Sea of Tranquility

by Lesley Choyce

  She closed her eyes and remembered drifting at sea. She remembered the sensation of not being alone. Doley and David, Kyle and William. Each of them, in his own way, keeping her company. This had become more and more frequent towards the point where her memory stopped. Where whatever happened had happened. All of the men had coalesced into one voice — a calming, reassuring, masculine voice. The men who had loved her.

  Sylvie opened her eyes again and studied the man in the chair. She had no name to attach to him. In fact, as she looked around the room, objects that should have had names seemed nameless. She struggled with her thoughts until she found the word “chair.” The young man was asleep in a chair. Beside him was a table. One entered the room through a hole in the wall with a movable slab of wood. A door? She tried to say the word out loud but there were no appropriate sounds she could create. It was as if she were being choked in some way. Something was choking her brain. Relax, old girl, the collective voice in her head soothed her. It was not the voice of her husbands, however, but her own familiar voice. Almost singing. The song of herself. And it began to sing something soothing and wordless until she felt calm again.

  She would study the man beside her and see what she could learn from just looking at him. She breathed deeply of the oxygen and it had a pleasant, cool sting in her nostrils and in her throat. It reminded her of the tart ozone aroma of the shore after rain.

  With close concentration and attention to the lines in Brian Gullett’s face, she could read in him a deep disappointment with life and a profound sadness. Great compassion blanketed over by injury to a man’s ego leading to despair. She also understood that whoever he was, he was supposed to be here. This consoling theory cast itself like a net around her confused thoughts and pulled them together. Two people in need of healing. Very different maladies, but both looking for a cure. Sylvie smiled, or tried to smile, and discovered her facial muscles were intolerant of her will. And then the full weight of understanding her physical debilitation settled down upon her like a dark, heavy cloud.

  As the big jet lifted off from LAX in Los Angeles, on Yoshiteru Kojima’s final leg back home to Tokyo, he fit the headphones to his ears and watched a pre-recorded version of the midday news. Violence in Miami. A building collapsing in Cincinnati, a very volatile day indeed on the markets in London, Wall Street, and the good old unreliable Nikkei Index was down two hundred points. Problems for the boys back in the office, for sure. But it didn’t churn his stomach the way it used to. He felt released from previous distress about the day-to-day twists of the markets after his regenerative time on the island in Nova Scotia. He could not wait to see Taeko and tell her.

  After the sports, something else. The bar cart bumped down the aisle. Yoshi leaned left to see the screen and saw a curious thing. A rowboat at sea, surrounded by whales. A man swimming in the water. Yoshi turned up the volume for his headset. Gale Jardine of the Sea Guardian Society was explaining something about global warming, about fish, about whales. Then, amazingly, as if he were dreaming, a camera shot of an island. His island — or so he had come to think of it. “Sylvie Young had travelled over a hundred and twenty miles from here,” a young woman reporter said. “This tiny island, with fewer than two hundred people left residing here, has been plagued by disappointment layered over with disappointment for nearly a hundred years. Fish stocks in crisis and failed eco-tours were only two of the most recent events that led to the government cancelling a ferry service that was the lifeline to this idyllic place.” Next Yoshi saw a very short clip of the premier of Nova Scotia, clearly embarrassed by the negative attention, trying to put a good face on it. “We’re looking into it,” he said. “We expect something can be done.”

  “Meanwhile, an eighty-year-old woman, who has become a powerful focal point of attention for environmentalists around the world, is believed to be in fair condition after a major stroke in a hospital in Halifax.” The final shot was a repeat of Sylvie, curled up in the bottom of the dory on a glassy sea, surrounded by seven whales.

  “Would you care for anything to drink?” the attendant asked Yoshi.

  “No thanks.”

  “Nothing from the bar?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing.” He looked at her and smiled, but she had already turned him off. She moved on and repeated herself to a man in a cowboy hat sitting behind Yoshi.

