so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Martin could not die yet, but he was not healed. Days and nights on end he waited at a window overlooking the wasteland, eyes seared by what lay before him, wounded sky and stranded dolphins rotting upon the beach; he stood and waited for death to come.
At night he lay awake and heard people moving softly in the room about him. They whispered, and he could hear his name amidst other words only half-understood, and he recognized the voices. His father was there; his first lover and many others; and once he knew the corrosive chime of laughter from his old nemesis, Leonard Thrope. He had not heard that Leonard had died, but was not surprised at the thought; nor by the twinge of sorrow that accompanied it.
But mostly he heard John. The voices, of course, must be the first stages of dementia. He knew there was no Good Death awaiting him; yet somehow he had not expected this. One night the whisperings grew so intrusive—scrape of bat wings against the window, giggling cold breath against his forehead—that he took a deep breath and opened his eyes, determined to prove to them, at least, that there was nothing there.
Only there was: an entire roomful of phantoms, all familiar faces as at a spectral cocktail party, chatting and moving their hands quite animatedly. The one nearest to him—it was John—turned and with a smile opened his mouth to greet him. Martin screamed. His entire body spasmed with such horror that he shat the bed. He did not repeat the experiment. He took to swallowing tranquilizers at night and slept with a pillow over his head.
So it was with more than the usual green-starved longing that Martin awaited spring that year. One by one he’d cast off the few remaining ties that bound him to the rest of the world—lovers and friends, telephone, television, radio, car, computer—surprised at how easy it had become, and how commonplace, to take up all the antediluvian burdens this Hotspur century had thrown aside. Chopping and carrying firewood, retrofitting an old hand pump for the kitchen, getting used to the sheen of ice on the interior walls and windows of his poorly insulated cottage. Mrs. Grose’s canned zucchini and wax beans (the only things that grew reliably anymore, though they hardly flourished), a hot bath once a week. He’d offset the expense of wax candles by gathering stunted bayberries in the fall, and cursed himself for not installing solar panels years ago, as John had urged him. Now, of course, it was too late.
“Tired?”
From his porch Martin smiled wanly at Mrs. Grose. “A little,” he confessed. No use lying to a centenarian psychic. “I was thinking I might walk down to the beach.”
Mrs. Grose cocked her head, still staring across the bay. “That was some storm we had, eh?” At her feet the little pug gasped, as though at a bad memory. “I thought the roof would blow away!”
“I’m surprised it didn’t,” said Martin.
They stood in silence, watching the uneasy sky. “Well, I guess I’ll go down and see what the storm washed up,” Martin said at last.
“Dinner tonight?” Mrs. Grose called after him. “Diana’s supposed to come and bring us a chicken.”
“Then I’ll be there.”
He bent to pick up the canvas bag he took with him on his sea walks. Then, waving, he stepped from the porch and started downhill to the pier, past the sign so faded that its letters were imprinted only in his memory.
MARS HILL
SPIRITUALIST COMMUNITY
FOUNDED 1883
Drifts of leaves clung to the base of the signpost, but not so many as there had been, once. Martin glanced down at the few sickly daffodils thrusting through the mulch, and winced. Moony had always said she hated spring at Mars Hill: “It’s so hopeless!” To which Mrs. Grose had patiently explained that there was always hope—spring always came, followed by that sudden brilliant burst of northern summer that you never were quite prepared for, no matter how many times you’d seen it. But when Martin had last seen Moony a few weeks earlier, she’d avoided any mention of spring, avoided her annual rants against mud season and snow in May and the necessity of fires in cranky woodstoves that aggravated her asthma. At the time he and Jason had laughed about it (though not within Moony’s hearing). Now Moony’s unaccustomed silence seemed ominous.
She knows something, Martin thought as he trudged down the gravel road to the beach. She knows and she’s not telling.
