by Robert Stone
When the wind picked up, he buckled on his safety harness and leaned his back against the mast. It was a bad night that he had put behind him. He found it difficult to imagine his way back into the depths of fear and helplessness that had assailed him. Kneading his sore leg, he found it quite serviceable. End of alarm.
It all had to do, Browne thought, with the zones of transit he had crossed. Within them, what was human met with what was not. Over there, the continent, with its frantic egoism, millions of ravenous wills. Here the sea, serene and unforgiving. Out of such places, interior storms arose. He settled back against the mast with Strickland’s camera on his lap and waited for the dolphins.
31
WITH Owen securely at sea, Anne had started working for Underway magazine again. The week before Thanksgiving, she spent one morning in the office alone reading the January issue’s proofs. When they were ready, she walked them to the printer’s herself and took an afternoon train home from Grand Central. She was expecting his call that evening, via the marine operator.
Riding home, she found herself a little high with anticipation. She had gotten the magazine out ahead of time, using the prospect of his call as a treat and incentive. At the same time she knew perfectly well that the telephone link was an ambiguous pleasure.
Driving from the station, it occurred to her that she might sign up as a volunteer at the Veterans’ Hospital in Bristol. She had worked there during Maggie’s first years in grade school. During the Vietnam War, she had volunteered at the Naval Rehabilitation Center in Kaneohe. Her memories of that were more pleasant than otherwise. If only she could summon back the tricks that had worked for her in those days. But they were lost in time and their memory drowned in nostalgia. To wish for those old tricks was to wish youth back.
She stopped at Gemma’s Exxon on the Post Road to fill up on gas and get a quart of oil. Since she was in the neighborhood, she took the opportunity of running next door to Post Liquors for a quart of Finlandia.
That evening, as the time for Owen’s call-in approached, she sat in the study drinking vodka and orange juice and thinking back on the years of the war. She could not altogether suppress the guilty pleasure she felt recalling them. How impossible it would have been at the time to imagine she could ever look back on them with pleasure. And with more than pleasure, she thought: with longing. It was partly, she supposed, a longing for him and for things to end well.
From the day after his departure, she had been running into the residue of things done wrong. There was the matter of the solar panels. Then she discovered that she had made a miscalculation in the amount of cooking oil he would need. He was almost certain now to run out of it before the race was over. The rubber for a reinforced casing around the mast step was shown by its invoice to have been the wrong sort. A letter for his birthday she had put aboard in a briefcase with the boat’s papers had somehow ended up back in the car. There were many, smaller things. Besides them, there were the telephone calls at night. For some reason she did not understand, she connected these calls with the errors. They were the standard silent harassing calls in the night: a pause and the receiver replaced. Of course, the race had been much publicized. She was known to be alone. She said nothing to anyone about either the calls or the mistakes.
Three quarters of an hour before his call was due, she gathered up her charts and rulers and went upstairs to change clothes. She thought it might be fun to dress up for him, and before long she had laid a considerable variety of clothes on the bed for her slightly addled inspection. Then, in the depths of the closet, as though it were meant to be, she found a leather miniskirt that she had bought in the late sixties, too dated to wear, too nice to throw away. When she tried it on she found it fit, although barely. It was what she had worn to meet him at Oakland airport when he came home from the war.
“Far out,” he had said, feeling her up in it. It was hard to imagine him saying that now.
She ended up putting on an old knit leotard of the sort that went with leather miniskirts and a pair of old boots and a purple turtleneck sweater that she had once worn with an ivory pendant on a silver chain. Then she sat down at the dressing table to fuss with her hair, a drink at her elbow. It was permitted, she thought, to drink while you talked to your husband at sea. And she had been cutting down.
The sight of herself in the mirror startled her. She saw that the fantasy for which she was dressing had less to do with present games than with past time. Her hair was the same length it had been in the late sixties. Fascinated, she combed it out. When other girls in college had ironed their hair, hers had always been straight and fine. Calmly, although not altogether soberly, Anne faced herself in the mirror. All flesh is grass, she thought. A helpful notion from the old country.
Her beauty, such as was left to her, was the old man’s. His was the striking look that caught the pulse of its victims. Also the false angelicity and kindly eyes. From her mother she had received long, sound bones. An honest countenance, one of her teachers, a droll old nun, had used to say. Aging, she would resemble her father more and it would all catch up with her. And now? Not bad, she said, hardly daring to smile at herself there.
She put her hands to her hair and old shards and shimmers of the past came back to her. Songs and old cars. The married junior officers’ housing with its snot-colored walls, suggestive of crooked government factors, the Philippine insurrection, the Seminole wars. Eucalyptus, San Diego, sandalwood, Hawaii. Always the war, the news, the war, the demonstrations. Girl we couldn’t get much higher. Gonna set the night on fire.
Of course, they had no right to the songs. The songs belonged to the marchers, the epicene young creeps, but she and Owen had made a few their own. There were naval couples who smoked marijuana in those days; it was not unheard of. There were a few among the enlightened or the corrupt. The young Brownes had not. Mai tais had been their aphrodisiac and high.
