by Oisín Curran
Eleven years, Iris corrected. Eleven years since I put my life on hold to be your wife. Eleven years of art I haven’t made because I’ve been too busy typing up your manifestos.
What are you talking about now? he cried, distressed as he ran about putting the beer under the counter. Why must you perpetually change the subject? Your mind’s all over the place, I can’t keep track, and anyway, if it weren’t for me you’d be a hermit living alone and going quietly crazy.
Yes, Iris lamented at volume, And I’d quite like that instead of being forced to make small talk with the ten thousand people you invite whom I don’t even know.
Well, you’d know them, shouted Myles from under the sink, If you got out a bit more and talked to people. How in blazes have I run out of bottle caps? And then he was rushing to the car with me behind carrying a shopping list from Iris, and away we jumbled.
In Frothingham, Myles mused at length over the selection of hops and malt at the tiny Seventh Day Adventist health food store. I excused myself to go to the library. He murmured a distracted assent, and I slid off down the icy sidewalk.
But I wasn’t going to the library. Not at first. On my way there I passed a door at the corner of Main and Water. In an ornate brick portico, an old, handsome wooden door with a window in it and the words Down East Real Estate painted in gold lettering on the glass. Inside, I was asked indulgently by a woman with long, blond, immaculately feathered hair, if I could be helped.
I’m looking, I said, but before I could say for whom, the grey-black waves of Willard’s hair hove into view as he passed from one office to another. Seeing me, he continued on his way, and I followed.
His office was tidy, spare, shabby. At his desk he sat and shuffled papers.
Well! he said too heartily, smiling too brightly. What a nice surprise. What can I do you for, young man?
I sat down, saying, You never used to talk like that.
A man’s got to make a buck. This is an office and this is how office people talk.
I’m not an office person.
Yes, but then what are you?
Is that a koan?
Just a plain question. If you’re not buying or selling property, why are you here?
I saw Athena, I said.
Willard leaned back and pondered the ceiling for a while.
She’s not...normal, I said. She’s like a ghost.
What have they done to her? Willard muttered.
I wondered who he meant—her parents? Society? Not him anyway.
I’m the one who called the police, I said, and waited for a bitter blast. A blast I somehow wanted, hoping it would cool my head and slow my heart. I was feeling dismal and confused. The room was hot, still; a radiator under the window churned out heat that roiled the air above it, making airborne dust sparkle heavily in the winter sun. Willard seemed not to have heard me. He never looked in my direction but sat forward, searched in a drawer for something, found a pencil, broke it gently in half, replaced it, softly closed the drawer, accidentally dislodged a pile of papers with his elbow, and watched without moving as they slid from desktop to floor in a heap. He went to his knees to retrieve them.
You hurt people, I said to the top of his head. You were supposed to help them.
Can you see how that happens now? he said from the floor, face hidden by the desk, voice constricted. You thought you were helping Athena, I suppose, but instead look what happened.
You’re the one who hurt her! I cried, jumping from my chair and leaning over the desk.
Ask yourself why you feel guilty, he said without looking up. Maybe your motives were not so pure as you think. And even if they were, would it matter? He placed the stack on his desk and sat back heavily in his chair, looking into the middle distance above my head.
Do you know, he said reflectively, I didn’t want any of it. I didn’t want to teach. Didn’t want the responsibility. All I wanted was to play my horn and bake some bread, saw some wood. But then they came, from their campuses, from their drugs, from the war, all those lost kids looking for somebody to tell them what to do, how to be, how to live in this fucked-up world. I said no, I’m not your man, look elsewhere. And do you know what happened? They wouldn’t fucking leave, they camped outside my door. Teach us, they said, We need you. Our world is falling apart and you know the way out of it, we can see it in your eyes, you know how to exist here, now. They said the very fact that I refused to teach them was further evidence that I must. It showed how egoless I was. I wasn’t egoless, I was afraid! Afraid to fuck them up even more. They stayed there for a month, two months, three. More came, there were dozens of them. And then the snow fell and they were shivering in the night and finally I opened the door and let them in. Out of what? Out of pity. I pitied the poor fuckers and that was my downfall. What should I have done? Leave? Move somewhere else? They would’ve found me. I told them they could stay, they could help me bake and saw, but I wasn’t going to teach them anything. They stayed and did everything I did. Everything. They made a religion out of me. They started talking like me, dressing like me, even moving like me. No, I said, you’re doing it all wrong. This isn’t going to help you, and then I made my first mistake—I told them what they should do instead. And they did it! And then one thing just led to another. That’s the truth, that’s how it happened. I didn’t make New Pond, it was the other way around.
For a three full seconds I felt bad for him. Yes, I thought, they tricked him into it, they made a monster from a man. But then I remembered Iris’s words, and my heart hardened.
You can’t make an omelette from an orange, I said.
What? he asked, climbing to his feet, puzzled eyes.
Why didn’t you go to jail? I asked more sharply than intended.
Willard looked at me in surprise.