Overhead the sky gleamed a soft metallic grey, streaked with undulating bands of violet and green. Seagulls called plaintively, trailing in the wake of a solitary lobster boat. The air had a harsh scent, hard to pinpoint but unmistakable. Jason was a marine biologist, and he believed the massive die-offs of krill and other plankton were changing the chemical content of the ocean. In the water a few cormorants bobbed, their heads snaking beneath the surface. Beside the rickety building that served as the community’s storage shed, Martin’s sailboat stood raised on concrete blocks, WENDAMEEN painted on its bow in plain block letters. Martin looked at the boat and sighed, and walked the last few yards to the beach.
Here, at last, things looked pretty much as they always had. No sand, just rocks everywhere, smooth and rounded by aeons of pounding waves. Braids of kelp and bladder wrack, stony hollows filled with periwinkles and goose barnacles; every now and then the fractured puzzle of a broken sea urchin’s shell, the astral shadow of a starfish or sand dollar. If you stared at your feet as you walked along the shore, you might almost imagine the world was as it had been, as it should be. But a glance at the bruised sky, the reflected glare of purple and gold put the lie to that.
The gravel path petered out beside a shriveled stand of rugosa roses. For a few minutes Martin stood and watched the lobster boat disappear into the glowing horizon. In the storm’s aftermath the day was calm and almost windless. But the air had a nasty bite: there was no hint of warmth or snowmelt, none of the vernal promise that usually followed a spring nor’easter. Martin frowned and thought of returning to his cottage, but that would mean facing a sink full of dirty dishes and a recalcitrant hand pump. He began to walk once more.
He kept his head down. Now and then the wind would bring a strong scent of the sea untainted by that poisonous stench of dying krill. He picked up three flattened Budweiser cans and a single brown bottle and shoved them into his canvas sack to be traded later at the Beach Store for credit. Spray stung the back of his neck. He walked slowly, hoping for a find that would match his best days of beachcombing. A twenty-dollar bill, all but worthless now, prized for its novelty value; a diamond engagement ring, hocked for food; the Bakelite casing of an old radio, miraculously intact save for its plundered electronics.
Nothing so exciting today. A broken skate’s purse, many broken razor clams. The nubbin of a brick, too small to bother adding to his salvage walkway. Ubiquitous and seemingly innumerable petrified rubber bands that had once kept luncheon lobsters from pinching hungry picnickers. A dead gull lay upon a bed of kelp, feathers matted, small black crabs spoiling at its breast. A few yards farther on a gang of its fellows squawked and beat their wings just above the beach. Martin lifted his head, surprised because he had not smelled the salt-rot of beached whale or dolphin that almost daily drew skeins of gannets and shearwaters, petrels and the lovely white fulmars that almost alone of birds possessed a sense of smell that helped them find the dead.
But the dolphin was there, its pale grey body barely glimpsed beneath the moving shroud of seabirds. Martin’s step quickened. He always checked on the stranded animals, to report to Jason at the Woods Hole lab; another sad and terrible task, pressing his hands upon their sides only to feel the great proud hearts fall silent, the splendid envoys turned into grey slabs of stinking meat that protein-starved locals sometimes butchered right there on the beach, fighting off the greedy seabirds with sticks.
This time, though, it was different. This time it was not a dolphin, but a body.
“Oh, fuck,” whispered Martin.
He began to run. Shouting and waving his arms so that the birds screamed and lifted into the bright ai
r. He reached the body, sliding on the dank stones and falling into a crouch beside it. He flinched, his breath catching in his throat.
