Beyond the Sea

by Paul Lynch

  The body and the head of Hector are gone, the blood dissolved into water.

  What have I done? Now it is really murder.

  * * *

  He weeps without tears in his sleep. Wakes tormented from dreams. Lies within the feeling left by such dreams. He is a murderer. Again and again, this is what is revealed to him. That he planned Hector’s death, led him to it, not here on the boat, but back on the strip. A secret thing, hidden even from himself. He stares at himself as he was in the dream trying to see who he is.

  He lies cowering, confused, not sure which is true, if he planned to kill Hector back on the strip or if he planned to kill him here on the boat.

  He stares into the dream that rests upon the water.

  Either way, he is dead. It was you who killed him.

  * * *

  The moon and the stars are outing wrong. The wind has been dead for days. The current that carries the panga slows and then stops altogether.

  He thinks, if you do not move, you will not use up any moisture.

  He tries not to suck on his tongue or his teeth.

  He thinks his heart is exhausted.

  He wakes from another dream wherein they are coming to kill him. He studies the sea with suspicion. He sees now the boat has swivelled to face the North Star.

  Two nights later the boat points south-west.

  You are going in circles.

  You are going back home.

  You are going to hell.

  * * *

  For hours he watches rain smoke the distant waters. His hands fondling the cups. He closes his eyes and can taste water loosening his mouth. The blood cleansed again and flowing into the heart. Little by little he sees what is coming is not rain but fog. It travels serene and without wind as though following the drift of its own thought. The air turns clammy and clings to his skin, beads the hull with moisture. Soon the boat is masked with dew. He pulls off his T-shirt and sucks the wet out of it. Crawls the panga on hands and knees licking the hull. When he looks up he sees with horror that the sea has fallen away.

  * * *

  He is falling out of time. This is what he thinks. He cannot be sure how many days he has spent in this fog lying crooked in the cooler, his chin touching his knees, his mouth sucking moisture from his clothes. His mind tasting clear water. Water bundled over rocks. Water splashing into his cup. He cannot remember how long it was since he last crawled the hull.

  He lifts his eyes and listens to the small echoings in the fog as though sound itself is coming undone.

  Then he sits up.

  He has heard voices. People murmuring close by.

  He listens carefully.

  This cannot be true, he thinks.

  His voice sounds out fearful and unsure.

  Who’s there?

  He listens.

  A woman whispers but not to him.

  He is afraid to ask who it is.

  Then his hand grips the cooler. They are talking about him.

  Yes, it is true, the woman’s voice says. He was a bad son. But he was like all sons, guilty of being born a man. You carry him inside you—

  Mama—

  You nurse him and you carry him in your arms. You do this and that for him – all the things a mother does, you are tormented day and night, you go without, you get no thanks whatsoever. But you never think that some day he will abandon you. That one day you will wake up and he will be gone. I did not know until now he was a murderer. Maybe he was always such. For sure there is a part of me he has killed. I did not bring him up to be like this. I did not bring him up to make life more difficult for everyone else. Maybe he is a murderer, who knows what a man is capable of. But he is dead to me, my own son. To think all that time I was carrying something dead in my belly—

  Bolivar lies clutching his hair and weeping dry tears. He squirms and wraps his arms about his knees. He calls out in a hoarse voice but she does not hear him, she is busy talking to somebody else.

  Then he hears the voice of another.

  He tries to call out with a swollen tongue.

  Papa. What are you doing here? How did you find me?

  He is punishing us. Maybe he is punishing us for sins in some past life, who knows. Maybe he is not of our blood. I’ve heard of such things. A bastard switched at birth. That would make sense to me, for sure. Look how many are born around here. It would have been easy. How can I believe he is my own son? Look at him. He is not in my image. I will admit he called me once to tell me he was safe. But I did not tell you this for fear of the pain it would cause you. I would say to you, look, he will be fine, you will hear from him when this trouble he has caused dies down. For sure, I could not tell his wife, his daughter. After a while I could see he was living another life somewhere else, who knows where he was. No doubt he had met another woman. Such is always the case. I did not bring him up to be like this. What I want to know is, how could he be my son?

  He wishes he had more tears to wring this pain out through the crying eyes. There is no more fluid left in the body. His gut seized with cramps. He imagines the knife searching the veins of his wrist. The tip loosening from the flesh a runnel of blood. The lips reddening as he drinks life from the skin.

  * * *

  He is woken by voices. Does not know for how long he has slept. He knows they are still speaking about him.

  Then he says, please, I am dying, bring me water.

  The fog is beginning to thin here and there to reveal the cold tar sea.

  Maybe they are on a boat searching for you, he thinks. Maybe they are lost also.

  A seabird alights upon the trim. He screws his eyes at the bird as it jigs about the deck.

  Then she is speaking again to somebody else. He hears the other voice and cowers back into the cooler, begins to pull at his hair.

  He whispers, Alexa, please, no. I do not want to hear.

