by Robert Stone
“I can’t do it,” he said aloud. His voice echoed powerfully off the surrounding rocks.
When he was certain he could not get back to work, he prepared to go ashore again. It was late evening and the sun was low. He climbed into the dinghy and set off westward in the lagoon, hoping to find the house he had seen the day before. When he had gone a few miles and it failed to appear, he backtracked. Eventually he landed in a bay that resembled the one he had seen behind the house. One bay looked very like another here. Walking along the shore, he found the mouth of a clear stream and followed it inland.
The stream was fast, running over black rock and through small meadows of coarse yellow grass. A short distance from the shore it curved and widened to a pool and he went beside it and looked into the water. He was surprised to see salmon in the pool, struggling upstream. He could see them clearly in the fading light—enormous, ponderous fish, their bodies gray and scarred. They held their own against the current and it was possible to imagine them gaining the odd fraction of an inch.
The sight of the salmon moved Browne to tears. He thought he had never seen creatures of such gravity. They had won out over time and the ocean. They had survived everything and come home. Browne thought he would give anything to be in their condition.
Ahead, the stream cascaded down from a three-tiered bluff some ten feet high. Browne followed a path beside it. When he had gained the rise, he heard the crashing sea and saw the house of ashes.
On the way to the house he tried to remember where he had seen salmon before. On the Pacific Coast, he thought, in similar polar light. He could have spent hours watching them.
This time he walked confidently up the porch and through the downstairs rooms. There seemed to be more blackened furniture in the place than he had seen before. On the wall was a faded needlework sampler of Gothic letters in a language he could not understand. Turning, he saw a flash of reflected light. A peeling, shattered mirror was bolted to the wall. Approaching, Browne saw a face in the glass. The face was dark brown and bearded, wild-eyed, like a saddhu’s. Or a dervish’s, Browne thought, the face of a man in the grip of something powerful and unsound. He raised a hand to his beard. The figure in the glass did the same.
“I can’t believe it,” Browne said, laughing. He saw a flash of white teeth in the brown face. The little mirror in the head aboard his boat had been deceiving him.
He went upstairs and opened the door and found the room where he had stood before. A scrimshaw tusk lay on the floor. He heard a scuttling in the shadows and saw that crabs had gathered in the dark part of the room. A carapace cracked underfoot and he stepped back. He believed he had been told that rails and land crabs preyed on each other’s eggs. The rails by day, the crabs by night.
“Where are you?” Browne inquired.
With the delicacy of an acrobat and the cunning of an engineer, one of the land crabs was easing itself down a leg of the old rocking chair. It touched one extended claw to the rocking bow while the other clutched an edge of the seat until its armored weight was balanced for the leap. Then it rattled down to the floor and hurried off, like a cavalier dragging his sword behind. Browne walked up to the chair and examined the rotting quilts and horsehair that he had taken for a human figure. Mistaken a crab’s nest for his wife.
“Johnny Plowboy,” sang the hard-hearted woman of the shadows. “Johnny Never-Should-Have-Seen-the-Ocean.”
He presumed it was some old song, drawing him into things he wanted no part of.
“Look there away,” sang the crab wench.
Browne wanted to invoke the honest, well-spoken young man he had taken himself for. The role of the information officer was difficult. There were worlds to explain. Something was trying to direct his attention toward the window. Browne stood his ground. He was afraid he might see another face to match his own. Tricks of the mind and of the eye, Browne thought. He had hardly slept for days.
“Look there away,” she said. He thought of a thin woman with watery blue eyes, wailing.
Finally, broken-willed, he consented to turn, dreading the thing that might confront him in the window. There, in place of the declining sun, he saw innumerable misshapen discs stretched in limitless perspective to an expanded horizon. It was a parody of the honest mariner’s sighting. Each warped ball was the reflection of another in an index glass, each one hung suspended, half submerged in a frozen sea. They extended forever, to infinity, in a universe of infinite singularities. In the ocean they suggested, there could be no measure and no reason. There could be neither direction nor horizon. It was an ocean without a morning, without sanity or light.