It was a young man; a boy, really. He was naked save for a torn pair of pants twisted around his legs and an ornate cross hanging from a chain around his neck. His skin had turned the color of the sea, greyish green and blotched with bruises, pinked crescents where fish had nibbled but all bloodless as a sponge. Seaweeds wrapped about him, ropelike strands of kelp and maidenhair. His right hand lay upon his breast, broken at the wrist so that it curved outward at an impossible angle. When Martin moved it oh so gently he saw black grit under the fingernails, a cloudy white scum that was soft flesh. On the third finger a gold ring glinted dully. His hair was so thick with dulse and laver it looked red, but beneath the weed Martin could see a frayed blond mat heavy with sand. His face was scraped raw, a cusp of exposed cheekbone so startlingly white it was like a wedge of mother-of-pearl. A tiny fish louse had embedded itself upon one swollen eyelid. With a grunt of disgust Martin pulled the parasite loose and flung it into the sea. The eyelid fluttered open and revealed a blue iris in a crimson bed. It stared at Martin, insensible as a stone.
But alive: he was alive.
“Shit!” Martin fell backward onto the rocks. He had to hug himself, hard, to calm down. He leaned forward again and placed a hand upon the boy’s chest.
Yes. Alive, though less a heartbeat than a faint pressure, like another finger there beneath the cold rind of skin.
He had no time to think, to worry about moving the boy and so finishing the sea’s job of killing him. He knelt and took him in his arms, gasping not because the boy was heavy—he felt like nothing so much as a sodden bundle of cloth—but because he, Martin, was so much weaker now. With a groan he stood, turned, and stumbled up the rocky headland to his cottage.
He laid the boy upon his bed, taking care to put an old wool blanket beneath him. Then he rushed to boil water on the big kitchen woodstove, gathered towels and antibiotic ointment, latex gloves, and isopropyl alcohol. There was no point in trying to phone for help. Even if the phone were working, no ambulance would come. The hospital was too far away and too poorly equipped now to do much more than offer the reassurance of watching its few doctors complain about the lack of money, medicine, staff.
He cleansed him as best he could, scraping off sand and salt, shreds of seaweed and torn skin. What at first appeared as a blackened hole in the middle of his forehead proved instead to be some kind of cross-shaped scarification. Still, despite his wounds, there was no odor of decay; his flesh, though battered, seemed free of infection. Martin set the broken wrist as best he could, splinting it with the wood he used for frames and an old coat hanger. Finally, he swabbed the cuts with antibiotic gel. The broken skin stirred like small mouths beneath his gloved fingers.
Throughout the boy remained unconscious. Young man, Martin corrected himself. His face was too badly bruised to get a sense of how young, but his hair where it had not been torn from his scalp was long and blond, his musculature lithe. He pulled a sheet over the boy’s exposed body, checked the room’s woodstove to make sure it was warm enough. He removed his gloves and took them into the kitchen, to boil and save them. Then he stepped onto the front porch.
Outside the light had shifted, from violet to pale lavender. The sea was calm. Gulls flew above the island like sparks, flickering from indigo to gold as they rode the wind. Martin’s heart ached to look upon it all, so unspeakably lovely and strange that it preempted any effort to capture it on canvas.
Or anywhere else, it seemed. When he left San Francisco, the most common topic at parties and funerals was of how hard it was now to write, to paint, to compose or sing or dance. Chatter online dealt with the futility of even trying. Only Leonard Thrope and his cohort of mori artists seemed able to endure what the world had become, and profit from it.
Martin was determined to find another way of seeing. When he first returned to Mars Hill, he had sat outside with notebooks and drawing paper, canvas and palette knife. All for nought. The glimmering transfixed the eye while it froze the heart: he could stand and stare at the sky for hours, awed and terrified, then go back indoors and face his empty canvases not with disappointment but mere relief, that they offered a void that he could safely contemplate, an abyss that did not defy comprehension. After a few weeks he gave up. What need was left in the world for art? Nature had taken up its own knife and was scouring the page; they had all become the canvas. He turned and went back inside.
The young man was still unconscious. But his breathing had become stronger and more even. His face was tilted to one side, and through the bruises something of the boy himself now showed, a face more sweet than handsome. His ghastly pallor had eased into a nearly luminous albescence. Not the whiteness of bone or any flesh that Martin had ever seen but an eerie, almost iridescent overlay through which could be glimpsed all that lay beneath: shimmer of blood, spleen, ligaments, the heart’s chambers opening and closing. Martin felt a pang of amazed fear. Who was this boy? And what had saved him?
He tried to focus on the idea that this young man washed up on the shoals was very strange.
And, he thought, pulling up his old Windsor chair and sinking into it to spend the afternoon at the boy’s bedside, this boy—whoever he was, wherever he was, poised between death and waking, black ocean and Mars Hill—was quite the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He got up several times over the next few hours, to feed the woodstove and check on the boy. In late afternoon Mrs. Grose knocked on the front door, to remind him of dinner.
“Roast chicken,” she beamed. At her feet the pug yawned hungrily. “A nice fat one—”
“I can’t come.” Martin slipped out onto the porch and shut the door behind him. “Something—I’ve got something to do.”
Mrs. Grose’s eyes widened. “Are you sick? You should not be outside so much—” “No, no, I’m not sick.” He hesitated. No way to keep a secret at Mars Hill. Probably no way to keep a secret from Mrs. Grose, anywhere. “Listen—can I tell you tomorrow? It’s—it’s important, but I think I need to be by myself this evening.”
Mrs. Grose regarded him with her wise tortoiseshell eyes. After a moment she nodded. “Of course, darling. I will even save some chicken for you.” She retreated heavily down the steps, at the bottom turned, clutching her windbreaker to her bosom. “Be careful, Martin.”
“I will.” When she was out of sight he returned to his room to stand watch. He woke next morning, surprised by how well he had slept in his chair—no nightmares, no furtive whisperings. He stood, yawning, and stepped over to the bed.
The boy was still asleep. Carefully Martin drew the sheet down, to check on his myriad cuts. They seemed no worse, at least, than before. The unblemished skin around them still had that pearly sheen, but now Martin was more inclined to think that had to do with the antibiotic gel. He found his gloves and applied some more, took a clean washcloth from the basin and moistened the boy’s lips, then went to get more water. When he turned back to the bed, the boy was staring at him.
Martin dropped the washcloth, retrieved it and hurried to the bedside. “Are you all right? Are you—”
He bit his lip. The boy looked like death: how could he be all right? Beneath its gloss of ointment his face was battered and swollen. He blinked, bloodshot eyes mere slits beneath sunburned lids. He seemed to comprehend nothing around him.
Martin extended his hand so that it hung trembling a few inches above the boy’s head. “My—my name is Martin,” he said softly. “I found you. On the beach, you’d washed up. Can you tell me what happened? Can you tell me your name?”
The boy closed his eyes. Martin lowered his hand until it rested upon the boy’s head. Beneath his gloved fingers the boy’s hair felt friable as dried kelp. “Can you tell me your name? Do you—do you remember what happened?”
The boy’s head moved. His mouth opened to croak a single word.
“Trip.”
/> “A trip.” Martin nodded. He lifted his head to gaze out the window at the bay. “On a boat? In the storm? Do you remember where you were going?” Gently he touched the third finger of the boy’s right hand, where the gold ring winked. “Do you have a family? Is there someone I can call?”
The boy tried to speak, was overcome by coughing.
Martin ran to the kitchen and found a plastic cup with lid and straw, relic of John’s last illness. He filled it with water and returned to the bedroom. “Here—just sip it, okay, don’t try to drink too much—”
He slid the straw between the boy’s lips and waited as he sucked at it, fruitlessly at first, then greedily as he tasted water. “Not too much!” cried Martin, but he smiled. “Better?”
The boy nodded. He looked around, but the effort was too much. A moment later he was asleep again. Martin spent the morning watching him. Whenever the boy stirred, he plied him with water, heavily laced with honey. Hours passed; the older man sat in his chair, looking in vain for some sign of recovery. A wash of crimson to the boy’s translucent flesh; murmured words; even an anguished moan. Anything that might tether him to that room.
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