Army of the Brave and Accidental

by Alex Boyd

  My father died the following year and I’ve always felt his loss. Maybe I only thought of him because I happened to turn my head the same way I did when I looked at the whales. Maybe enough whale-sized objects had sailed around us that it helped me think of that day. Maybe I caught a glimpse of him, distantly busy among the images. But my feelings welled up in me and a spontaneous moment arrived. I trusted my instincts and turned away from my friends toward the image of my father. It was all that was required to lose them in the chaos and I glanced back to see them carry on. I wasn’t sure I would see them again, but in any case, something in me was concluded—a quiet pain and a need to search was turned off like a tap.

  19: Oliver

  The madness and confusion came to a sudden end. I saw Catherine again, standing on the grounds of her home before a confused look crossed my face. I collapsed to my knees and unconsciousness took me in its cloak. For a day, I was not aware everyone else had collapsed all around me, nor was I certain we’d lost Ferah. We sat around the comfort of the kitchen table drinking tea beneath the gaze of Catherine’s calm green eyes. I had only two friends remaining: Maddy and Aldman. Catherine asked if any of us saw how we’d lost our friend, and Maddy said, “I saw her body turn away from us.” There was a pause and it was left to each of us to try to determine why.

  “And how did we find ourselves back here?” I asked, but I already sensed the answer. Aldman shifted in his seat and said that with the amount of chaos introduced, “All bets are off, as you say in North America.” We decided the last fall through time had been so hectic that exiting it, we’d somehow snapped back to our starting point. Quietly, Catherine closed her eyes and lowered her head a little, her long red hair falling forward to frame her face. It took me a moment to notice, and then I asked her if she was all right. She didn’t move but after a long moment lifted her head and I saw it was someone else. I don’t mean she had a different face, but it was clear someone else occupied it. There was a new, cautious look behind the eyes and it was as though all the muscles in her face were held differently. She opened her mouth to speak and I knew it to be Athena. “Good to see you, Oliver,” she said.

  I sat astonished. She seemed awkward, learning a new mouth and stopping to run her tongue along the teeth. A smile spread across her face, slow as a cloud, but as it faded it became clear she had something important to tell me. “Oliver, you’ve offended a powerful man,” she began.

  I learned it was someone she called Dr. Waters who caused the disruption we experienced, and that it was his son we injured. The chaos was meant to destroy us and he knew it had failed. As far as she could tell, his new plan was to engineer a specific situation, something outside our reality, involving creatures called Sirens. She didn’t know what they would look like or sound like but they’d be designed to draw us away from each other. Alone, there was a stronger possibility we could be killed or thrown somewhere inhospitable.

  Athena thought our next fall back would be rushed to us more quickly than we expected but that we could at least prepare for it, securing ourselves in some way before we fell and blocking the sound from our ears. I said that I wanted to hear these creatures and a new smile crossed her face. “Ever-curious Oliver,” she said, adding that the others must be able to hold me back if I’m not immune. Then she closed her eyes, lowered her head and returned Catherine to herself.

  We took the time to enjoy a meal with Catherine and try to calm our nerves. I was quiet through the meal and told my remaining friends I was sorry for having dragged them into this. They were gracious about it, saying it had been a wild experience. Catherine didn’t seem to remember or believe Athena had spoken through her body and shook her head at the idea.

  Catherine worked with us. She had no earplugs but expected they would not be sufficient anyway. Her staff arranged for soft, melted wax to be available for us to put in our ears. I refused the wax but sat in the middle of a row of chairs tightly secured to each other by white sheets torn from the beds upstairs. I was bound to my chair with Maddy and Aldman on either side of me. The idea was that we’d move safely through this new challenge together and if I demanded to be released and struggled, my friends were to secure me. We sat and waited.

