The Pacific and Other Stories

by Mark Helprin

  “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? And if you did know, what would you call this primal force?”

  “I have no idea. Perhaps theta.”

  “But in the face of this mystery, are you not open to the possibility of other mysteries, of connections between the unfathomable and the ineffable, that are beyond your power of explication, now or ever?”

  Voolsamdrek laughed, and shook his head in disgust.

  “What does it have to do with the telephone?” the simpleton asked.

  “Nothing,” said Jacob Bayer. “Nothing at all.” He sat down.

  “A luftmensch,” Haskell Samoa declared, “does not know how not to waste his life in irresolvable disputes. I began that way myself, and soon turned to simpler things, the progress and development of which one can follow without undue confusion. That is hardly reprehensible, and that is why the telephone, certainly not the locus of God, if there is a God, is so wonderful.

  “It will bring peace and assure prosperity. In an era of instant communication, no longer will countries go to war. It cannot but revolutionize all our affairs for the better, as we have begun to witness. The citizens of Koidanyev are not philosophers or theologians. They have not chosen to go on the road, like you, to chase dreams. They simply want to live their lives in peace, and, because of the telephone, they look forward to this century, which will be the greatest century of mankind. We in Koidanyev do not wish to be left out. Is that a sin?”

  “Yes,” said Jacob Bayer, “it is a sin. Ceaseless, feverish, desperate activity for fear of not having what someone else has, is a sin. Pride in one’s creations is a sin. The conviction that one has mastered the elements of the universe, or soon will, is a sin. Why? They are sins because they are a turning away from what is true. Your span here is less than the brief flash of a spark, and if, after multiplying all you do by that infinitesimal fraction, you still do not understand the requirement of humility, your wishes and deeds will be monstrous, your affections corrupt, your love false.”

  “What does this have to do with the telephone?” the simpleton asked again, painfully.

  “The telephone,” said Jacob Bayer, “is a perfectly splendid little instrument, but by your unmetered, graceless enthusiasm you have made it a monument to vacuousness and neglect. Recall the passage: I, Kohelet, was King over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven. … I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.”

  Now came to Jacob Bayer, without his asking, the gift he had of seeing terrible things. He bowed his head, tears came to his eyes, and he said, in despair, “Koidanyev will be destroyed. The tall trees will be cut, the houses will burn, even the stones will be buried. And the souls that have chased the wind will be scattered by the wind.”

  In the long silence that ensued, Jacob Bayer’s vision slowly glided away from the silent onlookers, like a thunderstorm that has cracked and boomed overhead and then flees on cool winds, its flashes and concussions fading gently.

  “Nonsense!” cried Haskell Samoa, awakening the crowd and quickly turning them against the man that, a moment before, they might have followed. “The Napoleonic Wars have been over for a century. The nightmare you describe has left the world forever, banished by the light of reason. Man can control his destiny, and this light will grow stronger. What could happen? I do not doubt that before us lie the most glorious years in history, and, in contrast to their coming wonders, you are a specter of the darkness and a reminder of the dreadful past. The commission has decided that you must leave and never return. You may stay the night, but in the morning you must go.”

  “It won’t be the first time,” said Jacob Bayer.

  “Are all the towns and all the people in the towns wrong? Can that be? Is it only you who knows the truth?”

  “Rabbi,” said Jacob Bayer, “the truth sits over Koidanyev like the hot sun. It has nothing to do with me.”

  JACOB BAYER was the first person to leave the new Koidanyev with nothing. (Of course, in his estimation even nothing was inescapably something.) The guards went through his pockets because they did not believe that anyone who had spent even just a few days there would not have been enriched.

  “You are a piece of work,” they said, “to go to a place where even insects get rich, and come out with absolutely nothing. A young boy came here not long ago with an idea for a machine that would polish the insides of solid objects. Now he’s one of the wealthiest men in the world, and the machine hasn’t even been built yet. All you had to do was to put a kopeck in the general investment fund when you went in—at the bank nearest the bridge—and in a few days you would have had ten.”

  “Sorry,” said Jacob Bayer.

  “Just go away. If you’re too stupid to get rich in Koidanyev, don’t get near us.”

  When Jacob Bayer had gone about a verst he looked back upon the city from a hill over which the road disappeared to other places. To the north, upriver, the forests were thick with birds singing their morning songs. The flowing water into which their sweet notes fell rushed past Koidanyev, cold and clear, where it gathered up as well the sounds of telephones, by the thousand, ringing from one end of the town to the other. And in the blue-gray water the sounds of the birds and the sounds of the bells were mixed before they went together into oblivion.

  As Jacob Bayer looked over the countryside and back at the town, sound evaporated from the landscape like the standing water of a light rain. He wondered why suddenly he had been struck deaf, for he heard not even a hiss. How strange it all seemed without sound, as if he were looking back from the far distant future. He had no wish to revisit his vision of the town burning, choked in coils of black smoke, but he could not help but imagine all its great activity stilled, the rush of things having come to an end, the water without flow, and the wind dead in the trees.

