by Joe Denham
He’s noticed Miriam is one of those people who look a wreck in the morning, like all her energy has crawled deep down into the cave of her body and hasn’t yet risen to the surface though she has risen from sleep. By noon she’s one of the most radiant, pleasantly energetic women he’s ever seen, of any age, which makes her morning appearance all the more surprising, almost disturbing, and intriguing, as it signifies for Francis—he doesn’t consciously articulate this thought, it’s more a visceral recognition—a complexity and a depth to Miriam, a ground-source to her character he hadn’t first perceived and hadn’t expected. It also signifies her need for coffee. “Take the wheel,” he says to her, just as she’s about to answer his question, to start telling him about the dream still hovering at the fore of her mind, and he jumps down the five steps of the companionway and into the cabin.
He emerges ten minutes later—Miriam’s morning fog already lifted, blown off too by the steely, crisp wind, shivers just setting in—with extra sweaters for her, and hot, black coffee. Now she’s thinking of her life with Yule from beyond the trance of her dream. “My first husband and I used to fish these kinds of mornings, offshore of Winter Harbour, trolling for coho and springs this time of year. It’s so clear, isn’t it?”
Francis knows little of her life previous to the one he’s seen her living at the Glass Globe, and hearing her say this he feels a mixture of shame for using her as a sounding board so much these past couple of days, for not reciprocating her curiosity; and understanding, because something in her seems too much like home to him, and the fact that she was once married to a fisherman, that she once fished herself, is a puzzle piece clicking into place. “A northerly always feels like a fresh start, doesn’t it, like the whole world’s slate has been wiped clean,” he offers, trying not to let his emotions surface, wanting to hear more.
“If only that were true,” she says, taking a good sip of her coffee and smiling at him, the blue in her eyes seeming to darken and deepen against the backdrop of the day’s light equally darkening and deepening the wind-waves as they begin to churn around them. “Yule always said there were two worlds, the one out here, and the one back there.” She tips her gaze toward the diminishing sight of land. “He maintained that if everyone was made to spend some time out at sea then the world would be changed for the better. That people would come to appreciate the magnitude of the natural world and so would learn to live with reverence, not narcissism and arrogance.”
“I think it’s a lot more complicated than that.”
“Me too, but Yule was still in his twenties when he died.”
“Before the romantic death rattle sounds.”
“That, and he was—we were—profoundly in love.” As she says this that love is still almost present, not something lost to the sea nearly thirty years ago, but just carried off with her dream-cloud on the northerly wind. She has just lain, less than an hour ago, in the warm cave of his arms, his thick beard rough down her neck. “I don’t think many people find that kind of love. That’s why they can’t believe things could be, are, as simple as Yule believed.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit presumptuous Miriam, a bit condescending?” he asks her, irked by her Anna-esque certainty, her moral authority.
On any other day she would have agreed with him. With the disillusionment of two marriages of convenience behind her, and the love she and Yule shared hardened with time to a statuesque fact—something for her mind to dust off, polish and occasionally ponder from the perspective of observer, not creator—she would have asserted that no love is transcendent; that romantic love is, ultimately, delusion. But this morning, still held within her dream’s gravity, she thinks differently. She thinks, yes, if only each person could spend a month at sea, or better yet a lifetime in love, real love, the kind she and Yule shared those days they fished alone together on the Misty; those nights they spent sleeping on the deck of the Florence Five, their little sloop, anchored somewhere in the Sea of Cortez in a secluded bay on one of its volcanic islands under a net of stars too numerous to contain.
“Let’s hoist the sails,” she says, by way of avoiding his question, not wanting to get further into a conversation which will lead inevitably to disagreement; to waste such a splendid morning doing the old tête-à-tête clackity-clack down that dead-end track. So they do, working for an hour to establish the right sail pattern, Miriam’s limited knowledge the only thing to guide them as they try various configurations before setting a double spinnaker, two genoas poled out, and the Belle assumes a natural downwind course and cuts across the swells at hull speed.
