by Ellen Datlow
Something in the air, maybe. Something in the water.
He loved seeing it unfold in the world. It was a beautiful time to be alive. But it wasn’t his arena anymore. He couldn’t compete with that. Go big or go home? He was home. He just had no idea what to do next.
“So you launch your own line of boards. Or gear. Or both,” Gail said. “Or you open up the Danny Yukimura School of Surfing, and turn into one of those cute old guys with the long white hair and wispy beard, but still a badass, and wait for people to come to you. Because they will.”
He wanted to believe. She made it easy to believe.
Even if he still ached for more, and had no idea what it was.
Before the dawn, even before coffee, they made their way along the stairs that zigzagged down a cleft in the land from cliff top to sea level. The wooden steps were perpetually damp, even in summer, crowded over by trees so that the sun never reached them.
They nearly always had the shore to themselves when beach walking this early, sharing it with at most a neighbor from above, out with a dog and a stick.
He knew of no place where dawn was more different from dusk than here, with the sun on the other side of the continent behind a two hundred-foot wall of rock and earth. Here, dawns were gradual and gray, a time of mist and fog. This morning the wind was up, sending ribbons of fine, dry sand skimming over the damp-packed plains of the beach. The surf rolled and pounded behind a veil, as if the sand were of one world and the water of another, and every sunrise it took the proper spell to bring them back together.
They wouldn’t be going home empty-handed. They never did. The only variable was what Gail would find, and how long it would take after she shucked his hand and went on the hunt.
He’d never met anyone more suited to spend her life seaside. Not merely to live here, but thrive. She smelled of the sea, tasted of it. Even the ocean knew its own. The sea had recognized this about her as soon as Gail arrived for good, a couple years before they’d met.
She had grown up Midwestern, landlocked in every direction, but the farthest shores had always called her, from as early a time as she could remember. A week after her eighteenth birthday she made the 1500-mile trek west, one-way this time. A week after that, one morning’s beach walk set her up for years, when she came upon what appeared to be a peculiar yellowish rock, stonelike yet waxy, embedded in the sand.
Right away, she’d known it for what it really was: ambergris, a solidified lump of secretions from the belly of a sperm whale, nearly three pounds of it. No substance on earth was more prized by the makers of perfume, especially in France. It was illegal to sell in the States, though, so one impromptu trip to Canada later, she returned three pounds lighter, $140,000 heavier, and after making the down payment on the cottage, had hardly left the ocean’s side ever since.
Such a find had to be more than dumb luck. Gail had taken it not merely as a welcome, but as a blessing. You’re where you belong now. This is your home. It’s always been your home. You just had to find your way back.
The sea never stopped giving to her. Danny had never seen anything like it, the sheer reliability of it. Some days the swells didn’t want to be surfed, and you had to accept that. But Gail and her walks along the shore, harvesting the ocean’s castoffs? She always came back with something, and the desire to see what she could make of it. Send her out beachcombing with ten other people, and there was a good chance she’d come back with more treasure than everyone else combined. He imagined salt-encrusted nymphs out in the surf, working on her behalf: Look alive, mateys, it’s her again! Heave to!
This morning, the farther north they walked, the lighter the dawn became, as ahead of them, Neptune’s Throne took shape out of the gray haze.
Neptune’s Throne was all he’d ever heard anyone call it. It was an observation platform for surfers to watch the incoming, but whoever had built it hadn’t made it particularly convenient. It was four solid tree trunk pillars driven deep into the sand, braced with crossbeams and supporting a planked deck just above head height. No steps. If you wanted to clamber onto it, you had to have either the upper body strength to pull yourself up, or friends to push you from below.
It had a back, like a gargantuan chair—a windbreak, he assumed, blocking what the cliffs didn’t—two of the trunks joined above the platform with an X, which in turn supported a row of ragged planks that were shortest on the outside and rose to an imperial peak in the middle.