  Waters was not patient. When the first signs we’d fall back arrived, it felt like people brushing by us in all directions though we could see no one. We were sailing together through a valley with cliff walls on both sides though they looked false and constructed in subtle ways, as though the appearance was correct but not all the details were available—a painting half-finished. We had little time to concentrate on the landscape because our attention was caught by two figures on ridges that jutted out from different sides of the valley. One was a black-and-white image of a man in dark suit pants and a dress jacket, like a picture torn from a magazine. On the other side, a woman flared in various colours, complete with an umbrella that blurred more colour into the air behind her. I could see all of us were looking back and forth between them. They were pleasant-looking and I instinctively opened my senses to them. When their mouths opened it was to let out an unbearable noise: the sound of hornets, the wail of alarms, the steady beat of music announcing news.

  I writhed in my chair. It was horrific and compelling: I wanted more even as I wanted to tear loose and dive from the chair into the vague mist of events below, just to get away from it. I didn’t care that it meant losing my friends, as long as I was away from the overwhelming hold it had on me. Following instructions, the good and reliable Maddy and Aldman worked swiftly to secure me further to my seat. We made our way through the valley this way, with me struggling at the centre like the heart of a wounded bird.

  20: Oliver

  The sudden brightness was like a swath of orange daggers. I covered my face with my arm. As my eyes began to adjust, I saw that we rose and spun as a group. My mind reeled at the idea we were floating in an orbit much closer to the sun. Waters had placed a trap within a trap, and though most of the heat and light was somehow displaced, it was enough that our poorly constructed carriage of chairs was torn apart, small flames appearing on the wood to briefly dance and flicker out, vile and unwelcome.

  Once broken apart, my friends and I fell from each other like groping, failing swimmers. I watched them recede into the distance. The sun was like a living thing, a god. Incredible tendrils of flame that would dwarf the Earth erupted from the surface and sailed upwards. Closer to us, I watched a smaller one envelop Aldman and then Maddy. I writhed in an attempt to turn away from the scene and saw other solar flares rearing from the surface. I fell unconscious and dreamed of Waters facing my friends one at a time and lifting his hands to open small rivers of time that surrounded them, changing them and taking them from me.

  Reluctantly, I gathered myself into consciousness, aware of a chirping bird and muted sunlight lying across my face, a mask of warmth. I was on my back across the grass and there were teeth coming out of the ground. I was in a mouth. No, there were tombstones on both sides of me. An ache along my entire body made me long to retreat into unconsciousness but I slowly lifted a hand to shield my eyes. Pulling myself to my feet, I caught a glimpse of a woman as she moved between two larger headstones nearby. As I approached, she lifted a camera from around her neck and took a picture that included the top of a small statue, the clouds above and the reaching branches of a tree.

  “Hello,” I said, having waited a few seconds for her to finish. It didn’t interest me to startle her. She looked at me, paused and replied, “You’re very calm for a man who looks like hell.” I looked down at myself. My hands were pale, paper cutouts. Corners and edges of my clothing had burned off, but the fire had been suffocated when I fell to this place. There was no way to know if it was a lucky accident or if Waters wanted me to carry on without my friends, but the realization they were gone struck me. I put out a hand to a nearby tombstone to steady myself. I looked at an inscription in cold grey along the side of it—We can all be changed in a
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump—and then pitched over into unconsciousness.

  I woke in the little cloud of a hospital bed, tucked into white sheets. To my surprise, the woman was there, sitting in an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair. She smiled a little and said, “You’re looking better than you did, though I’m afraid that isn’t saying a great deal.” She was a petite woman, alert and confident. Even sitting in a chair she seemed capable of instant movement as she looked at me. Her short black hair was perfectly in place, neatly framing her face. I couldn’t think of anything to say except to ask her name and she gave it: “Calandra.” And then I thought to ask her the year, and though she raised an eyebrow she calmly informed me it was the year 2000.

  There isn’t an easy way to explain why she let me stay in her spare room while I’d recovered a little. Maybe I seemed convincing when I said I had no one. Maybe my most useful skill in life has always been keeping awkwardness to a minimum. She worked a lot as a nurse but on her days off we explored the city, which was a city with a good personality. Glasgow was elusive. It asked you to live there and discover what it offered. I was pleased with the red double-decker buses, black British cabs and everybody driving on the wrong side of the road. A woman had the longest red hair that I’d ever seen. It moved like water in the air.

  The St. Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art presented facts, beliefs and rituals from all the world’s major religions, drawing the occasional parallel between them. It would prevent hatred if everyone in the world were to file through the place. I wrote down the description of the Christian faith because I thought it was the most pleasing way I’ve ever seen it written: By remembering and reliving Jesus’ experiences, believers are reminded of their spiritual debt to God and their responsibilities toward fellow human beings.

  Nearby Glasgow Cathedral dates back to the thirteenth century, complete with oak doors and leaden bullet holes. Behind, in a Victorian cemetery, a statue of Protestant reformer John Knox overlooks the city. Already my old life had started to feel like a recurring dream I’d known and I felt I could stay here. I gradually became aware that I didn’t feel the slightest sensation I’d be falling back anytime soon, as though the ability to do it had been stripped from me like a cloak. I had no idea it was something I could possibly miss.

  21: Calandra

  Oliver intrigued me, and felt right. He fit smoothly into the foreground like a final puzzle piece, something I didn’t know I’d been missing. The idea of love at first sight should be replaced with the idea of perfect placement. It was a time of transition for me. A man named Michael had been my focus for about a year, but recently we’d been in a car accident and everything was derailed, literally and figuratively. I was fine but he was hospitalized for contusions and strangely, two broken wrists. As I happened to work as a nurse, I looked in on him often, but I was frequently tired and closely supervised by people who didn’t want me to give him any preferential treatment. After he was released, he said he’d had plenty of time to think. He said we’d failed somehow, that we’d grown apart, and that I had been “clinical.” Someone who ruins a dream always leaves you with a word like a pin for a balloon.

  When your car is struck by another car, everything flies in the air like you’re in space. Michael was discharged and asked for exactly that—he asked for space. I let him go. The place two people make together should not be a citadel. It’s funny, when two people have a tender first moment on the street, a first kiss, the other people passing them know it can lead to so much potential for misery: days of crying, someone moving out, photos coming down off the walls. The people passing would only need to blurt something out to ruin the moment, but no one does.

  Oliver became the man who would leave the hospital and walk into my arms, exactly as Michael should have done. Leaving the hospital, Oliver stood at the top of the steps outside where he looked around and almost seemed to smell the air. It was somewhat infectious the way he treated the air like the sea, as though it could carry you. We drifted around Glasgow for a few days while I took a leave of absence from work and packed my things. It was a three-hour bus ride to Oban with a young couple in front of us, occasionally kissing as though there were no one else in the world. Across from them on the other side of the aisle sat an old couple, calmly affectionate.

  Oliver seemed hesitant to touch me. The old couple got off the bus early and the woman turned and waved to the driver. Oban was beautiful and built C-shaped around a small harbour. I always relax in a place that doesn’t feel compelled to build higher than a few storeys. We found a hostel painted in bright colours run by a pleasant older man named Jeremy who made a variety of jams for the kitchen, and Oliver asked for two rooms. It shouldn’t have surprised me, and yet it did.

  We walked the streets of Oban where a wedding party in kilts lined up for a bank machine and seagulls perched around the bay as though they ran the city before they finally dropped off and sailed away. From his window at night I stood with him to watch young Scottish men sing drunken songs as they passed along the street, and I said good night with the feeling we were growing closer. He kept eye contact with me longer and placed a hand on mine as we stood smiling slightly at brave, foolish youth.

  Oban also has McCaig’s Tower up on the hill: built at the end of the nineteenth century, it was intended to be an art gallery but someone ran out of money and the incomplete structure looks like a broken colosseum. Packages of Walkers Crisps were running an advertising campaign that sort of baffled Oliver: Win free books for your school! It wasn’t so much that it was a bad idea; he simply said, “I can’t imagine a North American product aiming such a campaign at kids.” We quietly laughed at an actual item in an Oban convenience store called Inflatable Bonking Sheep (adults only). A small box covered in dust touted a photo of inflatable, excited sheep, an X for each eye, and the tag line, “It will bring out the beast in you.”

