Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  The uplink! The uplink to Big Radio is in that light tower! Somebody has turned on a mike and you are transmitting!

  Nadia stared at them. She was silent and blank for a moment and then said, I was transmitting? Transmitting what?

  Come ashore, said James. He remained at the top of the steps. Get out of the boat and come ashore.

  One of Gandy’s crewmen jumped out onto the lower steps and tied onto the bollard and so they all got out one after the other as James watched with the dart gun held openly in one hand. They sloshed up the steps and at last they reached the top gasping for breath and all that they wore blew in the wind while behind them on the sea the dark schooner rode up and down with bare poles and on the horizon was the coming storm.

  Chan lifted a flat palm. He said, Peace.

  Likewise, said James. He lifted the dart gun and pointed the short barrel at Chan’s face. And so tell us all about yourselves.

  And so, said Chan. Right now we’re travelers. From Saturday Inlet, like I was screaming at you out there in the boat, then. Which is a Primary work station up on the coast.

  Okay, said James. I know it from my chart. Nadia stood behind him with the chair leg and now it embarrassed her but she didn’t know what to do with it.

  A chart! said Everett. He turned to Chan. You see, he has a maritime chart.

  Chan crossed his thick arms. We need your charts. Saturday Inlet is all out of food and out of ideas. I hope you weren’t counting on sailing up there for steak and eggs.

  Actually, yes. We were just about to leave.

  Nah, forget it, supplies delivery stopped a month ago, no more soy cheese and so, cheeseless, we five here decided to save ourselves and try for a place called Banefield. So put the gun away. We need you.

  James lifted his head to the Pacific behind them. Is that your ship?

  No, no, said Colin. That’s Captain Gandy, he’s a scrapper and a trader, like, illegal, sort of black market, we kind of hired him and it was me, okay? And you are transmitting. He waved both hands in the air like brushes as if to scrub the air of all doubts. It was me, I triangulated on the tower there; it’s the uplink to Big Radio and it transmits. Colin then pointed both forefingers at the light tower.

  Big Radio? Nadia was stunned into blankness. Her big yellow parka beat like a tent in the wind. From the tower?

  James didn’t look up at the tower. He kept his eyes on the group in front of him. I thought so, he said. I couldn’t get up the steps.

  I was transmitting, said Nadia. Oh my God. And you thought so. And you didn’t tell me.

  It doesn’t matter! said Oli and gave a little leap. It doesn’t! Where is Primary now? Lost, no orders. And television is dead.

  So, said James.

  Long story short, said Chan, we decided to form a company and hire that ship.

  We are the Five Companions, said Oli, presenting the fish.

  We imagine things, sir, said the Toastmaster, and lifted his top hat.

  I build radios, said Colin. So we can hear radio talk and, so, be encouraged, then.

  A better life, said Everett holding his wallpaper book. “And on either side of the river was there a tree of life, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Fahrenheit 451.

  They built a fire of driftwood and looked at one another’s faces in the endlessly altering radiance. Light speaks to us and holds us, flames or glowing TV screens, moving illuminated shapes seize human minds, a gift, a ball and chain. They spoke and explained themselves to one another, a tortuous process because they had all spent a lifetime in a suspect world of overlords and beautiful celebrities, and now bloody and terrifying scenes on the screen; a world of deaf, opaque social structures and contaminated language crushed by fear and boredom and awareness weeks. They were just people. They had no script.

  Oli brought out her flour and baking powder and made bannocks and the salmon lay upon the coals. Gulls hung overhead as if suspended on wires, turning their yellow eyes from one person to another as they spoke and interrupted one another and explained and then the gulls cried out as the red salmon was torn apart and handed around. The air was full of gull cries, hungry, always hungry.

  And so tell me about transmitting, said Nadia. She stared at them with her gray-green eyes fringed in wet black lashes, as if she were guilty of some grave social error, which she was, having muttered death wishes against Earl Jay Warren in the imagined privacy of the light tower, muttered only, she told herself, a mere whispering muttering.

  Couldn’t hear! cried Colin. I swear! All people heard sounded like murmuring and the birds!

  No indeed, said everybody else.

  Be easy, young woman, said Chan. And eat. Here, take another bannock.

  Still, her murmuring had gone out all over the Western Cessions, but who now would care? She lifted her head to the light tower, now something other than it was, something more than it was, far more, radiating all the great stories to a drowning world.

  The flames raveled like neon threads and streamed southeast and threw sparks and old nails glowed in the timbers as they talked and ate. And so these strangers on an island in the North Pacific sat down together on the magnetic lines of dire necessity, a collection of jesters gathered at the far border of the Western Cessions in top hats and oversized parkas.

  Now, said Nadia. She went to the house and brought out the bottle of wine. There was enough for one drink each. They clinked their enamel cups together and said, To Barking Sound.

  On January fifth the Companions started for Barking Sound, Everett whispered to himself. He must go on and write the chronicle as if they were a kind of royalty, founders of kingdoms. Their faces were turned to the beckoning wind that came out of the drowning megacities and then over the bare mountains, out of the dissolving tundra. It blew from the remote country known as Japan or Kamchatka, come over the sea to sing to them. In all directions were danger and hunger but also things unexpected. Things that would astonish them. The world unrolling like a scroll or a map of the unexplained and within that another maplike thing equally inexplicable, like the beyonding compulsion that seizes people as they stand looking at an unknown shore with a ship out on the sea waiting for them, and the smell of salt water and rain.

