Blue Arrow

by Stan C. Smith

  Blue Arrow

  by

  Stan C. Smith

  Copyright 2016 by Stan C. Smith

  Author’s Note

  Blue Arrow is intended to be a stand-alone novella or short story (15,000 words). But you will enjoy it even more if you have already read my novels, Diffusion and Infusion. If you have read these novels, you will already know who Peter and Rose are and will likely be eager to better understand the fascinating history of their relationship. Not only that, but you might be interested in getting a sneak peak of where the series is going next. Some of the parts of Blue Arrow could be considered spoilers if you have read Diffusion but have not yet read Infusion.

  You can learn more about my novels and sign up for my reader group emails at my web site:

  http://www.stancsmith.com

  My Amazon Author Site:

  https://www.amazon.com/author/stancsmith

  I hope you enjoy Blue Arrow!

  Stan C. Smith

  Blue Arrow

  I imagined leaving Peter when I was only forty-one. I packed my bags and placed them by the door. I envisioned myself walking out the door and down the street. I would rent a flat in Southside Cairns and someday open my own beach shop. Rainbow-colored sunglasses, dried starfish, earrings with dangling abalone and cone shells, large-handled bags with embroidered clownfish, and tasteful flip-flops made of hemp fibers—not the cheap plastic ones.

  But then Peter came home. At that time—it was 1977—Peter wasn’t what you’d call a working man. Three generations of his family had thrived in the shipping business. Sugar cane, mostly. He was not rich, but the family business had provided him with enough funds that working was optional. Oh, Peter could have worked, but he had other things on his mind. If you ask me, he was busy devising a most spectacular way to die. First, there was cycling. He wanted to outpace Hubert Opperman’s ride from Fremantle to Sydney—4,600 kilometers in thirteen days. Like Opperman, Peter had to carry his bike more than fifteen kilometers at Nanwarra Sands. And he did this on his own. No support vehicle, no one dropping off food and water. He didn’t beat Oppy’s record, but he survived. Then there was swimming—twenty kilometers across the Rottnest Channel. Again on his own, no support. Jellyfish nearly brought an end to that, and to his life. And then there was rock climbing—without safety equipment. Just to prove he could, I guess. But all of that came to an end when he attempted to traverse the island of New Guinea from north to south. Alone. This was impossible, of course. Well-equipped expeditions had failed. Peter would die there. I knew it, and he knew it.

  And so, when Peter left me at home to go die in New Guinea, I packed a couple of bags and placed them by the door. Four weeks later they were still there, waiting for me at the door. Two more weeks passed. I hadn’t left, and I hadn’t moved the bags. I began to realize I didn’t really want to leave, that I wanted the bags by the door so Peter would see them when he came home. Perhaps then he would see what was happening to our relationship. Perhaps then he would decide his life was worth living. If only he would come home.

  Another week passed. Peter was three weeks overdue. I should have begun the mourning process, because I knew he was dead somewhere in the rugged, stifling, uncharted wilderness. He had probably eaten the wrong fruit, or contracted a rare disease. Or maybe he had fallen in a ravine. Perhaps most likely he had simply died of hunger or thirst. But still my bags remained by the door, and every day I waited for a phone call that might end my suffering one way or the other.

  And then Peter came home.

  He called from the airport, and an hour later I heard the familiar sound of his Ford Cortina pulling into the driveway. He came in and saw my packed bags. He was apologetic, repentant, remorseful. And changed.

  Peter said he had found something in the jungle. Out there in the wilderness. He said it was something so important it would change the world. He didn’t know exactly what it was, and he hadn’t brought it home. I’m not sure I believed him, but at the time all that mattered was that I desperately wanted to. I had never seen him so emotional about something. Perhaps I allowed myself to believe his fervor was in part due to coming home to me. He promised he would never leave me again, and that we would grow old together. He wept and held me with trembling hands, and he talked about us being partners, and how he needed my help figuring out what to do.

