I was just wiping down a table when the pretty Irish waitress here for the summer came back with a nice cold beer. She stood and chatted with me while I drank it, telling me a story about a sunburn she’d got earlier this week due to a slightly skimpier bathing suit than usual. I found the story riveting and forgot to storm off when she mentioned that Bob asked her to ask me to stick around to help for Saturday dinner.
Sometime around half-past dyspepsia, the heat and flickery fluorescence of the kitchen began to knot the muscles of my face into a painful grimace. The beer, the coffee, the angry cook, the fussy sous, the shrill waitstaff; all of them conspired to give me a headache worthy of Phineas Gage. Working a holiday weekend night in a tourist town restaurant is like working in an ER during a circus fire. It’s hard to say whether we in the kitchen were the staff or the patients. My headache came to feel like a horseshoe crab clamped on my head, dry humping the nape of my neck. Cooks occasionally stick around to help the dishers at the end of the shift as an act of noblesse oblige; for me it was more grudging solidarity and tragic competence. Being the only person who knows how to snake the grease trap is not a source of pride. At least it earned me a few drags of a joint and two bottles of beer for my walk home.
When I got home, I smelled like hot garbage in a stagnant tidal pool. My bedroom upstairs was still too warm for sleeping. The sofa held an aroma of decade-old overheated parental shame. I couldn’t remember having eaten anything all day, and the mota I’d smoked with a disher by the Topsoil Dumpster made me feel like I was wearing a scratchy hemp bag over my head. The TV was at its most blaringly banal. I couldn’t bear most of the things I relied on when I couldn’t bear most other things.
Late that night, Rover lost patience with me and yowled until I got up off the living room floor. I washed my face and hands and sucked some water up into my swollen sinus cavities. Took some aspirin that smelled like vinegar. I prepared to make a donation to the goddess Cloaca. Blessedly, my gorge settled. I resolved to walk down to the shore and let the cool breeze and negative ions lull me into some kind of comfort—or thoughtlessness, at least. Sunrise over the ocean was bound to have some kind of positive effect on me.
Dawn found me nearly suffocated with my own breath as I dozed at the kitchen table, my head sweaty from the cage I’d made for it with my arms.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ProvuionlnjJor the Voyage
Iwent down to Puffin Muffins for my coffee, a place most Islanders avoided scrupulously. I figured I might forget who I was and wind up on the ferry that afternoon, on my way back home, where my furniture and fulfilling life awaited me on the mainland. Sometimes it did me some good to see people vacationing on my island. It reminded me that novelty and happy surprises really do happen to some people. Right here, even. I watched the daytrippers gathering their gear and provisions they’d ransomed back from the ferry skipper who charged ten dollars a bag, even if it was just a purse. They’d be right there again in five hours, crotches full of sand, skin burnt, wallets thinned. I had no right to mock their baffling choices in island-appropriate clothing. The plastic clogs that made them look like night nurses. The jellybean-colored summer survival gear with detachable legs and plenty of straps and D-rings for securing the tourist in four-point restraints. I’d had to sniff my socks a few times this morning before I decided my feet would be better off without them.
I waved wanly to Islanders who quickened their pace when they saw me. It wasn’t worth talking to them anyway. Either they were pathologically but vaguely busy—undergoing a uniquely stressful period in their otherwise seamlessly swell lives—or their kids were in urgent need of shuttling. Seeing me piss away time so flagrantly sent some people into a sort of rage I never fully understood. My simple existence must rot the pilings that hold up their sense of purpose.
At least as a single male adult islander, I was still allowed to smoke cigarettes, so I bummed one from the girl who sold me the coffee—a nymphette whose parents I sort of knew. It had the satisfying effect of inducing a scowl from a young woman who’d been arguing with her husband at a sidewalk table about how to properly deploy what could have been the ejection seat from a jet fighter, but was probably just a stroller. Children, of course, are the new gods. All must be made respectable and earnest before them. Persons such as myself were forbidden to enter their sacred groves. Only their priests—their parents—could interpret the cryptic commandments they uttered, but we all had to obey. Being a kid these days seemed too hard. I couldn’t keep up.
