by Joe Denham
The night Ferris dined at my home he and I were in the kitchen with his big oaf of a friend Svend snoring soundly on the couch, and strange old Fairwin’ Verge gone off to bed. I’d arranged earlier in the evening, with more ease than I’d anticipated, to have a buyer pay Ferris $150,000 for his float. So naturally his spirits were high, celebratory, and I’d played on that all evening, fixing a succulent feast of oysters and crab, thyme-roasted potatoes and a spinach, pear and chevre salad, with a dessert of chocolate ganache cake and a gooseberry reduction. I’d brought from my cellar fine wines: a ’73 Chateau Margaux and a ’84 Chateau Latour, among others. So there we were, pleasantly full and mildly intoxicated, comfortable in conversation, sharing the task of washing the evening’s dishes, a task that, despite its mundane domesticity, has always seemed to me to possess a hint of the romantic in such a circumstance—two complete strangers sharing a very commonplace household ritual.
“So, a fortunate weekend for you,” I said to him, wiping the last of the cheese and crab-shell bits into the sink. I rinsed my hands under the tap, then turned to him seated behind me on my wide maple island. I ran my hands up and down his thighs to dry them, looking up into his eyes with unveiled intent. My side of the air between us was electric; bolts of it rushed up my fingers to my breasts as I touched his legs, something I hadn’t felt in so long I’d forgotten or given up on its possibility. “What are you going to do with all that money?” I asked, which I understood immediately to be the wrong direction in which to steer the conversation. I lifted my hands from his legs as his eyes winced.
He looked away. “It’s complicated,” he replied, and slid drunkenly, more drunkenly than I’d expected, from the counter. Then he slipped away from me into the living room, where he lifted the float from its tote on the floor. Holding it at eye level, he stared into it like it was a crystal ball, as though he were viewing within it his future, swaying on his feet ever so slightly as he did so.
I poured our wineglasses full and carried them as quietly and elegantly as I could into the living room. I’m not an unrealistic woman. It was clear to me that Ferris is of the calibre of man who can pick and choose his women, so I knew if I was going to have any chance with him it was going to be then and there in my own home. I seated myself on the chaise lounge, trying to give him space to come back to me from wherever it was my question had sent him off to. Svend coughed and buried his head under a pillow on the couch opposite us.
“Why is this thing worth so much money?” Ferris finally asked, a perplexed and incredulous, almost angry look on his face. “That’s a good question,” I offered in reply, holding his wineglass up to him. “I can’t say I entirely know.”
He looked down at my answer and the proffered glass of wine in seeming disgust, then carried the float into the kitchen. He placed it on the counter and pulled a drinking glass from the drying rack, which I’d stacked, I’ll admit, in a rather haphazard, drunkenly fashion. The other glasses tumbled one after the other to the counter and floor, shattering around Ferris’s feet.
“Fuck!” he yelled, grabbing the float which had been set in rolling motion by one of the toppling glasses. He wheeled quickly around and moved toward me, which is when his feet slid out from under him on the scattering of glass. As he fell the float ejected from his arms onto the island. It rolled toward me across the wood, and it was all I could do to stand in time to see it drop from countertop height to the floor.
I rushed first to Ferris to see that he was all right, helping him up. “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed, brushing the glass from his jeans and shirt. “The float!” We both stepped over the glass to the far side of the island, where I reached down and lifted it off the floor. I turned the overhead halogens on and we inspected it in the bright light. Not a scratch. Ferris sighed in deep relief, glass shards still glinting on his shirt and in his hair. I swept him off, looked his hands and feet over for cuts and embedded glass, then suggested he take a shower down the hall in my ensuite bathroom.
While he did so I swept the glass from the kitchen floor and wiped a few small drops of his blood off the fir. I recall being aroused again by the rawness of this, dipping my pinky finger into a spot of it and taking it to my lips. I could hear the sound of the water falling across his body, and had half a mind then to disrobe and slip into the shower with him uninvited. Instead I waited, and finished wiping the glass from the floor with a wet cloth, listening as the water stopped, and shortly after as he stepped from the bathroom and the springs of my bed flexed as he lay his body across it.
I washed my hands again in the sink and loosened my hair from the bun I’d kept it wound in all evening. It fell beyond my shoulders, still long and shiny, though whitening and thinning, as I ran my hands over my breasts and belly, wondering for a moment if I was up for this, if I truly had it in me still. Then I took a last sip of wine from my glass and left the kitchen, dimming the lights as I walked down the hallway to my bedroom, where I found Ferris splayed across my bed, naked but for a towel around his waist, asleep.
I approached the bed and tried to rouse him, placing my hand lightly on his arm and quietly calling his name, but he was done. The sight of his still-wet and muscled body was a bit too much for me. I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, my breasts alighting as they brushed across his naked chest, and the next thing I knew I was practically running down to the beach house. There I knocked on the door until Fairwin’ answered, then proceeded to have my way with him. It was a rough, unfulfilling fuck, he and I having never had any spark, and both of us too old for our libidos to make up for its lack. Though it did serve to attenuate my desire enough that I could, in its easing, drift off to sleep beside Fairwin’ in a bed that has since been washed away by the sea.
Now I’m lying on Fairwin’s floor thankful both that I was not swallowed by the sea along with the Globe House yesterday morning, and that Fairwin’ made no mention before bed of that evening and what, in my inexcusable lust, I’d instigated between us. Recasting it all in my mind as I have this morning I feel a touch shameful and every bit the fool, and it has put in question for me the very premise of my being here. What is it that I’m after, the float or Ferris? It’s disorienting, everything that’s occurred in the past twenty-four hours, and I feel as though I can’t trust my own sense of direction, like I’m a ship unanchored, unpowered and drifting. So I resolve to slow down, to get in touch with Arnault Vericombe, and to keep his myth to myself until I’m able to do so.
ARNAULT WON’T ANSWER. I try his numbers several times without success as Fairwin’ and I hike down to Boat Cove to harvest oysters. Fairwin’ barters with the other islanders for what he can’t find or catch in the forest or sea. The rice we ate for breakfast, for instance, he trades for each fall with salmon he cures in a small smoker below his fort. It’s his one transgression, he says, the rice that forms the main carbohydrate staple of his diet, grown and shipped up from California. Otherwise, his is the five-mile diet, and those five travelled by foot or by oar.
We each carry with us two plastic five-gallon buckets procured from the Blue Roof Bar and Grill in False Bay. After an hour and a half’s walking we reach the bay, a beach of jagged and barnacled rock giving off to a long littoral sand-flat. There are old Salmon Enhancement Project signs along the roadside fence bordering the ravine and the little creek trickling down to Boat Cove. Once the object of some of the locals’ best intentions and efforts, the creek is now clogged with blowdown along its length, the mouth jammed with stormed-in driftwood. I remember when spawning-ground enhancement work was the new idea, it was going to save the salmon, and for a time every environmentally concerned citizen was out there cleaning creek beds of debris, building fish ladders, digging, planting, fencing. Then it was on to the next thing. Water quality, clearcuts, organic gardening, emissions… Now, some twenty years after these signs were set in the ground so hopefully and proudly signifying our efforts at atonement, the salmon are nearing extinction.
If only Arnault’s prop
hecy were true. If only everything, if only anything, were that simple. Though I have always believed that indeed there are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio… and so I haven’t ever gone to the extremes of Fairwin’ Verge, my über-hippie hermit friend picking his way adeptly over the beach, filling his bucket with some of the hundreds of oysters clinging to and strewn amongst the rocks. He says this will be one of the last harvesting days before the algae blooms turn the bivalves toxic, so he’s stocking up.
