After the house had become mine, all mine, Mitchell and Moira came over and we had an enthusiastic afternoon sketching out renovations and saying things like, “Opening out the non-retaining walls into the hearth area,” and “No more shag.” I still keep these noble goals in mind and will probably get to them after I finally buy a new TV. Besides, I was busy with the Spouter.
Ill John and Chosen were glad to have a guy who knew how to bring drywall over without having to pay the full ferry freight fee. They were offisland often during that offseason and trusted me to get much more work done at their new place than I’d ever conceived of doing. I got Mitchell some work as well as a few other guys, but not Donny, who seemed to be getting ready to inherit the Wendy’s Mom from his dad. I had a new kind of credibility on Bismuth and I was sort of getting used to it. I never did really horn in on the seagum trade with the island’s new innkeepers. Mr. Lucy kept that to himself and Donny felt he was gaining his own street cred because of it.
Since I’d sacrificed my WhaleNet phone to the Harbinger Whale last year, I’d actually owned a few more. I found out they were like gum and cigarettes in America—you could buy a phone almost anywhere that had a cash register. I lost two of them overboard, but had held onto the one that Angie gave me. It was Moira’s old phone from before she got her WhaleNet phone from Snorri. Angie had joined the WhaleNet too. Moira’s old phone was still gummy from the puffy stickers I had peeled off it. Unlike my lost, cheap phones, this one had a screen so I could see the WhaleNet icons again. It was interesting to see what they’d got up to. Mine was at the center; it still looked like me, but I had a better haircut, thanks to Angie. Despite the fact that the icons were all rendered in tobacco juice-colored scrimshaw-style, Angie’s icon had red lipstick. Sometimes it appeared to smile, but I might be presuming, since she’s not my girlfriend. Her icon circumnavigated around the rest of us. At first I took this to mean that she was the wanderer and I was the center of the solar system. Now I understand she’s prescribing her territory—Bismuth is hers. She keeps me schooled in the center of the shoal so I’ll stay out of trouble and out of her way. She’s not my girlfriend, but I don’t know who else she sees.
There’s another icon on the WhaleNet I don’t remember from my first phone, one that’s not on Moria’s and Angie’s phones. For weeks I thought it was just a little square of static. And then one day, when I’d been looking at Angie’s icon for a while, I noticed the static square had certain forms—lines and swirls that looked like a fetal sonogram or a tiny hurricane. It was like a caricature of bad reception. Something seemed to be taking shape there; it was hard to look away from. Once, the icon inflated to cover the whole screen and my phone throbbed, not vibrated. It thumped from within my pocket once, then several seconds later again. A sort of tub. .. dub. Slow and heavy. I took the call, and whatever it had to say, it was beyond the capacity of my phone’s speaker to render. All I heard was whooshing.
Snorri’s icon was pulsing with imminence. I’d seen its eyes follow me a few times recently. He was due on Bismuth. I could tell by the color of the water, the taste of the air, and because Moira told me she saw him at her Aunt Mini’s the other day. The last I’d seen of his flesh and blood form, I was sputtering in the cold Atlantic. He was still onboard, waving with his whole arm and pointing at me. All of my standard motherfucking imprecations had been shocked out of me by the plunge, and each time I tried to wave my fist at him, I sank some. My duffel straps kept shrugging off my arm and I wondered which would be stupider: losing my money and then drowning, or drowning while trying to keep my money. Unable to convincingly threaten Snorri’s life, I turned to the Hammer Maiden to beg Waldena to rescue me. She also was waving and pointing. It didn’t seem to me that Snorri was wishing me well on my journey, nor did I think Waldena was signaling how glad she was to see me. Utterly horrified, I realized they had the vantage of their gunwales to see the abominable shadow rising from below me, the Harbinger of Engulfment, the Big Blackie itself. I knew that in moments its sheer bulk would displace enough water to vacuum me under. I thought for a moment about loosening my hold on the duffel of money so I could grapple the whale’s blowhole when I got the chance. Some whales launch themselves from the depths to shake loose and then crush the demonic lampreys burrowing into their hides. So too would the Harbinger Whale when I scrabbled for purchase on the rim of his blowhole. At the apex of his breach I’d be ejaculated skyward. In what would be my last sensible moment I’d give a good full wave goodbye to my Northern Indian friends before I splatted on the ocean’s surface. The whale would give me a last whomping to demonstrate who was boss out here on the wide lonesome; what was left of me that wasn’t bludgeoned into chummy paste would flutter downward into the predatory, teeming nowhere. Maybe I’d have time enough to bloat and return to the surface to have my eyeballs pecked out by the skua and gulls. More likely though, the sharks that attended the whale—the Harbinger’s hench-sharks—would rend my corpse into stew-chunks before I even knew I was dead.
