by Austin Bunn
We never heard their cries. In an instant, the line unwound ferociously and the longboat vanished. The crew jumped on the rope and found themselves nearly propelled over. I grabbed the final length of line and tied it to the base of the main mast. When it uncoiled completely, the rope, three-fingers thick, sprang taut, and the mast groaned. The crew scrambled forward to regain a hold but could not pull the line back. We were strung tight; the fathom line ran from the Elena, through the air and over the ledge.
A monstrous pull tilted the ship sidelong and dragged her toward the drop. Everything on deck slid to one side.
Alfredo drew his knife and began to cut the line. But I couldn’t let him release Diego and the others to their death. If there is only this life—and nothing after—then it must be defended.
I met him at the rope, his blade already biting in, the line opening like tendon.
“You’ll kill them,” I said.
“They’re lost already,” he said. “We’ll go with them!”
I wrestled the knife from his hand and tossed it into the sea. Alfredo looked at me as if I were mad. Before I could move, I felt another blade across my throat.
“Cut it,” the English conscript called out from behind me.
Armando came to his brother’s side and continued the sawing with his own knife. But then my eye caught something out at the ledge: Diego, pulling himself along the rope, hand over hand, back to the Elena.
“Look!” Alfredo cried.
Armando stopped. The crew gathered at the line and hove. And this time, the line yielded, and we managed to reclaim it, until it was clear that we were pulling a weight far greater than just Diego. With a final heave, the tension on the line dropped and then we could see the longboat itself crest back through the spume and come to rest on the ocean surface. We had gaffed Diego back onto the deck—he rolled on his back and sank into a stupor—before I noticed the longboat was not empty.
A lone figure sat inside it. A woman.
She sat on one of the benches, in a high-waisted dress with flared sleeves and a heart-shaped hat. She was old and frail and dripping wet. Her skin looked as white as boiled bone.
“Where am I?” she called to us. “I’m frightened.”
I knew the Elena’s bilge, awash with rotting food and piss, could inspire delusions. Ethers from belowdecks had been known to poison sailors with mirages, even throttle them in sleep. You could be surrounded by fresh sea air and your own ship could suffocate you. But we all saw this woman. Could every man be taken with the same dream?
Coralito peered out, his face blanched. His eyes hunted through his blindness. “Who is there?” he asked.
“A woman,” I said. “From beyond the ledge.”
“What is your name?” Coralito called out.
The woman swooned. “The sun is burning my skin. I must dry and get out of this heat.”
“What is your name!” Coralito called again. “Your name!”
The woman gasped. “Coralito?”
Coralito staggered back and crossed himself. “This cannot be,” he said.
“Tell us your name,” I called out.
The woman flapped her hat in her face. “My name is Isabela Hernandez Coralito, wife of Fernando Mancuello Coralito.”
Coralito hissed, “She has been dead for six years.”
The woman cast a glance over her shoulder. “Please,” she said. “There are so many others waiting.”
We kept her in the longboat. All day the wraith cried out, demanding shade and water. Her voice was so human, so frail and chilling. She tried, fruitlessly, to paddle forward with her hands. When the sun continued to rise in a rinsed sky, she grew more urgent and pained. If she had been alive, truly alive, our treatment—watching an old woman wilt—would have been torture. Instead, as Coralito swore, his wife had passed away. He had set her tombstone himself.
At dusk, Diego gathered strength, though he was now ashen, his skin drained of color. I caved a blanket around him while he stared into the bowl of his hands. They were red and badly cut from his climb back to the boat, one wrist disjointed and swollen where he’d twisted it up in the line. He rehearsed his grip, opening and closing his fingers. I sat beside him, holding the ledger.
“Write,” I said. “Tell me. What did you see?”
I noticed, then, his wound: a deep gash at his right wrist that ran through to the other side. Inside, the tissue was gray. Every time Diego rotated his hand, the flesh opened like a mouth and did not bleed. He looked at it queerly.
His letters were feeble and wrong-handed. “DEAD?”
I felt a kick to my leg. “What’d he write?” the English conscript asked, peering on the page. “What’re those letters?”
