Finally, we would reach the Left Coast, where we would see familiar ground—the Pacific. There would be whales but not as many islands. I knew of two versions of that coast. One was fully of jiggly boobs and beach volleyball. The other was of neon signs reflected on dark rainy streets. There were sharper racial and class divides here. And professions like style coach and time-management guru—I was from the relative Far East; maybe I could land a job telling people how to rearrange their furniture according to ancient Northeast island spiritual formulas that would make them feel lucky and me wealthy.
I stopped the RV Honeypaws before it became a boat again and took us toward Korea. Thinking about the continent was tiring; I opened a beer and faced east, just to put the landmass behind me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A New Telephone
Several days out, I found myself with only a few beers left. I had mismanaged my supply. I couldn’t even blame Snorri, since he thought my brand was swill. I tried to explain the advantages of buying beer by the thirty, as opposed to twenty-four pack, but he just turned the argument back on me, using it as an example of how his culture favored quality and mine, quantity, and I got stuck trying to make a patriotic point that I couldn’t actually sustain. Sensing my inverse relationship between beer and surliness, or perhaps seizing on the prospect of my impending sobriety, Snorri asked me down into the cabin and said he had a gift for me. Mr. Lucy—my most frequent skipper—sometimes prefaced the assignment of an odious task with ‘I got something for ya.’ Snorri actually had a little box in crisp white wrapping paper with a lacy white bow. I shouted “Sampo!” in mock-triumph, like I was shouting “Goal!” at a soccer game. Snorri looked miffed, as if he thought I had peeked.
It was a rounded ivory rectangle, about half as thick as a pack of cigarettes with a bas-relief carving of a runic “O.” Inside the circle was a cameo of a stylized eight-point mer-deer in profile with one staring saucer eye that immediately sought out my own. After hoofed forelegs, its body took the form of a coiled fish’s tail. Snorri showed me how the device opened like a folding measuring stick. And then he slid and turned a section of it and unfolded it some more, and then some more, tessaract-style, until it resembled a nautilus. “Don’t use it fully extended too often,” he told me, “it saps power.” He then refolded it back into its tile-shape and used his thumb to push forward on the mer-deer and slid the cover open. Inside was a smooth flat surface the color of old milk. Snorri touched the surface with his thumb and the word “sampo” appeared on it, as if it were being time-lapse scrimshawed. He shook it and a grid of tiny faces appeared on the screen. “That’s the private Whale Network,” he said.
Each face was a tobacco-tinged etching of a member of our joint-stock company, plus Moira and Rover, whom I assumed were not actually shareholders. The faces looked like they had been carved on baby teeth. He poked his own face and it grew to fill the screen, which was too narrow to accommodate his reaching eyebrows. A tiny whale began to sing in Snorri’s shirt pocket. He handed me the device and pulled a similar one from his pocket and slid it open. On its screen was an etching of me. I looked OK, but a little startled. This was what I would look like if I were on money. “See? You’re calling me.”
We both put our phones to our ears.
“Hello?” Snorri answered.
“It’s me, Orange,” I said.
“Hello, how are you, Orange?”
“I’m fine, how are you?”
“Splendid.”
“Uh, how do you hang up?”
Snorri demonstrated with his device, sliding and twisting it. “Waterproof. Very rugged. Clever, too. But still, don’t force it.”
I rubbed my thumb over it; it felt good, smooth but a little soapy. It smelled slightly sulfurous.
“I carved the mer-deer sigil for you Orange, that’s your phone. Each of us has our own. We can only call each other on the Whale Network right now, but you can access any network you want with it, no matter the protocols.”
“I thought ivory was illegal.”
“Not for natives, not for ceremonial purposes.”
“This is ceremonial?”
“The ceremony was held a century ago, when this ivory was consecrated to future generations, like myself, to make utensils they hadn’t thought of yet. Look—” he took it, slid open a section, and held it to the sky. The open portion had a translucent yellowish inlay. “That’s ambergris.” Snorri slid and folded it some more until it looked like a batarang, then reconfigured it back into its natal slab shape and handed it back to me. “That’s the self-winding mode, just keep it swinging.” Somehow, now the mer-deer was facing left, when it had been facing right. It was still staring at me, though. Snorri looked at me expectantly.
I was baffled, well on the way to consternation.
“It has free minutes for life,” he said. I was thinking I already had more minutes than I wanted when it started to take on the properties of my own arrhythmia, and I nearly fumbled it. “That’s shudder mode,” he said. “You have a message.” It felt like a bumblebee in a matchbox. I handed it back to Snorri, who held it horizontally and pecked at the screen with his thumbs. He didn’t seem to like the results. “Calluses,” he said, holding up a thumb. “There. See? It’s from me.” It read, ‘Welcome to the Whale Network.’ Snorri handed it back to me again and gave me a look with his eyebrows arched so high, his hairline was pushed back a couple of inches. I realized finally that I was supposed to be grateful, not deeply intimidated.
“Wow?”
Snorri’s face crinkled in a brief registration of frustration.