  As they tipped up their heads and drank they heard the report of a shotgun. James grasped his cane and stood up and saw a puff of smoke at the rail of the schooner.

  That’s the signal, said Chan. We’ve got to board in under an hour. The storm is coming.

  Chapter 52

  Colin, who had been seasick from the hour they left Saturday Inlet, would stay behind and work in the light tower to build a relay transceiver that would transmit on one frequency and receive on another. He had already found the hyperzipped CDs of all the readings, moving with infinite slowness inside the green battery units at the bottom of the tower and was carefully taking the console apart. They agreed that he would transmit whatever information he had at ten o’clock every night. For food he had a pallet of the expired foodstuffs from Gandy’s hold, mussels, and the net contributed by Gandy and set in the slot. For company he had Edward the Cat.

  Gandy and the crew threw down a boarding net as the skiff bumped against the strakes. A tall thin man shipped his oar and came up first, thin to emaciation but yet he reached down with strong arms and hoisted the young woman aboard with little trouble. James’s cane fell from her hand, turning over into the rising sea and was lost.

  Let it go, the man shouted. Let it go.

  Sparks called up, Sir, sir, come down, sir.

  Gandy and Sparks sat at the radio table. The marine radio was set at FM, 88.3. Male Voice One said, This is the last excerpt from The Pickwick Papers before we go on, with the arrival of the New Year, to the tales and poems from the Mysterious East. So let us begin with our final selection. “It is the fate of all authors to create imaginary friends, and
lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.”

  And then Colin’s voice, breaking in: Captain Gandy do you read? This is Lighthouse Island. Try band 16. Do you read?

  Sparks glanced at the captain, not knowing what to do.

  Gandy picked up the VHF mike and turned the knob to band 16, clicked to transmit, and said, Read you loud and clear, Lighthouse.

  A nerdlike scream of triumph erupted from the speaker.

  They set sail in a cold, hard wind and light snow racing across the deck in gusts. Nadia held to the rail and watched as the lighthouse tower disappeared, pouring out the great stories and poems of the world, and in their interstices, messages from the present disaster.

  The Bargage Maru drove on southward with only occasional glimpses of the Velveteen Mountains of the coast. Here and there on the sea the rafts of debris streamed up the crests, stringing along torn roofs and clothing and bodies.

  In the dark hold the passengers huddled around a vial of Kero-Light that Nadia had placed inside a jar, braced with shoes. They sat in an alley between strapped-down pallets of expired rations and bags of fuel pellets and rolls of screening, bales of rags and children’s toys. James and Nadia broke open packets of anything readily edible even if it were expired or stale.

  They considered what to do if Banefield were either there or not there. James said first they should be something. A club, a moot, a council. So if there were people at Banefield they would not think they, we here, were a sloppy gang of raiders. He looked over at Nadia. What do you think?

  Nadia said, That would be better. It would mean we had sense enough to organize ourselves.

  She had found a bag of roasted wheat berries long past their shelf life and was eating them by the handful and even though there were sour looks and dubious frowns and small negative gestures about being a moot or a council and so on (it seemed to invite creeping bureaucracy) Nadia suddenly liked them all, in a kind of surprise rush. Because they were doing something together, because they had set out on the wild sea on a chancy mission and thus they made themselves beloved to the great, dangerous forces that offered fire to humankind. They had a mission. It makes all the difference in the world. In this they would become dear to one another, she was sure of it.

  In the end, tossed back and forth in the dark hold with the sea roaring past the bulkhead and hands reaching out to grab the glass jar with its small flame inside, they decided to give their group a name.

  And they would make a flag, and have a written purpose, which was to learn to plant things and raise domestic animals, to make their own living, and make good maps of the coast and the interior and share them with whoever needed them and fight off whatever agencies tried to stop them. This founding charter would forever forbid them from any other purpose and would convince the Banefield people that they were not mere helpless refugees or pirates. After a long controversy they decided to call themselves the Lincolnshire Poachers after the strange and distant numbers station.

  But my good people we must not forget about radio transmission from the lighthouse, said the Toastmaster. And Chan’s coal seam?

  “ . . . make good maps of the coast and the interior and share them with whoever needed them and look for coal seams and maintain radio transmissions and this founding charter will forever forbid us, etc.,” said Everett, writing in “coal seam” and “radio transmissions.”

  What about . . . said Oli.

  Stop, stop, said Chan. He leaned back and laid his thick hands on his stomach. Stop. It will never end. We’ll end up adding weaving, composting, plumbing, shingles, naval architecture, and geriatric hygiene.

  We’re going to do all that? said Everett.

  Depends. He glanced over at James, who had burst out laughing. James stopped and cleared his throat. This is going to be harder and dirtier than any of you imagine, said Chan. Sometime I will tell you about the timber camps.