“He’s weak,” I answered. “We need to leave him alone.”
The conscript sized me with cold eyes. “I served ten years for my crime. And you, for yours?”
At the sound of oars in the water, I pushed him off. I stood to see Alfredo and Armando in the fishing dingy. They approached the woman with a small skin of fresh water—their Christian duty—and a crossbow aimed at her chest. Coralito joined them. The dory held still at thirty strokes from the longboat.
“Fernando, why do these men hold their weapons at me?” she called out, nervously.
“Where have you come from?” Coralito asked. “I buried you.”
Her hand went to her chest. “What?”
“You died in our bedroom in Aragon, in my arms,” Coralito said. “We fell asleep and when I awoke you were gone, Isabela. This was six years ago.”
Isabela shook her head. “I don’t remember, Fernando. I don’t remember any of that.”
Armando and Alfredo rowed the dory closer and closer until it knocked the side of the longboat and Coralito stepped over to attend to his wife.
She was fed and given a swath of tarpaulin for shade. While Coralito comforted her, Alfredo and Armando rigged a small shelter with a split-bunk post and cord fixed to the prow. They left Coralito and rowed back to the Elena.
“I felt her breath,” Armando whispered. “It was cold, like a winter draft.”
“Her eyes are black,” Alfredo added. “But her pain is as real as any.”
By nightfall, Coralito called for the dory. Back on ship, he steadied himself at the mast. “She is no dream,” he said.
“What does she know of the captain, of the others?” I asked.
“Where did she come from?” Armando asked.
“It is a peculiar story,” Coralito began, chewing his nail. She told him that one day, she awoke on a shoreline crowded with people. The sea there was tideless and still. Inland, trees loomed over the shore, a forest so dense it seemed like a wall. People there wandered along this shore as far as she could see, men and women of many ages, colors, and costumes, speaking in strange tongues. Each appeared to travel alone, and they often stopped her and asked for things, but she was afraid and pulled away. Eventually, she said, she began walking too. She never saw the same face twice.
At one moment, a moment that she could not separate from other moments, Isabela moved into the sea, knee-deep. She had never thought to enter the water before. But something called to her. From the mist, the longboat drifted into her sight. She got in. The crowds from the shore saw and rushed at the water. The fathom line snapped taut and she found herself pulled out to sea. She held tight as a mist enveloped her. The sound of the voices faded until it was replaced by a rumble and the sense of vertiginous turn. The next she knew, she could make out the Elena.
Coralito stopped and ran his hand across his face, wiping the disbelief. Armando the Taller crossed himself.
“I asked for her hand and made a cut along her finger,” Coralito continued. “Her blood is red and real.”
“Lie. She doesn’t bleed,” said the conscript, nodding to Diego. “Just like the mute. They’re both wraiths now.”
The crew stared at Diego. He did not look up.
I said, “Come morning, we return her to the ledge
.”
Coralito tugged his tunic taut against his chest. “Then I go with her,” he answered. “I will not leave my wife.”
“Diego goes too,” Armando said.
His brother stepped toward him. “But what if there are others, abandoned over the ledge? Are we to leave them in purgatory?”
Armando shook his head. “Anything else would defy God’s will.”
Alfredo’s face lost its softness. He seemed to rise up his whole length. “You speak of God’s will?” he shot back. “Was it God’s choice to take our brother? Or yours?”
The brothers leapt on each other and wrestled to the deck. They fought, equally matched, like a man with his reflection. If no one stopped them, it was because we felt we were watching the war within us playing out. Each man aboard—Coralito, the conscript, Diego, Marco, and the other deckhands—understood that the ledge was now among us. We could pass over the edge or we could plunder it, but we could not escape. We watched in silence until the two brothers sat across from each other, exhausted and bruised. Blood ran from Alfredo’s nose and his brother rubbed his jaw.
“I remember him,” Alfredo said. “He was our brother. And if he is still alive, I will go and get him myself.”
