Authors: Michael Cadnum
“I dreamed we were living at the bottom of the ocean,” she said. “It was just like land, hills and rocks. But there were only the two of us.”
“And we couldn't drown,” I said. “We breathed the water in and out, like air.”
“That was the dream,” she said. She touched my face, tracing my nose, my mouth. “I think I know what's wrong,” she said. “I think I can tell what's changed.”
“Don't try to think, Rebecca. Don't worryâ”
“We're in the middle of a storm,” she said, sounding unconcerned.
“In the middle of a storm, in the middle of the ocean,” I said. I tried to argue myself out of a respect for what attorneys call truth issues. Did I really know my own nature, and what my nature was likely to become?
“I don't know anything about boats,” Rebecca was saying. I could hear her unasked question: just how small is this yacht?
There was a simple pleasure in making conversation. It was constructed, tongue and groove, out of what we needed to say, and avoid saying. “You can call almost any pleasure vessel a âyacht,'” I said.
“We're alone?”
“Entirely alone.”
She put out her hand and found mine. “Don't joke about this, Richard.” But she had a strange smile, an odd certainty in her voice.
“There are worse things than solitude,” I said.
“You're afraid to tell me,” she said.
“Do you remember how much you disliked stepping on snails,” I said. “They crawled out onto the stonesâand you asked me to rescue them before you would go outside.”
“What kind of an operation did I have,” she asked, not a question so much as a gentle challenge.
A postmortem
, I wanted to say. They stitched you up every which way because they knew it didn't matter.
But she was drowsing again, rocked gently by the shifting of the boat. I carried her into the cabin, and the water soaked from her gown into the mattress of the bunk.
Swinging on a bent nail was a weather radio, tuned to 162.55 megaherz, the National Weather Service. The batteries were almost spent, the broadcast a whisper. But I could hear clearly enough the storm warning,
from the Channel Islands north
, with gusts up to sixty knots.
A storm was coming. A big storm, almost a hurricane.
I knew what to do without really knowing anything, flying without intention, soaring high above our craft. The sight of it far below would have troubled me if I had let it, such a tiny nutshell.
The wind twisted my wings, straining them. I blew like a hat in a cartoon. Weightless at times, I tried to fight the updraft that swept me into the clouds.
When a tanker loomed out of the storm, I labored toward it through the blowing salt spray. I missed the deck entirely, flattened against the side of the ship by the wind. I crawled upward, my leathery appendages slipping along the steel without a sound.
I rolled onto the deck and felt my body fall open like a book, losing itself to my man-like shape again.
The engine thrummed, and the big ship took the swells, settling just slightly to port and then correcting itself. It would be easy to forget the ocean entirely in a floating building like this.
The ship was a plateau of steel, as characterless and unlovely as a refinery. Rustproof paint, clay-red and sea-gray. The working and living quarters were units in a city, a place of duty and desultory recreation, paperbacks, videotapes. I had expected sailors, technicians, but I saw no one.
I paused beside a fire extinguisher and put my ear to the bulkhead. The grind of the engine was a rumor. There was a smell in the air I could recognize.
Two men sat at a table, eating from plates with sections, one compartment for string beans, another for Salisbury steak. It had been a long time since I had paid any notice to the eating habits of ordinary people, and the smell stopped me, microwaved flesh and canned vegetables. Surely that wasn't what food smelled like, I thought. I remembered eating with gusto.
Now I looked on with something like horror as one of the men tried to cut a string bean with his fork, a pale gray seed squeezing out from the ruptured pod. “You never see a flat,” one of the men was saying, muscular, with hairy blond arms. “Not anymore.”
They chewed.
The one with hairy arms continued, “The tires are too good.”
“What are those guys doing?” said the other one, younger, with an accent I could not place, Scandinavian. “Along the freewaysâyou see them.”
The hairy-armed one gave a nod and a smile, still chewing. “When I say
never
I mean same-as-never,” he said. And for a moment I could not bring myself to interrupt them.
