Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (7 page)

              “It was the rat,” he snarled. “Check to see if the boats are operational.” They were all set with traps, as he well knew. At that point, a sailor announced, “We’re taking on water, we’re sinking.” The sky immediately was lit up by Louis’s Very lights.

              “I’ve never seen anything like this in thirty years at sea,” the captain confessed, as laconically as stupefied. He had realized nothing.

              “It was a plot,” John assured him. “A plot by a very powerful group, Cliff.”

* * *

Louis Marcé knew nothing about sailing. He was up the creek without a paddle. But as the storm took shape, he realized that he had to point the bow at the waves. The waves quickly reached more than fifteen meters of pitch black, as if the ocean wanted to shake the unwelcome parasite off its fine, shallow skin. When they advanced, they looked like a concrete wall, the ultimate compacting machine. It was death without the comforting hand of a friendly soul. How the boat rose above them was inexplicable.

              One could say that, compared to the storm of magma that Theia’s first passage brought forth from the Earth’s entrails, making it split, spitting part of it into space and giving birth to the Moon, this was no more than the sea gargling. Even confronted with watery mass’s surge during the tidal wave that swept through Lisbon’s lowlands in 1755, this would be a tempest in a teacup. But it is well known that the only difference between a grain of sand and the highest mountain range is the dosage of the mountain and, in its own scale, that grain has enough mountains doses to bury you.

              For a simple man’s size, that shock was, yes, the promised return of Theia, threatening to drown him with no time for last words and without the sky gaining a new moon out of it. As Lucas realized the lifeboat actually floated, his terror became mixed with traces of pleasure. He was confronting the elements. The ocean was testing Lucas without his having to make the ocean bleed. It had come dressed as a behemoth at the bottom of the sea, a silent behemoth, a stray wolf that can be overcome without the pack perishing so it can test other men in the future, until either men or the ocean are done in. After the first half hour, Lucas was convinced he had been born for this. Sailing in an eternal struggle against the great lake. Each angry wave was an adversary and the rain and cold were music for his face and his hands, again with blue fingers, but blue from the coldness of freedom. He’d always liked the cold and had never been a sweet sugar person who would dissolve in water.

              Lucas had passed his life between close walls and only now realized nature’s amplitude. Freedom was not moving from this to another cell in the large prison that was Lisbon. To visit one or another prisoner who saw himself as free and to choose a lunch menu, a gift for your girlfriend or a movie in the evening. Freedom was the space with no horizon. A night in the sky’s darkness and another night in the darkness of the sea.

              He needed to turn on the G.P.S. and the compass, since he knew neither where he was nor where he was going. Not that it made a big difference at that point, but he couldn’t even think about turning his back on the waves. He took the instrument from underneath the oilcloth still covering part of the boat. It was simple and intuitive. It found him in the sea and showed him the continents; he was heading straight to the State of Virginia in the United States. Unexpectedly, between the Atlantic rain and the liquid desert, he saw another boat being offered up to the sky by the fist of a wave in front of him. His heart raced—a boat from the collier.

Chapter 7

Death in the Storm

They must not have seen him as they were focused on the waves. He had the upper hand. How many lifeboats could be nearby? He thought there should live inside himself, hidden, old corsairs or maybe he was under the influence from the book he’d read, since he felt attracted to the boat that preceded him.
In ten minutes, it’s either me or you.
He opened his backpack and took out a pistol. It was loaded. He looked back to make sure he wasn’t being pursued by other lifeboats. He wasn’t. When the enemy lifeboat reappeared after another wave, it was presented to him obliquely and apparently without a motor. The boat was in trouble. Lucas accelerated, not knowing if he’d been seen. A wave moved between them. Suddenly, a Very light illuminated the sky. It was coming at an angle from the boat, but passed about twenty meters above him.
They’re calling the pack,
he thought. Another Very light, in his direction, like a tracer, parallel to the water.

              He took two flares and shot them in his opponent’s direction. The response was given. The prey was in his sights when Lucas bested the next wave. The boat was totally by his side, full of water, and the crew—a grandmother, a woman, and two drenched children—were holding onto one another, waiting either for him or for death. They were neither Cliff Burton Richard nor John nor their ilk. They were common people, offered by destiny to be drowned. He was frightened. More than when he saw the liquid compactor smashing into his boat, more than when the captain Cliff ordered the women’s bathrooms opened, exposing his refuge, more than when his mother appeared before him, livid in his doorway with the police behind her.

              The boat reappeared and the women waved and shouted. One tossed a rope that he grasped firmly, but the force of the sea tore it from his hands as if he were a tender child. They screamed something, pointing to his boat and he realized that the rope had to be tied off. The two lifeboats banged together and remained side by side to the sea that, predictably, poured tons of salt water in them. He stretched out and grabbed a child. She must have not been more than nine or ten years old. And then another, very blonde and maybe thirteen. And then the elderly woman, thin, stiff, with no sign of giving up. It was all very quick, as the next wave prepared itself to write the end of this paragraph. He still tried to grab the last woman, but in a hysteriform gesture, she refused his hand and retreated to the lifeboat that was sinking. She was committing suicide.