That night, there was no reversing of the sand clock, no order to the Elena. Coralito boarded the dory and was rowed out to his wife. The men drained the wine casks and fired all the supplies in a noisy feast. Diego stood at the prow, ignoring me, even more pale, like alabaster. He paced, the way a wife grooves a path of anticipation on a widow’s walk, and stared out at the ledge. I could find no consolation in the riot around me and the chill air had me missing the simple heat of my mother’s bakery. Why had I ever left? Why is it that men are always leaving? What is this hunger for what we can’t see? I ached for the Calle de la Mar, for the sounds of the fruit carts jostling, and to see one more time my mother at the doorway and to smell her honey cakes rolling out into the street. I called to her in a prayer. I wanted to see her face again and feel blessed, but I could not summon the whole of it. It remained blurred, like smoked glass, and the knowledge that I had forgotten it filled me with a clawing emptiness. The night wore on. The crew’s exuberance faded into melancholy, and they keened for their families and home cities, for those they would never see again. I fell asleep in a curl of loose sail.
I woke to a jerk. Under the first kindling of clouds, the fathom line was already strung out to the ledge and Alfredo, Diego, and others, with a great cry, pulled together.
“What are you doing?” I asked. None turned to answer me.
Armando shoved his way forward, shouting, “This is blasphemy!” But before he could fight, the longboat returned over the ledge and came through the spray, laden with three new figures.
“Armando? Alfredo?” yelled a young man, standing in the boat. “Is that you? I felt you calling me!”
Armando stepped toward the gunwale, squinting, his mouth open.
“Brother!” Alfredo called back. “We’re both here! Come to us!”
The longboat knocked alongside the Elena, and Alfredo lifted the young man to the deck with a stevedore’s strength. He looked just like the brothers, though youngest, and his skin had no pigment. He hugged Alfredo with genuine pleasure.
“You seem so old,” he said. “Have you been away?”
“No, no,” his brother said beaming. “It’s you who left us.”
Armando made the sign of the cross. “You are dead,” he said. “I took your life.”
A laugh shot out of his brother. “You took nothing.”
A boy followed up the rope ladder, unkempt, in tattered trousers. He was not more than five or six years old, and a swollen lump rested at the base of his neck. It had been years since I’d seen a mark of the plague. The boy stood bewildered by the unfamiliar faces until the ship’s gimbaling startled him and he began to shake and cry. Diego pushed his way forward to face the child.
“My son,” he said, collapsing around the boy. “My son.”
Diego’s voice. The sound of it shattered me, the deepest chime of the closest, celestial sphere.
When the final figure boarded the Elena, holding her head down in humility, I knew that I had called her. Those who crossed the ledge did so because we summoned them with yearning. Her shirt was soaked, a damp rag giving no warmth, though none was needed. When she looked up, I understood why the crew had mutinied: Death is the tyranny. To conquer the ledge was a conquest over this. The greed of time.
My mother stood before me, wet and shivering in her resurrection. Her black eyes studied me in a bloodless face.
I embraced her, and as I did, I noticed the odd twist in her body, her neck stretched. An angry, red indentation wrapped around her throat. My fingers sought it out and ran these ridges where rope had once been.
“I told you to never leave,” my mother said.
My strength left and I buried myself in her hair. “Forgive me,” I said. I remained there until I felt a lock of it brush against my face in a breeze.
From where I sit, I watch the crew busy with lines. Every one is now strung over the ledge. In time, each snaps taut and the deckhands pull first the longboat, then a handful of crude rafts around the ledge, heavy with people. Soon, the Elena is crowded with men and women, in all kinds of dress and colors, my mother among them. I write in the ledger, “Many new souls.”
By afternoon, the crew sends the longboat one last time over the drop. This time, they cut free the sea anchors and raise the mainsail for a broad reach. A westerly favors us, and even before our sails are half-raised, the Elena heaves forward with life. An enormous weight drags on us and hemp lines split, some tear from their braces.
Finally a Portuguese galleon crests through the spume, with dozens of people clutching to its deck. The Elena has towed it over. The white faces look as if they have survived a squall, as if they are amazed to be alive. Eventually the men of the galleon set its sails and drop more lines back into the roar.