  And then something struck Oliver—perhaps it was his weakened condition—but a cold and fever combination had me returning to his room to check on him and nap lightly beside him, waking once to find his arm over me. We stayed seven nights in Oban, at least partly because of his illness. Weak and slow, he walked with me to the pharmacist to describe his symptoms and the pharmacist smiled and shook his head because he’d recently endured the same thing. Leaving the store, Oliver said, “I admire the kind of people who can smile at little adversities.”

  Nearby Kerrera was an island with very little on it, but a serious and quiet young local took us and a few others across in a small ferry. All you can do there is walk around or speak to the few locals, but it’s a lovely island and we picnicked economically on bread and cheese. Of the many sheep, the adorable younger ones run away and look back, while the completely unimpressed older ones carry on eating. When a fighter jet cracked open the sky above us, Oliver flinched a little. Jeremy later told us they practise around the lochs and islands. I told Oliver, “I’m glad to see you feeling well,” as he was lying back on the grass to gaze at the sky. He abruptly sat up to share a long kiss with me.

  There are several castles near Oban. We trudged up a steep hill on a hot day to decaying Dunollie with warning signs posted everywhere saying you enter at your own risk. Not a soul there, just the sun burning down on the remains of history. We peed and left. Dunstaffnage Castle nearby had a story to tell—Alexander MacDougall was “foolish” to side with English King Edward the first during the Scottish wars for independence and had his castle just bloody well taken from him by Robert the Bruce in 1309. Imagine: seven hundred years after you die there’s a sign posted declaring your foolishness. I looked through stone arrow slits and imagined the attack. The chapel out behind was a pleasant surprise—I expected it to be far less interesting than the castle, but the woods behind were amazingly peaceful: cool and dark, like being underwater with just the occasional pattern of sun on the wood and green mould, the soft bed of dirt and moss. A great fallen tree looked like the v
isual echo of a woolly mammoth with broken tusk branches.

  22: Oliver

  Mice are a living afterthought, like the echo after a symphony. In the darkness, after everything, they shoot across floors and down corridors, gone by the time light arrives again. I told Calandra I was tired of feeling like a mouse. My feelings for my family weren’t lost, but events had been like a series of subtle and persuasive servants breezing through my thoughts and ushering all remnants of them to the back rooms of my mind. They weren’t lost as much as displaced, just as my familiarity with an everyday world had been taken from me.

  We took the wide, white Caledonian MacBrayne ferry from Oban to Mull, then a jerky bus ride across Mull. It was uneventful though Calandra pointed out the immense cloud shadow on the mountain. Then, to a tiny outboard motorboat that takes tourists to Staffa, an island that looks like a layered cake. It has simple grassy hills on top, but the sides of the island have been patiently carved by the sea into clean line shapes like a great musical organ. Fingal’s Cave is mentioned in a lot of geological textbooks and is famous for its basalt columns. Mendelssohn was inspired by it when he paid a visit in the summer of 1829. The boat ride was so choppy that we were uncomfortable by the time we got there. Pale and trembling, we reached our final stop of the day: Iona.

  A beefy tourist about my own age smiled each time a salty wave hit me until I began glaring at him. When we finally arrived at Iona, we watched him march up the beach with his girlfriend then along the only street while we slowly made our way to the visitor centre to sit and recover over a bowl of soup. Iona has been a centre of religious worship for centuries. Nobody lives on Staffa, but Iona has a road leading from the dock and curving down the length of the island. Calandra loved the multicoloured bricks that were the remains of the nunnery. The larger abbey is still in use, and the small local bookshop had books by residents. Waiting for the Caledonian MacBrayne to take us back to the mainland, we stood on the white sand and watched small streams of water sweep over themselves and fingerpaint in the sand, the darker spots of seaweed showing through the clear green water.