On this ocean, Browne thought, goodbye to almanacs and hope in Stella Maris and the small rain down. This is a game beyond me. A diver, he felt as though he were breathing from an emptying tank. His windpipe contracted in its greed for the thin stream. His gasps went unrewarded. He knelt down on the floor of the house. He felt the suspension of hope and wished for it back. He regretted lying.
For a moment he thought he might undo the deception. I’ll go home, he thought, before I take a crab’s nest for a wife. Before a thin ghost is all the wife I require. Then he was certain it was too late for that. He was a new man with a new fortune.
59
THERE WERE daffodils on the lawn of the Southchester Yacht Club as Strickland made his way to Captain Riggs-Bowen’s office. Songbirds were tootling in the locust trees. Inside, he recalled the perfumed booze and hornpipe ambience that had informed the place the previous autumn.
The captain brewed Typhoo tea on a hot plate. He wore a white Irish fisherman’s sweater and a maroon and gold ascot, the first ascot Strickland had seen in years. On his desk were tiny flags, the Stars and Stripes and the white ensign of the Royal Navy. Framed on the wall behind his desk was a document displaying the harps and anchors of the equally Royal Irish Yacht Club.
Captain Riggs-Bowen took his tea with evaporated milk. Strickland had lemon.
“Well,” the captain said heartily, “he’s out in front, your man. You must be pleased.”
“We are,” Strickland said. “We’re pleased. We hoped you might comment on the race. For our cameras.”
“I’m tempted,” Riggs-Bowen said. “But I won’t as yet.”
“How do you think he’s doing it?”
“Interesting question. I do wonder.”
“His boat must be better than you thought.”
“Umm,” said the captain.
“Wouldn’t it be that?”
“I’m confounded, Strickland. At a loss. We’ll have to find the answer in his logs. We’ll want to look closely at those.”
“Why?”
Riggs-Bowen looked innocently out at the spring day.
“Well, because there we’ll find the secret of his success.” He turned to Strickland with a confident smile. “Won’t we?”
“When it’s over—will you appear for us?”
“When it’s over, yes. You may have a more sensational film than you imagine.”
“You’re behaving like a man with a secret.”
“You’re wrong. I don’t know anything you don’t.”
“Well, you’ve seen the reports he’s been sending. Can you sort of piece things together?”
“His reports are rather colorless,” Riggs-Bowen said. “Lacking in detail. His speeds are erratic. It’s hard to tell what’s going on.”
“I wonder why. When he’s so articulate.”
“I do too,” Riggs-Bowen said.
Strickland watched him, waiting for more.
“I don’t think he enjoys life,” the captain continued. “I don’t think he even enjoys sailing. Some of them, you know, they go out there to suffer.”
“I guess he’s sort of a philosopher.”
Riggs-Bowen laughed. “Is that his wife’s opinion?”
Strickland kept his eyes on the tea.
“She worships him,” he told the captain. “Thinks the sun rises and sets on the guy.”
> “Lucky man,” said Riggs-Bowen.
Walking back across the club lot to his car, Strickland felt oppressed by the sweet spring weather. Driving to Anne’s, he had an attack of despair. It seemed clear to him that no reasonable person would care remotely about the race that Matty Hylan had conceived or about the pilgrim, Owen Browne.
He parked discreetly downhill from the house, hiked up and let himself in through the kitchen. She was upstairs in the bedroom, dressing.
“Ron?”
“Right.”
He poured himself a shot of Scotch and went into the living room. On the mantel was a picture of Owen as a newly commissioned ensign, virtually draped in Old Glory. Somewhere along the line, Strickland realized, he would have to do something with flags and navies.
“Where did you park?” she asked from upstairs.
“Miles away,” he said. “Not that anyone around here cares.”
He took his drink up. She was lying on the bed in jeans with a folded newspaper beside her. He thought she seemed preoccupied and tense. For the first time in days he stammered in her presence and, just for a moment, thought he detected her impatience.
“I . . . went to see Riggs-Bowen. Thought I might get him to go on for us.”
“Will he?”
“No.”
“Too bad,” she said.
“It is too bad. He’s a real package. He’s got this happy-to-be-a-prick attitude.”
“That you admire?”
“I think it’s unbecoming in a man who doesn’t drink.”
There was a Winslow Homer show at the Metropolitan Museum and Strickland decided they should go to see it. Running up the museum steps with him made her feel briefly like a schoolgirl with a day in town. She was amused to find he was a member of the Metropolitan.
As they made their way to the gallery in which the Homers were on exhibit, he held her hand. His grip felt somehow fateful. The moment she saw the seascapes on the wall, she drew her own hand away in surprise.
“How about this stuff?” Strickland asked her.
The oils in the first room depicted the ocean crashing ashore at Prouts Neck.
“Well,” she said, “at least I can tell what it is.”
“Kindly don’t play the philistine.”
“Want to give me a lecture?”
“Sure,” Strickland said. He took her by the elbow and marched her to the largest painting. It showed four female figures standing on rocks beside a swollen sea. “The ocean is in its place. The force of nature barely contained. The women are frozen by its power. Late nineteenth century, Eros and Thanatos, the Red Universe. Full of subverted morality. See it there?”
“I guess so,” she said.
In fact, she found herself quite able to see what he said was there. She was an old intimate of the ocean.
“Look at the women,” he said. “They’re out of equilibrium. Facing in different directions, as though they’re hearing different voices.”
“Is that really there?”
He began to stammer again. “Of c . . course it’s there. It’s in the composition.” A well-dressed Latin American couple in front of the next picture glanced at them.
“Are you angry?”
Strickland laughed in frustration. “Of course not,” he said.
“You’re right,” she said, studying the picture. “I see it.”
By the time they had done all six rooms, the ocean was crashing behind her eyes. The muted Maine colors belonged to a world now lost to her. She felt herself wrapped in a shawl like the women in the first painting, standing stricken beside the water.
Afterward, she made him take her to the cafeteria for wine. They sat in the glass-covered atrium, listening to the fountain. Strickland looked displeased.
“I liked the pictures,” she pointed out. “I saw what you wanted me to see. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Successful work annoys me.”
“Winslow Homer probably had a very unhappy life, Ron. Look at the bright side.”
“It’s no good,” Strickland said. “He had a long and satisfactory life. He died rich in honors. Having done what he set out to do. It’s enough to make you fucking weep.”
“Aren’t you successful enough?”
“Nah,” Strickland said.
Anne finished her bad Chablis.
“What gets me,” Strickland said, “is how he can take something as boring as water and make it swing that way.”
“Water isn’t boring, Ron. The ocean is not boring.” She glanced about the museum café, still half afraid of being seen by some friend or acquaintance of theirs. “What’s the Red Universe?”
“Oh,” he said, “you know. Nature. Red in tooth and claw. Christ!” he said savagely. “A turn of line. A shade of light. And he does it. So close to nothing at all.”
She watched him give his wrist an elegant turn. The sudden curve of his forearm, the thrust of his strong graceful hand in a checkered cuff, aroused and repelled her.
“Ron,” she said, “you do the same. Your films do.”
“Ah,” he said, “but I’m saddled with people and their silly bullshit. If only I could eliminate the human factor.”
It struck her as wonderfully funny. She took his hand and pressed her pursed lips against his knuckles.
That evening, in his loft, they smoked marijuana and it was pleasant for a while. During the night she awoke in desperation. She had been dreaming of Owen; her sense of him was intense and immediate. She was suddenly panic-stricken at the presence of the impossible man beside her. The confusion made her feel as though she were losing not only consciousness but identity. Her mind drifted over landscapes of desire and memory. She experienced flashes of shame and absurdity, laughed and cried. In the gray morning light, she felt herself exhausted, thirsty, lustful, pursued by more notions than her mind could safely contain. She thought it must be the drug.
