by Roy Freirich
No bars, only the battery indicator at four percent. But does powering it up and down use more than low battery mode? Or leave it on, but turn cellular off and on with airplane mode?
−−−
Hours in the white dazzle of endless water. Joints throbbing, tongue swollen across cracked lips.
Against the stabbing of that light, he would move his hand to shield his eyes, but there is strength enough only to test the mainsheet for a breeze and find nothing as the sail sags in so much heat and stillness. And then to lie back again against the stern gunwale, where the outboard has died, out of gas, from where their last sight of land faded so long ago.
The Boy barely blinks, hunched against the cockpit bench in the patch of shade Sam has made with his shirt hung from the barely swaying boom.
Without measure, time is lived too long and hard, only guessed at by the blaze of day and the trail of spume passing on a ghost current to nowhere.
−−−
Fever dream of agony, the unthinkable choice: turn the cell on and risk the last of the battery but find no network, when later they might find one? But how else to know if they’ve already crossed some invisible line, a threshold of data on a wavelength? Even here, in sight of nothing, it must be possible, because when Sam succumbs and flicks it on, suddenly a service bar flickers darkly, hesitantly upward, and then a second. Sam lifts the little phone to arm’s length, peering through the blur of salt-crusted lashes, a sound between a sob and a laugh as the tiny black arcs appear.
Full bars, connected!
He yanks the little phone back to thumb at it, “0” and “send.” He murmurs prayerfully, “please, please,” a croaking not his own, but some dying, desperate foolish man’s.
“Operator.” A voice crackles through, brusque, officious.
“Operator? Thank God, this is a ship-to-shore mayday.” His throat is clogged, swollen raw. He coughs, a loose rattle. “Sam Carlson, calling from a daysailer, drifting, probably ten or twelve miles south-southeast from Carratuck Island. Hello?” He stands and limps toward the bow, into clearer air, perhaps.
“Sir? I have that. Ten to twelve miles south-southeast of Carratuck—”
“We’re becalmed, out of gas. Got a boy here needs medical attention.” Say anything, anything can be legitimately said.
“Is he conscious? What’s—”
“Barely. We need help.”
“I have that and will relay that. Do you want to hold while I contact Coast Guard?”
A laugh rises in him, an unstoppable, manic blurting of noise. “Sure. Okay, yes.”
A burst of static intrudes, a loud gush of it, but the operator’s voice surges through again: “Say again? Did not copy.”
Sam shouts it now: “Okay, yes!”
“Got it. Sorry, static on this end.” Another burst of it. The word again, “static.”
He glances back behind him, and again. Why is the Boy somehow suddenly standing at the stern? Why is he staring into the water, the glassy flickering there? Where is his life vest?
Sam’s hand floats up as his other drifts away from his mouth, and he looks to see the life vest lying there in the cockpit. Carefully now, he sets the cell gently down to approach the Boy with both hands spread as if their emptiness is an argument to persuade.
“Hey, Admiral. What’s up?”
The Boy glances at Sam, but then turns back to the water.
How, to have come so far, to lose him now? “We’ve had some days, huh? You and me?” The honest desperation of it, the helpless truth: please, let this Boy hear it.
Breathe. Go on, step closer.
“You’re not afraid of much, are you?”
The Boy looks at him now, pleading, shaking his head no.
Here, always, searching out a way toward, a way in, to some solid purchase with which to pull the deathward, helpless children back again. “Your mom was brave too. But she got tired. It wasn’t your fault. You’re not in any trouble here. She—”
Turned away to face the water again, the side of the Boy’s face quivers.
“Hey, wait . . . just—”
The Boy steps from the gunwale, plunging straight downward like a dropped stone, vanishing with a small thick splash into water so sluggish it seems oily.
Where, what? Something to throw first, before himself, for them both—there! A stained cockpit cushion, looped loose handles he grabs to fling hard and fast, an arcless path to splash down a dozen yards out, drops like rainbows spattering.
The sky and the boat’s bright hull sideways as he dives.
Sounds gone in a sudden violent coolness, returning in a rush: his own pulse hammering, basso echoing thrum, faster with panic as he turns, eyes wide against the sting and in the dimness searching through shafts of sunlight from above. His hand hovers, nearly reaching out, but for what? The moment held like a drowning man’s last breath.
He kicks away and sweeps an arm sideways to spin himself to find the Boy there, floating as if in space, hair like slow living tendrils, eyes closed, skin blue-white.
With a frantic push, Sam grabs the Boy and yanks him upward.
They burst into air, gasping, the Boy coughing and sobbing, “I couldn’t . . . she . . .”
Sam holds him, reaching out for the dirty floating cushion. “Shhh, it’s okay . . .”
“ . . .she got pulled out in the griptide! She shouted! I ran in but then she yelled no! She yelled no . . . so I didn’t . . . I didn’t!”
The cushion his now, Sam brings it quickly beneath the Boy as pain expands in his helpless heart.
“You couldn’t. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“She said, no, to wait! But—” The Boy’s eyes find Sam’s, his voice a thin rasp, pleading, ashamed. “So I did, I waited, but then she yelled, she yelled help, she did, please help but I couldn’t because—”
Sam lunges to reach out roughly for the Boy, to put a shoulder between him and so much pitiless sky, blurred by his last choked whisper: “I was afraid.”
The Boy breaks down, finally, in his arms, shoulders hitching, his face crumpled around a wail that rises into the sodden air, harsh and echoless.
Sam pulls him in as if to shield him, if only he could, murmuring mindlessly, “Okay, okay.” We cling, against everything.
Finally, his eyes scan the yards of flat, unending horizon to find the boat, not far, the mainsail loose and lines hanging limp.
Tiny cat’s paws ripple the surface around it, and the mainsail fills just enough for the boom to creak like a haunted house’s door opening.
Well, but maybe the mainsheet has caught a little on something, a kink in a block, or a block fouled with salt or a burr of corrosion. The mainsail fills a little more now and ghosts the boat just another slow yard or two away.
From the cockpit Sam can hear the voice of the operator leaking from the dropped cell: “Sir? Hello?”
The first fear is little more than a glimmer, all he allows himself before he shakes it off with a bemused chuckle as he turns to the Boy. “Can you hold on real tight? Can you? I’m coming right back.”
The Boy nods, too weak for words, too stunned and numbed by grief.
Sam kicks away, hard, cupped hands flinging water, drops scattered with glimpses of glaring sky, water in his eyes and mouth. Swimming, he smooths his stroke to cut through more cleanly until his lungs burst with burning and he slows to lift his head to see how far, how very far.
The boat no nearer. Farther. The yellowed sail a loose belly of air.
He stops, just treading water now, gasping at so much precious effort for nothing.
The little boat moves so slowly but unstoppably away as he suddenly understands everything. He shakes his head with a faint, sick smile of disbelief.
But no, of course, he needs only to understand instead that they will trace the cell signal a
nd then the current and wind direction right back to them. Coast Guard helicopters with infrared heat signature technology, search and rescue vessels. Not long.
He swims back to the Boy, peels his soaked shorts, shreds them once and again with his teeth, and ties the boy onto the cushion with it, knotting it with half-hitches.
He looks again back to the boat: farther now, smaller.
2
Vastness, sparkling. Faces seem to float in the glare, edged in light, spectral. Gabriel, gone. Kathy, alive, laughing.
Treading water for too many years in each spinning moment.
The Boy who barely shook his head when Sam asked his name, beyond exhaustion now. Bleeding from a lip cracked by dryness. Sun dappling from water into motionless eyes.
The light shifts, brightening. Heat deepening. Failing of limbs that continue anyway, pushing at the water to keep his nose and mouth above. All there is to measure these hours in the endless tormenting day.
Once he reached to keep from sinking, clinging to the Boy’s cushion for just the blessed sweet second of it, and then he let go to tread again.
A new sting of salt in one eye. Wiping it away, making it worse. Blinking blindly, the edges of light blurring. The fire in his lungs from gasping as fear grips his chest. The fear that fear will exhaust him, muscle failure from the tensing, heart racing beyond its rhythm.
Easy, calm now. Nothing but waiting. Smallest motions to float. Easy, so very calm.
−−−
The bonds are still fast and tight on the buoyant cushion and around the Boy’s thin back and chest, hollow and bony through his soaked tee.
A lapping of warm saltwater fills Sam’s nose and he coughs, the pain in his arms of ceaseless use a shearing beneath the skin. He reaches to cling to the cushion again, to rest for only a briefest moment, but it bobs lower and the water sloshes up into the Boy’s face, and Sam pulls his hand back and coughs again with a weak gasping shudder.
No thinking, no choices, just shutting the mind to all else but the moment arrived with its simple undeniable truth. “Well, it seems like . . . two’s a crowd. But they’ll find you. They’ll . . . find the boat and track the current and the wind back to you. Just hang on tight. I promise, they’re coming.”
The Boy only stares dimly, lost in the hours of dehydration, the insensate daze of dying.
“You can’t save everyone.” Sam touches his shoulder, gives his weary smile. “See you in my dreams, Admiral.”
Sam treads water and lets the Boy drift on.
−−−
Is it hours? The steadfast glare of the sun, the sound of it like static now. The small darkness of the Boy’s head lost in the fire of the horizon.
He thinks of Gabriel, backing away out his door, turning, fleeing. His unappeasable fear of the dreamtime coming through a hole in the world, of the malignant blooming of the seed of a notion.
Click your heels together. Wish upon a star. The innocent adage of empowerment: believe and it will happen. Was there ever a more truly horrifying idea?
The longing comes now like a hollowness for something to blame instead of each other: bird flu, Lyme’s disease. Subsonics from shifting ocean currents. The blue color temperature of the new lights along the lanes. Hashtags, destroyers of truth and lies, of despots and democracies. Or the very screens we live by, the billions of synapses of our brains finally become like the binary bits of all we listened to and looked at, on/off, awake or dead, no in between.