  How could I know him? she says. He is there only as a ghost, a shadow within me. I think of him almost never. Sometimes I dream about him and he is there as a feeling, but when I call to him he walks away. Maybe I am searching for him in other men. It is not a question of forgiveness. The sin is ancient. It originated before my time. That is what I reckon. It is as you say. He was born into nature. He is guilty of being born a man. All men are like this, or maybe not all of them. Many perhaps. Maybe there is a choice. It is not for me to say.

  He is not my son.

  God is the father of the devil but the devil is the father of man. That is what I always say. He is made in the devil’s image for sure.

  He is not my father. I look nothing like him.

  His own voice whispering, over and over.

  Man is the father of the devil.

  The father is the devil in man.

  What man ever looks the same way twice when you look at him? Even my own husband. You will find no truth in a man. If he is a murderer he deserves whatever will happen to him. I wash my hands. You cannot expect a mother to put up with everything.

  They asked me to decide whether he is guilty or not.

  Who asked you?

  He must be guilty. He willed his own fate, did he not? He made all this happen.

  Well then, he will die alone. He cut all ties with the world.

  Hell is nothing but shame. Soon he will find this out. That will be his fate. He will be his own judge.

  He can hear the soft cuffing of the bird’s feet. He is thinking of the vein in its neck. Suddenly he surges towards the bird, his hands outreached, his hands arriving upon nothing.

  * * *

  It is raining in the dark when he wakes. The panga rising and falling upon a swell. He crawls near-blind and weakened out of the cooler, feeling for the cups. He falls onto his back and drinks, the water sliding over the swollen tongue, the cold rain striking the face and alerting the skin. He opens his eyes and it is then he sees the fog is gone. He sups water until he is drunk, the moon an impossible fruit.

  * * *

  For days it rains without
cease. He is coming to be again. This is what he feels. The mouth living at the edge of the cup. The mind feeling the water go to work within the body. He can almost see it, the water sluicing the blood, the blood rinsing clean the heart. The mind renewing in the body.

  He thinks he was beset by a dream brought on by drought in the body. And yet the dream lives within him as though real. He hears himself whisper. They will not— Why would they? Why would they come? They will leave me to this punishment. The rain upon this nothing sea. This nothing sea reaching without end. The end never reached. You held within the nothing. It is a strange and lonely fact that you exist.

  He puts his hand to his heart.

  And yet your heart beats. It beats as though you were not nothing. This beating heart feels.

  He sits clutching at his arms, his mind gripped by loneliness.

  * * *

  He is sitting against the hull when he discovers it. If he does not move nor open his eyes he can see her as she sits. His hands very still as he watches. She is getting up from the chair. Her hands upon the arms of the chair and turning. He tries to look. Her face turning into light. He sits squeezing his eyes and tries to see. She is getting up from the small bamboo chair and turning. She is standing up from the chair and turning the chair in another direction. In her turning he can see the curl of her almond hair as it rests upon her shoulder. A red cardigan. Almost her eyes. He stares and holds his breath. She is getting up from the chair and she is turning the chair and she shrugs, pouts her lips, she is looking at him. Almost her face. He tries to see her face but the mind cannot hold a clear image, the image briefly seen cannot be held twice. She is looking at him and he can see her mouth as she speaks. I don’t want to. This is what she says. He has asked her a question. He does not open his eyes. He does not breathe. He does not know what he has asked her. She is getting up off the chair, she is fed up, she is turning the chair into the light, the same light that falls upon her almond hair, the blushed cheek. Then he sees her hands rise up in a protest of some kind. Almost her eyes. I don’t want to. This is what she says. This is what she did. He remembers the moment from so long ago as he looks at it but he cannot remember what surrounds it. What he was doing. What he did after this. What it was he asked her. For a long time he does not move. I don’t want to. Almost her face. How memory sees with feeling not seeing. What he sees is the feeling of a face. Now he is with her. He is helping her move the chair. Then he is picking her up. He is touching her skin. He presses his finger gently into her cheek and feels the run of her teeth. He strokes her hair, separates the strands with his fingertips. He sits a long time like this, his eyes squeezed shut, barely breathing. When he does not breathe he can feel the tiny breath in her chest. He can hold her like this. He puts his arms around her and he is able to speak into her ear. Skin to skin. Almost her eyes.

  He whispers, I was gone.

  I was gone but a great storm blew me back to you.

  The moon black-born while Hector was alive is waning towards its end. He can feel the water’s rising sap within the body, begins to pace the deck. Stands willing for some doing thing. His sight absorbed by emptiness. Now and again he can see some refuse. An item that looks like polystyrene. Then a pandemonium of shearwaters.

  * * *

  He wakes with a sense of something nearby. His eyes combing the half-light. Then he sees some plastic bags floating within reach of the bow. He wonders how he could have heard this. He takes the plank and draws them in, carefully unknots the first bag. What he sees is some medical waste. Discoloured gauze. Cuttings of what might be blood-stained fabric. Something else that causes him to close the bag and retch. He throws the bag overboard. Then slowly he examines the second bag. He unties it to see four plastic bottles with faded labels. Each contains about a cup of brown fluid. He takes a suspicious sniff, tips a finger into the fluid and allows a small taste. It is industrial, somewhat alcoholic, strangely resinous and forbidding. He puts it to his lips and takes a small drink and it comes upon him quick, a sudden feeling of lucidity and strength. The fluid rushing the blood, he can feel it in his hands and legs. He wants to row the boat ashore. He wants to swim towards home. He stands up and shouts and moves about with renewed energy. Later, he sits and stares at the bottles. He does not care what this fluid is. He pours a small drop into a cup and calls it coffee, thins it out with water.

  * * *

  When he wakes each day he reaches over the trim. The sun within its pale increase. His hand scooping the cold sea. He washes his face, his hands, then he bathes the sores on his skin with brine. He dries with a yellow rag that he hangs with a discoloured peg.

  He puts on a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and Hector’s sweater, which now fits him. He makes coffee but does not eat. He reads whatever he can find. A book belonging to his father or a newspaper he can recall. He stares at photos in the newspaper of people from back home. Their images forming and reforming in a dreamlike and fluid consortium.

  He sits and feels the nodding green of the palm trees. The sunlight upon the beach. The bright green fronds shadow-laid in grey-green along the edges of the strip. He thinks of the bodies passing. The motion of walking. The hands languid, the shoulders circular in motion, the toes curling as the feet print the sand. The mouths supple and wet-licked while talking. He thinks about what it is to walk freely, easily. To go from one place to another. How each body moves in a thoughtless echo of all such bodies moving within such daily orbits.

  He takes long walks around the cooler. His feet following the road over the crumbling bridge. Past the beachside cabanas full now with tourists. Burning diesel that drifts from a pickup truck. The air sawing where Memo is running tests on an outboard motor. He steps past men in T-shirts rank with sweat and fish and beer. Leans into the fragrance of guava leaves smoking on charcoal. The waft of cooking fish.

  * * *

  He studies the outness of the world. The profound colours of night. His ear attending to the silence. A growing feeling of awareness coming upon him. What you are among this. He imagines an ocean full of container ships and tankers, each ship moving constant and true and yet all passing within this same silence, the silence itself passing within this outness that is itself always silent. He studies the panga as it rides the swell. His body as it sits in the boat. He examines the feeling of being adrift within this outness until he can no longer measure himself.

  And yet you are here.

  He thinks about this and cannot understand it.

  He thinks of the different ways he could meet death. A swallowing wave. A sudden storm. Hunger setting the body adrift. Thirst setting the mind adrift from the body. And yet he knows he is going to live. It is a feeling that sits alive within him. He tries to examine this feeling but cannot explain it to himself.

  He asks, but how can you know? Where can such a feeling come from?

  He thinks, perhaps it is a question of probability, of doing the right things. There are birds to eat. Fish if you are lucky. There is water in the barrel. You do this and that and you keep your head screwed on and maybe you survive.

  He watches the dark washed by the moon.

  Gazes upon a distant star fallen upon the water.

  Knows it for the jewelled light of a ship.

  * * *

  Always now she is with him and he sees her both as a child and young woman. She sits at the verge of his sight. She sits in the bamboo chair and giggles. She is older, studying a book. She is applying lipstick, putting on a coat. He tells her about the many things he is doing. He says, you will not believe it, but I have grown old and am returning home a different man. All this is thanks to you. You must walk down a path before you are able to return. Isn’t that always so?

  His mind running over the different things he will say to her. He can see himself humble before her door. Then sitting before her, his head bowed, his hands folded on his lap. Afraid to look her in the eyes.

  I did not offer you the comfort of a father.

  I did not gi
ve comfort to others.

  I understand this now.

  Then he shrugs, hears himself mutter, maybe I was not to blame. He thinks about this. Maybe a man is not to be blamed if he has not yet been confronted by truth. Who is to know the how and the when of a man encountering his truth? How long this journey takes. What matters is that he encounters it.

  * * *

  Over three days he catches four birds and puts them in the aviary. He runs daily around the cooler, pushing through the fatigue, feeling the creak in his joints. He thinks, for sure, you have aged a bit. Maybe ten years or so, maybe more. He tongues at a hole in his gum where a molar fell out and he cannot remember it happening. His nails are yellowing and wrinkled. His hands not the thick hands he has known. The wrists are thin. The shoulders gone to bone.

  He stares at the sea hoping to see himself.

  A half-seen stranger with long hair stares back. The face fowled and hidden under beard.

  He shakes his head at this substitute watching in the water. Raises a hand and the substitute’s hand mirrors his own. He opens his mouth and shouts and the mouth before him opens. He turns then but senses in the moment of turning his double remaining on the water unmoved.

  He leans over the trim and stares hard at the water.

  * * *

  These are days of distant lightning, pulses of light in a hundred-mile sky. He feels an ancient awe. A sense of great chaos beyond reach. He wakes into the faint reek of sulphur. Can see in the dim light the panga has crossed the wake of a ship. Discoloured waste upon the water. The who of them. What has passed into nothing.

  Then comes a quickening swell of water marble-topped. He pours coffee and goes to sit in the cooler, gets up and checks the water barrel. He takes a long inhale of air. The sky smells different. Rain will fall and stay down for days.