Mare watched him make his camp. She didn’t try to help him. She was comfortably silent. When he had everything ordered, he looked at her and smiled briefly and sat down on his little sitz pad on the grass. He took out his notebook but he didn’t work on the journal. He pulled around a clean page and began a list of the materials he would need for beginning the boat. He wrote down substitutes when he could think of them, in case he had trouble getting his first choice. He planned to cross the strait to Vancouver Island and then sail east and north through the Gulf Islands and the Strait of Georgia, across the Queen Charlotte Strait and then up through the inland passage to Alaska. He hadn’t figured out yet how he would get across the Bering Strait to Siberia—whether he would try to sail across in this boat he would build, or if he’d barter it up there to get some other craft, or a ride. It might take him all winter to build the skipjack, all summer to sail it stop and go up the west coast of Canada and Alaska, and then he would need to wait for summer again before crossing the Bering Strait. He’d have time to find out what he wanted to do before he got to it.
The girl after a while approached him silently and squatted down on her heels so she could see what he was writing. She didn’t ask him about the list. She read it over and then looked off toward her family’s trailer. She kept crouching there beside him, balancing lightly.
“Do you think it’s helping yet?” she asked in a minute. She whispered it, looking at him sideward through her long bangs.
He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
“They’re still fighting,” she murmured. “Aren’t they?”
* * *
His mother had written to the Oklahoma draft board pleading Jay’s only-child status, but by then the so-called Third-World’s War was taking a few thousand American lives a day and they weren’t exempting anyone. Within a few weeks of his eighteenth birthday, they sent him to the Israeli front.
The tour of duty was four years at first, then extended to six. He thought they would extend it again, but after six years few of them were alive anyway, and they sent him home on a C31 full of cremation canisters. He sat on the toilet in the tail of the plane and swallowed all the pills he had, three at a time, until they were gone. The illegal-drug infrastructure had come overseas with the war and eventually he had learned he could sleep and not dream if he took Nembutal, which was easy to get. Gradually after that he had begun to take Dexamyl to wake up from the Nembutal, Librium to smooth the jitters out of the Dexamyl, Percodan to get high, Demerol when he needed to come down quickly from the high, Dexamyl again if the Demerol took him down too far. He thought he would be dead by the time the plane landed but his body remained inexplicably, persistently, resistant to death. He wound up in a Delayed Stress Syndrome Inpatient Rehab Center which was housed in a prison. He was thirty years old when the funding for the DSS Centers was dropped in favor of research that might lead to a Stealth aircraft carrier. Jay was freed to walk and hitchhike from the prison in Idaho to his mother’s house in Tulsa. She had been dead for years but he stood in the street in front of the house and waited for something to happen, a memory or a sentiment, to connect him to his childhood and adolescence. Nothing came. He had been someone else for a long time.
He was still standing on the curb there after dark when a man came out of the house behind him. The man had a flashlight but he didn’t click it on. He came over to where Jay stood.
“You should get inside,” he said to Jay. “They’ll be coming around pretty soon, checking.” He spoke quietly. He might have meant a curfew. Tulsa had been fired on a few times by planes flying up to or back from the Kansas missile silos, out of bases in Haiti—crazy terrorists of the crazy Jorge Ruiz government. Probably there was a permanent brownout and a curfew here.
Jay said, “Okay,” but he didn’t move. He didn’t know where he would go anyway. He was cold and needing sleep. There was an appeal in the possibility of arrest.
The man looked at him in the darkness. “You can come inside my house,” he said, after he had looked at Jay.
He had a couch in a small room at the front of his house, and Jay slept on it without taking off his clothes. In the daylight the next morning he lay on the couch and looked out the window to his mother’s house across the street.