The small, choked sounds he hears are only his own weak, weary laughter, because what was that, any of that? Every thought the thought of someone sleepless, every Sleepless made so by another, spreading each to each as sure and simply as belief, as laughter or fear.
He blinks again from the sting of salt, and in that brief unseeing conjures the ferry’s stern growing smaller across the bay, fading into sunlit haze. How many brought sleeplessness home, a souvenir from their summer idyll? Would it spread in the larger world or dissipate with time and distance? Will it end, only to happen again, somewhere else, and be misnamed or forgotten?
Only children believe in answers to everything, and here is childhood’s end.
But not the Boy’s, please, please, if only a prayer can rise high enough, whispered as it is, weak, ragged, the single word again and again, faint from bleeding lips.
−−−
Some echo of Sam’s voice, or the memory or a dream of it, nearly turns Kathy’s head as if to look behind her, but there is only the Coffee Spot’s warm hard door she leans against, sitting in that doorway waiting for her life to begin again.
She remembers another door, ajar, from her childhood bedroom to the hallway, that welcoming rectangle of soft light, and she imagines for a moment that nothing can harm her as long as that light shines, and that no fear and no regret can ever reach her.
She knows it to be true: Sam and the Boy are safely away from the howling vengeful creatures so desperate to blame, well on their way off the island to some other shore. And in her waking dream, she dreams she, too, will find her way home again.
−−−
The salt stinging Sam’s burned skin and blinding his swollen eyes makes him wince and flinch in smaller motions as he tries to lie floating with his face to the empty sky.
Where there has been only the rasp of his breathing and the slosh and splash of his fingers just breaking the surface, like tiny fish as his hands waver and float, another sound reaches Sam now—like the truest reason to submit, finally, to all that has been weighing so long, the unendurable sun, the inescapable water.
The distant thwok thwok thwok of a helicopter.
Hovering at the edge of everything, lower, lower, the black angelic machine bringing mercy.
The ocean rises around him, even as it pulls him downward.
A cough, and his arms push helplessly for purchase where there is none. His mouth, filled as if drinking, as if breathing in air, but there is none. A stab and spasm of pain in his chest. The shuddering clutch of terror but then the pain is further, fainter. Fainter, until it’s gone.
Why struggle? The world is right without him now. We let go, as we must, in these last living seconds of volition. Smiling with tears of awe and gratitude up at the sky, through the blur and coolness of the water closing over it.
The last faces returning behind his eyes, a lovely woman’s, a rescued boy’s.
Falling slowly in his cathedral of light and silence.
−−−
Up, up in the rescue basket, from the circle of blown spray, the Boy ascends. Eyes unblinking, focused so very far away, far from the roar of the massive blades of the search helicopter beating at the air.
Thwok thwok thwok.
The soundless shouting of his rescuers.
The water below, shining away beyond him, finally.
#day_nine
1
Shuffling in circles to the foggy beach and back again and again for hours that wouldn’t stop, so no one did: Mom and Tay and his parents, the waitress, the fisherman and the beach taxi driver and the police chief’s wife, the slumped staggering tourists with unclosing eyes turning milky like the eyes of the blind.
The man who saw his old dog alive again enough to lick his hand and whimper and disappear into the dunes. The woman whose husband woke up from a coma, and they laughed together for a little while. Another man driven mad by music. Another woman who saw the boys who chased her when she was little, exactly the same. The other men whose fear made them blame and murder. Everyone living what they used to dream of.
These are the stories.
And these: Roscoe’s supermarket trashed and looted of candles and cans, shopping carts half-buried in the dunes like skeletons in the desert. Beach house doors creaking in the warm wind smelling like low tide, seagulls’ cries that go up at the end like questions. Sand windblown smooth around the base
of the boardwalk posts and the empty high lifeguard chairs, a page of newspaper flapping along like a dying bird.
But then, there was a shout from down the beach and another woman stood and lifted a shaking hand to point out to sea and it was okay, a light glimmered in the shifting whiteness of the fog, red and then green, the outline of a boat, and another, with flashing blue lights, bobbing. People were onboard, in uniforms!
Another shout, and down the beach more shapes of people came, in uniforms too, in a group they came together, but their voices were kind as they turned this way and that to look around at everything and even stop to speak quietly and hand a blanket and bottle of water to someone else just speechlessly staring. We were all silently staring, hoping that maybe somehow they bring the end of all the bright noise.
2
They kept the islanders separate while they searched for a virus or poison, but found none, and quarantined us on the mainland in an empty middle school they turned into a dorm, with lumpy cots and cafeteria food.
They never told us what was wrong with us and kept us carefully from anything that could give us information: no cell phones, or computers, or TV. They walked among us calmly and smiled reassuringly, and the sleep they gave us was hard, deep and dreamless—until the evening they took the wrapped bandages from our wrists—mine, Tay’s, everyone’s. They slipped the needles out of our veins and wheeled away the metal poles and tubes and hanging medicine bags, telling us that they would be near, they would leave a small light on and the door open just so, that we had to learn to do it on our own.