They lunch early on the remainder of yesterday’s tuna, then Miriam takes the helm and lets Francis sleep away the afternoon, well through his three-hour allotment. She can see he’s tired, and would be too, she concedes, if she were carrying the burden he’s set upon himself. The wind courses across the water at a steady twenty knots, the waves stirred to a not-uncomfortable four feet, the Belle’s high stern solid with the following seas, so the steady, easy sailing affords Miriam time to reflect, and consider.
A week ago, this time, she was preparing dinner for herself in the warmth and comfort of her well-arranged and well-appointed kitchen. Poseidon would have been most likely having his late-afternoon nap on the couch, or just waking to demand his dinner. She was probably considering what pretenses she might invent to seek out Francis, as in her at the time was a thirst for him that seemed unslakable. Now she’s headed for the fortieth parallel, without a home, lost in her old love for her first husband, with Francis sleeping his torment off below deck, seeming less like a man to be desired than like a confused, frightened child. Which he is, it’s becoming clear to her. A boy not much older than her eldest daughter, albeit inhabiting a man’s body, a strong and perfectly balanced, beautiful body that could fire desire in the most frigid of women. And now she’s on this boat and there’s nothing to be done but make it through to Hawaii, to find this man Sunimoto, whom she’s been assured by several old and good acquaintances does indeed live there, as they have been assured by their old and good acquaintances, whom have been assured… It’s a mug’s game, possibly, the entire thing.
Francis finally wakes just past 5 p.m., climbing to the cockpit with sleep still in his eyes. He rubs them heavily, then squints out off the port side, toward the eastern horizon. “It’s gone,” he says, and she looks out too. She’d been so engrossed in her own thoughts all afternoon she had not noticed the last of the distant mountain peaks disappear from view. “I’ve got to say I never thought I’d see it. No land. Wow,” he says. “I’m not sure about his ideas on love Miriam, but I’ll go with your husband on this. It’s definitely a different world out here.”
Nightwatch
THE NORTHERLY PERSISTS, pushing them past the fortieth parallel. Through the night Francis holds to a downwind track, south-southwest, keeping the wind and waves astern so Miriam can sleep comfortably below. They’ll keep to this course until they’ve crossed the thirty-fifth parallel, the horse latitudes, then they’ll catch the northeast trade winds and set a direct course southwest to Hawaii.
Francis likes the night watch. It’s eerie, the sound of the hull creaking and splashing through black water, the stars scattered from horizon to horizon against a sky lit by the light of no moon. It gives him shivers, the immensity of space surrounding and the cold north wind, so he lights the propane lantern in the cockpit to keep them both at bay. He wishes he had a pack of smokes, a bottle of rum… and thinks about opening one, perhaps a bottle of Scotch to warm the blood; thinks about what Miriam said of the flame being inside his head, his heart, not the whiskey, and concedes to himself her point. Perhaps with Jin Su things will be different. Perhaps they’ll share a bottle of wine over dinner and it won’t lead to a scathing fight, to him tearing out to the bar for more, to escape her suffocating reprisals, pushing the fire at his feet hard and fast down the dark winding highway, his anger like an anvil on the accelerator.
That’s a worl
d away to him now, those dark nights, and Francis thinks instead about what lies ahead of him, all things going with grace, the new lease on life the fishing float will provide at this journey’s completion. He sets the autopilot and goes below to take the float from its tote stowed beneath the main salon bunk. Carrying it out to the cockpit, he studies it by the pale lantern light. Not a scratch. It’s something he and Miriam don’t talk about because it’s ultimately beyond explanation or comprehension. Like crop circles. Or the tiny ball of light he and Anna saw once while lying in bed a few days after Willow was born. It flitted about above them, streaking across the room, then hovering, then again streaking on another angle until it suddenly disappeared. What to say of such a thing? Tinkerbell? Extra-dimensional crossover? Extraterrestrial visitor?