  I would like to hear it, said Oli. She combed back her wet hair and smiled at him and she began to braid it.

  Later, said Chan. He did not look at her.

  After a while all but James and Chan fell asleep, exhausted by the talk and the unpredictable movements of the ship. They placed the shotgun and rifle nearby, slotted between two pallets of tattered ration boxes, and leaned back against the bulkhead that wept with damp. They talked long into the night, about James and Nadia’s flight from arrest, about what news they had of the catastrophic flooding inland, about the rifle and the shotgun and the possibility of finding ammunition, about staying alive in a world in which some things were going to be new and other things would return, altered but recognizable, such as numbered years and maps and animal husbandry.

  We need maps of the interior. Chan pulled out his last packet of tobacco and rolled a cigarette. He bent over the jar with its wavering flame and sucked air and smoke. You’ll have to travel. And I need you to blow out my coal seam. And then new marine charts. Chan’s agile mind leaped from one thing he wanted to another thing he wanted.

  That’s hydrography. I’m not a hydrographer.

  You’re not stupid, said Chan. You could learn it in two weeks. The agencies are gone, okay? They will show up again in a few hundred years. We will all be happily dead. So it is with the world. Bureaucracies have been around since Mesopotamia. Chan drew on his cigarette and turned it and looked at the glowing end as if it were a world on fire. Eventually they always fall apart, segments, crash, ends up with somebody living in a cave, “Hey, I’m an assistant director for the general director for information systems!” Like, no shit.

  James found a pallet of canned oysters, pulled one out, and rolled back the key. And so?

  The times in between are the good times. I know. I listened to it on Big Radio. The good parts in Lucifer’s Hammer, eh? And so, there’s got to be other people like us on this island.

  James held on to the pallet beside him as the ship rose up and then plunged down again with a roar. Then he went on eating the oysters. Sorry, let me get this straight. What island?

  Chan lifted the hand with the cigarette in it and indicated the mainland, beyond the bulkhead. The island, he said.

  James frowned. That’s the mainland east of us, yes?

  No, man, no, that isn’t the mainland; this is a gigantic island. Chan moved one hand in a circle. I escaped labor camp in a hang glider, came right over a big strait, you could see forever, I about froze my Kazakhstani ass off. Crash-landed and some old guy helped me. He said it was known to be an island. Huge, absolutely huge. He said it was called Vancouver’s Island.

  Be damned, said James. Worlds unknown.

  Yah. Chan smoked. It’s as good as space travel. The smoke wound around his ragged bandanna and his gold earring glinted. There’s got to be a map of it somewhere.

  There is. But I would have to get to a connection.

  Okay. List of priorities needed here, one-two-three.

  And that uplink is valuable. Incredibly valuable.

  I figured that out, said Chan. Brain engages, gears grind.

  The tower has to be guarded at all costs. Or we transport the radio equipment up a mountain.

  Either way, a white-knuckle thrill ride.

  A cross wave hit the schooner and they jerked sideways and James caught the jar with the Kero-Light just before it slid off the pallet. He shoved the empty oyster can into a trash bag and ran his hand through his spiking, lengthening brown hair. He looked down at Nadia’s face with her lips slightly parted and the auburn blaze of her hair strewn across her face. She slept exhausted on a folded sheet of canvas in her vast yellow parka. He reached down to move her hair away from her nose. If they all managed to live and break the bread of celebration, he would be working with a scratch crew drilling blast holes in a coal vein and then months aboard scrapper ships, struggling with sextants
and azimuth compasses. Nadia would have to keep the island alone for weeks at a time with their animals, and hopefully, someday, the inevitable children. She would need help. He would have to search out old hydrographic surveys, compute magnetic variation and tidal races, and this would be a lifetime of work were he granted a whole lifetime. He would stand upright and walk among people, one among many on two feet. This thought left him with a lifting feeling of gratitude as if a hot-air balloon were taking him into a stormy sky. And there would probably be shooting. Errol Flynn, in tights, leaping over the starboard rail.

  Chan tipped up a water bottle and poured a few drops on the end of his cigarette to extinguish it. Not the old kind of life, is it? No promotions, no weekend seminars in elegant resorts. Maid service, hot tubs. A good apartment and water features. All gone.

  James looked carefully at Chan’s heavy face. He recognized it from a time when it was much slimmer and unscarred. He said, You know a great deal about the agencies.

  Yes. I was very involved with them in my former life.

  You were? How?

  Chan rolled another cigarette. He turned it in his thick fingers and put it in the pocket of his parka.

  Yeah, he said. I was Brian Wei.

  Chapter 53

  The schooner drove south through waves like glass where fish shapes poised in the rise and petrels struck the foam to carry them away. James and Gandy braced themselves at the gateleg table in the main cabin, the atomic clock secured to a shelf overhead.

  How did they do this? Gandy said. There’s Goat Shoals, like you were looking down on it from above.

  James ran his finger down the coastline. He said, It’s a copy from the old GPS readouts a hundred years ago. But much of this has changed. Is changing. With the floods and avalanches, and now silting you’re going to get prograde deltas. Tell me to shut up if I go on. I do go on.

  Well, go on, then, said Gandy.