by Robert Stone
The place was plainly a caldera. Around it, the blasted ridges had been worn smooth by time. Over it, beyond the screeching of the skuas and the whine of the outboard, hung an enormous silence. There was snow on the ridge line and dark autumnal vegetation lower down. The surrounding peaks cast deep cold shadows.
He could not resist shouting once. His own voice surprised him but its answering echo made him feel, for a moment, in possession of the place. When the wind rose, it too resounded in the crater and its sound was very strange, music out of stone.
Back aboard Nona, Browne decided to come into the bay under sail, in spite of the perverse winds. The alternative was to tow the boat in with his dinghy on a slack tide—a process that, when he imagined it, made him feel out of control. He hauled up the anchor and set off under a light jib, the dinghy bobbing along behind.
“All right, lady,” he told the boat. He thought Lady would make a good name for her. It would be pronounced in the New York style, with veiled but apparent contempt. I’ll rename her, he thought as the island’s winds rattled in his sail and its walls bore down on him, for my secret purpose, in the book, the film.
The bad winds were merciful and he cleared the passage and dropped anchor in the middle of the crater. He could see rocky bottom forty feet below. Late that evening the obscured glare of the sun disappeared beyond the surrounding ridges and Browne lay down on his rack. Lying at anchor in the bay felt so different from the open sea that he was restless. Boiling an egg for a sandwich, he turned on the single sideband. That night Melbourne would not oblige him. Eventually, on thirty megahertz at the even hour, Whiskey Oscar Oscar reached out, broadcasting the name and call sign of each entry in the race. Browne zeroed in on the top end of the band. Soon he heard the cheerful, Gallic lisp of Patrick Kerouaille.
He had to fiddle to get the reply. He heard: “Zero four hundred Zulu time. Over.” He thought it must be when the satellite system would resume tracking. By Browne’s Rolex, the most expensive thing he owned after his house, it was eleven hours or so until nineteen hundred GMT, “Zulu time.” Thereafter he would be plotted in New York. He lay down to think about it. For some reason, something Ernest Shackleton had said came into his mind. Shackleton had been a boyhood hero of his, a figure of the vanished world he had childishly thought he might inherit, instead of rebellion. Of course the world had changed many times since Shackleton, and even since Browne had read of him in the old books, in the old gatehouse, on winter Sundays.
“A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.”
That night, under cover of the brief darkness, he climbed the mast and removed the transponder before it could reveal his existence and position.
55
THAT WEEKEND Strickland talked her into driving down to Atlantic City in the rain. He claimed to have another project in mind. Fretful, hung over, she went along. She found herself nursing a weak Bloody Mary for nearly an hour while he checked them into Bally’s. A music video played against a giant screen on the crimson back wall of the bar. Cab Calloway in a yellow zoot suit was cakewalking through a dance set that resembled the New York Street in an old movie. The beat was contemporary and relentless.
“What am I doing here?” she asked him. “It’s so ghastly.”
“Consider it a field trip,” he told her.
There was boxing at the hotel that afternoon and he wanted to see one of the fights on the undercard, a bout between two middleweights. He had been following the fortunes of a fighter from Providence called Joey Azzolino, whom he referred to as a guinea psychopath. Azzolino was matched against a Philadelphian named Underhill. After the fight they were going to a party to see some of the people who had been in Under the Life.
The fight took place in a welter of obscene cries, blood and spittle. Half drunk, she found it easier to take than expected.
“You liked it,” he insisted afterward. “You liked seeing those guys whacking away at each other. It got your blood up.”
“Maybe so,” she said. She felt distracted and confused. “I used to fight when I was small. I used to like it.”
Their room was small but clean, commanding a few square miles of serried, rain-dull ocean. The theme was a milky beige, vaguely organic and sensual. Mist raced by outside. In the oversized mirror, she got to inspect herself gross and full of bread, a drink in one hand, a lipstick in the other. The sight gave her a quick vision of her future as a blowsy middle-aged reveler, all booze and beige hotel rooms. A former wife and former mother easing into forlorn, privileged self-indulgence, bloated and shrill. By the bathroom scale, though, her weight was a reassuring hundred twenty-eight. Penalties might be suspended.
When they went out, she was dressed to please him, shorn and tightly encased.
“Like a woman of mine and not some other guy’s,” he said. The voice he said it in was strange. She thought he might be doing an impersonation.
The revelers convened in a cloud-bound apartment in another hotel. The ratty city behind the hotel strip was partly visible below—yellow beer-sign lights, traffic signals, motel flashers. Inside, hundreds of people were jammed together; men and women smelling of oil and leather, blacks and whites in equal numbers. A sound system was blaring James Brown.
They encountered a man called Junior, whom she vaguely remembered from the film.
“I say, my friend,” Junior said to Strickland. “I say, my man Ron.”
He was tall, very dark and round-faced. He began explaining it all to them in a careful sibilant diction.
“What it is,” he explained, “the woman is drawn to the strong. Whatever’s strong draws the woman’s nature, the force is central, you know what I’m sayin’? Be natural like the tide, like the phases of the moon.” He addressed himself to Anne and Strickland in turn.
“The male is substance, the female has the fluid quality. The fluid is sweet, is drawn by substance. The substance stands, the nectar flows. The substance is warm and strong, the tide is of the moon. Be soft, curving, burns by reflected light.”
“Good Lord,” Anne said.
“Woman will always turn from the weak to the strong, be the nature of forces, the way of thangs.” He carefully pronounced the word “thangs” as though to indicate its distinction from things in general. His voice hung just below the baseline of the music in the room.
“Female finds completion in the male, the syrup in the branch, the honey in the rock. So all thangs turn to the light. See what I’m sayin’?”
“I’m so bombed,” she told them. “It’s wasted on me.”
“I’m hip,” Strickland said.
They were separated. Anne found herself talking to a man who claimed to play with Lester Lanin’s orchestra.
“I remember you,” he insisted to her. “It was Scottsdale. Sure it was.”
“I’ve never been there,” she said.
“Sure it was. It was the country club there. I remember your frame, man. I remember your eyes.”
“Why are you calling me ‘man’?” she asked him.
“You were there with your fiancé. You told me, ‘We’ll get in trouble.’”
“Oh gosh,” she said. “A whole life I’ve never lived.”
“Sure it was, sure it was,” the man insisted.
Eventually she found Strickland in conversation with a pale fat man in a tuxedo, who turned a glittering smile on her approach.
“Have a heart,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“To what do we owe the pleasure?” the man in the tuxedo asked her. “What brings you to Jersey? You his project?”
“She’s a f . . friend,” Strickland said. “Not a . . . project.”
“Sort of a friend,” Anne told the man. “An ex-project.”
“An ex-project?” inquired the man. He turned to Strickland. “Is she kidding?”
“I never know,” Strickland told him.
56
DURING THE NIGHT there was a single hour when the sky cleared and the southern st
ars appeared to him in their cold alien courses. Scorpio was entirely visible beside the Southern Cross so he tried getting a fix on Antares. He kept losing it and finding it again. Each tremor of the shoulder set him wandering among the constellations. Eventually he brought the right star to the horizon. As a young man, he had been good at celestial navigation; he had known the names and aspects of more stars than anyone.
Without much confidence, Browne calculated his position at approximately forty-nine degrees south, nineteen degrees east. Neither the Admiralty nor the Hydrographic Office charts showed an island there.
When it was light, he had some juice for breakfast and sat down at his navigation table. Taking his night’s sighting as a starting point, he awarded himself thirty knot winds and an average speed of a little over nine knots. At that rate he would make around two hundred fifty miles a day, seventeen hundred fifty miles a week.
Marking the next day’s false position filled him with dread. It seemed to matter less that it was false than that it marked time unlived. After that he found the work quite easy. Once he had picked a mark to represent dead reckoning, he worked out a calculated sextant angle in the almanac together with a true one. A false true one. Then he entered the figures and plotted an intercept and a line of position. It was agreeable to work at anchorage, seated at a steady table.
It took him all day to work out a week’s worth of positions. Logging them, he realized that he would have to invent weather for each position, and not only weather but little incidents to accompany the entries. Wraparounds and broken poles, parted stays and chafed halyards, reefs, sheared bolts and jammed winches. And of course there would have to be suitable reflections—not the freakish notions that haunted unsound minds but helpful and healthful insights to inspire happy strivers everywhere. He would be fashioning a counterworld in which to locate his improved self. At the same time he would have to live secretly in the actual world as the man he had become.
Browne surprised himself—not only with the ease with which he worked out false angles and positions but at the fluency with which he was able to invent convincing details for the imaginary future days he was constructing. It was much easier than attempting to record even the roughest outline of truth. He felt as though he had happened on a principle of existence. He became more and more elated. With a swift and lively imaginary week’s sailing behind him, he felt a sudden urge to take command of the new island. There were still a few hours before nineteen hundred Zulu. He put on his arctic foul-weather gear and went out on deck.
The sun was thirty degrees above the ridge line, in an edge of clear blue. A massed bank of bitter black clouds had occupied most of the sky. The wind was variable, alternately icy and mild. He took his camera, a marlinspike and the dive mask, climbed into the dinghy and cast off.
He stepped ashore on a shingle of flint that shifted beneath his boots. Not far away, on the ocean side of the island, he could hear great waves crashing and the hiss and rattle of their retreat over stones. The unsteady wind carried a chaos of birds and a chicken-coop stink. He trudged on over the flint, sliding and stumbling toward firmer ground. The disc of the sun glared on the water and the peaks of ice. Browne put his sunglasses on.
It was hard humping to the ocean side, over a quarter-mile spine of delicate, razor-sharp black lava that was riddled with fissures, hollows and fossilized bubbles. The rocks looked to Browne like a mold from hell, a maelstrom frozen at a stroke. The going was dangerous. Once he fell and cut his hands.
The nearer sand on the ocean shore was black and soft as dust and he sank sometimes to the ankles. Advancing toward the breakers, he at first felt a sense of liberation. Thalassa, he was thinking, repeating the whispered word as he labored over the beach. When he was nearer, the murderous force of the great waves was plain. They threw themselves against the stones with much brutality, seeming to double their strength after cresting and accelerate on the final roll. You had only to watch their coming in to feel the dizzying, suffocating force they contained. Each breaker cast up a thin cloud of debris, so that going closer to the water, Browne felt not only icy spindrift on his face but pebble shards and dirt that soiled his eyes. It made him remember that he was not one of the Ten Thousand and that the ocean was his prison and not the road home. The sight of it made him sick so he stretched out and retched on the sand.
Lying there, he became aware of the birds. It was the smell of them, he thought, that had made him sick and not the ocean. There were thousands, right at the edge of the soft sand on which he lay. They had black button eyes and yellow crests through which the sun and the spray made rainbows. He stood up and walked over the sand toward them.
Penguins surrounded him like wheat. The ground was slippery with kelp and guano and the landscape stank to heaven. The crowd of penguins gave way to make a path for him. Their clucking calls filled his ears, echoing off the rocks until they made a silence. It was a droll scene, he thought, the Protestant formality of the birds on their icy stone island with a black sky overhead. But the sun’s upper limb shone from an edge of sky as though reflected in an index glass. Everything is measurement, Browne thought, everything I see. The sun’s rays lit the penguins’ crests to a thousand colors.
Ahead of him, along the penguin shore, were white shapes in the sun’s glare. Ice, he thought at first. Coming closer, he saw that the white shapes were not ice. What they might be confounded him. At first they seemed meaningless and without form; closer up, they assumed a geometry with which he was somehow vaguely familiar. For a moment his attention was distracted by the sight of a young penguin besieged by skuas. The penguin was alone within a circle of disaster ten feet in diameter. No other bird came nearer. It was eyeless although it stretched its neck and strained to face the sky. One leathery flipper was raised in comic rage at things. The other hung bloody and truncated at its side. Overhead, skua gulls were wheeling. Every minute or so, a skua would descend screaming from the wheel to tear flesh from the dying bird. Browne stopped for a while to watch, then turned away and put the back of his arm across his eyes to protect them from the glare. I want a missionary woman now, Browne thought, to make a story out of this. Mother Carey tending her chickens, God’s sparrows falling aslant his gaze. Creatures for sacred inscrutable reasons denied flight are brought piecemeal into the sky as meat.
The white shapes, Browne saw presently, were the bleached bones of whales. Hundreds of bones were strewn along the beach just beyond the rollers. Penguins wandered among them like the citizens of a town. He walked faster, bracing for balance with his marlinspike.
There were fin bones like skeletal wings, head-high pelvic bones and mandibles full of peg teeth the size of fists. Cages of five-foot ribs were piled like the tiers of a stylized prison to a height beyond reach. The field of bones stretched to the end of the cove, a mile in the distance. They were clean and dry. Their contours were natural and pleasurable. At first Browne was shocked, as though he had stumbled on some kind of sordidness or scandal. But the beauty of the scene, the order and grammar of the bones, put his mind at rest.
He walked patiently around the next point and saw what appeared to be black towers rising from the beach. The towers proved to be huge vats raised on three metal legs. The rocks here and the scattered bones were all burned black as though by fire. It seemed that the cauldrons had burned out of control.
A few hundred yards from the shore was a black metal shed. Browne went closer and saw that it was covered with graffiti. He stopped and stared uncomprehending at the shed’s walls, unable to assign any meaning to the scrawled words.
ONIONHEAD. HOBB. TREMAGISTER. SEVEN SPIRITS.
There was a trident and the tricolor flag of some nation which Browne, who knew his flags, failed to recognize. There were semaphore characters, together with drawings of genitals and odd smiling faces.
One of the island’s freak winds came up and rattled the metal roof of the building and played one curving wall to the tone of a musical saw. He was aware of darting fig
ures on the ground. Rats, he thought at first, seeing a gray-brown blur. But when he had a closer look he saw that the creatures were not rats but small flightless birds that looked like plucked penguins. He thought they were called rails.
There was a stick covered with flaking white paint on the ground and he picked it up. He wanted to write something on the wall, to leave something there. The paint on the stick was long dry and there was nothing to write with. Be true to the dreams of your youth, he thought. He traced that, word by word, on the black wall with his white stick, although it left no mark at all.
BE TRUE TO THE DREAMS OF YOUR YOUTH.
Inside the shed, the droning of the wind in the metal frame was deafening. The pitted metal floor was burned black too. An empty bottle of Australian brandy stood in one corner.
When he went out of the shed, he noticed another structure he had not seen before. It was a square house of two stories, tucked out of the wind’s reach behind a hill. Beside the house was a fenced-in area that might have been a dog pen or, in some other place, a garden. The protecting hill was unnaturally round and grown with tough yellow grass. He walked toward the house, up stony, invisibly slanting ground. At close regard, it appeared to be made of wood that had seared to the color and consistency of charcoal but somehow remained upright.
The house’s entrance faced the lagoon in which he had anchored. There was a charred porch that somehow supported his weight. The door was missing and he was just about to pass inside when a flourish, a bright flash like a banner, caught his eye. Looking toward the ocean, he saw a languid curve of colored cloth. The wind had a bright silk dress, gusts filled it like a sail and gave the appearance of flesh. Then he realized he was seeing a woman there. When it disappeared, he could almost remember a face, a frowning blue-eyed look.