Far From The Sea We Know

by Frank M Sheldon

CHAPTER 66

  Two days after Penny and her father returned to her parents’ home, Chiffrey showed up, his demeanor noticeably subdued, the goofy humor all but gone. Perhaps because he was not alone. Another man in civilian dress had hovered just behind him like a shadow. Penny recognized the man as one of the investigators who had boarded the Valentina while they were still at sea. He was neither tall nor short, had thinning blonde hair, rather nondescript in almost every way. The exception was his pale gray eyes. They crouched half closed behind steel-rimmed glasses and never seemed to blink.

  Chiffrey acted almost as if he had never met her or her father before and was formal except for one moment when he said, “We just want to ask you a few things about your last day on the Valentina. If you’re not ready now, they’ll send someone else later.” She understood the implication. Her father must have, too, given the way he looked her way and nodded consent.

  The civilian did nothing at first but watch and listen, while Chiffrey seemed to do a thorough job debriefing her father and her about “the last known day” of the Valentina’s whereabouts. Yet without avoiding anything, Chiffrey subtly framed his questions so they were able to supply answers that, though honest, contributed little more to what was probably already known. They were able to maintain the impression that they were essentially all in the same situation as far as having the facts, that is, that they were as astonished and in the dark as anyone else. As to the matter of Matthew’s disappearance, she was able to say that she had a hard time remembering it and “must have been in some kind of state,” but was now recovered. Since the Navy had had more than a few of its own in that condition, she felt her answer was acceptable. Chiffrey asked her if she knew where Matthew was. Again, but with some pain, she was able to answer truthfully that she had no idea. If she didn’t completely know why Matthew had to leave when he did, leaving even her in the dark, she did now.

  Later, the still nameless civilian took over and essentially went through all the questioning again to see if he could shake their story. Since they avoided any lies the first time, they were able to keep to the same line. In the end, the investigator expressed no satisfaction or thanks but simply explained the obligations that came with the security clearance they were given on the Valentina, as if he had given the same speech a thousand times before. At this point though, and not only because of Matthew, neither she nor her father had any wish to publicize what had happened anyway, so they agreed to the restrictions without resistance. They would keep what happened on the Valentina to themselves as long as the incident was classified, which most likely would mean their whole lives.

  The agencies involved had nothing legitimate they could draw on to bring Penny or her father into custody regarding the Valentina’s inexplicable disappearance. More to the point, harassing them would simply attract the glare of publicity. The investigator had told them if they stuck to the agreement, they would never be bothered again. So far, he had kept his word. In the weeks that followed the interview, no one else came to their door.

  This included reporters. In the news accounts, all the leaks, unintended and otherwise, had combined with the public’s tendency to either dismiss or exaggerate. The last known voyage of the Valentina was distorted into unrecognizable fictions. Experiments gone wrong. Radiation accident on a submarine. Tabloid theories, including UFOs and Atlantis. In the end, it seemed, all the conflicting tales taken together canceled each other out and many came to believe it was nothing more than overblown summer filler. A few well-placed, but misleading, words in the media from those behind Chiffrey accelerated that process, but it was probably inevitable as what falls beyond our comprehension slips past the hooks of memory. After a week, the story dropped out of the news cycle as the public moved on to other entries from the daily all-you-can-eat menu of endless distraction.

  The evidence that the crew had gathered, little as it was, had disappeared along with the Valentina. Chiffrey’s employers would keep the few scraps they possessed for themselves, hidden away to be scrutinized in some secure location. The videos, scans, and even the affected Navy personnel could only yield so much information.

  So what. Penny no longer cared about convincing anyone of anything. Let them all believe whatever they would. She only wanted time and solitude.

  After their return from the Valentina, the afterglow of Penny’s encounter with Matthew in the tank had lifted her up for days, but as time wore on it slowly faded, and left her feeling the like some cast-off skin whose owner would never return. Denying it at first, she began to slip into despondency, but was able to keep this to herself. She was surprised at how well she outwardly carried on just as if all was as it should be. Later, she resolved that although she may not have that rare song singing in her heart anymore, she would still keep a place for it.

  In late August, she gave notice to the research team she had been a part of that her leave of absence would be permanent. She had remained at her parents’ house without really deciding. Her parents never mentioned it.

  The next few months passed slowly. While the nights grew longer, daytime was in steady retreat and seemed in danger of surrendering forever to eternal darkness. The rains that year were light but almost constant, and the grounds around the house seemed perpetually half-hidden in slow rolling mist.

  “Your mother and I are going to meet an old friend in Bali,” her father announced one morning. “And we’d like to stay there for a few months. Kind of a retreat, really, and one we need to do together.”