  There was an empty seat beside him and he slid across to the window and looked out at the pattern of clouds beneath the plane. The missing woman that Bruce had told him about. That was who she was. He could not remember her name. She must have been crazy. Old and crazy like what happened to his father. Yes, it must have been just that. But then what about those images of the little boat, surrounded, as if protected, by those whales, cousins to the whales that fishermen from his country were still slaughtering despite protests around the world and within his own nation.

  Perhaps she was not crazy. The people he had met on that island were completely unlike people he encountered everywhere else. She was one of them. He would like to hear her reasons for going to sea. The TV images of the island reminded him how powerfully the place had affected him. He was tied to the fate of the island. Yoshi picked up the skyphone, made a couple of inquiries, and then located a florist in Halifax who would deliver a great array of flowers to the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Halifax. He felt confident she would be taken care of in the hospitals of a country that had universal health care. Someday Japan would be so wise. Later, he would ensure that if she needed anything, he would make funds available.

  Concern gave way to a familiar shrewdness that Yoshi was never able to shake. He could use this somehow to convince his loyal investors that investing in Ragged Island’s new economy was not just financially prudent but that something much, much grander was going on here. He would get video copies of the news report. He would have his researchers see if it had played in Japan. This was the sort of thing that might allow him the high profile that would nudge this project into something very successful indeed. But he would have to learn how to protect the island as well, to set up the harvesting and processing so that prosperity did not destroy this island that he had grown to love.

  Yoshi continued to observe the blue-white clouds beneath him as he raced home at five hundred miles an hours, six miles above the planet. And he decided that in order for him to ensure that his project did not harm the island in any way, fragile as it was, he would have to move there. He was ready to make the sacrifice of his Tokyo career if necessary. He would tell Taeko this, tonight when they were alone in bed. Taeko, who had longed to return to her little fishing village on Hokkaido, yearned for it every blessed day of her life in Tokyo. She would understand. His prayers for good fortune at the Buddha shrine had been answered.

  Brian left Sylvie’s room not long after a massive delivery of daffodils, roses, and tulips. He needed to shave, he needed to clean himself up. She was sleeping peacefully. The nurses said she was stable. There was paralysis, and the loss of speech was to be expected. But she was far from death’s door. What she was going to need was physical therapy and retraining. Despite the phone calls from his editor, Brian decided he was not going to write a word about his part in all this. In fact, he was prepared to tender his resignation. The endless spewing of contemporary events, the rattling on and on of news was a version of reality that was very, very far from truth, no matter how you sliced it. The endless trail of carnage, disasters, and human error, punctuated by brief bubbles of good news, would continue without him. He was no longer a player in that game.

  Brian wondered why he had hung in there so long. It was a sort of addiction, he supposed. Ever since he had jumped from the Belize and felt the cold water of the Atlantic, he knew that he was no longer the same person. His future was now tied to Sylvie and her island.

  The first frost of October glistened on the grass in Sylvie’s backyard. She awoke and tried to work her right hand and felt a tingling sensation. Her fingers folded over. Her thumb could bend. She wiggl
ed toes on both her feet and arched her right foot. She had become a child, relearning how to move her limbs. She formed words with her lips, but often no sound came out at all.

  The jigsaw of ideas, images, and words rattled around in her head. Each morning, the puzzle needed putting back together yet again, but it was a little easier each time. She felt her energy coming back to her ever so slowly. Her bedroom door was open a crack and she saw Brian Gullett in her kitchen, making coffee in some kind of modern coffee contraption. Another man, a complete stranger, who had moved into her home. A good man.

  Today she would sit again and write. It was a much slower task than before the stroke. She now wrote with her left hand instead of the right. Her handwriting was no longer beautiful to look at. And the English language itself did not always work properly for her. But the words would pour out of her and she would put them on paper and Brian would help her rearrange them to make sense. Todd or maybe even Angie would come to visit and use their computer to put the words into the machine and then print them out at home to give back to her. Her story, her ideas.

