The thought of his daughters brought him sadness. Perri was seventeen now, and Alma twelve. He made a choice to feel that sadness, and the more he considered the damage to their hearts, the more his pain rose in desire of taking back the hurt. No word from the family had passed his way since the day he signed the papers for divorce, or if it had, the news never penetrated his long trance.
He was impatient, he was hungry, he was lonely. The prison’s revelations were not bread, and this was another revelation. “I am hungry. I am still Tom Levy,” he said to himself out loud. “I am myself, and I have to leave Jamaica. Whatever purpose I served here, my own purpose or God’s, this piece of my life needs to end. I am sorry for the hurt my daughters suffer, sorry for the horror I caused the family of the man I killed, and sorry that his place in the world is gone, but there is nothing I can do on this harbor’s walkway to make the past different. I am here, and I want to be somewhere else. I don’t know where I want to go. I don’t know how to get there. I suppose this is a prayer.”
He sat on the quay, waiting for the next thing to happen. Night came. He did not sleep. Morning came, and with it, pulling a child’s red wagon, a brittle-haired blonde of something like fifty, though she could have been ten years younger and twenty years at sea. Her face was cracked from sun and salt, and her eyes bulged with delight, as though her skull could not contain the surplus of her joy. On the wagon was a large sail bag that she kept steady with one hand, but the going was awkward for her.
“American?” asked Jan Dodge.
Tom said, “How did you guess?”
“It’s what I say to everybody. Breaks the ice. Can you give me a hand?”
Tom said yes again and let her pull the wagon while he walked behind her, holding the bag in place. It was a simple job, and Tom liked how even this little effort to help someone improved his day.
“It’s the new spinnaker. The last one tore between Cancún and here. That was a leg. Do you sail?”
“Not really.”
“Eddie and I are making for the South Pacific, but the long way, around Africa through the Indian Ocean, north of Australia. We started in Long Beach, California, and we had a fellow with us all the way from Mazatlán to Panama, but he got tired of us. I don’t blame him. I’m telling you that because if you want to crew with us, you have to put up with us. No boat is big enough for people who don’t get along. You look like a man who’s ready to leave. You look like one of us, a little dangerous but not evil. Am I right?”
“I don’t know how to answer that question.”
“Everyone is marked. You spend enough time at sea, and when you pull into port, you have perspective. How many billion in the world today?”
“Six.”
“The numbers don’t tell the story. They don’t lie, but they don’t tell the whole story, which you get when you’ve been at sea long enough. Say there’s six billion people. That’s an impressive number. But that’s only counting bodies. What do you know of the ancient Hebrew doctrine of the prime soul? That’s the types, the types that are deeper connected than the fabrications of race and tribe. I want to introduce you to Eddie. I say there’s not too many thousands of different prime souls, maybe six hundred thousand. Take New York. You walk in a crowd, you see faces, you see body types, and you see the mood in someone’s eyes, the way that person looks at the world, whether he thinks it’s all kind of funny, even the worst of it, or he’s just beaten down by the world and doesn’t have the peace to hold the world in any kind of detached appraisal. How many distinct types in New York? I don’t mean commuter cabby doorman bartender model, I mean finer distinctions within and among them. Crudely, I’d call your attention to the difference between the bald and the hairy, that the hairy mathematician and the balding athlete are types. Y. A. Tittle, being the founding idea of the bald jock, and any number of hairy Jewish boys at Columbia University are witness to the obvious connection between adolescent Jewish hirsutism and a stirring facility with figures. But I am also thinking about a quality that includes morphological categories yet goes beyond them. You have a feeling of familiarity with people in the world, and what does that come from? You know something about someone, a finer knowledge than a physical imprint gives you, it’s the source of the impression. Am I making sense? Because if I’m not, stop me.”
Tom said, because he knew she wanted this from him, “I don’t quite follow.”
“Take yourself, your special case. You’re a man prematurely white-haired, a man obviously with some life under his belt.” She held the moment, she was waiting for Tom to permit more of the lecture with a quiet agreement, which he gave.
