtle outfit. So I was sliding along on a dolly beneath a claustrophobic plastic shell with bad eyeholes.”
“That had to suck,” Leo observed.
“The more I watched her,” I said, “the less I liked her. To be fair, I wasn’t her dream date either. She’d agreed to go out because I was geographically desirable and overlooked that I lived on a boat and my hands would never be clean again in this lifetime, as she put it, while I overlooked that twenty-seven of her last twenty-nine paintings were self-portraits. The only feedback she gave me on our one dazzling sail together was that it was a fashion disaster. I was through with her before the end of the parade, though she’d probably dumped me blocks earlier, seeing as how she went out drinking immediately afterwards with a muscle-bound zebra.”
“Is that all you got?” Noah asked.
“One more. Number Thirty-Four was one of those skinny-jeans high-heel types you worry is gonna slip right through the dock slats, snap an ankle and drown. She definitely didn’t want to sail. She got motion sickness from everything—driving, flying, yawning. You name it. She wouldn’t go to a movie theater without taking Dramamine. So we got loaded, and it was warm, but that didn’t completely explain why she stripped to her bra and stretched out on a bunk, ankles crossed, with a premixed store-bought margarita balanced high on her chest and began telling me about her two ex-husbands and about the odd things her most recent disaster dates would say and request. If I fell for her even briefly, I knew her next date would hear all about me.”
Then I relived—but didn’t share—our last conversation.
“Humans weren’t meant to be monogamous,” she told me.
“I am,” I said.
“You and me, we’re not marrying types,” she insisted. “We’re misfits.”
“I’m not,” I said.
“How many dates have you had in the past six months?” she asked.
“Thirty-four.”
Her laugh sounded like a seal barking.
“This probably isn’t a great idea,” I told her. “I mean, given how far apart we live and how all I’ve got for you to visit is this boat.”
“You kidding me?” she said. “I love this stinky boat! You want to get rid of me you’re gonna have to drag me out by my hair.”
I sat there, studying her dark mane. It was thick enough.
What I also didn’t tell the boys is that I was one bad date away from disproving my mother’s equation for romance. So I was getting extremely picky about whom to ask out next. I’d study their photos in hopes of reading their minds and mulled over and over again their backstories and platitudes, their interests and disqualifiers. Yet the closer I looked, the better I understood that Mother’s math wasn’t the problem. I was the weak link in her equation, the unreliable variable. My inability to discern what I wanted invited chaos into her otherwise-sound equation. So did my cowardice. How much of myself had I shared since Kirsten found me so easy to replace? Last time I saw her, she was pregnant and happy, fondling avocados at QFC.
“Hey, Noah,” Mick said while grabbing another beer, “that your father on the radio?”
“Yes,” he snapped as we all listened intently to the creaky old voice.
“I’m not the authority. The Bible is the authority. There are numbers in the Bible for a reason. And they tell us things. They inform us.”
“Is somebody interviewing him?” Mick asked.
“It’s just him,” Noah said softly, shaking his head. “He’s got a talk show.”
“Animals were loaded onto the ark in 4990 B.C.,” droned the old man, “a number I arrived at years ago from looking at carbon dating, tree rings and other data. You need to realize the seven days spent loading the ark were actually seven thousand years. So add that to 4991 B.C. and you get 2011 A.D. I added one more year because there is no Year One in the Bible. And all that points to this being the year of the Rapture.”
Mick and Big Alex burst out laughing.
“Thought he wasn’t on the air here,” I said gently.
“He wasn’t!” Noah barked.
“Maybe it’s just some old dude that sounds like him,” Alex added cheerfully.
“No!” Noah said, his neck stiffening as his head started to twitch. “And I can’t…”
“What?”
“Deal with it. I can’t…deal—”
“Relax,” I said. “I’ve got this.”
The boat owner with the loud radio was halfway up an aluminum ladder, taping off teak rails. When I asked if I could change the station, he shook his seagull-white beard.
“This is a secular yard,” I improvised. “No religious programming allowed.”
“Excuse me?”
“Please,” I said, “either let me turn it off or change the station.”
“When I’m through listening I might,” he said, adhering another uneven foot of blue tape to his pocked hull. “Then again I might just tell you to go fuck yourself.”
“Hey, it’s my friend’s father, okay?”
“Who is?”
“That crazy preacher you’re listening to!” I pointed at Noah. “It’s his father.”
“Big deal,” he said. “Free country, last I checked.”
“Check again,” I said, and yanked the plug from the socket.
Stomping back, steam lifting off me, I heard two more radios tune into Grandpa Doomsday. I kept walking, noting the radio I’d just unplugged was back on again and even louder.
Noah’s head swung low like he was talking himself out of something. “Don’t worry ’bout it,” he told me. “I can’t keep hiding from him. And it’s not like he’s some monster. Only thing he’s ever read is the King James. He’s on his fifth or sixth copy. If people could just see him holding that Bible all scotch-taped togethe
r they’d see how harmless he is. And aren’t we supposed to look out for our parents when they start losing it?”
“To a point,” I said.
“But seriously, what if, like I said before, he’s actually sort of right this time?”
“Kinda like you give a monkey enough tries and eventually he’ll type The Grapes of Wrath?”
“No, more like every party’s gotta end.”
“Yet the penguins come back, year after year,” I said in my own voice-over.
“You’re a decent human, Josh. You know that?”
In the awkward quiet that followed, we heard his father calmly articulate what was going to happen in exactly forty-seven days:
“The true believers will ascend suddenly, leaving everything behind, even their clothes. All told, about two percent of the people will go up.”
Noah and I stood there looking upward, picturing the ascent of the naked believers as sunlight blazed through clouds and sped toward our eyeballs at precisely 671 million miles per hour.
My father surprised me by showing up at the boatyard that night. He said he might, but in my dozen years in Olympia, he’d made the hour-long drive only twice, both to try to bully me into returning to work with him and Grumps. So it startled me to see him actually wheel up, spring out of the truck and march toward me and the Joho, his right arm swinging in front of his hulking frame like a speed skater. As he neared, I heard him panting and noticed he was wearing Mother’s old glasses. They looked silly on his big head, but he’d worn them for driving ever since he’d lost his last pair three years ago.
“What do you think?” I asked while he stomped around the boat, crouching low, cocking his head, rising onto his toes, lining up the rudder with the keel.