It had crept up upon me, my wet and final moment. But I hadn’t been drained into a whale vortex. Instead, its enormous round blaze orange-rimmed eye ogled and speculated me. For far too long. In fact, it went from looking at me to looking an awful lot like a life buoy with a line back to the Hammer Maiden that Waldena had thrown me. The same orange life preserver they’d been pointing at. I feathered my ankles to check if my feet hadn’t been bit off yet and paddled to the ring and let Waldena haul me in.
I learned things on the Hammer Maiden. I was taught things. Things about myself, even. Things that will vex me forever after, things that are none of anybody’s business, that I wish weren’t mine. Things that will never have any practical application on Bismuth. I return to these things in my mind too often, the way my tongue returns to stroke a canker sore.
My phone rang. Or, it uttered a pleasant trill. That was Moira’s ringtone, though it was neither a ring nor a tone. Each member of the WhaleNet has a ringtone. I think I could set them individually if I wanted, but I let the WhaleNet handle it. Moira called me more often than anyone else; her ringtones almost always connoted a cheery busyness. I’d never heard my own tone, but Moira said it had changed from sounding like a beached grampus to a sort of puzzled but interested bird, sort of like a raven’s “Bok?” A grampus, she reminded me, was a small whale with a soft head.
Actually, I think maybe Ill John and Chosen were my most frequent callers. They had a lot of questions about Bismuth and a variety of, as Chosen liked to put it, opportunities that have risen. Their tones were pretty similar—both were a pair of watery barks, as if a dog were trying to tell you something while it was swimming and biting bubbles. It sounded something like my name: “Unh rij, unh rij.”
Waldena texted me sometimes; I think just to spook me. It was never anything sinister—just lines of poetry, sometimes in Estonindian, and terse descriptions of sea creatures and ice floes. But my phone felt different in my hand when I read her messages.
Snorri rarely called to speak to me. His calls announced themselves with an inhuman yoik. He was, however, an epic texter, literally sending me epics and sagas and whole encyclopedias of information about, I don’t know, anything on his mind, I suppose—I didn’t usually read past the first screen. Most recently he’d had plenty to say about the King of Herrings, a nightmarish fish so long it could not fit on one screen of my phone, no matter how much the image was reduced. It was a snaky, despotic beast that had terrified the entire race of herring into subjugation. In addition to being mythically monstrous, it was also, evidently, real.
Angie most often used her phone to predict the future. She would call me and her tone would be like a roomful of canaries; she’d say, “I’ll be there in five minutes,” and then she was. Angie would look at her phone more often than anyone I knew. I would say something, she’d pull out the phone, thumb-type something, then look at me with a slightly anguished, “How could you have possibly been right about that?” expression.
> After nearly a year, her sister Mineola’s icon was still barely sketched in. I got the impression that Mini didn’t want to be on the WhaleNet—or at least didn’t want to be apparent on it. I don’t think she and I ever spoke directly on the phone. I did get plenty of reports from her on WhaleNet business stuff, but it mostly went unread, although I didn’t delete it. My mother, who was mercifully not on the Net, called often. She felt even more compelled to tell me what to do with the house now that I owned it. It turns out the list of things I still hadn’t done to the house since they moved down to Florida was much more extensive than I ever knew. The house was fine though. Even if the uninformed eye did find it a bit rustic.
Moira, though, I took all her calls. She had enthusiasm and little regard for the myriad of inhibitions and confusions that lassoed their coils around me like a. . . . well, like a wall phone cord. It was a relief to chat with her sometimes. My phone again uttered its sharp but happy little “squee,” which was its tone for Moira in her most result-seeking mode. I answered.
“Hi, it’s me. We got here a few minutes ago,” she said.
This was a habit I think she picked up from her mom. I didn’t mind. It’s nice that the youth of our island live a few more moments into the future than their elders. She said she and her mom were in the kitchen, and I went in to find them. Angie and Moira were here to help clean up too.
This was the Spouter’s first wedding. In the small kitchen, Angie, Moira, Chosen, and I were entirely in the way of the poor caterer and her minions, but it was our island and our friend’s B&B, even if it was someone else’s wedding. Nothing really needed cleaning up yet. Or actually, there were vast and teetering towers of sauce and food-filled aluminum trays and pots that we were not going to clean up since we didn’t work for the caterer. I specifically was employed to stay until the bitter end, in case guests needed hauling back to their various rented cabins and rooms and boats for the night. It was an ambitious operation, too big for Bismuth, really. The ferry had even been hired for an extra run to take back the caterer and the guests who weren’t staying overnight. That ferry was leaving pretty soon and we really weren’t helping by clogging up the kitchen. I was glad I was neither working for the caterer nor getting married. I think Moira was there out of excitement and curiosity, and Angie was there due to her congenital habit of supervising anything that occurred within her ken. I recognized the percussive rattling tone of the caterer’s cookware and could tell she was near snapping. As a fellow kitchen worker, I did her a favor and shepherded our group of in-the-way islanders outside.
Moira surveyed the wedding guests. “How many sunglasses you think I’ll get?” She had a good collection of lost glasses she’d been waiting to grow into for years.
“What do you think for phones?” I asked.
“Those scarfs the ladies are wearing are pretty,” she observed.
Strangers leave a lot of stuff behind on the island, and it’s not always trash. We were being quiet, since we didn’t want Angie to overhear us.
We sat down at an empty table set up near the kitchen door that opened up on the back garden. The catering minions were snapping the folding chairs closed with peevish alacrity, signaling the end of their involvement and desire to get back on the ferry. We stayed planted in ours—they were island chairs anyway, I’d pushed them over on a wheeled rack built for neither sand nor cobblestones from under the stage of the Historical Society house where they were kept. Actually I was supposed to fold and stack them, but I wasn’t going to mention it to them. Chosen went to get Moira a soda and to make Angie a gin and tonic. He hadn’t asked me if I wanted anything. After he left, I took the bottle of beer out of my jacket pocket and put it on the table. I knew better than to light a cigarette in front of Moira, but would have liked to.
Angie said she’d seen Snorri at Mini’s the other night and that he was coming over to Bismuth tomorrow. Last fall, I’d actually rehearsed some martial arts moves I’d worked out that were all about throwing the Finlindian into the drink the next time I saw him. I was less sore about it now since I’d come to realize that unless one of the boats is a Coast Guard cutter, there’s no easy way to get a dry sailor from one ship to another— if neither ship were willing to be polite and tie up to the other, that is. He just wanted a friend to come with him as he followed a mythical whale to the Arctic. Was that so much to ask? And he really did know I was better off on Bismuth with Angie than on Waldena’s wicked vessel. I knew his shove signaled his disappointment with me—I should have gone with him and allowed him to deliver me to Angie.
What really kept me off of my revenge fantasy, though, was the fact that I had been telling people for a year that the Harbinger Whale had rammed our boat so hard that Snorri had implored me to jump ship and save myself, since he was certain the Honeypaws was going to flounder. It was desperately important to him that someone survive and pass the news of the historic whale sighting along. I had pleaded with him to let me stay aboard and help fend off the monster, or to at least bring him with me to the Hammer Maiden, a ship neither of us wanted to board at all, ever, unless our continued existence was in question. The last I’d seen of Snorri, he was putting on his survival suit and manning the harpoon gun. He’d waved to Waldena and I, shouting, “You’re a brave man, Orange! Remember me!” We both saluted him. “There goes a noble soul,” I told Waldena, as he motored off to face his martyrdom, and she said with grudging but sincere respect that he loved his Honeypaws and that he would be honored by the Whale Council. Then Waldena and I, who were not attracted to each other at all, kept a mature and chaste distance from each other on the trip back to Bismuth, as two grown-up and civilized people would naturally do. Especially since I was so eager to return to Bismuth and make amends to Angie, who was someone I respected as a person, a mother, and as a beautiful woman.
Like the Polk, the target-practice boat I’d first met the Koreans on, my story was full of holes so big you could drive a boat through them, but it hadn’t yet been questioned. Not in front of me, anyway. There was little chance that Angie believed me, but she’d let it go. We’d all managed to be on the same telephone for a while now. I was concerned what might happen if we were all in the same room together.
Angie and I talked about the eternal mysteries of offislanders and their strange ways. With the entire continent at their disposal, why get married here? I’m not even allowed to mention marriage to most married people my age. They’re liable to scream, “We’re fine!” and wave a fist in my face. I suppose some discontent at home is necessary to keep the men of Bismuth going down to the sea in ships.
“How come so many people take pictures of food?” I asked. The caterer had photographed everything she made with her telephone, and many of the guests photographed their plates before eating and then did the same with the table debris afterward.
“It’s nice,” said Angie. “They post the photos to share the stories of the night with their friends. The caterer is probably proud of her work, or wants to study it later.”
“Is there a new stage in eating? It’s like they’re doing favors for anthropologists from the far future.”
Angie didn’t answer. I thought about an invention for telephones that would source local ingredients, choose a recipe, prepare the meal, do the dishes, donate the leftovers, and broadcast every step of it to the world. No actual eating or cleaning would be necessary.
“Do you remember Jellies?” asked Angie.
“When that gale pushed them all into the harbor?” I said. “That was beautiful. And disgusting.” “No, not the fish, the sandals.”
“No.”
“They came between Tevas and Crocs, I think. Years before flip flops. They were ugly. The sandals this year are nicer.”
Angie was looking at the young women’s sandals. I looked at hers. They were pretty and leather and would probably stay on if she broke into a run. She had painted her toenails. They were red, probably. It was dark under the table. She was wearing an Indian print
skirt with a little fringe and a Bismuth Yacht Club hooded sweatshirt. I was wearing my clothes. She saw me thinking about her feet and let a sandal fall from her heel.
Chosen came back with Ill John and gin and tonics for all of us. Everywhere Moira looked, adults were drinking. She said she’d get a start on cleaning up but wanted to know first if she could keep some of the lacy/candle/faux-sea glass table decorations. Later, I risked a hand on Angie’s knee, for the sake of conversational emphasis, and she let it stay. I can do that sometimes, even though she’s not my girlfriend. It was a soft warm night and it never did get fully dark. I forgot to worry about Snorri until I was cinching one of the last trash bags.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Hyperborea
Ialways thought that someday I’d stop being subject to other people’s plans. I shouldn’t, of course, they’re probably the only thing that get me out of the house. I’m sure other people feel I should have better plans of my own, but it doesn’t seem like I ever have the time. I don’t need anyone’s help to waste my own time, but someone’s usually there to do it for me, since their plans might as well be my plans, and my time might as well be their time.
So Snorri’s plans changed, and I had to join him on Gaeity, Mineola’s island, two days after the wedding at the Spouter. I had plans the day after the wedding that involved some nice weed from Ricky—I was glad he’d signed on for another tour of duty as the Topsoil tender captain—the weight of Rover upon my belly, the leftovers I was sent home with, and the beer that found its way home with me too. It was good: Lemon chicken with capers, Asian-style noodle salad—there had been a cassoulet with lots of smoked bacon, but Angie and Moira ate it all that night. Ever since I’d been mooching meals off of Ill John and Chosen, I’d been eating better than I had in decades. So Rover and I were busy that next day and unable to come to the phone just right then, even if was actually in my pocket.
SWELL Page 28