Star Sailors

by James McNaughton

  Jeremiah gamely continues. ‘A wave machine can’t be the same as real surf in the ocean, under an open sky, Mr Peters.’

  ‘That’s right, young man. There’s no comparison.’

  Karen sees that Peters has softened considerably towards Jeremiah. He’s warmer, almost boyish when talking about things he likes, and not pretending to be cynical about his job. Comms work for Venture group, she’s sure now, actually genuinely upsets him.

  ‘I used to work on the West Coast as a young man myself, you know, as a reporter,’ he says fondly, ‘at a time when you could swim wherever you liked. No acidification, algae or bacteria from run-off everywhere. Fish within casting distance. Bluff oysters, my God, and whitebait. Salmon running up the Grey River…’

  ‘Salmon? Incredible.’

  Karen guesses that Mr Peters has had at least five glasses of wine. Jeremiah would have had about the same, keeping up with his superior, which is a lot for him.

  ‘Actually, speaking about the West Coast reminds me. You’ll be too young to remember this—particularly you Karen.’

  She feels the story he is about to tell is particularly for her benefit, but the sense of a personal connection quickly fades when Trix settles back in her chair in a manner that suggests the story is familiar. Maybe even too familiar.

  ‘I was a reporter on the West Coast,’ Mr Peters begins, ‘for a newspaper, of all things.’

  Karen’s sure that ‘newspaper’ will be a keyword for senior Comms managers—a word freighted with historical significance which can be used by a junior to unlock a senior manager’s emotions and enable a deeper relationship. There are lists of keywords available for every profession and Jeremiah is a subscriber. She taps Jeremiah’s foot under the table.

  Jeremiah shakes his head ruefully. His face is red. ‘Progress? The end of newspapers was progress? There’s nothing like paper in your hands. The smell and feel of it.’

  The slurry comment earns a look of approval from the older man. ‘I was 20, working out of Greymouth for the Evening Star, driving up and down the coast in a clapped-out Morris Minor 1000, and I thought I was the king of the coast. Rolled my own cigarettes and everything.’ The memory provokes a rumbling laugh that morphs into a deep-seated and frame-convulsing cough. Trix’s hand flies to his back. ‘Well, enough about cigarettes,’ he finally manages. ‘Can’t even talk about them. God, I’d love one though.’ For a fearful moment it seems he might laugh again.

  ‘You mustn’t.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Peters replies wearily, and winks at Jeremiah.

  Things are going well, Karen thinks.

  ‘You were twenty?’ Jeremiah asks, incredulously. ‘With all that responsibility?’

  ‘Yes, and I was paid, too. It wasn’t an internship. I hadn’t set foot in a university, either.’ He looks self-righteous for a moment. ‘Anyway, I got a call from Hokitika—old Hokitika, that is, the original gold-mining town before it was moved inland. Anyway, it was a biggish story for the West Coast: a Chinese man had been found on the beach, naked, nearly dead from hypothermia, and with a broken leg. Calm summer day, no sign of a boat or life raft. He had a heavy jaw and funny mouth. Couldn’t speak at all. Very groggy, hardly opened his eyes.’

  Jeremiah blinks heavily as he shakes his head. ‘Chinese.’

  Speaking of groggy, Karen thinks. He’s registering keywords, but not much else.

  Mr Peters waits for Jeremiah to expand on his comment.

  Jeremiah frowns. ‘Times have certainly changed.’

  The fail-safe card, she thinks, about times changing. It’s all Jeremiah can manage.

  ‘Yes. Anyway, the doctors were fascinated with the man’s mouth. To me it looked like a disability.’ Mr Peters shakes his head.

  ‘Disability,’ Jeremiah says, and takes a mouthful of wine.

  Jeremiah flings Karen a sloppy anxious look. Too good to resist, she thinks and taps his foot under the table, as if ‘disability’ is a keyword to a deeper relationship with a Comms manager.

  ‘Uh,’ Jeremiah says, ‘um, ah, not good old “handicapped”?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Oh. People said “handicapped” in the 1980s. Mr Gully says that, you know, you knew where you stood in those days with “handicapped”. You don’t want to be shifting your terms of reference for the same object. The handicaps, I mean. It’s expensive changing the signage and—’

  Mr Peters holds his hand up and Jeremiah falls silent. ‘I meant that my impression of him being disabled was about as wrong as one could get. But I’ll come to that. Anyway, a couple of days after that first visit, I drove back to Hokitika and checked up on him again. He’d woken up properly but he was mute. The nurses liked him. They named him Sam, Sailor Sam, because as I said, he was thought to have fallen overboard from a fishing vessel.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Peters. I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘It takes a wise man to realise that, Jeremiah.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You’re welcome.

  As Mr Peters’s story resumes and goes on and on, in rather inappropriate pedantic detail concerning what doctors said about the man’s mouth, and the way Mr Peters supposedly taught Sailor Sam to read and write basic English in an hour—with increasingly robotic encouragement from Jeremiah—it feels to Karen that Mr Peters is reading a script from memory, with many pages to come; a suspicion that Trix’s glazed expression seems to confirm. While the monologue continues, Karen wonders where Trix stands on cotton since the subsidies ended and water shortages made the 20,000 litres required to grow one kilogram of it uneconomical. She remembers Trix campaigning for hemp as a substitute years ago, using the disappearance of the Aral Sea to illustrate the cotton industry’s insatiable water consumption. Nothing changed at the time, but Trix had seen change coming, including the importance of stockpiling secondhand cotton. Karen wonders if Trix has enough left for more pure high-end garments, or if she’ll use it only in mixes. Well, a lady wouldn’t ask. Karen knows she could learn a lot from Trix about a lot of things, and have fun as well. Perhaps she could offer Trix her services as an intern? If and when the right moment comes up.

  She tunes into Mr Peters’s speech.

  ‘I had the sensation, when close to Sam, of a different mode of perception. He had access to something bigger than the record of his own life. I mean, we’re essentially individuals, right? We learn through personal trial and error and a school curriculum and recorded history and what have you. Sam was different; he had access to a well of communal knowledge, was part of a mentally unified community, which he added knowledge to as well as took from. He was part of one organic whole, and sustained by it through a process of dynamic interplay.’

  That sounded like a well-rehearsed line, Karen thinks. A few of them have. Why, she wonders, is he inflicting this on us now? Something that happened so long ago? Just when things were going so well? She suspects that having spent years trying to convince people that this man Sam was special in some way, Mr Peters is now bound to convince himself as well. It’s a rut he’s invested too much in. It’s too late to cut his losses and get out. Also, he’s nearly 80, and even seven-pointers can lose the plot, particularly those who came late to NST. Maybe he thinks it’s the 1990s and the story still has currency.

  He senses her scepticism, and surely Jeremiah’s as well.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m ruining the Beach.’

  ‘No, no,’ Jeremiah cries, ‘not at all!’

  Mr Peters sighs. ‘The other thing going on at the time was that the hospital’s director wanted to shift Sam from the general hospital over to the nearby psychiatric hospital at Seaview. At the time, Sam’s writing about the world heating up and the collapse of civilisation was cited as evidence of his insanity. But to me and many others he was the sanest, most responsive and curious man imaginable.’

  Karen drinks with Mr Peters out of sympathy. She doesn’t know what he’s getting at but the pain in his face and voice is real; it’s his
reality—whatever it is—and she feels for him, but she can’t focus on this interminable story anymore. Neither can Trix, it seems, who has turned to watch the ploshing waves. Hopefully, Karen thinks, she’s mulling over our discussion. Trix liked her silk-lined bag idea and had actually even said, ‘I’ll make that happen for you.’ She wonders what Trix’s next move will be. A coffee, maybe?

  ‘So why am I telling you this?’ Mr Peters says loudly. He looks thunderous. Karen turns to him; Trix also. Jeremiah straightens. ‘Because Sam left a notebook under his pillow before he disappeared. A nurse found it and gave it to me. He’d written a couple of pages before cutting off mid-sentence—probably when he heard the police coming to take him away, to ‘repatriate him’. It was a warning about climate change, which was not in the public mind back then. We printed it in the paper, without really understanding its significance at the time. You’ve read it?’

  Jeremiah frowns. ‘A warning about global warming?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’ve been so many,’ Karen says, ‘from scientists.’

