by Robert Stone
“Early instruments employed a combination of electrostatic and magnetic focusing whereby ions were sorted specifically according to their mass.”
Not useful. Then there was a mad ham in South Africa, Zulu Romeo Alpha one Juliet five six three, who had bestowed upon himself the handle Mad Max. Max was apparently a teenager who traded worldwide for all sorts of collectibles. He broadcast over two assigned frequencies, voice transmission on one, Morse code on the other. Browne could catch only one end of the conversation. In Morse, Mad Max had an able, subtle fist: his pauses resonated, his dots and dashes rhymed, his silences could be downright sarcastic. His voice was a husky boy soprano with a South African drawl. Sometimes he sounded frantic.
“I have a set from India’s sunny clime! I have an ivory set from Thailand, the western game but the rooks are elephants with tusks. I have a mahogany set carved on Devil’s Island by a convict. Dreyfus? Monte Cristo—Cuba’s finest cigar. I have a Persian set, Kaz, the original game still played up the Khyber. I’ve got a set out of walnut as well. Coconuts? I’ve a loverly bunch of those!”
He also went in for impossible jokes, available to Browne only in fragments.
“It wasn’t the feather or the ten shillings, yer honor. ’Twas the mean low cunning of the bastard.”
He seemed part pitchman, part voluble, greedy child.
At sunrise, when Browne went up on deck, there was a pale blue shimmer over the northeastern horizon. Staring at it, he saw something inexplicable.
In the center of the glow was what appeared to be an inverted mountain range. Peaks hung upside down like stalactites, their points barely touching the surface of the sea, thickening to a central mass a few degrees above the horizon. It was as though an upside-down island hung suspended there.
He stood for a long time staring at the strange sight. The inverted peaks were delicate and beautiful, flashing ice colors as the sky lightened. He turned the boat toward them. After about thirty minutes the sight vanished. But where the line of ice had been, a single petrel soared on the wind, ranging ahead of the boat at a constant bearing, as though it were leading him on. Impelled by some urgency like hope, Browne steered his vessel after the bird’s passage.
49
STRICKLAND stood with the telephone to his ear, watching Pamela Koester attempt to open a bottle of no-salt vegetable juice. Her first efforts to twist the cap off having proved unavailing, she had begun to bang the top of the bottle against the side of the refrigerator. Each blow was harder than the last. Her eyes took on a cold fanatical cast. The tip of her tongue protruded from one corner of her mouth. Strickland intervened. Without putting the phone down, he walked over to Pamela and took the juice away from her. He had his partner, Freya Blume, on the line.
“We can proceed with the film,” Freya was saying happily. “We seem to be provided for.”
That morning a number of people connected with the Hylan Corporation had been indicted, including Hylan himself. No charges had been lodged against Harry Thorne.
“Good,” Strickland said. He wrapped a dish towel around the juice cap, gave a sharp twist and handed the open container to Pamela. Pamela threw her head back and drank greedily. “Because I have a few subjects lined up.”
“As counterpoint, you mean?”
“Yes. As layoff coverage. I think we’d like to hear from some boat people. We got some pithy commentary from those guys on Staten Island. We might have a little more of that.”
“Honestly,” Freya said, “do you know what those guys are talking about? Can you make it comprehensible?”
“I don’t know,” Strickland said. “Maybe it doesn’t have to be.”
All day he had been trying to reach Altan’s former chief designer, a man named Fay. When he had left yet another message on the man’s machine, he saw that Pamela had succeeded in spilling juice all over the tiles of the kitchen area of his loft. He shouted after her.
“Can’t you clean up after yourself? Don’t be such a child.”
He went into the main loft space and saw her huddled on cushions near the great window, leaning sulkily on her fist and looking down toward TriBeCa.
“I didn’t pay my maintenance this month,” she said. “I’m really worried.”
“What about your dad? Maybe while he’s preparing for death he’ll think of you fondly.”
“His mind,” Pamela said, “has been poisoned against me.”
Pamela’s recent social ascent had led her to a position as a hatcheck girl at the Marabout Club, the young new year’s most dashing. It had slipped away when she was discovered attempting to steal a Caius College, Cambridge, scarf from one of the club’s prominent customers. Pamela felt particularly ill-used, since she had not coveted the scarf for herself but as a gift for a new boyfriend.
“Don’t look at me, Pamela,” Strickland said. “I don’t believe I’m suited for nurturing.”
“I know that.”
“These are lean times for me. I’m not from Hollywood.”
“I understand,” she said. “Can’t I stay here for a while?”
“I’ll loan you the money to pay your maintenance. If guys are harassing you, leave town.”
“I will,” she said. “In a couple of days I’ll go to the Cape. To Provincetown.”
“And you’ll hang with your junkie friends up there and get in deeper.”
“It’s the only place they’ll take me in,” she said. “It’s like home.”
“All right,” Strickland said. “You can stay here today and tomorrow. I have to go out later.” He sighed. “I’m so tired,” he said, “of seeing people fuck up.”
“Really?” she asked. “I thought you couldn’t get enough of it.”
“I guess I’ve finally had enough. Maybe I’m losing my nerve. Maybe I’m getting old.”
Pamela studied him. “You look sort of old.”
“Thanks a lot,” said Strickland.
“But happier,” she added. “You look happier lately.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. You look sort of up. Where do you have to go out to?” she asked.
“Out on the job. Up to Connecticut.”
“To Brownes’?”
“That’s right.”
She looked at him sidewise. “Are you fuckin’ her? I bet you are!”
“Mind your business.”
“But, baby,” she cried, “what about us?” For a moment Strickland thought she was serious but she let forth a burst of her chat-tery ersatz laughter. “Can this really be the end?”
Informed all at once by a burst of unsound energy, she went to the bulletin board where he had fastened a few dozen pictures of Browne and his family.
“Let us have a lookitchere,” Pamela crooned, imitating a pimp’s drawling manner. “Lessee her one mo’ time.” She held a picture of Anne at arm’s length, inspecting it under one of his pole lamps. “Hey, she’s a honey, Strickland. She’s old but she doesn’t look it. She’ll never look old.”
“Under forty,” Strickland said.
“She should be ashamed of herself,” said Pamela. “At her age. With a cute little daughter. And a really excellent husband. Fucking a mean, street kind of guy like you.”
“I am not,” Strickland said, “a street kind of guy. Put the picture back.”
“Afraid I’ll get it dirty?” Pamela asked. “With my ho’s hands?”
Strickland turned away from her to look out of the window. It was a gray, drizzly morning.
“Boy, I wouldn’t be fucking you if I had a husband like Owen.”
Strickland turned in amusement. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Hell no,” said Pamela. “I’d be true.”
“Women do seem to like him,” Strickland observed.
“Fuckin’ right,” Pamela said warmly. “He’s real.”
“I suppose I don’t get it.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Because you’re a carnival-type person and he’s a high-class g
uy. She’s got her brains in her pussy.”
“You seem to feel very strongly about it.”
“You don’t know what love is, Strickland.”
“Everyone says that.”
“You’re a seducer,” she told him. “You got ’em fuckin’ before they can turn around.”
“There’s a place for seduction, Pamela. Sometimes people have to be told what they like.”
“You’re like a hot handful of pistachio nuts,” Pamela said. “That’s my image of you.”
“Go home,” he said. “Put the picture back. You take too many drugs. You’ve been under the life too long.”
She walked back to the wall, singing to Anne’s picture:
“Go tell mah babee sistuh
Don’t do what ah have done—”
In Strickland’s film Under the Life there was a sequence in which Pamela belted out a few giggling choruses of “The House of the Rising Sun.”
“So what are you gonna do, Ron? Run off with her?” She pinned the photograph neatly back on the wall. “What?”
“I don’t know,” Strickland said.
“Crazy for love,” Pamela said. “Who woulda thunk it.”
Having finished the vegetable juice, Pamela began drinking red wine. Strickland joined her in a glass.
“You know,” he said, “there’s a level on which she’s never been got to.”
“You can do it,” Pamela said, “if anyone can.”
“I’d like to,” he said quietly. Pamela looked at him and shivered. “What’s the matter now?”
“You’re a freak,” she said.
Strickland sighed. “My dear Pamela. Who took you in? Who taught the cultivated world to love you? Who understands?”
“You,” she said.
“Exactly.”
She turned to him with the kind of sneer that had teeth at the edge.
“A freak. Out of the carnivals. You’re an attraction. Just like your mother.”
“Well,” Strickland said after a moment, “Moms was a strong joint.”
When Pamela went out, he worked at his monitor through the afternoon. At around four, Fay returned his call. They talked about boats and whether Fay would appear in Strickland’s film.
“No sir,” Fay said. He had a somewhat military style. “I would have to pass up that opportunity.”
“Well, tell me this,” Strickland said. “What beef do the Finns have? Has Owen got their boat or not?”
“I can give you my theory on that.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I think Matty probably planned to sail their boat in the race and mass-produce the design in the Far East. Then he couldn’t pay the Finns. He didn’t want to pull out of the race. So when they did the knockoff in Korea or Taiwan or whatever, he took the first one off the line.”
“To sail that one instead?”
“Sure,” Fay said. “It’s a fast design, he might have won with it. Then he would have put it into production with all the race publicity. That’s essentially what Browne’s hoping to do. In Matty’s, shall we say, absence.”
“What kind of boat is it?”
“I’m sure it’s well designed. How it’s made is another story. Sometimes they cut corners.”
“Browne likes it a lot.”
“Well,” Fay said, “Browne’s an asshole. Sorry,” he added, “I don’t mean that. He’s a salesman.”
“Do you think it’s unsafe?”
“Uncomfortable is more like it. A cheap boat will knock you around a lot.”
“Browne would know if it were unsafe, right? And not go?”
“Unless he’s more of a salesman than I think he is.”
“What about Mr. Thorne?”
“Harry doesn’t know any more about boats than Owen Browne tells him. These days Owen Browne is his fair-haired boy. Harry’s busy.”
Strickland succeeded in getting back to work for a while, cutting footage of Browne and his preparations to the music of Erik Satie over WNYC. The news that evening was of terror. Bombs were going off in comfortable, progressive European cities, causing power outages and loss of life. It was the anniversary of something.
Strickland was due in Boston the next day for an appointment with the Public Broadcasting people there and he had been attempting to persuade Anne to go with him. She kept declining because Boston was too near to Maggie’s school for comfort. That evening, sipping wine, boiling an egg for dinner, he could not keep from telephoning her.
“I was in New York today,” she said. “I thought of coming to see you.”
“Why didn’t you? Come to Boston.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “I’d be crazy. Just come back to me.”
Come back to me, she had said. Strickland repeated the words to himself. He could not believe she was saying them to him. It made him dizzy.
“B . . baby,” he began. They laughed together over his stammer. It reminded him of when she had laughed at him in the street.
“Poor sweet,” she said. “Poor tied tongue.”
“I want you to do crazy things for me,” he told her. “I’ll do the same for you. I want you to dress up for me. I want you to cut your hair.”
“God,” she said, “I love your saying that.” Hearing her, Strickland laughed to himself. “How shall I cut my hair?” she asked.
“Short,” he said. “Short as you can.” He smiled at the anxiety he sensed there.
“For disgrace. What shall I wear?”
“Silk. Skin. Something visual. So we can see where everything is.”
“And who pays for these clothes, boss?” She called him boss in imitation of Hersey. “Will you buy my clothes now?”
“I’ll do anything,” Strickland said.
50
BROWNE FOLLOWED the petrel until it disappeared beyond the black, foam-crested waves. Over the daylight hours he kept watch for the strange inverted towers he had seen at dawn. The weather turned gray and threatening.
That day’s sky was too overcast for a sun sight and the navigation satellites out of range. His on-deck thermometer registered an air temperature of seven degrees Celsius. The surface of the sea was a little above two. The wind was steady from the west at ten knots, whipping aside patchy fog. Once he spotted a small floating berg a few miles off. He kept to an easterly course.
In mid-morning Browne heard his call letters recited by the frenetic Mad Max. He assumed that Max had volunteered to patch a telephone call through. Disinclined to chat, Browne had just about decided to go off the air, pleading the generator. He logged Max’s signal but did not respond. Shortly thereafter, Whiskey Oscar Oscar, the high-seas operator, called out from the Jersey marshes. WOO had another call from Duffy.
“We got a minor problem with all you guys,” Duffy said. “You’re off the map, so to speak.”
Browne asked Duffy what he meant.
“Some Basques blew up the satellite receiver. They’re not getting your transponder signal.”
“Basques?”
“Basques,” Duffy said, “Colombians, Armenians, who knows? It was a capitalist invention, they blew it up. So you’ll have to call in with a position report every twenty-four hours. Let us know if you get in trouble, because we can’t see you.”
He asked Duffy how long the thing would be down.
“The company isn’t giving out much information, Owen. They don’t want to say exactly where their receivers are or what they’ll do. Our information is, up to a week.”
Browne was silent. Then he said, “My injectors are still giving me trouble. Tell them I may be off the air a while.”
“I told them,” Duffy said. “Is everything else O.K.?”
Browne assured him that everything else was fine. He decided not to respond to any further transmissions. Let invisibility be matched with silence, he thought.
Continuing east, he saw no more of the peaks. He concluded they must have been some trick of the southern horizon. Of ice, thin light and fog.
Durin
g the night, he happened on the missionary station again. A broadcast in a language unfamiliar to him was suddenly concluded by the voice of the Englishwoman whose narratives he had listened to weeks before.
“We now conclude our lesson broadcast in Tagalog and shall broadcast in English starting at seventeen hundred hours Greenwich mean time. We shall then broadcast the same lesson in Cantonese at twenty-two hundred hours Greenwich mean time, in Korean at zero hundred hours and once again in English at zero four-thirty. Our next Tagalog broadcast will be heard at ten hundred hours GMT.”
Browne put a can of chicken broth on the galley stove. It was the first nourishment he had taken in twenty-four hours.
“I wonder,” the lady asked, “how many of our listeners are tuning to our broadcasts while at sea? Our mail indicates that we have many listeners who are serving on shipboard. Many listeners are employed in the petroleum industry. Others are fishermen. I wonder how many of our listeners remember that our Lord’s first disciples found their employment as fishermen?”
Pouring out his broth into a coffee cup, Browne found himself listening to radio-drama effects that weakly replicated the very sounds of the sea that beat about his wounded vessel.
“Listeners may remember,” the lady said above the rising sounds of wind and sea, “that when our Lord was pursued by His enemies, Saint Matthew tells us that He went by ship into a desert place apart. When the multitude came to Him they were sent away satisfied—satisfied in spirit and in body as well, fed by His miraculous abundance. When they were gone He went off by himself to pray.”
Great day in the morning, thought Browne, this has got to be taped! He was overcome with hilarity. I’ll dine out, he thought, on this one. There would be loaves and fishes.
Since there was no time to attach the recording unit properly, he simply put a mike beside the speaker and switched it to Record. The lady described the amphibious apostles setting forth upon Gennesaret. Grinning, he clung to the overhead bar, clutching his cup of broth, crouching over the radio.