  So I unpacked my bags and put them away. We all make mistakes in our youth, and I was only forty-one, after all.

  Yonks Day – Year 1 – 1978

  Yonks means a long time. As in, I haven’t seen you in yonks. It is derived from donkey’s years, which also means a long time. Yonks Day comes once a year. I like to think of it as Peter’s other birthday, as it is the date of his return. And he had come home a new man.

  A year after Peter had come home, we weren’t yet calling it Yonks Day. It had only been a year, so why would we?

  During the first weeks following his return, Peter was occupied with a sort of second courtship. He went to great lengths to convince me I was the love of his new life. He sold his bikes and his climbing gear. He had lost the best of his wilderness survival gear in New Guinea, but he took what was left and sold it, too. He set up a savings account in which we would deposit what we could each month until I could quit working for Sylvia at her beach shop and buy my own shop on the Esplanade. His efforts were not wasted; I fell in love with him all over again.

  That first year was magical. It was a sit-on-the-beach-and-giggle-at-the-sinking-sun-until-everyone-goes-home-and-then-make-love-in-the-sand year. It was a collect-gull-feathers-and-put-them-in-a-box-until-you-have-thousands-and-then-make-Rose-a-wall-hanging-that-looks-like-ocean-waves year. It was a year of keeping promises and making love until I hurt. You see, I was not perfect. But Peter was.

  Many people claim their partner is perfect. What they mean is, their partner is perfect for them, or their partner is a perfect dancer, or a perfect cook. Peter was none of those things. But he was physically perfect. He had come home with no imperfections. His appendectomy scar was gone. His moles and birthmarks were gone. He was no longer circumcised.

  Like I said, he was a new man.

  Love is blind, they say. I would add that love is also numb. It is particularly numb to fear and suspicion. I saw and felt in those first months exactly what I wanted to, and I avoided asking too many questions. Who was I to question good fortune?

  On the first anniversary of Peter’s return, I had intended to get up early to surprise him with breakfast. But I was too late. I put on a long t-shirt and left the bedroom. Light under the office door indicated he was working. I opened the door and squinted.

  “I thought we were sleeping in, Peter.”

  His eyes were wide when he looked up. “Couldn’t sleep. I know it’s a special day, but I thought I’d work on this until you got up.”

  I smelled stale coffee. “You ran water through yesterday’s grounds again?”

  “Saves time. I need your thoughts on this.” He waved me over to look at the pad of paper in his lap.

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on it. In a column on the left were hand-drawn symbols, each of them unique. There were spirals, ovals, and a circle. There were sharp angles and zigzagging lines. Some of the symbols looked almost like letters of the alphabet, but not quite. The page I could see contained about thirty of the symbols, so I suspected there would be more on the next few pages. There would be a total of 128, because that’s how many symbols Peter claimed to have seen in the jungle.

  On the paper, to the right of each symbol, he had written a person’s name. The first was Linda, and then Margaret, Tom, Sheila, Jason, and so on.

  “You’re naming the symbols?”

  He flipped the page, showing that the n
ames continued. “Working on it. Got the idea this morning. Here’s what I’m thinking.” He turned to the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 on the desk. It was a computer that used a cassette tape drive and could execute simple commands in BASIC code, displayed in white text. He said, “We can’t use the actual symbols, right? There are no corresponding characters on the keyboard, and we’ve already decided it’s impractical to produce a new keyboard with all 128 symbols.”

  I picked up his mug and swallowed some of the awful coffee. “Right.”

  “So we give each symbol a name.” He tapped the pad of paper. “And we make sure folks have a printed index of the names paired with the symbols. Folks can group the symbols by typing the names, separated by a space.” Four names appeared on the TS-80’s tiny screen as he typed. He pressed Return, and the names disappeared. The flashing cursor waited for him to type more names. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me.

