by Robert Stone
“Christ, that my love was in my arms,” he said.
The gale whistled in his slackening shrouds like incoming fire. He laughed in despair. He could imagine the long-legged crabs of Fiddler’s Green rosining up their bows for him. He felt warm, sweet and powerless, a morsel, a portion. Above all, alone. Also the wind, for all its fury, was not the only sound he heard. There was a worse sound below that made him prefer it.
The sound from below was nasty indeed. He could not remember when he had begun hearing it. Just beyond the doldrums, probably, in the rising of the southeast trades. There was something human in its nastiness, a squeal, a squawk. It sounded like the gutter, like an obscene threat, a New York objection. Plastic. Listening, he clenched his teeth.
Its whine suggested loud vulgar language and cheap macho menace. Bad workmanship and sharp practice. Phoniness and cunning. Fucking plastic, he thought, enraged. It sounded like a liar burning in hell. Plastic unmaking itself.
That was what it was. And of course he should have known. He had been seeing the crazes and having trouble with the locker doors. Like a little tin soldier in a paper boat, he thought, biting his lip, headed for the drain. He was riding a decomposing piece of plastic through an Antarctic storm.
“You bastards!” he shouted, trying to outdo the wind. “What have you done to me? You fucking filthy swine!”
It was hard to force himself down into the cabin where the whine was loudest. It reminded him of the kind of dirty laughter it was sometimes expedient not to hear. You are not called Nona, bitch, he told the boat. Fake bitch. You have no name. But she was not even a bitch. Just plastic.
He sat down at the navigation table and started going through the chart drawers in search of the boat’s design drawings. He had not seen them for months. The first document he laid hands on was the rough copy of a brochure he had written himself. He stood up and, holding fast to the overhead rail, got to read his own prose.
“Altan Forty! Master-crafted! A seasoned winner in the newest design! All the elements of the precision-designed racer—attainable! Affordable!”
They were his own words. And of course he had approved the boat. More than that: in imagination he had invented a perfect boat for it to be. It had been salesmanship by ontology, purveying a perfect boat for the perfect ocean in an ideal world. The very thing for a cruise to the perfect island, the one that had to exist because it could be imagined. He had been his own first, best customer.
With every gust the fiberglass screamed. The urgency in the sound was genuine and he understood that, under sail, she could not stand up to the weather any longer. He went on deck and, laboring furiously with the cockpit open to black sky and rain, dropped the main and genoa and raised a storm jib. He brought the boat to a close reach, virtually hove to, a humble penitent posture.
Below again, he had to strip the boards of the cabin sole with a crowbar to reach the mast step. The devilish, spiderwebbed craze patterns across its surface were worse than anything he had imagined. The makers of the boat had simply piled on extra fiberglass underneath. With each tightening of the stays, Browne realized, he had been driving the mast step down and bending the hull.
Clinging to the overhead rail, he began to smash the bulkhead cabinets with his crowbar. They were his own work, poor quality, of the cheap material he had bought to replace Dolvin’s obsessive masterpiece. He had a proper use for them now. When he had stove in the lockers attached to the main bulkhead, he saw that there too the glass was crazing. So it was no wonder, he realized, that his shrouds were slack, since the chainplates were secured there. All the secondary bonds were giving way.
Again and again, Browne brought his crowbar down on the shiny, cosmetic cabin fittings of his worthless boat. “What do you do for a kid with a terrible laugh?” he remembered the woman in Connecticut saying. It was an odd thing to recall in his rage. He remembered her voice so clearly he could hear it in the cabin. His thoughts raced.
Res sacrum perdita. He could not remember the origin of the phrase. Sold our pottage, overheated the poles, poisoned the rain, burned away the horizon with acid. Despised our birthright. Forgot everything, destroyed and laughed away our holy things. What to do for our children’s terrible laughter?
He lowered the storm jib. With all sails down, the boat was pitching relentlessly. Browne lay across the cabin sole, his legs braced against the bulkhead, trying to buttress the mast step with the ruins of the floorboards. He jammed the fragments of his cabinets against the angle between the hull and the main bulkhead. Every few minutes he had to turn away from work to retch over a bucket.
The suffering plastic ground on. It was like a last, terrible laugh. There is a justice here, Browne thought. He had been trying to be someone else. He had never really wanted any of it.
The tie-rods he found behind the liner were not stainless steel rod but appeared to have been rigged out of galvanized wire. It made him laugh to see the way they had stretched because it was like a practical joke. Like a cartoon in which some furry creature’s flying machine deconstructed itself element by element until the poor thing was left about to fall, humorously embarrassed and terrified, naked and unsupported over emptiness. Flightless furry me, Browne thought.
Drenched with sick sweat, he hammered the slats into place. Gradually he realized that the noise in the cabin had diminished. With the sails down, the pressure eased; the boat was relieved of her misery. He went on deck and felt ashamed to face the gale.
When the wind shifted to southwest, he put out a storm drogue and started northeasterly with the wind on his quarter. The drogue kept his speed down but he had to stay at the wheel to keep the course.