The man who had taken him in was a Quaker named Bob Settleman. He had a son who was on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, and a daughter who was in a federal prison serving a ten year sentence for failure to report. Jay went with him to a First Day Meeting. There was nothing much to it. People sat silently. After a while an old woman stood and said something about the droughts and cold weather perhaps reflecting God’s unhappiness with the state of the world. But that was the only time anyone mentioned God. Three other people rose to speak. One said he was tired of being the only person who remembered to shut the blackout screens in the Meeting Room before they locked up. Then, after a long silence, a woman stood and expressed her fear that an entire generation had been desensitized to violence, by decades of daily video coverage of the war. She spoke gently, in a trembling voice, just a few plain sentences. It didn’t seem to matter a great deal, the words she spoke. While she was speaking, Jay felt something come into the room. The woman’s voice, some quality in it, seemed to charge the air with its manifest, exquisitely painful truth. After she had finished, there was another long silence. Then Bob Settleman stood slowly and told about watching Jay standing on the curb after dark. He seemed to be relating it intangibly to what had been said about the war. “I could see he was in some need,” Bob said, gesturing urgently. Jay looked at his hands. He thought he should be embarrassed, but nothing like that arose in him. He could still feel the palpable trembling of the woman’s voice—in the air, in his bones.
Afterward, walking away from the Meeting house, Bob looked at his feet and said, as if it was an apology, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a Meeting that was Gathered into the Light like that. I guess I got swept up in it.”
Jay didn’t look at him. After a while he said, “It’s okay.” He didn’t ask anything. He felt he knew, without asking, what Gathered into the Light meant.
He stayed in Tulsa, warehousing for a laundry products distributor. He kept going to the First Day Meetings with Bob. He found it was true, Meetings were rarely Gathered. But he liked the long silences anyway, and the unpredictability of the messages people felt compelled to share. For a long time, he didn’t speak himself. He listened without hearing any voice whispering inside him. But finally he did hear one. When he stood, he felt the long silence Gathering, until the trembling words he spoke came out on the air as Truth.
“If somebody could walk far enough, they’d have to come to the end of the war, eventually.
* * *
He had, by now, an established web of support: a New York Catholic priest who banked his receipts from the journal subscriptions, kept his accounts, filed his taxes, wired him expense money when he asked for it; a Canadian rare-seeds collective willing to receive his mail, sort it, bundle it up and send it to him whenever he supplied them with an address; a Massachusetts Monthly Meeting of Friends whose members had the work of typing from the handwritten pages he sent them, printing, collating, stapling, mailing the 10,000 copies of his sometimes-monthly writings. He had a paid subscription list of 1,651, a non-paid “mailing list” of 8,274. Some of those were churches, environmental groups, cooperatives, many were couples, so the real count of persons who supported him was greater by a factor of three or four, maybe. Many of them were people he had met, walking. He hadn’t walked, yet, in the Eastern Hemisphere. If he lived long enough to finish what he had started, he thought he could hope for a total list as high as fifty or sixty thousand names. A Chilean who had been a delegate at the failed peace conferences in Surinam had kept a year-long public silence as a protest of Jay’s arrest and bad treatment in Colombia. And he knew of one other world-peace-walker he had inspired, a Cuban Nobel chemist who had been the one primarily featured in Time. He wa
sn’t fooled into believing it was an important circle of influence. He had to view it in the context of the world. Casualties were notoriously underreported, but at least as many people were killed in a given day, directly and indirectly by the war, as made up his optimistic future list of subscribers. It may have been he kept at it because he had been doing it too long now to stop. It was what he did, who he was. It had been a long time since he had felt the certainty and clarity of a Meeting that was Gathered into the Light.
* * *
On the Naniamuk peninsula, he scouted out a few broken-down sheds, and garages with overgrown driveways, and passed entreating notes to the owners. He needed a roof. He expected rain in this part of the world about every day.
One woman had a son dead in India and another son who had been listed AWOL or MIA in the interior of Brazil for two years. She asked Jay if he had walked across Brazil yet. Yes, he wrote quickly, eight months there. She didn’t ask him anything else—nothing about the land or the weather or the fighting. She showed him old photos of both her sons without asking if he had seen the lost one among the refugees in the cities and villages he had walked through. She lent him the use of her dilapidated garage, and the few cheap tools he found in disarray inside it.
