Lighthouse Island

by Paulette Jiles

  Here’s the old Amphitrite Lighthouse, twenty-five miles south of us, on the north shore of the entrance to the sound.

  I’ve seen the ruins, I know where it is. Weird name. What does it mean?

  It was the name of the daughter of Oceanus. Greek.

  Now, this chart is off north. Gandy’s thick finger pinpointed the compass rose on the chart.

  Magnetic north, said James. It indicates magnetic north instead of true north and so you can see it’s twenty and a half points east of true north when this chart was made. Magnetic north moves around and so there’s no telling where it is now. James grabbed a shelf overhead and his chair slid beneath him.

  No wonder the idiots go aground all the time. What does your compass say?

  James compared Nadia’s little compass with Gandy’s. Its bulb of plexiglass shone queasily in the binnacle light. I’ll know as soon as I can get a fix on the North Star.

  God give us a clear night, said Gandy.

  But a storm front moved in again and within the naked mountains repeated lightning strikes sent echoes that doubled back on one another and so made strange and frightening harmonics that did not sound like thunder but like roars coming from beasts as big as moons. They sailed past ruined docks breaking up in a long delta, the spilled slants of fallen buildings that had slid down an eroded slope, a fallen microwave or radio tower awash in the surf. Stony headlands revealed themselves one from behind the other. They sailed at the foot of these gigantic forms, their prow like a raven’s beak cutting its black way into the sea.

  James and Nadia sat together in the shelter of the cabin, watching the white line of breakers against the coast in the darkness.

  What does Amphitrite mean? said Nadia. The ruined lighthouse.

  Sea goddess, daughter of Oceanus, said James. They shared a package of crushed Savory Circles. He shook out a whole one for her.

  Then, floating through the layered clouds, a glare of shifting light in the mountains: a transport helicopter with stalking searchlights that blazed like an electric wig. It ran its beams over the mountains, lit up a plated collection of angles, the walls of a collapsed building. The helicopter hit the walls with a hissing blast of cannon fire and red shards flew up into the foggy night in slow expiring arcs. Nadia dropped her Savory Circle, her mouth open. They watched it thunder on to the north.

  Primary, said Gandy, beside them at the rail. He put down his binoculars.

  The dragon, said Everett. He held his book against his chest. Remind me to get this written down.

  Looking for who? said James.

  Forensics, said Chan. He lifted the rifle and followed the disappearing lights of the helicopter gunship. I tell you, we will dance before the gates of our enemies.

  They shot at empty cartons thrown overboard to get the feel of the weapons and after the hard crash of the explosion lifted their heads to watch the splintered boxes lifted on the waves and floating past as high as the rail.

  Another, said James, and tried again, then lowered the shotgun and watched the broken boards and gun smoke float past.

  Let me show you something, said Gandy. They followed him down to the cabin where he laid the shotgun on the cabin table and took up a twenty-gauge shell. This shoots in a broad pattern, which doesn’t have much force. You need a hard-hitter, do this.

  He took a shell and cut small perforations all around it just above the wadding. His penknife pecked at it like a gunpowder bird.

  This is called a cut shell. When you fire, the brass case at the bottom will be all that’s left. The perforations let that sleeve bust loose with the shot and it stays intact; it flies out in a solid mass. It’s like bar shot, like bar lead. You’ll knock a hole in something as big as your fist.

  They went out again and Gandy aimed the shotgun at an old telephone spool made of heavy timber and knocked a hole in it as big as his fist.

  Little extra firepower, there.

  Gandy and James and Chan and Nadia and Oli leaned toward the maritime radio receiver and the hour was ten at night according to the atomic clock. It was the first week of January, time for excerpts from Chinese and Japanese novels, poems, and plays.

  From the Middle Kingdom and its delicate music, its enthralling landscapes, the poetry of Tao Qian, said Male Voice One. “Mistakenly I fell into the worldly net and thus remained for thirteen years . . .”

  Bargage Maru, do you read? Colin’s tenor voice broke in.

