The Divers and Other Mysteries of Seattle

by Jerome Gold

  We talked writing again. He had had a story published in Esquire back in the Forties, and another one in Prairie Schooner. He was not enthusiastic about academic publications, because nobody read them, he said, but he was pleased that Prairie Schooner had done “Where No Flowers Bloom.” We sat for a while without speaking.

  It was an exceptionally clear day, I remember, and as we looked out at the bay through the big windows Les remarked how close the land on the other side appeared on a sunny day when there was no mist. He used to teach fiction writing at Fort Mason, he said, and he once had a student, an elderly woman, who had been a little girl at the time of the San Francisco earthquake and fire. Her mother had taken her out on a ferry with other people fleeing the fire and the ferry had brought them all out to the middle of the bay where it was safe and had stopped so they could see the city burn. She told the class seventy years later how it had looked, the city burning down to the water, how she had seen the section where her house had been all red with the fire’s glow, how worried she had been about her father and her brother who had stayed behind. She had held the class in thrall when she told this, but she did not write a word about it. Instead, she wrote light romances.

  Les and I got together again the following week. Each of us had wonderful things to say about the other’s work. His little book seemed to me a near-perfect piece of writing. The character development was solid, and the book had a theme! I was not accustomed to recent American novels, other than some science fiction, having something to say about the nature of our species. I told Les this. He came back with “Character and theme are everything. If you have character and theme, everything else will follow.” He wagged his finger at me as though he were a schoolmaster trying to impress his student to remember something.

  For his part, he liked Negligence of Death, saying it reminded him of Camus’ The Stranger. I had not thought of that. I knew that I had been heavily influenced by Camus but I did not recall having thought of him as I was writing Negligence, at least not consciously.

  I asked Les about Conrad. It seemed to me that The Forty Fathom Bank was a kind of converse of The Secret Sharer. Les said he had read Heart of Darkness while writing his book and thought that might have been an influence. I mentioned The Secret Sharer again but Les only shrugged. I think now that I was right, that Les had modeled The Forty Fathom Bank on The Secret Sharer but had not wanted to admit this to me.

  In 1982 I left the army and returned to Seattle to finish graduate school. In the fall I went to Samoa to do anthropological fieldwork. While there I met an American who, though earning his living as a teacher in Samoa, was also an editor for a small press in Milwaukee. It had published one book and on its title page was “Milwaukee and Pago Pago,” which meant that while John lived in (or near) Pago Pago, the other editor lived in Milwaukee. The book they had published had been written by the Milwaukee editor. John said they were looking for other manuscripts. I wrote Les, asking him to send me The Forty Fathom Bank. I gave it to John as soon as I received it. He liked it very much and sent it to his co-editor. They had an arrangement whereby both had to agree to publish a book; neither had the authority to acquire a book on his own.

  The Milwaukee editor turned it down. The rejection letter was perfunctory, but he told John that if Les were a younger man he would be willing to publish the book, but since Les was not young—

  John was dumbfounded and I was angry. To both of us a book was to be judged by its quality, regardless of who wrote it. I suspected that John’s co-editor had been threatened by Les’ manuscript, that he was afraid it was better than his own book. Years later, John told me that he eventually reached the same conclusion. The press finally died because John’s friend would not agree to publishing another book.

  But I had learned some of the rudiments of publishing from listening to John. He had been an editor for the University of California at Berkeley and was a poet and literary critic himself. So he knew publishing, at least certain aspects of it, from both the publisher’s vantage point and the author’s.

  When I returned to the United States I went to San Francisco to see Les. I suggested we publish his book ourselves. Les equivocated. He did not like the idea of being both author and publisher. My argument was this: Editors select books for publication that fall within the parameters set by the companies they work for. Les and I both knew he had written a good book. Quality was not the issue. The issue was the acquisition policies of the large publishing houses. Still, Les was unsure. Finally I said: “How will you feel five years from now if you don’t do it?” And so we put together our own press, Black Heron Press, to publish The Forty Fathom Bank.

  His early life had been one of adventure. He had sailed to the South Pacific on the last clipper ship to put out of San Francisco. He had fallen in love with a prostitute in New Zealand and jumped ship in Hawaii, having fallen in love with another woman. Later he was a motorcycle courier for a Bolivian general during a war against Paraguay. Always an admirer of competence, he deserted because he did not think the general knew what he was doing. Following his travels in South America, Les lived in Mexico City for a year. Except for one unpublished novel, Beyond the Dark Mountain, much of which concerns a Pacific voyage, he did not write about any of this. Instead, he wrote some exquisite stories about the sea, including The Forty Fathom Bank, “Where No Flowers Bloom,” and “The Albacore Fisherman.”

  When he was sixty he began work on Beyond the Dark Mountain, finishing it almost ten years later. He met with the usual responses when he sent it out: editors did not read it but pretended they had and sent it back, or they did not send it back. Mostly they ignored it. Finally an editor from a local publishing house did read it and liked it and offered Les a contract. The week before they were to begin editing, the entire fiction staff, including Les’ editor, was fired. The publisher had decided to cease publishing fiction. Three or four years later, Les told me that he had been disappointed and angry, but he had also felt relieved. Publishing that book, he believed, would have changed his life and he did not want it to change. He continued sending the manuscript around but nothing happened and I think he regarded sending it out as a matter of duty rather than desire. We never talked about publishing it through Black Heron Press, if for no other reason than that it was very long and we could not have afforded it.

  Beyond the Dark Mountain is fictionalized autobiography. Its first chapters are taken directly from Les’ childhood. As a boy, Les developed a high fever and had to be hospitalized. Hospital care was costly, his father, an itinerant preacher, was away on one of his jaunts, or perhaps he had left for good by that time, and Les’ life was at risk. His mother, an attractive, sensual woman, slept with the attending doctor in order to ensure Les’ care.

  This is an old story, of course, a mother’s sacrificing her honor for her child, but it is no less poignant for the retelling. When, after I read those passages, Les told me explicitly what had only been implied in them, he alternately spoke and puffed at the pipe he was trying to light, but all the while he watched my eyes. For my part, I tried to reveal nothing, to convey only that I accepted what he said as one accepts life. He said he never learned the nature of the fever he had had, but it left him with a stiffened hip and a leg that would not grow much longer.

  I never knew a man who so enjoyed the company of women. It has been said so often that most men do not like women that it sounds true even if it is a suspect truth. Still, I never met a man who liked women more than Les did. His skin took on a blush and his eyes glistened when he was with a woman he was attracted to. But if women were his joy they were also his sadness, for he was haunted by them.

  I believe he felt indebted to them as he felt indebted to his mother. He married several times, each wife but one flawed in the same way as the others, fathered several children and raised all but one himself. He and I never talked about friendship or love, though we discussed love’s delusions and, of course, its betrayal. When the sexual urge finally left him, he
told me it was a relief, he did not miss it a bit.

  Until he became too ill to write, he worked on another novel, a kind of love story. (One must always qualify the genre with Les: The Forty Fathom Bank is a kind of sea story but also it is a tale of greed and the failure of redemption.) I never saw it and, as far as I know, no copy exists. Convinced by a friend that the story was not up to the standard Les set with The Forty Fathom Bank and the best of his stories, he destroyed it. Here is its plot as I remember his telling it to me.

  A young man travels to Utah from California. In Salt Lake City he falls in love with a girl. However, requiring specialized surgery, he must go on to New York. He is in love but also he is looking forward to meeting some of New York’s fabled elegant women. In New York he undergoes surgery and stays on to recuperate. He and his love correspond but then she stops writing. He has not been faithful and wonders what she might know, what she might have gleaned from the subconscious aspect of his letters. Finally, out of guilt and remorse, he writes her a vicious letter, ending their relationship.

  Decades later, an elderly man, he returns to Salt Lake City. He searches out the family of the girl he loved and from them he learns that she died in an automobile accident while he was in New York. From the dates on her headstone he understands that she was already dead when he wrote the vile letter.

  This story is so essentially Les: the flaw of character, the minor decision that takes on tragic significance, the base act that exposes the actor to himself, the ghostly echoes that arise from that act.

  I knew him for only the last ten years of his life. He wrote well until a year or two before he died, when physical pain and medication confounded that special clarity of mind he needed to write. His last decade, it seems to me, was an itemized giving-up of everything that was important to him, including any attempt to resolve the conflicts that had beset him early on. His writing showed no resolution. (Were he able to read these last sentences, his eyes would flash and he would turn away in contempt. “Writing is not about resolution,” he would say. “It is about conflict and conflict is never resolved.”) It showed, instead, wonderment and knowledge. He believed in Nothing as though it were Something. Yet despair was foreign to him. Writing for a few friends, he told me, was enough for him. Had anyone else said this, I would not have believed him. But Les was so lacking in self-pity that I took him at his word. He did that, writing for his friends, as long as he was able.

  The phone rang at half past midnight and I thought immediately of Les. Who else would call at this hour? I did not want to get out of bed and I let the machine take the call. I listened for a voice and when it didn’t come I was even more certain that it was he, for he hated talking to my machine. I promised myself that I would call him back but I did not call. I had talked with him a week or two earlier and he had sounded so depressed—he was weak from the dialysis, he said—that I was reluctant to talk with him again so soon. He had asked when I would be coming down to San Francisco. I told him I did not think it would be before August or September and he said he did not think he would be alive then. I had never heard him sound so tired. I did not try to joke with him. We talked a little about books and then we hung up.

  On Thursday, May third, 1990, a message from his daughter Lisa was on my machine when I came home from work. Les had died—“passed away”—the Sunday before. It was a stroke. He had expected to die from an aortic aneurysm he had been cultivating. Instead, it was a blood clot that had traveled to his brain from his foot.

  A final vignette. This was told to me by a friend of Les. In the late Eighties when The Forty Fathom Bank had been out for several years, he and Les had gone to dinner at a very good fish place in San Anselmo. It was a weekend evening and the restaurant was packed, the tables pushed so closely together that you could not help but hear your neighbors’ conversation. At the table nearest Les and Tom was a couple engrossed in talk about fishing and books. They were very young, in their earliest twenties, but they knew what they were talking about. Les figured the young man must be a commercial fisherman and both he and his woman friend knew the best books about the sea. Before either of them could object, Les had joined in their conversation and in a moment the young man turned to him and said, “Oh, next you’ll be telling us you’re the author of The Forty Fathom Bank!”

  Les, of course, was both surprised that they knew the book and delighted that they did. He introduced himself, putting the surprise back on them, and in a moment the conversation included both tables.

  Gravity

  Sylvia Browne, the famous psychic, best-selling author, and founder of her own church, tells us that the Other Side is not a religious or ideological concept, but is an actual place located three feet above what we know as Earth. It is distinct from our Earth insofar as it exists in a dimension apart from those we recognize.

  Actually, I suspected as much. Not the part about the Other Side being in another dimension, but that it is a place contiguous with our own world. I have thought this was true ever since I was nine years old and something or someone smacked me on the butt when I had it elevated as I hunkered down on my elbows in my bedroom, reading a comic book. As I recall, the smack didn’t hurt; it was, rather, as if someone had been walking by and decided in passing to swat me on the butt.

  In a trice I was on my feet, searching the corners of my room for the perpetrator. I had, after all, thought I was alone, and the door was closed, as I had left it. Finding no one, I sought out first my mother, then my father, and finally my sister, asking each in turn if she or he had just been in my room. In turn, each said no. I believed them, as they all looked at me as if I were genuinely nuts. Why was I asking? my mother wanted to know. She was hanging clothes on a line in the backyard and she had a clothespin in her mouth, but I understood her.

  “Someone just hit me on the butt,” I said.

  My mother laughed but she kept the clothespin in her mouth and her laughter came around it on either side, making little puffing sounds. “Go ask your father,” she croaked.

  I found my father lying on his side on the front lawn, a pile of crab grass near his left arm, a trench knife in his right hand, digging in the dirt in front of him. He also asked why I was asking.

  “Someone just hit me on the butt.”

  “You probably deserved it. When are you going to come out here and help me weed the lawn?”

  I pretended I hadn’t heard him and went back inside the house and into my sister’s room where she was playing house and talking with her invisible friend and I accused her of going in my room when I wasn’t looking and hitting me on the butt.

  She laughed, but then she started to cry and said she was going to tell our mom that I was accusing her of things. As I left her room, I heard her cry change to a laugh again.

  This was the first incident I can recall for which there was no explanation other than the one I came up with, to wit: someone from another, invisible, dimension had crossed into our world, smacked me on my butt, and ducked back into his or her own world.

  As I grew older, I found myself bumping into things that were not there, and I often thought that the same person who swatted me on the butt was placing invisible coffee tables, chairs, kitchen counters in my path, then whisking them away as soon as I had walked into them. These encounters were, on occasion, painful and always discomforting, but when I looked for such evidence as I could show my parents, like a bruise, I found nothing at all. Evidence was important because my regular complaints about invisible beings from another dimension victimizing me just about had my parents convinced that I was well and truly crazy, and they were talking about sending me to a military boarding school.

  As I grew older I grew taller, and the things I bumped into, at least the invisible ones, grew higher. It seems to me now that whatever it was I connected with, it was always at hip or thigh level. Nowadays, though I no longer bump into invisible things, my hip is about three feet off the ground, where Sylvia Browne tells us the Other Side exists. I wonde
r, though, if she is wrong, if the Other Side resides at, say, two feet above the earth, for this would have been the altitude of my hip when I was eleven or twelve and sorely encountering invisible objects most frequently.

  Another thing that bothers me about this three-foot dictum is the matter of gravity. If Sylvia Browne is right about the location of the Other Side, or even if she’s wrong and it’s two feet off the ground rather than three, this means the world the dead live on is larger than our world. Here is the math. The diameter of the earth is approximately 7,957.7285 miles. As there are 5,280 feet per mile, we multiply 7,957.7285 by 5,280 and get 42,016,806 feet. But given that the Other Side is four to six feet wider than our earth, albeit in the same location as our world, its diameter is between 42,016,810 and 42,016,812 feet. Another way of conceptualizing this is to look at the diameter of the Other Side as between 7,957.7285 miles plus four feet and 7,957.7285 miles plus six feet.

  This is worrisome. As everyone knows, the earth spins on its axis at a certain rate of speed. The exact rate is not important for our discussion. What is important is that the speed of spin is gradually slowing, such that in several billion years objects on the surface of the earth will begin to fly off into space. Remembering our high school physics, we recall that objects farthest from the center of gravity—in this case, somewhere around the center of the earth—are least affected by gravity. In other words, when the world loses spin enough, the dead who live on the Other Side will be flung into space even before we the living are. They will die first. This is worrisome, as I say, because when we pass over, our loved ones who have preceded us will already have passed on again. But where? Is there another aspect to the Other Side, one that we don’t yet comprehend? Is there another Other Side?