  ‘Yes, but no one listened to the scientific predictions because the illusion of serious discord among the scientific community was created. It wasn’t a compelling narrative. It was too slow and abstract, a very dull doomsday scenario. And there was no believable messenger. But the world would have listened to Sam’s prophecy. Had he been allowed to continue, I mean. We needed an alien to come and warn us about climate change, someone with that kind of authority; that’s the only way things would have changed. Look at the world’s religions: the messenger has to be superhuman to have authority. Sam would’ve changed our attitude to the environment overnight. I truly believe that.’

  An awkward silence is developing. An alien? Karen feeds Mr Peters an easy question—one he’s already answered. ‘Why didn’t people listen to the scientists until it was too late?’

  ‘Because the media made the issue seem scientifically uncertain. It was like tobacco smoking. A few scientists were prepared to say it wasn’t bad for you, back in the day, and their crooked findings got a lot of press, a very disproportionate amount of press, because big business has powerful interests and owns the media. The media was apparently being impartial, you know, stating both sides and implying that the truth lay somewhere in the middle, but the truth doesn’t lie in the middle. There is no “balanced” story. Cigarettes kill people. The truth about climate change doesn’t lie in the middle either. We were and are responsible for it and the impact is proving disastrous. Adaptation shouldn’t be the priority now. The end of extraction should be.’

  Karen knows that Jeremiah is biting his tongue. Big energy and its ubiquitous manufacturing offshoots, which the Comms arm of Venture Group represents, has PR theories about climate change: that scientific knowledge silos produced imperfect and contrary data that there was no conclusive big picture; that continual growth is crucial to finance mitigation and adaptation to climate change (whatever the cause); that natural, cyclical climate change has occurred since life on Earth began; that adaptation must be the ethical priority when lives are at immediate risk. Malcolm talks about big business propaganda frequently, even when they’re in bed. She’s ready to stamp on Jeremiah’s foot if he opens his mouth.

  ‘And the 95 per cent certainty principle in climate science has been fatal,’ Mr Peters continues. ‘There has to be only a 1 in 20 chance of something happening by chance for a phenomenon to be considered scientifically unproven. Like the increase in hurricanes, for example. Even though the link between increasing sea temperature and hurricanes was obvious, it didn’t quite meet the certainty principle. Yet this figure of 95 per cent has no mathematical or statistical basis. It was invented by a certain Fischer, a scientist who denied the link between smoking and lung cancer. I can see you’re tuning out here, Jeremiah—this is the whole problem with science. It’s not a compelling enough story to make people change their lives, because the teller is faceless and the motivations obscure and the facts seemingly contested. Like I said, we needed a prophet 60 years ago, someone to lead us into a new age.’ He takes another drink.

  Jeremiah taps Karen’s foot. It means, Hang in there.

  ‘They made out that climate change wasn’t something that serious, respectable people worried about. Hippies, tree-huggers and other people who didn’t understand the real world got hung up on it. And then, after decades of obscurantism, when the science was no longer deniable, they made out that climate change would be a good thing because it was the solution to feeding the world’s growing population, remember? It would thaw the permafrost in Canada and Siberia and open up vast new tracts of arable land, in which plants would thrive on the high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. As if feeding the hungry was ever the motivation for CEOs to get up in the morning. Pure spin. And spin is something I know about, right?’

  Jeremiah frowns as if he doesn’t understand, while nodding as if he does.

  ‘What happened? The obvious: drought, disease, storms, floods, sinkholes. The big monocultures didn’t work in Siberia, no matter how much was thrown at them in the form of pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers and genetic modification.’

  Jeremiah opens his mouth, probably to say something about a net gain in food production despite higher than anticipated costs. She stamps on his foot. He remains silent.

