Children of Zero

by Andrew Calhoun

  “Friday. Be at the airport by thirteen hundred.”

  It was Sunday today, so that gave him a little under five days. Jay was leaving on Wednesday, so he’d visit the Frenchman on Tuesday. Maybe he’d try to go see Haley at the plantation on Wednesday or Thursday. He wasn’t sure how that would work, logistically or conversationally. He’d have to think about that for a while.

  “Thanks for coming here,” Kettle said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, standing up and downing the rest of his beer in one shot.

  “Want another?”

  “I need to go Skype my kid.”

  “Right. Well, I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

  “Take the rest of the week off, Kettle,” Doug said, waving his hand dismissively. “And try to stay out of trouble.”

  “Ah, okay. Thanks, Doug.”

  “No problem. Enjoy the weather while it lasts.” The big man started trudging toward a truck parked nearby.

  “What do you mean?” Kettle called out.

  “Storm’s coming in.”

  He looked out toward the horizon and saw clouds. They mostly looked harmless, although some darker formations looked a bit ominous. The incoming breeze was starting to pick up as well. Diego was overdue for some rain, and when it rained, it tended to hammer down in sheets.

  “You can tell from the clouds?”

  “Yeah.” Doug was at the truck now, with the driver’s door open. “The clouds and the Weather Channel. Might be a big one.” He got in the truck, started the engine and began to pull away. As he drove off, his left hand appeared out of the window, waving goodbye. The dust kicked up by the truck settled down, and that was that.

  He refocused on the task at hand, pulling the tab on another beer and setting his eyes out to sea. He counted the waves as they came in, remembering stories from his childhood that every seventh wave would be the biggest. This, like a lot of other childhood stories, had turned out not to be true.

  Kettle was Hawaiian by birth and by ethnicity. He had been born in a little town called Pahoa on the Big Island. It would have been a pretty great place to grow up, but that hadn’t been in the cards. The first thing his mother had done after Kettle was born was to put him up for adoption. In stepped Simon and Rachel Kettle, a volcanologist and dental assistant, respectively. Unable to have kids of their own, they had been on a long waiting list to adopt a bouncing bundle of joy, so when the stars were aligned and the bureaucratic hurdles overcome, the deal was done.

  Two years later, the Kettle family relocated to the mainland, which might have seemed counter-intuitive. For a volcanologist, there weren’t many places on the planet better than the Big Island of Hawaii. The town of Pahoa was literally in danger of being inundated with lava, which was a volcanologist’s wet dream. Nevertheless, when UW in Seattle offered Simon a tenure track position with a healthy remuneration package, the Kettles packed their bags and hopped on a plane. Career and money wise, it was a step up for Simon, and it wasn’t like the Pacific Northwest didn’t have its own fair share of volcanoes.

  Eventually, Simon and Rachel had to have ‘the talk’ with young Merrick, who wanted to know why his skin was so much darker than mommy’s and daddy’s. They carefully and lovingly told him the truth. They explained that his birth mother had been unable to raise him, and that even though Merrick had been adopted, he was loved all the same. When he was older and more capable of contemplating his adoption with greater mental sophistication, he came to three conclusions. First, he loved and respected his parents both because they had provided him with a loving home and because they were always willing to tell him the truth, even if it hurt. Admittedly, they wouldn’t have been able to hide the fact that he wasn’t genetically related to them. But he knew their propensity for telling the truth would go further. He understood with certainty that if he wanted to know more about his birth mother, they would tell him everything they knew.

  This led to conclusion number two. He decided he didn’t want to know anything about the woman. After all, what was there to know? What kind of mother turned her back on her newborn son? Sure, she might have been in financial trouble or had some other sort of obstacle in her life, but that didn’t excuse her from discarding her baby as an undesirable burden. Kettle had no interest in getting to know a person like that. He believed it would only bring him anger and pain. Better to just forget about her. That would turn out to be easier said than done.

