The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  Absence is the aphrodisiac of the soul. I don’t remember who said that. It’s from some book or movie we both loved once I think. If you were here you would tell me exactly which one. You’ve always been the one to sift the chaff from the grain for me Ferris. Here’s one I can recall. Distance is the soul of beauty. Simone Weil. Come back to me Ferris. Come back to me, and come back to me. Time is much kinder at night, Berger writes, there’s nothing to wait for. But he’s wrong. Because this night here is unkind without you, and I am waiting.

  Your love,

  A.

  I fold the letter four times, carry it to the bedroom, and slip it under Ferris’s pillow, for him to find when he returns. I know he will. With everything around me silent and asleep now I can feel him. I know he’s still in the world, that he’s left Hawaii safely and is on his way home to me. I say a little prayer for him to whatever god or gods might still be here, then I lay my head down on his pillow and curl up on his side of the bed. There’s a little songbird—I haven’t the faintest clue what kind—nesting with its young in the attic above our bed. I’ve never seen it, but every so often it sings in the night. Short, pretty trills. Tonight they fall through the dark like a song of blessing answering back from wherever my prayers might be heard.

  •

  The world is elevated in the light of love found or love renewed. I’m not naive to this. It brings the soul to the surface, the way some deep sea fishes rise to the light of the moon on clear nights. I don’t resist it. Willow heads off to the beach in the morning and I go out into the garden. It’s a hot June day, no wind, and I spend it watching the bees trip from stamen to stamen, then fall asleep in the shade of the broadleaf maple behind our house and dream of a day a lot like this one, back when we’d first moved from the city. Willow was teething, fussy, so we loaded him into the crummy and drove up the east side of the inlet to Tuwanek, then up the logging roads into the Tetrahedron Range. Willow fell asleep before we even left the pavement.

  Somewhere in the mountains we pulled the truck over beside a small creek and made love on the front bench seat of the cab. It was muggy and hot and we finished with a slick film of sweat and dust coating our bodies. We got out to wash in the creek, the world around us silent but for our splashing and the ticking of the still-cooling engine close by, in the distance a float plane lifting into the air from the inlet waters far below. I dreamt this all clearly, exactly as it had been. Ferris came up behind me while I was bent over the stream washing my legs in its cold glacial water. He leaned over me, so I thought he was going to take me again from behind, right there on the side of the road. Instead he put his mouth to my ear and whispered, “I’d pick you one, but it doesn’t seem right. Come see what I’ve found.”

  On the far side of the creek the blasting scree rose steep and barren back to the trees. In amongst the granite cobbles and shards were these little bunches of flowers. Tiny, with yellow petals and purple sunburst centres. They were the only growth on that inhospitable slope. Perfect clusters of flowers, growing as though out of nothing. So small in relation to the magnitude of their surroundings—the aggressive man-made road cut through a slope of towering firs and hemlocks, the wide view of the sky to the downslope side, the long inlet below—those flowers would have been impossible to notice if it weren’t for the afterglow of our lovemaking.

  I woke up with this in my mind, and have been lying here a long while savouring the feeling of that day as it still lingers inside me, watching the late-afternoon sun illuminate the chlorophyll in the maple leaves above as they rustle in the lightest of winds now blowing in off the bay. I’ve also been thinking of something else I read in Berger’s novel last night. I want to recollect it properly, as he wrote it, so I rise and go to the house to retrieve the book. It’s on the front porch where I left it and I quickly find the quote I’m looking for.

  What lasts is women recognising the men they come to love as victors whatever happens, and men honouring each other because of their shared experience of defeat. This is what lasts!

  Which is why, I’m realizing, the kind of love we had on that mountainside hasn’t lasted us. I’ve not seen Ferris as a victor, regardless of his ill-fated decisions and his failures. I’ve not honoured him despite his defeats. But even as I think this I feel the counterweight of other thoughts, dissentious thoughts, leaning in. Should a man then be honoured regardless of the ill stride he takes his defeats in?

  A few pages on, perhaps the passage that struck me the most last night:

  And what we today can show … is that victory is an illusion, that the struggle will be endless, and that to continue it, aware of this, is the only way to acknowledge the immense gift of life!

  Somewhere along the way Ferris decided he didn’t want to struggle any longer. He started acquiescing to dimwit ideas like, for instance, the one of plastic, as a product of human ingenuity and synthetic manipulation of terrestrial material, being natural. And therefore acceptable in whatever quantity we deem necessary, or so I’ve always assumed the rest of the argument must go. All our destructive designs being somehow inevitable, unavoidable, foreordained, and so permissible. He started questioning the solidity of the ground we’d staked out and stood firmly upon, regurgitating pat aphorisms like, We can’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater, or Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone. Questioning whether it was right, for instance, to call people like Joni Mitchell to task for signing a record contract with Starbucks; or David Suzuki for making a deal with the devil when he broke ranks with Alexandra and Salmon Coast and founded allegiances instead with Ocean Harvest, the largest aquaculture corporation in the world.