  I swiveled the second chair around and sat next to him. I appreciated that he consistently included me in the process. He had done so from the day he’d come home the year before. But I hadn’t been able to provide much help. In fact, there were times I had thought Peter was delusional. He claimed to have found something strange in the wilderness, something guarded by an ancient aboriginal tribe. It sounded like a story from an old Tarzan novel. At one point he had even implied that the object had come from a distant alien civilization. But after I had laughed at this, he stopped mentioning the possibility. Yet he swore the thing he’d found was some kind of computer, and that it had communicated with him using 128 symbols. He even remembered every one of the symbols. He had spent months trying to develop some kind of software application that would teach people to communicate with the mysterious computer, or whatever it was. He was convinced the object would eventually be discovered again, and his software would then become useful.

  I plucked the pad of paper from his lap and flipped through the pages. “You’ve given them people’s names. You expect folks to remember these? Why not just give them each a number?”

  He shook his head. “I’m thinking ahead. When I was there with it, the process began with me sorting the symbols into groups based on their shapes or features. And you’re right—that part would be easier if we just used numbers to designate them. But then later it guided me on to sorting tasks that resulted in assigning numeric values to the symbols. It would confuse folks if the symbols already had numerical names.”

  “God forbid we confuse folks.”

  Peter chuckled. Because he loved me, not because he actually thought it was funny. This endeavor had become his new obsession, and it’s not easy to laugh at your own obsessions. Peter was convinced the object he’d found was important. Not I-discovered-a-new-species-of-butterfly important. More like, I-discovered-a-medical-miracle-that-will-make-doctors-obsolete important. But I had my doubts, even though I had seen Peter’s body, somehow stripped of its imperfections.

  I dropped the pad of paper onto the desk. “Okay, I’m up now, so no more work for you. Today’s a special day, and we’re celebrating.”

  Peter sighed. Then he smiled and slapped his knee. “Right you are, Mrs. Wooley! That’s precisely why we are going out.”

  “Peter, I was going to—”

  “Oh, but you’re not. I have already stuffed a pack with tucker, and we are going to sit and enjoy it from atop Lumley Hill. We’re going for a picnic, sweet Rose.”

  This was how Peter was. He knew I adored Lumley Hill, and he knew I fancied prawn salad and fritters, which he had secretly made while I was at the shop the previous day.

  So we drove to Flecker Botanical Gardens, climbed the Red Arrow track then the Blue Arrow track into Mount Whitfield Park, and then we climbed the side trail to the top of Lumley Hill. This was a combined trek of over two hours, and in 1978 the trails were crude at best. We sat in the shade of a mango tree as we ate. The air was clear and we could see the turquoise water of the reef around Green Island, nearly thirty kilometers out in the Coral Sea. Peter pulled a bottle of wine from his pack, and I sniggered when he realized he’d forgotten the corkscrew.

  Peter talked endlessly. He said the mango tree was there at the top of the hill because a cassowary had carried the seed in its gut until it shat it out. The giant birds were still common on Mount Whitfield and Lumley Hill, which was one reason I loved the place. Peter then did an impersonation of a cassowary shitting a mango seed, making me laugh. I listened to him talk and told a few stories of my own.

  Late in the afternoon the sun cast a spellbinding hue over the Coral Sea. Peter wandered off to relieve himself somewhere in the trees. When he returned he sat beside me and held his cupped hands out. Resting in them was a long but delicate feather that sparkled with indigo iridescence in the sun’s light.

  “You found a cassowary feather!” I said.

  “It’s a surprise for you, sweet Rose.”

  I plucked the feather from his hands. Something that had been hidden beneath it caught my eye. “Peter!”

  “That’s the rest of your surprise,” he said. He grabbed the object by two fingers and offered it to me. “I figured it was time I got you a proper wedding ring.”

  I slid the ring onto my finger and gazed at it. It was a gold band with a single diamond, large enough to catch the eye but small enough to be tasteful and practical. It was the first time in my life I had worn a wedding ring. We hadn’t exchanged rings when we had married twelve years before, thinking at the time it was a frivolous tradition and a waste of money.

  “It’s lovely,” I said. “Now I’ll have to find one for you.”

  He wrapped his arm around me and gazed out toward Green Island. “No worries, love. Plenty of time for that.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder and stared at the horizon, where blue sky blended with the emerald water and white breakers of the Great Barrier Reef. Two gulls flew side-by-side over the mouth of the Barron River, squawking as if they were bickering with each other. But then they parted ways, and one of them flew north while the other flew south.

  I was forty-two, and at that time it was the best day of my life. A year before, when Peter had come home, we were both forty-one. I didn’t know it, but on that day on Lumley Hill a year later, Peter was still forty-one.

  Yonks Day – Year 13 – 1990

  Every relationship has its challenges. Typically they are you’re-spending-too-much-money-at-the-pub kinds of challenges. At the risk of being dramatic, the challenges we faced were unique. They were for-years-I-doubted-you-and-thought-you-might-be-cracked challenges. And you-weren’t-cracked-after-all-but-the-truth-scares-me-even-more challenges. I have come to realize that my psychological scale tips gradually. Although I rarely talked to Peter about what had happened to him in New Guinea for fear of what he might say, there were certain unavoidable observations that incrementally tipped my scale from believing Peter might be delusional to believing I might be intolerant and small minded for having doubted him. Perhaps some people might argue that if the evidence is before your eyes, you must succumb to it. But I’m pretty sure those people have not faced evidence of what they had previously thought to be impossible. Miracles may sound good in stories, but they are hard to swallow in real life. For me, the tipping of this scale took many years.

  And there was the little issue of the promise. Peter had made it the day he’d come home, the day my bags were packed. I was going to move out, so I suppose he would have promised anything. He had promised he would never leave me again and that we would grow old together.

  By our thirteenth Yonks Day, we both knew he could keep only half of the promise.

  On this day, as on every other Yonks Day, Peter was up before me. He had fallen into a pattern of dwelling excessively on his Kembalimo project in the days leading up to Yonks Day. As Peter described it, Kembalimo was a word used by the aboriginal tribe he had stayed with before coming home. It meant, to return. He insisted that the project’s name was symbolic of the archite
cture of the computer program he was creating and did not reveal a secret desire to return to the tribe. He endeavored to recreate the functions of the object he had found in the wilderness—the computer or whatever it was. If he could figure out how, his creation might help prepare others for when the object would be found again. And all his efforts were contingent upon his memory of this thing he had seen only a few times during only a few days thirteen years past. But apparently this wasn’t a problem, because his memory was just one more thing about him that had somehow become perfect while he was in the wilderness of New Guinea.

  Many times over, he had shown me indisputable evidence of his perfect memory, but still my scale tipped at a glacial pace.

  After getting out of bed I pulled on some clothes and gazed at my aging face in the mirror. I straightened my back and held my chin up, feigning courage. Today would be a Yonks Day like no other, because I was tired of hiding from the truth. Whatever that truth may be. Too many years had been spent not discussing what should have been discussed.

  I took a deep breath and went straight to Peter’s office. All four of his computers were on, but he was huddled before his new Macintosh IIfx. I could hear the chuckity-chuck of its hard drive as it worked. Peter liked to say the IIfx was “wicked fast.” The damn thing had cost more than I made at Sylvia’s shop in five months.

  He didn’t turn around when I walked in, so I sighed loudly.

  “I know you’re there,” he said. “And I’m fine. I’ve had ample rest.”

  I sat down next to him. When he finally turned to me, I said, “Happy Yonks Day.”

  His eyes grew wide. Pretending he’d forgotten. “Uh…was that today?”

  I slapped his shoulder. “Funny. I know you bought prawns, and I smell the fritters.” I nodded at the Macintosh. “You going to be able to leave this behind?”