The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  “Something like that,” she agrees. A perfectly clear image suspended in a cloudless sky. She takes his hand in hers, she can’t contain herself, she needs the connection to keep steady on her feet. There’s the sense of an immense, godly energy coursing through her, through him. They have to hold each other as they stand, watching for minutes that seem like hours, each of them surrendering to this inexplicable appearance, this otherworldly vision, until eventually it dissolves into the distant blue.

  •

  The wind stays down all day, so they cruise under power on a course to magnetic southwest. By sundown the fuel tanks measure half-full, but they’re sure to catch the trade winds soon, as reliable a source of propulsion as any diesel engine. The weather is warm suddenly, balmy, and they strip down to shorts and t-shirts and soak up the sun. They scrub the deck and clean the cabin. They each shower, and Francis replaces a burst seal on the galley water pump, the only breakdown thus far. They knock on wood, both feeling so optimistic, so smiled upon, they almost don’t think to do so, each assigning as they have a disproportionate spiritual weight to the sighting. They have been shined down upon. Their quest, their association, blessed.

  At sunset, they watch the sky together again, both with their eyes fixed on the blazing ball of deep, darkened orange as it falls. The instant the last of its circumference sinks below the horizon-line an instantaneous flash of bright emerald green ignites across it, a burst of light and colour radiating laterally and upward from where the sun has fallen.

  Flotsam and Jetsam

  THE SLACK HEAT persists. They deliberate in the morning, questioning their fuel consumption, but both are beginning to wonder, on account of yesterday’s sightings, if indeed there is something to Arnault’s tale. They both think and say so, unashamed now at admitting to themselves, to each other, that each has always given some credence to the possibility. They’ve both felt since the outset that this voyage may be about much more than retrieving some money. Perhaps time is more of the essence than they can even possibly imagine. So they motor onward, holding their course straight southwest.

  So far, by virtue of the changeable weather and their only-just-getting-to-know-each-other banter, they’ve more or less avoided the onset of boredom which is to be expected on such a trip, and is indeed the norm on any open-ocean crossing. The mind needs something to munch on, so once the exhilaration of being beyond sight of land subsides, the great, irreducible magnitude, the vast unending blue, becomes, well, reducible. The reverent mind becomes irreverent. A piece of garbage, a white Styrofoam cooler, say, or a plastic dinner plate, floating by on the flat sea becomes an occurrence.

  They are both starting to sink into this state of mind, despite the remnant exhilaration spilling over from yesterday’s sightings, and so, with nothing more of chores or cleanup to keep them busy, they decide on a mid-afternoon bottle of wine. Miriam brings from her special stash spot below—the storage locker beneath her bed, though Francis doesn’t know this, having found the liquor cabinet, obviously, but not her wine, which he’s noted she seems to have a fair quantity of—a Chardonnay of fine vintage from the Burgundy hills of France. It is, as far as she’s concerned, the finest bottle aboard, and she brings it out now to toast the majesty and magic of yesterday.

  The miraculous mountain in the sky was in actual fact a type of optical phenomenon known in the lexicon of meteorology as a looming. Currently, there is a deep temperature inversion on the coast of California caused by the particles of volcanic debris still floating in the lower atmosphere from the multiple eruptions which took place last week, the remnants of which have blown down with the north wind over the past few days, holding the sun’s heat trapped above the cool northerly air below. The light rays carrying the image of the mountain peak to Francis and Miriam’s eyes were refracting, bending as they bounced off the lid of warm air downward toward the dense, cool air rising off the ocean. They began beyond the geometric horizon, arcing over the distance in a manner somewhat parallel to the circumference of the earth, but Miriam and Francis’s minds assumed the light rays to be straight, as they normally would be, and so saw a mountain peak hovering where clouds would. In this way sailors throughout the centuries have seen visions of “ghost ships” sailing in the sky; real ships that were positioned well outside the sailors’ standard line of sight, just as the looming peak Francis and Miriam saw was far beyond theirs. Loomings are the most common of the superior mirages, and every time a person stops to watch the sun rise or set over the horizon one is seen, if just for a few moments, as the sun’s image rises to or descends from view before or after the sun actually does.