  Conclusion number three: having Polynesian ancestry was kind of cool. This was aided in part by growing up in Seattle. While Kettle stumbled and found his way through his teenage years, Seattle was making its own way through the latter stages of grunge. Unbuttoned flannel shirts and ripped jeans were everywhere, and Kurt Cobain was a god, both before and after his untimely demise. To speak ill of Cobain was to enrage the wrath of legions of devout followers. Cobainism went on to influence – and was influenced by – a series of shifts in the culture of the entire Cascadia region from British Columbia to the north all the way down through Oregon and northern California to the south. Among young people like Kettle, there was an increasingly urgent sense of disenfranchisement. The standard narrative being handed down to them from above was that if you worked hard, trusted in God and loved your country, you would achieve the American dream. This narrative was explosively being exposed as a myth, which in turn allowed for alternative behavior to be embraced rather than shunned. In short, being different became cool.

  All of this meant that being a sometimes confused and occasionally depressed Polynesian kid wearing ripped jeans and being raised by white parents was decidedly Cobainist. When classmates found out that Kettle’s middle name was Koa, they approved because it was outside the norm. It made Kettle want to learn what Koa actually meant. It turned out to be the Hawaiian word for warrior. Even better. It also made Kettle want to study Polynesian culture, and he gradually felt a much needed sense of pride about who he was and where he came from.

  However, none of this meant that Merrick Koa Kettle had enjoyed an easy, happy-go-lucky upbringing. He hadn’t. Despite living in a stable, loving household and going to good schools, he still managed to dabble in drugs and explore the darker sides of Seattle’s seedy underbelly. He began hanging out with people who thought it was cool to vandalize cars and buildings just for the hell of it. He had a couple close encounters with the law, though thankfully nothing too serious.

  When he was nineteen, he made the biggest mistake of his life. It started when he slept with a native Hawaiian girl three years his senior and got her pregnant. That wasn’t the mistake. The mistake would come nine months later. The girl, an exchange student from the University of Hawaii studying criminology at UW, got married to a well off law student two months after Kettle had slept with her. Then came the hefty decisions. Over the next seven months, she had to deal with a husband who was understandably enraged that his new wife was having a kid that wasn’t his and a very scared Kettle who was absolutely not ready to be a father. Ultimately, the three parties came to an uncomfortable but seemingly necessary conclusion. They decided that the best thing for the baby would be for the newly married couple to pretend that the baby was theirs. Since the wife also had Polynesian ancestry, they guessed no one would be overly suspicious when the baby looked a lot like her and nothing like the husband, who was of Scottish stock. She would say she had strong genes. The flip side of this deal was that Kettle would have to disappear from the equation. As a naïve-to-the-world nineteen-year-old, Kettle had simply breathed a sigh of relief, wiped the sweat off his brow, and walked away thanking his lucky stars. He never even learned the sex of the child.

  Astonishingly, it had taken a few years before he realized (with no small amount of horror) that he had done to this baby exactly what his own mother had done to him. He had abandoned his own flesh and blood. He had let his own selfishness lead him to surmise that this living, breathing creature with a beating heart and newly opened eyes, in all its vulner
ability and innocence, was a burden that was better off forgotten. A greater act of cowardice and callousness was hard for him to imagine.

  The salt in the open wound was that upon this sudden realization of inescapable guilt, he had subsequently been unable to see any path by which he could make amends. What was there to do? Should he track down the mother and demand to be a part of the child’s life? What would be the outcome? Most likely a lot of pain and heartache for everyone involved.

  Further soul-searching and introspection offered him a choice between two options. First, he could use the entire experience to bring himself to an intellectual position whereby he shared greater empathy for his birth mother. Second, he could continue to hate his birth mother and by extension, he would have to hate himself. He decided that option number one was the easy way out. He chose option number two. He willfully succumbed to self-loathing.