  He knew that he had a long day before him, and he began his walk to the west. What had Koidanyev done with its children? He could not even imagine. He glanced back for the last time, and thought that before Koidanyev would stop still forever the telephone would triumph, as it had triumphed over him, and spread victoriously over the whole world. Probably, after the first flush of enthusiasm, people would no longer think it divine. But having thought so, they would have put a distance between them and all that was true, a distance that would perhaps be extended by the overwrought embrace of new enthusiasms as they arose, one by one, until the gap was so great that only God could see across it. And into this chasm God would let a million Jacob Bayers float down like sparkling dust on a dry wind.

  Sail Shining in White

  AT FIVE IN THE MORNING, the wind over Palm Island, off Cape Haze, took on a quality that could not fail to wake from his bed a man who twice had raced around the world, alone, in a sailboat. As always upon rising, he felt his loneliness more sharply than during the day, when both sunlight and the things that had to be done covered sorrow like the tide. He pulled on his tennis shorts, buttoned them, and went to the louvers to look out at the sea. The light over the waves early on a late August morning was a tangle of black and gunmetal blue, the whitecaps and foam a dirty gray that seemed to pulse as it appeared and disappeared in greater and lesser illumination, as if it were alive, beckoning, or sending a signal.

  As he would do at sea, he carefully smelled the air. This was not tame air trapped in the Gulf of Mexico and backed up against the west coast of Florida, the hardly moving air that, like the retirees, like him, was going nowhere and would never go anywhere again, having finally come to the last stop and hit the stunning wall where nothing lies ahead.

  This air said in less than a whisper that a storm was coming, the kind of storm that exists between the deserted coasts of Antarctica and Cape Horn, or thunders through the Bering Strait, or erupts off the sea-lanes in the empty Pacific and then spreads to overpower islands, the kind of storm that alters the sc
ales by which such things are measured.

  He knew before the satellites, the meteorologists, and the television announcers who for the next week would broadcast without knowing what was coming. As if by some magic, he knew of the storm at the instant of its birth in the Atlantic off the coast of Africa, when satellites could not yet see it. He knew because the air over the Gulf, the light, and the waves themselves, knew. Several times, in sailing around the world, once at his own pace and once while racing scores of other boats, he had sensed the coming of a great storm.

  The waves flatten, tighten, and darken. They reflect the changing light differently. Sharks have a similar intuition, sensing a kill hundreds of miles away. Perhaps it is electrical, or comes via a microscopic variation in the underlying sounds that travel from sea to sea with almost infinitely greater power than sounds in air. Whether by a process unknown or a hardly apprehensible variation in that which is understood, the message was clear as the waves drove in and the clouds unfurled at dawn.

  After making the bed and shaving, he did old-man exercises for half an hour on the cool tile floor, following them with ten minutes of exercises that put his heart at risk. Then, when his heart had not failed and he was flushed with the color of life, he had the kind of unsatisfying breakfast a devoted athlete might eat—a discipline from which, at eighty-two, he had long before earned the right to be excused.

  He was eighty-two, but his legs were not pipe cleaners and neither were his arms as frail as potato sticks. He still had muscle and grace of movement. He did not wear pastel Bermuda shorts without a belt, or a flat cap, or a shirt with seahorses on it (as many men his age did for a reason known perhaps to their wives, who wore straw hats with berries on the brims). He dressed habitually in a navy-blue polo shirt, white tennis shorts, and boating shoes.

  He was without question an old man, but he did not carry his money in a clip, he had never had to give up golf (never having played it), and he neither watched nor owned a television. This, in conjunction with other things, meant that he had no friends. But he didn’t want friends, because it was over, or just about to be over, and in preparing for the greatest moment alone he did not want shuffleboard, crafts, dinner theater, book discussions, or college courses. He wanted, rather, to probe with a piercing eye to see in nature some clue to the mystery to come and the mysteries he would be leaving behind. He wanted a long and strenuous exercise of memory to summon in burning detail what he had loved. He wanted to bless, purify, and honor it, for if at the end he did not, he would by default have dishonored it.

  No matter that nothing would come of this. No matter that all he thought and remembered would be unheard and unshared. The beauty of it as it burned within him was enough in itself, something like music, something that would set its seal even if all it did was vanish on the wind. But, then again, perhaps something would come of it. For very often, far away on the sea, a white sail will appear, running stiffly with the wind and shining in the sun, even if the sea is gray under dark and heavy cloud. These distant sails, proceeding with seeming purpose amid thin bands of sunlit green and blue, these persistent, silent flecks of white, are irresistible. You want to go to them, to be with them, and you wonder if they are a dream. They are so strong in purpose, so straight in direction, so steady, bright, and glowing, that it seems not unreasonable to follow them, to trust, to give oneself over to the light-filled other world of which they are the fleeting and resplendent edge.

  QUITE CERTAIN that the storm was coming, he would be the first one at the barge that morning, even before the carpenters and other early risers, and so his was the first footfall on the sandy road to mar the pattern of alligator tracks left overnight with remarkable delicacy in forms that suggested the passage of tanks or tractors. Alligators and lizards seemed unable to cross the road perpendicularly. They preferred a slash: whereas the snakes, whose imprint was like that of a garden hose, liked the perpendicular even if at a slither.

  The rusty barge that slid across the water, though it floated, made no pretense of being a boat, as did many craft that operated close to shore, and even some on the open sea. These made him recoil, these boats that were top-heavy five times more than was safe, too wide by a factor of two, and either insufficiently rakish (as if born in a bathtub factory) or too much so, with needle bows to please the sensibilities of men who wore black shirts open to the navel. These boats, hubris in fiberglass, asked to be sunk in the wrath of waves, because they carried out upon the waters things that made a mockery of the fine line there between life and death. Instead of holding only what was essential, beautiful, or quick, they were seagoing repositories of every kind of vinyl, plastic, and sin. They carried waterbeds into parcels of sea where beneath them for seven miles lay unimaginable volumes of brine. And when they had metastasized into ships, they floated casinos, as if to be upon the ocean were not enough of a gamble in itself. They were places for nightclub reviews and various forms of prostitution, the carriers, upon the ineffable ocean, of pinball machines, lobster tanks, and bowling alleys.

  The last time he had been in a ship at sea that was not propelled by the wind had been in a destroyer that not long before had shelled Iwo Jima. The rest had been sail, on purpose, from conviction, out of respect for the sea itself and for the wind that sang in sheets and stays. He wished he did not have to see the obese cabin cruisers with deep stern drafts and amusement-park wakes, and their speechless and beefy occupants in fluorescent bikinis and sun brims, rushing at thirty knots from nowhere to nowhere, with a deep rumble and the smell of perfume, gin, and suntan lotion.

  The channel was clear except for a trawler moving downcast from a night having failed to break even, unlike the pelicans, whose every swoop put them in the black. “Storm,” he said to the captain of the tug as they glided silently to the ferry slip, engines off. He casually pointed straight up.

  The ferry captain turned his head in every direction, considering the air and clouds most carefully even as he was gliding toward the slip. “What makes you think so?” he asked, puzzled.

  “You can’t tell?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve been listening to the Coast Guard. What storm?”

  “It’s coming.”

  “Well,” said the ferry captain, dipping down to spin the wheel, “if you wait long enough, a storm always comes.”

  “In a week or less, this one will come, and no storm like it has hit this coast in my memory, which goes back to nineteen fifteen.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “How can you not know? Everything here,” he said, looking around at the houses and docks, “will be destroyed. Everything on the island will be gone. Half the island itself, the sand and the trees, will be washed away. My house is on pilings, but the waves will be high enough to shatter it in one blow. The level of the sea will rise above the tops of those mangroves. Even things that float will be hard pressed to stay afloat, for the sea will shuffle, break, and overturn them.”

  “If what you say is true,” the ferry captain said, “there’ll be a general evacuation. Everyone on the coast will have to get out.”

  “Not everyone,” was the answer, which the ferry captain thought strange.

  HIS CAR ACTUALLY STARTED, which was a miracle after so many years in the hot sun and salt air and use only every two weeks or so. The empty road was washed out in the morning sun that by now had climbed to beat down upon a coast of resilient green. Every time he saw the fragmented maroon debris that signified a crab killed on the road the night before, he thought of numbers, probability, and fate, and was reminded that most of his generation had already fallen, and would soon be fallen completely. Others would follow him where he was going, with both the certainty of the result and the absolute unpredictability of the means. The crabs in the road, scuttling by moonlight or in the tropical dark, were surprised by the sudden appearance of cars and trucks planing through the night air at eighty miles an hour. These and other kinds of small animals
that littered the sides of the roads were returned in a week to the cycle of soil, sun, water, and wind. He noticed that their presence at the roadside diminished only when he came to the town, where stores on the tree-lined streets were just beginning to open. Watering cans and hose spray maintained the plants and cleansed the sidewalks. In the morning, when they are watered, plants seem to give off their most communicative scents. And store owners, waiting for the day to begin and hopeful of good sales, are often cheerful and engaging.

  “What will you give me for this?” he asked of a jeweler who, even for a jeweler, was exceptionally calm.

  “What is it?”

  “The Scarborough Trophy, which you get, if you are lucky, for going out of the harbor at Scarborough and, with great excitement and hardly any sleep, passing the east coast of England in daylight and darkness, and then skating through the Channel to the open sea to drop down the entire length of the world, until the seasons change and summer becomes winter, though by the time you get there winter is over. And then across the Indian Ocean under stars that few people see and are brighter than you might think, through the Strait of Malacca, north of Australia, into the South Seas, and against the wind across the southern Pacific, where time is buried in the blue ocean. Around the Horn in storms with waves that seem like mountains, and then up the coast of South America, across the equator, with a glimpse of the lights of Tenerife, and anxious days in the Bay of Biscay. Into the Channel like a chip in a whirlpool, and to Scarborough once again, where the winter of your departure is long over.”

  “In what?” the jeweler asked.

  “In a sailboat that cannot be more than forty feet in length, cannot have an engine, and cannot carry anyone but you.”

  “You won the race?”