For my part, I walk more tentatively over the inhospitable rocks. I suppose the past fifteen years living with Horace’s money, on beaches of fine sand, in luxury, have left me soft. I fill each bucket half-full, not wanting my arms stretched down to my ankles by the time we’ve ascended back to the fort. Which I suppose is emblematic of our varied approaches, Fairwin’s and mine, of the different lengths (pardon the pun) we are willing to go to.
Fairwin’ has chosen a life beyond reproach. He told me last night, as we were discussing the failure at Copenhagen this past winter, that his years alone on the lights gave him the clarity to see that we were beyond hope. There was something, some frenzy we stirred in one another that kept and would always keep us from coming anywhere close to the collective acuity necessary to come to terms with ourselves, and to live on the earth with dignity. His chosen path, he said, is the result of that understanding. Because, he said, given the slightest entry point the comforts of modernity are insidious, and the resulting ease breeds a laziness which the mind clings to covetously. Somehow, in his matter-of-factness and his accepting countenance, he related this without any tinge of condescension, regardless of the fact that I am, from his perspective, obviously one of the lazy who have chosen to buy into the collective mind’s cheap delusions.
Which is fair enough, I suppose, though I’m not so certain all our innovations and efforts are to be so easily dismissed. Tidal power, solar and wind, geo-engineering and bio-mimicry, though they won’t bring us back to the Garden of Eden—to Arnault’s Lost Land of Mu—are certainly not to be scoffed at. I suggested to Fairwin’ last night that he might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, which he conceded, though he countered that my argument would be made irrelevant once there were no babies born but those of humans, and the earth and oceans were rendered toxic, scorched and entirely ugly, as we’d now become, with our desperate creations built of metal alloys and concrete and plastics.
“Don’t flail outward any longer Miriam,” he’d said. “We’re too old for that now. Turn the lights out and live in the darkness, as your precious whales do, and you will hear how saddened their singing has become.” Then he blew the candle on the floor between us out, said goodnight, and slipped silently away to his bed on the other side of the fort, leaving me to fumble my way to the heap of lambskins he’d set out for me, blinded, my eyes straining but unable to adjust to such an absolute, unfamiliar darkness.
Now Fairwin’ leads the way back up his scraggy trail, which climbs like a stream in reverse, meandering upward. He hikes adeptly, the iconic mountain hermit, his feet unshod, over the mountain’s loam and stone. I struggle on the steep sections, my feet sliding out beneath me. “The shoe is the root of our human ills,” he says. “That, and dehydration.” He leads me down a fork in the path, traversing the side of the mountain for a time, until we come to a spring, a small hole in the ground with a silty bottom and a foot or so of water held within it. There’s a dented tin jug on a moss- and fungus-laden log beside the spring, and Fairwin’ dips it into the spring and offers it to me. “This water filters down through fissures in the coastal range,” he says, waving his hand out toward the distant mountains we can see through breaks in the fir and hemlock branches. There is still a great plume of ash above the mountains to the north, though the westerly which brought with it the sunshine we’ve spent the day walking in seems to have broken it up, carrying it eastward over the hills, up the Fraser Valley, to the higher hills beyond. “It travels under the strait, then trickles back up here. It’s as pure as it gets. Try it.” I take the water to my lips and it washes cool and complete through me, a great essence, an elixir.
The only rebuttal I can offer to Fairwin’s very positional manifesto is one beyond reason, beyond words. It’s what keeps me hoping, despite the dire daily evidence of decline and the very convincing arguments of futility, of ignis fatuus, set forth by Fairwin’ Verge and the like. It’s something I learned in pregnancy and in caring for my daughters. It’s a very small and vital, a very elemental truth I would not expect Fairwin’, whom as far as I can gather never fathered children, to be able to wholly grasp; and I wonder if any man actually, ultimately could. It has something to do with a deep interconnection—and by that I don’t mean to invoke the scientific connotations so common in modern environmentalist dogma; I don’t mean to slip into pat ideas about the air we breathe being composed of the same molecules Jesus once exhaled; don’t mean to infer we’re all walking on water—it’s that underlying thing that interweaves us, like the mycelium to the mushroom, or rather the under earth which holds the mycelium. The rhythmic surge of the tides and currents upon which the salts and waters of the wide ocean fall and rise. Something like that, though perhaps without the poetic flare.