  Captain Gandy thumbed the transmit button and his breath smoked out cold and fogged. I read you, he said. Reply.

  Bargage Maru, do you read?

  Gandy shook his head. He can’t hear me. We’re out of range.

  So now I want to head to the southern lands . . .

  I can’t pick you up, said Colin. In case you are reading me, there is a Primary gunship bearing north toward Nootka. I am sending out a general notice that the Bargage Maru is heading south to Banefield with an explosives expert, a cartographer, coal supplies, and seven willing hands.

  Before the hall are gathered peaches and plums . . .

  If that gunship hears Colin he’s in deep shit, said Gandy. We’re in deep shit.

  I could do it, said Nadia. She looked around at them. I could broadcast information when Female Voice One is reading, I can imitate her. They’d never know. I could, I really could. She pressed her hair back and was alarmed at herself, volunteering like this, emerging from concealment, having ideas as herself, Nadia, in front of a group of people. Yes? Listen, when she’s speaking, I switch off Big Radio, relay messages in her voice as if it were part of what she was reading. I could make it sound sort of like whatever she was reading. Then when I’ve relayed the messages, switch back on. Back to her reading. It would be seamless. They don’t listen to Big Radio anyway but if they did they’d think it was part of the reading. She paused. I’m repeating myself.

  Damn, said James. Of course you could. He thought for a moment. You’d have to have earphones to monitor what she’s saying so you’d know when to break in.

  But first, Banefield, she said. First food.

  Beyond the dark and distance lies a village . . .

  James turned to Sparks, who was jammed back in a corner listening. The radioman sat with his earphones around his neck, smoking, and he looked up at James’s sudden attention with some alarm.

  Listen, said James. If you could home in on their dispatcher and imitate his voice you could transmit a fake set of coordinates to that gunship and send him straight into a mountainside. If we had a map. If we knew what mountain. They’d never think ordinary people could do that.

  Gandy and Sparks stared at each other in a slow, private thoughtfulness.

  It’s called spoofing, said the radioman.

  I like the way you think, said Chan. He slapped his hands together. I like the way you think.

  The weather cleared the next night and those on deck could see the stars; the wind had blown all the storms away and set fire to the constellations and in their thin acidic illumination and that of the binnacle light James took a reading on the polestar. Magnetic north had shifted in the hundred years since his chart had been made and it was now fifteen degrees west of true north. He buttoned his wool coat tightly around his neck and went below.

  Nadia and Oli stood together at the rail and grasped the shrouds. They drove on into the blackness and above them sails hard as metal forged by the wind, lit by starlight. Sirius white-hot in the east, Orion a blaze of jewels. Nadia ate fragments of musty Almond Delights and listened as Oli spoke enthusiastically of cloudberries and blackberries, of fruit leather and teas from wild mints and the nannies, the hens, the competent and friendly people of Banefield. They’ll have dogs! Oli opened her hand in a gesture of magical production; canines, leaping from the imagination as if through circus hoops. Dogs to herd the goats and chase off foxes, just animals all over the place.

&nb
sp; Nadia had a flash image in her mind of herself setting out a brown fragrant loaf of yeast bread on a table and hungry people tearing into it, of standing in a strawy barn with a goat baby in her arms. Heidi of the Alps.

  Yes, she said. If it would come true. I think about it a lot. It’s complicated, Oli. It’s not simple.

  But we can learn! We can do it. And when we learn how to live, and we get back, you will speak over Big Radio, said Oli. Her face was serious and sprayed with her unraveling hair and scarf fringes.

  The lights from the cabin shone out onto nearby rising waves and lit them as they formed and sank and fell beneath the prow; they sailed on into a wall of night and a rising moon.

  And so what’s the story about Kazakhstan? said James. He handed Chan the gun oil and the stiff little wire brush on its rod. I’ll just play straight man here. They braced themselves at the bottom of the companionway, in the hold, where the dove-gray light fell down in moving bars from the deck. They were taking apart and cleaning the weapons.

