The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  The door opened and I stepped through first. Dorothy and Ben had let go of each other’s hands and had unlinked their minds. Or so I supposed. I, too, as my mother’s son, had become a disciple of these psychic games. But I had always been an observer. Not like Ben who dived into the metaphysical pool headfirst and had barely come up to gulp the air of the real world again.

  My mother was on her feet rushing towards us. “What a treat,” she said. “Both of you here at once.” And I didn’t know just then if she meant Dad and me or Ben and her husband. Both of the men she loved. Oh, I doubted very much that the two of them had been physically intimate, beyond the language of hands and “eyebearns,” but I knew deep down that they had developed a love for each other and from what we had seen through the window, theirs was a more passionate intermingling of minds than any I had ever seen.

  “It’s so good to be home,” my father said, the weight of defeat still tugging on his frame so that now he seemed a heavier, bulkier man who had shouldered the worries of the world. He and my mother locked in an embrace and I saw one minute tear trickle down my mother’s face, spill from her cheek and disappear into the dust on the hardwood floor.

  “I should be going,” Ben said. Guilt was written all over him, even though, I suppose by civilized standards, he had nothing to be guilty about. Ben was a gentleman and a good friend to both my mother and to me. He had never under-stood my father, but the two of them had never had the chance to get to know each other. Maybe in some other world with some other set of mores and values, the two of them could have shared this exquisite woman who was my mother. Maybe one could have been intimate with her mind and soul while another loved her heart and body.

  My father did not look at him. My mother did, but said nothing. Her eyes simply told him it was okay, that nothing was wrong; it was not his fault.

  On his way out the door, Ben turned to me and asked, in a half-whisper, “Did everything go okay in Boston?”

  I could not begin to recount the whole tale. “We were treated very well in Boston,” I said. “Dad came to pick up Gwen and me at the airport.”

  Before Ben had a chance to walk out the door, the phone rang. I moved across the room and answered it. It was Gwen.

  “My parents just came back,” she said. “My grandfather’s missing. He took Hants Buckler’s dory out fishing late this afternoon but didn’t come back. At first my mother wasn’t worried. She said he’d always been around boats. She said he could swim like a dolphin if anything went wrong. She was sure he’d be okay. It would be good for him. But it’s so late. No sign of the boat. My parents have driven all around the island and can’t find him.”

  Everyone in the room could tell from my face it was an emergency. “We’ll be right over,” I said. “Stay put.” The simple act of cradling the phone back in its place seemed painful. I was thinking about the lie that had brought her grandfather back to life; I was thinking about all the lies.

  “Gwen’s grandfather went out in Hants’ boat and he didn’t come back.”

  My father let go of my mother. “It’s not a cold night. If he stayed with the boat, he should be okay. Not much of a sea running. Light onshore breeze, down to nothing at all by now. Wouldn’t drive him out to sea.” This would have been something my old man would have known instinctively, even in the dark, even though he had not even had a look at the sea since we arrived on the island. Some things “stay with you in the blood,” as he was fond of saying. Like wind direction. And wave height. In the old days, my old man could wake up, open one eye and only get a glimpse of the sky through a crack in the window shade and know the weather for the day.

  I looked at Ben and we silently admitted our conspiracy to each other again. Could Delaney swim? Did he know anything about boats? What other infinite number of details had we forgotten in our attempts to save a hound of the street and give Gwendolyn her grandfather back from the dead?

  “I’ll call the Coast Guard,” my father said. “They’ll be a while getting here, though. We’ll pick up Ernie and get on over to Eager’s boat. It’s big and it’s fast.”

  “What can I do?” Ben asked.

  “Better come too,” my old man said. “Might need a doctor.”

  “I’ve got a pot of tea already hot,” my mother said, as if the sweet elixir of bitter tea would be enough to save a man lost at sea. But it was the kind of thing that would mean so much to my old man. She was off to the kitchen and back before the call to the Coast Guard was through. She handed me the giant thermos. “You take care of your father,” she said, as she handed it to me.

  The tea was a link to our past. It was the old thermos my father and I had used when we went to sea on those early, magical mornings in the days of fishing, in the days when life was simple, when life was good.

  My father next called Lambert and Eager who said they were ready to go, any time. We drove over to pick up Gwen’s father who was pulling the two headlights out of his old Ford. He had a spool of wire around one arm and jumped into the car with us. I saw Gwen standing in the doorway but I didn’t get out to say anything. “We’ll wire these up to the battery on the boat,” Tennessee Ernie said. “I’ve never been out to sea be-fore,” he said. “What’s it like for him if he’s out there now?”

  “It’s dark and it’s lonely. And there’s two kinds of luck you have out there alone in a boat.”

  “It doesn’t look good, does it?” Ernie asked.

  “Just relax,” my father said. “It doesn’t look one way or the other until you get out there and stare it in the face. We got half a moon and lots of stars. That’s a good start.”

  As we bumped over the road towards Lambert’s wharf, I wished for once we did have the roads paved. I wished we could get there faster. I closed my eyes and tried my mother’s trick. If anyone could tune in old Duke, it should have been me. We had become good friends. I loved that crazy old saint and felt a sudden pang of loss. I tried to reshape his image in my mind but it wasn’t there. I tried to remember how we had conjured him up, so near perfect to the photograph, conjured him up out of the rabble, the pile of old clothes and battered souls who had huddled in Grand Central Station. But he just wasn’t there.

  The car smelled of man sweat. It wasn’t the high school locker room smell. It was the smell of men on a mission, the smell of men with a job to get done, a life to be saved. It was the sweat of fear and necessity. My father pulled up to Lambert’s wharf and lay hard on the horn as we all piled out. Lambert and Eager came charging out the front door. They were cursing at each other and pulling themselves together as they came. A zipper up here, a shirt tail tucked in there. A hoist of a suspender over the shoulder.

  “We got no lights on the boat,” Lambert admitted as we piled onto the boat. “Have to go at it near blind.”

  Ernie held up his two headlights and wire. “Show me where your battery is. Only take me a few minutes to rig these.”

  Lambert handed me a flashlight and pointed towards the battery box. I led Gwen’s father to it as they fired up the boat and started to untie the lines. Despite the darkness, we were already underway as Ernie hooked up the wires and ran them outside. It was the first time I’d ever been alone with Gwen’s father, and as I held the light for him in the cramped corners and he made the sparks fly as he wired in the lights, he spoke first. “I know all about Duke Delaney,” he said. “I probably could have stopped him today. I knew he wasn’t my father-in-law. Gwen’s grandfather was a mean son of a bitch who hated my guts. He was a very cruel man to Gwen’s mother and he carried the hate around in his heart. Duke is just the opposite. I don’t know how you did it, but you saved Gwen’s mother from cracking up. You might have saved our marriage as well.”

  “But I made a mistake. Look what I got him into.”

  “You didn’t make a mistake. I should have stopped him but Gwen’s mother insisted. He had been a great man on the water, she said — boats, fishing. It was all he had lived for at one point.”

  “Unfortun
ately, it isn’t him out there in the dory,” I said.

  As he connected the final wire, the car headlights lit up the inside of the boat with stark, intense light. We looked at each other in the blinding white illumination. “When I saw the first bomb go off in the desert,” he said, “I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I thought I had been part of one of the most splendid creations anyone had ever attempted. I had this feeling that the world would now be safe, it would be perfect. There’d be endless energy, unlimited everything for everyone.” Ernie taped up the wires and then handed one of the lights through an open window to my father, then another to Eager on the other side. The cabin was now a pale yellow. I had looked at the headlight and I was half blinded. All I could see were white spots. “Then Hiroshima, then Nagasaki. But I still believed. Then I thought that if we could do it bigger, do it so big and horrendous that no one would ever dare challenge us or go to war with any nation for fear we would step in and annihilate them, I thought we’d have a peaceful world.”

  “But it didn’t work out that way,” I said.

  “And then all the magic was gone. If nothing could save us, then there was no point in further research. I didn’t know that for sure until I got here. You did more good in a few days by taking Duke Delaney off the streets of New York and bringing him here than Einstein and Fermi and all those years of research did — along with millions of dollars.”

  Ernie pulled something out of his pocket. A folded sheet of paper. “Read this,” he said.

  I unfolded it and aimed the flashlight on it. It was a poem without a title. It read:

  I’m near the end but stumble on —

  the haunting truth, I’m nowhere near.

  The coast goes on like this, too far to match.

  Its million miles will call my bluff,

  remind me I know nothing yet.

  The sun stains the other side

  of the inlet now.

  I see the other shore.

  With a narrow blade of copper light

  I see the green, tall crown of trees.

  The farther shore reminds me this:

  if I were set to circle round

  the continent’s coast

  I’d end back here, a stranger still.

  I could not come back to tie the knot

  of ending to beginning

  since change still rules this ragged edge

  and sets my seasons spinning.

  I realized that Duke Delaney had been a poet after all. I had tangled him up in a beautiful conspiracy of hope and he could not help but accept the lie. Now this.

  “Whatever you do, Ian, don’t feel sorry for him. I think Duke believes he had dreamed you and Ben Ackerman into existence.”

  Up on deck, I surveyed the darkness beyond the skim of the headlights. “Where are we going?” I asked my father, standing by the wheel with Lambert.

  “Only two places to look,” Lambert answered.

  “Shag Rock and The Singing Sisters.”

  “Right,” my old man said. “What’s the tide doing?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Tide was like wind and wave. He knew it instinctively.

  “Low,” Eager answered. “She’s all the way out. That’s good news and that’s bad news.”

  “What does he mean?” Ernie asked me.

  “Means that it’s likely pulled the boat further out, but it also means that Shag Rock and the shoals at the Singing Sisters will be up out of the water. Anything that washes off Whale-bone seems to go to one of those two places. Duke could be on one or the other.”

  “Gonna be tough getting in close to the Shag,” my father said.

  Shag Rock was a low stark island of rock that was visited only by gulls and crabs. No trees, no shrubs, only lichen and sea creatures in the sea ponds and little lagoons. All jagged rock everywhere, not a place for a big boat like this to get in close. The Singing Sisters were a series of small island rocks, each one at this tide probably not much bigger than a man stretched out. If Duke was out here and if he had landed, I hoped he had made it to Shag Rock.

  “Pull in close to the boot,” I told Lambert. “Water’s deep there. I’ll jump off onto her and you go check out the Sisters, then come back for me.” The boot was a little peninsula of Shag Rock that stretched out into the sea. It looked a lot like the boot of Italy without Sicily trailing off at the end.

  Ben didn’t like my idea. “Sounds dangerous.”

  My father agreed. “Yeah. I don’t like it. It’s dark out there, and all those slippery rocks. But you’re right. We’ll never be able to get a look at everything — can’t get in close to all those nooks and crannies. I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” Ben said. “Let me go. You need to make sure that somebody can find their way back to us.”

  My father was shaking his head but he knew there was truth in it. Lambert and Eager were good fishermen, but they were not to be trusted. My old man was probably remembering the fire on their boat from years back.

  “Coming up on the Shag,” Eager said.

  “Cut the lesus engine ‘fore we gouge a hole in us, for Chrissake.”

  Eager throttled the engine down.

  “See if you can find the boot,” my father told Lambert. He grabbed my flashlight and checked it. “Don’t try anything fancy,” he told me.

  “Why don’t you let me go with the boy?” Ernie asked now.

  “Can you swim if you fall in the drink?”

  “I could give it a try,” Ernie answered.

  “Stay put. What about you, Ben?”

  “I once won the fifty meter freestyle in college,” he boasted. “Here we go,” Lambert said. “Good thing there’s no sea min’.”

  “Good thing is right,” echoed Eager. “Give us just a few seconds here. We’ll drift in close. You jump and then I’ll rev her up quick so we don’t turn her into loose lumber.”

  “Ready. Go!” Lambert shouted as we saw the shiny wet ledge of rock creep up close alongside from out of the darkness.

  34

  My previous visit to Shag Rock had been when I was maybe eight years old. It was a hot, clear summer day. No wind. No waves. I’d been up at sunrise with my old man and we’d been fishing all morning. No luck. Not a single bite. It was exquisitely beautiful on the calm sea, but it was also a dead world with not a bird, not a fish anywhere. With nothing to catch, the morning had turned into something other than work.

  My father cut the engine and let us drift. We wouldn’t go far. Like so many things drifting away from Whalebone island, we found our way to Shag Rock. Without saying a word, my father dropped anchor, tore off his shirt and pants and dove straight into the deep, immaculately clear, dark blue water. I did the same. It was the first time I’d ever actually gone swimming off a boat at sea. But we were only yards away from Shag Rock and we swam for it. Instead of hoisting our-selves up onto the first ledge, my father led us up a narrow channel cleft between the rocks to a sheltered pool surrounded on all sides. Long fronds of kelp slithered along my body as we swam, a feeling that still haunts me to this day — those long, almost silky, fingers of seaweed stroking me.

  All was stillness once we were in the pool. But if the sea had been a lifeless place today, it seemed that all of the watery kingdom was here in this basin of crystalline water, thirty feet across and maybe only ten feet at its centre depth. I dared not put a foot on a single rock for every square inch was covered with spiny sea urchins with long, needle-like probes or grotesquely huge barnacles sharp as razor blades. Blue crabs scuttled everywhere. Magnified by the clear water, everything looked surrealistically large. I cocked back my head and just floated.

  Suddenly there was noise. Chaos above us in the sky which was now a jumbled puzzle of black and white laughing gulls who, after a few minutes of studying us, decided we were harmless and settled back to roost on the rocks around this little sea within the sea. I noticed now that the shores were populated with adolescent sea gulls — large, brown mottled, f
luff-ball gull chicks, each as big as a hen and looking nothing like a full-fledged herring gull. Some were tucked into clefts, others simply strolled leisurely along the rocks until a parent was found for company.

  I don’t think I was looking at him at all. Maybe I had for-gotten my father was there, forgotten how I got here and what this was all about. Clearly, I had been transported into another world. The sound startled me at first. A loud whoop echoed off the rock walls, followed by an uncontrollable laughter. I turned myself around in the water to see my old man floating on his back effortlessly, as if he was lying on a bed, his arms locked behind his head, his elbows cocked out to the side, floating and laughing.

  I’m sure I had heard him laugh before but not like this. I admit, it scared me. Everett McQuade was a man with a sense of humour. Yes, he chuckled, he told a joke, but I had never heard him laugh like this. He let out a whoop, turned over on his stomach, dove to the bottom of the pool and came shooting like a Polaris missile back to the surface, his arms outstretched with a lobster the size of a small motorcycle lofted above him. As he shot up into the air, he let out another laugh, heaved the lobster half-heartedly in my direction and I watched as the giant claws pinched the sun from the sky as it descended, then touched the water and began a slow, comical descent back to the bottom.

  “Today, Ian, the world has no purpose and we are obliged to do nothing, kiddo. You and me. We are free.” Later, we lay sunning ourselves on a rock shelf, dozens of the half-grown sea gulls sleeping just feet away from us. We went home fishless but happy. And I would never understand why neither of us said a word about that morning to my mother.