Holding the float fills Francis with a feeling of presence, of reverence, of being in possession of something sacred, even perhaps of being in its possession. It’s a feeling he’s felt since he first lifted it from the waters of Porpoise Bay, but holding it now he can’t be sure how much of it is inspired by the object and how much by the events of the past week, by the stories Miriam has told of its mythological powers. If pure belief were possible it would be made so on a night such as this. But Francis has always had a hard time with Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. It’s why he stopped attending AA meetings years ago. Faith’s not an answer for him, it’s delusion. Though in the suspension of time and space that blooms in perception when the sailor crosses the barrier of the continental shelf, the living ocean deepening beneath, in the dark of the new moon beyond the limits of the cities’ light-surge, a fold of anything’s possible opens that even the staunchest atheist would be liable to fall into.
Francis shuts the lantern’s fuel off and it hisses and flickers out, leaving him again with the boat’s creaking and clinking and the unfathomable stars. The glass feels warm in his hands, in contrast to the cold wind curling around them. What if the stories of the Naacal and the Sohqui are true? Sunken continent or not, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of an unacknowledged, anciently ancient civilization. It doesn’t nullify the possibility of some super-spiritual curse. There’s no question the ocean, the whole earth, is in the throes of an extinction crisis. And what of the Mayan 2012 thing, or is it 2018? It must signify something. Pop-fluff. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Francis knows better.
He takes the float back inside and stows it away in its tote, safe and unaffecting. Above the bunk, in the upper salon cabinet, are the stores of alcohol. A row of shiny bottles holding liquids of clear and amber and gold. He considers, then takes a bottle of single malt, a single glass, and returns to the cockpit. He’s feeling good, substantial, surprisingly grounded given the lack of ground beneath him. So good riddance.
He pours himself a drink. Sweet Scotch. The stars are like little bells ringing above his temples. Sweet music. He drinks to Willow and the Wichbaun blood humming behind his ears. He drinks to Anna and her variable ugliness and beauty. His mother asleep in her filtered air above Fourth Avenue, and Miriam in her wide forward berth below, dreaming to the rhythm of the hull sliding through the sea. Jin Su curled around Emily, warm in Svend’s spare bed, enwrapped in the cocoon their two hearts keep spinning, synchronized, in the little microcosm he’ll soon call home.
•
One hand on the taffrail, one hand guiding his stream, he recites to the nightscape while pissing into the wash:
Man’s sole gesture of defiance
at a hostile or indifferent universe
is standing outside at night
after the requisite number of beers
and with a graceful and enormous parabola
trying to piss on the stars
failing magnificently
It’s all he remembers of the only literature course he ever took, Introduction to Canadian Poetry, an easy second-year credit. It’s a poem by Al Purdy entitled “Attempt,” though he remembers neither the author nor the title, and couldn’t say now if he was asked what precisely the word “parabola” means. But he does recall that the single most common cause of fatality at sea amongst fishermen worldwide is falling overboard while pissing off the deck. The thought sends a second shiver down his spine as he zips himself back up.
•
He considers his choices, the mickey of Scotch soundly downed, and decides on a bottle of Jägermeister, for old time’s sake.
•
Her smell is of lavender and ice. Of red wine and coal smoke. Of sweet grass. Of thyme. All these things at once. It lures him to her door. He stands, swaying slowly, wanting to enter. The dragon’s lair, he thinks, and sucks in the ensuing chuckle. He puts his hand on the doorknob and twists, then comes to his senses, realizes he’s being creepy, and goes back out on deck.
•
His vomit projectiles out into the wind, into the dark. How many sailors follow that overboard? he wonders. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.
•
It’s another song by The Boss, “Local Hero,” that’s been playing through Francis’s mind since they set sail from Neah Bay. These days I’m feelin’ all right, ’cept I can’t tell my courage from my desperation. From the tainted chalice, well I drank some heady wine. He belts it out at the top of his deep, booming voice. He bellows Bruce up at the stars. Then he sobs, big drunken breached-levee sobs, because Anna and Willow and Cosmo and Mom; because if Miriam’s right then Jin Su and Emily too; because the ocean is so wide and the stars are so many; because his moments of joy are so few.