I took my mope on the road and drifted dockward. I was pleased I had killed the morning; I hoped I could dispatch the afternoon with an equal lack of effort. Just to give me something to look at, a three-masted windjammer was moored outside of the harbor. Some of the rocks I stood on were said to be whilom ballast from English ships during the whaling days. People even said that about our gravestones. As if the island weren’t mostly stone in the first place. I wondered what people of other ports said Bismuthians left behind, besides bastards. I had just realized the pain in my stomach was actually hunger when I noticed the Princess Pea tied alongside the Wendy’s Mom a few docks down at the commercial wharfs. It was a bold and foolish spot for smuggling. A more careful look revealed a couple of guys with black hair and yellow foul weather pants stacking some pots. It had to be the Koreans; by the look of it, they’d finally been alobstering. I figured if they saw me, I’d be conscripted again, so I slunk.
Moira scared the Christ right out of me.
“How come you didn’t come to karaoke night?” she said, having sidled up to me out of nowhere.
“You spooked me.”
“You were standing there forever.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“She’s in town, shopping.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be with her?”
“I don’t have to. How come you weren’t at karaoke night?” She pronounced it ‘Carrie Okie,’ like most of us.
“I was working.” I hate karaoke. It’s no news to me that my neighbors can’t sing. I don’t need empirical proof. “How come you were? It’s late isn’t it?”
“Everyone was there,” she said, as if she were disappointed with me.
“What does your mom say about me?”
“Nothing. I have a new purse. For next year at school. But I probably won’t bring it, but I could just leave it in my backpack. You want to see it? It just has some shells in it now. And some money.”
Moira grubbed into her bag and showed me several dimes, around thirty cents worth of a sand dollar, some periwinkles, and a lot of sand.
“Nice,” I said. “You going to buy me lunch?”
“Do you know what yoiking is? It’s so stupid. Uncle Snorri yoiked at karaoke. You know how it’s like video karaoke? He picked some song and didn’t even sing it. He just wanted to look at the video. It was these people in bathing suits walking around and the sunset and stuff. He wasn’t even singing words in any language. Dad said he was a strangled auk. First he made everybody be quiet, then he said we could yoik too, and the DJ said ‘Thank you!’ in a funny voice and everybody laughed.” “Did you sing?”
“I don’t think kids are allowed to. My mom and Aunt Mini did that “Barracuda” song they always do. They’re so good! My mom told me that this lady, Waldena, is your friend. She’s pretty but kind of mean. She did a song that everyone knew but she did it really scary. And these two guys! They sang “Yellow Submarine” in Korean! I couldn’t believe it!”
Moira sauntered off, purse exhibited, wild night described. I felt a little bit like I did when my mother called me to tell me about the exploits of people I hadn’t seen since they were teenagers. Their difficult in-laws, the delighted grandparents—some-how I was left feeling sadly nostalgic for something I’d never wanted.
I spent the next week-and-a-half trying not to look too hard for the Angie Baby and suppressing my dread of being Snorri’s mate. Tharapita’s Hammer Maiden and Honeypaws were not in evidence, though
I did see the Princess Pea around the harbor several times. I wouldn’t have minded passing some time with Ill John and Chosen, but they seemed busy; maybe they had rented the franchise to someone’s trap line. Lobstering was supposed to be good this season, but prices were down. That probably didn’t much matter to those two. They were probably enjoying themselves just hauling up the bugs.
When it came time to depart with Snorri, I provisioned myself with beer, of course, and some good store-bought food so I wouldn’t have to subsist on herring and shoe leather, or whatever it was that Snorri packed for extended picnics on the Atlantic. I paid too much for a quarter from Ricky, who now said maybe he would go back to school next week—he thought it would just be easier than a job and an apartment. He was very curious about Waldena, and I made him promise to jump overboard if he ever found himself alone with her. He looked at me almost as if I’d cuckolded him, but I let the impertinence pass, since our tacit pact to not mention her had served us well until now. Also, I told him she was seventy-eight years old and had several monstrous grandchildren his age and an angry husband. I traded an eighth of Ricky’s weed with Mitchell to take care of Rover. I thought he’d say no, but he was a strong proponent of me taking a long ocean voyage. I wanted to ask him about Angie, but knew I’d only piss him off. It must have been bad enough for him to watch the Angie Baby make its rounds without wondering if I were on board too.
