They chewed.
The one with hairy arms continued, “The tires are too good.”
“What are those guys doing?” said the other one, younger, with an accent I could not place, Scandinavian. “Along the freeways—you see them.”
The hairy-armed one gave a nod and a smile, still chewing. “When I say never I mean same-as-never,” he said. And for a moment I could not bring myself to interrupt them.
They did not speak again. They worked the half-chewed food around in their mouths. They both saw me at the same time, and they acted in a way that could have been mistaken as courtesy, napkins to lips, chairs forced back, both men standing.
This time I climbed straight into the sky. It was going to be hard, fighting the wind, and I wanted to gain as much altitude as I could.
I pulled upward into the rain, until the updraft of a cloud swept me higher. I panicked, until the ice begin to bristle my hair and I fell again, the grizzle melting as I tumbled.
I couldn’t find our boat.
There was a hard logic to it. It was more than logic—justice. Its time past, the old vessel had vanished. Who was I to expect this miracle to spin itself out forever? I had lost her.
I screamed her name, my cry out of the range of sound. And I began the search, swell, valley, sudden mountain, beckoning plain, all of it below me, a world new every moment.
We all have the dream. We are called to take an examination, or show up to fill out a long, impossibly difficult questionnaire. Without passing this test, without filling out this form in the time allotted, everything we have accomplished will be lost.
The dream was true. It recurred because I had never seen that it was not a dream. It was the way I had lived my life, my existence a test.
I found it.
The mast stabbed the wind at crazy angles, and I fell toward the vessel certain that I would miss it and plunge into the waves.
I collapsed on the deck. I found my human shape, ulna, radius, the highways of bone reasserting themselves. I flung myself toward the cabin. Surely the iron melodrama behind such nightmares would continue to play itself out. I knew what would happen next—the cabin would be empty.
She was still there.
This time I opened several vessels in my wrist, subcutaneous and interior, veins and at least one artery. This time as she drank she lifted her head and drew strength from me with growing color, her eyes fluttering, her head falling back to the bed at last.
Blood pattered onto the floor, and I tasted the flow, drinking from my own wrist. Wrong, I told myself. I am using her, seducing her into this.
She sat up, steadying herself against the rocking of the boat.
“It’s time to wake up,” I said, sitting beside her, putting my arm around her. Blood snaked into my palm, already congealing, the skin healing.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said in a rush. “I know.”
“Let’s not stay in here,” I said.
It was better outside the cabin, in the wind. She said, “There was an autopsy.”
This was my last, best opportunity to lie. Leave her one or two illusions, I urged myself. Since when is brutal honesty the wisest, kindest course of action?
It was over. She knew.
She continued, “I was dead. The coroner did an autopsy.”
Medical examiner, I mentally corrected her. Postmortem.
“I know what you’ve done,” she said.
I shivered. It was the strangest feeling—I could not meet her eyes. I said, “I am not proud of anything.” It wasn’t entirely true. There was some small pride I took in the way I had learned so much, in the way I had survived. “I didn’t think I had any choice.”
And shame. I felt shame, too.
The storm was dying. The quiet was what carried us, lifting and holding us. “We can’t live like people,” I said.
She laughed. I was astounded. Her laugh was tender, but it was mocking, too. I had expected shock and sorrow, dismay, the sort of self-loathing I had begun to expect in myself. “Richard, I have something to tell you.”
“Forgive me,” I said. “If you can.”
“My gown is blue. Like the sky at noon. You’re taller than I expected, and so pale, Richard. But beautiful—Richard, you’re so wonderful!”
I looked into her eyes.
She spoke calmly, as though measuring her words, preparing me for them. “There are many things we have to learn,” she said.
The boat slipped to one side, shifted, and rose again on the next swell.
Touching my lips with hers, she said, “I can see.”
43
She still wanted to touch things, run her hands along the rails, the foot of the mast. She was fascinated by the lifejacket—look at this color, Richard!—but comprehended its purpose only when she looked away from it and her hands could search its straps.
She said she had trouble determining what things were. She knew all about clouds, and the ocean, and how clothing rumpled in wind, dimpling and smoothing.
Colors fascinated her, the weed-yellow ash of the mast, the green corrosion of brass fittings. I wanted to show her everything, trees, houses, faces, far-off cities, and all that offered itself to the eye was this lost storm, frittering itself away.
But it was more than enough, a few stars in the sky. She loved the way the weathered cordage twisted in her grasp when she tried to wind it into a loop. Whether by my will, or by an accident of the gale, the boat swung around and nosed south, and I stood at the helm pretending I had some choice in the matter. She crouched on the cabin’s roof, hanging on to the mast, and kept looking back. When I waved I was stunned when she lifted her arm and waved in return.
“It’s beautiful!” she cried.
Yes, I must have called. Beautiful as I rarely saw it, all the way to the horizon.
I was a part of her visible world. I felt how meager my appearance must be, how she deserved to see men and women in finery. When a gull adventured through the night she whooped, and the bird heard her, shying upward, spinning away.
“A bird,” she cried.