  Brian was surprised at the public’s continued interest in Sylvie and her recovery. He was even more shocked at the genuine outpouring of concern for the island itself. The Sea Guardian Society, having lucked onto a gold mine of publicity, had milked the old-woman-and-the-whales story for everything it was worth. Global warming and mass destruction of sea life was back on the public agenda. A recent Gallup poll suggested that it was an issue that was now running ahead of “concern for government deficits.” They called it the “Sylvie Factor.”

  Sylvie needed help getting up but then she could walk on her own with the aid of a walker. She smelled Brian’s French roast coffee as she dragged her right leg and stood firm with her left. She kept her right arm rigid but worked to move herself and her walker with her left. She sat herself down at the kitchen table and looked at the frost outside on the grass.

  At night while she slept, her dreams allowed her better footing for walking, running, dancing, and even lovemaking. David Young, Kyle Bauer, Doley Keizer,William Toye. In her dreams she always had news for them wherever they were. They were still younger men than her, and good men. Vigilant for her recovery. Once fully awake, Sylvie was uncertain if they were somehow real (spirits alive after death) or purely imagined (existing only inside her imagination and memory). She fussed over that for a few days, writing down questions for Brian, who would, in turn, ask his own questions that led her to her own conclusion: it was more or less one and the same.

  She laughed every time someone reminded her of what it was that was restoring the economy of the island. When the new Japanese neighbour and his very delicate wife came to visit her, they brought Brian green tea and left small packages of Oriental herbs to help in Sylvie’s recovery.

  Sylvie heard the island sing every day. Wind in the trees, ferry boat arrivals, cars without mufflers driving too fast to Up Along. The rattle of stones buffeted by the sea. Sylvie could feel the tug of the moon at night, the push and pull of the ocean’s tide. She knew the whales were out there, distant, but safe for the most part, and following the paths they needed to follow until some time in the future, when they would return.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Brian Gullett reads books about whales, about the surface of the moon, and about philosophy. In Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson, he learns that instinct is sympathy. Or in Sylvie’s case, empathy. Something has transformed her. The stroke took away her speech and gave her this heightened sympathetic awareness. She can read people like words on the page of a book. Brian wants to learn that skill from her as well.

  He has taught Sylvie to squeeze a tennis ball with her right hand, to lift her right leg and move her right foot. She can bend her knees. Sylvie is a good student and a quick learner. She is learning how to make the muscles of her face work again, to try to form words with the shape of her mouth. Sounds come out, but they are not always words.

  Brian reshapes his own thinking. She is teaching him. About himself. About time, about memory, about island ways. About living with a woman. There was a time when Brian used words to formulate thoughts rather than the other way around. Now he prefers that freedom of idea over the continual regimentation of language. He laughs at his own former stupidity. Several decades of it — being a good reporter, a cynic, a non-believer. Now Brian believes in just about everything. He believes in possibility. He would like to say he believes in miracles, but that implies a set of other beliefs. Nothing is fixed. All things are possible. That is enough to sustain him in a time frame of becoming instead of having been. He wants Sylvie to train him in sympathy, empathy, and intuitive action. Where should you dig a well and be guaranteed to hit the clean, cool gusher of water beneath? How do you do that mind immersion thing with the sea? What happens when you learn to ride with the solar reflective energy of the moon? Where does it take you? Why is it better to fall prey to madness and return to sanity rather than being sane for an entire lifetime?

  Brian now knows, the world knows, that the whales that had come to Sylvie on the open sea were right whales. Only a few hundred left in the Atlantic Ocean, where there had once been thousands.

  Sylvie is writing in her journal, slowly and carefully with her left hand. Brian touches her hand, smiles, and goes out into the fall afternoon to sit with Phonse Doucette, to drink beer with him and listen to his jokes. Aside from Sylvie, Phonse is his closest friend on the island. It’s because Brian had to work so hard at winning his trust. Today, Brian will tell Phonse about his discussion with Yoshiteru, about the arrangement.

