The decision point came. I squinted at my cards one last time, put my money on the table, hauled on the tiller and waited to see what Nature had.
I came about fast and was once again perpendicular to the waves. I stopped approaching Coveney . . . but I stopped sliding past it, too. I started to gain ground, a little. I hadn't fucked up. I began to envision a point at which I would be able to do a quick one-eighty, and almost coast to Coveney. Call me Ishmael. Predecessor of email.
That raised the question I'd been postponing: just exactly what the hell I was going to do when I got there?
The first reason little Coveney Island is a terrific place for a man in Zudie's predicament to live is, there's no good place to land. The second reason is, there aren't even any mediocre ones. There are only one or two even rotten ones charted, with warnings in boldface. Ugly rocks, laid out like a Driver-Ed obstacle course. Completely invisible rocks in no pattern at all. Crashing surf, with an occasional geyser like a sounding whale. Whirlpools. Randomly reversing currents. Enough rusting pieces of ex-ships to qualify as Davy Jones's Dumpster. Even horny teenagers on drugs don't try to land on Coveney. (There are better places closer.) I think Keith could have done it. Lina would probably never have tried.
I told myself I'd think of something, once I got a closer look. Hell, I'd figured out that I needed to go the wrong way, hadn't I? There'd been a time when Columbus was the only guy on earth that smart. How hard could it be to park? No wonder the boat was barking like an applauding seal and shaking my hand. It was—
Barking like a seal?
—I spun around. A similar sound can be made by inhaling sharply while saying the word "We!" repeatedly. What was producing it now was the motor mount tearing itself free of the Fiendish Dinghy. No, the Killer Zodiac. All rubber breaks down if you leave it out in the sun for enough years, and the first warning is usually failure. A visible gap widened with each "We!" as the motor tried to deny our inevitable parting.
It wasn't because I'm stupid—really. It was because I'm so much faster than a normal human being that I tried to hold onto the motor. Even as my hands touched it I was thinking it's going to be loads of fun, rowing with ten burned fingers, so you can see I really was alert. It just didn't help.
Neither did my sacrifice. "We!" became "WE!" and then with one terminal "WHEEEE! Pah-LOOT!!!," the motor left me. Followed a moment later, with the exquisite subtlety of a Chuck Jones punchline, by the barely audible "wish-poop" of my cellphone leaving my shirt pocket and chasing the motor.
It was suddenly much quieter. Just the white noise of the rain, and the oscillating signal of the wind. I waited for the overgrown inner-tube to start hissing, go soft, and sink, but Fate's sense of humor was subtler than that.
Lina was going to kill me. Worse: Keith was going to break my balls for the next twenty years.
It wasn't fair: all she'd said was don't sink my boat. Once the motor left the boat, it wasn't my responsibility. If it had asked me first, I'd have told it to stay.
If you're going to burn all your fingers, it is useful to do so in a swimming pool with a decimeter or two of ice water in it. They didn't hurt too bad at all until I picked the paddles up. Then they did. It was hard getting the paddles into those oarlock things; when I finally succeeded I told myself I was an Oarlock Warlock, smart as Sherlock. Myself said it was sheer luck, so I called it a Person From Porlock. A split personality, suffering from share-lack. When in danger, when in doubt: run in circles, scream and shout!
Look where you are. Look where you're going . . .
No: rowing is better. In straight lines. Check position. Assess wind and current. Plot course, and:
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream
Screw merrily. Too many syllables.
Row, row, row your boat
Row, row, row your boat
Fuck, fuck, fuck this boat—
—for about as many iterations as you used to be able to stand singing "Ninety-Nine Bottles Of Beer" on the schoolbus, before your chest starts to hurt.
Right side, low in back. Rest, get breath back. Pain fades reassuringly. Just a pulled muscle, this time. Lift head, assess position and course . . . yikes . . . so much for resting, pick up paddles in sore hands and:
Row your boat
Row your boat
Row your boat
Row your boat
Blow me, boat
Row your boat—
—chest pain comes much sooner this time, high and on the side. Sharp, too, but that's the good news: it's only one of the braces the surgeons left in there, shifting around a bit, pinching some nerve. No biggie—usually. Work the right shoulder around and it starts to back right off. Longer pause for recovery this time before you dare lift your head up, check position and course, and:
Row!
Row!
Row!
Row!
Row!
Row!
Row!
Row!
—mild pain now, but it's dull and intimate. This summons some of the scariest memories you own; even resting doesn't give you much of your breath back. One of the little bubbles you were born with on the bald tire that is your lung is officially threatening to let go. You remind yourself that sometimes the little bubbles are bluffing. And sometimes they pop and they're just minicollapses, of no consequence, a day or two in bed moving carefully. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms must surely set some statutory upper limit on the amount of bad luck a man is allowed to have in any given day. Unclench teeth, open eyes, and holy Jesus it's not too much further, let's:
Row, row, row, row, row, row, row, row, row—
Okay: row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . .
All right, dammit!
Row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . .
I had wondered all my life what the word "landlubber" was all about. I got it, now. It came from a guy who was trying to tell the universe he was a land lover, and drowned before he could finish.
. . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . .
Some tasks you can't ever complete, no matter how hard you try—but you have to keep on trying anyway, die trying if that's what it takes. You know what that's about, eh, Russell?
Everything melted away—the pain, the fear, the boat, the sea and sky themselves—and I paddled through memory instead. Some of my least favorite memories, but I no longer had the strength to push them back.
I was with Susan, on one of her last good days. Don't ask how far our definition of "good" had contracted by that point, and don't even think about the days that came after that and redefined "bad" just as drastically.
Lying beside my beloved wife in our last living room, on the foldout couch my friends and I had converted to her deathbed. Her head on my chest, her left arm across my belly, carefully placed to avoid dislodging the IV. Talking quietly to me about some of the problems I would have to deal with after she died, advising me one last time. I've done very few intelligent things in my entire life that weren't based on Susan's advice.
She saved Jesse for last.
"Forget it, Russell!"
"He's got a perfectly good brain. There has to be some way—"
She shook her head against my chest. "Spice, listen to me. I'm not saying you won't be able to do it. I'm saying it isn't going to be doable, by you or the best shrink in the world or anybody."
"But it's so stupid."
"That's not a word that applies in this context. It's like saying apples are awkward."
"But—"
"It's sad, yes. That won't be easy to take. But it's nobody's fault. Not yours; not his. It's just the way it is. Who Jesse is. The age he happens to be now. Who you are. How he relates to you, and to me, and . . .and to this. All the history between all of us so far."
"Suppose I—"<
br />
"No matter what you say or do, no matter how rational he is on most other subjects, Jesse is going to hold you responsible for me being gone. He is going to believe—no, he's going to know for a fact—that you could have talked me out of it if you really wanted to, that your voice added to his would unquestionably have turned the tide. Ergo, you must not have really wanted to; ergo, you are evil. You are merciless, indifferent, selfish . . . you are the cancer itself. It will take him years to get past that; it's just who he is, and who he imagines you are."
I didn't answer. I knew she was probably right.
"That's a shame, because you don't deserve his anger, and trust me, he's going to feel like a major jerk about it one day. But I can live with . . . no, I can die with . . . the thought of him hating his dad's guts for a few years. He'll move as far away from you as possible—don't be surprised if he actually picks New York, just to spite you—and that'll actually be a good thing. I think you both need to be alone for a while, to heal separately before you try to heal together. Does that make any sense?"
"I guess. I'm not sure."
"But what I can't die with is the thought of you hating him back. Of you doing just what he's doing: being mad at him for something he can't help. You're supposed to be smarter than a twenty-one-year-old. If you let yourself stay pissed off at him, together you're both going to dig yourselves a hole you'll be too stubborn to climb out of even when you finally figure out you should."
I sighed. "Damn it, babe, I've been letting him be pissed off at me since he was sixteen."
"Sure: that comes with the job. That's the point: he's about to become ten times as pissed off as ever, and you're his customary whipping-man."
"Terrific. What am I supposed to do with my own rage against the universe for stealing you?"
She reached up, being careful of the IV, and touched my face. "Put it to good use. Sit down at your keyboard and aim it at all the sons of bitches and bitches in the world. 'Right livelihood,' the Buddhists call it. Cut 'em all a new one for me."
Pain, with its reminder of mortality, brought me back to myself.
I learned a long time ago that I can die; being reminded wasn't even interesting. I was absolutely unsurprised to be unready again, this time. I kept rowing because now it was easier to keep going than to stop, somehow.
. . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . .
Maybe not.
. . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . . row . . .
Noise asserted itself. Noises. Ugly noises. Death-rattle thunder. Giant turds falling into a bowl from a great height. Whiplashes. Lions roaring. Birds shrieking. God trying to shush them all. This was some very groovy acid. Maybe I should stop a minute and dig it. Smell the fish. Open my eyes, the visuals might be even better . . .
Holy shit!
I was nearly there.
Now what?
I had a very short list of contingency plans for this. Always go with your best hope first. At least it didn't call for physical exertion. I closed my eyes again, and thought as hard as I could, so hard that I saw bursts of acid-colours again, saw them shape the words I was thinking in shimmering blossoms of fire, heard my voice chant them in my head louder than all the Gyuto Monks in Dharamsala:
HELP ME, ZUDIE!
HELP ME, ZUDIE!
HELP ME, ZUDIE!
It's a hell of a note when your best hope is something you don't think is going to work.
Zandor Zudenigo had told me a few years ago—the first night I'd seen him since we'd been college roommates back in the sixties—that these days, he had to stay at least a hundred meters away from people, or it was "agony." (If you're an American baffled by the metric system—nobody else is—a meter is about a yard.) From anyone but me, anyway: apparently I don't think as loud as most people or something. That was my sole data point for his current telepathic sensitivity. With absolutely nothing to go on but intuition, always a poor guide in novel circumstances, it felt to me like if a hundred meters was safe range, anything over five hundred meters would be out of range altogether. I was a good three hundred from the catastrophe zone where sea and land met snarling, itself a good hundred meters across, and beyond that were fifty meters of horrible rocky rising shore before you came even to the edge of the twisted, deformed, but quite thick woods. God alone knew whether Zudie's home even lay on this side of the island. There was no guarantee he had not gone to the mainland for a quart of milk today. There was no guarantee he was even still alive, if it came to that. Hermiting is a risky profession. It had been more than six months since the last time I'd come out here to try calling him again, and as always gotten not an answer . . . but at least the sense that one was still being withheld.