  The flaring streak of green they witnessed together at sundown can be similarly explained. Because light moves more slowly in the denser air of the lower atmosphere, the sunlight rays, again, refract. And because higher frequency light—green and blue hues—curves more than lower frequency light, these rays remain, for but a second or two, visible to the eye after the others are gone. This phenomenon is known as a green flash in meteorological vernacular, and is not an uncommon sight over the open ocean. Which is why Miriam, in the sobering light of the day after, has not entirely given herself over to the belief that yesterday’s mirages were of supernatural origin. She has seen green flashes before, from the boat with Yule and from the Glass Globe with Horace, and though these were far less dramatic than the one she witnessed with Francis last night, it’s enough to make her suspect, though she isn’t certain, that there could very well be some plausible, scientific explanation for both of yesterday’s sightings.

  This still wouldn’t, in her mind, completely eliminate the possibility of spiritual attribution. Just because science can explain something, does that then negate all mystical significance or the possibility of otherwordly origin? Regardless, she can tell that Francis is sold, hook, line and sinker, and what she does know is that somehow, as a result of yesterday’s happenings, her lust for him has returned to its former fury. Playing into what, as far as she can tell, is his unquestioned conviction that they have been visited upon, seems to be working in her single-minded favour, and she’ll drink to that.

  And so they do. And for most of the afternoon it seems to spur just the sort of light-hearted palaver and whimsical flirtations Miriam hoped for when she popped the cork.

  •

  He takes his shirt off and shows her the scar. “See, that’s where the knife went in.” He’s been telling her a tall tale about being attacked on board his crab boat by a rival fisherman. As it went, Jerry Phillips, a crabber out of French Creek who occasionally gets the idea to blast across the strait in his overpowered aluminum skiff with a couple strings on board, rammed the Prevailer in a fit of rage, then hopped aboard, looking for blood, only to find Francis waiting with a very long, very sharp pike pole at the ready. Francis gave him one good smack upside the head, and that was enough to send Jerry clambering back onto his own boat, very nearly ending up in the drink as he did so. But as Francis tells it to Miriam, it’s a gruesome affair, a bloody deck brawl with both men bruised and bleeding as its outcome, a rusty line-knife plunged into Francis’s side.

  “That’s an appendicitis scar,” she says, calling him on his fib. Then she lifts her shirt and shows him hers. Identical. Then she lifts her shirt above her head and off.

  •

  Her breasts are surprisingly shapely and pert. He’s never seen a middle-aged woman’s breasts before, not even in the movies, but he’s always imagined them to be something akin to deflated balloons pinned to a corkboard. Hers are two cousins of the mirage he saw yesterday, laid on edge. He’d like to hold one. Just one. He’s had too much wine.

  •

  She throttles down and shuts the main engine off. The boat slows, then comes to a standstill. She slips her pants off and strips down to her underwear of fine white silk. She dives in and under as far as she can swim, then re-emerges just beyond the bow, treading water, her whitening hair a waterfall in stasis across her shoulders. Francis dives
in, too, coming up beside her. There’s over two thousand fathoms of water beneath them. Cold water, dark, saline and thick. But the blue they swim in is warm and clear like the inshore waters of the Georgia Strait never are, never could be, there being too much sediment washed down off the mountain slopes.

  “It’s a bit creepy, isn’t it?” he says. She doesn’t respond, floating back with her face to the sky instead, a gesture of absolute trust and surrender. Her answer.

  •

  “This is the first time we’ve stopped since we left land,” she says, cradling her dripping legs to her chest. She licks some of the salt water from her knee and looks over at him sitting beside her. “Not exactly,” he corrects her.

  “Right, there was your little episode.” She springs to her feet and strides to the cockpit to retrieve the bottle of wine as she says this. “I suppose we should drink to that then, should we not?” She takes a good swig, standing above him with her fine legs and figure, still naked but for her underwear. He takes the bottle when it’s offered. Sweet sin, he thinks to himself, though there’s no god’s stricture he’s submitted to live under. Just his own law, now three times broken. Three times lucky. Three times gone.