They did not speak again. They worked the half-chewed food around in their mouths. They both saw me at the same time, and they acted in a way that could have been mistaken as courtesy, napkins to lips, chairs forced back, both men standing.
This time I climbed straight into the sky. It was going to be hard, fighting the wind, and I wanted to gain as much altitude as I could.
I pulled upward into the rain, until the updraft of a cloud swept me higher. I panicked, until the ice begin to bristle my hair and I fell again, the grizzle melting as I tumbled.
I couldn't find our boat.
There was a hard logic to it. It was more than logicâjustice. Its time past, the old vessel had vanished. Who was I to expect this miracle to spin itself out forever? I had lost her.
I screamed her name, my cry out of the range of sound. And I began the search, swell, valley, sudden mountain, beckoning plain, all of it below me, a world new every moment.
We all have the dream. We are called to take an examination, or show up to fill out a long, impossibly difficult questionnaire. Without passing this test, without filling out this form in the time allotted, everything we have accomplished will be lost.
The dream was true. It recurred because I had never seen that it was not a dream. It was the way I had lived my life, my existence a test.
I found it.
The mast stabbed the wind at crazy angles, and I fell toward the vessel certain that I would miss it and plunge into the waves.
I collapsed on the deck. I found my human shape, ulna, radius, the highways of bone reasserting themselves. I flung myself toward the cabin. Surely the iron melodrama behind such nightmares would continue to play itself out. I knew what would happen nextâthe cabin would be empty.
She was still there.
This time I opened several vessels in my wrist, subcutaneous and interior, veins and at least one artery. This time as she drank she lifted her head and drew strength from me with growing color, her eyes fluttering, her head falling back to the bed at last.
Blood pattered onto the floor, and I tasted the flow, drinking from my own wrist. Wrong, I told myself. I am using her, seducing her into this.
She sat up, steadying herself against the rocking of the boat.
“It's time to wake up,” I said, sitting beside her, putting my arm around her. Blood snaked into my palm, already congealing, the skin healing.
“You don't have to tell me,” she said in a rush. “I know.”
“Let's not stay in here,” I said.
It was better outside the cabin, in the wind. She said, “There was an autopsy.”
This was my last, best opportunity to lie. Leave her one or two illusions, I urged myself. Since when is brutal honesty the wisest, kindest course of action?
It was over. She knew.
She continued, “I was dead. The coroner did an autopsy.”
Medical examiner, I mentally corrected her. Postmortem.
“I know what you've done,” she said.
I shivered. It was the strangest feelingâI could not meet her eyes. I said, “I am not proud of anything.” It wasn't entirely true. There was some small pride I took in the way I had learned so much, in the way I had survived. “I didn't think I had any choice.”
And shame. I felt shame, too.
The storm was dying. The quiet was what carried us, lifting and holding us. “We can't live like people,” I said.
She laughed. I was astounded. Her laugh was tender, but it was mocking, too. I had expected shock and sorrow, dismay, the sort of self-loathing I had begun to expect in myself. “Richard, I have something to tell you.”
“Forgive me,” I said. “If you can.”
“My gown is blue. Like the sky at noon. You're taller than I expected, and so pale, Richard. But beautifulâRichard, you're so wonderful!”
I looked into her eyes.
She spoke calmly, as though measuring her words, preparing me for them. “There are many things we have to learn,” she said.
The boat slipped to one side, shifted, and rose again on the next swell.
Touching my lips with hers, she said, “I can see.”
43
She still wanted to touch things, run her hands along the rails, the foot of the mast. She was fascinated by the lifejacketâ
look at this color, Richard!
âbut comprehended its purpose only when she looked away from it and her hands could search its straps.
She said she had trouble determining what things were. She knew all about clouds, and the ocean, and how clothing rumpled in wind, dimpling and smoothing.
Colors fascinated her, the weed-yellow ash of the mast, the green corrosion of brass fittings. I wanted to show her everything, trees, houses, faces, far-off cities, and all that offered itself to the eye was this lost storm, frittering itself away.
But it was more than enough, a few stars in the sky. She loved the way the weathered cordage twisted in her grasp when she tried to wind it into a loop. Whether by my will, or by an accident of the gale, the boat swung around and nosed south, and I stood at the helm pretending I had some choice in the matter. She crouched on the cabin's roof, hanging on to the mast, and kept looking back. When I waved I was stunned when she lifted her arm and waved in return.
“It's beautiful!” she cried.
Yes, I must have called. Beautiful as I rarely saw it, all the way to the horizon.
I was a part of her visible world. I felt how meager my appearance must be, how she deserved to see men and women in finery. When a gull adventured through the night she whooped, and the bird heard her, shying upward, spinning away.
“A bird,” she cried.
The hours I had spent in recent nights all fitted together, and I wanted nothing but this, the boat racing ahead of the wind as I decided where I wanted to go, a new course, a new future. A puzzle is like that, one day fitting together into something like the scene on the lid of the box, the picture some rule-bound member of the household has put away so no one can cheat. The summer cottage of my boyhood often sported a card table with a jigsaw puzzle, a Monet garden or a Buddhist temple beyond a half-circle bridge.
When a whale broke water in the distance I scrambled to her side. The tail lifted drowsily, delicate at this distance.
Sometimes I manned the helm, but the boat generally drifted on its own, like a dray horse guiding itself homeward. I had not felt this way since I was a childâplaying at some game, pretending to be pirates, knowing that soon some voice from the adult world would break the spell.
“We're dressed like we're going to a wedding,” she said, running her fingers along the lapel of my jacket.
“I think we should compliment the limousine service, don't you?”
“What color are my eyes?” she asked.
“Ocean blue. Mine are almost the same color, sort of. More filing cabinet gray,” I said.
“Agate blue,” she corrected me.
“It's too dark to really tell.” Our eyes were actually almost the same slate gray, but there was life in her eyes, nuance, humor.
“I'll see even better when the sun comes up,” she said.
“I felt the whales when we were sleeping,” I said, to avoid the subject of morning. “They were so close they nearly brushed us.”
“I thought your hair was black,” she said.
“I think it says
brown
on my driver's license.”
“It's a reddish color. And your eyebrows have a hint of goldâI can hardly wait for better light.”
“They migrate this time of year,” I persisted.
“Your eyebrows?”
We both laughed. She ran fingers through her hair. “GodâI wonder if there's a mirror in the cabin. Not that I'm eager. I'd rather put off my first look.”
Tell her now
.
“I'm afraid,” she said. “Isn't that silly? I'm afraid to look into a mirror. The last time I saw myself I was ten years old.”
I looked down over the stern, and even in the bad light I could tell. There was no silhouette in the shifting water, no sign that I was there.
I wanted her to see something spectacular, knowing that the ordinary glory of sunrise was forbidden. I knew she understood imperfectly what had happened to us. Morning could not be far off. She would discover what light and hunger changed in her.
The night turned warm, and stars broke through the clouds. No sign of daylight, only stars, the Milky Way, and man-made satellites ticking slowly eastward.
“I thought you would have a frown wrinkle, right here,” she said, touching the space between my eyebrows. “From thinking so much.”
I didn't want her examining me too closely. I let a little silence pass, water hissing as it rolled past the hull. “An airplane,” I said, nodding upward, an aircraft high above the clouds.
“Tell me everything you know about this.”
“Can't we just enjoy the view?” I said. I wanted to sound debonair, but my voice was ragged.
“If I knew all your secrets I would be miserableâis that what you mean?”
“There's Orion,” I said, looking up again. “Taurus must be up there, too, behind the cloud.”
“You're afraid!” she breathed, putting her arms around me. “Don't be, Richard. I'm so happy.”
Perhaps it was her happiness that was beginning to trouble me.