  A ripping and fascinating tale, said Chan. My great-great-grandfather, tough guy, notorious liar. Eat your lunch. He escaped from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, they were about to shoot him into orbit as a test case, ka-boom, straight to the moon. Then, Urban Wars. So he scarpered to London, which he said was all of south England, stowed away on something, ended up in a titty bar in Seattle. Family warrior tradition, here. Possibly totally untrue. Everett wants all this for his Book of Amazing Personal Stories. My name is actually Abay Qunanbayuli. Don’t try to spell it. Chan stood up and started up the companionway, the rifle across his chest. Man, I would love to get a shot at a Primary helicopter. Bango, right through the plexiglass.

  James stood up as well. So how did you get to be Facilitator?

  I looked good. They wanted somebody that looked Eastern and wise. I just read off a teleprompter. Remember the shit about the birdfeeder? I had great scriptwriters.

  They scrambled up onto the deck and bent against the wind and spray.

  Chan, said James.

  What?

  Don’t draw fire. We have two old people and two women.

  Ah, said Chan. He stood on deck and regarded Oli hanging out her underwear on the lanyard of the jack staff, and the first mate hurrying toward her, shouting that we do not hang our underwear from the jack staff, if you please, ma’am.

  Right, said Chan.

  Colin and Edward the Cat occupied the light tower like secret squatters among the radio waves. Colin ran through the kilohertz and the megahertz on a hunt for voices while storms splattered the glass and far below the old wooden Russian chalet unloaded waves of snowy rainwater from its eaves and the fir trees appeared conical when he looked down on them. He adjusted the antenna at the risk of his life, clambering up to the roof of the cupola while Edward meowed at him through the glass. He dropped down and began again to gather news of the flooding and the voices of survivors.

  The Antarctic polar jet stream kept on spiraling out of its regularly assigned route to circle the South American latitudes at 550 miles an hour. It sent off cyclonic back-eddies that seemed they would rip all the snow from the Andes. In this alternative world of overpopulation and man-made greenhouses the northern polar jet stream whipped itself into meanders called Rossby waves that would have looked like the fluting on an Elizabethan collar had there been any scientific equipment available to track it, or meteorologists to read the instruments. All gone like les nieges d’antan and all the old familiar places as time went by. Weather was a kind of faerie, a land of mystery and peril that nobody could control or even understand.

  The Rossby waves brought front after front tearing across North America, gathering moisture up from the Pacific in megatons and flinging rain onto the already-wet northwest coast, onto the parched Great Basin of Utah. The rains filled the dry bowl of Lake Mead. Water crawled up the cracked structures of Hoover Dam. When the rain hit, at first it stirred up a rolling front of dust clouds so that people watching from their packed apartments thought they were seeing another sandstorm.

  The cyclonic storms filled the rivers of the central Great Plains, the Kaw and the Platte, and fed into the Missouri, which tore out of its banks and charged into the Eighth Gerrymander, formerly known as Kansas City, which now stretched all the way from Omaha to Des Moines to St. Louis. The floodwater brought down with it workers’ barracks and any loose wood and at the bottom of the channels, unseen, Buddy cars and nameless scrap rolled over and over on themselves. Also the bodies of people and rats. The silos full of soybeans swelled and burst. Rotting grains surged downriver from the storages of the great Denver-Kansas field systems in floating putrid islands. At first people watched the progress of all the flooding on a few shaky-cam shots slipped into news reports and sat staring, fascinated, but since nobody knew where any of this was taking place they often heard the locomotive sound of oncoming water and stood up to find that the televised flooding neighborhood was their own and floodwater was coming through the windows.

  Within a month Little Radio broadcasters appropriated parts, stole antennas, and cobbled together a network that radiated laterally like a sparkling network of unofficial news, some of it true, some not. They listened to Big Radio, they relayed all they could gather. Nutrition Enforcement Teams and Black Ops from Furniture Supply are at war with each other, fighting going on now in Gerrymander Seven, Neighborhood Seventy-Two.

  Among the listeners was Farrell Orotov, far in the south where he and his mother, his wife and two children lived in a mansion formerly inhabited by a Mariculture executive, on Les Isles Dernieres, which were once again becoming islands.

  Farrell pressed the earphones to his head.

  From the Middle Kingdom and its delicate music, its enthralling landscapes, the poetry of Tao Qian, said Male Voice One. Let us begin. Mistakenly I fell into the worldly net and thus remained for thirteen years . . .

  Then without warning a different male voice broke in. Bargage Maru, do you read? A pause and then it said again, Bargage Maru, do you read? This is Lighthouse.

  Farrell began to laugh aloud. Thank God, he said. Thank God.

  So now I want to go to the southern lands . . . Again the new male voice broke in. You are out of range. Primary gunship bearing north toward Nootka. I am sending out a general notice that the Bargage Maru is bearing south to Banefield with explosives expert, a cartographer, coal supplies, and seven willing hands.

  Then Male Voice One returned. Before the hall are gathered peaches and plums. Beyond the dark and distance lies a village . . .

  Down in the ship’s cabin the elderly Toastmaster, much worn by the voyage, sat with his knobby hands clasped one in the other and listened to the radio. Smoke from the galley streamed forward with the smell of a thick pudding and from farther up in the pointy nose the racketing sound of a hand-cranked sewing machine as a sailor ran a piece of white cloth under the needle. Oli and Nadia decided they would design the flag. A round blue circle partly covered by a yellow star. That seemed noncommittal and generally peaceful. Later they could add things like leaping salmon, the Big Dipper, lightning bolts. On top, “The Lincolnshire” and at the bottom, “Poachers.” Nadia and Oli sat in the captain’s bunk, with quick and furious stitches, hemming the circle and the star by hand.

  Female Voice One said, in delicate tones, And now it is time, in the beginning months of the New Year, that we turn to fable, legend, and myth. We step into the land of mystery. We move on to the graceful and moving No¯ plays of ancient Japan.

  The night grows late. Eastward the bells of the three pagodas toll. By the moonlight that gleams through the needles of the thick cedar trees I begin to put on my armor.

  Do it, said Oli.

  Nadia said, in a perfect Female Voice One voice, The night grows late. In case you are reading me there is a Primary gunship bearing north toward Nootka. By the moonlight that gleams through the needles of the thick cedar trees I begin to
put on my armor.

  In the slanting afternoon light the Bargage Maru passed the remains of the old Amphitrite light station; the ruins sat, a low square stub, stained with the sea fogs, draining rain, at the top of a mass of volcanic rock. It warned of shoals and the entrance to the sound. The Pacific swarmed white at her feet.

  That night James and Nadia lay together in a space between secured pallets of hydrated lime packages on a bed made of sacking and what blankets they could find and felt themselves rising and falling with the Bargage Maru as she rode like a dark swan over the eastbound waves. Coats and bags hung from overhead beams; they swung forward and back, forward and back, a water bottle galloped down the hold until somebody grabbed it, whispered voices from the others came to them over the creak of strakes and the rush of the sea. A light gleamed. The others were still talking, Chan and Oli and Everett and the Toastmaster. Talk of hopes and plans and dreams and dangers but in all that happy imagining you still had to hang on to your courage and your traveling bags.

  Nadia, said James. Listen to me.

  Nadia lay with her arm thrown across his chest and her nose on his shoulder.

  He said, If I were to die I think we will meet in another world. Some other life.

  James! Her hand shut tight on his biceps. James, how could you? Die?

  Shhh. People die. They will do it, sooner or later. I just wanted to tell you that. James’s hand stroked her back under the blankets and the yellow parka. You are destroying my arm.

  She loosened her grip on his biceps. Don’t say that. Don’t talk like that.

  Shhh. The medication could allow for tumors, he said. Various blood cancers, there’s that. We are in danger now of a great many things. I just want you to know what it means to me that you chose me when I was still in that wheelchair. I remember how you stood back so I didn’t have to look up at you. And so many things. Seeing you running in from the rain in those red shoes. I can’t tell you how much I love you. So I want you to know that if something happens to me we will meet in another life. This can’t be all. I know it is not all.