  To all those around him, this voluntary self-flagellation was nearly impossible to pick up on. Kettle had always been a private individual anyway. He went on with his life, got a university degree in resource management – a highly in-vogue subject for the Pacific Northwest – and then proceeded to bounce from job to job making enough money to pay rent each month and put a little extra in the bank. He went to the pub with friends, dated women from time to time, took up various hobbies and generally behaved as a normal human being. However, this relatively healthy existence was punctuated every few months or so (depending on external variables) by a few days of livid self-hate. He would disappear from the public eye and spend a solid seventy-two hours by himself drinking, swearing and crying. Then he would pick himself up and wade back into the stream of society with no one the wiser.

  He had wondered if this pattern would fade after time. It didn’t.

  Now, from his plastic beach chair facing out to sea on Diego Garcia, Kettle couldn’t help rehash these old memories in his head while simultaneously pondering what the future would hold. The last four months had been life changing in their own way, and along with the standard feelings of low self-worth, new possibilities had arisen. These possibilities meant that some more tough decisions were around the corner.

  Kettle snapped back to the present. Rain drops splattered down onto him from above. He looked up to see that the offshore clouds had moved in a lot faster than he had anticipated. They were also a lot darker now. There was no use waiting to see if this would be one of the quickly passing showers that frequented the atoll. It was pretty clear from the oncoming wind and darkening skies that Doug and the Weather Channel had been bang on. A full on rainstorm was about to make landfall.

  Sliding his toes back into his flip-flops, he scooped up the cooler by the handle and unhurriedly strolled back through the rain toward his building. A little water never killed anyone. The walk was brief, but it was long enough to soak his shirt through and make his hair wet. His place was up on the third floor. He trod up the stairs, unlocked the door, placed the cooler on the linoleum and moved over to a laptop perched on a small computer desk. He swiped his hand through his hair to get the worst of the water out so that it wouldn’t drip down onto the keyboard. He then made a few keystrokes and logged on. Outside, he heard heavier raindrops start pelting the roof. He clicked on his email inbox and searched for an email from Emma Connolly. He found it almost instantly and opened it up, as he had done countless times already. The date indicated that it was little over three weeks old.

  It read as follows.

  Dear Mr. Kettle,

  My name is Emma. I don’t know how to say this without being blunt, so I’m just going to say it. I think I’m your daughter.

  I’m 14 years old, I was born in Seattle, and my mom is Jane. Before she was married, her last name was Kalani.

  I don’t know how you feel about it, or if this seems too weird, but I’d like to meet you one day. Do you think that would be okay?

  You don’t have to answer me right away. I know this must be a shock. Just send me a reply whenever you’re ready.

  Sincerely,

  Emma Connolly

  Kettle closed the laptop. As he had done many times already, he promised himself he would reply tomorrow.

  1.4 SAELIKO

  Janx, revered and much-feared harker of the Epoch, sat in her enormous seawood chair. Saeliko hated that chair. If nothing else, it was a complete waste of space, no small concern when living on a ship. The entirely impractical construction consisted of roughly twenty hunks of washed up tree debris all mashed together and carved into a monstrosity that looked vaguely – very vaguely – like a throne. An unnecessarily uncomfortable throne with some of the larger component pieces splayed out to the side and rear at considerable distance, meaning that anyone trying to get close to the stupid thing had to navigate varying heights of seawood. Were it her choice, she would take an axe to it.

  Janx called it her conduit. She claimed that the wood itself, twisted and debauched by the ocean’s touch, helped her commune with the Five. It was the rawness that appealed to her – the way the convoluted form writhed and spiraled like a storm frozen in place. There was an energy trapped in the chair, she said.

  Bollocks.

  “When exactly did the quickspice leave Meshaltown?” Janx inquired in a flat tone that made it impossible to read her feelings on the matter. If she was angry, she wasn’t showing it.

