by Jeffrey Ford
“We studied the oceans and seas of the world,” said Maggie. “I never heard of the Sea of Dolphins.”
“Am I to be held accountable for the state of education in these dry times?” asked Archer, pouring himself a glass of tea.
She laughed, as Math laughed beside her, at the antics of the marionettes on the stage of the puppet theatre. The dog turned to her in the dark of the auditorium and whispered, “I know how to cure your mother’s unhappiness, to dissolve her ghosts and sadness, for you know she is troubled behind her eyes.”
“Insane,” said Maggie, a word she had only recently learned.
“Quite,” said Archer and then continued. “Another of the fellows aboard ship was Hustermann, a giant of a man who had never been granted the power of speech, but who could haul in the ship’s anchor by himself. There were also the Fong brothers, identical twins from a village on the South China Sea, who had their own invented language of whistling with which they told each other secrets. A man from the frozen north, Kekmi, ate everything raw and went about without a shirt on even when we sailed through waters littered with icebergs. And there were others, a dozen or so, each as interesting as the next. These rough-and-tumble men, with muscles like rocks and dispositions like exotic creatures, who could not live for more than a year at a time on dry land, who had witnessed firsthand the treachery and wonder of nature, all treated me like a prince. “Beetle,” they called me and, I suppose, saw in my innocence something they had lost and could never regain.”
“Beetle,” said Maggie. “I’m going to call you that sometimes.”
“As you wish,” said Archer. “But you might instead want to call me Collo, the name of the ship’s mascot, a monkey from Brazil with a long tail and the refined human face of a leading man in the moving pictures, whose purpose in life was to make the crew laugh precisely when things seemed most grim. I remember a typhoon off the Cape of Bad Faith. We were all huddled below decks, the deafening sound of the storm above, screaming like the ocean itself was angry at us, and the jostling, the buffeting, the chaotic tumble as we all gathered around a single lantern, waiting to see if we were to live, or drown and lay forever, slowly rotting, on the slope of some undersea mountain …”
Mathematics led her into the heart of the city, his narrow snout pointing the way through dark alleys, across the piazza, up and down great flights of steps. “What is it called?” asked Maggie. “The cure, what is it called?”
The dog got down on all fours as they stopped by a fountain. “I cannot speak its name,” said Math, “for then we will never find it. But, here, I will trace it in the water of the fountain with my paw and you will know it.” The whippet leaned over the pool of the fountain and traced the name of the cure in his reflection. Maggie tried to read, to herself, the silvery trail of his design but did not understand. “Never say it,” said Math as she became a monkey riding on his back through the long columned hallway of a museum.
“… but that damned primate was a card, I tell you,” said Archer, laughing so hard he wheezed and coughed, using the index finger and thumb of his right hand to clear the tears from his eyes. “The spitting image of Randolph Mondrian in The Marble Lark, I tell you, especially when he combed back his monkey hair and employed his tail as a mustache.” He took the bowl off the hookah and tapped it against the side of the table, clearing its charred contents. He then replaced it atop the water pipe and went through the process of refilling it from the crow’s head.
“What about the exotic beast you were capturing for the millionaire?” asked Maggie as her eyelids began to droop.
Archer watched her yawn as he toked at the pipe. He slowly exhaled and said, “Yes, I have yet to tell you about The Mare’s clandestine passenger, hidden in a crate in the hold. We of the crew had heard only rumors of him, that his name was Chromonis and he needed no air or sunlight or water to survive, and that he was the perfect hunter.”
“How many zeroes in a million?” asked Maggie as her eyelids closed. She pictured the zeros as a string of pearls.
“Do you know a thousand?” asked Archer.
His niece nodded as if in a trance.
“Ten thousand?” he asked.
She tried to nod again and her head went down but did not rise.
“Use your mathematics,” she heard him say and saw an image of the boot at the end of his crippled leg crush a clutch of pearls. A thick dark gas, like the ink of a squid, rose to momentarily envelop her in the aroma of the sultan’s perfume. When she looked again, her uncle was asleep and Math had slipped out from under her feet. He stood on his hind legs by the opening to the path they had taken to the observatory.