  “So, you decided.”

  “I sent in my resignation to the Point this morning. It was that or be forced out. No regrets,” he said as if reading her thoughts. “We all knew this was coming, and I’ve come around to believing it might be the best thing that could ever happen to me. Already it is, pardon the cliché, as if a great weight has been taken off my shoulders.”

  “Good to hear that, and maybe you’re right.”

  “We’ll be gone till next July. Think you could look after things here for us?”

  “Give the devil something to do, right?” she said with a quick laugh. “To keep her out of mischief. Of course.”

  “So you’ll have a retreat as well,” her mother added. “On your own. A bit of heaven.”

  Her mother and father had never been overly protective of their children. They knew Penny needed solitude at regular intervals and perhaps needed even more now. They trusted her. She suspected they were going away at least as much for her as for themselves.

  A few weeks after they set sail on a classic liner, on a day made dark by the dense clouds of late December, she was going through some old papers in her room, sorting them in piles, most of them to be discarded. The world outside had reached that pause of the pendulum before the season finally swings back. The air outside was still, the wind having lost its way in the mountains somewhere. She was enjoying the song of winter birds in near silence until the sound of an engine rose up like a prelude from the driveway below the cliff. An unannounced visitor to see her parents? Sounded like a motorcycle. An old one. She walked out to wait at the stone terrace.

  “Wonderful to see you, sugar. As welcome a sight as the sun would be.”

  Chiffrey, back to his old self. Or maybe not. He was wearing an old leather jacket with a flannel shirt hanging out below, and well-worn black jeans with grease on the cuffs.

  He leaned on the galvanized iron railing that ran around the terrace in a semicircle, his back to the sea. His smile had returned, but not completely the old one. He seemed different. Though he looked like he had been spending much time outside, it was more than that.

  “Yeah, this is me now,” he said. “Gone to earth, back on the street.”

  “You left the Air Force?”

  “More like it left me.”

  “And what about your…other employer?”

  “That too. I left it all. Had a little encouragement truth to tell. Hey, you believe what I’m saying.” He laughed a little and shook his head. “No
t like you.”

  “You’re not like you. Something’s gone.” She gave him another quick once-over and sniffed a few times. “You even smell different.”

  He laughed, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he turned and looked out across the Strait for a while. A lone fishing boat was passing by.

  “I started seeing things differently than some people thought I should,” he finally said. “After a decent mourning period for my career, I made it my own decision before it became someone else’s. Just walked away from the whole game.”

  “Must have been hard.”

  “Hard to come to, but once I did, I was done.” He ran his fingers through his now longer hair. “Anyway, Becka and I were staying together. I thought we might get married. She turned me down gently, but it was not just a ‘let’s wait a while’ thing. She’s living on a boat again, by the way, but not at sea. In Ladakh, on a mountain lake in northern India. Just ‘needed to be there’ she told me, but not why. Another string to bow, I guess.”

  He turned toward the house again and took a small step sideways along the path back. “Well, just wanted to check in, say hello, see how you were.”

  She shook her head. “No need to hint. Come along, we’ll have some tea.”

  While Penny poured hot water into the pot, Chiffrey sat at the ancient kitchen table and casually examined its surface. The top had long since worn down to bare wood. Her mother scrubbed its vaguely rounded surface with sand once a month, but otherwise, she let it take whatever stains found their way into the bleached grain. In so doing, the table had become a record of the heart of this house, a story that spanned her entire life.

  “The way things worked out in the end made a number of people extremely unhappy with me,” Chiffrey said. “Some felt I mishandled the whole thing, but the loss of the Valentina with the DNA samples and other stuff was especially bad. It was my idea to leave just the Captain on board until everyone else disembarked, if you remember.”

  “Appreciated.”

  “Glad to hear, but no one else did. And there were plenty of others who never quite bought what happened, and as time went by with little hard evidence, they bought it less and looked for other explanations. They’ve archived the study of what evidence they do have so deeply that it’s become almost a myth. Even the few supporters I had knew that someone had to fall on their sword for the whole mess. At that point, my name might as well have been Lieutenant Someone.”

  “And no honor burial.”

  “I don’t really blame them. I mean the people who wanted me gone. It’s a risk that comes with that kind of work. Just the way the game has to go sometimes, and we all go in knowing that. Thing is, when Captain Thorssen beamed out with the Valentina, I was not only stunned like everyone else, but stunned that I felt damn glad he’d done it! Wished I’d gone with him, to tell you the truth. That’s when I knew the job was no longer for me.”

  “And now?”

  “The mind is such a sticky web,” he said. “Good for catching flies, but you try to think some things out and you only catch yourself.”

  He nodded as if waiting for her to respond, but she had nothing to add so he continued on his own. “The history that thing must have. Deep in the ocean, growing, but never growing old. Never dying.”

  He looked out the kitchen window at the now falling rain. “Guess I’m going to get wet on the way back.”

  He lowered himself a little in the seat, hunched down over his steaming cup, and said, “So, okay, it was born and raised here, been around a long time, took a little holiday and came back. And might be gone again or not, no one knows for sure. Far as I know, at least. I’m mostly out of the loop now. But if you take humankind as a whole, we’ve also had a long and continuous history on this planet.”

  “The difference is our generations roll by and most of us forget and are forgotten.”

  “We’ve learned how to preserve experience. We pass on what we know and future generations build on that.”

  “If you mean information, yes. We acquire, preserve, and build on knowledge. The dome remembers everything, not the way we do, but as if it’s always all happening now. Everything is one big ‘now’ for it, she can hold it all like a grain of sand in the palm of your hand. Everything! That’s the clearest way I can put it.”

  “Well, you didn’t really have that long…”

  “By the clock, maybe not, but it felt like a lifetime. Believe me.”

  “I have no reason not to.”

  “Well, we all lie, it’s all we can do no matter how hard we try. You and me, everyone. That is the fundamental human tragedy. For most of us, by the time we have an inkling of what might be possible, we are near the end of our existence and it’s too late.”

  “Kind of pessimistic. And strange to hear. You seemed to have had such a strong connection that night on the ship. Inspired, if you will, though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Lately, it feels like it happened to someone else.”

  “I think that’s one reason Becka left. Went looking for what she lost, maybe.” He sipped from his cup then looked at her carefully. “If you feel so disconnected now, why do you keep evangelizing? Sorry, but you used to hold some of the others onboard up for scrutiny for much the same reason.”

  “And I probably still would.” She got up and turned on the oven to give a little warmth against the chill. “There’s a difference between how something first emerges and what we later twist it into for the sake of what we can bear.”

  “Amen,” he said with a smile. He watched her for a moment, then stared into his tea as if to divine some answers before adding, “Still, I keep wondering about the ‘Orb,’ as Becka now calls it.”

  “Way too precious,” she said solemnly, and then laughed.

  “Hey, I’m trying to be serious,” he said, smiling. “Listen, here’s a question, sugar. If you or I were to have as much experience, a life where even millennia might seem but a moment, and there was no one else like you anywhere, and you remembered everything, what would you be?”

  “Only a fool could know,” she said. Then closed her eyes. “Everything and nothing.”

  “Now who’s being precious?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “Listen, it’s a waste of time. You’ll never figure it out. It can’t be figured out.”

  “Maybe, but my reality is that I have to try until some better way comes along. And it hasn’t, believe me.”

  She leaned over toward him and looked into his eyes unblinking. “Out there. On the Valentina. That was reality, or at least a taste of it. Most of the rest of our lives we spend in a little cage of our own making, bumbling around showing our teeth as we lurch into one another. We settle for a shambling fake of a life, and burn through our days, all the while hoping for the unlikely happy ending. You believe that’s reality?”

  “No need to sugarcoat it for me.” He stared out the window for a while before saying more. “I know most of that song, and it’s been around as long as people have.”

  “And why is that, do you think?”

  “Because there’s too much truth in it to ignore, much as we might like, though I hope I’ll never find it’s the only truth.”

  “Same here.”

  Chiffrey raised his cup in a toast. “We’re more alike than you might like to admit. My cupcake’s just frosted a little different, is all.”

  He drank the rest of his tea and eyed the pot, so she poured him some more. He nodded in gratitude and took another sip, peering at her over the rim like a puppy on the wrong side of the screen door. “Reminds me. Went to the metaphysical section of a bookstore the other day, thumbed through a few volumes of new and forgotten lore. Some of what I read did give rise to wonder, but I can’t see me going that way. I just wish I understood what really happened out there.”

  “Maybe you just don’t realize yet that you have understood something.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Well, you’re si
tting here now instead of skulking around on whatever your next assignment would have been. That should tell you enough.”

  He let out a deep sigh. “After I bailed on my career, I spent too much time wondering why. I mean…I never had the encounter experience that seemed to touch most everyone else onboard. Why was I left out? And that I was has to be at least part of the reason Becka moved on without me. And why what I thought was my life moved on without me.”