  ‘Scientists were funded to focus on carbon and ignore the methane released by melting permafrost, which is a much worse greenhouse gas, of course. Business as usual.’ Mr Peters turns to the lapping water and raises his palms and face to the blue. ‘And here we are. On the verge of losing the Indian and African monsoons and the Amazon rainforest to fire.’ He turns back to the table. ‘After all these “drastic” emission reductions, which only offset population growth and the growing middle-class in developing countries, we’re still putting as much carbon into the atmosphere as we were 20 years ago. People forget it’s cumulative, that carbon just builds up, because the language is misleading. In 2043, 40 billion metric tons of carbon were reduced to 37 billion in 2044. But that’s not some kind of cause for celebration; that’s a 37 billion ton increase in one year, which only adds to the massive amount collected in the air and sea since the Industrial Revolution.’ He takes a drink, as if wine and not breath is needed for speech.

  ‘We’re already over the two-degree maximum that was seen as the sustainable limit early in the century. It’s twice that high in the Arctic. Emission reductions didn’t happen because of so-called growth and humanitarian reasons, according to our leaders, so now it’s all “Adaptation first, reduction later”. Billions and billions of tons of cement in sea and security walls and along flood-prone rivers, and billions of tons of more carbon in the air as a result. Our leaders say that they “didn’t see this coming”. They must have been falling asleep in briefings for the last 50 years. Mushrooms, that’s what we are. Kept in the dark and fed bullshit.’

  Jeremiah opens his hands helplessly.

  Mr Peters nods. ‘We needed someone to lead us against the money-hearts, a rallying point for the world, someone who couldn’t be denied. People want a leader like that now.’ He knocks the table rhythmically with his fist. ‘Non-political, non-denominational, someone who can’t be bought out or play favourites. Someone above suspicion. Beyond reproach. Someone non-human, as I said—it had to be—to unite the world and show us a new way. Someone like Sam.’ His table-knocking stops.

  Fans spin high above. The aroma of something good wafts over. A happy shriek drifts across the water.

  ‘They’d kill someone like that, though,’ Karen says, to fill the silence. ‘Or brainwash him.’

  ‘Yes. They took Sam away.’

  Jeremiah blurts a prepared question. ‘You said that Sam wrote something?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mr Peters looks deflated for a long moment. ‘It opens with: “English is not my language and Earth is not my home…”’

  ‘Yes, I’ve read it,’ Jeremiah says. ‘Very powerful. Extraordinary.’


  ‘Oh, he was Sam Starsailor,’ Karen says. ‘I didn’t make the connection.’

  ‘That name came later.’

  The text, sometimes framed, was hung at certain flats in outer Wellington when she was younger and still hangs in some cafés today, where chewy muffins are served. She’d always assumed him to be a Native American chief. Jeremiah probably doesn’t know the passage, she thinks, despite his praise of it. She pictures him, his eyes glazing over while sitting opposite it on a toilet somewhere.

  ‘Well,’ says Mr Peters, ‘Sam was right. The world as we inherited it is ending.’ Tears fill his eyes. Bowing his head, rubbing his forehead with blotchy hands to hide his face, he has become old and defeated. All his proud glitter has gone. Trix rubs his back in a familiar way, as if he tells the story regularly and weeps upon its conclusion every time. She even has a tissue for him.

  Poor guy, Karen thinks. He obviously needs help. She’s embarrassed. Jeremiah doesn’t know where to look either.

  Trix smiles ruefully. ‘Would you mind giving us a minute, please?’

  Jeremiah stands and bows grandly. ‘Of course.’ He turns and extends a hand. ‘Karen,’ he intones, as if he’s a Knight of the Round Table requesting a dance, ‘would you like to swim?’

  Karen finishes her drink. She would indeed.

  3

  Jeremiah leads her solemnly through the restaurant, past the maître d’s podium, towards the main entrance, having forgotten and not seeing that the Pagoda has no walls to prevent them walking straight onto the beach. His foot catches on an empty chair, scraping it noisily on the parquet floor. ‘Shit.’ They’re both drunk and making a scene and she doesn’t care. As soon as their feet touch sand he breaks into a run and drags her towards the water. ‘Aaaaahhhhhhh,’ he yells, and follows that with a loud laugh at nothing immediately obvious. He’s slaughtered. She releases his hand and he falls flat on his face—hard. She stoops over his prone body. ‘Jeremiah?’ She shakes his shoulder. ‘Jez?’ Seconds pass. She’s concerned now. He rolls onto his back. Fine white sand clings to his sweaty face like a mask. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘the sky looks so high.’