“Quick, Maggie, we have so far to go,” Math said and dropped to four paws. She wriggled out of the wicker chair and threw off the quilt. Passing Uncle Archer, she leaned over and lightly kissed the scar on his cheek. Then, with a skip and a bound, she was on the dog’s thin back, her legs wrapped around his rippled rib cage, and they were dashing, with whippet speed, along the path. The night trees went by in a blur, and the wind in her face momentarily took her breath away. Math’s haunches released like powerful springs long held back and, yelling to her, “Put your arms around my neck,” he leaped into the sky. They touched down again in the field near the house and then with one more leap they were out over the ocean glimmering with moonlight, flying.
Archer was about to begin his story again when he saw that Maggie had dozed off. He loved to see her so peaceful, but hated to think of her in the clutches of anything so powerful, such as sleep, where he could not intercede. She looked so small in the wide-backed chair, wrapped like a cocoon in the quilt; so alone in the meager glow from above. The wind blew the leaves and the lantern swung, and he wondered if there was anything more he could have done to save her from the unhappiness that would overtake her the following day.
It was true that her father would be leaving her mother, but what Maggie did not know was that she would be accompanying him because her mother would, by then, have been committed to an asylum for the insane. “Elise,” whispered Archer, contemplating his sister and her ghosts. He pictured her tall, stately figure, her long black hair. She had been a kind and gentle mother to Maggie, but those spirits that only she could see, hounding her day and night, had made her dangerous to herself and others, for she believed the only way to rid the world of them was with fire. The list of disastrous incidents was a catalogue of charred remains and close calls for the child.
The ghosts might as well have also haunted his brother-in-law for, through the years of trying to understand her madness, they had drained much of Havrad’s personality, leaving him rather cold, haggard, and blank. Archer gave him credit for trying to effect some change that would save the child from any more time in the presence of true madness, but at the expense of a mother’s love, it was not a real solution. Life was never so clear-cut as to offer anything as certain as a war between Heaven and Hell. That was for stories. As Maggie’s crippled old uncle, he knew that all he was capable of was kindness toward her, and though many would think that enough, he felt its inadequacy tattooed in aquamarine and rose upon his conscience.
Archer refilled his pipe and smoked again. The house blend influenced his thinking, leading him down a back alley of rumination concerning Elise’s spirits. One was a fat old man, Grisby, with a long white beard and a ruddy face like Santa Claus, and the other a small, wasted child, a girl, Quill, with wide eyes and a pale, alabaster face. These two wraiths were always present, reminding Elise of anything that could possibly go wrong. She had told Archer that they spread their messages of gloom with such jolly sarcasm—the possibilities of injury to her daughter, death for her husband, and war and famine and chaos for the world they lived in—like some cosmic joke. At the same time, they protected her from injury, for, as they admitted, without her they would not exist.
Mathematics slipped out from beneath Maggie’s feet and came over to sit next to his master. Archer leaned back in the chair and strok
ed the whippet’s smooth scalp. He closed his eyes and saw the fat old man and the child laughing uproariously. Those peals of mirth, at first cacophonous, soon began to flow like music and then like water, gushing down and all around as the fat man held his stomach as if to keep it from bursting and the poor girl pinched her nose with her fingers to hold her breath against the rising tide. Before he knew it, Archer was quite literally at sea. He lost his weak grip on the chair and was floundering, kicking his good leg and flapping his arms in an attempt to stay afloat.
A giant wave took him under, and he sank like a stone down into the depth of the ocean. “I’ll drown,” he said aloud and his words came as a torrent of bubbles. He did drown but was still somehow miraculously alive. After falling through sleep and miles of jade-green ocean, his feet touched the edge of an undersea mountain. When he kicked off with his good leg in a vain attempt to rise back to the surface, only his spirit ascended in the phantasmal form of his old body, which he left behind to rot on the craggy rock of the sunken precipice.