The deck was usually thatched, and at first glance the bristly edges gave it the look of something that belonged somewhere tropical. Kimo recalled more of Hawaii than he did, and said the thing reminded him of rough-hewn structures he’d seen in places tourists didn’t get to: burial platforms, and shrines where fishermen laid offerings to the gods of the sea before heading out, or after rowing back in with their catch.
Keep looking at it, though, and the tropical impression faded, darkened. Danny wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the way the two front trunks topped out with the flared stumps of long-gone limbs as thick as the trunks themselves. Neither appeared shaped by hand, only weathered, yet each had the look of a skull that faced the sea, like the bones of a pair of malformed whales.
Who had first built the thing, and when—questions no one could answer. If their neighbor Felicia was to be believed, Neptune’s Throne was older than he was, and her as well. Felicia had lived atop the cliff for fifty years, and claimed the structure was there when she and her husband moved in. Claimed, as well, she’d seen a photo dated decades earlier, from the time of the Great Depression, and it was standing then, too. Meaning none of today’s throne could have been the original wood—it was too well maintained to have withstood over eighty years of weathering. But in the years he and Gail had been dividing their time between here and Santa Monica, he’d never seen anyone repair it … only use it.
When they passed by, Gail patted one of the gray-weathered anchor posts as if it were the leg of a friendly elephant. He lingered, fingertips tracing the little holes along the wood. He knew what they were now, but wasn’t pleased about that, as if there were a chance he could probe far enough inside to find a tangle of worms that had learned how to live outside the sea.
In their present direction, north, they were nearing their terminus, where a point of land fit for a lighthouse curved around from the right and speared out into the waves. At the base of the wall ran a stream fed by tributaries that trickled down the hillsides, then joined and cut ever-changing channels in the sand before emptying into the sea.
It was here she found it, a still-wet chunk of driftwood the size of a truncated log, mired in the sand of a delta that might not be there tomorrow morning, erased by the tide and recut somewhere else.
Gail knelt. She scraped off sand and picked away rags of seaweed. “You want to do the honors, my strong guy?”
Danny wrestled it free of the beach’s hold and stood it on end. It was lighter than it looked, would be lighter still after it dried. Regardless, he didn’t relish the thought of lugging it two hundred feet up slick wooden stairs.
“Wow,” she said after she’d had a longer look. “If I didn’t know better, and maybe I don’t, I’d say this was something that had already been carved.”
They traded places, Gail holding it up while he stepped back for a view. She was right. It had a suggestion of form—human, or maybe he was biased that way. Still, working with the contours and curves of what remained, he could discern legs, pressed together and thickening into hips. A waist and sloping shoulders. A head. It would be unrecognizable without a head.
“The figurehead off a ship’s prow, maybe?” He recalled yesterday’s yacht, being gnawed to slivers on the ocean floor. Maybe not that boat in particular; a stray chunk of someone else’s bad luck. The ocean was forever digesting the remains of bad luck and coughing up the pieces.
“A lot of figureheads were big-breasted women. Traditionally speaking.” Beside it, Gail went ramrod-straight and perked up her chest, comparing
. “If I squint just right, I can make out a couple of boobs.” She looked him in the eye, squinty. “And if you say, ‘But what about the wood,’ I will murder you in your sleep.”
She had him call heads or tails, then they took their places at either end and began to shuffle the thing home.
Two days later she found another one washed up half a mile to the south, longer by a few inches, but shaped almost identically. Two half-rotted figureheads on the same beach at the same time? Not likely. By now he was leaning toward dismissing it as a case of pareidolia, the tendency to see ships in clouds, the man in the moon, and Jesus on a burnt tortilla. Or making a face out of two holes, a bump, and a line.
Even so, lugging them home felt like carrying corpses, complete with grave worms. The sodden outer wood sloughed and squished in his uncertain grip. Halfway up the cliff with the second one, his fingers broke through as if piercing a crust, and pulped an embedded shipworm as thick as a sausage. He nearly dropped the log and went down with it. The stairs were damp underfoot and slick with wet flora—treacherous for carrying this kind of load.