She went on, “But I’ve seen this before, looking at a man’s face and discerning a laminate of moral collapse, recovery, and collapse again. Now, that’s one composite layer of what I see, but I don’t see that on your surface, your surface skin has a shine, and I recognize this as a kind of shellac, it’s a glaze, if you will, composed of two basic elements, one, your rueful contemplation of the tentative achievement of a new sobriety, and two, your hesitant fear that the sobriety is temporary. I see this here,” she said, rubbing her thumb rudely and hard under his eyes, “in the reflective capacity of the bags under your eyes, your sad eyes. Shiny skin, wrinkles, a good sign of an old shame. But I’m talking to you because I know by your white hair, old man, that you’re probably, which is enough for me, safe.”
“A lot of men get gray hair when they’re still young.”
“Yours is white, not gray. And you have your eyes, those kind of eyes, my old friend, can’t fool me. The reason you turned prematurely white is that your soul recoiled at the things of this world that your body had dragged it to witness. The soul does not participate! That’s how people die before they die, the soul picks up and looks for daylight under the walls of the tent. The soul is God’s ambassador to the will! The soul is more like a classical analyst than any kind of rabbi or spiritual teacher, you know, because the soul can only advise and watch, the patient has free will. Oh, the soul speaks, but the body rarely listens. This is a bit mixed up, I’m sure, but the thread is right, and if you crew with us, we’ll work out the tangles. This is what I need other people for. I can’t do this alone, or even with Eddie. The universe doesn’t rest on my opinion of it, and this is just a provable theory only as I search the world for cases and find, when I talk about this, a harmonizing pitch in the spirit of whoever is listening to me. There’s no growth without a good conversation. And my ideas, I have to confess, are a fever of the brain with me, because my humanity is marred forever by my constant searching of faces for analogues in my inventory. Faces and cases, of course, the thing within that comes through the beacon of the eyes and heart. But I’ve said too much already, and there’s my man. Eddie!” she called her husband’s name.
He waved back at her. He was on a wooden pier, beside a rubber dinghy with an outboard motor. Beyond him in the harbor, a few dozen sailboats were tied to orange buoys. Jan said, “This is Tom. He’s thinking about shipping out with us.”
“Let’s start with lunch,” said Eddie.
“Thanks,” said Tom, for the rhythm of things. In what prime-soul category did Jan Dodge file her husband? He looked like a golf pro who’d been sacked for embezzlement, the boyish fifty-year-old with just enough smarts to know he was dull and dumb and incapable of success on the level of his rich golf students at the country club. This blend of self-knowledge and stupidity attracted people to him, gave his greed permission to run, but dangerous resentments propelled him towards disgrace. Now Tom could think only in types. Eddie Dodge was a chunky man disdainful of exercise but always active, cheerful in the wind of disappointment, with the wife swapper’s glint in his eye, saying, “I know the route to contentment while pursuing malicious pleasure.” But was he any of these, Tom wondered. Or did the theory of the prime souls allow that all suspicion is founded in the truth?
Tom couldn’t help but ask, “Does each of us, in our bodies, contain one prime soul, a
copy of the original prime soul?”
“Prime souls?” asked Eddie, winking at Tom as if to say, Did she bend your ear on the way? Well then, welcome to my life, but it’s not a bad one, and I love her, so don’t look to me for support against her philosophical attack. It was that kind of wink.
“No,” said Jan. “The original six hundred thousand prime souls have been chopped and blended and spread throughout the world, so that the shards of each type of soul search the world to complete themselves. This is about community and friendship, the fellowship of cosmic similarities that speaks to us across the gulfs of loneliness. Like you and me right now. You can never feel complete the way the Platonic system promises because there’s no perfect matchup of the other half of the torn dollar bill, there are millions of pieces among millions of people. Six hundred thousand is a big number, line up everybody in New York City according to your distinctions, and do you really imagine that you’d create more than a thousand rows? There’s some souls that seem to predominate and others that are rare, the distribution isn’t equal. But this is getting too ornate for you, and we need help loading the spinnaker into the dinghy.”
