She found an empty wooden crate to sit on and put her head in her hands. This needed thinking out. This was entirely new. There was no food. None that they knew how to garner, net, search out in the tide or the ocean or among the firs that stood guardian on the island. At some time people had fed themselves with animal products and gardens but neither she nor James had any idea how to go about this. All her life and in the lives of everyone she knew food had been issued. Now there was no agency to issue it. It was not so much frightening as it was puzzling. Behind her confusion was a growing panic. Don’t tell James. Not now, not just now.
She carefully searched out and stacked whatever was salvageable, counting it all up and brushing away broken glass. She found herself weeping. She wiped her face, lifted her head, and saw a stack of books.
Gardening North of 50°. Good. Nadia supposed they were somewhere around 50° north. Next was Western Birds and something called A Bouquet of Best-Loved Love Poems, which did not sound promising. Then in a blue cover was the crudely printed journal of an early lighthouse keeper.
This one she opened. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and then flipped the damp and wrinkled pages with the skill of an expert reader, holding the flashlight in her teeth. The prose spoke in terms of unwavering and uncompromising confidence in all those virtues that were right and good and made life worth living. A language more than a century old. The journal was written with a kind of undiluted conviction, the confidence of somebody who did not have real or imagined censors looking over his shoulder and who was not facing starvation. Other people’s standards, including those of grammar and spelling, were irrelevant.
Your lite tower lins is your most important companyon and you must gard it from brakeage for the lives of others and the fulfilmint of your duty depends on it’s remaining unbrockin.
A white-bellied mouse sat holding up its pink paws as if to announce something. Perhaps, I am not a rat.
Nadia turned the flashlight on it. And when she did shadows like persons appeared behind the empty tins on the shelves and behind the stairway. And in these shadows she seemed to see the former selves of lighthouse keepers from time immemorial, keepers who had lived on lonely islands and unpeopled coasts, who had endured storms and raised children and goats and stubbornly cherished their solitude, whose job it had been to light the beacon to say, Don’t come here, who had been keepers of the fire for those in peril on the sea. All these in the darting shadows that fled from her flashlight beam. The mouse ate a seed between its two paws.
Nadia, Nadia, read the book.
One: He stared at his kerosene-soaked hands and wiped them on his trouser legs. The kerosene heater was between his knees where he sat in the wheelchair and he had used the vise grips to remove the line from the tank to the pot. He put the copper pipe to his mouth and blew it out. Thick substances spattered on the floor and then the line was clear. He wiped his mouth on his coat cuff. Two: Where’s my briefcase? He screwed the line back into place and placed the heater next to his bed and lit it. Bright, hot blue flames sprang up and he said, Good.
I set up the desk for you, said Nadia. She wiped at the kerosene on the floor with one of the towels. She said, That desk made out of a door in the central hall. I laid out your maps and notes. I put your briefcase there. As a handy-dandy wife-type person.
He reached for her hands and held them between his to warm them. Good. Three: Did you check the stores in the basement?
Yes, they’re pretty good, pretty good, said Nadia. I’m a terrible cook. I should have told you that before we got married.
Food is food. Four: Take the binoculars and go up in the tower. Can you make it?
Yes. I can. And I am to look for enemies. Forensics agents, savage hippies, pirates, kraken, Oversupervisor Blanche Warren.
He regarded her in the damp boy’s clothes and the wet red canvas shoes, a blanket over her shoulders and that slight, glad smile came to his face as it often did when he looked at her. He said, Also the Flying Dutchman. Jack Sparrow, Director Crumm in goggles. If they come here I will kill them. And then go out and cut me a sapling to make a cane with. He watched her widen her eyes and pause at the edge of saying something. He said, You don’t know what a sapling is. A young tree; cut it at the bottom and just above the first branch. Then he released her hands. Then he said, Nadia, how are you?
How am I?
Are you troubled about anything, are you tired, are you frightened?
I can’t lie?
Not at present.
Okay, well, the sea is rising. I mean the entire level of it. She gestured with nervous little movements of her hands.
They’re called tides, darling. It’s all right. It will go back down. He held to the arms of the wheelchair as if he would stand but then sank back down again.
This is a new life, Nadia thought. She sat beside the stove, exhausted, and massaged her knees. A life of the ocean and endless rain and someday a garden when lilacs first in the dooryard will bloom. She remembered thinking, in the hot streets, that when she came to Lighthouse Island she would be herself. And so she was, a person grateful to be alive and slowly unfolding one new mind compartment after another, which happens when people begin to believe they might be their own masters and are forced to find their own food and shelter. I’ll worry about that later. She had a photograph of her own parents, a map of Sissons Bend, where she was born, unique in all the billions, and a window looking out into a world of leaves, trees, and curious unshaped stone. And therefore, choose life, however appalling that might become.
