by Nell Zink
At 7:30 I crawled from the bed to the computer and found an especially dense and challenging message from Shats. The ostensible subject was the old port of Tel Aviv, more of a marina, really, it turns out: The port could never handle ships, they would anchor at some distance, and boats would come and go, loading and unloading passengers and cargo. He portrayed the people of Tel Aviv standing by the quay and singing as Zim Ship No. 1, Kedmah, lured their flimsy dinghies to certain death in the pounding surf, July 1947.
My mother had this to say: Frank called last night. They dropped a seventy-million-dollar crane over the edge in some deep trench, so they are back in Mobile being repaired.
My brother Frank, a ship engineer, lives in Seattle and works on a very large boat out of New Orleans. The boat, a gigantic coracle approximately four miles in circumference, carries immense towers of steel to the center of the Gulf of Mexico, where, wiggling and heaving, it drops them into trenches, then pops four hundred feet into the air, relieved to be rid of the extra weight. Workers such as my brother grip their coffee cups tightly in preparation for a bounding, vertiginous return to New Orleans by hydrofoil. Even the work schedule is larger than life: Rather than time their work by the sun as other workers do, they work by the moon, “twenty-eight days on and twenty-eight days off.” Already in the four hundredth hour of a shift, the workers are bleary-eyed, rigid automatons, hardly aware whether their coracle is moving as scheduled toward the meteor-craters of the Yucatán or merely spinning in circles. Has the seventy-million-dollar crane broken loose, or was it cut loose this morning, in response to orders no worker can be sure he did not hear in a dream?
Such a ship could not dock in Tel Aviv, any more than Mr. Pickwick could sail up the Yarqon. Only a few wooden rowboats come and go, rocking in the shadow of a single heroic statue—The Hebrew Worker. A magazine shop lends an air of commerce to the scene. Other ports, in Haifa and Ashdod to the north and south, are made to submit to the indignity of a more than symbolic function.
Yigal did not go down to the port. Instead, he went to his office. A brief euphoria after his engagement to Mary had surrendered to the realization that he could not quit his job. Most especially, he could not quit his job and then appear to be living very well without it. His assignment was frustrating, even impossible, but it was the only thing standing between him and certain death.
“Laos and Iceland?” Rafi said. “Take a look at this report about the carousel in Central Park.”
Yigal scanned it. “This one’s two years old. I’m telling you, he’s not in New York.”
“You’re right, he’s not—he’s at Rye Playland, since April. I’d like you to talk to him. That’s not much to ask, is it? Just talk to the guy. And be careful. How are you fixed for money?”
“Not too bad, but I could use a little extra this month—some nuclear missile landed in my office, so I’m thinking of upgrading my hard drive, plus I need to buy some paint. Also, my fiancée wants a car.”
Rafi handed him $5,000. “You’re not cutting down on your travel, are you? Because if you are, you won’t be working in this office. You’ll be in purchasing in Holon. Medical supplies for the veterans’ hospital. Have you considered changing apartments?”
“I like my apartment.” Yigal shrugged, his boss shrugged, and the meeting was over. As he walked home, he formulated a list of questions.
1.What’s in the submarine?
2.What is Rye Playland?
3.Will another missile fall into my apartment, or is my apartment the safest place in Israel?
When he arrived back at Basel Street, he came straight to my place, and I got out the tarot cards.
“This is a sort of cute tarot,” I said. “It’s all these smiling, happy dolphins—look—”
“Even the hanged man?”
“That’s actually a very positive card,” I said, handing him the deck to shuffle. “That’s why he’s leaping and splashing that way. It means change.”
“Dolphins don’t have necks.” He gave me the first card.
“Eight of urchins—eight of urchins—let me get my book.” I struggled out of the lotus position and grabbed the Dolphin Star handbook. “Hmm. This is interesting. It’s actually a little essay about the biology of dolphins. I hate it when they do this—it’s how they cover their asses, like if they actually said what was going to happen in the future and got it wrong, I’d sue them or something.” I handed him the book.