When Gail found the third one a few days later, he had no idea what to make of it. If pareidolia was simple pattern recognition, okay then, what sort of pattern was this? On the surface it seemed the same old relationship Gail had always had with the sea and the generosity of its tides. But it had never given her the same exact thing time after time. If it was going to do that, why not be really generous, and keep lobbing more lumps of ambergris at her.
She first left her finds outside on heavy racks to dry in the July sun, turning them every few hours like hot dogs on a grill. Then she moved them into her workshop, lined against one wall, standing in a row.
They’d turned pale now that they were dry, bleached by the elements and time. With the muck wiped off and the water-bloat gone, finer details emerged. The pieces all tapered and thickened the same way, with dual concavities that suggested eyes, and a nub that suggested a nose, and a crack against the grain for a mouth. They were just humanoid enough that Danny didn’t like turning his back on them, as if they were shells that would break open and release some worse form gestating inside.
“Gotta be a simple explanation,” Kimo told him on the boat while out on another freediving trip. “Maybe they’re something that fell off a cargo ship, some shipment of carvings that weren’t very good to begin with. Or there’s some asshole out here who lives on a boat, thinks he’s an artist, and dumps his mistakes overboard when nothing turns out the way he wants. Whatever they were, now that they’re washing up, they look that much worse.”
“Incompetent artists,” Danny said. “Really. That’s your explanation.”
“If you had a better one, you wouldn’t have asked me what I thought.”
Point taken. But the wobble in this theory was that nothing about any of these pieces appeared to have been carved. Danny had looked, and closely. No evidence of chisels, rasps, scrapers, drawknives. They showed no obvious signs of hand-tooling at all. Even the ends looked broken, not sawed. What was the likelihood that someone who couldn’t turn out a carving that looked more than vaguely human was, nevertheless, skilled enough to keep everything smooth, free of facets?
“Erosion. Wear,” Kimo said. “You ever see a jagged stone in a riverbed? Not me. Pick any rock, you don’t know how it looked when it went in. You’re just getting what’s left.”
And when Gail found another—number four, but who was counting?—Danny wasn’t even surprised. Well, yes, he was. Not by the find, but by the irritation he felt at the news. How many of these things did she need, anyway? Just because they washed up, did that obligate her to accept every single one, bring them all home?
It wasn’t like him to be resentful. But analyze it anyway. Things hadn’t merely come easily for Gail. They came effortlessly. The ocean gave and never ran out. All she had to do was show up and take possession.
He’d been lucky to be able to make a decent living doing something he loved. But it had never come easily. It had taken thousands of hours of wave time to hone his skills. It had taken near-drownings, lacerations from coral, jellyfish stings, reef rash, a staph infection, various sprains, two separate concussions when the board smacked him in the head … and that was before factoring in every competitor on the tours breathing down his neck, eager to take his ranking and sponsorships for themselves.
Worst of all, it was life with an expiration date. He couldn’t keep doing it forever, and he was nearly there. He could feel the downward pull as surely as he felt it during a dive, after entering the Doorway to the Deep.
Gail, though, went on as ever, bringing up trinkets as though she were being wooed by the sea. The same sea that she claimed to love, but wouldn’t go out on, not even with him.
As she began to spend more hours in her workshop than ever, he wondered if it was karmic payback. If this was what it had been like for her over two decades, forced to share him with a passion that consumed him, sent him around the world to wherever the waves were at their biggest and baddest: from Mavericks to Waimea Bay, from Tavarua to Padang Padang. Maybe that was the part that hadn’t come easily for her.
But by the time the fifth one turned up, even Gail seemed past taking any joy in it. Something about this was not right. It had never been quite right.
“This feels like a cat sometimes, bringing you its kills,” she confessed in the workshop one evening. At the bank of windows, the sun dropped boiling red into the cauldron of the sea. “It loves you. But it’s love on a whole different wavelength.”