  •

  One thing that can be said of fishermen, as a rule—and to be clear there are not many things can be said of fishermen inclusively, them being a motley and unruly bunch the world over—is that they almost invariably have a somewhat manic-depressive, red-hot to icy-cold temperament. Either it comes with them to the job, or the job, by nature of its ups and downs, bonanzas and busts, infuses it. Whichever the case, it’s there, and it is why Francis rushes to the stern and heaves Chardonnay-laced bile over the rail almost immediately after their first kiss.

  •

  “I actually thought it was quite nice,” she says, making light while handing him a wet towel. “I can’t do this Miriam,” he says, not interested in making their drunken kiss smaller than it is. “It’s not right.”

  “There’s just you and me on this boat, Ferris.”

  “Francis,” he says. “My name is Francis.”

  “What?”

  “My name is Francis. Francis Wichbaun. Do you think you could just be one of the few people in this life who actually call me by my real fucking name.”

  “Gladly. It’s much more suiting of you, Francis.” She walks toward him and puts her slender fingers on his flushed cheek. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ve already got one woman too many in my life,” he says to her, realizing as he does that he’s not entirely sure what that means, which woman he’s referring to.

  “Perhaps, Francis. Or maybe you’ve got one too few of the kind of woman you need.”

  “And which is that Miriam, your kind?” He’s angry now, at her brashness, her lack of obvious boundaries, of decency. “Jin Su and Anna are the mothers of my children, for Christ’s sake. What are you? Some rich woman with a thing for antique fishing floats and men half her age?”

  “That’s unfair,” she shoots back, her voice quavering slightly.

  “Is it?” he counters, unrelenting. It’s his downfall in arguments. At the first sign of weakness he eschews the opportunity to diffuse things with compassion. He goes in for the kill instead, against his better judgment and his heart’s intent. She wants none of it. And knows enough to see a man whose deepest vulnerabilities have surfaced, the aggravation that inspires, and how alcohol elevates such emotions to unreasonable proportions.

  So she says nothing in response. Instead she scissors her legs over the starboard rail and dives back into the sea.

  Albatross, Albatross

  THE ALBATROSS ARRIVES with the wind. High noon, and the smooth sea starts to ripple, then curl. Francis and Miriam made their peace over a breakfast of oatmeal, orange juice and canned peaches. Only eight days out. What choice but to do so? “I’m sorry,” she’d said to him, ending the silence. “I shouldn’t have pushed you.”

  Through the night he’d lain awake thinking through it all, Anna and Jin Su and the alcohol, and now Miriam too caught up in it, his little shitstorm of confusion, until his anger had melted back to self-derision. “You didn’t push me. I should have been more clear from the get-go. I need to keep off the booze out here.” This is spoken not as an emphatic statement but as a request, for support, and Miriam understands it won’t be an intoxicated entry party into his heart. His is of the heavier sort, and if he’s to be opened to her it will have to be by virtue of a gentler lever. A quiet affection. She’s beginning to know him for the old-fashioned romantic that he is. Which is fine. There’s still weeks and weeks to go on this expedition, together, alone.

  So, in answer to his declarative question, she takes his empty bowl from him and climbs down into the galley. Minutes later she emerges with Francis’s blue tote emptied of the float and filled instead with bottles of liquor and wine. She hauls it with great effort through the companionway and drops it at his feet. Saying nothing still, she tosses one of the bottles over the stern. “Miriam don’t,” he says, reaching up and holding her wrist firmly. She looks him square in the eye.

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I want to. I do.” She nods at him lightly until he releases her arm, then she proceeds to throw the rest of the bottles overboard. The full ones sink fast where they fall. The others, the half-full or near-empty, float in a line behind them so they look like a string of glass floats, from a time now past, glinting in a new day’s sun.

  •

  They hoist the main sail, then the jib, and as the latter takes the first of the trade winds to billow it full Francis feels the dark bird’s shadow cast a stream of cool across his skin. Above him its wide, grey wings, six feet tip to tip, glide. He viewed a flock of Laysan albatross through the binoculars while off the coast of Oregon, but this is his first up-close visitation. Those Laysan, the albatross he’s seen in photos and movie footage, even his dream albatross, have all been of a predominately white plumage, so Francis doesn’t recognize this black-footed albatross for what it is. But Miriam does, and she quickly begins reeling in the hook they’re trolling behind the boat. “Albatross,” she says to Francis, winding the reel. “Lucky it didn’t dive on the hook before we noticed it.” The bird turns its black beak down at them, assessing, and issues a loud shriek. “Let’s feed him,” Francis says, and leaps down into the galley to open a can of tuna.

  “And a good south wind sprung up behind. The Albatross did follow, and every day, for food or play, came to the mariner’s hollo!” Miriam recites to Francis when he emerges back on deck. “It’s from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’” Francis responds with a blank look. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge?” she tries.

  “I was never really into that old poetry stuff,” Francis finally offers her, tossing the tuna into the sea. The albatross dives, nabs it in its bill succinctly, and chokes it down, twisting back up into the air.

  “Me neither,” she says. “But Yule was always reciting verses from that poem. He knew the whole thing, word for word. Every time we’d see an albatross while trolling, without fail, he’d pipe in.” She puffs her chest out, pulls her shoulders up and back, reciting in a deep-voiced caricature of her late husband. “At length did cross an Albatross, through the fog it came. As if it had been a Christian soul, we hailed it in God’s name.” Then she relaxes back into herself. “It’s always stuck. It’s funny what we retain, isn’t it? I’ve got this song in my head, from when the girls were little, when we lived with my second husband.” She leans back this time, relaxed, a crooning posture. “One two three, four five six, seven eight nine, ten eleven twelve, ladybugs came to the ladybug picnic,” she sings. “There’s more to it, but that’s all I remember. The thing is, I swear to God, that song runs through my head a good ten times a day. It’s totally random.”

  “I know the thing,” he pipes in, laughing at her display. “Here comes the rain again, falling on my head like a memory, falling on my head like a new emotion…” he belts out.

  “Annie Lennox,
” she says, “I love Annie Lennox.”

  “You can have her. I hate the shit. But I swear, every time it starts to rain, doesn’t matter where or when, I hear that stupid song.” The albatross squawks at them for more scraps, to which Miriam puffs out her chest once more. “‘God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends that plague thee thus!—Why look’st thou so?’—‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross,’” she bellows up at the bird, which watches her display curiously, then again squawks its request.

  “Yule used to shoot them?” Francis asks.

  “No,” she replies, her tone rising back to her own, turning serious. “But we killed our share. It was the seventies. Back then we didn’t think much of them as by-catch. It was just the way things were, always had been.”

  “And always would be,” he interrupts, an unveiled accusatorial tone to his voice.

  “That’s right. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. It was a bit before your time.”

  “Not before Rachel Carson’s though, was it?”

  “No. But chemicals and fishing by-catch are two different things.”

  “Are they?” He’s starting to grow agitated again. Short fuse Ferris, she thinks to herself, pondering what to say next to redirect the conversation.

  “It certainly seemed so at the time. You do use toilet paper, don’t you?” she asks, throwing his own critique back at him. He wants to refute the point, but he knows he’d be wrong in doing so. Which is the crux of the entire thing. Where’s the line, and who draws it? For a time, when he and Anna were first living together, they lived with no toilet paper in the house, using instead an old yogourt container in the bathtub to wash with after shitting. Then Anna got pregnant and it started to seem unsanitary to her. The neighbourhood health food store sold 100 percent post-consumer recycled toilet paper, nowadays a regular grocery store item, but back then a rarity. It seemed a reasonable compromise. And of course they never went back to the yogourt container and tub routine. So instead of a bit of tap water there’s energy-consumptive manufacturing, bleach, plastic packaging and shipping. DDT and by-catch. Oceanic acidification and ass-wipe. There’s nothing to be said, and he knows it. Touché.