  We don’t need to work with the industry, we need to eliminate it! It takes five pounds of feed-fish to grow every pound of farmed salmon. This will not change without radically changing the salmon’s DNA or increasing their already heavy hormone regime. In what way then can this industry be made to be sustainable, closed containment pens or not? But Ferris would stand steadfast by Suzuki’s collaboration-with-industry approach, saying I’m foolish to question a man of such experience and broad-based knowledge. Coward’s talk. How can I see it otherwise? How can I call the author of such feeble-minded thoughts my victor?

  Our parents might have said the future was what we were struggling for. Not us. We were fighting to remain ourselves.

  That’s Berger’s A’ida again. It’s the articulation of the unspoken mantra Ferris and I lived by, together, before he gave in to the fear of what’s lost—financially and socially—when you’re anything but a fence-sitter in these hyper-conservative times. Forgetting to keep his sights trained instead on the personal dignity retained, Ferris lost his allegiance to those tenacious, impossible flowers, and since then he’s been lost to me.

  •

  “You’ll end up old and bitter and alone,” Ferris said to me the last night he was here. He was on his hands and knees picking window glass from the carpet in the dining room. I’d come at him hard when he told me he was leaving the next day for Lasqueti to try to arrange another meeting with the fish float buyer. I’d told him he’d bought into the system so far when he bought the boat that he couldn’t see anything clearly anymore, that he was just another panicking worker on the rat-wheel, lost in the racket of his own whirring. And I meant it. “It’s not that fucking simple Anna,” he’d fought back. “Everything for you is so fucking black and white.”

  “That’s right, it is. You’re either scrambling for money with the rest of them, poisoning and killing whatever you have to along the way, or you’re not. Which is it, Ferris? Which are you doing with your life?”

  “The best I can with what I’ve got to work with is what I’m doing. Put it into whichever box you want Anna.”

  “I have, and I will.”

  “That’s right. There’s me and everyone else, destroying the precious world in one box. And you in the other. Immaculate Anna, sitting at home all day with your fucking Apple computer and your iPhone, saving
the world.”

  “Don’t start at me with the hair shirt shit Ferris, it’s pathetic.”

  “Alone Anna. You’re all alone. There’s a whole world of people out there struggling together to make things work and you sit in this house passing judgment. I won’t do it. I can’t.”

  “Cause you’re a fucking coward like the rest of them. You’ve gone soft. Which is all fine and dandy for you, isn’t it, but the whales don’t have that choice Ferris. And the salmon and the albatross and the fucking sea turtles. Why don’t you ask the great auk whether they figure all those people out there are trying hard enough? Oh, wait a second, I forgot, they’re already extinct. Fucking gone, Ferris. And the salmon will be the next to go while you and all the rest of the doing-our-besters are easing into the idea that we might need to seriously rethink some shit here. I won’t join in, Ferris. And if it means I live and die alone at least I’ll do it with dignity. Something you used to have before you went and made fishing the end instead of the means.”

  “As if that’s what I wanted. As if what’s happened in the fishery is all my doing.”

  “It’s a sinking ship, Ferris, and you refuse to jump.”

  In my disgust I turned my back on him and stormed into the kitchen. He got up off the floor and followed.

  “What would you have me do then, sell the boat for a hundred-thousand-dollar loss? And then what, get a fucking job on the ferries?”

  The knife I’d used to dice the vegetables for supper earlier in the evening was sitting there on the counter beside me, so I grabbed it, and waved it in Ferris’s face. “I’d have you lie down right here on this kitchen floor so I can cut your heart out and find out once and for all what’s happened to it,” I said.

  “You’re fucking nuts. Put the fucking knife down,” he yelled at me. And I did, tossing it with a loud clang into the cast iron sink.

  “What the fuck is this about anyway?” he asked. “What? Why are we having this same old stupid fight again. I’m so sick of this. I can’t even remember what started it now.” He had that look old people get in the early stages of dementia when they suddenly realize they’ve lost their bearing and have no idea where they are, what they were doing, or why. For a moment I felt an upwelling of tenderness toward him, and I realize, revisiting this now, that this feeling, one I often feel in the more heightened moments of our fights, must arise from the fact that yelling is the closest we come to sharing ourselves with each other. In the absence of lovemaking, of dreaming and envisioning our future, of laughing together, fighting has become our only intimacy.

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” I said, and meant it, hoping maybe the fight might turn to the crux of the matter for once, to the thing neither of us wants to out-and-out say.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said, sidestepping.

  “It’s about the fact that there’s just been a massive earthquake, and you’ve just arrived home, and you’re already planning to leave tomorrow morning to go chasing after money, as if that’s the least bit important right now.”

  “Right. Exactly. And that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Whatever Ferris. You do whatever you want,” I’d said. “Just don’t expect there to be a place in this home for you when you return.” It was the last thing I said to him. I left the kitchen then and went off to bed. I listened as he had a shower, then lay down to sleep on the couch. When I woke up in the morning, he’d already left.

  I came home from the beach that evening to a message on the machine explaining that he was sailing to Hawaii, that he was on a good safe boat, and so he’d be fine. He said that Fairwin’ would be coming to stay with us. Then he told Willow he loved him, and to take good care of me while he was gone.

