Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

Greg Cookson was a university student with a summer job. He had been hired by the provincial government to go around the province counting things that some deputy ministers thought should be counted and logging the numbers into a small, state-of-the-art laptop computer given to him by his supervisor,Vance Little. Greg eventually realized that this was a make-work project, but he didn’t know that at first. His beat was the South Shore, where the province was fairly certain there were a lot of things that hadn’t been counted lately.

  For a while, he counted various items of trash along a certain stretch of the Number 3 Highway. He wore shorts and a t-shirt that promoted the Canadian rock band Rush. Not everyone understood that he was a Rush fan, and they couldn’t fathom why anyone would wear a t-shirt that stated you should move faster instead of slowing down and taking it easy. Some drivers along the Number 3 actually drove faster when they read “Rush” on Greg’s t-shirt. Subliminal maybe.

  So Greg counted the trash, then street lights in Lunenberg, mailboxes in bad repair in Bridgewater, and potholes in Mutton Hill Harbour. He fed all these numbers into his laptop and plugged in a modem at night so he could send it all to his boss in Halifax. He wondered what he was going to count next, and he was starting to feel like a character in a play. Something in the Theatre of the Absurd that his St. Mary’s University English instructor had taught him about. Eugene Ionesco had written the script for his summer job. But despite the absurdity, he liked the job okay. He had some outrageous games logged onto the hard drive of his laptop for desperate moments of boredom. And he was outdoors a lot, getting a tan, meeting people sometimes. Sometimes young women asked him what he was doing, though, and he felt like a fool trying to explain that he just counted things. Computers had to be fed information and there wasn’t enough new information to feed them. Summer job. Help get him through school, that sort of thing. Someday he’d be a lawyer. He didn’t know why he wanted to be a lawyer. Maybe he didn’t want to be a lawyer, really. He just liked the idea of going to law school. Or at least just telling people that he would go to law school. Something about going to law school seemed cool, but he didn’t know why.

  Vance Little phoned him at his bed and breakfast, the place with way too many flower arrangements and lots of Victorian stuff that made him gag.“Greg, I need you to go out to Ragged Island on the ferry tomorrow and count people.”

  “Wow.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You want me to do the census?”

  “Not exactly. But our information is way out of date. And we can’t tell from our records exactly how many people live out there. Oh sure, we could guess, but why do that when we have you out there working for us. Department of Transportation wants hard data, as current as possible. Something to do with the ferries. Guess this is really why we hired you. Our man on the scene. Households, family counts, breakdown by age. Probably take you a few days. I’ll download the templates for you after we hang up if you want to plug in.”

  “Sure.” Greg plugged in the modem to the phone line and his laptop sucked up the forms it needed. Greg lay back on his Victorian bed and studied the frills and fluff of his room. The B&B, known as Fishermen’s Rest, was run by a gay couple, two men from Calgary who made extraordinarily good breakfasts with local German sausages and eggs and enough cholesterol to kill an Olympic runner.

  In the morning, the ferry left Mutton Hill Harbour dock no more than thirty seconds after it was scheduled to go. Cormorants dove out of the way of the big iron vessel. It was a bright warm day, and the sting of salt in Greg’s nostrils gave him a déjà vu feeling that would not go away. He looked down into the cool, greenish water and saw his own wavy reflection. He kept staring at it like a movie of himself pumped through a special effects toaster. He looked up in time to see an osprey dive straight down into the water and nail a fish, then surface, make a difficult ascent back up into the air, shake itself, and fly off toward an island. Something about all this made Greg decide that he wouldn’t be a lawyer at all. Maybe go to law school for a year, then drop out and hitchhike around the world. It was that kind of a morning.

  On the wharf at Ragged Island, people smiled at him, but no one said hello or anything. He looked like a tourist, a bit goofy with his laptop case slung over his shoulder and the white zinc gunk on his nose to keep it from burning. Zeke, one of the owners of Fisherman’s Rest, had insisted he start wearing serious sunblock or he’d end up with a purple nose and terminal skin cancer by the time he was sixty. Greg figured Zeke was probably telling the truth.