              Lucas had to untie the rope or they would all die together, but the knot he’d made was not a sailor’s knot and could not be easily untied. There is a pact of the devil between incompetence and death in the sea. The woman remaining on the other side undid her knot in one quick movement. What luck. The boat freed itself in time to take the behemoth’s chest straight on and, once again, overcome it. When the wave passed, the women’s small lifeboat was some eighty meters distant and had overturned. There was no law of physics to explain that distance. He took a risk. Lucas turned his back to the waves and moved back, accelerating the motor for all it was worth. Sideways to the waves never, that would mean certain death. Then he turned the boat aslant to ocean chops, toward the wrecked wherry. A desperate woman and an exhausted man grabbed the side. He threw them a buoy, and they entered the boat one at a time.

              The man, an American, had a deathly pallor, a widespread fatal cancer, and was passionate about the sea. His wife, daughters, and mother had offered him a last ocean voyage. The suffering mariner would die at peace in the Atlantic. They hadn’t counted on the storm that did their sailboat in. The two adult women, with the help of the older child, put the lifeboat in order. The collier’s boat was five stars, had the resistance of a rhinoceros and, after bailing it out, recovered its gazelle-like agility.

              When the tempest appeared to lessen, the little girl pointed toward the horizon and asked what that was. They turned around and saw two heavy rescue helicopters over the area where the collier was supposedly at risk of sinking. They were illuminating the water with powerful spotlights. But instead of picking up the sailors, the helicopters fired two missiles each and annihilated the ship. They remained in a muted paralysis for a brief moment. The helicopters now were flying in circles over the sea, firing a heavy machine gun here and there, probably at the shipwrecked crew’s lifeboats. When the airships came near them, they tuned off the motor and hid beneath the oilcloth. Without propulsion, the boat adorned the waves, a little tamer, and transformed itself into another drifting pool. The Americans prayed, holding hands, including him in the circle of fear and hope. At some point they no longer heard the helicopters, confirmed that they’d disappeared and then poured all of the water out of the boat.

              In the following hours, the storm abated, and then ended. Only the rain continued, despite being sparser. Both the man lying in the bottom of the boat and the women knew well that Louis understood nothing about the sea. They didn’t ask him anything with their voices but wanted to know everything with their looks. He explained to them that he was European and was fleeing the Lisbon police. He knew that all criminals said the same thing, but he really was innocent. He had stowed away on the collier and witnessed a crime that put his life at risk and, for that reason, he’d fled in the boat.

              The woman only said to him, “You don’t look like a criminal to me.”

              Her husband’s breathing slowed down. He’d lost his deathly air. Calm, he looked at this family together and safe. He was ready to leave this life and died three hours later. His family hugged him for a long time, rocking him with the sway of the boat. His daughters, blonde like angels, cried quietly, holding hands, and his mother was almost smiling between her tears that the rain swept to the sea. His wife’s expression exhaled the peaceful tranquility of a mission accomplished. They wrapped him in a blanket and the grandmother sang a child’s lullaby he did not know but which was simply so beautiful that Louis would never forget it. They then offered his body to the deep, taking care so the druids of the depths, friends of the travelers that the song convoked, would look after him and give him peace.
He has found peace,
Louis thought.

              Daylight brought calm, with neither breeze nor rain. Still seas. The ocean had the same water and the same salt, but the behemoth had gone to other parts.

              Louis entered the United States protected by the family that he’d saved. He stayed in their home, near the coast. The girls adored him, and he learned a lot of English from them during the hours he spent dedicated to that language. Secretly, he studied Québécois French because of his adoptive birthplace. The American mother knew that, being a fugitive from the police, Louis would only stay in their home temporarily, but she was determined that he would decide when to leave and, until that day arrived, the young man would be treated like part of the family. It was also obvious that it would be better for him if she did not know details about his future plans. During the first few days, Louis avoided contact with other people and dedicated himself to small maintenance jobs in the yard and the house, cutting the grass, trimming trees, painting, unclogging pipes, and so on. The few times he went out, walking in the streets lined with trees, landscaped yards and children running in bands, observing that the houses’ doors were closed only with a latch, he felt a peace and a renewed sense of security. Everything was spacious and green. The houses were made of or covered in wood, like boats. There were no buildings. Americans seemed to live in boats run aground decades ago.