The hours I had spent in recent nights all fitted together, and I wanted nothing but this, the boat racing ahead of the wind as I decided where I wanted to go, a new course, a new future. A puzzle is like that, one day fitting together into something like the scene on the lid of the box, the picture some rule-bound member of the household has put away so no one can cheat. The summer cottage of my boyhood often sported a card table with a jigsaw puzzle, a Monet garden or a Buddhist temple beyond a half-circle bridge.
When a whale broke water in the distance I scrambled to her side. The tail lifted drowsily, delicate at this distance.
Sometimes I manned the helm, but the boat generally drifted on its own, like a dray horse guiding itself homeward. I had not felt this way since I was a child—playing at some game, pretending to be pirates, knowing that soon some voice from the adult world would break the spell.
“We’re dressed like we’re going to a wedding,” she said, running her fingers along the lapel of my jacket.
“I think we should compliment the limousine service, don’t you?”
“What color are my eyes?” she asked.
“Ocean blue. Mine are almost the same color, sort of. More filing cabinet gray,” I said.
“Agate blue,” she corrected me.
“It’s too dark to really tell.” Our eyes were actually almost the same slate gray, but there was life in her eyes, nuance, humor.
“I’ll see even better when the sun comes up,” she said.
“I felt the whales when we were sleeping,” I said, to avoid the subject of morning. “They were so close they nearly brushed us.”
“I thought your hair was black,” she said.
“I think it says brown on my driver’s license.”
“It’s a reddish color. And your eyebrows have a hint of gold—I can hardly wait for better light.”
“They migrate this time of year,” I
persisted.
“Your eyebrows?”
We both laughed. She ran fingers through her hair. “God—I wonder if there’s a mirror in the cabin. Not that I’m eager. I’d rather put off my first look.”
Tell her now.
“I’m afraid,” she said. “Isn’t that silly? I’m afraid to look into a mirror. The last time I saw myself I was ten years old.”
I looked down over the stern, and even in the bad light I could tell. There was no silhouette in the shifting water, no sign that I was there.
I wanted her to see something spectacular, knowing that the ordinary glory of sunrise was forbidden. I knew she understood imperfectly what had happened to us. Morning could not be far off. She would discover what light and hunger changed in her.
The night turned warm, and stars broke through the clouds. No sign of daylight, only stars, the Milky Way, and man-made satellites ticking slowly eastward.
“I thought you would have a frown wrinkle, right here,” she said, touching the space between my eyebrows. “From thinking so much.”
I didn’t want her examining me too closely. I let a little silence pass, water hissing as it rolled past the hull. “An airplane,” I said, nodding upward, an aircraft high above the clouds.
“Tell me everything you know about this.”
“Can’t we just enjoy the view?” I said. I wanted to sound debonair, but my voice was ragged.
“If I knew all your secrets I would be miserable—is that what you mean?”
“There’s Orion,” I said, looking up again. “Taurus must be up there, too, behind the cloud.”
“You’re afraid!” she breathed, putting her arms around me. “Don’t be, Richard. I’m so happy.”
Perhaps it was her happiness that was beginning to trouble me.
“Eric Sunderland. Studious, insecure. Poor Eric,” she said, when I had filled in the last details of my recent days. “He hated me because he thought it was easy for me. I got the scholarships, the prizes. He actually had talent for a certain type of music. Music with splash. Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff. He could play that full-spectrum piano music much better than I could.”
“He envied you,” I said.
“Music was food for me. The struggle wasn’t finding time to practice the piano. It was tearing myself away when it was time to do something else, like eat.”
“He didn’t have your talent.”
“He did have a gift. His talent was different, but it was very much alive.”
She had her arm around me, her eyes closed, as though the familiar world of touch was, for the moment, less overwhelming. We stood in the stern of the boat, where I would have held the tiller if the engine were chugging, if there were sail.
She continued wistfully, “Eric knew at some point he would never really go far in music. He had trouble keeping teaching jobs. He thought people were narrow-minded, put off by him because he had a bad temper.”
I didn’t want to think about Eric. I pictured him in his last moments despite myself, and I turned to look at the glassy wake of the boat. “You don’t think I should have taken his life,” I said. Why, I wondered, did I avoid saying killing him.
She put her hand on mine. “You shouldn’t have killed Eric. It wasn’t necessary. It was wrong. Look at us—this is all we need, isn’t it?
“Eric doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Nothing about him does. You don’t murder a woman because you envy her.”
“But you might,” she said, “kill a woman because you loved her.”
I showed her the place on my finger, the cut. It was invisible now.
“You were going to sail up the coast to Crescent City to see my brother,” she said. “To find out where the mirror came from. To fathom its secrets.”
I felt miffed by her tone. “It was a plan.”
“It was a good plan, Richard.”
“Except for one thing,” I said, prompting her.
“Connie lied to you,” Rebecca said. “The mirror was never in my family. My family prides itself on plain wooden furniture, craftsman bungalows, pruning the roses the day after New Year’s. My father teaches engineering. My mother teaches remedial reading. They both believe in straight lines, neat handwriting, and balancing the checkbook.”
I’d lost the argument, but persisted a little longer. “Maybe it was something you never noticed.”
“Because I was blind I didn’t realize we had an ornate treasure hanging in the living room?”
“You should have been an attorney.”
She laughed. “And if Simon ever got his hands on something like that, I can’t imagine him sending it to you as a gift. Simon would keep it and try to write his master’s thesis on it. Simon conserves. Reads military history, loves the French Revolution. Giving you the melted bracelet was an act of real generosity on his part.”
“I’m surprised I could be taken in so easily.”
“I don’t think she sold it, either. I think Connie fell in love with the mirror, and doesn’t want you to have it.”
I will have it, I thought.
“You certainly aren’t going to break the mirror into a thousand pieces, Richard. I know you. You won’t be able to.”
“It’s a dangerous thing,” I said.
“Do you really think the mirror caused you to evolve into—whatever you are.”
“Whatever we are.”
“No, Richard—you brought me back into the world. Whatever happened between you and the mirror had to do with something in your nature, not in mine.”
She was mistaken, I thought, but I let it pass. “There is some kind of poison. Something in the silvering, in the frame. Something toxic. The way mercury seeps into your body from dental fillings.”
“I think Connie gave it to you,” said Rebecca. “As an experiment, to see how you would react. Or out of vindictiveness, wanting to remind you of something.”
“Then she must have known something about the mirror’s history—”
“Something about its power,” she said, just a trace of teasing in her voice.
“Knowing something about me,” I said. “How I had always been fascinated by mirrors.”
The sea was wrinkled, the swells constantly shifting the horizon. The sudden etching of shadows on the surface told me everything I had to know about why the gulls were pink, why the sea birds to the east were suddenly visible in such detail, in such numbers.
“Dental fillings don’t do that, do they?” she was asking. “You just heard that somewhere. It isn’t true.”
I didn’t answer. Dawn was nearly here.
After I cut my forehead on the mirror, my mother drove into Stinson Beach so a tanned, jolly, half-retired surgeon could chill my skin with a local anesthetic and take what he called a painless tuck, three stitches. I rode home in the front seat, marveling at all the blood on my T-shirt.
Rebecca was right. I didn’t want to find the mirror. I wanted to stay like this, and some part of me sensed that, once I rediscovered the mirror, all of this would end.
44
As a child I loved rainy nights. I listened to the drift of the rain over the shingled roof and felt protected. As I grew older, and sued builders for roofs that could not withstand fallen branches, foundations built in dry creeks that flooded every January, I learned that no refuge is what it seems to be.
And yet, under the sea those long hours, I again felt protected. The waves were a quaking roof, the walls made of water.
So when I woke, the last light of sunset dimming from the water, it was a shock to find myself alone. I spun in the water, kicking hard in the direction Rebecca had been asleep during those hours of daylight. Her rope coiled and twisted high above, drifting. She was gone.
I scrambled to the surface. The ocean was calm, but a calm that breathed, alive. I called her name. The radio dangled from its bent nail, and the mattress on the bunk was just as we had left it, a wool blanket folded neatly at the foot. But the mattress was damp, and there were drops of water gleam
ed on the planks of the floor.
The Radio Shack receiver had been left switched on, faded now to an even more ghostly whisper, three to five knots out of the north-west, an innaccurate report. Still, I understood the instinct that had driven Rebecca to hear a human voice. I switched it off. There was a footprint, a parenthesis of water. She had sat here, on the bunk.
I could detect no wind, and the swells were glassy. I leaned against the stem calling, rushed to the bow, continuing to sound the three syllables of her name.
A gray whale lifted above the surface, breath fuming. It lifted a forked tail, lazily, and dropped it, a loud clap that reached me after a few seconds.
There were two layers of weatherproofing on the deck. The layer that was peeling, the outermost coat, was plastic, verathane. Then there was a yellow varnish, a coloring that did not peel away but wore through. Beneath it all was the decking itself, teak, fine-grained.
I had worn through to an inner core of myself. This was a substance that endured, my fiber. I climbed to the top of the cabin, crooked my arm around the mast, and called her name. In the early evening there were two tight clusters of lights, small craft making way to the north, toward the Golden Gate or Monterey Bay; I wasn’t sure how far south we had drifted. For a moment the sight of these fishing boats or pleasure craft made me feel thin comfort.
But another sort of vessel, still far to the north, was heading this way.
The prow of this fast boat was cutting the seas. The waves parted neatly, twin leaves of water catching the starlight. The vessel sported a tall tower of radar equipment and broadcasting gear. A wide cylinder of light winked on, and its beam swept the water.
Surf worked the dark rocks to the east, cliffs and evergreens. The seas around the hull roiled, and something tangled and dark clung to the keel, slowing the boat. Some merchant marine or fisherman had spotted our boat, perhaps thinking we were in danger. But it was more complicated than that: we had left behind an abandoned car, not to mention an aggrieved boat owner. Perhaps all the deaths had been pieced together by now.
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