Then he was Beetle, scurrying along the deck of The Mare, heading for the prow at the insistence of Farso, who pointed into the clear sky. The rest of the crew, the Fongs and Captain Karst, silent Hustermann, Kekmi and Collo, all gathered behind the tattooed man and looked up to where his finger pointed.
“I see it,” said Beetle.
“It’s a girl,” said the captain.
And so it was, a girl falling out of the sky.
Farso pulled off his shirt, leaped up onto the prow and then, taking two quick steps along the wooden horse’s head and muzzle, dove into the sea. His muscled arms, one bearing the likeness of Saint Michael, one the visage of Beelzebub, cut the water as he swam with all his might to the spot where the falling girl hit the waves and sank like a cannonball. When he reached the vicinity, he dove.
“I hope she is all right,” said Archer in the guise of Beetle. He was the boy, but still strangely aware of the old man he had been. Of two minds at once, he wondered at the odd happenstance of a girl falling from the sky and then at the oddness of being a boy filled with wonder.
The Fongs whistled shrilly and Hustermann brought a hand up to cover his roast beef of a face, one eye peeking through splayed fingers. “Get the medical bag, Beetle,” said Captain Karst. “Treatment might be in order.”
Beetle ran back across the deck and then down the short flight to the captain’s cabin. Archer worried that he might not be able to find the bag, but the boy spotted it sitting next to the globe and knew it immediately. By the time he had rejoined the others, Farso had the girl gripped in his left arm and was swimming on his back toward the ship. Hustermann climbed out over the side and hung down by a rope in order to take the girl from her savior.
She lay on the deck, eyes closed, water glistening on her in the sunlight as if she were a newborn baby. She wore a pair of powder-blue pajamas and her hair was twisted and fastened in the back into pigtails. Captain Karst called for the bag and removed its only contents—a bottle of rum. His knees creaked as he knelt beside the girl and tilted the now-open bottle to her lips. A droplet or two of rum trickled into her, and then they waited. When, after a few moments, she did not begin to breathe, Kekmi, the man of the north, gently pushed Karst out of the way and took his place beside the girl. He leaned down over her and put his open mouth on hers. Collo, hanging by his tail from the rigging, looked down upon the group and clapped excitedly.
Nothing happened for close to a minute, and then Kekmi reared back and spat something small, black, and tentacled out onto the deck. Whatever it was tried to scuttle away, but the better looking of the Fong twins stomped on it, crushing it to a pulp. The girl opened her eyes and coughed. The northerner lifted her and placed her in the captain’s arms; he took her below decks, removed her wet clothing and wrapped her in a warm blanket. He and Beetle sat with her, feeding her hot soup, and listened to her explain how the dog she was flying on had turned into a string of numbers, mostly zeros, which were nothing. Then all that was left was a thin one, and she eventually lost her grip on it and fell.
Beetle told her she was safe and with friends. She smiled and asked where she was.
“On a ship in the Sea of Dolphins,” said the captain. “You’ll stay with us until we return to port and then we will find your mother for you.”
“My mother?” asked the girl.
“Of course,” said the captain. “Until then, The Mare will be your mother, and we will all be your father, except Beetle, here. He can be your brother. Come to think of it, Collo can be your doll, if you like.”
“I don’t play with dolls,” said Maggie.
“Just as well,” said Karst. “I don’t think the monkey would have liked it.”
The waves, the sky, the tropical breezes, and the dolphins always leaping, arcing up out of the sea that carried their name and plunging back to cut the water, marked the passage of time beneath the saffron colored sails, appearing for all the world like the curtains in Archer’s sunroom. Like some montage out of The Marble Lark—there was Maggie, riding Hustermann’s shoulders to the crow’s nest as if he was a plough horse with a penchant for climbing; listening intently and learning in a single day the whistle code of the Fongs; taking cutlass instruction on the poop deck from Farso, who smiled, with three gold teeth, at his pupil’s ingenuity; and watching Kekmi carve a dolphin out of whale bone.