  So where the hell to begin? It wasn’t like counting fire hydrants in Halifax. People. He was counting people. One, two. No. People didn’t stay put. He’d have to go door to door, rely on verbal information. Feeling like an encyclopaedia salesman. Oh well, nothing to do but go for it. Do the best he could. Get a tan, enjoy being on an island.

  He started with something that looked official. There was a post office, but it had been closed down. There was a school that looked like something out of the TV show Road to Avonlea. The door was open. Someone was inside.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi.”

  Whoa. Like going back in time. Young woman not much older than him in a long cotton dress, sitting at a desk, cutting out oak and maple leaves from coloured paper. Another déjà vu.

  Greg tried to explain what he was doing on the island, but suddenly he didn’t care. He stared at her delicate hands cutting out the leaves.

  “Gotta be ready for fall. Lesson plans, visual aids. I’m Kit Lawson, I teach here.”

  Greg sat down in one of the desks in the first row, a desk designed for a kid in third grade.“This place is unreal.”

  “It is. That’s what I love about working on the island. It’s not like anywhere else. Your first time here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the moon last night?”

  “What?”

  “The moon? Full. I can pick out H. G. Wells and Jules Verne now. Grimaldi. Gutenburg. The Bay of Rainbows was like a gift. Daedalus, Doppler — right there, just like they were announcing themselves. Abulfeda, Birkoff, and Botzman.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry. Craters. Those are some of the craters on the moon. I can finally identify even some of the obscure ones. Telescope on a clear night is all you need. When there’s no fog out here, the conditions are perfect.”

  “They named craters on the moon after science fiction writers?”

  “Yes. And astronomers and composers. I love the moon.”

  “So do I,” Greg heard himself say.

  Kit stood up and wrote something with chalk on the old-fashioned slate blackboard that had been washed to a dull, clean surface:“The bluebird carries the sky on its back.”

  “Henry David Thoreau,” she said. She gave a curious smile that made Greg think she was a little off her rocker.

  “I read Thoreau. Something about a cabin in the woods.”

  “Yes. Something like that. Welcome to Walden Pond.”

  She was making those little leaps in conversation that he’d encountered only once before with a girl from St. Mary’s he’d gone out with, fallen in love with, then given up on. So much smarter than him, more complex. Greg was a nuts and bolts kind of guy. Get a degree, go to law school, maybe don’t drop out, get a job that paid good bucks. All there was to it.

  Out of nervousness, he unzipped his computer case and set the laptop on the desk. It seemed absurdly out of place. But Eugene Ionesco was writing. Greg inhaled deeply the smell of chalk, of washed hardwood floors, a trace of wood ash. He felt under the desk and there was chewing gum, decades deep. Ohmigod, he thought. Something going on here. He didn’t know what. He knew that it was important. Shit. “I’m doing a kind of census of the island. D. O. T. is looking for the number of people living here.”

  “Dot?”

  “Sorry, Department of Transport. It’s a summer job. Better than sitting on my butt at home.”

  “You’ll like this place. Everything about it.
This island has saved my life.” Kit began to talk as she continued to cut out fall leaves. Words spilled out of her as strips of coloured paper fell onto the floor. Everything right up to her boyfriend being busted for growing dope.

  Forty minutes had passed. Greg felt like he’d been hypnotized. He stared down at the blinking cursor on his laptop screen. One, he said to himself. So far he had counted one person — a teacher. Slightly mad, very beautiful. He didn’t know if he had the ambition anymore to get up and count others on the island.

  “Do you remember your dreams?” Kit asked, getting up to erase Thoreau from the board.

  “Hardly ever.”

  “Tell me just one.”

  “Um. Well, I’m in a boat and there are no oars. I’m in the middle of the ocean, but somehow there are all these people out there. Laughing at me. I don’t know what to do and I’d like to get out of the boat but I don’t know how. I have no sense of direction. And they keep on laughing.”

  Kit walked over and ran her hand in a strangely casual way through his hair. He thought he’d maybe faint or something, felt his jaw muscles paralyze, stared at the curser blinking at him. “I know that dream. It takes many forms. Don’t worry. You’re okay. The fact that you told me the dream is a good thing. Most people are chicken shit to tell you their dreams because dreams are mostly about fears.”

  “I thought you were going to interpret my dream?”

  “Who do I look like? Carl Jung?” She laughed. Greg had a funny look on his face. Maybe she was laughing at him.

  “Oops, sorry. Not trying to offend. Sure I’ll interpret. No surprises really. You have decisions you have to make about what to do with your life. You don’t think you’re going to make the right decisions. You don’t even know how to begin to get them right. People are laughing at you. You feel insecure. Welcome to the human race.”

  Greg clicked off his computer. Jesus. Why did he feel like someone had just lifted twenty tons of concrete off his head?

  “Is this what you do?” she asked, pointing at the computer.

  “Not really. It’s temporary.”

  “What do you want to do when you get done university?”

  He would not answer with the lawyer thing. No way. “I want to volunteer for work in Third World countries.”

  “Which ones?”

  He was caught off guard. It was some kind of a teacher’s test.

  “Australia,” he said.

  She laughed. “Right. Good choice.” She laughed again and he was back in the oarless boat. Now he thought he could see all the faces of people laughing at him from high atop the deck of a big cruise ship. The big ship reminded him of another dream. He had dreamed that he had been on the Titanic and gotten off in time — that was one version of the dream. He was in a lifeboat with no oars but he had left the ship of his own accord. The rest of the people on the Titanic were laughing at him. And then he saw the name of the ship, not the Titanic, but the Queen Mary. And it began to move off. He was alone on the ocean. Waiting for the currents and winds to carry him to Australia perhaps.

  Greg heard what he thought to be gunshots in the distance, felt that he’d arrived in some strange land where the usual principles of civilization did not necessarily apply.

  “Just the men at the junkyard. Not to worry,” Kit said. “Harmless fun, shooting at cars and whatnot.”

  “I guess I better get on with this census thing.”

  “Go talk to Sylvie. She can give you the run-down on everyone on the island. She’ll save you the legwork.”

  “Is she reliable?” he asked like an idiot. Oh, frig. What was he, back to being a lawyer now?

  “Sylvie wouldn’t lie, if that’s what you mean. Sylvie understands the nature of truth better than any of us. Oh, and hey, I’m sorry I laughed at you. I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought it was kinda cute.”

  “Okay.”

  Greg walked out of the dark school into the blinding sunlight and tried to get a grip on himself. Another gunshot. Men hooting and laughing. A car raced by suddenly with a roaring exhaust and a storm of dust. It had no doors on it and the driver was sitting on a plastic milk crate. He blew the horn and waved. Greg waved back.

  Greg was waylaid on his way to Sylvie’s house by a twelve-year-old American kid named Todd. Todd had been looking out his bedroom window, daydreaming about a video arcade at Seaside Heights on the Jersey Shore. He liked the island okay but he felt peaceful here all the time and he hated feeling peaceful. He called it being bored, and it was the result of a programming problem in his mind that related to vocabulary and the colouring of words with various meanings. He had phone lines and Internet but it just didn’t feel right spending too much time at his computer somehow. Like there was some kind of a force field around the island that made you feel uncomfortable sitting in front of a computer.

  Todd’s sister,Angie, was getting on his nerves here, too. Hell, she got on his nerves everywhere. And it was a little too much like they were living in some old TV show like Little House on the Prairie or something. It was so weird that it was interesting sometimes, but other times he felt cheated out of a real life, not being able to ride his skateboard down to a Seven Eleven and get a large watermelon-flavoured Slurpee when he wanted it. Life was passing him by. If it wasn’t for the fact that his father was letting him shoot guns at things in the junkyard, he’d hate this place altogether. His mother still didn’t know about it. She was all caught up in time-tripping back to life in another century. Even though they had electricity, they had a hand pump in the kitchen. You’d pump it and water came up out of the ground. Spooky or what?

  When Todd spotted the mainlander with the laptop, he was out of the house like a bullet. He introduced himself and told the college student how much RAM he had in his own portable Compaq. Like two wolves in the wilderness, the older boy and younger boy sniffed each other out by trading computer specs and knowledge about software programs. There was common ground and so a sense of community was established. Todd said he’d trade his upgraded Duke Nukem and a couple of three-dimensional chess and checkers programs for anything Greg could offer.

  About then, both noticed that the sky was getting very dark off toward the eastern side of the island. They were standing by the road on high ground, overlooking the harbour. Greg noticed several boats hurrying back to port. They walked up the steps of Todd’s house and sat beneath the sheltering roof of the old porch.

  Greg had bootleg copies of several new adventure games and some role-playing stuff that fundamentalist church groups thought was downright satanic. It would be an equitable trade.

  Todd was only a kid but Greg trusted him, as an outsider, to provide some inside edge on what this island was all about.

  “I don’t know, man. It’s like voodoo or something. People talk funny, they have weird ideas, and everything is like a thousand years old. You can’t pick up TV stations from out here unless you have a dish and we don’t. But I don’t hate it.”

  Greg knew that when a twelve-year-old kid said he didn’t hate a thing, that this was actually very positive. “Do you know how I can find this Sylvie woman? I think I got the directions screwed up.”

  “Oh, yeah. Just go to the end of the road. Keep going until the road ends and there’s just a grassy path. She’s pretty cool, makes good stuff like cookies and cupcakes. But a little strange.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “Right.”

  Todd brought out his laptop and they swapped software as the sky darkened around them and some lightning flashed off at sea. They ran out of things to talk about except for short fragments of sentences about technical attributes of computers. In another time or place, they might have been trading baseball cards, a Hank Aaron for a Roger Maris, and talking batting averages and ERAs; or further back it might have been kids with whittled model boats showing off a miniature keel or rudder. Instead, it was this. Todd was losing interest after a bit and felt boredom creeping up like a familiar thief in the back alley
s of his brain.“The only problem with this place really is that nothing ever happens here.”

  Nothing, Greg understood, was the thing that drove you nuts when you were twelve years old. What happened today? Nothing. What are you gonna do this afternoon? Nothing. What’s bothering you? Nothing. Nada. Inactivity. Lethargy and stasis. He fully understood Todd’s dilemma. Nothing ever happened on the island. In one respect.

  That’s when they heard the hail begin to hit the roof of the porch they sat on. Both closed up their laptops and set them up against the house wall. “Holy Mother of Shit,” Greg said suddenly as he saw a waterspout moving up the eastern side of the island from the sea. He’d never seen a waterspout before and neither had Todd. It was a tall dark funnel of water leading from the sea right up into the heavens, a water tornado. Both Greg and Todd were certain it would not turn out to be real, that it just had to be a Steven Spielberg special effect. Nature could never be this cool.

  It only lasted about five seconds, at least the part they could see. Then it suddenly disappeared. The hail stopped hammering on the roof of the porch and, as Todd’s mother and little sister came out of the house with mouths agape, the hail turned to heavy dollops of rain, each drop seemingly the size of a hardball. Puddles formed almost instantly and those massive clots of rain would hit and flatten, looking like shiny CD-ROMs tossed randomly about on the yard.

  And then the fish began to fall out of the sky.

  At least fifty mackerel splash-landed in the great sheet of water that was now the front yard. They hit with a splat, flipped and flopped around, along with a few slithery eels, rockweed, kelp, and the odd clam and quahog that cracked upon impact. Then the sun burst out just like that and there was a rainbow over the government wharf, where the tethered boats were rocking back and forth like toys in a tub.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Two hundred and forty-four. That was the number of living souls on Ragged Island. Sim Corkum at the D. O. T. finally had the figure he was looking for. His right-arm man,Vance Little, had this kid out there on the island; none of this blind government statistics bullshit. Always out of date, the feds’ material was. The province had the actual number now and it was lower than they had reckoned. That was the good news. There was a bottom line to this thing that could be nailed down. Vance owed his minister a favour, big time. The Honourable Dancy Moxon. It was his own riding, dammit, but Dancy knew he had to cut back the ferry budget to the bone to keep the minster of finance off his back.