The girl, Mare, came unexpectedly after a couple of days and watched him lofting the deck and hull bottom panels onto plywood. It had been raining a little. She stood under her own umbrella a while, without coming in close enough to shelter under the garage roof. But gradually she came in near him and studied what he was doing. A look rose in her face—distractedness, as before on the porch of her trailer, and then fear, or something like grief. He didn’t know what to make of these looks of hers.
“You’re building a boat,” she said, low voiced.
He stopped working a minute and looked at the two pieces of plywood he had laid end to end. He was marking and lining them with a straight edge and a piece of curving batten. He had gone across the Florida Strait in a homemade plywood skipjack, had sailed it around the coast of Cuba to Haiti, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and then across the channel to Yucatan. And later he had built a punt to cross the mouths of the Amazon. A Cuban refugee, a fisherman, had helped him build the Caribbean boat, and the punt had been a simple thing, hardly more than a raft. This was the first time he had tried to build a skipjack without help, but he had learned he could do about anything if he had time enough to make mistakes, undo them, set them right. He nodded, yes, he was building a boat.
“There are mines in the strait,” Mare said, dropping her low voice down.
He smiled slightly, giving her a face that belittled the problem. He had seen mines in the Yucatan channel too, and in the strait off Florida. His boat had slid by them, ridden over them. They were triggered for the heavy war ships and the armored oil tankers.
He went on working. Mare watched him seriously, without saying anything else. He thought she would leave when she saw how slow the boat-making went, but she stayed on in the garage, handing him tools, and helping him to brace the batten against the nails when he lofted the deck piece. At dusk she walked with him up the streets to the Four Pines. There was a fine rain falling still, and she held her umbrella high up so he could get under it if he hunched a little.
In the morning she was waiting for him, sitting on the porch of her trailer when he tramped across the wet grass toward the street. Since Colombia, he had had a difficulty with waking early. He had to depend on his bladder, usually, to force him out of the sleeping bag, then he was slow to feel really awake, his mouth and eyes thick, heavy, until he had washed his face, eaten something, walked a while. He saw it was something like that with the girl. She sat hunkered up on the top step, resting her chin on her knees, clasping her arms about her thin legs. Under her eyes, the tender skin was puffy, dark. Her hair stuck out uncombed. She didn’t speak to him. She came stiffly down from the porch and fell in beside him, with her eyes fixed on the rubber toe caps of her shoes. She had a brown lunch sack clutched in one hand and the other hand sunk in the pocket of her corduroys.
They walked down the paved road and then the graveled streets to where the boat garage was. Their walking made a quiet scratching sound. There was no one else out. Jay thought he could hear the surf beating on the ocean side of the peninsula, but maybe not. He heard a dim, continuous susurration. They were half a mile from the beach. Maybe what he heard was wind moving in the trees and the grass, or the whisperings of the snowy plover, nesting in the brush above the tidal flats, on the strait side of the peninsula.
He had not padlocked the garage—a pry-bar would have got anybody in through the small side door in a couple of minutes. He pulled up the rollaway front door, let the light in on the tools, the sheets of plywood. Mare put her lunch down on a sawhorse and stood looking at the lofted pieces, the hull bottom and deck panels drawn on the plywood. He would make those cuts today. He manhandled one of the sheets up off the floor onto the sawhorses. Mare took hold of one end silently. It occurred to him that he could have gotten the panels cut out without her, but it would be easier with her there to hold the big sheets of wood steady under the saw.
He cut the deck panel slowly with hand tools—a brace and bit to make an entry for the keyhole saw, a ripsaw for the long outer cuts. When he was most of the way along the straight finish of the starboard side, on an impulse he gave the saw over to Mare and came around to the other side to hold the sheet down for her. She looked at him once shyly from behind her long bangs and then stood at his place before the wood, holding the saw in both hands. She hadn’t drawn a saw in her life, he could tell that, but she’d been watching him. She pushed the saw into the cut he had started and drew it up slow and wobbly. She was holding her mouth out in a tight, flat line, all concentration. He had to smile, watching her.
