by Lisa Moore
A family of ducks on a pan of ice tried to flee, all huddled together in a pack, waddling fast and then stopping. Staying still. They waited, and with the next bang the ducks turned together and waddled in the other direction. Helen was close enough to hear the ducks, but they didn’t make any noise at all. A red spurting fountain shot up a geyser of white spirals. More flowers over their heads dropping petals.
A girl a few yards behind them was counting down with her boyfriend. Five, four, three, two, one. And then the girl yelled Happy New Year, hopping up and down. Boom, crack, boom crack, boom, and Barry drew Helen into his arms and his mouth was on her mouth and they pressed hard together, and his tongue and the firm strength of his body and his hand under her jacket on the back of her cashmere sweater. They kissed for a long time.
When they drew apart, the dark sky had clouds of smoke and the crowd had started back up over the hill, and Helen said, Do you want to come back for coffee or a whisky or something. And Barry said, Yes I do.
In the kitchen, Helen screwed the espresso maker together and put it on the stove. She had whipped cream in the fridge and a bottle of Baileys, and she set those things out. Barry was on the couch in the living room and Helen went out and flopped down beside him, and it was ordinary. They were friends and it was well past midnight and her thighs were cold.
Then his hand was on her crotch, moving, and she lifted her hips towards his hand. He was looking into her eyes. It wasn’t ordinary. She was mistaken. His thumb on the seam of her jeans, rubbing intently. The reflection of his watch face, a disc of light, was jiggling on the faded pink floral fabric of the couch. It was a frenetic, crazed jiggling.
The espresso maker on the kitchen stove began to bubble. Helen hadn’t screwed down the top canister tightly enough. Steam was escaping through a groove that hadn’t been threaded properly. The metal canister was whistling, high-pitched, and then chugging like an engine. Then it was screamingly high again. Helen pressed hard against Barry’s hand and turned her face into the sofa.
I am going to come, she said. She was not speaking to Barry, and he didn’t answer. The jiggling oval from his watch fluttered over a printed flower on the couch near her mouth. Helen pushed her face into the cushion so he could not watch her. She put out her tongue to touch the disc of light. She could feel the texture of the Scotchgarded couch. It tasted of sawdust.
Then Barry was tearing her jeans down. He was a little rough. Helen held his ass with her hands and their feet hooked together. He was wearing slippery nylon socks. He grimaced during orgasm the way she had once seen him grimace while lifting a sheet of plywood into place, holding it with his shoulder while digging for a nail in his carpenter’s apron. And he grunted. It was a sound so unselfconscious and from so deep inside him that it thrilled her. He said, God almighty. A thrill ran the length of her body like a spill of icy water. Then he said, Goddamn. Goddamn. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath and he kissed her collarbone.
Somebody should turn off the coffee, Helen said. But the espresso maker kept whistling. Finally Barry stood and pulled up his jeans and fastened the leather belt. He walked to the window and parted the curtains. People were walking up from downtown. A cop car went past with the lights on and a few whoops of the siren.
Helen walked into the kitchen and the bottom of the espresso maker was glowing orange as if it were about to melt.
… . .
What Did He Say
THERE WERE A lot of men in the water. There wasn’t very much time, Helen. We were trying to get to them.
What did Cal say? Did he say anything? Helen wanted to hear that Cal had said her name. She wanted to hear that he knew she loved him. She wanted to hear: tell Helen this or that.
It didn’t have to be love.
It didn’t have to be her name.
Just some shout to show that he knew what he was leaving behind. Some shout to acknowledge that she would have to raise four children by herself now. That she would have to get through without love. That she was pregnant. She would like to think some part of him knew, or had intuited, or that some paranormal force had let him know, there was a baby coming.
Helen would like to know that Cal understood how dark the rest of the winter would be, and how the fetus in her womb was kicking and making her throw up, and how the baby would have the cord wrapped around her neck and would be blue, bluish, as none of the others had been, and the terror that Helen would lose the baby now, and how she could not lose her.