  “Think back a little,” she said. “I wasn’t exactly an early convert, if you recall, and I can remember feeling a little like you do now.” Chiffrey just looked off at the wall, nodding vaguely. She didn’t know what else to say. They sat together in silence, drinking from their cups, taking in a little warmth against the winter. “Pie?” she finally asked. He smiled, and she put half an apple pie in the now-hot oven to heat it up.

  “Why the dance?” he said. “Why won’t this thing make direct contact? Can only be one reason. It can’t. Or at least, can’t all on its own. Needs someone. That would explain Matthew. Maybe Lorraine, too, and to some extent everyone else who was touched in some way. And the Captain with his ship, apparently. How about you?”

  “Mine was a one-night stand, and the bed was cold and empty in the morning. But to answer your question, before he left, my father came up with this analogy: What if you were trying to speak to someone, but the softest you could make your voice would still kill them? You’d have to filter or dampen it somehow. Or maybe find someone who could take that volume. Do that, and they can pass it on at a lower volume.”

  “Only it wasn’t a person,” he said, showing no surprise. “You mean the whale. So, it can’t communicate with us directly. It needed something in between, like a mediator. Or filter.”

  “The decibel analogy is far from perfect, however. It’s not just a matter of intensity. It would be as if there were an untranslatable language.”

  “Maybe not perfectly, but every language can be translated.”

  “The dome, which is really a sphere, has no language at all, or at least not one in the sense that we would understand. Why would it need a language, after all, if it’s the only one if its kind? Language is essentially symbols. It doesn’t use symbols. For me, it was a direct link to knowing. But there’s another reason it doesn’t just say, ‘good morning, what a day, huh?’ Back in the tank, for one long moment, it was as if I took us all in as we appear to the dome.”

  “And?”

  “Mad.”

  “She…it’s angry at us?”

  “No, ‘mad’ as in crazy, and it’s us who are crazy. We’re like a snarling dog with its leg caught in a trap, dangerous even if you’re trying to help. And if you do manage to help, the dog just runs back to jealously guard its dirty little chew toy, instantly forgetting everything else. Or tries.”

  “Kind of a bleak assessment even by my standards.”

  “We expend an enormous amount of energy and resources to make sure we never know how bleak.”

  “So, no hugs coming our way from our new neighbor.”

  “We probably got more than we deserved.”

  “Well, I kind of hope we deserve all the help we can get, but I take your point.”

  She didn’t comment. A winter fly appeared and landed on the table amid a few grains of spilled sugar. Chiffrey watched it eat for a while before saying, “In case you didn’t know, Jack’s been moved to a private psychiatric hospital, a place so posh I wouldn’t mind a holiday there myself. My old crew certainly has people inside.” He smiled. “To watch him, I mean.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “They wouldn’t let me see him. Being out of the game, I’m little people now. Their excuse was they didn’t want to get him going again which, to be fair, is exactly what happened when Becka tried a visit. Took three guys and the maximum dose of tranquilizers to bring him to earth, apparently.”

  “Where does he get that strength from?”

  “No idea. But I did see Mary there.”

  “Served no time and got probation, right?”

  “Your father’s board at the Point didn’t want to attract unwanted attention, so they dropped the main charges.”

  “She got a wrist slap like I predicted.”

  “Yeah,” he said, yawning without trying to hide it, “you called it.”

  “Is Mary looking after Jack?”

  “Oh, yeah. There everyday. About the only person he can tolerate. Even though the place is private, it’s part of her required community service. Can you believe that? Somebody pulled a string, I guess.”

  “How is she?”

  “Wears a crucifix, carries a rosary. Looks more like a nun than ever, yet the damnedest thing is, she’s somehow even cuter.”

  He glanced at the oven. “That pie ready yet?”

  “Soon.” She could tell he had something else on his mind.

  “Do have one thing for you,” he said. “I still have to abide by my clearance obligations just like you, but I’m taking that to apply to everything that happened before my early retirement. I recently ran into an old friend from work. Over a few grasshoppers—hers, not mine—she mentioned that a satellite had picked up an image of the Valentina. I didn’t see it, but she told me it was a perfect match.”

  “Where?”

  “Off the coast of Argentina. Golfo Nuevo.”

  She was sure he noticed the look on her face, but didn’t try to hide it.

  “Penny, when you all got clearances, we did standard background checks. I know that’s where Captain Thorssen lost his wife. Valentina.”

  “He didn’t ‘lose’ her,” she shot back. “I was there when it happened. You know that, too, of course. Six years old. I was mad at her. She had promised me earlier she’d finally take me out on the sailboat she used for her whale research. Then she felt it was too rough. I was mad, and screamed that I hated her. And those were the last words she ever heard from me.”

  “I really am sorry.”