  In front of the harker, a broad table held a plate of partially eaten chicken, a few simple wooden cups, some scattered cutlery and an opened bottle of wine. A map had been rolled up and pushed to the side of the table to make way for the food. Positioned across from Janx in a low-sitting wooden chair that was laughably small compared to Janx’s monstrosity, Governess Gaemmil sat disquietly. She at least looked the part now, having been permitted to exchange her night clothes for a more official looking tunic of dark blue thread with golden embroidery as well as black breeches tucked into calf-high black crocodile skin boots. Over her shoulders hung a Maelian greatcoat with the royal crest – the Snow Bear of Laeden bracketed by halberds – visible on the arm just below the right shoulder. Her face was covered in sweat. The weather on Dyssal Main hardly seemed compatible with official uniforms. Even from where Saeliko sat nonchalantly on a barrel near the door that led out onto the deck, she was exposed to wafts of Gaemmil’s heat- and weight-enhanced stench.

  “Midday the day before last,” the governess replied.

  “Who took it?” Janx stabbed a piece of chicken with a knife and raised it to her mouth.

  “The Mynndah,” came the answer. “Harker Lyssan Lemmel.”

  The Epoch’s harker raised an eyebrow. “Mynndah? That’s one of ours.”

  “Aye, she’s Maelian.”

  Janx raised her knife upward, the piece of pierced chicken dangling in the air. “Hold on.” She cast her eyes back to the Epoch’s qarlden and spoke. “What’s the last we heard of the Mynndah?”

  “Anchored in New Dagos a month ago,” Saeliko reported to her harker. It actually wasn’t very difficult to keep track of the Maelian fleet in the Sollian. It was small and in constant need of repairs, which meant that it was stationary for large parts of the year. The Empire had many priorities spread across the globe, but the Sollian wasn’t one of them. “Last I recall, the Mynndah wasn’t fully seaworthy,” she added. “Lemmel was keeping her in port to help with the city’s defenses.”

  The harker popped the chicken in her mouth and chewed slowly, apparently ruminating on this information. There was a long pause while she masticated and swallowed. Gaemmil shifted in her chair; it groaned and creaked under her girth.

  “Governess,” Janx said suddenly. “How did she look to you?”

  “Lemmel? Looked well enough, I sup . . .”

  “No, not Lemmel. Don’t be daft.” Janx’s eyes were scolding. “The Mynndah. How did that sorry old heap of wood and sail look?”

  “Oh, right.” Gaemmil considered her answer. “Like a sorry old heap,” she concluded.

  “Mainmast was badly cracked up the middle
. Lemmel had it braced in steel, but I wouldn’t be trusting that mast in the open ocean. You get caught in a storm, and that’s that.”

  Janx raised her knife to silence the governess again. “Saeliko, did you have time to have a look around Meshaltown before bringing the good governess aboard the Epoch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see any Lavic sailors?”

  “No.”

  “Not a single one?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Well,” said Janx, tilting her head to the side and leaning the knife toward Gaemmil, “that’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it?”

  “T’is a mystery,” Saeliko agreed. Probably not a difficult one to solve.

  About four weeks past, a convoy of eight Lavic ships had been spotted sailing south of the Dyssals when an off-season tempest took them unaware. One of the ships – a big hulk named the Sarleff, the Lavic word for dawn – wrecked itself on a rocky slab of land extending off the southern point of Dyssal Main. After hauling everything they could onto dry land, a handful of the survivors set off overland to find assistance, leaving the rest of the crew to guard the all-important spice. Apparently it had taken eight days of hacking their way through serpent infested jungle, losing two women along the way, before they stumbled on a coastal logging outfit. From there they used a bit of coin to coax the loggers to row them in canoes all the way up to Meshaltown.

  And that’s where the story got even more interesting. Once the governess learned that a fortune’s worth of quickspice was sitting in fifteen cargo chests on land under her officially mandated jurisdiction, she was by all accounts quick to act. She had very good reason to believe the spice wouldn’t have been compromised by seawater; the Lavics were, if good for little else in her mind, superb at transporting spice. They used a mixture of bees wax, hog lard and some sort of fish oil to waterproof giant leather spice sacks, so even in the event that water penetrated the chests, the spice should have been fine.