Probation, he said. A misdemeanour, not a felony. Luckily the local justice system still has a few reasonable types. Anyway, thanks for stopping but I have to get back to work.
So that was that. I rose and moved to the door, but before I left he said, Don’t.
I turned, and he muttered quickly, Don’t squander your gifts, as I have.
I stood and stared at him. Was he admitting guilt? What gifts of mine was he speaking of? He’d never mentioned them before. He nodded curtly, teacher dismissing student, and I withdrew.
At the library, I took refuge from my disquiet in an old leather-bound edition of Kidnapped, but even the thick pages with their uneven edges and the smooth, thinner ones that bore the illustrations by N. C. Wyeth failed to distract me. I put it down. The giant windows arched nearly to the top of the high, bone-white ceiling, letting in great quantities of brilliant winter sunlight. But no amount of sun could brighten the bookish gloom in that library. Dark lacquered wood bookcases, glass-encased model ships, ancient suits of armour, all conspired to absorb light and reinforce the interiority of that quiet world. On a window seat sat a cheap, aging paperback with a cover that featured a shooting comet. I picked it up and flipped through the brittle, sand-coloured pages. I saw familiar words. Too familiar. Whole phrases, whole pages were unfolding, already known, already spoken. With growing unease I fanned through until I found words I didn’t recognize. The words were: I am dull and empty. I’m in an empty tunnel, behind three doors.
I am dull and empty. I’m in an empty tunnel, behind three doors. George hauled me up the steps, opened a big metal door in his giant rock, and pushed me through. Then two more doors after. Blood dripped down his sleeve, off his hand. I watched it drop in shiny drops and splats, then he left me…
Odour of proto-beer suffused the Buick all the way home. Dark malt and hops in bulk packaging bounced in the back seat. It was a soothing smell, and I needed soothing after my encounters with Athena and Willard and finding the book and reading my story in it and reliving the awful end of Quill and Rook. The book was in my lap, borrowed from the library,
but I dared not open it.
Off on a comet? asked Myles.
Sorry, I said. Yes, daydreaming.
I meant the book, said Myles. You’re becoming a real Verne aficionado. That’s one of his more obscure ones.
I looked down. The book had a title. How had I not seen it? Off on a Comet by Jules Verne. I’d never even heard of it. And yet between its covers were words, memories, stories from the back galleries of my self. What of my expedition, of Quill, Rook, Captain Severn, Chisolm, the others—were they just the contents of a book I couldn’t remember reading?
I flipped through the pages, skimming, flipping, skimming, and was even more bothered to find nothing. No names I knew, no expedition, no City. I’d had some kind of biblio-hallucination. All this triggered by what? By guilt? I’d hurt Athena, yes, Willard was right, and my motives were not pure. And now there was nothing I could do to help her or assuage my guilt. I hadn’t done the right thing. Not at all. But what was right? What was right?
When we got home, there was plenty to distract me from my distress.
At the kitchen table sat a strange ragged man, wild beard, crazed pupils, cheeks concave with hunger. Iris sat nearby, anxiously watching him eat a sandwich.
Jack! cried Myles.
Even then I couldn’t see him. There was no Jack here, no urbane audiophile with neat goatee and sleek leather vest. This creature looked like a missing cat rescued from the woods. But then I recognized his earrings and, just barely, his eyes.
Where’s Simone? asked Myles, drawing up a chair.
No answer. Jack kept his eyes down and dedicated himself to the sandwich until there was nothing left.
That’s his third, said Iris.
Simone’s dead, said Jack abruptly, pushing his plate away.
Myles shouted disbelief. Iris slumped back in her chair. I stood dumbly waiting for more horror.
Breast cancer.
Jack said it came on like a locomotive, he barely had time to say goodbye before it took her. Mind you, he said, with all her ailments he’d been half-expecting her to die on him for years now, but it still felt like a catastrophe. She was twenty years his senior. Of course she would leave first, he’d always known that, but when it happened, with hardly any warning, it shattered him. He didn’t know how to live without her. He’d gone feral. Walked away from her burial service and kept on walking, not knowing where he was going, heading vaguely north for no particular reason, into the woods, out of the woods, through subdivisions, across highways.
He said, It turns out December is a bad time for a grief-walk.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d gone on like that. Days and nights of walking, until he fell beneath some trees, huddled under boughs and snow, and nearly died of exposure. That brought him back to life enough that he stumbled into a truck stop and found a driver willing to give him a ride. The trucker was headed for New Brunswick and went out of his way to drop Jack here. Even waited to make sure there was somebody home to let him in.
Crying, Iris said she was glad he made it, and Myles said with feeling, yes, yes, he must stay for as long as he needed, as long as he wanted. Pierce was gone, he’d moved into one of the cabins down at the Zendo and so his trestle bed was free. Jack thanked them and muttered that he should call Simone’s family in Iowa. He’d abandoned them at the graveyard and they would be wondering where he was.
Iowa? said Myles. They’re not in Brittany anymore?