  The Shifting Poles

  DAY NINE ON the water, and they finally enter the trade wind’s perpetual flow. The sails stretch taut, full of the strong and steady northeasterly, and the hull rides smooth on the following seas. The journey is a rhythm in and of itself now, and the only thing is to submit to it. A day in and they begin to keep, finally, to the watch schedule they’d agreed upon when first leaving Neah Bay.

  Their relationship too falls to a different rhythm. The charades of the first week behind them, they turn from that romantic potential to a more congenial, cordial exchange. They share with each other the stories of their lives, both avoiding anything that might be suggestive, that might reawaken the tumult of days previous. Because it’s there still, their desire, and they are both constantly aware of its powerful, single-minded force.

  •

  They are like two magnets, each backed on one side by steel. If one turns away from the other, the other attracts. If they both turn, each feels only the slightest pull to spin and face the other. If they do, and at the same time, the force is one that pushes, repels. Until one turns away again, and they come together.

  The magnetic poles of the earth are in constant flux. What is known as true north and south are static points, zero degrees lat and long, north and south, from which all official maps and charts of the world are based. They are an agreed-upon human convention and, as such, are fixed. But the magnetic poles that the compass needle swings to are forever in motion, moving in swirling loops up to fifty miles in a day. And for reasons greatly speculated upon but not fully understood, the poles occasionally flip. This hasn’t happened in almost eight hundred thousand years, and no one can predict when next it will occur, or what on earth may alter as a result.

  In this way neither Francis nor Miriam can completely predict the movements of the magnetism between them. This is the essence of emerging love lived. It won’t be contained, corrected or controlled. It won’t be fixed as a constant by which one can navigate. But as a force it can be harnessed nonetheless, and it is through this they each develop an awareness of the other that is kinesthetic: she knows precisely his location on the boat whether he can be seen by her or not, just as he knows hers. They speak less and less because so little need be said. When she brings him coffee, it’s with plenty of cream and sugar. When he brings her coffee, it’s black. When he tires, she gives him room to be alone. When she’s tired, he tells her a story, or coaxes one from her. They each take an interest in the deeper workings of the other. When one speaks of their waking dream, the other keeps quiet, and listens.

  St. Elmo’s Fire

  A WEEK IN the trade winds goes by in an instant and an eternity. Such is the nature of monotony. When inside it, it seems the gears of the world’s clock have worn all their teeth away so the passage of time has ceased. But when one looks back over a week of such days they seem to have passed as a single, uneventful instant. Often there are no points of reference inside the trades, no significant shifts in wind or wave pattern to mark the passage of time in one’s memory. The sun rises and sets through the unbroken blue, the stars cast their net over the night, augmented only by the odd airplane’s passing, and higher up the sight of satellites orbiting by—little glints of light being pulled as by an invisible string across the sky.

  But on the morning of their sixteenth day at sea the sun rises behind a blanket of thick grey cloud gathered on the eastern horizon. By midday the clouds approach from every direction, at first diffuse, then thickening. Thunder rumbles across the ocean, and by early evening they’re inside a squall of rain, intermittently dumping sheets of water down upon them. There is a taut intensity to the air in the intervals. Sounds of hissing and crackling begin emanating from the mast and bowsprit. Then the lightning starts in the far distance, bolts and sheets, approaching through the deepening grey.

  •

  St. Erasmus of Formiae. St. Elmo. Beaten around the head and spat upon by his Roman captors. Flogged with leaden mauls until his body burst with blood, then thrown to a pit of worms and snakes and doused with a mixture of boiling oil and sulphur. Still he sang his Christian God’s praises. A great storm of thunder and lightning descended, and electrocuted all surrounding the pit, sparing the saint. Later, according to the legend, hi
s teeth were plucked from his mouth with iron pincers, his skin torn with iron combs, and he was roasted upon a gridiron. Then, with his eyes plucked from his head, his Diocletian persecutors laid him out naked, tied withes around his neck, arms and legs, and stretched him until his body broke. Still, he sang. But it is commonly thought that the account of his first round of torture, of his being spared and protected, even avenged, by the great lightning storm, made him the patron saint of sailors.

  It is also thought to be the etymological origin of “St. Elmo’s fire”, the name given to a particular phenomenon witnessed often in the midst of thunderstorms. A searing, flame-like blue or violet can be seen at night emanating from the tips of tall, sharp objects, accompanied by a hissing or buzzing or crackling, as of fire. It is this sound that Francis and Miriam have heard projecting from the mast and bowsprit throughout the early evening, and as night falls the darkness makes visible its luminous glow. Miriam has seen this once before while crossing from La Paz to Puerto Vallarta with Yule, so she knows it for what it is: a coronal discharge; the result of what’s known as an electron avalanche, an exponential ionization of the air. They are both in the cockpit when the blue becomes visible, each unable to rest in the heaving tumult. The sea has turned sinisterly unpredictable, sending waves at them from every direction, and though the rain has ceased, there is a constant churning of ocean spray in the air.

  “St. Elmo’s fire!” she hollers to Francis over the racket of the thrashing waves and wind.

  “I see it,” he calls back, holding the wheel hard to their downwind course. “What the fuck’s happening on this boat?”