Tom lifted the sail bag over his shoulder while Jan and Eddie brought the red wagon into the rubber boat. She was right; as theologies go, Jan’s was awfully gaudy, but at least it explained to Tom how Eddie Dodge could be the corrupt golf pro and so much else besides, how he could give the aura of corruption even if he had never so much as kept a library book past its due date.
Tom stepped from the dock into the boat. When his second foot left the dock, he realized deeply, profoundly, and ardently the distance he’d come, not in a measure of geography but of time and spirit, that he was now leaving the island of Jamaica, that he was off around the world with interesting lunatics, that he was going someplace new, someplace different.
Eddie took control of the outboard, and Tom unwrapped the dinghy’s lines from the iron cleat on the dock. A thousand soul types in New York City? Tom let the thought drop as far as he could, and forced his way into the moment by watching Eddie Dodge steer the dinghy through the yachts. Tom read the names of the boats on their sterns, and where they came from. Here was Jo-Ann from Boston, My Three Sons from Boca Raton, Sea You from Galveston, Jack Iron from Newport, R.I. It seemed a snug world. Over the time that Tom spent with Jan and Eddie, he could never get used to the dull eccentricity of so many world cruisers, how to reconcile people so often boring with the high specific skills and courage they needed to steer small boats through storms a thousand miles from rescue. “Here she is,” said Jan, as they pulled alongside a catamaran. Painted on both hulls was the boat’s name, Mimesis. “Forty-eight feet long,” said Eddie. “Would you be nervous about sailing a cat around the Cape of Good Hope?”
“I don’t know enough to answer the question. Have you done it?”
“Not yet, nor Cape Horn, either. We’re scared but not afraid. You?”
“I don’t know enough.”
“We don’t like to hurry. We can make the long passage from Cape Town to Australia in one leg, but the seas out there can be pretty high. Do you have an opinion?”
“It’s your boat.”
“But if we were to be hurt, if you were sailing this boat not quite single-handed but without our full ability to lead, could you handle things?”
“Why don’t we sail for Cape Town and see what kind of sailor I am? If you don’t want me after that, I’ll get off.”
“That’s an answer,” said Jan.
...
Great waves that followed others scared Tom when he met his first storm, but Jan and Eddie taught him how to surf the faces of the waves and, when the storm proved too ferocious, how to drag a parachute in the water to slow the boat and let the broad slick settle the following sea.
So the worst of his fear left him, and in the literal wake of that departure, Tom found room for new thoughts. He sat in the hammock between the hulls, eyes on the mast tracing arcs across the sky, until everything dissolved in motion. He was lonely with these strangers but wanted no comfort from them, and enjoyed them as he once should have enjoyed his children’s friends. He had never cared for other people’s children, the burden of his own took enough of his patience and spirit, but if he had them again, he would ask his children’s friends, “What’s the name of your favorite doll, who is your teacher this year, do you have an enemy at school?” He would take them to parks and let them stay as long as they wanted, and he wouldn’t bring a book, he would watch them the way he watched the sky, and love them no less than his own.
He was in the hammock when Jan Dodge slapped his face.
“Get up!”
Tom covered his face with his hands as she emptied a large sack of garbage on him.
“We just crossed the equator, and you’ve never crossed before. And everyone who crosses the equator for the first time is a pollywog. Do you want to stay a pollywog?”
“Is this a joke?” Tom asked, spitting out eggshell and coffee grinds. He tasted something even uglier.
“Do you want to stay a pollywog?” asked Jan. “Answer me. Yes or no? Do you want to be a shellback?”
“Where’s Eddie?” Tom worried that they were going to drop him into the ocean. So my punishment has finally come, he thought, the hanged man did not save me.
“There is no Eddie on this boat. There’s only King Neptune and his bride. And I’m not the bride today, my little pollywog. Come here.”
Jan twisted Tom’s right ear and forced him to the stern, where Eddie sat on the end of the hull naked, his belly covered in grease from the diesel’s oil pan. He wore a gold-foil party crown.
Jan picked up the boat hook and knocked Tom’s shoulders with the handle. “Kneel in front of the royal baby.”
Tom crouched down, facing Eddie’s filthy stomach.
“He’s not dressed right,” said King Neptune. “He can’t marry me if he’s not dressed right.”
Jan went below and came back with a yellow bra stretched between her hands like a cat’s cradle. “Take off your shirt and put this on,” she demanded.
Tom obliged her, seeing no choice.
“Come on,” said Eddie, “join us. Kiss me. Kiss my belly.” He said this in his own soft voice, putting aside King Neptune’s bluster.
Tom reflected that his life had carried him to strange places, and now he was on the equator, closer to the sun that he had ever been, with the world of water around him. What did he have to lose?
He pressed his face into Eddie’s gut, covering himself with slime, when Jan whacked his shoulders. His body folded around the pain, and he fell to the deck. Jan hit him again. “Stay down,” she said, while Eddie pulled the storm sail out of its bag and spread more garbage on it. Then they wrapped him like a cigar and made him crawl out of it. Of course this is birth, he thought. I know that much.
And then they threw him into the ocean.
When he came to the surface, caught in a trough between waves, the catamaran was gone.
Tom treaded water, stirring the current and summoning the coldest layer six miles deep. A swell lifted him high enough to see the mast of the Mimesis coming towards him. He grabbed the hammock’s netting from below, and the boat dragged him through the water. Jan and Eddie watched without comment as Tom swung himself to the hammock’s leading edge, resting until he found the energy to pull himself to safety.
When he came back on board, Eddie was clean. Jan gave Tom a little printed card of a sea turtle.
“I don’t know what it means,” said Jan. “It’s an old sea tradition.”
Tom knew but kept it to himself. The sea turtle, like Tom in prison before release, is self-condemned to lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness, never mind that he owns the ocean.
They never spoke of this again.
So they sailed without crisis for a year, from South Africa to the Indian Ocean. They stopped in lonely Chagos and traded stories with the cruisers who cast off from shore and spend the rest of their lives at s
ea; they sailed below Sri Lanka to Malaysia, where a freighter cut across their bow with ten feet clear because the freighter had a bad spirit aboard and offered the ghost another ship to haunt, but Eddie wasn’t afraid, “because I don’t believe in Malay ghosts.” Eddie taught Tom how to fix a diesel engine, and when they pulled into a harbor and needed cash, they’d find other cruisers with trouble and fewer skills and help them.
...
So a year and a half passed. By and by they stopped in Fiji, where the Mimesis dropped anchor in a lagoon on the coast of Taveuni Island, below a colony of bungalows on a low bluff.
Eddie said, “Look at this place. There’s two well-fitted dive boats, and a few skiffs for fishing, but no sailboats. We could spend a few months here running sunset cruises and make some money, enough for a year.”
“If they’ll have us,” said Jan.
“There’s only one way to find out. Tom, you stay on the boat while Jan and I make a useful friend or two.”
An hour later, they returned with Pete and Beryl Poole. From Pete’s first “G’day mate,” Tom pegged them for professional Aussies, an exhausting type, forever playing the role of the free man, but he wanted to pave over his wariness with some benevolence; they were innkeepers with years of forced affability, and perhaps after time they’d show Tom some of their despair.
The Pooles were in their forties, and there was something grim about each, thought Tom; he saw, underneath the manic friendliness, a defeated expectation. This would have made them sympathetic, but his caution increased the more he watched them. Pete was handsome and Beryl was pretty, without either being interesting to look at, like career officers stuck in the middle ranks, Tom thought. Their movements were precise and quick. Things happen slowly for a long time, and then everything is new and fast. Who are these people? Why are they here? Something begins with them. What?
Under Radar Page 11