Hours later, the wind eased and he raised a storm jib again and went below to rest. Sleep eluded him in spite of his fatigue. Sickness came and went. Petty hallucinations assailed him. He found himself absurdly concerned with appearances. Everyone must have seen the poor set of the main. Anyone could have found him out, exposed his lack of knowledge and experience. It had all been pretending, he thought, as far back as memory. He was at the root of it. He was what raised the stink at the heart of things. There would always be something to conceal.
The sleep that finally came was shallow and thirst-ridden. In dreams, he was trying to overcome his father’s loony drunken scorn with quiet logic. It was necessary to be patient because his father was highly intelligent and knew no limits and was capable of saying anything.
But reasonableness had been the strategy. There was always a chance you could surprise him and strike a spark of approbation. You had to stage an ambush to wring a good word from him.
Half waking, Browne felt the peculiar anxiety with which he had always awaited his father’s laughter. If I’m not careful, he thought, thrashing in the bunk, he’ll have me laughing too.
Browne thought he heard that little bubbling up of humor in the throat that preceded one of the old boy’s amusing sallies. His heart fluttered, in fear of embarrassment. Then he heard the voice itself, dry and theatrical, heartless.
“Everybody loves you when you’re someone else, son.”
That was a good one, Browne thought.
47
SHE WOKE to gulls. Steadman’s Island. Outside the warm bedroom in which the two of them lay, the sky was winter blue. They were naked under a huge down comforter of the same color.
She turned over and put her face against Strickland’s shoulder, put her hand across his chest and ran it down his belly. She was remembering the night he had walked in on her. Late that night when they were making love, he had urged her down on him. He had done so silently. It had all been very unfamiliar. He came, she swallowed. And he had said, “Good for you, baby.”
It had been as though she were someone else altogether. Every smell and sensation had been strange. His voice had sounded unlike any voice she had ever heard.
This morning, nestled against his side, she thought back on it and shivered. When she raised her head to look at him he seemed to be still sl
eeping. Both his eyes were open just a fraction and she could see a sliver of his flat, cold gaze. He looks phallic, she thought. Yes, a prick, a snake. She laughed silently and put her open mouth against his ear.
In the next minute, she heard a crash against the side of the house. A shadow passed across the daylight. “Shit,” she whispered, and pulled the down blanket over their heads. Strickland woke up.
“What’s happening?”
“We’re hiding from Mr. Baily.”
“Who the fuck is that?” he asked impolitely.
“Mr. Baily is the propane man,” Anne explained. “He’s changing our propane tanks so we won’t freeze to death. But we don’t want him to see us.”
“I’m hip,” Strickland said.
It struck her as funny and she kissed him as they huddled under the spread. The wall shook as Mr. Baily, outside, rammed the replacement tanks into place. When they heard his truck start up, Strickland got out of bed.
Anne stretched and felt herself sore in unfamiliar places. She pulled the pillow over her head. Strickland was standing at the window, looking out at the winter light.
“Nice place,” he said.
“I always thought I liked it. Now I don’t know.”
“I spoiled it for you? That what you mean?”
“No,” she said. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Last time,” Strickland said, “I thought you went very well with the place.”
“Last time I did.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked her. “You’re the same.”
She watched him pick up what appeared to be a small medallion on a chain that he had set down on the dresser. When he slipped it around his neck, she beckoned him over.
“Show me.”
He sat down on the bed to let her see the thing. Leaning on an elbow, she took it in her fingers to examine.
“It’s tiny,” she said. On the chain was a minuscule human figure with an agonized expression. It seemed to represent a man assaulted by a winged monster of some sort. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing here?”
“It’s the god of d . . discomfort.” He laughed and began to stammer.
“Seriously. What on earth is it?”
“Mayan,” Strickland said. “From the Grijalva. It’s a guy tied to a stake. A captive. There’s a vulture on the stake and it’s eating his eye.”
“It’s horrible,” she said after a moment.
“Come on,” Strickland said. “It’s exquisite. Look at it.”
She let it fall against his chest and looked up at him.
“I do love you, you know.”
He stood up and went back to the window to pull a T-shirt on. “Yeah, well. It’s only rock and roll.”
Anne sank back and pulled the spread around her, trying to see it as rock and roll. Maybe, she thought, I can make a friend of him.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said. She had no idea what she wanted, finally. It was a brutal business.
Strickland kept looking out of the window and did not reply. All at once she was lonely and frightened. Her remorse felt like mourning. It would be necessary to put all life aside and deal with the man presently in her bedroom and protect herself. That made her feel cold. She pulled the spread closer. On the wall across from her bed was the yellow flowered wallpaper she and Owen had hung together two years before.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Promise you no regrets?”
“No,” she said. Was she wishing her husband dead? Maybe she was wishing them both dead, Owen and herself. Maybe they both should have died long before, in 1968, in Bu Dop. Bu Dop was a heartless name for your generic Vietnamese hamlet. Her life seemed to be disappearing before her eyes. “No,” she said, “that would be impossible.” After a moment she asked him, “What will it be like?”
He laughed and again began to stammer. “Like with everybody,” he managed to say. “What happens to everybody will happen to us.”
“What’s that?” she wanted to know. But he did not answer. Presently he went out to the kitchen. Anne stayed in bed under her comforter. When he came back later, he brought two cups of tea.
“What will we do?” she asked him. She was still naked, wrapped tight in the quilt. “Will we go on filming?”
“Sure,” he said. “That’s what we do. That’s how we make our way through life.”
“Everyone’s going to see it.”
“See what?”
“You and me,” she said. Strickland looked thoughtful. He shrugged. There was something on his mind. “It will come out in the film,” she insisted.
“Not unless I want it there, Anne.”
“People will see it.”
“They’ll see what we want them to see.”
“They’ll see us.”
“What are you,” Strickland demanded, “a fucking mystic? You think the camera never lies?”
“I think it will be apparent,” Anne said.
Strickland only laughed. “Don’t get so French about it. It’ll just be a movie.”
They sat in the sunny room drinking tea for a while.
“Take it by the day,” he said. “Can’t you do that?”
“Not really,” Anne said. “I tend to live for the future. Of course,” she added, “I don’t really believe in the future I live for.”
“Same here,” Strickland told her.
48
HE CLEANED UP the cabin as best he could. He was very tired and it was difficult to concentrate. His arm was sore; he assumed he must have fallen at some point during the gale. The radio was still functioning because there was news from Cape Town and a report on the race that had the competition spread out in a broken line to the west. Fowler and Kerouaille were nearly neck and neck in the fifties, riding the same weather that had driven Browne. Dennis, Rolf and Cefalu were to the northwest, less than a hundred miles apart. Held’s boat had sustained serious damage in the forties. His and another American entry were heading in company for the coast of Argentina. Browne was fascinated to realize that in one period of thirty-six hours, he had covered nearly four hundred ten miles.
He was steering northeasterly, sailing a broad reach on the port tack under a marbled mackerel sky. The wind was stiff but serviceable; it filled the belly of his sails and played the worthless fiberglass below like a cheap harmonica. He had fashioned tie-rods to hold the craft together out of spare wire and turnbuckles. But he knew that the next big blow would dismast him and beat the boat to death.
In the aftermath of the gale, he found himself meditating on the race’s circularity, its notions of flight and pursuit. A game, if you could stand the incessant motion, made a perfectly decent life. Games were all that made things serious or gave them form. To be a serious person, it was necessary to embrace one.
Browne took comfort in his reflections, although he supposed the race was lost to him. Sometimes anger kept him from sleep and spoiled his appetite. He rarely ate or slept.
Once he spent a day that was rewarded with a night, although a brief one. He thought it delicious to see the sky go dark. There were no stars. To his bemusement, Duffy was on the line to him.
“How’s tricks, Captain? Where you been?”
Browne regretted having responded to his call sign. He had no idea of what to say. I would have won if the boat had been good, he thought.
“I’ve had high winds,” he reported. “I’ve made good time. Over.”
“Are you O.K.?”
“Outstanding,” Browne said.
“I’m supposed to remind you to keep filming.”
I could say, Browne thought, that I was anywhere on the planet except for his transponder tracking me. I could be free of them all.
“I will.”
A stratagem for silence occurred to him.
“Look, I have a problem. Over.”
“What’s that, Owen?”
“My fuel injectors are blocked. I’ll have to clean them before I can charge the generator. I ma
y have to go off the air for a while.”
“Is that like a major problem?”
“No. I have gas. It’ll be all right. Over.”
“What should I tell the public?”
Browne could not keep from laughing.
“Are you laughing?” Duffy asked. He sounded as though he wanted to laugh too but was prevented by some caution.
“Tell it to get some sleep,” Browne said. “Out.”
Hours later, he dug Buzz Ward’s crumpled letter from under the boards.
“No one knows how he will react to being alone,” Buzz had written. “There are different levels of it. My opinion is that we are much more alone in a human situation that is utterly alien to us than when alone at sea or lost in the woods or something of that nature. The point is to keep solitude from becoming a prison. The old saw that ‘stone walls do not a prison make’ is valid.”
Encoffined in his grinding fiberglass walls, Browne waited out the short night. Just before dawn, the boat’s power failed briefly and the masthead light went out as he was watching it. The light’s going out seemed to be a part of a process that was outside randomness.
He took up the letter again, in the beam of a flashlight.
“In 1970 and ’71 we had fourteen months in solitary without light. After a few months I found a hole from which I could see daylight and even sometimes people. They were local rural people, Tonkinese peasants, mainly elderly for some reason. They came to barter with the guards—some kind of scam. Often they stopped to shoot the breeze and rest. Watching them, I would think: How sane they are and how little they expect from life.”
With the return of light, he thought how strange it was that he had so doubted his abilities as a single-handed sailor that he had been reduced to lying about his experience. In the end he had managed perfectly well. He might have won if the boat had been good.
For some reason, in his desolate quarter of the globe incoming messages multiplied. An Australian voice explained the Doppler effect for the benefit of students for a radio officer’s certificate. An instructor who might have been Asian American held forth on the history of spectroscopes: