The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  •

  Both the vigour and the hope fade fast. He’d begun to think the Belle was genuinely cursed, and thought maybe if he rowed free of her he might eventually cross paths with some other mariner. Could it be though that it’s he who is cursed? It’s not hard to get sucked down into the whirlpool of such thoughts when thoughts are all one has. The mind is a creative angel or monster, depending on the tilt of one’s life. Francis’s mind, being angled so steeply toward the bad, has turned ugly. What is left for him in the wake of his last burst of optimism is a fatigue that makes every joint ache and muscle sear with pain, weighing upon his eyes until even the middle and near distances grow blurry and his eyelids become almost chronically heavy. He begins to lie down on his bed of salty blankets more often than he rows, losing sight of the difference between the life he dreams and the one he wakes to inside this endless, unsheltered blue, where he spills finally the last drop of water, sweet with the tinge of champagne, across his cracked and swollen tongue.

  Blue

  SPLAYED OUT IN the heat of the sun pounding through his shower curtain shade cover, his body stiffened and sweltering with dehydration, Francis hears the voice of an angel singing in his ear. Joni Mitchell. Blue… Songs are like tattoos. You know I’ve been to sea before. Crown and anchor me, or let me sail away… He hears her as though she were right there in the boat with him, her piano fingerings floating down from the cloudless heavens in accompaniment. When he occasionally comes to, he prays for the less angelic tone of Annie Lennox instead to fill his ears, but neither her song nor rain falls upon him. Just the relentless rays of the sun. When something finally, suddenly, shrouds him in shadow, he’s too far gone for it to cohere across the distance his mind has receded to. He hears a great rumbling in the shadow and thinks it must be the thunder of death, his brain in his boiling skull imploding, the end of the world, and sees a vision of the black-footed albatross, god-sized, its dark wings wrapped around the flame-forked, furious sun.

  IT HAS TAKEN us less than a week to make it to Hawaii. Now what? Vericombe and his first mate—a bald, very small, very serious man named Smith—rarely descend from the captain’s deck. The one time I ventured up they gave me a polite tour of the instruments and such, then made it quite clear that I was to leave and not come up again unless invited. So I’ve turned my attention in the opposite direction, down to the engine room instead, befriending Figgs over the past week. I ran out of smokes two days into our passage and I’ve been bumming them from him ever since.

  He’s down in the engine room or out on deck doing repairs and maintenance most daylight hours. But at night he’s always in his quarters, the forward fo’c’sle. Between him and the towering aft cabin where the rest of us sleep is the open steel deck, and below it the hold, probably sixty feet long by twenty feet wide by fifteen feet deep, which Vericombe has, as Figgs tells me, “stuffed with enough diesel to keep us running till the end of the world.” Funny he should state it as such given all that he’s told me over the past five days. I now know where the name of the skiff Sohqui comes from, and with that knowledge I’ve picked up a basic understanding of all that Ferris’s finding of the fish float has us caught up in.

  I come down here to smoke with Figgs every night once I’ve put Willow to bed. I’m too full of anxiety and upheaval to sleep much. It’s getting more and more difficult to keep Willow calm too. My ill-ease is infectious I’m sure, especially to my own son. But Willow is a good, level-headed eleven year old. He’s self-sufficient really, for a kid, and as I watch him sleep in the bunk beside me at night by the passage light leaking in under our stateroom door, I can only guess at what he thinks and feels of all that has gone on this past month. The quake. His father’s leaving. And now this. Us on this boat with these bizarre strangers. He doesn’t say much, which isn’t uncommon, though he’s been even quieter than usual the past couple of days, which tells me he’s starting to feel the strain of it all. Tumultuous or not, what with Ferris and I fighting, our home has been a stable one for Willow for as long as he can remember. Aside from trips to my hometown to visit his grandparents, we don’t travel, on principle, and we’re fairly reclusive and routine-oriented people. So I know this is a lot for Willow to absorb, and I keep waiting for his nightmares to return. It’s been a couple years now since they desisted last, but being the mother of a child who is haunted the way Willow is, the worry is never far from my thoughts.

  So I don’t usually stay long visiting with Figgs, dreading the thought of Willow waking without me. We share a smoke, a story or two, then I return to my bunk. But tonight we’ve been talking for hours. We’re on our fifth, maybe sixth smoke each. Figgs has been telling me more about Mu and the Sohqui, and I have to admit I’m a sucker for the magical beauty. The mystery. I read fantasy throughout my entire childhood, Tolkien and Lewis and later Marion Zimmer Bradley. It might be safe to say that I secretly enjoyed reading the Harry Potter books with Willow more than he did. Figgs usually seems indifferent as he tells me of the Naacal, but tonight he’s engaged and it’s got me wondering if he actually believes in it all. So I ask.

  “Do you know why I became a marine engineer?” he asks me in response. Figgs has a voice both rough and smooth at once, like the sound of broken sea waves raking back on a pebble beach. It’s a voice easy to get lost in listening to. “Those engines back there. The reduction gear and the pitch of the wheel. Those are all things I know you know very little about. My father was the son of a poor farmer. I grew up in Odessa in a two-room house with five sisters. A marine engineer is someone who has knowledge that very few people have. And so we’re always useful. There is always work because not very many people know how to keep boats running, but many depend on them doing so. Maybe it’s the same with these kinds of things. Arnault Vericombe is not a stupid man, I can tell you that. He’s spent much of his life learning about the Naacal, and he’s seen and read the tablets that tell the stories I’ve been telling you. I won’t be the one to question his knowledge now. Not while the ship’s going down.”

  He takes a long drag from his cigarette and butts it out in the ashtray beside his bunk. He’s been lying on it with his feet up, in shadow, while I sit at his small table and chair beneath a dim light fixed to the ceiling. “It’s a big ship Anna. And it’s one I don’t have the first clue how to keep running.” This is the first time Figgs has pointedly mentioned the state of the world. Of course I’m dying to get into it with him. It’s so much of what I’ve made my life about, I’m a bit of a junkie at this point, one who hasn’t had a good fix since Ferris left.

  “Do you think anyone really does?” I ask, looking for more.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? The big question.” He pulls his burly body up and sits facing me as he says this, his bare feet now out of the shadows.

  “It is the big question, you’re right,” I reply. “It’s the only question now, I think. So, do you think someone’s got an answer?”

  “I think a whole lot of people have an answer, Anna. Everyone’s got an answer. Which is why none of them are enough. Look at the accords. They’re all full of you-give-me-this-and-I’ll-take-from-you-that. It’s not about keeping the whole ship afloat. No. People don’t give a shit about the ship, they just want to know that the little section they’re floating on isn’t going to go down with the rest. And they’ll do whatever it takes to keep thinking so, because life otherwise is overwhelming and intolerable.”

  “And don’t you think that’s exactly what Vericombe and his cronies are up to here? They’ve got this fantastical idea in their heads, and it sure helps stave off the reality of what’s really going on doesn’t it? Just imagine if all we really had to do was break a glass ball and poof, the fish stocks replenished and the corals unbleached. Wouldn’t that be something.”

  “It would. But then where would it leave you? You say you work with a woman who is fighting the aquaculture companies. But what if this thing that Vericombe is doing works and all your efforts amount to nothing wh
ile his fantasy changes the world? Of course you don’t want to believe it could be so. It’s not the corner of the ship you’re sailing on. Not right now, at least.”

  Figgs stands up and clears his bedside table—a wooden produce crate turned on its side, strapped with two bungee cords to the wall—of his ashtray and books. He unhooks the bungees and carries the crate over to the table I’m seated at, places it on the floor and sits across from me. Then he rolls the sleeves of his flannel work shirt up to his elbows.

  “This one,” he says, pointing to a faded tattoo of a pirate flag on his left forearm. “It was given to me by the third mate on a Swedish carrier after we passed through the Malacca Straits. I was twenty-one, having just entered the merchant marine. Back then I was the great explorer. The sailor. The drinker. Me and my mates brawled in the streets of Bombay and Cape Town. This one,” he continues, pointing to the tattoo on his right forearm, one of a white whale with a harpoon pierced in its side. “I got that done at a parlour in Tierra del Fuego. I was a bit younger than you are now, in my late twenties, working on a Norwegian whaling ship. A mate of mine in the merchant marine gave me an old copy of Moby Dick. He told me I had the mind of a scholar but the sensibility of a snake, and that I better get out of the sailor’s gutter before it was too late. Before you end up like me, he’d say, then he’d drink himself sick on Jim Beam. So I became the whaling adventurer, fisherman and poet. You’ll like this one,” he says, lifting his shirt off his back.

  There’s a tattoo across his entire chest of a wave with the heads of a flock of big-horn sheep rising from the cresting foam. “I got this one at a parlour in San Francisco. This was me in my mid-thirties. Eventually the lustre wore off on the whaling and all the blood got to me. I had what I guess you’d call a mid-life crisis, so I did an about-face and signed on with Sea Shepherd. I engineered on the Farley Mowat for five years, fighting the fleet I’d just been working with. Then I was the storied sailor who’d seen the world and wrought destruction with his own hands, and I was doing penance. I drank more than ever then.” He turns his right shoulder to me. Live and let Live, is written in black across it, arched over a black and gold crucifix. “Here’s where I had AA and God. I did two years in a rehab centre up the Fraser Valley. A working farm for drunks and addicts. At first I loved being off the sea and I blamed her for all my troubles with the bottle. But after a couple of years I couldn’t take it any longer so I got a job on the tugs out of Vancouver.”

  He turns his left shoulder to me and there’s a tattoo of a black, red and white tug with the name Husky King scrawled beneath it in black ink. “This one was done by an artist on Commercial Drive, Quincy, a Native guy I met on the farm. He also did this one for me.”

  He turns around and shows me the tattoo on his back. It reaches from his waist to his shoulder blades, a circle of red and black Coast Salish art. “It’s a whale swallowing a serpent swallowing a grizzly swallowing the whale,” Figgs explains. The three figures are wrapped around a ball of black with a reddened centre. “And that thing in the centre of the circle?” I ask. “That’s the earth. It’s Quincy’s depiction of my life upon the earth. I’m the bear.” Figgs sits back down and puts his shirt on.

  “And the serpent’s the bottle?” I ask.

  “The bottle, and everything that leads to it, and everything that threatens to take its place. For me, really, I think it’s anger Anna. Maybe it is for everyone, I don’t know. I’m not sure of much anymore. Which is why I’ve taken this job working for Arnault. It’s a quiet life this one. And I think for now I’ve heard and seen enough.”

  “So what about that whale on your back. Is it not worth fighting for anymore?”

  “It’s not that it’s not worth fighting for. I just don’t have the fight in me. And I think maybe there has to be another way. Those five years I spent with Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd, what did we accomplish? We saved a few whales from the harpoon. So what? At one point we were all out on deck: Paul, the crew and a group of young volunteers, university kids who had come with us to the whaling grounds to help stop the Japanese fleet. We’d just been through a major confrontation with one of the whalers who had sent his crew out on deck with semi-automatic rifles and threatened to open fire on the Mowat if we didn’t get out of the way of his fishing. So Paul had us all, the twelve kids included, surround the deck to make a human shield. He’d just put all those young people in the line of fire. And there we were, victorious, but all I could see in the eyes of those around me was anger. Those young kids with the same anger and defiance I had when I was their age. And I couldn’t blame them, but I couldn’t feel it any longer. I realized then it was a life source for them as it had been for me, but I’d grown to want something different. Which isn’t to say that’s what I’ve found. But in leaving it behind at least I’ve left myself open to possibility.”

  “Did it work?” I ask.

  “I don’t know if I can say it worked. But I think it’s working,” he replies, misunderstanding my question.

  “No. I mean putting those kids out on that deck. Did it keep the whalers from killing whales?”