He had no idea what to say to that. Along the north wall, the carvings seemed to be daring him to try. He was beginning to hate them. Whatever secret they knew, they weren’t telling.
At the center of the shop, a rectangular worktable, as stout and sturdy as a stage, held half a dozen pieces of driftwood in various stages of transformation—sculptures and a bonsai planter—none of which had progressed in three days. All Gail did now was come out and sit with them, seemingly stymied by the new arrivals that were piling up. As if they’d come to tell her that her work was at an end.
Her methods hadn’t changed in all the time he’d loved her, across nineteen years of being together, seventeen of marriage. Each piece of driftwood she harvested merited its own staring context, a still, silent interrogation during which she divined what it wanted to be, needed to be, in its new and resurrected life.
But these? These unblinking humanoids? Gail was treating them as if they were complete already, in no need of refinement. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Like her, they were home.
“You know, we’ve done the seaside thing for more than half our lives,” he said. “If I’ll be retiring soon anyway, maybe we should give mountains a try.”
She almost laughed. “Lie awake at night listening for elk? I don’t know if that would work or not.”
She turned at the window and faced the rolling waters. He followed her gaze in case there was something to see, but if there was, only Gail could see it.
“Did you ever hear about the 52-Hertz Whale?” she said.
He hadn’t.
“It’s the saddest thing ever. Researchers have been picking it up on hydrophones for years. It’s only ever been heard, never seen.” She was still facing the window, as if telling the ocean, and he was just around to eavesdrop. “This whale, this one single whale, that sings at a higher frequency than all the others. Fifty-two Hertz. All the usual suspects—blue whales, fin whales, like that—they’re down around fifteen or twenty or thirty. So nobody even knows what kind of whale this is. All they know is that it just keeps roaming the Pacific, calling out, singing its song, and nothing else is answering.”
She turned her back to the window, facing him again.
“Better keep your mountains. I don’t think I could handle that with an elk. They’ll come right up in your front yard.”
He left her to it—all of it, the worm-eaten pieces of wood and the stalled magic she wielded over th
em—and traded the workshop for twilight. Out here on the grass, the fifth refugee carving remained wedged in its drying rack. Horizontal, it looked helpless. As he stepped closer, Danny wondered how she would react if he dragged it toward the setting sun and threw it off the cliff.
He hadn’t given this one a second look since it was cleaned off, and mostly dry. What would’ve been the point? They were all the same, more or less.
Except this one … wasn’t.
He dared to touch it, to run his hand over what had been obscured before, and was still barely visible: a faint impression scored around it, near the bottom end, like the groove on a finger after taking off a wedding ring, tattooed with a trace of rust.
No way, he thought. This whole time, assuming these had started out as ordinary logs, when they were nothing of the sort. No way.
The great thing about Kimo was that there was almost nothing he wouldn’t drop at a moment’s notice to take his boat out. He’d saved the GPS coordinates of the sunken yacht, so even after three weeks it was easy to find again. Once Danny was in the water, Kimo waved the coil of rope before tossing it over the side.
“I’m giving you a longer leash, so leave it on. If you touch the lanyard this time I’m going to break your arm.”
“Yes, Mom.” Danny huffed wind to saturate himself, filled up, locked it in, then ducked and plunged.
By now he’d traded his frogman flippers for a monofin. Kimo called it his mermaid ass. It fit over both feet and forced his legs to move together, scything the water like a whale’s flukes to turbocharge each kick. It made the hardest part of the dive easier, if no faster; he could equalize the pressure in his head only so quickly. But it took less energy to power downward, dolphin-kicking, and to maneuver around once he got below neutral buoyancy, and that was what mattered.
Seventy-six feet down, the wreck waited in the hushed indigo haze, still tipped onto its starboard side with its mast jutting down into the ooze. And if the boat still unnerved him, helpless, disintegrating in a grave of silt and mud, it was at least familiar now. He knew it was pointless to check the prow for a figurehead but felt compelled to do it anyway, and of course there was no evidence of one ever having been there.