HELP ME, ZUDIE!
HELP ME, ZUDIE!
ZANDOR, PLEASE SAVE MY ASS—AGAIN—
Okay, no problem: go to Plan B. Close my eyes, cross my fingers, arms, and legs . . . head straight in . . . and pray to all the gods I didn't believe in that—
Coming across the rocks of the shore like a ghost walrus: the cartoon character Baby Huey, or Tony Soprano if you prefer, bigger than life and stark naked. Holy shit. Reaching the surfline, beckoning me toward him with exaggerated gestures, indicating, "This way—this way—right here, straight toward me—this way—"
Well, hell. That had been my plan. THANKS, MAN—HERE I COME—
More gestures, all unmistakable: "NOT SO LOUD! That's better—keep coming—"
Sorry! I started paddling with all I had left.
"—keep coming—keep coming—that's it, straight in—"
He had me heading into a rock funnel toward an unbroken line of exploding foam. Are you SURE? It really looks—
"—STRAIGHT IN—"
Giant ragged boulders went by on either side. I was committed now, and everything ahead was ghastly. I trust you with my life, Zudie, but ARE YOU SURE?
"STRAIGHT IN!"
One last huge black stone went by on my left, like the spine of a submerged whale, or a submarine with no conning tower. Okay, but listen: some CIA or NSA spook is after you—Nika's cousin was—
Suddenly he was gesturing even more frantically than I was paddling: "GO LEFT! GO LEFT! DO IT NOW! GO LEFT—"
I went left, saw no point, kept going left, he gestured even harder, I gave it everything I had left, and all at once saw a clear open channel to a tiny sand beach maybe six or seven meters wide, two or three long even when the waves came all the way in, quite invisible to anyone who had not committed himself to certain death and then been directed just as I had.
THANK YOU, ZUDIE!!!
Row, row, row, row, rowrowrowrowrowrowrow . . .
He came out waist-deep to meet me. Helped me beach the Killer Zodiac. Helped me out of it. Helped me climb up onto and stretch out on a flattish bit of rock which was very hard and very cold . . . but not wet, and not moving in any direction at all. Dragged the Killer completely out of the water and up onto rock that would not gut her. Came and sat beside me.
Familiar voice. The voice of the little Martian who keeps threatening Bugs with his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator. "You're okay now, Russell."
I felt like a crumb. "I'm sorry, man."
He shrugged. "I know what I look like naked.
"How close behind is he?
"Oh. Hell, for a minute there, I thought there was a problem or something.
"Yeah, you too.
"Well, give her mine, too.
"Because this is my shower; you caught me bathing. Not that cold.
"I don't drink it, remember? No, not even tea. Yes—dry, and warmer than this."
Talking with Zandor can be unsettling for someone who doesn't smoke marijuana, but one compensation is, it doesn't matter a bit if you're out of breath. You don't have to condense your own side of the conversation to the fewest possible gasped syllables, and then take forever to get them out.
7.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Bug Cove, Heron Island, Briti
sh Columbia, Canada
McKinnon's state of the art, top of the line GPS receiver had a bad earphone jack.
So even though he was very hungry for breakfast by now, and wanted coffee very much indeed, he had to stay in the car if he wanted to keep on monitoring the conversation taking place. It never occurred to him not to; in similar situations in the past he had gone hungry for days, gone without peeing for a day, remained motionless in the sun for hours. Years ago. He concentrated hard . . . on what turned out to be nothing much, which is a classic first step to the hypnotic state. The conversation started out with an interesting sentence or two. But nearly at once it wandered off into nothing but meandering meaningless chatter between the two males, which his target seemed prepared to let go on forever. Could Canada really be such a sissy place that even female police officers were too self-effacing to interrupt men talking? Or was she simply too busy smoking the pot they'd mentioned? The men's voices were remarkably alike, and they were so far from the mike he had to strain to make out what they were saying, and when he did it never turned out to be worth the trouble, and he didn't even realize he had fallen asleep until the first crack of thunder and avalanche of rain arrived together.
When they did his first thought was that he'd had a stroke. The truth made him little happier. He had never fallen asleep on stakeout before. It rattled him—might have frightened him a little if it'd had time.
First things first. The conversation was over; obviously they had gone inside to wait out the rain. The GPS snitch said it had not moved a centimeter from its last known position. He could probably expect them to stay inside until the rain at least moderated . . . so he would have time to play back the conversation he'd just dozed through.
Once he had dealt with second things. Now he was starving for breakfast, and desperate for coffee, and his bladder was about to burst.
Very Hard Choices Page 8