“Unlike seals, who feel love every day of the year but conceive their pups only in the fall, dolphins have insatiable sexual appetites year-round.” Yigal took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Whatever,” he said, handing the book back. “Next card.” He pulled the lobster.
“The lobster means safety.”
He nodded and pulled the three of barnacles, symbolized by a pack of young male dolphins abducting a female from her pod.
“Travel. Give me three more cards and lay them out in a row.” He withdrew the seahorse, coral, and the ten of shrimp.
The book was explicit. “Ten of shrimp after the seahorse means a ride on the Derby Racers. ‘The Derby Racers,’” I read aloud, “‘is a monumental revolving, domed structure located on the grounds of Rye Playland in Rye, New York. Unlike a conventional carousel whose figures move up and down, the Derby Racers figures move forward and backward. The vast, deep rumbling sound created by the revolution, on wooden rails, of this large building more than one hundred years old is the most impressive achievement of Western civilization, the first and last wonder of the world.’ Coral—that’s just sex, pure and simple. I don’t know how that fits in. This is interesting.” I tried to read further but Yigal took the book away.
“Nell, there’s a card called ‘Leviathan’ symbolized by a big black blob waving a trident.” He looked upset.
“I didn’t write the book. Are you saying the Dolphin Star Temple had something to do with it? Because if you are, forget it. That thing went right through my coffee table.” I took the book and put it back on the shelf.
“One more card?” He held up the four of shrimp.
“Four of shrimp is ambiguous. It means either mechanical difficulties—could be the plumbing, could be bursitis—or an explosion and fire.” Yigal shook my hand and left.
I realize now that my free-floating anxiety might stem partly from having written so much dialogue yesterday and today. I’m not good at it, and I don’t claim to have an ear for colloquial speech. Writing dialogue is an unnecessary risk and an inefficient way of telling a story. (All my best stories are in one paragraph, with no dialogue at all. The only exception is in the story about the anaconda, when he says in a plaintive manner while dying bankrupt in the prison hospital of self-imposed starvation: “I can’t eat small things, and I can’t eat dead things—without money there’s just no place for me in this world.”)
But if efficiency were my goal, would I be devoting a month of my priceless youth, which can never be regained, to the re-creation of a novel already written? For four long years Shats labored to make straight in the desert a highway for this second version of Sailing Toward the Sunset, stealing time from work and family to create an entirely original literary masterpiece. In order to follow in his still-warm footsteps, I quit my last full-time job in 1995 and haven’t worked a day in the last fourteen months. Were I efficient in any way, I would have re-created Shats’ book of short stories, his reviews and feuilletons, his diary and letters, and his bank statements by now. Ashamed of my indolence, I will pass to another topic.
When I first began work almost two weeks ago, I made extensive notes regarding the topics to be covered. Now I find that two have been omitted completely. They are:
1.The Hart Senate Office Building
2.Poe’s “Tamerlane”
Outside the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., is a long brick sidewalk, where I often walk on my way from Union Station to my friend David’s office. Washington is a beautiful and peaceful city, most especially in springtime
and in this particular section, Capitol Hill. The humid air telescopes the long view down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial and the row of reflecting pools into a single wide-angle panoramic painting. In May thousands of tulips in red and orange engulf the Capitol itself, but in April the predominating color is the pale green of new grass brushed with the delicate frosty pink of apple and cherry blossoms, those still on the trees, and those that drift from the trees into soft, feathery heaps, covering lawns and filling gutters with pale petals that keep for weeks in the cool shade of the oaks and tulip poplars. I wander through the drifts of flower snow, throwing soft handfuls upward and letting them fall until they cover me, and occasionally lying down in them, at which point I probably look like a complete idiot, and it’s no wonder I’m unemployed.
Anyhow, outside the Hart Senate Office Building is a big parking lot, and between this parking lot and the building is a strip of plants a block long, so beautiful and diverse that I suppose it must have been designed to represent the fifty states and must be subsidized by all fifty. No one ever looks at it but me. It sits in an ugly spot where no one ever goes who is not in a hurry. Besides, in Washington, D.C., such things are ordinary.
Inside the building is a strange sculpture. A black mountain range sits on the white granite floor, jagged peaks upward. The heavy black plates of steel are at least twenty feet tall. From the ceiling hang the clouds—the same heavy black plates of steel, but rounded. The clouds twirl slowly and threateningly. No one walks on the floor anywhere near the sculpture, which sits in the center of the lobby out of the way, but senators who go from one office to another must look out and see it. The building was the first ever to have an open but fireproof atrium. Were fire to break out, water would pour from the edge of each balcony in a solid sheet, creating a temporary wall. The sculpture would sit in a choppy sea of dirty water thick with shredded paper and blue-green carpet lint while the impotent flames raged on in the offices, trapped behind an artificial Niagara.
Poe’s “Tamerlane” is a long poem, but I used to know it by heart. Tempted by Ambition, the shepherd Tamerlane hopes to make his girlfriend a great queen. His empire complete, he returns home to find her dead.
I have no words, alas! to tell
The loveliness of loving well!
Nor would I now attempt to trace
The more than beauty of a face
Whose lineaments, upon my mind,
Are—shadows on th’ unstable wind:
Thus I remember having dwelt
Some page of early lore upon,
With loitering eye, till I have felt
The letters—with their meaning—melt
To fantasies—with none.
In despair, Tamerlane compares his wasted youth to the sun, and his maturity to the moon, less harsh, beautiful, but cold. He protests,
And boyhood is a summer sun
Whose waning is the dreariest one—
For all we live to know is known,
And all we seek to keep hath flown—
Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall
With the noon-day beauty—which is all.
I used to carry this very small book (Poe didn’t write much poetry) everywhere with me when I worked in offices. Memorizing it was an accident. I discovered that I almost knew it already, so I just worked on the gaps. Then I stopped carrying the book. Reciting it to yourself from start to finish takes a good ten minutes. All I seek to keep hath flown, I thought every Friday as I deposited my large paycheck.
Later, when things got worse, I thought more of “The Raven”—“Is there—is there balm in Gilead?” Gilead probably isn’t far from here, come to think of it—it’s probably a stoplight with a falafel stand, like Armageddon.
Back downstairs, Yigal asked Mary if she’d like to help him set up the model railroad. She spliced all the track and he hooked up the signals and the whistle. They darkened the room and watched the engine, whose heavy flywheel made its starts and stops gradual, dramatic, and forceful like those of a real train, circle behind the mountains over and over, first one way and then the other. The engine had a real Mars headlight, and there were lights in the passenger cars, where tiny hand-painted passengers sat diffidently looking out at the warm evening. Mary and Yigal lay on the floor and watched it from eye level. The next day, they left for New York.
CHAPTER 10
“ISN’T IT STRANGE HOW AVNER’S book resembles our story exactly, although it was written long before?”
It was 8:30 this morning when Zohar turned to me and posed this question, his curly hair disheveled by friction with our irregular nest of cheap, lumpy pillows and his sweet smile framed by a bulwark of ferociously masculine stubble. His appearance was charming in the extreme and I thought of taking off my shirt, but instead I asked him what on earth he was talking about.
“It’s just the same. A spy is sent on a stupid mission to a foreign country and brings back a girl.”
I had not been aware that Zohar was a spy.
“Who do you spy for,” I asked him, “Elite?” Elite is Israel’s leading chocolate producer. I surmised that Zohar’s work had involved monitoring competing products worldwide, and that the “stupidity” of his mission had something to do with the quality of American chocolate.
Refusing to name his employer, Zohar assured me that when the narrative of Shats’ Sailing Toward the Sunset begins, the Israeli spy has already persuaded the girl from the Shetland Islands to live with him on a permanent basis. They arrive in Israel ready to settle down in chapter one.