              In that small city, most people professed being Christians in a very different way than he’d seen in Europe. They integrated their beliefs into their day-to-day living and it was not, for them, something of a private matter, almost intimate, testified to publicly once a week in a ritual celebration in closed circles that did not communicate with the community’s life flow. It was the opposite, making up part of their global existence. Not only did they not show the least inhibition about saying they were Christians that is so common on the eastern margins of the Atlantic, but they were spontaneous and extroverted in their feelings. On his second Sunday, the mother asked him if he was Catholic, to which Louis answered “yes.” The American mother surprised him by saying, “That’s just as well because the Catholic church isn’t far from the Lutheran church, and we can drop you off on our way and pick you up on our way home. Remember that you are the son of our European friends and that you came on a trip to America.” Louis never went to mass in Portugal, but there he had difficulty in refusing the suggestion. When he arrived at the church, two lay families who were receiving worshipers at the door greeted him warmly and, since they didn’t know him, asked him his name and what had brought him to their city. Afterwards, they wanted to know if he’d liked the ceremony and the choir, explaining that they were proud because their two children sang in it. When the American mother stopped to give him a ride, she chatted with the Catholic woman for some time, smiling and telling how she and her late husband had been helped by Louis’s parents during a trip to Europe. Later, someone from the Lutheran Church called, offering Louis Marcé a job, but he declined, since he planned on going on to Montreal.

              Louis found it odd that in this place religious sentiments were expressed candidly in the light of day, without any special reservations. It was a type of tolerance different from what he’d known on the old continent, more innocent and more open. Perhaps freedom of religion implied that normality, he thought, and not just not being persecuted or discriminated against. In Lisbon, freedom was the law, but here freedom was in the streets. A few days later, he was invited to participate in a fundraising campaign organized by the Catholic and Episcopalian churches, but decided not to go. However, some neighbors, seeing that Louis was good at painting and carpentry, proposed a simple task to him—building a storage shed and a tree house for their children. Saying no to everything was increasingly difficult, so he accepted. Within a week, he had finished the storage shed and was putting the last touches on the tree house, to which he decided to give an Iberian flair, painting it white with a red roof to the great delight of the neighbor’s children. He had the sensation of wanting to forget that he was leaving for Montreal sooner or later. The possibility of staying a long time near the coast grew in his soul, but then he began to have nightmares again and the old pain in his left arm returned. He was in a boat, alone, stalled in the midst of a storm. In the water, three mermaids surfaced, carrying offerings in small chests—one said gold, another rhodium and the third iridium. When he was about to open them, the sea-cock in the bottom of his boat was opened and he was immersed, awakening shocked and covered in sweat. A few days later, he had a fever, the pain in his left arm worsened and his shoulder swelled.

              “We’ve got to take you to a doctor or a physician’s assistant,” the girls’ mother told him.

              The man saw him and conferred with a doctor on the phone. He was not a doctor himself, but the Americans trusted him. He prescribed an anti-inflammatory and an x-ray. Lucas took the x-ray that came with an incomprehensible report, saying
increased osseous density with no certain signs of osteopetrosis. Idiopathic variant of elevated bone mass? Foreign object near periosteum of the proximal humeral metaphysis, to the left, of mixed density, predominantly metallic. Edema of soft tissue, surrounding the deltoid, without images compatible with abscess or osteomyelitis.

              “What does that mean?” Louis asked.

              “You have very hard bones and a foreign object in your shoulder,” the physician’s assistant explained.

              “Foreign in what way?” Louis wanted to know.

              “It was not produced by your organism,” the health professional clarified.

              “How did it get there?” Louis asked.

              “You tell me,” retorted the physician assistant. “Have you had a recent accident in an electronics factory? It looks like an electronic device.”

              “Could it have been something I ate?”

              “No,” laughed the physician assistant. “Have you had a problem with the police?”

              “No. Can you take it out?”

              “Well, that’s something for the doctors, but try to remember anything, an accident, trauma. The report shows no associated infection, but the doctor told me to give you this antibiotic as a precaution. He can see you tomorrow. Take the x-ray with you and take your temperature to see if you have a fever.

              Back home, Luis examined the foreign body in the x-ray and in his body with a magnifying glass. He researched images on the Internet. Undoubtedly, it was a microchip. Could there be another one? Had it been implanted in prison? On that night he’d been drugged in his room in Lisbon? Was he being followed? He realized that, if he were the doctor, he’d contact the authorities. It was possible the physician assistant had already done so. In weeks, his life had changed more than in the last ten years. It was going to change again.             

              The time had come to get back on the road, this time en route to Canada, after putting two cards in the mail, one addressed to his parents whom he loved very much and another to the brother he missed terribly. He went to get the backpack, which he hadn’t touched since arriving. Lucas opened it. Stacks of one hundred dollar bills, the manuscript, identification for the two scoundrels and the two victims, the orphans. One was the Canadian who resembled him. Two sealed boxes, one with LM and the other PR. Louis Marcé and Peter Romberg. He opened PR with difficulty. There were ten fingertips preserved in formol.
What’s this?
Fingerprints, he realized. He went to the lavatory, threw them in the toilet and flushed. He looked at the box labeled LM. Fingers, he thought. Portable fingerprints.
I’m Louis Marcé, an orphan, and I have a box with my fingers in formaldehyde. I can have them embalmed and hang them around my neck in case I need them.
The Canadian’s fingers also went into the toilet. He had to get rid of the other three IDs, but documents for the identity he had assumed since the beginning were absolutely necessary. He’d left Lisbon and his name was Louis Marcé. He had become a Québécois and his name continued being Louis Marcé.