•
Miriam rises before daybreak, dresses warmly, and comes to the cockpit shining a little hand-held flashlight. They’re using house lights only when necessary now as it’s been days since they last ran the main and they’ve discovered the tow-generator provides only a nominal amount of amperage. The beam catches first the gleam of the near-empty bottle of Jägermeister and the drinking glass, then the image of Francis curled up on the stern bench, cradling both, fast asleep. She smiles to herself at the sight, then descends below, returning with some woollen survival blankets. She takes the bottle and glass from his hands, and tucks the blankets over and around him. She’s in the afterglow of her second consecutive dream of Yule, still a-swim in tenderness and affection, so she places a long, soft kiss on Francis’s forehead. Then she pours herself a drink and sits back to savour the residual dream-flow; the contrast of the warm liquor and the cold, cold wind.
The Looming
FRANCIS SPENDS THE rest of the day sleeping it off and puking it out. He won’t eat. Miriam drinks a pot of coffee after dinner and stays up well into the night keeping watch. They haven’t seen another boat in almost three days, but she’s heard horror stories of massive cargo ships barrelling over boats the size of the Belle, crumpling them like pop cans. The wind goes slack in the sails some time before dawn, and the softening swells lull her fears to rest. Exhausted, she clips to the jack-line and lowers the sails. Then she sets the radar alarm with a twenty-mile radius and curls up in the cockpit on the same bench seat Francis slept atop the night before, wrapped warm in the survival blankets and some of Horace’s thick sweaters. His was that British man’s smell of aged cheddar and mothballs, and the faintest trace still lingers in the wool. She thinks of how proud he would have been to be out on the high seas, on the Princess Belle, drifting across the thirty-fifth parallel, the fabled northern horse latitudes, with plenty of water and provisions, and a good steady British motor to power them through. Horace trusted technology, provided it was engineered properly and built flawlessly, which it was sure to be if done by British minds and hands. She says a little prayer to his ghost, and has a laugh at the irony, having presently put her life, and Francis’s, solely in the hands of a Japanese radar. Then she drifts as the boat does, off into sleep.
•
When she wakes it’s to the sound of a lone humpback exhaling, a great burst of air startling her from sleep. All she sees upon bolting upright, her worst
fears of cargo ship collision sending a shot of adrenalin to her blood, is the plume of sea water drifting away from her and the tail flukes descending as the whale sounds. Then nothing. She scans the water around the boat, but the whale must have surfaced once, then dove.
She’s oriented now, though, having walked the length of the deck to the bowsprit, then back to the cockpit. She’s wide awake, which makes the mountain peak she sees suddenly hovering over the eastern horizon, a snow-capped precipice floating, solitary, north of the rising sun, all the more unbelievable. They haven’t seen land for almost two days now. They couldn’t have drifted back that far while she slept? She does a double, a triple take, but there it is. Jumping down into the nav station, she checks coordinates on the GPS, and sure enough they’ve drifted southeast of their position, but barely, it’s only been four hours since she set the radar alarm. She pops her head back out of the cabin and it’s still there, clear as day, so she slides Francis’s stateroom door open, leans in and shakes him awake. “You’ve got to get up, Ferris,” she says. “You’ve got to come see this.”
Francis wakes easily, having more than slept off his stupor, dresses and hurries to the cockpit. “You’re sailing us back?” he asks, squinting up at the mirage on the horizon. He’s instantly annoyed. “Look Miriam, I know I fucked up, but it’s no reason to give up…”
“I’m not,” she interrupts him. “I didn’t. I don’t care about that. We’ve been sailing on course. We’re almost two hundred miles off the coast of central California.” Miriam’s excitement is settling into a reverent awe now—now that she knows Francis sees it too and she hasn’t gone mad.
“That’s impossible. There’s no way we could see that if we were.”
“Go check our position. You’ll see,” she says, not taking her eyes from the horizon, the pale-orange morning sunlight flashing in them, widened and entranced. Francis descends to the nav station and does as she has just done, then hurries back up on deck with the binoculars in hand. “Jesus Christ,” he says, peering through the binoculars at the mirage.