What did we know? she thought. The Notre Dame fight song. The words to “Dover Beach.” She put the drink aside and relaxed on the bed. Stacked on the night table was some of her chosen winter reading. Brideshead Revisited, for the first time since college. The New Jerusalem Bible with its Tolkien translation of Genesis, a gift from her brother Dermot, ardent Christian and recently unemployed broker. Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai. Minna Hubbard’s memoir of crossing Labrador, a present from Owen. She picked up the Hubbard and reread Minna’s adoring dedication to her lost Leonidas, the strenuously living, doomed, obedient Spartan.
32
AT NOON on Tuesday, Browne took a sun sight and located himself northeast of the Cape Verde Islands. The fix did not conform well to his satellite reading. At the same time his compass was shifty, as though some countermagnetic force were in the air. The wind was moist and intermittent; he was riding the Canary Current, making about two knots under the mainsail and a light drifter.
In midafternoon, he sighted an island off his starboard bow that was black but inlaid with a deep delicious green, a festive sight in the glare. A hill rose from it to a height he reckoned at four hundred meters. Referring to the Admiralty sailing guide, he decided it was the Cape Verdean island of Boa Vista. Later, a little boat painted in violent African colors went across his bow at a distance of a mile or so. Through binoculars he could make out a shirtless brown man with a red bandana across his head standing behind the wheelhouse. The boat seemed top-heavy and tossed alarmingly in the mild sea. The name Sāo Martin da Porres was stenciled across its stern.
At four o’clock, the marine operator broadcast a roll call of the entries. The stars of the race, the big boats, were already closing on Cape Agulhas. Browne’s competition was spread westward over several hundred miles. Of the lot, only Preston Fowler was ahead of him, clearing the equatorial doldrums at about latitude eleven south. When the broadcast ended, a weather fax arrived announcing a tropical depression off the horn of Brazil.
Boa Vista passed out of sight before sunset. The moment the sun was down, equatorial
darkness closed around him, black on black under the cold stars. Worried about the current and his proximity to land, he stayed late on deck. His mind’s eye refused to give up the image of the black and green island. Finally he played the game of refusing the image, trying to force it from his imagination. Eventually he nodded off to sleep. Awakening with an odd but familiar sensation, he discovered himself in tears. The same thing had been happening all the way across the Atlantic. It was strange because his easting had been a particularly invigorating run, spinnaker set and westerlies across the port quarter at seventeen knots. Brilliant autumn weather. But night after night he would go to sleep in perfectly good spirits and wake to feel some old misery slinking away with an unremembered dream.
Finally he put on some Dorsey brothers music to guide himself through the darkness. For whatever reason the old numbers sounded unaccountably sad. The image of the island stayed with him relentlessly until he could almost see it, glowing out on the dark ocean.
In one late dark hour, the mysterious bibliolators came in over the open transmitter.
“A false balance is abomination to the Lord,” said a stern female voice, “but a just weight is His delight.” The rest was static. Browne went to sleep on deck.
He opened his eyes to a peculiar amber light. There was sand on his eyelids and between his teeth. When he stood up he felt a light salting of the stuff on the deck beneath his bare feet. From every quarter, the horizon seemed to be closing in, visibility eroding at a quarter of a mile or so. The sun was obscured but its glare was all around him. The wind was hot and comfortless. He checked the compass, then went aft to inspect the steering vane. Nona was on course in the strange fitful air. Each gust lifted columns of spindrift from an oily, seamlessly rolling sea. Uneasy, heavy-headed, he went below and checked his radar scanner. The beam was reassuring. Half unwillingly, he climbed to his rack and went to sleep again.
His dreams were vivid and sweaty, incorporating a vaguely familiar noise that suggested telephone wires or nights in the country. Opening his eyes, he saw something in motion on the highest step of the companionway. The cabin was darker than usual; something was blotting out the fingers of light that normally penetrated the reinforced cabin windows. Then a moment came in which he connected the noise to what he was seeing and he stood up in terror.
Insects infested the wind. The companionway steps were covered with them. They were spilling like a foul liquor from the higher to the lower steps and had covered the cabin windows. Charging up the ladder, he crushed a million brittle carapaces underfoot. Once on deck, he refused the sight he saw. The things glided down singly like so many paratroopers and in writhing clusters that rolled like tumbleweed and skittered across the main hatch. Each shroud and stay was alive with them, the mainsail and mast crawling.
In his first active, waking moments, he felt the mass of fiddling legs and antennae cover his bare skin. He was briefly unable to control his own panic. As he recoiled, brushing away insects, he became aware of the sound they made.
Browne ran headlong for cover, which the deck did not afford. Frantically he tried to pry the insect bodies from his face. Their mandibles adhered. With his own shrill curses in his ears, he wrapped one arm around the boom, stared down at it and saw it crawling.
All around the boat, as far into the murk as he could see, the surface of the water was smothered, as though the swarm had displaced the ocean. Nona’s wake cut a swath through them, churning out creatures and soiled white water. Only when the noise stopped could he see that they had stopped falling. Teeth clenched, shuddering, he brushed himself off. He stamped as many as he could into the deck. Finally, more calmly, he took a bucket to them. He labored for hours to clean the decks and lines and brightwork. For weeks he would find them in unlikely places, sometimes in disgusting numbers. The insects were a little over an inch long, pale yellow and black, with delicate spotted wings folded against the thorax. Holding one spread-winged against a page of his log, he was reminded of a fantastic print he had seen reproduced long before. He thought he must have seen it in a book during his school days. Very distantly, he could remember the book as disturbing, showing things that were outside his experience then and of which he wanted no part.
In Vietnam, the battle-crazy Lurps who lived across the landing strip from Browne’s Tactical Air Control base had made a legend of beetles who entered the brain and contaminated the mind. Some of the Lurps had believed so intensely in the beetles that they had succumbed to the infection. That evening, Browne entered the infestation in his log to bring the experience under control:
“1400 GMT, 1300 local, course 130 degrees, wind off the African coast. Hamseen or harmattan brought a cloud of insects, flying or airborne, covered Nona and surrounding sea. Hours cleaning up.”
Beyond that he could think of nothing to write. Later, he thought he might sit down to his journal and make a literary event out of it all. Then it occurred to him that not once had he thought of taking out Strickland’s camcorder. He put a stick-on memo slip in the log to remind himself to do it in future.
Just before sundown the unwholesome mists cleared and a gentle breeze rose astern. Browne watched the passing of the light with a troubled mind. For the second time since setting out, he was left with his nerves on edge and his confidence shaken.
That night his compass went shifty again. He stayed up to wait for the passing of the navigation satellite to confirm his position and tended his radar screen every hour. Having impetuously come so far east on a favorable wind, he was making scant progress southward, poking along toward the doldrums at their widest point. When he had his satellite bearings he sat down at his navigation station and drew a rhumb line that would take him across the equator at about the twentieth meridian. He felt a measure of irrational dread, as though the wind had brought him to some dark quarter of the ocean.
For hours then he sat awake in the cockpit, lifeline secured. At times he thought himself home with his wife and daughter a room away, but with the din of the insect swarm pressing outside. A few of the surviving vermin still fluttered about the shrouds, visible in the dim masthead light. Dawn came with a fresher wind and feverish colors. It was Wednesday, the day for him to call home. There was no question about it, Browne thought, he had a story to tell.
The prospect of telephoning later that day led Browne to meditate upon his wife. He imagined her voice very clearly and the way she would sound as he described the insects. The thought of her voice aroused him considerably. It might have been that something about the strange Senegalese light inclined him toward obsession. He could not take his mind off her.
Through the day, as Nona ghosted along with only the current behind her, Browne waited for the hour of his phone call. Faint gusts of indeterminate direction slapped the listless sea against the hull. Lolling beside the mast in the doldrums’ glare, he fell deeper and deeper into the contemplation of Anne, her shape and savor, the contours and tastes of which she was composed. In his tense sleepless state, the desire he felt was restless and uneasy. In spite of himself he wanted to indulge it. He was finding that, at sea, the richest occupations, the keenest sensations, were interior.
It was peculiar, Browne thought, that he could summon up the sensual presence of his wife so vividly. Subversive. In Vietnam, he had spent a great many lonely desirous days but never one so haunted and distracting. Under the desire, he suspected, lay weakness and danger. It went with the weather, the doldrums and the malarial hamseen. He began to wonder then just what it was that he should say to her.
33
ANNE WAS standing by the bedroom fireplace when the phone rang. She ran to it.
“Honey?”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s me.”
All along she had planned to ask him to guess what she was wearing, so that was what she did.
“Can you?”
The silence that followed was long enough to be exasperating. She supposed he was embarrassed. She became embarrassed herself. It was all a little
silly.
“I found that old black leather miniskirt that I had when we were in the Navy,” she explained. “Do you remember it?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Do you really? Did you like it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Yes? Yes you did?”
“You were delectable in it,” Browne said.
“I still am,” she said. “I’m looking at myself right now.”
“There’s not much I can do about that, Annie. From here.”
“Where?” she asked. “Where are you?”
“Well,” he said, “according to the last satellite, ten degrees forty minutes north, twenty-one sixty west.”
“What?” she demanded. She slid to the floor to read the chart. “What are you doing there? You’re in the Sahara.”
“It’s all water, Annie. As far as the eye can see.”
“Good,” she said. “So you weren’t misinformed.”
“What do you mean?” Browne asked.
“Well,” she said, “there was a famous movie line. In a Humphrey Bogart movie. About his being in the desert for the waters. And he said he was misinformed.”
“Yes,” he said, “I remember.”
“Are you sure you know where you are? Did you take a sun sight?”
“Yes,” he said.
“God,” she said, “I wish I was there. I think you’re ahead of everyone in your class. You’re winning.”
“Darling,” Browne said, “we’re on an open circuit here. I don’t want to make things easier for the competition. I don’t think we ought to get personal, either.”
“I’m sorry, Owen.”
“Never mind. But I had a great westerly wind for a while. I had the spinnaker up for a week. I couldn’t leave it.”