The Great Offshore Grounds

by Vanessa Veselka

  She began to run. Bolting, backpack looped around one arm, she tripped and hit the ground hard, wiping out on the concrete, bashing her knee and tearing a hole in her jeans. Getting to her feet, she danced in a circle. She could see the blood welling and winced. A man from the rental car company was coming to see if she was okay. Looking back at the Toyota she threw the keys at it as hard as she could. They sailed in an arc and landed on the pavement.

  She caught up to Essex in the carpeted tunnel to the terminal. She was right behind him and he didn’t know she was there. How could he not know? She took a quick skip forward to match his gait and grabbed his upper arm.

  “Don’t stop,” she said, “don’t stop.”

  She felt her way down to his hand and locked her fingers in his. It wasn’t as bad as she thought, walking like this, exposed as she was. Just a new kind of naked.

  The blood running down her ankle into her shoe tickled. She stopped to scratch it through her sock. Standing again, her knee was stiff. It was already starting to scab. Essex put his mouth by her ear.

  “You look like you spent all night in a park.”

  “Keep walking,” she said.

  Coming into the main part of the terminal, people cut across their path dodging carts, looking at signs to other terminals and shuttles. Essex opened his wallet, took something out of the change pocket, and pressed it into her palm. She felt what it was and laughed. She put the extra ring on her finger next to the first one he had given her.

  “We get to make it whatever we want,” he said in her ear.

  “Don’t look at me.”

  “No one’s watching.”

  “They are watching.”

  “Who cares.”

  He pulled her toward a crowd gathering, forming a line, waiting for the ticket counter to open. A woman in her fifties with frosted hair, peach lipstick, and a robin’s-egg blue neckerchief stepped behind a computer and began her day.

  “Can you even buy a ticket at an airport counter anymore?” Cheyenne asked.

  “Don’t worry, I doubt my credit card even works.”

  “They’re going to look at us like we shouldn’t even be here.”

  There was blood on the carpet from her leg. She tried to smudge it out with her shoe but Essex stopped her. “They deserve it,” he said. She shifted, only half there. He squeezed her hand to let her know to move up. The woman with the robin’s-egg blue neckerchief was now close enough to hear. She spoke in the tonal language of transaction and permission.

  They stepped forward in line.

  “Don’t forget,” said Essex, “we’re Chernobyl wolves. We eat radiation grass.”

  She leaned into his ear. “Valley of the Kings,” she whispered.

  Epilogue

  OFF THE EAST COAST of North America whalers head for the Horn. Cutting through the waves of glowing seaweed in the bioluminescent surf off Hatteras Island, they head for the breeding grounds. Ghosts.

  And so, what if someone told you, whispered in your ear, you, you are exceptional. Shh…the rules do not apply—but don’t look down. Yet you look down. Or maybe you’re on a hill and build a city but the hill was never empty, what then?

  Hometown. City of your birth. Ghosts everywhere.

  * * *

  —

  The first white Christian child born in North America entered the world at Roanoke but went missing at the age of three and her body was never found. Some say she was born un-locatable. Others say little Virginia Dare was only location. Contemporary investors split on the impact of her disappearance. Under the right circumstances, would her absent bones spur or deter investment? Was she warning or cause? Girl or brand? Coal-mine canary or kick start? Futures unpredictable, stockholders revolt, board meetings devolve—so perhaps her body is to blame? Or never mattered at all, a pin drop in a map of colonial imagination, Virginia Dare.

  Flickering in and out of accountability, Raleigh closes his eyes. Half-filled ships wreck against rocks on foreign shores. He paces…I am spirit…I am spirit…Trembling, Raleigh doffs his blame-taking body for the cutting-edge technology of economic imagination, the joint-stock entity. Co-creating a new world, incorporating over and over until he is no longer a blamable individual with a body, but a simulacraic choir of self-replicating cells, a new form of life. Raleigh, founder and corporation, strides forth. Toward sunset! Angels ring; sailors shout through a spray of seawater and sun.

  Shaking off his losses, he sets sail for El Dorado and catches, in the periphery, the spectral child Virginia racing along the Outer Banks as his ship sails past. He squints but cannot make her out, seeing at once a milk carton with a child’s face then a sad man surrendering on a horse. She stops and begins to turn in a circle, Santa-doubting-Shakespeare-sister Virgin Queen of tobacco fields rending her Quantico dress and laughing. Training his mind, Raleigh turns his intention toward El Dorado (which rumor has is many miles up that wet jungle-mouth delta of Orinoco to the south), only he doesn’t know where it is. So many things have happened since he left that he can’t tell how far he’s come. And because he’s never been to El Dorado and it’s only an idea, he can’t tell how close he is. He practices EMDR and taps…I am spirit…I am spirit…

  The problem of location has never been simple. Do you fix a point and aim at wherever you want to go? Or do you locate yourself in relation to the shore, memory, and landmarks?

  Baleen whales navigate this way. Toothed whales do not. Early sailors preferred celestial navigation—best to rely on something outside the grasp of this world—but celestial navigation doesn’t solve the problem of unknown shores and cloud cover, which is why dead reckoning is the fallback of sailors.

  A fixed beginning, speed, and trajectory.

  Dead reckoning is how wolves cross snowy hillsides, how pumas slip between desert ridges in the night. Out of satellite range in open ocean without lighthouse beacon or buoy, dead reckoning is a sailor’s final hope. But solve one problem and it has puppies. Give a man a fish and it’s not his fault, but teach a man to fish and he eats everything in the ocean.

  Starting point, mode of transport, goal.

  Rome, St. Augustine, Hill City;

  Gravesend, Roanoke, El Dorado;

  Nantucket, Essex, the Great Offshore Grounds…

  Raleigh takes the bridge and calls to his sailors. Never forget the depths of this world! He shouts, though they cannot hear him over the squall, Strangers! He shouts. Shh…strangers. We are strangers to these waters, only cartographers. Mark your head. Look sharkish! And tell me what you see. A sailor, peering across the lens of curved horizon, frames the sea. L7…I spy…I spy with my little eye a sun, a cloud, a mast…I spy…I spy with my little eye…a sister, a highway interstate system, a statue of Jefferson Davis.

  * * *

  —

  A song breaks out:

  They grew to the top of the old church tower

  They couldn’t grow any higher

  They locked and tied in true loves knot

  The rose around the briar.

  Raleigh never saw the tidal estuary at what would someday be Camp Lejeune or the river that fed it or its relationship to the ocean of moon jellies or the pods of right whales heading south to give birth. And who can say what happened to him when they cut off his head? Did he wander a Christian bardo? Did he explode into a Shinto grapeshot of small ticking souls haunting tobacco fields in the New World? Did he return as a barnacle bound to a whale swimming southward coming ever closer to but never making it up the hot humid delta river-mouth he was certain led to El Dorado?

  It is known that Raleigh’s physical head was embalmed by the Crown and handed to his widow in a velvet bag, but as embalmers tend to guard their secrets, the exact method of its preservation is unknown and traditional approaches vary by region. Some involve soaking a head in saltwater. Others prefe
r to bury it in hot sand.

  Sun flashes on the sea.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes Lejeune and Raleigh sit at a fold-out table on deck of the Neva and play cards. For Virginia! shouts Raleigh when he lays down a winning hand. For the canal, says Lejeune. A Confederate captain circles the table, a long line, a through line, a red line.

  Livy opens a letter from Cheyenne. It says: What’s the secret of empire? Location, location, location…

  Livy crumples the note and throws it into the ocean. A white paper flower, it blossoms on the water’s surface unshaping itself in the waves.

  Livy shades her eyes.

  Inescapable, whispers Raleigh, inescapable, all this salt and light.

  * * *

  —

  At night, the well was an illuminated pinprick on the edge of the world. Though the sea was quiet, and though the well was only a speck, Livy’s ears filled with the buzzing and deafening alarms and sounds of metal slamming metal she’d heard when they’d passed the massive oil rig in Alaska. She had the sense that they were not moving forward at all but were caught in a whirlpool, circling around the exact point where it had all gone wrong.

  Raleigh emerged from the cabin for the last time and went to the starboard rail. He extended his arm then lunged, reaching for something close but unattainable in the flush of dementia.

  “It’s in their heads!” he said. “Perfume and cigarettes and transmission fluid, cures for epilepsy and solar systems, whole solar systems!”

  Livy tried to calm him but he didn’t know her.

  Just before dawn, he shook her awake.

  I have terrible things to confess…terrible things…

  She sat up to listen, but he was gone.

  Livy went above. The sea was full of constellations. The North Star was beyond the curve of the globe. She relieved Marne on the bridge.

  Captain’s got the con.

  Captain’s got the con.

  As they closed on the rig it looked less like a deep-sea well and more like a sinking ship. Covered by a low fog but just under the crown block, affixed to the tower, Livy saw the flag of her homeland. In the predawn light it appeared in grayscale: its stripes, bone bars over black; its stars, the whites of the eyes that seemed to Livy imprisoned in the darkness. It pillowed once in the wind then was pressed by a breeze flattened over the struts, sunken against its emaciated ribs. On the deck below was a child with tangled hair waving so frantically it seemed she might fly. Livy could barely make her out, dressed as she was in fog and shadowed in violet light.