Briefly, I considered starting over, but then I realized that the addition of a lifelong commitment to the story of Yigal and Mary would not alter it in the least. Mary’s reluctance to be fully comprehended, Yigal’s continuing fantasies about Nofar, his panicked flight, the sublimation of their cognitive dissonance into marathon sexual activity, the rationalization of a mindless Dionysian compulsion as an economic partnership—these are well-known aspects of lifelong commitment, and my treatment of them as aspects of a shallow and probably doomed flirtation does not affect their fundamental nature.
Therefore, on the arrival of Yigal and Mary in New York, I will send them almost immediately to city hall, where they will be married in a ceremony lasting several minutes.
An Israeli marriage was practically impossible. Only religious weddings can be performed there, Mary was not a Jew, and Yigal’s low profile did not permit large bribes.
Seal marriage may have played an important role in shaping Mary’s conceptions of the institution, but she did not mention to Yigal that her usual routine was to submit for two weeks a year to whoever seemed largest. It was dissatisfaction with the seal system, after all, that had led her to seek a better life on land.
Shats and his wife, Orly, and daughter, Ayelet, visited us last night. We walked on the beach near the Roman city of Apollonia, where Orly spoke of geology, of embryology, and of the aurora borealis—in Hebrew, the “Northern Zohar.” Shats described the brightly glowing lagoons of the Sinai. Later, he told us how some anthropologists had once decided that mankind descended from an “aquatic ape.”
I had heard something to that effect myself. Why else would we be smooth and hairless as eels? Why else would we have breasts at the top instead of at the bottom, if not to keep our children from drowning as we wade in search of marshmallows and cranberries? Our abundance of subcutaneous fat helps insulate us against the chilly waters of the Eocene swamps, while the unique human confusion of the esophagus and trachea, which allows us both to speak and to choke on food, has an important function of some kind—a function of . . .
There was a moment of silence. Shats tried hard but, like me, he could not remember the underwater function of the human larynx. We looked searchingly into each other’s eyes, struggling to find there some insight into the trivial, absurd breathing habits of our damp, naked, nonexistent ancestors (biologists had heaped ridicule on the theory), and it was perhaps this tender moment of shared regret, stolen
in the aftermath of a dinner party for which I cannot quite claim success (people seemed to be poking at the food as though they thought it was weird), that led Zohar, at approximately 8:40 this morning, to say, “Avner is in love with you!” (He had tried “You are in love with Avner” on several previous occasions to no avail.)
“Give me one piece of evidence,” I demanded.
Zohar was unable to think of any, and I concluded that his claim had the same origin as his occasional declarations that he is moving to the planet Mars to live there with the parakeets Pouf and Poufa—a sort of waking epilepsy, a random firing of disused neurons. On the other hand, his failure to justify the statement may well have originated in a quality Shats and I share—you might guess “discretion” or “asexuality,” but I refer the reader instead to our lovingly maintained sense of personal innocence and forthrightness. Many less privileged people attempt this feint, but they forget that, unlike Shats and I, they are least innocent when they are most forthright.
It occurs to me that the elephant and the hyrax too have breasts at the top, but instead of hypothesizing that they used to walk upright, I will return to a question posed by Shats himself several chapters ago: “Is mankind descended from the seals?”
The obvious answer is “No,” but his posing of the question reveals an interest in wrongheaded pseudoscience I feel I have unwittingly echoed, to good effect, in several chapters of the present re-creation of his novel. My own interest in quasi-plausible nonsense was fostered early, partly by Smithsonian magazine’s regular features on, for example, the genetically engineered “rat-cow” and the probable appearance of the natives of Jupiter (dense, amoeboid), but mostly by my uncle Charlie. I recall his explaining to me in 1971 or so why dinosaurs are extinct: Although they had evolved to be birds, they could not overcome their fear of heights. His crowning achievement was the all-encompassing theory that immediately predated his conversion to Presbyterianism: