Outerbridge Reach

by Robert Stone

  “You really never had another guy?”

  “No,” she said.

  He thought she was avoiding his eye. “In twenty years you never got it on with another man until me? I’m sorry, but I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true,” she said, looking at him directly. He saw immediately that it was. Her arrogant innocence amazed him.

  He reached out from the bed and took the glass from her hand.

  “You shouldn’t drink all that,” he said. “Not by yourself. Not without me.”

  He drank the wine and held his breath, suddenly bemused, as though he were just another fellow like his patron and quarry, the average asshole in the street. All at once he was afraid of losing her.

  52

  THERE WERE no petrels in the cloudy dawn, but Browne brought his boat about and headed east for where the peaks had been. He felt distinctly in rebellion. About midday, after hours of running before the wind, he saw them again, right side up this time, ice towers that formed the spine of a volcanic island. He made a cautious circuit of the place, checking bottom all the while. The heights rose to a snow-covered central peak of two hundred meters or so that extended jagged arms around both ends of the island. Browne suspected there might be a central caldera beyond the spires. Small glacial valleys saddled the line of hills. When his boat passed close inshore, cold winds rushed down from the canyons and set his mainsail luffing and rattled the unsteady mast in its step.

  Approaching nearer the island, he saw that below the snow line there were hummocks of coarse yellow grass. Some dark green, thick-fleshed plant seemed to cover certain hills. He thought he could make out a few scarlet spots that might be gentians in bloom. There were purple stands of saxifrage but no trees at all. The rollers were almost within his hearing; he could imagine the sound of them. Sometimes he thought he heard the screaming of birds echoing off a canyon wall. He saw a flight of cormorants just outside the wave line.

  By the end of the day, Browne was still sailing around the island he had found. The dusk was many hours long, with shadows so extended that it seemed the planes of the visible world could not contain them. The sea turned inky black and the sky a breathless blue. That evening Browne heard his call sign repeated over and over again in a hoarse adolescent voice: “Whiskey Zulu Zulu one Mike eight seven three.” He made no reply.

  The idea of invisibility made Browne feel as though he might be able to sleep. For a long time, though, he could only lie staring at the overhead, transfixed with cold anger. At some point he had a sense that the wind had reversed. It seemed desperately necessary that he liberate himself somehow from the humiliating race. Eventually, out of exhaustion, he lost consciousness for a while.

  The next day, studying his island’s contours through binoculars, Browne saw birds everywhere. There were gulls and petrels of every variety, shearwaters, albatross. One of the black rock beaches was so crowded with king penguins that he had mistaken their seething mass for foliage at first glance and their yellow crests for flowers.

  He suspected that the caldera formed a lagoon which might be somewhere open to the sea. The only coast with an approachable strand appeared to be on the west side. But the beach there, such as it was, had been pounded out by enormous rollers driven by the prevailing winds that made any kind of anchorage impossible. The leeward shore of the island was a wall of sheer black rock, bluffs over a hundred feet high at their lowest point, priestly black and remote, a fortress. The Island of Invisibility gave nothing away.

  After a few days his rebellion assumed a routine. During the brief periods of darkness he would head just off the wind with only a storm jib up, sailing away from the island. With first light, he would come about and head back toward the peaks. Every day, winds permitting, he got a little bolder and approached the shore more closely, feeling his way in on the sounding device. There seemed to be no bottom anywhere.

  The high-seas operator at Whiskey Oscar Oscar kept him apprised of the race into which he betrayed himself. The positioning satellite was still down. Fowler, Kerouaille and Dennis had already passed him during his northward excursion. Others were gaining. At his chart table, he made a game of calculating where he might have been if the winds had held, if the boat had hung together, if the world had been different from what it was. He might well have made over two hundred fifty miles a day down in the south fifties. Three weeks of that would have borne him most of the way to Australia. He marked his imaginary daily positions on the chart, the road not taken.

  Studying the positions, he found himself imagining log entries to go with them. The weather had been constant enough throughout the area, the winds consistent, predictable stuff for that time of year at that latitude. All of it, together with the droll gallantries and plagiarized meditations, might have gone into the book he had imagined writing. The book of a stern, steady man, a man for long solitary passages.

  Browne was moved to consider the differences between the man he might pretend to be in a book and the one he actually was. The differences, it suddenly occurred to him, were everything. He might spend his whole life considering them. He sharpened a pencil with a Buck knife and took up a spare notebook:

  “Two hundred and eighty miles today,” he wrote, “in a near gale.” Just to see what it might look like. He could not bring himself to set down the name Nona anymore.

  “I’m in excellent spirits in spite of dark weather, minor injuries and my faulty generator.”

  He could sense his father rejoicing in the discovery of a lie.

  “Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole . . .”

  So the trite, brave anthem, beloved of the old fool. But the night covering Browne’s father had been hell itself, so black that in it he had ceased to be a man at all.

  “I remember the night,” he told the old man. “I remember your drunken screams there. I remember your smiling, unlucky face.”

  He was the captain now. The master of his fate, an inherited rebellion. Somehow he had cut himself with the Buck knife. He washed his wounded hand in the galley sink. The cut was deep. He had to spend nearly an hour dressing it. Later on he found that he had cut a tendon and could not bend the finger at the outermost joint. It was his left index finger.

  He took up a new notebook and sat down again. What more might be in the edifying book? With “Invictus” as its epigraph. Something absurd for ardent children. Onward, upward, away from Dad’s night. He had to admit it might have been good to have won. To have served himself and his country, to have done a decent, simple thing well.

  Carefully, he examined his imagined positions on the chart. All the stories were embroidered, so it was said. Sailors privately ridiculed each other’s accounts. No one had ever brought the truth ashore. It was not to be had.

  The stern, steady man—a man not altogether unlike Browne—who had made the speeds indicated by those fictional positions would experience predictable weather. Above all, Browne thought, he would experience conventional emotions and suitable reflections. The stern, steady man’s log would read like dozens of others and his memoir would imitate the form. Indeed, the man or his publisher might employ a hack to agreeably ornament his narrative.

  But if the man were not in fact so stern and steady—if he were in rebellion and his positions fictional like Browne’s—he would face a few dilemmas. As a game, Browne began to put himself in the position of a man given to subterfuge, a man who might fake his positions all the way around, as he had once humorously imagined doing. A not so stern and steady man who might not sail around the world but say he did.

  It would be necessary to work backward. Instead of determining longitude and latitude by comparing the real and calculated angles of his sightings, he would have to start with the position and extrapolate both angles in the Nautical Almanac. Some very fancy figuring would be involved. It would be an absorbing game and a demanding one, a game of time and space. The perfect entertainment for Absolute Elsewhere. Playing would req
uire some difficult impersonation. He would have to impersonate the individual he had spent his whole life earnestly not becoming.

  It could all be looked at as philosophy, Browne decided—as a question of reality and perception. Everyone had to believe his informing story. Everyone had to endure his own secret. That was survival. Survival made him think fondly of the island he had found. If he could only find an anchorage, he might rest there, in a safe secret harbor.

  53

  STRICKLAND, Hersey and Jean-Marie were guests at the Inn on Steadman’s Island, the only off-season hostelry in the island’s tiny town. Strickland was staying there for propriety’s sake, in a gesture at preserving Anne’s reputation on the Island where she had spent her summers since childhood. Hersey had brought film equipment to accommodate Strickland’s possible notions. Jean-Marie had come along with Hersey. She disclaimed knowledge of ever having been on an island before, playing excessively dumb, to annoy Strickland.

  On arriving, the film makers had been compelled to share the inn with a party of dissolute construction workers who drank, cursed and occasionally subjected Jean-Marie to mild sexual harassment. After the second day, the construction workers had packed up and gone home to Bridgeport. Leaving, they had complained loudly. The vacation housing market was collapsing, they announced. Their employers had been ruined.

  “Degenerates,” Jean-Marie said. “Good riddance.”

  On the third day it rained. Strickland spent part of the morning playing three-handed hearts with the young students. Hersey did accent routines.

  “Zee nine of spades,” he would declare in a portentous gitano quaver, “eet ees zee card of death!” He would repeat the line whenever it struck his fancy. After a while Strickland threw his own hand in.

  “I’m going up to the house.”

  “Should we come along?” Hersey asked.

  “I’ll call you if I want you,” Strickland said.

  Jean-Marie went to the rain-streaked window and looked after him.

  “I wonder if he hits her,” she said.

  Hersey dealt for the two of them. “Hits her? The guy’s in love.”

  “In love?” she repeated. “That coldheart?”

  “He’s a romantic,” Hersey said, “believe me.”

  Jean-Marie turned from the rain.

  “We gonna get paid or what?” she asked her boyfriend. “Because that company is in bankruptcy, that’s what I hear. The boat company.”

  “He’s been taken care of,” Hersey said. “He’ll pay us out of his pocket.”

  “Really?”

  “Anyway, I’d work for him free,” Hersey said. “As long as I could.”

  Jean-Marie stared at him. “Wow!” she said.

  Hersey picked up his hand and examined it. “Once again zee nine of spades,” he wailed. “Zee card of death!”

  At the house, Strickland found Anne in the living room going over Admiralty charts. There was a glass of white wine beside her chair.

  “You’re starting early.”

  “I know it,” she said.

  He came up beside her chair and ran his hand along her cheek and beside her ear, brushing back her hair. She had cut it very short to please him. The clothes she put on when they were together, her lingerie and what she wore to bed were all chosen to suit his taste. When he touched her face, she inclined her head against his hand slightly. The hand had been curled in a three-quarter fist and he relaxed it.

  “I take it he’s still off the air?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind hearing his voice.”

  “Well,” Strickland said, “anyway, they’ll soon have that thing back up.”

  “Avery Point says it’s unlikely all the transponders will be transmitting.”

  “Then,” he said, “we’ll still have our element of mystery. Christ, I hope he wins!” He sat down in a wicker rocking chair, shoved himself fore and aft a few times and got to his feet. “The goddam company goes under and he goes ahead and wins it.”

  Her impatient smile put him on his guard. For a moment he had the sure sense of her slipping away. It had never mattered all that much before. He had always watched women cure themselves of him with the detachment of a philosopher. All things passed.

  “We should film,” he said, pacing.

  “God,” she said, “I dread it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “For God’s sake,” she said. “The home front? Me waiting faithfully? Are you kidding? I don’t know a lot about documentaries, but surely there’s an authenticity problem.”

  “Good point,” Strickland said. “Still, I want more of this island.”

  When the rain stopped, he summoned Hersey and Jean-Marie and they staged some chores for Anne Browne to perform. Some grocery shopping. A visit to the island hardware store.

  The clerk at the hardware store was a grossly overweight man in his forties with a youthful but pustulous face who wore unbuttoned plaid flannel that exposed his belly and T-shirt. He was something of an extrovert and ready for discourse with the camera. When Anne had made her purchase and gone out, he recorded his attitude toward Browne’s voyage.

  “Wouldn’t catch me out there in one of them little boats.”

  “No?” Strickland asked. “Why not?”

  “Hell,” he said with a giggle, “that’s dangerous. Life is sweet.”

  The image of a fat, leprous clerk declaring life sweet seized Strickland’s imagination. Over time it would become a catchphrase for the film makers and they would toss it back and forth incessantly.

  “Hey, life is sweet.”

  Strickland would show the footage in which the clerk uttered it over and over again. Hersey and Jean-Marie took to exchanging glances behind his back. In New York, he showed it to Pamela a number of times. She variously laughed and cried.

  When they were through filming Anne at her workaday tasks, Hersey and Jean-Marie stashed their equipment and went for a walk. Strickland and Anne went back to the house. Anne had another drink.

  “I must have looked loaded,” she said.

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  That night in bed she talked about Owen.

  “He. believes in all those things people used to believe in. Before people were like you. Like us.”

  “Precision bombing,” Strickland suggested as he ran his hands over her. “Surgical strikes. All the good old stuff.”

  Bad cards, he was thinking. I’ll never come through. This bitch has got my brains, my blood.

  “Virtue,” she said. “Navies.”

  Somehow things turned ardent. Afterward, she replaced the amulet around his haggard neck. She kissed him.

  “My sparrow,” she said drunkenly. In the light of the bedside lamp she examined the little carving yet again.

  “It’s so small. How could anyone have carved it without a magnifying glass or something?”

  “They were very mysterious,” he said. Indeed, he thought, it was a wonder, and he would never part with it. The captive’s features, minute but precisely carved in the exuberant, faintly comic Mayan manner, expressed unmistakable agony.

  “I call him the Sufferer,” Anne said. She took it in her fingers.

  “That’s good,” Strickland said. “Who did you decide he was?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “An informer? A voyeur?” He watched her regard the little figure without mercy. “A lying witness?”

  “No,” he said. “A truthful one.”

  54

  SIX HUNDRED YARDS off the south shore of Invisibility, Browne’s depthfinder suddenly gave him a reading of one hundred twenty feet. He had been tentatively edging toward the shore all morning in unusual light air, wondering if he could find a temporary anchorage. Seconds earlier, the bottom had been beyond measure. He brought his bow across the wind, lowered the main and dropped anchor in about ninety feet. When the hook dug in, he payed out scope as she drifted slowly downwind. He imagined a ledge of lava below, an outcropping of the island ahead.
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br />   For the first time since arriving off the island, he had a quick glimpse of sun in a dappled, March-like sky. The showing was over before he could get out his sextant. Off the southern point, the smoky seas were pitching restlessly as though they missed the wind’s authority. Scanning the shore that morning, he had seen glistening in the unaccustomed sunlight what looked like a passage through the volcanic wall. Immediately he had started cautiously toward shore.

  Satisfied for the moment with his anchorage, Browne cast a weather eye on the distant horizon. There were not many signs to watch for. At any time the wind might shift and resume its full force and there would be no warning breeze or change in pressure.

  He got his inflatable Zodiac dinghy out of storage, pumped it up, attached the outboard to its mount and secured it to the stern ladder. For his exploratory trip, he brought along a diver’s face mask, a marlinspike and an antique lead-line with leather depth markings some Campbell progenitor of Anne’s had hauled from Newfoundland.

  It was strange to pull away from his boat and watch her roll at that uneasy anchorage. Her fouled hull and battered rigging aroused no forgiveness in him. He felt glad to be leaving her. Set free.

  He made a zigzag course in, checking for rocks, looking for bottom. Here and there he put out the lead-line; each time it sank taut. Random winds of surprising force blew down from the island, turning the Zodiac’s bow aside, showering him with icy spray. Eventually he made out the channel quite clearly. In the next cove, two sea lions were drawn up on the rocks in what appeared to be astonishment, watching him. He passed swimming penguins that shot through the water like miniature dolphins. Predatory black gulls came out to meet him. There were eyes everywhere. When he drew closer to shore, the sea lions fled.

  The passage in the rock was about forty feet across at the surface. The water, though full of kelp, was amazingly clear and he could see at a glance that there was clearance for his vessel. The channel seemed to widen with depth, as though it had been a cave in the lava, an underwater tunnel with its roof either worn down by the sea or blasted out by men. It would do in any case. He gunned the outboard and motored into the bay he had discovered.