Helen had not believed in an afterlife before Cal died and she still did not think of it. But she listened for Cal after he died. She listened for his tread on the stairs; she listened for his advice. She listened for him pouring cereal out of a box, the clink of his spoon; she listened for the dog’s nails on the hardwood as Cal set out its food in the back porch. She listened for his breathing at night. If she was lost in sewing and the kettle whistled, she expected Cal to turn it off. She asked him what he thought of the girls.
And then a murmur, a collective gasp went up, and it turned out her baby girl was fine, just fine, what a big girl, and Helen found herself thinking, Look, Cal, look. She would have liked him to tell her certain things, and she knows exactly what they are:
I’m not afraid.
Tell Helen thank you.
Tell the children I love them.
Tell Helen; tell Helen.
All the men were calling out. We had to cut the ropes where they were iced over. The ropes were so cold. The men couldn’t hang on.
What Helen cannot fathom or forgive: We are alone in death. Of course we are alone. It is a solitude so refined we cannot experience it while we are alive; it is too rarefied, too potent. It is a drug, that solitude, an immediate addiction. A profound selfishness, so full of self it is an immolation of all that came before. Cal was alone in that cold. Utterly alone, and that was death. That, finally, was death.
Helen wants to jump into the ocean in the middle of the night when it’s snowing just to see what it feels like.
Sometimes, like tonight, she is so awake she feels she will never sleep again. She feels an acute awareness of the ongoing life of the teapot. The teapot goes on, the gold vinyl sneaker belonging to her granddaughter remains a gold vinyl sneaker, the phone goes on being a phone.
It is very cold out and very dark, and Helen longs for some movement in the dark, for a taxi to go by. Out on the street the asphalt is so solidly itself. It will always be itself. The house across the street is the house across the street with its naked light bulb in the third-floor window. And there is Helen. But Helen is not sure she is herself.
She lifts her sleeping mask and the furniture buzzes and she feels pins and needles in her feet and a mounting wave of terror; she is solidly alone. She is as alone and cold and obdurately dull as the tree in her backyard, as the fender of a car under the street light, as the apple in the bowl on the kitchen table, as the church across the street, as the steeple covered on one side with snow; she is not Helen, and who is Helen? A scrap of a dream, a fragmented, a frayed—and the phone rings, it blasts into the room, it rings and rings. There is a body in the bed with her and she goes cold with terror. It is Cal. Cal is back, but he is dead.
But it is not Cal. It is not Cal.
Barry switches on the light. He is a man who wears slippers and who scuffs his feet. She can hear him pissing in the toilet down the hall. And she answers the phone and her heart leaps. What you have to become. It’s John. What is it, three? Three in the morning?
Mom, John says. He is crying.
Mom, John says. We have a little baby girl.
… . .
She Sees It
SHE IS THINKING again about the portal. It had a metal deadlight that could be lowered and secured over the two panes of glass, but nobody lowered the deadlight. If that metal deadlight had been lowered, the water wouldn’t have gotten over the control panel.
Helen has memorized the ifs and she can rhyme them off like the rosary. If the men had t
he information they needed, if they had lowered the deadlight, if the water hadn’t shortcir-cuited the control panel, if Cal had had another shift, if Cal had never gotten the job in the first place, if they hadn’t fallen in love. If she hadn’t had the children. If.
She wants to believe Cal had time for a game of cards.
Helen knows Cal liked to have a game of 120s after supper if he wasn’t on duty, and there was time for all that. The fist of ocean had punched through, yes, but there’s every reason to believe from the retrieved voice recordings that nobody was too worried.
Helen wants to know exactly what happened because she can’t stand the idea of not knowing. She wants to be with Cal when the rig goes down.
The public address system had short-circuited and maybe there was a subtle absence of sound the men would have noticed. Maybe Cal was dealing a hand at a card table and he would have noticed a silence like when the fridge cuts out. What she doesn’t want is for him to be asleep. She doesn’t want him to have woken up to the panic. If only someone could have told her where he was.