They pull over a strange ship, this one low and open and driven by oars, with a high wooden dragonhead fixed at its prow. The two ships repeat this, and before long, the sea here becomes busy with boats, many unknown to me, and far outnumbering the Elena. The water carries the noise of weird cries. This motley army of the dispossessed, recovered from the ledge, soon fills the ocean as far as I see. At evening, we depart east together, toward home, sails bellied in the new wind.
Everything, All at Once
My mother calls. “I have lichen,” she says. “On my vagina.”
What can be done? I am her daughter. I accept.
“Lichen is a woods thing,” I answer. “A hiking thing.”
My mother lives on the tenth floor of a high-rise that overlooks New York Harbor from a New Jersey bluff. She leaves only to shop, to return half of what she has bought, and to eat lunch at the Quick Check. She has not been hiking or on lichen or lichen-adjacent since before I knew what a vagina was. Her adventures are happy hours in the penthouse bar, where she counts the freighters and container ships in the harbor with Al, a retired sea captain.
“Well, the Internet says I have it inside me,” she says, “and you can’t tell a soul.”
It is Saturday morning. I open my garage door, the phone compacted between my ear and shoulder. Inside, the mausoleum of my marriage—the shelves and stacks and piles—greets me with a grim exhale. The papers arrived from the lawyer yesterday. Soon I will be officially divorced from Scott. I’m selling what I can.
“You have to come with me to the doctor,” my mother says.
Except I have buyers coming. I’m expecting to get money for my past life. The pleasure of seeing things go.
“This is your mother speaking,” she says. “This is your mother in need.”
What can ever be done?
I say, “Give me an hour.”
At noon a girl drives up in a pickup with her Mexican boyfriend. They saw my ad on Craigslist and are trying to outfit their life in a day. Already they
look numb, zombified by exertion. She sucks the final drops from a Gallon Guzzler, pegging the ice with the straw for more. Her boyfriend wears a sweat-soaked, red and yellow T-shirt that reads “YALE.” I don’t think those are the colors, but things get random on the boardwalk. He massages her shoulders when she stands still. He is shorter and has to reach up a little. In the bed of the truck, a mint green refrigerator is lashed down haphazardly with straps, like an escape trick nobody wants to see.
“How come you want to get rid of so much awesomeness?” the girl asks, her fingers tracing the scalloped rim of a Waterford crystal bowl: a wedding gift that I used for loose change. Her boyfriend picks through a basket of shells and conches, carefully spaced and layered with towels, that I displayed in a glass cabinet at our old place. We lived a hundred yards from the shore, yet I thought we needed reminding about the ocean. My whole marriage felt like that, a reminder that the real thing was close and available but out of view.
“I left my husband four months ago,” I say. “All this reminds me of him. Of us.”
The girl glances over at her boyfriend. “Don’t tell him that,” she says, under her breath. “He’s wicked superstitious.”
I see their relationship unscroll in front of me—his fears, her fears of his fears, the double braid of accommodation and resentment—I want to tell her: Run. The divorced aren’t jaded. We’re clairvoyant.
The boyfriend presses two conches against his ears and grins. I say, “I give that basket to you. No money. Mi casa, tu casa.”
“He’s not retarded,” the girl says.
The boyfriend looks surprised, then honored, then seems to see the basket for what it is, which is a wicker container of beach trash, another weight he’ll have to carry. He deposits the conches and turns to a shelf of puzzles. I had a jigsaw period.
They leave with the crystal bowl, coffeemaker, nightstand, single mattress, artificial Christmas tree, and miter saw. Without asking, I carry the basket of shells to their truck. I smell the creamy coconut of suntan lotion and a funky undertone, brackish and tidal. Shards of sanded beach glass rumble like fogged irises inside a cookie tin. Scott and I lived at the beach for five years, and if you could watch just our beach episodes, we would look happy. Scott would fish in the surf or play his guitar, and I would read or just listen, jealous of his aptitudes. I’m a librarian at the elementary school; what I’m good at is cataloging. After every good time we had, I had an assignment for myself. I had to take one shell home, something singular. Proof that I’d felt loved, that I was experiencing what there was to experience. That display case was my own library, a library of moments.