The day before we shipped off, I sat at the nearly empty raw bar upstairs at the Topsoil and drank my way through two bartender’s shifts. I tried to watch the news so Snorri and I could discuss current events. I was too bleary to read the crawl on the TV bolted into the room’s darkest corner. Afghanistan. . . Blood. . . Contested. . . it was always the same anyway. I doubted Snorri watched much American TV, or any other nation’s for that matter. Finlindian state TV probably had herring for newscasters.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Whale Network
Imay not be as lazy as many people think. It’s just as reasonable to believe that I oversleep because I am not yet done with my seizure of the previous day. Snorri did not share this point of view, but he was going to have me for the next two weeks, so I really didn’t care. We shoved off well before lunch, at any rate. I didn’t know anyone who had ever spent this much time alone with Snorri, and it seemed possible that no human being ever had; I was concerned about being his captive audience. I was just a bit giddy too, wondering when the last time a Whippey from Bismuth had boarded a whaling ship.
Honeypaws was an intimidating vessel, even with her harpoon gun shrouded under heavy Kevlar; pearl white and thick-skinned with armor, she lumbered like her namesake at low speed. Her hull looked tough enough to break ice and she was trimmed with wide gray rubber bumpers, which made it look like she did a lot of shoving. When she got up to speed on open water and up on her hydrofoils, she shrugged off the waves and vaulted along their peaks. This was no tug; she was a catcher boat, born and bred an Arctic predator.
Inside, she was clean and nearly spacious. She had berths for at least eight crew and a few more nautical versions of the Murphy bed. Her cabin did not carry the cannibal’s crock pot aroma I was accustomed to on the Bismuth tubs, but it did carry several more bookshelves and hanging artwork than I’d ever seen on a fishing boat. I was disappointed to see that most of the texts were in Finlindian, a language that seemed to have more diacritical marks than letters in its alphabet.
What was truly intimidating about Honeypaws was being responsible for her. I had never piloted anything this big or fast and had only been on a boat up on its hydrofoils once on a high-speed ferry trip to Canada that had cost as much as a flight to South America. In easy weather, Snorri could set it on automatic pilot and get much of his work done, but he was eager to teach me. It was easier than I expected. I commented to Snorri that I was surprised by how high tech his controls were, and he reminded me his civilization was older than mine and that he was concerned that letting an ignoble savage such as myself take the wheel was less than wise. His highly civilized wheel was more of a hybrid of a steering wheel and a video game controller. I never did find out what half the buttons and gauges did, but I didn’t need them for most of our work. Within a few days and with only a few incidents, I was commanding, “Make it so, thusly!” as I pushed forward on the lever that sprouted our hydrofoils. I came to enjoy it and doubted I’d ever get another chance to skipper anything with half this much power and speed as long as I remained on Bismuth.
Our job was, essentially, to play shepherd to invisible sheep. We had ninety-eight beluga whales to protect as we followed them on their slow migration, and they rarely showed themselves to us. These were the small white whales that Waldena mockingly called “melonheads.” I couldn’t imagine Waldena being much else but indignant that she had been employed as a whale herder. She was probably blasting all the other big game out of the water—the Maiden was probably crusty with swordfish blood. The networked belugas had been bred in open water and conditioned through the generations to be docile. The antennae implanted within them were nearly flat flexible strips of plastic with embedded wires and circuits. They were, according to Snorri, installed in quick painless procedures that could be done on a boat deck or in shallow water. Snorri considered this breed of whale to be sweet and kittenish, but not so bright. He said the obnoxious ones could actually spit buckets of water quite accurately and he disliked feeding their cousins in the Finlindian fjord whale pens. I had heard them on the underwater microphone, and they sounded like Tweety Bird imitating a dial-up modem.
Apart from spying a fluke here and there, we had to rely on the Whale Network itself and Honeypaws’s sonar. Snorri had a handheld device that he would not share with me. He could access most of the boat’s controls with his device, and could even pilot the boat with it remotely. I was allowed to use the boat’s computer, which performed, I supposed, most of the same functions. Mostly, I used a big pictorial spreadsheet with an illustration of each whale on the network. Snorri had named each whale—Henriikka, Iiltaa, Jhalmarii, Kaijia, Lyyli—I couldn’t pronounce any of them, except Mineola and Moira.
By selecting each whale, I could see its network status and the compass coordinates of its location. Another couple of mouse clicks and the location of each nearby whale was shown on a chart of our current coordinates. We more or less followed the main pod of belugas and took occasional excursions to see where the outliers had got to. We kept track of their positions and plotted their courses, along with rating the reception we got near each of them. What we wanted was adequate to excellent signal strength all along their projected migration route.
These little white whales were semi-domesticated and probably easy prey. The other, much more interesting aspect of our job was to protect their little selves. I had asked Snorri several times about weapons access, but he said they would only come out if needed. He said the same thing about his secure cabinet with the old milk, but I still had beer and was happy the noxious stuff was locked up. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to shoot at anything, but having a shotgun handy would have made the enterprise seem more exciting. I couldn’t think of any genuinely persuasive arguments that began with ‘I have plenty of experience with firearms and liquor,’ even though it was sort of true.
The North Atlantic was treating us well. There was a tropical depression somewhere near Africa according to the weather service, but no corresponding Arctic elation in our region. The water was calm and boring. The job was boring. I was boring. After the first few days, I’d run out of things to say to Snorri and depleted my reserves of listening energy—most of Snorri’s stories began with a Northern Indian version of biblical begats, since it was so urgently important for me to know the ancestors of every person, creature, and significant object, fictional and historical, that could sustain a narrative.
One night, as I piloted Honeypaws from boring chart point A to tedious chart point B, and then halfway to featureless point C, but back again to tedious B, I imagined turnin
g her about and taking her as far west as the water would carry her. I had to turn her into an RV to get us across the continent, but she bore the indignity. We were lost for weeks among the rotaries and expressways of the East as we explored Red Sox Nation. We cruised some coastal cities, our vehicle too huge to park among the countless, ever-spawning automobiles. My imagination found it difficult to conceive of the urban masses as anything other than post-apocalyptic zombies and marauders, so Snorri and I had to take turns with the harpoon gun on our armored RV’s roof turret.
Farther west, in the continent’s vast and spreading midsection, the people, like the buffaloes they replaced, were bigger and slower and better armed than their coastal cousins. People of the continent’s heartbasket knew nothing of Bismuth, not even as a cheaper alternative to a weekend on one of the expensive islands. Most of them had never even seen an island or been behind the control of anything without wheels. Snorri and I served the brave and curious among them chowder and made them gifts of T-shirts from distant lands.
We found the middle of the continent’s tragic flaw to be overabundance. From cholesterol to floodwaters, they were imperiled by proportions beyond human control. Today’s archeologists still wondered whether the ancient mounds they found there were monuments or heaps of trash, and so would tomorrow’s. I figured Snorri would save us from the middle-Americans. His experience with bears and whales would give him an intuitive sense of easily-spooked herding creatures. We would flee farther west into the forbidden zone, from whence no Bismuthian had ever returned with a coherent tale to tell. I couldn’t tell the difference between the cities and states from what I’d seen on TV, and every story I’d ever heard was about sameness and distance.
As we crossed the Rockies, Snorri would be reminded of his days in the forest with the bears. He’d like it there and want to stay. I would have to remind him that I’d eat him right away if we got stranded in the snow. People from my island had done that before, so it wasn’t an entirely empty threat.
SWELL Page 24