They ate lunch sitting on the sawhorses at the front of the garage. Jay had carried a carton of yogurt in the pocket of his coat and he ate that slowly with his spoon. Mare offered him part of her peanut butter sandwich, and quartered pieces of a yellow apple. He shook his head, shrugging, smiling thinly. She considered his face, and then looked away.
“I get these little dreams,” she said in a minute, low voiced, with apple in her mouth.
He had a facial expression he relied on a good deal, a questioning look. What? Say again? Explain. She glanced swiftly sideward at his look and then down at her fingers gathered in her lap. “They’re not dreams, I guess. I’m not asleep. I just get them all of a sudden. I see something that’s happened, or something that hasn’t happened yet. Things remind me.” She looked at him again cautiously through her bangs. “When I saw you on the porch, when you gave me the letter, I remembered somebody else who gave me a letter before. I think it was a long time ago.”
He shook his head, took the notepad from his shirt pocket and wrote a couple of lines about déjà vu. He would have written more but she was reading while he wrote and he felt her stiffening, looking away.
“I know what that is,” she said, lowering her face. “It isn’t that. Everybody gets that.”
He waited silently. There wouldn’t have been anything to say anyway. She picked at the corduroy on the front of her pant legs. After a while she said, whispering, “I remember things that happened to other people, but they were me. I think I might be dreaming other people’s lives, or the dreams are what I did before, when I was alive a different time, or when I’ll be somebody else, later on.” Her fingernails kept picking at the cord. “I guess you don’t get dreams like that.” Her eyes came up to him. “Nobody else does, I guess.” She looked away. “I do though. I get them a lot. I just don’t tell anymore.” Her mouth was small, drawn up. She looked toward him again. “I can tell you, though.”
Before she had finished telling him, he had thought of an epilepsy, Le Petit Absentia, maybe it was called. He had seen it once in a witch-child in Haiti, a girl who fell into a brief, staring trance a hundred times a day. A neurologist had written to him, naming it from the description he had read
in Jay’s journal. He could write to the neurologist, ask if this was Le Petit again. Maybe there was a simple way to tell, a test, or a couple of things to look for. Of course, maybe it wasn’t that. It might only be a fancy, something she’d invented, an attention-getter. But her look made him sympathetic. He pushed her bangs back, kissed her smooth brow solemnly. It’s okay, he said by his kiss, by his hand lightly on her bangs. I won’t tell.
* * *
There hadn’t been a long Labor Day weekend for years. It was one of the minor observances scratched from the calendar by the exigencies of war. But people who were tied in with the school calendar still observed the first weekend of September as a sort of holiday, a last hurrah before the opening Monday of the school year. Some of them still came to the beach.
The weather by good luck was fair, the abiding peninsula winds balmy, sunlit, so there were a couple of small trailers and a few tents in the RV park, and a no-vacancy sign at the motel Saturday morning by the time the fog was burned off.
Jay spent both days on the lawn in front of the town’s gazebo, behind a stack of old journals and a big posterboard display he had pasted up, with an outsized rewording of his form letter, and clippings from newspapers and from Time. He put out a hat on the grass in front of him, with a couple of seed dollars in it. His personal style of buskering was diffident, self-conscious. He kept his attention mostly on his notebook, in his lap. He sketched from memory the archway at the front of the RV Park, the humpbacked old trailer, the girl, Mare’s, thin face. He made notes to do with the boat, and fiddled with an op-ed piece he would send to Time, trying to follow up on the little publicity they’d given the Cuban chemist. The op-ed would go in his October journal, whether Time took it or not, and the sketches would show up there too, in the margins of his daybook entries, or on the cover. He printed other people’s writings too, things that came in his mail—poetry, letters, meeting notices, back page news items pertaining to peace issues, casualty and armament statistics sent at rare intervals by an anonymous letter writer with a Washington, D.C. postmark—but most of the pages were his own work. On bureaucratic forms he entered Journalist as his occupation without feeling he was misrepresenting anything. He liked to write. His writing had gotten gradually better since he had been doing the journal—sometimes he thought it was not from the practice at writing, but the practice at silence.
The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990 Page 34