I considered it. I wasn’t sure I could utter a credible “thank you.” I discovered a small section of my brain that was concerned the device might be alive. The better-informed departments in my head knew how important craftsmanship was to Snorri and his people. But I barely knew what it was, and my pockets had special holes for important objects like this. It was worrisome, like a clock with an extra hour.
I tapped our faces. The etchings had a sameness to them that made me suspect software was the artist. When I had it set on Rover—it was strange to see such a young face rendered in virtual faux-scrimshaw—Snorri took the device from my hands, folded it into a right angle and returned it to me. Somehow it was displaying a three-dimensional illustration of Rover’s head between the halves of the device. Poor little Rover’s face instantly became the creepiest thing I’d seen in days. Still, though, it was fascinating. I looked at it from different angles but she kept looking at me like she was Andrew Jackson looking back at a cashier searching a bill for a watermark. I turned half of the device around so the mer-deer was on top again and folded it back into its rectangle. I was genuinely relieved that the cat’s eidolon hadn’t spoken to me. I told Snorri that it was like a piece of heirloom future.
He was pleased. “The best of the batch have a numinous puissance. They are each unique, but most of their functions are potentialities, at present.”
“It doesn’t work?”
“No, I think in business-English you would say it is ‘beta.’ Its full capacity may never be called upon. Just don’t focus your eyes into the corners of the image projection for long or hold it at a thirty-seven degree angle while moving it in a horizontal plane.” “What?”
“Those might trigger functions that are reserved for the device itself to determine. It is a little more presumptive than intuitive right now.”
“What would it do?”
“There is no real saying. Now all it can do is take different aspects of its programs and mix them together. We think future generations of the device will be able to get past randomness and into wrongness and falsity. From there they might be able start creating something meaningful.”
“This isn’t some kind of robot?”
“No, we just took the future into account when designing it. It’s going to be a phone that might learn how to converse someday. Like how humans only use ten percent of their brains. This has room and some
motivation. The more you use it, the more it will learn and adapt to its circumstances. The richer, more interesting your conversations, the more sophisticated your device will become. When there’s no one to talk with, I have been telling mine the sagas.”
“So that they’re stored in its memory?”
“To give it something to listen to. To establish the cadences. I can tell it is working because the device keeps adding more detail to my portrait. I have even told yours a few stories. Don’t worry, nothing too personal and not even in English.”
I was very reluctant to keep this thing on my person. I slid it into my back pocket like it was a loaded mousetrap. I had an insight. “They talk to each other about us, don’t they?”
Snorri smiled. “Yes, indeed. They are curious.” He patted his crotch. “Here, keep it in your front pocket instead. It will keep you a little warmer on a raw day and the shudder mode is better experienced this way.”
“This is sampo, isn’t it? Not just brand sampo.”
“You’re learning!”
The first intrusive feature of the device I came to learn about was tattling. It ratted me out to the rest of the Whale Network shortly after I had stowed it in my pocket. “Snorri, it’s poking me.”
“Each caller in the Whale Network has their own vibrational signature. Someone is calling you.”
I slid the top open. There was the money version of Moira. The phone was poking in a childishly insistent jab. I wondered if she had chosen her own vibration. I poked her illustration’s nose, held the phone to my ear, and said hello.
“Hi! It’s Moira!”
“How you doin’, Moira?”
“Good. Snorri gave you your phone.”
“Ayup.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m with Snorri on the Honeypaws. We’re sort of whale-watching.”
“I know. Your picture is on Sampo.” “That’s what you’re calling it?”
“It’s written on it. I think that’s its name. What’s yours called?”
“I don’t even know.”
“Snorri will help you name it. I think my mom is going to talk to you soon. Because she didn’t yell when I said you were on the Whale Network now.”
“Can I talk to her? Is she there?”
“I. . . Mom can’t come to the phone right now,” she said, trying to get the euphemism right.
“Um, how come you’re calling me?” I welcomed her bright voice, especially as an antidote to Snorri’s superannuation, but she’d been weirdly quick on the draw, as if she’d been watching her phone, waiting for me to show.
“Your head started bumping up and down on Sampo, so I knew Snorri gave you yours.”
“Well, uh, nice to hear from you. We’ll be back tomorrow.”
“I’m going to give you a ringtone now. You should give me a good one too. Bye.”
I told Snorri it had been Moira, and he smiled. “Mineola says that Angie is making very good progress in trying to forgive you.” He punched me lightly in the shoulder. It was a gesture my father called an “attaboy,” and which I always hated.
The thing home phones must envy about mobile phones is that home phones attract very little attention when they aren’t ringing. Mobile phones are like so many Yorricks to their Hamlets. People muse and ponder over them, waiting for their oracles to speak, or, as in my case, squint at them in perplexity. Yorrick might be a good name for a phone. Snorri would have something snide to say about Danes, though.
This time it rang instead of vibrated. A nearly real ring, too, almost like a little clapper and bell. I slid it open with my thumb; none of the network faces were jiggling. I asked Snorri what was going on. He said I had a phone call, which I’d already figured out. I told him there were no faces to poke.