  “Oh. Yes, for a time. But it didn’t stop the rest of the fleet from filling the quota. Which means the whales got killed and would have even if the Japs had fired on those kids.”

  “But what if there were more Farley Mowats out there? What if there was a fleet large enough to actually rival the whalers?”

  “Then armies would be sent in to clear them out. That’s the thing. If the defiance gets large enough they snuff it out. You can’t fight their fire. You have to unfuel it. And anger is the fuel, I think.”

  “I think it’s ignorance.”

  “Ignorance has nothing to do with it Anna. Ignorance is benign. We all live with it because we have to. You know a lot about fish farms and salmon, but what do you know about engineering, or physics, or plumbing? What about the struggles of women in Sierra Leone? Or Afghanistan? What about the life beneath us now at the bottom of the sea? There are people who’ve made it their life’s work to know about these things and would call you ignorant. But that’s just their place on the ship. We can’t know it all Anna. So we all do what we can with what we have. There’s a guy right now driving cab in London trying to figure out how he’s going to get his wife and children out of Bombay. That he’s there at all means his life has been, for him, lucky. It’s all he can handle. Does it make him ignorant that he doesn’t protest the war or the WTO? He knows more about survival, I mean in the emotional sense, about living life stripped of certainty and dignity, than you or I could possibly imagine. So who’s ignorant Anna?”

  Figgs lights himself another smoke while his question lingers in the air between us. There’s this knee-jerk reaction in me that wants to thrash against the wall of his logic. “It’s an endgame then,” I say, taking another smoke, too.

  “Possibly. Or maybe there’s much more going on here than we can account for. Maybe Arnault’s little tale is the truth and we’re caught inside a curse long cast and not for us to undo.” He takes a hard drag, then places the butt still burning in the ashtray. “Give me a moment,” he says, and walks to the sink at the far end of his room. There he flicks on a fluorescent light over a wall-mounted mirror and again takes his shirt off. From the under-sink cabinet he takes a cordless hair clipper and begins shaving off his scraggly grey hair. He keeps his back to me as I watch the strands drift slowly down his tattooed back to the floor, then he turns the fluorescent light out and comes back to the table. He sits and bows the crown of his head toward me.

  There’s a bright blue and white tattoo of a coiled, scaly, snake-like creature on the top of his head. It has a tail with three fins fanned out at its tip. “Sohqui,” he says, his head still bowed down. “At this point Anna, they’re both as real and fictitious as any hope we have.” He sits up and pulls his shirt once more over his broad shoulders. Quite hairy, I realize now, in light of the shaven contrast he’s just created. And I can’t help but laugh at the thought,
and he laughs too, though I don’t share with him the source of my humour, as he doesn’t share his with me. We just laugh like that together for a good long time while our cigarettes burn down side by side in their tray.

  •

  When I finally climb back to the stern quarters, well into the early hours, I find Willow in the galley with Fairwin’ playing cards and drinking warm cups of Krakus, milk and honey. I couldn’t feel more like a rotten mother, though Willow seems happy enough to be up with the old kook, and Fairwin’ seems happy too for his company. “He’s teaching me a game called hearts,” Willow says as I sit down beside him. He’s putting up his cute-boy shield to deflect the shit he expects me to give him for being out of bed so late, but under these circumstances I’m just happy he’s happy and I can’t blame him for not sleeping.

  There’s a lot of anticipation in the air since we arrived in Hawaii. This morning we pulled in close to shore—I’m not sure where, some large, sandy bay with a long man-made spit stretching across it—and Arnault’s man Smith launched the skiff and left the boat on a “reconnaissance mission.” These guys think they’re in some kind of 007 flick or something. And as ridiculous as it all seems, the three of us at this table tonight want nothing more than to find Ferris and the woman, and so it’s contagious, Arnault and Smith’s sense of seriousness and urgency. I suppose it’s testament to how much Willow has grown up into a little man over the past year, how much like his father he’s becoming, that he’s woken up without me and sat down calmly to a game of cards with Fairwin’ instead of turning hysterical.