A cat had come to the island on a pile of floating debris. He came ashore the day before the helicopter arrived. The debris was mainly a roof of pinewood with rustic cedar shingles from some higher-up’s house in the Columbia River Valley. A gated estate home with dormer windows. It came meandering up the Pacific currents, far out on the gray and heaving sea. Around the stub of its chimney a fishing net had clung in a thousand tangles of purse seine. In this were caught empty containers and a child’s plastic lobster toy with very white ominous cartoon eyes and more busted lumber, door frames, parts of trees, and Buddy car tires.
The orange-and-white cat lived under a dresser drawer held in place by the edge of the seine net and all day and all night the salt water lifted the roof and all its hangers-on high into the air and then down again. The cat had been soaked wet for five days and had nothing to eat but the remains of fish caught in the net.
A man had swum up and clutched his neck and then let go and sank and then a woman and a child had tried to entice him onto a rubber raft. Eventually the cat crawled out to drink the rainwater washing around in the Buddy car tire. Worst of all were the arms and hair floating inside the dormer windows, rising and falling and gesturing. He clung to his insignificant life under the drawer as if it were as valuable as that of a prophet or a king.
And then the debris broke apart in the surf on the mainland side of Lighthouse Island and somehow he swam ashore. There he ran headlong into the head rat of the engine house burrows, ten inches long with a ten-inch tail. The orange cat was nearly without strength but he managed to run up a tall fir to the first branch and hold on.
From there he saw the house and its lighted windows. Inside were royal personages, a king and queen of heat and food and life, who were probably also homicidal, guarded all around by terrible enormous rats, and he called out from his fir tree, Help, Help, Help.
James began to pace, hesitantly and slowly, up and down the long central hallway. He walked to the storage room and went through its tattered piles of discarded things. He had trouble placing each foot in front of the other. A slight fever lingered in his body. The Shalamovs must have had some kind of arms, if only a shotgun with rat shells. Broken chairs, a roll of canvas, rusted kitchen tools, scraps of sheet metal. He dragged out the roll of canvas and fell at the door.
Okay, okay, he thought. Okay, I fell. No problem. Get up.
He pulled himself up by one of the long support beams that rose to the ceiling in the central hall. His eyes were spasmodically winking with pain. He left the canvas where it was. His central nervous system fired a billion neurons and misfired and fired again in an interior series of little detonations. It was an assault on the unused muscles of his thighs and lower legs, the wasted quadriceps.
He waited for the pain to slide away, bit by bit. He checked the atomic clock against his watch; if he could find Greenwich mean time and set the atomic clock to it, and if it would hold steady, he would be on his way to finding their longitude and placing themselves on the invisible grid of the planet, he and Nadia. The book of their lives had opened to a new and difficult font. You are on your own, said the opening line. On an unknown coast, and on that coast a strange people.
Chapter 41
Nadia lifted the binoculars to look out through the glass of the cupola. She was sixty feet above the island and below her the firs appeared to be conical, flashing with ravens. She traveled her lenses across the coastal mountains and its bursting surf. She focused on flood trash thrown above the tide line, the prow of a wrecked ship in an inlet. Nadia could not make out its name or why it had come to grief. Farther north tall black things stood near the shore. She spun the focus wheel. Chimneys. Blackened stone standing out of a mass of dark jumbled timber. A village that had been burned and destroyed.
She lowered the binoculars.
That meant trouble. Bad trouble. She wouldn’t tell James about that just yet.
She focused on something glittering that rose and sank with the waves: a collection of debris loosely held together—boards, barrels, billowing cloth or tarps, tires. This whole world seemed to be in a state of anarchy as parts of the megacity floated past and the rain fell unregulated. On their island everything just grew anywhere it wanted. The sea did whatever it liked. This coastal world made inhuman noises on its own. Beyond the partly open door to the catwalk she heard the wind tearing through fir needles like the reeds of a musical instrument and from somewhere a singing howl: a beast, an unowned and unlicensed animal.
And on the Outer Rocks, playing in the crashing surf, seals appeared. They were blond and glossy; the waves broke over them and they reemerged without drowning. They were like unsinkable bathtub toys playing in the dangerous ocean. Nadia watched them for a long time until they disappeared into the absorbing and alien sea.
She studied the radio console with its microphone the size of a potato, decorated in brass. She clicked all the buttons and slid the sliders. A dial jumped once and fell back. She threw off bird’s nests and tried to wipe it clean.
I made it! Nadia spoke into the microphone. She threw out both arms and cried, Ta dum! We’re on the fabled Lighthouse Island, everything is going to be all right. We are going to make it.
She eased down the steep and ringing metal steps and passed by the big green metal consoles at the base of the stairs. Their lights still glowed, powered by the wind turbine. She had no idea what they were for. She was thinking about how to find books about the sea, instructions on fishing, edible plants.
The yellow cat ran through the rain for the engine house. There he came upon the head rat of the engine-house burrows, the margrave, bruxing and guarding his rat hole, a foot long from nose to tail. On the concrete surround and in the whipping rain, both stood on their hind feet and threatened each other. The yellow cat burst out into the demented screaming of a desperate feline at such a volume that the head rat flattened its ears, wavered, and finally gave way. It scrambled over the side of the surround and dropped into the brush. The soaked and starving cat shot into the rat hole and gained the shelter of the engine house.
They took apart the old television camera that lurked in the long central hall. James unscrewed the lens barrel and the lenses dropped into his hand, Nadia held a tea mug for the screws. They spoke of their journey through the city, evasions, narrow escapes. James told her of life in Fremont Estates and its luxuries and its dangers. Ponds for skating in the winter and a sailboat in the summer, pet goats and ducks, arrests and abductions in the middle of the night. They spoke of Nadia’s gray days in jail, James’s fall from the balcony, and the day that Nadia threw her diary into a mixer of hot tar. The short day slid into darkness and unrestrained vegetation lashed at the windows. James slid the lens over his maps, down the Missouri River to Sissons Bend, where she had been born. There had been gardens there in centuries past with gleaming leaves of sweet corn and bean vine tendrils. Smoky little houses teetered on the bluffs looking down on the river and animals stared over the fence into the fresh edible leaves and fruit.
We will have to get domestic animals, he said. There’s no use trying for a garden in this rain.
And soon, she thought. Before we starve.
The Buddha said, One can’t always go through life saying, “Not this, not this.” At some point you must say, “This, this.” At least I think that’s what he said. Don’t quote me.
That night Nadia dreamed of mythical animals returning two by two with all their trouble and all their messiness and dubious loyalty, bearing unknown to themselves the gift of food, half of one world and half of the other. They had waited up in the constellations for a long time and they stepped back down in a long procession to be with human beings again: Capricorn, Taurus, Sirius the Dog Star, Draco, Pisces, Pegasus, Leo, and children. The twins. One named Man, the other named Twin. And the Milky Way to feed them and the pastures of the hurricanes in which to play and die.
The sun sank below the sea horizon as if it were wet and had been drowned.
Chapter 42
The deep interior glow of the Zircon radio dial band shone on their faces. Nadia had found it in the engine house, along with a bale of used clothing: rain gear and sweaters. She had found wet paw prints in the engine house as well as rat sign and stinking nests. When she came upon a rat head she grabbed up all she could carry and fought through the rain along the elevated walkways. Some gruesome thing lived in there. She would tell James about it later. Not now.
The kerosene heater flickered ornate patterns on the ceiling; the chalet smelled of fumes and the chemical tang of fuel pellets. Beyond the windows they could hear the roaring surf and the light pattering of a thin rain striking the collection tanks in their cradles.
James ran the needle down the band, searched for the TV audio and news of the megacity, the world and all the people they had left behind, either drowning or starving. She pulled a kitchen chair up beside him and he listened and absentmindedly stroked the hair from her face.
It was heavy, said James. Carrying all that back in the gale.
I could do it, she said. I mean, I did it. It was so you will love me and be forever grateful.
He looked at her a moment and smiled; her lashes seemed to have grown thick in the wet and cold, her gray-green eyes half hidden in the parka hood fur, a cautious animal.
Now here is the chill map. An announcer’s professional voice. We can see the isobars coming down from the northwest so some areas are being hit with successive waves of isobars.
Oh my God, said James. He doesn’t know what an isobar is. He threw himself against the backrest of the chair. Nobody has told him.
There are some floods that are exhibiting extreme flood behavior in certain areas.
That’s it, said Nadia. The TV audio for sure. She was nearly engulfed by the big yellow parka but she didn’t care, it was warm. Life was warm, just sitting here beside him.
An investigative panel has been tasked with looking into several instances of dam malfunction but the panel is finding it difficult to meet and the chairman has objected to the lack of a clear mission statement. In the meantime WETEMERG is considering requests for Type II Incident Management Teams and on-scene incident command structures . . .
Stupid sons of bitches. Louts. Hominids. Illiterate cretins. James shifted restlessly in his chair and turned t
he dial carefully. Odd how people who love abstract language also want to kill you and cut your legs off.
Listen, said Nadia.
They heard a simple folk tune, eight bars played over and over, ceaselessly.
What’s that?
James bent his head and listened. I think it’s a numbers station. Has to do with intelligence stuff. Spy stuff. He turned the fine-tune dial slowly.
Then a man’s voice speaking in a foreign language, a patient, explaining voice.
That’s not Spanish or French, said Nadia.
No. I think it’s Japanese.
Do you speak Japanese? Nadia looked up at him.
No. They listened, as intent on the dial as if it had been a human face. And so, said James. He sounds close, so close.
But the Japanese speaker faded away into a distant Pacific of radio noise. Then they picked the TV audio again at 720.
Next! The trial of Director James Orotov and Sendra Bentley, the sexual brigand who seduced a paraplegic director of demolition.
Far overhead rats cried out in ultrasonic chitters. James and Nadia stared at each other.
Sendra Bentley has been repeatedly charged in the past with adulterous affairs, Tom, really sordid stuff here, and we obtained an interview with a subdirector in Cactea Opuntia Supply named Earl Jay Warren who was one of her, well, conquests and he . . .
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