“That tone means the call is from outside the Whale Network. Here in this box is ‘caller identification’ and that lists the name and number of the person calling you, as long as it’s not blocked. See, it says ‘Whippey.’ I don’t know the American area codes.”
I did. Florida. Mom. Maybe Dad, but probably not; he’d only ever called me a few times in his life, and I could tell Mom was standing right next to him each time. “My mother? How?”
“Why don’t you answer it?” he said and then showed me how.
I tried to clear my mind first. I didn’t want Snorri or my mom to know how spooked I was by her ability to find this little ivory device in my pocket from across the continent. When I answered, she told me how proud she was that I’d finally got a phone and was impressed I had reception. I told her it was a new network, and tried to imply that I’d been on top of the whole cell thing for years and was just waiting for the technology to meet my exacting standards. I didn’t mention the whales.
“How did you find this phone?”
“Your friend John told me.”
“John?” There were several.
“Your Korean friend.”
“How do you even know Ill John?”
“Mrs. Cruikshank—you know she got her real estate license last year, right?—she introduced us. Honey, I think you have his name backwards. You know Hezzie’s—Mrs. Cruikshank’s— daughter, Emily, right? She’s down in Massachusetts and her husband.…”
I didn’t, though I probably just didn’t remember. My mother had a gossip network of her own with a trunk line that stretched along the Atlantic seaboard from their condo in Florida to Bismuth. She was always telling me about the illnesses and exploits of several generations of people and their offisland diaspora she presumed I knew and cared about. I never told her anything I might need to deny later.
“. . . Ronald and Tabitha are moving back from Kittery because they can’t cover their taxes on Bismuth with renters. .
The real purpose, I think, to my mother’s calls was to make sure my little thread was woven into the Bismuthian social tapestry. She thought I did a terrible job of it myself and stitched me in like she was still patching the knees on my Toughskins all those years ago. I usually had trouble accounting for myself when we spoke and had to plan anecdotes about wholesome things I’d done ahead of time, so mostly I just listened passively to the strokes, children, and divorces, and typically failed the occasional pop quizzes she proctored.
The phone had a little stopwatch in a corner of the screen. It would be interesting if it could divide time up into karmic units; this much time has been wasted on the phone; this much time banked up so I don’t die lonely. I had always been good at wasting time, but not so hot at enumerating it.
“Orange, Honey? I asked you if you knew the Hobbler house.”
“No, which one?”
“You remember Jenny Hobbler, that girl that used to tease you in school? Her family’s house. She’s offisland now; she had two boys, I think. Deirdre, that’s Jenny’s mother, Mrs. Hobbler, still owns the house, since they wanted it for Jenny’s family, but she’s not coming back. But since Mr. Hobbler passed, she won’t live there alone and has moved in with her sister just over on the mainland. She doesn’t like it there. I don’t think she and her sister ever got along that well. When they were girls.…”
“The house?” I asked, hoping the interruption would be taken as eager attentiveness and not impatience.
“Dear, as I’ve been trying to tell you for the last several minutes, the Korean boys are going to buy the Hobbler house. And listen to this—they talked about buying the Topsoil and the store too.”
“Why?”
“Well, John said that he and his friend loved the island and they wanted to make investments in hospitality opportunities, or something like that, anyway.” She lowered her voice: “I think they may be the B&B types.” That was my mother’s politest code for ‘gay.’ She was eager to meet more gay men; she had felt deprived throughout most of her life. I’d thought they were probably gay, too, but couldn’t tell for certain. Maybe they just actually liked each other. That’s easier to do if you don’t have sex with each other.
“You know Orange,
your father has said for years that we could sell the house to you for cheap. There’d be no mortgage and no sales tax—you would just have to pay the property tax.” This was a conversation many Bismuthians of my age had with their parents. I’d had it several times with my mother. It’s never been plush on the island, but these days, the houses are assessed for so much and there are so few jobs that even inheriting a free house was too expensive. But Ill John and Chosen were the men with tiger testes and whale phones and probably deep pockets in other peoples’ pants. Property on Bismuth was probably nothing compared to their friends’ crash pads in Bangkok or Dubai or wherever.
“So how come you were talking to John?”
“Hezzie—Mrs. Cruikshank—said that you were their only reference on the island.”
“So? They’re cool.”
“She ... felt that she wanted some more background.” “I would have told her whatever.”
“I think, Honey, that Mrs. Cruikshank and I had more to talk about than you and she might.”
It was possible that my mom was trying to imply that Mrs. C. had insinuated I might not be an entirely reliable character witness.
“So she calls you in Florida to vet these guys neither of you have met?”
“Well, I told Mrs. Cruikshank that I’d have to talk to the gentleman. And then John called me, and he was very polite. Did you know that his father met Mr. Lucy during the war?”
“Yeah, on a sub.”
“He told me about his mother’s kimchi and the hole they had for it in the yard. He was a dear. I’m going to buy some so your father can try it.”
“I don’t think he’d like it.”
“I make cole slaw for him all the time. And he eats sauerkraut.” “Their slaw is like weaponized cabbage.”
“At any rate, Dear, John and his friend want to buy someplace they can stay at next summer.” “Not year round?”
SWELL Page 25