  And what if someone said to you: You were conceived in a cracked lighthouse that has no keeper. While there might be a faint glow up top, it is only a ship’s lamp.

  Ask me a secret. Whisper. I won’t tell. Promise?

  …I still love my country…

  You have no country.

  …I love the idea of my country…

  Whose idea?

  My idea, mine. That exceptional flame. A country not yet born.

  Below the derrick, Virginia Dare covers her eyes with her hands as the sun torches her hair gold. She yells over the water with all the power of her three-year-old lungs words garbled in the din of whale song and ghosts. Her ankles are in the water. She looks in all directions to see how to swim. Baleen whales navigate by memory, but she has no memory. Toothed whales navigate by echolocation, but she cannot even hear herself. She slaps away the water, now over her knees.

  On the horizon, a bright line shot in either direction as the corona of the sun touched the water behind them. Livy squinted in the advance of the coming glare and made an aperture with both hands, a ghost ring to target the oil rig unblended by reflection. Just before sunrise the fog rolled back to reveal the drilling platform. It was at the waterline and Livy saw that it was sinking, slow and inevitable. Then the sun like a scythe cut the sea from the sky. A beveled and perfect lens signaling through space: We are here! We are here! It swept over the waves and began to climb the well strut by strut until it reached the flag, which caught fire in the flash of dawn. Call-and-response, moving together, like swifts, like submarines, listening to the sound of shapes, toothed whales cross the ocean. Sonic and concentric waves radiate out from their great bodies filling the space between locations with an unceasing chant: How close? How close? How close?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Novels are like doomed marriages. You start with great expectations—in love with all the characters—then things take a turn and you have to walk away. When you’re not sure whether to stay or go, you need your friends, and sometimes outside professional help. This novel took a very long time to write and edit. Everybody mentioned here was needed.

  At its inception, I was greatly helped by the Bingham family in the form of a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and by the MacDowell Colony in the form of a fellowship. In the middle years, I was sustained by readers who kept me company, my mother and father, Alex Ney, Nili Yosha, Angus Durocher. Kirsten Evenson, a poet and fisherwoman, read multiple times and offered her invaluable experience in the Bering Sea.

  During the course of research, I was fortunate enough to work on the US Brig Niagara, a replica of an 1812 square-rigged, two-masted warship. I am grateful in particular to Joe Lengieza, who made it possible for me to come on as a sail trainee for nearly a month; to Jen Dexter, who took me to work aloft for the first time; and to Matt Kent, who clipped me in when we were up at the crosstrees and got hit on the beam by a freak wave train and swung side to side like a metronome for four minutes. In addition to assuring me we would live if we held on, he also kindly offered to let me throw up on him if that helped. Tom McCluskey, of HMS Rose and Bounty, brought his considerable experience as mate and bosun to these pages, making valuable corrections. Therefore, all mistakes regarding tall ships are mine alone, and something always gets past me.

  In the end, I needed outside help. My agent, Sarah Bowlin, helped shape the novel and find it a home. Tim O’Connell, my editor at Knopf, and assistant editor Anna Kaufman were patient and unafraid of a good debate. Brilliant editors are a gift, and I can’t imagine doing this book with anyone else. My friend and former publisher, Richard Nash, was and remains my greatest champion. These stellar humans were essential to this novel’s existence.

  The deepest support I received, though, was from my family. Throughout the writing—and it took years!—I did not do my share of dishes or drive my daughter to band practice. I did not pay my fair share of the bills or move my share of boxes from apartment to apartment. These necessities fell sometimes on Blake Wright, but most profoundly onto the shoulders of Stefan Jecusco. Stefan worked far more hours of manual labor than anyone in their mid-forties should. When there was a financial crisis, he burned his credit to cover the gaps. He often supported my artistic life and growth at the expense of his. From 2015 to 2019 I struggled with depression and despair. I became antisocial and morbidly self-involved. At a certain point, I decided only politics and organizing mattered and saw no point in writing novels. I told Stefan I wanted to quit and was sharply informed that the decision was no longer mine. They had all put their labor into this, my family, friends, and other believers in my career.

  So here it is, and thank you all. I truly hope that I have not let you down.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Vanessa Veselka is the author of the novel Zazen, which won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Tin House and Zyzzyva, and her nonfiction in GQ, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and The Atavist Magazine, and was included in Best American Essays and the anthology Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex worker, a union organizer, an independent record label owner, a train hopper, a waitress, and a mother. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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