  Yoshiteru Kojima wakes up in a cold room in an old wooden house on Ragged Island. It has electric heat, but he and Taeko prefer sleeping in a cold room with the window open, tucked beneath heavy layers of quilts. The air is pure and clean. The sting of salt is always, always there, and it is something they love. Everyone, everyone back in Tokyo thought he was crazy. Except his own father and Taeko’s widowed mother. Two important anchors of understanding left on the north island of Japan.

  Yoshi wraps his arm around his wife who sleeps so peacefully. He studies the pattern of the quilt upon their bed. The relationship of all the pieces. The quilt was given to them, as was much of their furniture. Things were given to them even before the people of the island knew that Yoshi’s plan was part of their own economic salvation. Yoshi, however, imagines himself as part of some grander plan. It’s some kind of Buddhist thing, but he doesn’t quite know how it has led him to Nova Scotia. In North America, his enterprise is considered somewhat of a joke. But Bruce believed in the idea, and the people of the island, when asked if they wanted to work on the project, said they would give it a try. Even though it sounded pretty far-fetched.

  There was a market for seaweed in Japan. It was no joke. Rockweed, sea lettuce, dulse, Irish moss, laver for making okazu, alaria esculenta — edible kelp for making kombu. All harvested from the Front Bay, dried beneath glass panels, using solar heat. Preserved, packaged, and ready for shipping there in the new “factory” up the shore. But it is nothing like a factory. It is more like a family of people working, laughing, telling jokes, with kids playing in the daycare centre there.

  The sea is full of wealth to be harvested as long as it is harvested with great care. Protect the resource and it will sustain generations. Everyone is amazed that it is profitable. Yoshi knows that others will dare to ruin the valuable food source by over-harvesting. But he will explain this to his contacts in Japan. He believes they will understand. He will explain about the people of his island. He will convince them to buy only from him or from the Nova Scotian entrepreneurs who can guarantee they will not damage the ocean floor and kill the sea. He believes he can do this. He gained great respect and power as a senior investment trader. Although he shuns that former life, he can still make use of the respect he has earned. Do some good with it.

  Yoshi cannot stop being an analyst at heart, but he can shift his point of view. Do the ends justify the
means? Will the process and the product share integrity? He is glad that he and Brian Gullett discussed the dilemma of Phonse Doucette. It will be a break-even at best. Crushing old rusty cars, hauling them on a barge to the ship in Halifax, shipping the metal scrap to Osaka. Some risk, no profit for him. But it will allow Mr. Doucette to turn around a failed business. The island will be cleaner, healthier in the long run. Pieces of the pattern. The quilt that Buddha stitched for him.

  Moses Slaunwhite. Standing on the dock in Mutton Hill Harbour. The very man most suited for managing the seaweed plant. Right place, right time. They still laugh at the pot-bellied Buddha statue in the factory sun room. Some put wildflowers in Buddha’s lap, others light incense sticks. Gautama Buddha on the Atlantic. It’s a fat, jolly Buddha that doesn’t seem so out of place here anymore.

  December holds back from fully fledged winter this far at sea on an island like this. Soft, wet snow melts before it lands. Grass is still green this year and proud enough of morning frost, but white gives way to green again by late morning. The island is an active place. The ferry shuttles back and forth. Not many tourists, but visitors.

  Sylvie can make her own way now to the Aetna, takes along baked goods to sell. Stays for a while. Sometimes mainlanders arrive, hoping to have a chance to speak with her. Pilgrims of sorts. Some find her fascinating, some are a little disappointed that she seems so frail and human. Her speech is slow and she still has trouble with pronouncing words. Those who really care are patient; they wait and they listen. Others return to the mainland feeling they wasted their time. After all, what Sylvie has to offer is very simple, conventional, and old-fashioned.