  “That’s not the point. She had been like my angel. I followed her around everywhere, wanted to be just like her. It never should have happened, not to her. It wasn’t a tragedy, it was a mistake, it was just wrong. She was special. Andrew and her together were special. The world just seemed to make sense when they were around. It was the only time it ever really did for me.”

  “It must have been terrible. And for him.”

  “It was.”

  “And I can see now, for you.”

  “I would give anything to be able to go back and change that day, to stop her from going! Eventually, I made a partial kind of peace with it, but I still wish I hadn’t screamed the words I did. I never bought this ‘have no regrets’ thing. I have regrets and that will always be one of them.”

  “You didn’t mean it. And she knew. Six-year-olds say that stuff all the time.”

  “But if I hadn’t, maybe she would have been more collected and seen the storm come earlier, headed back sooner.”

  “Who can say?”

  “I just did.”

  “You’re double thinking it. My old Grampy told me, ‘no, you don’t shy away, you just look your trouble square and true. Then keep walking your road.’”

  Chiffrey sighed and after a while slowly began to speak again. “When Brand, our ancient hound died, I was ten. Loved that dog, he’d come with me wherever I roamed. Everywhere, never a complaint, nothing but love. One morning, he doesn’t get up. Couldn’t walk. We took him to the vet. Liver failure, nothing he could do. So they put him down.”

  “I was devastated, and I finally went to Grampy. The only thing he said was, ‘every dog has his days and when they’re done, they’re done. The dog dies, but the dog lives on.’ He got me a puppy a few days later, and you know, when I looked into that whelp’s eyes, I saw Brand, I swear. Never forgot that. It’s gotten me through some rough patches.”

  He looked for a moment as if he were gazing into those puppy eyes again. “Anyway,” he said, “the next pass of the satellite, and that shi
p was nowhere to be seen, but I am certain it was the Captain. If you ever see him again, I’m ready to sign on as deckhand anytime if he has need of one. Seriously.”

  He paused for a moment and traced the grain of the tabletop with his finger. “There’s been nothing on Matthew.”

  “I didn’t expect there would be. Ready for your pie?”

  Not long after Chiffrey’s visit, she was surprised to find herself missing the sea, its smell, its sounds, the movement of water. Even though it was winter, she began to take their small sailboat out into the Strait a few times a week. Sometimes a vision of Valentina, Andrew’s wife, would return, topping the waves in her sloop off the Argentinean coast for the last time. The sadness was still there, like a root crept deep into a crack, impossible to dislodge, but this time she simply left it there in peace.

  On other days, if it wasn’t raining hard, she rode Akaba, their aging stallion, through the many woodland trails. One morning she found a pathway that led her back through her mother’s orchard. She stopped to take a closer look. Small buds were on the branches, life ready to return when prompted by the warmer sun of spring. She came back the next day and the next and soon was also spending time in her mother’s gardens, legendary for their lushness and variety. At first she only strolled through them, but later she began to notice details she had never taken in before. Stones, fitted together on a mound to provide the best conditions for a wildflower, raised beds spaced to maximize the growing potential. She watched a snail for an hour to see where it would go and what it would do. Its shell was a shiny yellowish green and as perfect as anything could be.

  She began to work.

  For the most part, she simply noticed what needed to be done, and as she noticed, started to see what had always been there: the infinitesimal dramas of the natural world. One afternoon as she was weeding, a sun break fell upon some winter flowers and they seemed to smolder with their own luminescence. Though far more subtle and less overwhelming than her experience in the tank with Matthew, that sense of the quintessential in things glimmered again. She rose with it, fell with it, and slipped with joy through its wilder parts.

  Like a stone under falling water, her old cares began to wear away as she gave her hands to the plants and animals immediately around her. Her steps grew lighter on the earth.

  There was a day Penny rode out on Akaba to the one nearby country store for some butter. She wanted to make another pie from the last of the previous summer’s raspberries she had taken from the freezer. When she had walked into the small local store, an old logger she remembered from her childhood was buying bait and ammunition. When she was eleven, he and his crew had clear-cut her favorite gully. It was near her parents’ place, and before it was logged she would wander there and sit with her feet in the stream, watching for the odd fingerling. She had hated the loggers on the day it was all destroyed, the hate burning like a branding iron in her heart.

  Now she stood in the store gazing at this man, and the rain outside seemed to fall in an unfathomable rhythm. An old dark pain deep inside her began to dissolve, like a shadow in sunlight. Her connection with the old logger became like an old dance remembered. Whether he would dance with her or not didn’t really matter. Whether they knew it or not, the circle was big enough to hold them all.