“There was this time, about a year into my first taking up qigong, a long time ago now, when I thought for a while that we as people might possess the necessary strength to evolve, with it all part-and-parcel, our technologies and luxuries intact.” Fairwin’ takes the jug from my hand and bends down to scoop from the pool as he says this. I watch him, wondering if he’s been reading my mind, or if there’s simply something about drinking water high on a mountain from a deep-source spring that stirs such thoughts. We’ve spoken very little today, for two people walking together alone, and what conversation we’ve had has been about the earthquake and its aftermath, and Ferris. And the unfortunate timing of it all, him being possibly in downtown Vancouver when it struck—the last place one would want to be in the event of such a thing.
“I felt an energy upsurging in me,” he says. “Something I hadn’t sensed before and didn’t know the source of, something boundless and universal, and it felt so great it seemed conceivable that a shift could occur, something beyond ready explanation, some real spiritual awakening in humanity, and things could still be set right.” Fairwin’ places the tin jug back on its log and begins the trek back up the path as he says this, and I follow. “But then I became accustomed to the feeling, it was simply that of my body’s energy flowing properly, and the intoxication subsided and I realized that it was an individual discovery I’d made.” He stops there, as though that were the end of it, and quickens his step a bit, his arms hanging tautly at his sides, the two buckets of oysters riding against his thighs.
“Sure,” I reply. “But that implies it’s a discovery that can just as easily be made by others.” Fairwin’ scales the side of a steep abutment of rock, then sets his buckets at the top and scurries back down to retrieve mine. He leans in close to me as he takes them from my hands, his forehead and bushy eyebrows glinting with sweat.
“Yes. And no. A different mind might experience the same energy and make of it a conquering power, not one of healing. A corporate executive in New York might take up the practice of Kundalini and use the energy and newfound clarity to win a mega strip mining contract in Ecuador. It’s an individual discovery, and each individual will make of it what their life’s ground provides for. I was a hermit long before I chose to live in this way Miriam.” There’s an intense resignation in Fairwin’s eyes, not a sadness exactly, but an acceptance. “It was the most sensible and natural evolution of my being, but for another it might be to engineer rocket trips to Mars, or better ways to extract oil from bituminous sands. Which seems good for them, for their individual lives. But it’s not so good for those whales you love. And it most probably won’t be so good for their grandchildren either, though it’s not going to be any spiritual awakening that’s going to make them see that, not in th
e profound way necessary to realign things as needed.” Fairwin’ takes the oysters and shoulders them up onto the rock, then reaches down and offers me a hand as I climb behind him.
“What is it then?” I ask. “What is it that’s going to make them see?” I’m feeling frustrated with this now, this hopelessness Fairwin’ has espoused.
“It,” he replies. “The actual damage. They’ll see it when it’s right before them. When the oceans turn and the earth’s oxygen goes thin. When the heat comes and the famine. When those grandchildren can’t properly breathe, haven’t enough to eat—when the world’s emptied of everything but us. But by then it will be too late.”
“But there are options Fairwin’. Radical ideas and possibilities for rejuvenation,” I contest.
“Yes, ideas and possibilities,” he counters. “And then there are probabilities. Which aren’t easy, at this point, to live with, because they’re awful and unthinkable and might mean you’d have to give up that fancy car of yours, hybrid or not, because regardless it’s still made of metals mined and intensely machined, and plastics that poison those seas you so love. Our technologies are mind-boggling Miriam, I’ll concede that. They’re of the greatest complexity and accomplishment, but they’re mostly damaging, and we’ve lost sight of what it means to live without them. We’ve lost the wherewithal to live in the world, with the weather, and the desire’s not there now to learn.”