Jack went silent for a long time at that. He looked down and looked down and clenched his toes and straightened them, struggling with a thought. Finally, he looked up and supposed it didn’t matter anymore since she was dead.
Simone was never from Brittany, he said. She wasn’t even Simone.
What did he mean, what did he mean?
He meant her name was really Sheila. Sheila Miller from Des Moines.
Fresh out of community college, she’d married an insurance agent, had three kids in a row, and suburbed through the fifties and sixties until two days after her youngest turned eighteen, when she took advantage of the new no-fault divorce laws to leave her husband and move to Boston, where she resurfaced as Simone Le Gall, daughter of a French diplomat, raised on the beaches of Brittany.
But the clogs around her neck! said Myles.
Invented. Or rather, borrowed from true stories.
Her children! said Iris. We met her children.
They humoured her.
And you, you humoured her too, said Iris.
It was the reality she wanted to live, said Jack.
He’d met her when he was twenty-five and she was a glamorous older woman. By the time he learned the truth of her history, he was so deeply in love with her that her world became his and he did everything he could to maintain the story she wanted to tell.
She was something else, he said, And when I was with her I became a part of that, and now it’s all gone. The world is small. And dull. And empty.
There was a long silence while we all stared at the ground, absorbing Jack’s news. Finally, Myles rose.
Well, he said, Then this party will also be a wake.
I wake in shock, read, sleep, wake. Outside, days go on for weeks. Or maybe just one long night of asteroids and competing moons. I close my eyes and see twin planets, green one chasing black around a broken star. I daydream to crowd out memory.
We must run too close to a sun that yanks us from our path. Coming round, we hit the sky of a strange planet and I rattle like a nut roasting in a shell as we burn down. We smash water. The comet sinks, I don’t. I pop up on a raft, bruised but breathing, thrown on big surf in the middle of a storm.
Wind pitches me over huge water for a day and a night. Between the tops of giant waves, I see pieces of the sky on fire, and shake with each bang of thunder. Rain claws my face, waves punch me, and the noise splits my skull. I tie myself to the raft and give up.
When I wake the sea is a flat sheet to the end, and a red sun rolls up the sky. On the other side of the day, the last thunderclouds creep off full of water and lightning.
Now hunger takes over—the morning goes dark. Ration check: some jerky, a packet of nuts and dried fruit, a gallon of water. I swig and spit brine, and see the container’s torn seal. Chewing the jerky, I look over the raft’s speargun, which seems to be jammed. Can’t fix it. There’s a still. Following a manual, I set it up, but it’ll be hours before there’s enough water to drink, so must go on with a dry, dry throat and swollen tongue. Leaning my arm on the rubber gunnel, I look down for fish.
I’m the last surviving member of an expedition that logged a high count of strange sights, but here’s a new one: my eye falls through numberless tons of clear water, past whale pods and schooling fish, to the lights of an underwater city lying there at the bottom of the ocean. I can see it as clearly as I see the little hairs on my arm. I see streets, towers, neon lights; I see a river all through and suburbs out beyond. I’m dreaming, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, so I’m dreaming: or maybe not. I’ve seen so much that’s strange. Or maybe not. Maybe those memories are just an ocean dream. The sun’s coming up over an empty world. No life above water outside my heartbeat. Unless my heartbeat is a dream too, just water lapping, heard wrong, thought wrong, and I’m dying, or dead, or never was.
I look down again; the city still sleeps under me. Will they look up through telescopes to see my raft above them? Maybe the bottom of the ocean is closer than I think; maybe the city is very small and just below the surface. Maybe I’m a giant on a planet of tiny underwater people. Or I’m more than a giant. Yes, why think I’m dead when really I’m too alive? So much, I’m a god floating on the ocean of a world I made and this city shakes in my shadow!
Then I’m underwater, my raft upside down.
A few jellyfish in the bending light. Big shark nosing around my upturned raft, ten feet away.
To my right
the jammed speargun hangs from a ball of cork tied to its handle. I run out of air.
I scramble to the surface, gasp, and heave myself, thrashing, to the right, grab the cork and dive under again. Too late, the grey monster is on me, jaws wide, teeth flashing. No time to position the gun for a jab. I swing my legs under me, kick, and nail the snout. Shark recoils, as do I from agony in my unused heel. No time for agony: it’s circling back around. I wrap the cord of the gun around my wrist, hold the point rigidly in position, and wait. As though propelled by an explosion, it shoots toward me. I thrust with the gun, but the shark swerves up at the last instant, bites the cork, and dives. The cord cinches my wrist and jerks me down.
Within seconds we’re far below, and my heart thuds in my ears, ribs crumple. I swing and bounce against the hard grey body. No point trying to free myself—the cord is a noose embedded in my wrist. I seize the shark’s dorsal fin, climb onto its back and jab feebly at its gills and eyes, as instructed in survival manuals, but it’s useless. If anything, the creature speeds up, and I can’t find the gills anyway. My blood fizzes in my veins, lungs near bursting, and I know beyond doubt that I’m done.