Somebody in the control room said: Let’s get this water cleaned up.
Or: Get someone in here to clean up that glass.
Somebody said: The panel is wet.
Somebody said: Valves opening by themselves.
And a voice said: Working on it.
They retrieved those taped voices later on, and the men didn’t sound worried at all.
Get down there and get it cleaned up, somebody said.
Here’s the funny thing. The sea water hit the panel and it forced a 115-volt current to run in another direction. The current was supposed to run one way but it dug its heels in; it changed its mind.
How different is that current from a human thought or emotion, Helen wonders. A flurry of feeling. A burst of giddy indecision? A filament in one of those bulbs was shot through with an orange line of light that turned blue and then turned to ash. The filament held its shape for an instant and then lost its shape. And that constitutes the first if in a series of sacred ifs that Helen tortures herself with every time she is drowsy or alone in the car or finds herself staring into space: If the current hadn’t run amok.
There might have been smoke or there might not. Maybe a few blue sparks like fireflies hover over the board for a second before they are extinguished. Helen doesn’t imagine smoke, but she hears the crackle inside the teensy-tiny lights, like crunching tinfoil against a filling, a sound more like a touch than a sound. She hears this tiny sound, or feels it, deep inside her head.
The current was nervous energy that panicked and busted all the delicate filaments in its wake, and indicator lights went off on the control panel.
Or they flickered.
The PA system died. One of the guys in the control room might have asked for assistance, but the PA system wasn’t working because of the water all over the control panel.
If you listen to the voices recorded in the control room the men sound relaxed, and there’s every reason to believe that Cal is scooping up a handful of change on the card table with no idea of what’s about to happen. Helen wants him that way, innocent of everything.
A radio handset caught stray sound floating between neighbouring rigs out on the ocean. A line or two of talk crossed wires. The men on the other vessel, the Seaforth Highlander, heard this talk, and they wrote down what they heard. What the men on the Ocean Ranger knew was the weather. They knew the waves were thirty-seven feet and the wind had reached eighty or ninety knots. Or the waves were ninety feet and the wind was gathering speed.
On one of the other rigs, a metal shed bolted to the drilling floor blew away.
We’re going to need every helicopter they got, someone from the Ocean Ranger said. This was the line that came through. Consider the hope in it.
Or the line that came through was: Tell them to send every helicopter they have.
They said: Send everything you have. Someone listening remarked on the calm. It was a calm voice that said about needing helicopters. Of course, there were no helicopters because there was rime ice in the clouds, because of a low ceiling, because helicopters could not fly in that weather, and the men must have known it.
The men on the Ocean Ranger sent out a mayday. We have a list from which we cannot recover. They gave the coordinates. They said, ASAP. They said eighty-four men.
The men on the Seaforth Highlander heard the mayday and they just gave it to her. Full throttle. They were travelling eight or nine knots. They were eight miles away. They came upon the rig before they knew it. They could not see, and then they saw, and there was a lifeboat and—they could see through the murk—wavering rays of light. The men were bailing. The thing was sinking but there were men on board and they were bailing.
Someone said, Don’t tow them.
Someone had been in a similar situation and knew a tow could capsize a boat like that. They’d laid out a net on the deck of the Seaforth Highlander and the net was gone just like that. Washed over. Everything the men did was covered in ice, and they broke through the ice. The ropes were iced over, and the men’s faces. Every grimace, every gesture, broke out of the ice mask of the last yell or scream. Cheeks and eyelashes and mouths and all the folds and wrinkles of their coats and every new gesture cracked out of the shell of the last gesture and broke free to be seized by ice again. They were men in a film shot frame by frame.
But there were men, still alive, in a lifeboat, and some of them were lightly dressed. These men were bailing because there must have been serious damage to their boat, and they had a system worked out and they were doing what they had to do. They were moving slowly and with method. The method was to stay afloat at all costs. And they capsized.
