The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  A quizzical look comes over his face and it appears as though he’s going to burst into laughter. “Can I use your phone for a second?” he asks. I’m taken aback, it being an odd request at the end of such a diatribe. I reach into my pant pocket, turn on my cell and hand it to Fairwin’. He promptly hurls it from our perch to the forest below. As it lands with a crack somewhere beyond sight, he hoists my oysters onto the rock and resumes his brisk pace up the trail.

  “What the hell?” I call at his back, but he doesn’t turn as he hollers his reply.

  “I just saved a bee colony. You’ll thank me next time you drink your tea with honey.”

  I scurry up the rock, grab my two buckets, and hurry behind him, not quite incensed, but agitated by his arrogance, his impenetrable certainty. I catch up with him just as we come to what I suppose you’d think of as his yard, the space around the base of his fort, a circumference delineated by the fishing float strands hanging down from the fort’s underside. Fairwin’ drops his buckets by a fire pit to the outside of the perimeter, a heaping pile of shucked shells already forming a midden beside it.

  “What the hell was the point in that?” I ask him, indignant. “I might’ve needed that in the near future. We did just have a major fucking earthquake Fairwin’. My home was buried under ten fathoms of water yesterday, and that phone is one of the only things I’ve got right now.”

  “And you won’t make do without it?” he asks, and I can see by the cheek in his eyes that he’s enjoying this now, my dander being up as it is.

  “That’s not the fucking point, you asshole,” I say, raising my voice considerably, and I realize that I’m enjoying this too. A good row. I also realize that this is what it was like the other night, us having sex, two lonely hermits taking it all out on each other. So I decide to dig in deeper. “You wouldn’t have done that if we hadn’t screwed the other night.”

  “Perhaps not. But we did, didn’t we?”

  “Much to my displeasure, believe me.” I’m stomping up the winding staircase behind him now, raising my voice in congruence with the climb.

  “That wasn’t my idea was it, Mrs. Maynard?” He looks back at me from the top of the stairs, grinning.

  “Well don’t worry, it’s not a mistake I’ll make twice,” I bellow at him. “I’d rather service myself, thank you very much, than have your hairy heap of grunting sweat on top of me again.” I climb through the door as I say this and before me is Svend, presently bursting into hysterics, and behind him Ferris, laughing in a less gregarious manner, the Sohqui float cradled and glimmering in his arms.

  The Eve of, or Deliberations

  SHE SAID, “WE should go.” This was like the parable of the forbidden fruit, but in reverse: she was proposing abandoning knowledge for bliss. He didn’t fully know this, couldn’t read her intentions, couldn’t feel what she had felt all along, the insatiable pull of her to him, him to her, because his mind was like that of a long-caged animal’s, desperate and withdrawn. She knew he needed the clarity of the offshore, with its seeming endlessness, to see her. So although she found her own words dubious, she spoke them nonetheless, and convincingly, because for her it was the understory beneath the words she was telling. She said, “And so Mu sank in a storm of fire and water,” and she was saying, My body is an ocean. Dive. She said, “Cursed to search the world over, for tens of thousands of years,” and she was saying, I am your orb of perfect glass found, young fisherman. Break me open.

  •

  “This time of year, south around the high and into the trades, it should take us twenty days, give or take.” She only knows this by virtue of conversations overheard, but she speaks it with certainty, tries to make it sound easy, like an everyday journey.

  “Have you ever done it?” he asks, seeing through her facade.

  “There are lots of things I haven’t done. That’s no reason not to now.”

  “We’ve both never been out there.”

  “You’re a seaman, aren’t you? The boat is as seaworthy as they get, a sixty-five-foot hull of hand-laid fir and yellow cedar. She’s on the hook in Boho Bay, waiting. It’s the fastest way.”

  “Maybe the airports will reopen.”

  “The whole ring of fire is erupting!”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Svend?” she appeals to his friend.

  “That’s what the CBC is reporting.”

  “I know what the CBC is saying, Svend, I heard it, too. But that’s just the news. It’s probably sensationalist reporting. There’s no way I’m taking a sailboat to Hawaii because of some crazy myth a cult fanatic cooked up.”

  “You just dropped that thing from a twelfth-storey window,” Miriam counters his disbelief, swallowing her own spittle of self-doubt as she does.

  “I didn’t drop it, it fell.”

  “Yet there it is, round and perfect as ever. How else can you explain that?”

  “Physics.”

  “What?”

  “Chance.”

  “Chances are, that thing should be busted to smithereens. Look Ferris, I know it’s a lot at once, we’re all going through this, but think of it this way. If the prophecy is real, we save the seas, possibly even the planet. If it’s fiction, we find Sunimoto and we get your money. In fact, we get more money than he’s already agreed to. Sunimoto must believe the myth is true, which is why he’s paying such a high price for these floats. Now that these earthquakes and eruptions have occurred, he’s likely to be convinced that your float is the one he’s been looking for. And he’ll be desperate to have it. So we set the price. A half-million? A million? Then we’re back within six weeks, eight tops.”

  “And how do you propose we find Sunimoto? We’re just going to show up in Hawaii and ask someone at the nearest gas station if he’s around?”

  “I’ll make some calls. We’ll arrange it.”

  “Okay. So let’s just say this whole hocus-pocus thing is actually real. Doesn’t the earthquake mean that Sunimoto’s not the man, that it’s not him who is supposed to find the float after all?”

  “But it wasn’t actually him you were going to meet. How do we know Sunimoto’s man had Sunimoto’s best interests in mind? Maybe it works this way: you find the float, you deliver it to the hands of Sunimoto. Any deviation sets the earth to shaking. How are we to know? Sunimoto has bought every one of these things known to have been found for an exorbitant price all within the past six years. Aside from those few purchases, he’s not known as a collector. We know he lives in the town of Hilo, at the base of Mauna Kea. What better do we have to go on?”

  “I have a wife and a son, Miriam, and there was a major earthquake yesterday.” Francis looks at Svend as he says this, affirming his confidence. Jin Su and Emily, their secret. “There’s no way I’m sailing off with you to Hawaii based on some stupid fairy tale and some hare-brained speculations.”

  “Then what are you doing here? Why come to Fairwin’s in the first place?”

  “What was I supposed to do? This thing just fell from the top floor of a twelve-storey building and didn’t break!”

  “Exactly.”

  Miriam takes the float from the knee-high table. She does it swiftly, and swiftly she makes for the door of the fort. She thinks better of what she’s about to do as she’s doing so, a skeptic of the Mu myth herself, but follows this line of reasoning: if it doesn’t break, he’s hooked, we all are. And if it does, I’ll give him the 150 grand myself, and besides, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

  She leans out over the fort’s deck railing and hurls the float into the trees. It tinkles through the branches, then lands with a thud far below. They all watch it bounce, and roll, and bounce, and roll down Fairwin’s path, out of view. “Don’t think it broke,” she says. “We’ll leave tomorrow then, first light.”

  “Are you fucking nuts?”

  “Better go find it before dark. Keep your eye out for my cell while you’re down there,” she says, and shoots a playful look at Fairwin’,
at peace with him now that their fight and approaching evening alone has been interrupted by Svend and Francis’s timely arrival. “Though its curse is of a different sort.” This time she winks at Fairwin’. “And I doubt it fared as well as the float.”

  •

  He doesn’t trust her. She’s a dragon, obviously. He finds it pathetic how she wants him, the way she leaned across his nakedness that night on her bed and kissed him. The way she pushed her breasts to his chest as he pretended to sleep. He can see that she was once very beautiful, perhaps more so even than Anna. But what of it? Even Anna’s beauty, not yet lost to age as Miriam’s is, fails to stir anything inside of him. She’s a bored, rich woman well past her prime, unable to face up to her age. So ungraceful, despite appearances, despite her natural way of movement and demeanour. And un-genuine. He can tell for sure she doesn’t buy her own bullshit. The float is heavy, obviously blown thick, which would explain its being of a larger than normal size for such a thing, and might too explain its resilience. Further, earthquake or not, Francis remembers enough from Geology 101 to know that land masses and the ocean floor are of very different composition. No major continental lands have ever sunk, nor could they have. He knows this, and he knows that she does too.

  But he can’t go back to Anna’s—he already thinks of their home as “Anna’s,” not “his” or “theirs” so long has he been removing himself from it emotionally now—he’s just come from there, and it was ugly. And he needs the money to leave her. If this old Sunimoto guy actually believes he’s some immortally cursed fisherman, however that works for him, maybe he will pay more than 150 grand given the recent circumstances. Maybe it’s time to strike while the iron is hot. So he’s going along with it, because Miriam’s certainly right about one thing: what else has he got to go on? It’ll be futile to harvest crab for market any time in the next few weeks, and he’s not going back to Anna, not ever. He’s done. So he will sail with Miriam for Hawaii, her sights clearly set on him, his set on the horizon.

  First Light

  HE FEELS THE strength quiver out of him as he sets the dog on the windlass and Miriam starts motoring the boat out of Boho Bay. What kind of an idiot am I? he’s wondering of himself. But now they’re heading out into Bull Pass, a light westerly astern, and it’s past the time for second-guessing. He’s asked Svend to provide a home for Jin Su and Emily, knowing they couldn’t be in safer, more trustworthy and capable hands. And though he’s not sure if Anna will even let him through the door, he’s asked Fairwin’ to go and stay with her and Willow, at least until the earthquake’s aftermath subsides. He also took him aside and told him about Jin Su and Emily, and he’s asked both his friends to ensure Anna and Willow don’t discover who Emily is to him. To them. Willow’s sister.

  There is a hint of nausea in Miriam, something she’s felt off and on since this past winter, a feeling she can’t put her finger on, except to say it seems to start in her core and radiate to her spleen and up into her larynx. She suspects its cause to be of an emotional nature, and feeling it now tells her only that she’s experiencing the anticipatory anxiety which one would expect at the outset of such a journey.

  They’re motoring at six knots, the wind too light for sailing, southward in the middle of the Georgia Strait, the gravel-pit scar above Sechelt to port and the big-box suburban sprawl of Nanaimo to starboard. The sun is cresting over Mount Elphinstone to the east. Francis takes the wheel so Miriam can go below and make coffee. Off the stern-quarter now he can see into Halfmoon Bay, between South Thormanby and Merry Island, its little lighthouse rising like a steeple from the rock, and he thinks of his son and wife, still asleep for certain, in their small cabin just beyond the bay.

  The morning after the earthquake, before he left with Svend for Lasqueti, he stretched and fastened poly over the blown-out windows and looked over the emergency food stores and supplies to ensure they would be adequate. Anna lives with a perpetual distrust of the grid-dependent life, so she’s well prepared. Still, he hopes she will let old Fairwin’ stand in for him while he does this thing. The anger he felt when last he saw her gives way to an instinct for protection, and that feeling gives way to a sort of sentimental compassion. So in the light wind, in the brightening blue of sunrise, he feels deeply ashamed of all that he’s done, what he’s become, a desperate man with a child born of an adulterous affair with a woman he has to confess, if he’s being honest, he barely knows. And he is being honest with himself in this moment, perhaps for the first time in far too long, perhaps because he’s cast off now on this journey and it is swiftly setting a distance between himself and his life. He can feel it now being just beyond focus, his life, like something receding in a rearview mirror, and he wants to slow down, to stop, to go back and take a closer look, but he knows he can’t because it will just ambush him then, will consume him and offer no clarity, and so he knows all he can do is continue, that the only way forward is to keep this boat on course for Boundary Pass, Juan de Fuca Strait and the unknown, open Pacific.

  •

  Passing by Francis’s old crabbing grounds, Sand Heads, the Fraser’s fingered mouth, memories like ghosts rise off the cold water. I wouldn’t go back there, he thinks of that time, the eighteen-hour days, his back like a wall of bricks, crumbling. It’s unthinkable, only a decade beyond, the intensity of the work a young man can bear. Hour after hour with his head down, beating crab pincers free of steel mesh, wrestling hundred-pound pots about the deck. How much of a seaman is he? Never been outside the tide-churned waters of the strait, never on the open swell, never beneath a billowing sail. “How much have you sailed?” he asks Miriam, wondering suddenly, with full gravity, what he’s gotten himself into.

  “My entire childhood, every summer, on the Mediterranean.” She’s lying, usurping a bit of her mother’s life story to fill out her own. “My first husband and I wintered on a small sloop in the Sea of Cortez for many years. And then my last husband, Horace, he bought the Belle a few years before he passed away.” She looks him up and down for a moment, his hands on the big stainless steel wheel, then looks back to the sea. “It’s not difficult, Ferris. It’s like anything, a little knowledge, some good equipment, a little luck, and you’re off. Complete morons set sail for Hawaii every summer. You see them kicking off, dogs and grandchildren yapping away from the yacht club floats as the boat pulls from its slip, their son-in-law filming the whole scene with a fancy little digi-cam, their daughter at his side flapping her arm in farewell, trying not to sob. RVers with boats. They make it to Hawaii, get drunk for a week in an all-inclusive, feeling all the while smug and triumphant, then fly home and wait for the hired skipper and crew to complete the somewhat more difficult return leg of the journey and deliver their baby back to its berth.”

  It kind of ransacks the mystique, her response, but it eases Francis a bit, and warms him to her as well, the wryness of her tone, her little c’est la vie smile at the end of her answer, something he can understand, something of the resignation of his class. And he sees there is more to her than he’d accounted for, that really he knows nothing about this wealthy woman with the tongue of a dilettante, with the eyes of one who’s stood fast in the strongest of winds, with hands smooth and fingers long and slender as coral, into which he has chosen, against his better judgment, to place his life’s safety and care.

  •

  “Okay, I made some calls on the shortwave and I’ve finally got it figured out,” she says to Francis, emerging from the cabin to the cockpit. Francis used the last of the charge on Svend’s cellphone battery to call Anna and Willow last night, his own phone long forgotten on Jin Su’s bedside table, so Miriam has been below deck most of the morning using the shortwave. She hands him his third cup of coffee of the day. He hesitates before taking it. “You don’t get seasick do you?” she asks him, wondering at his hesitation.

  “No, heartburn. And I get a little… unsettled I suppose would be the word.” He grins at her as he sips from the hot brew. “I think that’s t
he idea, isn’t it?” she quips back. They’re passing through Haro Strait, motoring with the afternoon ebb, and the quake damage on shore becomes evident again as they pass by Sidney Island and the houses of Cordova Bay come into view, a whole swath of them and their manicured yards stripped away some ten feet above high water, the last casualties of the tsunami before it broke up and receded on the scattering of islands Miriam and Francis have just passed through.

  “Sunimoto’s on a large, fenced property above the town, and I’ve been given a password to get us through the gate when we arrive.” He looks at her with the question. “Pineapple,” she answers, before he can even ask. “It’s Pineapple.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I didn’t make the game.”

  “Is that what it is, a game? I mean, let’s cut into it here. You don’t actually buy all this sunken continent curse shit, I can tell, so what’s in it for you?”

  Miriam lets the question linger for a few moments before answering. She can tell Francis is irritable, probably tired and hungry, a bit overwhelmed—though she has yet to discover just how overwhelmed he is, or why—and getting a bit jacked on the fine, very potent Ethiopian Harrar.

  “Look at the shore, Ferris.” And she pauses again for him to do so, for it to sink in: the torn shoreline, its newly exposed striations of soil like some secret script exposed, the long-closed vault of geological time flung open in a human instant. Houses buckled and sheared from their foundations, teetering above the beach. “Imagine what my home looks like right now, if there is even anything left of it. Most likely there’s not, and the beach house is most certainly gone, and my cat, and the orchard, too. What’s there for me other than ruin? This boat is my home for now, and what better to do with it than sail the westerly trades to Hawaii? In everything an opportunity, Ferris, it’s what gets me up each morning.” And she isn’t entirely being untruthful in this answer, though it’s incomplete, it’s what she knows is appropriate, knowing very well that everything is timing—luck, love, life—and so keeping the rest, her heart’s stowaway cargo, for what she knows comes next. The lightness and relinquishment when land’s gone from eyeshot behind the unperceived arc of the earth.