Beetle lazed in the moonlight, twined in the rigging, thinking with his Archer-half about how much of the night remained back at the observatory in the forest. Off the starboard side, he saw a ghostly longboat pass, holding a miasmatic old man, fat as a barrel, with a white beard, and a wan, iridescent, young girl. They were laughing without mirth, in a sinister tone. The sight of the spirits frightened him and he closed his eyes momentarily. When he opened them, it was morning, and off in the distance he spotted an island. “Land ho!” he called in his Beetle voice, with his Beetle-half, and below, on deck, the crew crowded to the side of the ship to view the palm-lined shores and volcanic crest of Taramora.
“The home of Neptune’s Daughter,” said Karst.
“He has a daughter?” asked Farso.
“Does Neptune even exist?” asked Karst. “I believe he is merely an ancient myth. You see, if you were to take the ocean and pour it into the shape of man … No, I am referring to the creature they call Neptune’s Daughter. It supposedly haunts the sea caves of this island.”
“Is it pretty?” asked Maggie.
“More horrible, I believe,” said Karst. “With seaweed for hair and a blue and green mottled body. Slippery like a dolphin, but stalking around on huge webbed feet.”
“Claws,” said Kekmi.
“My friend is right,” said Karst. “It cracks one’s head like a walnut, with fangs as thick and sturdy as marlin spikes. Then it scoops out the brains and … you get the picture,” said the captain, glancing down at Maggie and then back to the men.
“How do they know it’s a girl?” she asked.
“They don’t. Men named it,” said Kekmi.
Collo, sitting on the captain’s shoulder, batted his eyelashes and placed the back of his hand lightly against his forehead.
As The Mare approached the island, there was much commotion on deck, for the men were hauling out of the hold, with block and tackle, the large crate that contained the perfect hunter Chromonis. One of the indistinct crew, of the dozen or so whose faces and characters had yet to become clear, utilized a crowbar to pry open the front panel of the container. Its nails released their hold with a screech and the wooden wall fell forward onto the deck. From within the darkness of the crate stepped a man, glistening silver, made all of metal.
The sun’s bright reflection off the strange figure shot a beam into Maggie’s eyes. This blinding light, combined with the frantic whistling of the Fongs, formed a whirl of flame inside the girl’s mind. In the leaping patterns of that fire, she saw, played out, a tableau of her mother in the arms of her father. They were dancing to music perform
ed on the keys of a tiny piano, each snowflake note like the sound of a crystal pin tapping a crystal goblet. She realized eventually that what she had mistaken for a fire was the flicker of a motion-picture projector and that her father was really the actor, Randolph Mondrian. And then Mondrian was, in fact, Collo, hair perfectly combed, pretending to be that leading man with the reputation for romancing starlets. They danced on and on, in tight circles, through light and dark until finally disappearing into a thick fog redolent of perfume and crushed pearls.
That night, after Maggie had retired to her hammock, the men passed around the bottle from the medical bag and listened, by torch light, to Chromonis recite the times tables in honor of the morrow’s hunting. He stood tall and straight like an ambitious young student declaiming Horace. The reflection of the flames played upon his metallic skin, and his eyes, like rivets of light, never blinked. His copper lips did not pronounce words, but merely opened and closed like trapdoors, allowing words to escape, holding them back, straining some to make them squirm through as a means of emphasis. The numbers came and went, and one by one the crew fell into a trance.
Amidst the incantatory rhythm of arithmetic intoned with mechanical accuracy, like a molten rain upon the senses, Farso had a vague recollection of walking the plank in shark-infested seas off Zanzibar. Kekmi fell from the prow toward the gaping maw of a sperm whale. Karst recalled a monstrous typhoon on his tail in the Far Tortuga, but forgot if he ever escaped it. Hustermann felt his neck where the rope had once burned, and the Fongs did not whistle about the incurable fever they had contracted back in the Year of the Rat. Even Beetle had the tiniest whisper of a notion of a bullet to his leg, a cutlass across the face.