These men were in the water and the men on the Seaforth Highlander had to untie themselves so they could reach farther, and they were in danger of going in themselves, and they threw the ropes, but the men from the lifeboat could not raise their arms. Life preservers floated within reach, but those men could not reach.
The crew on the Seaforth Highlander had to cut the engine because the men in the water were in danger from the propeller, they might be dragged under and sliced to ribbons. But without the propeller it was a matter of minutes before they had drifted away from the men in the water. And that is the last, Helen thinks. He is gone.
BUT THIS IS not a true account of what Cal faces, and Helen knows it. It’s better to keep to the true story or it will have to be told again until she gets it right. She endeavours to face the true story.
A crevasse forms in the cliff of water and it turns, as things sometimes turn, into concrete. Is it concrete or is it glass? It’s mute and full of noise, angry and tranquil.
How like itself and unlike anything else. How unlike a Ferris wheel or a dog whimpering in its sleep or popcorn in the microwave oven or watching your lover have an orgasm, the clench of a foot curled around a calf or a square of sunlight on the hardwood floor. Growing old. It is like none of these things. Not remotely like.
Or trying to hang on to an iced railing during the tipping upwards of the monstrous hunk of metal. How unlike.
This wall of water has always been. It did not design itself or come from anywhere else or form itself. There was never a forming of. It just is.
It is still and self-combusting. Hungry and glutted with love. Full of mystery, full of a void.
Full of God. Get down on your knees before this creature.
It is the centre of the outside.
This wave is death. When we say death we mean something we cannot say. The wave—because it is just water after all, just water, just naked power, just force—the wave is a mirror image of death, not death itself; but it is advantageous not to glance that way. Avoid the mirror if you can. Cultivate an air of preoccupation. Get. Get out.
Death would like to be introduced. It is willing to be polite. There will be no rush. When the wall closes over Cal, he will be like a fly in amber, a riddle of time, a museum piece. He will lose t
he desire for escape. The obsession with living will seem like a dalliance to him then. Stillness will be the new thing.
The ocean is full of its own collapse, its destiny is to annihilate itself thoroughly, but for a brief moment it stands up straight. It assumes the pose of something that can last.
This wave has been working towards the chewing and swallowing of the world since the beginning of time. Chomp. Chomp. What is the world after all? What are sunlight and love and the birth of a child and all the small passions that break out and flare and matter so very much?
A great guzzling of itself is death, or whatever the end of life may be called, or referred to as, or spoken of. But we don’t know how to name it because it is unknowable.
Except those men know it.
Cal knows it. It is a glittering thing, big and disco-ball beautiful, full of dazzle, and he left her for it.
Here is what Helen has come to think: There must be some promise in death.
If she is in a hopeful mood, sometimes she can believe in more than rot. Sometimes she thinks there must be promise. More promise than the cold ground and a skull and the sprinkle of holy water on a casket and the gold-embroidered robes of the priest and a flock of pigeons and the street gleaming after the rain and snowbanks so bright in the evening gloom after the dark of the church that they hurt the eyes.
She heard Cal in the bathroom that night, brushing his teeth. He spoke to her, but he was not there.
He was passing through. He came to her, Helen believes. Look out the window, he said. Or he said something similar. Look out the window. The rig tips and all the water falls away from its decks and the men hold the rail. They hang on.
It tips and tips and the card table slides sideways and all the silver coins bounce across the floor, dimes and quarters and nickels, and now, at last, she is with him.
Helen is in his skin. She is Cal and she lives through this every night, or sometimes in an instant as she cleans the dishes, and the fact of it is in the faces of her children. It is the doorbell ring and the heat from the oven when she takes out the casserole, it is the smell of ketchup and the noise the ketchup makes coming out of the squeeze bottle, it is the swooshing inside the dishwasher, it is an absolute terror that she wakes to every night. A terror that has invested itself in the microfilaments of her being, in every strand and particle of thought. What will she be without it?