Seeing Strickland awake, she said, “He’s coming back, Ron. I’ve got to prepare.”
He turned over in bed.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
He put his arms around her. She lay still.
“Look, that’s the past,” he said. “It’s over.”
She was touched at his urgency. At the same time, she realized she would be far freer with Owen than ever with him. He was really out of the question.
“You have to stop saying that,” he commanded her. “You have to stop thinking it. You’ve wasted enough of your life on that guy.”
He was far too much work, she thought. Too much hassle. She was too old for it, and there was Maggie.
“We have to go on living,” Strickland said. “Remember that.”
She agreed absolutely. Somehow, she thought, he failed to understand that this was the problem. She rested against him, giving him her body as comfort for the moment, wondering what he thought he wanted. Did he really believe in hope, this sufferer? In happiness?
60
DURING THE WEEKS sailing north, he applied himself to his logs. The false one he filled with suitable reflections. In the true one, he described what he had seen ashore. Sometimes he thought of himself as headed for the Azores. He had periods of great elation. Northward, the weather was superb and he spent each evening out on deck watching the stars. Meteorites illumined the black subtropical sky. In imagination, he continued to work himself around the world, keeping his businesslike false log, sending position reports through Mad Max.
Max tried to keep him entertained in Morse:
“HEAR ABOUT NUCLEAR PHYSICIST WHO HAD TOO MANY IONS IN THE FIRE? SWALLOWED URANIUM AND GOT AN ATOMIC ACHE!!”
“HL,” Browne radioed.
Presences addressed him over the sound of the wind and the luffing of the sails. The voices they employed were all vaguely familiar. Most of the time he knew no one was there.
“Monitor your thoughts,” he would instruct himself. The words were on the wind: “Reme
mber everything.”
Sometimes he thought it might be possible to explain it all away. Any excuse might be accepted if he did not claim to have won. Then he might go back to the life he had left. The problem was that the life he had left seemed more and more unsatisfactory. There was no passage in it.
One day he found himself a few hundred miles east of Tristan de Cunha, crossing the fortieth parallel. His reported location was far away, in the central Pacific. In his doctored log, he entered the weather he was experiencing because it was so pleasant. The ocean was a deep dark blue and the sky a few shades lighter. There were flying fish in dozens. A stand of towering cumulus clouds lay to westward, in the direction of the island.
In the warm sun again, he felt an overpowering nostalgia for innocence and the truth. It was hard to believe that they were lost for good. In the evening he saw a petrel. That night he listened in on the missionary station.
“Therefore snares are set round about thee,” the English lady informed her listeners, “and sudden fear troubleth thee.
“Or darkness that thou canst not see and abundance of water cover thee.
“Is not God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are!
“And thou sayest, How doth God know? Can He judge through the dark cloud?
“Thick clouds are a covering to Him that He seeth not; and He walketh in the circuit of heaven.”
So Browne knew that things had found him out, down to the deepest level of his dreams. He thought of the shadowless beach, skuas descending out of the sun. The snares were like land crabs whose bustling caused hallucination. The fear was the loss of reality, never quite retrievable once your share in it was put aside. The appearance of stars was a deception.
Max sent more HLs.
“SI SI SAID THE BLIND PERUVIAN WHEN HE REALLY COULDNT SEE AT ALL.”
Copying the message, Browne experienced a sudden insight. He called for a voice rendezvous on 29.871 megahertz.
“Whiskey Zulu Zulu one Mike eight seven three, Whiskey Zulu Zulu one Mike eight seven three, this is Zulu Romeo Alpha one Juliet five six three, over. Yowsa yowsa.” Max was in his carnival barker’s mode.
