Authors: Aaron Starmer
“Why doesn’t your father let you leave the island?” George once asked.
“He says there’s nothing for us out there,” Martin responded. “Our destiny is here.”
“Why doesn’t he let you talk to people? He doesn’t even let you have pets, does he?” George shook his head in disbelief.
“Losing a pet will break your heart, and you’re bound to lose them all,” Martin said, echoing his father’s words. “And people? People leave. They always have.”
“Does he lie to you?” George asked gently.
“Do your parents?” Martin shot back.
“Where’s your mom?”
Martin could have told him that he didn’t know, that his father was hiding the truth about her in metaphors and silence. But he wasn’t ready for that yet. “It doesn’t matter,” he said defensively. “Just tell me more of your stories.”
George and his family left the island at the end of the summer, but he promised Martin he would be back the next year. That autumn, after the last boat of summer people took to the water, Martin celebrated his tenth birthday. Then he and his father pulled the machine out into the yard, where there was room to get at its insides. Like every year since Martin could remember, they went back to work on it.
All day, every day.
It was school for Martin. Through the machine, he learned about physics and engineering, electricity, and everything his father had the ability to explain. It wasn’t a particularly big machine. A man and a boy could fit in it, but not much else. Inside, next to a control panel, was a glass door that opened up to a tall and hollow chamber with a small shelf and a round basin at the back. His father said the chamber was the machine’s heart. All the while, the purpose of the machine remained a mystery.
“It’s our destiny, right?” Martin once asked. “But what does it do?”
“The less you understand, the better,” his father explained. “For your own protection. It’s a powerful thing, and if it’s misused, the results could be devastating.”
“I promise I won’t misuse it,” Martin assured him. “And I would never tell anyone about it.”
“Magic, then,” his father said. “It’s going to help us start
over. That’s all you need to know. Life is a path, Martin, and you follow it. Sometimes you follow it blind. Maps are for doubters, and I raised a believer.”
It was a typical answer from his father, astoundingly elusive, but to a boy of ten, it seemed like wisdom from a life lived. Martin knew only a few details about his father’s days before the island. He knew his name was Glen. He knew he had owned a farmhouse. He knew he had even lived with a circus for a time. “It’s funny,” his father told him with a smile. “I didn’t run away
to
it. I ran away
from
it.”
“Is that where you learned to build the machine?” Martin asked.
“It’s where I learned about it,” his father said. “It was my father’s circus. There were carnival rides there. Not many, but we had a carousel and a Ferris wheel. Basically things to spin you in a circle. I always helped the mechanic when the rides needed fixing. One day, he gave me a piece of paper. It had small ink sketches of the machine. Showed the inside, showed the outside, not much else.”
“Did he tell you what it did?” Martin asked.
“He didn’t know,” his father said. “He’d found the paper folded and jammed in the gears of the Ferris wheel. There was one word written on it.
Hope
. That didn’t explain much, so he gave it to me, thinking a smart kid with fresh eyes and loads of imagination would figure it out. I gave it a close look, but I didn’t have all that much interest. A few days later, I ran away. I threw the sketches in a trash can somewhere.”
“But you
did
figure it out?” Martin asked.
“Eventually. But not for a long time, not until I’d almost completely forgotten about it. You were just a baby then. We lived in a farmhouse, far away from the island. And I—it’s
sad to say—was a desperate person. Completely lost, full of regret. The only thing that saved me from going over the edge was a knock on our door one evening. The mechanic, by that time an old man, had found me. He asked if I still had the sketches. I told him I’d thrown them out. It didn’t upset him, but he gave me a pat on the shoulder and said, ‘I think about that machine every day. I guess it’s better to just imagine what it might have done.’ Then he left.”
“But you didn’t just imagine, did you?”
“No I didn’t. The realization hit me like a fist to the jaw: the machine could give us exactly what the paper had advertised and exactly what we needed—hope. I started building it from scraps of my memory.”
“Where did you get the pieces?” Martin asked.
“I bought some. Stole others. I started the construction in the farmhouse, but it was trial and error. People thought I was crazy. I was a bit crazy, I suppose. I was also careless. There was a fire. I managed to save you and the pieces, but that’s all. Not the house, not all the other things. We moved to this island, where I could take my time, be safe and deliberate. It was also a place where no one would bother us.”
“And we have everything?”
“Almost.”
Almost was the problem. They had almost everything. But on a rainy spring morning, about a month before the summer people were scheduled to arrive, Martin’s father put on his coat and told him that he had to leave for a while. He had to get the final piece for the machine.
“Can I come with you?” Martin asked.
“Someone has to stay with the machine.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“Hard to say,” his father said. “Could be a few days. Could be longer. No matter what, I’ll be back for your eleventh birthday. In the meantime, it’s your job to carry on.”
A few hours later, his father got into the skiff and set out onto the spitting ocean, heading to where the trawlers bobbed.
Days passed. Martin climbed up to the rock outcropping and watched the horizon. The skiff didn’t return.
He wasn’t too worried, but as the days became weeks and there was still no sign of his father, seeds of doubt were planted in his mind. How far did he have to travel to find this final piece? Was it a dangerous journey? Could he die along the way?
It was still months until his eleventh birthday, so Martin pushed those concerns aside and did what his father had told him to do. He carried on. He tended the garden and the field. He mended the frayed wires that transmitted electricity from solar panels to their cabin. He trapped deer and caught fish. He kept the machine clean and polished, and every morning he practiced the procedure of turning it on. In the evenings, when the distractions of survival were furthest from his mind, loneliness would take hold. So he would sit by a lantern and read the book his father had given him, over and over again. It provided more comfort, perhaps, than it should have.
Finally, when the summer people arrived, he used levers and fulcrums to lift the machine onto dollies, and he moved it to the back room. He spied the Jolly Roger and tapped on George’s window.
He had thought long and hard about what to tell George.
On one hand, George was the only person in the world he could trust, and Martin wanted to express how worried he was about his father. On the other, he couldn’t betray his father’s wishes. The more he thought about it, the more he began to believe that carrying on had nothing to do with surviving. It was all about the machine. And no one else was ever supposed to know about the machine. So he pretended that nothing had changed. The friendship was treated as a secret, relegated to nighttime meetings in the forest.
It started off as thrilling for Martin as it had ever been, but as the summer went on, he began to wonder what else there was in the world besides what George was telling him about. Martin had no idea what video games were, but they sounded soulless and flat to him. Soccer seemed like an intriguing sport at first, but then he realized that nothing happened. And school? It must be something other than just pranks played on substitute teachers and gossip involving invitations to birthday parties. Martin’s father had been out beyond the ocean for over a month. There had to be something bigger keeping him there.
“Do you know anyone else’s stories?” Martin asked George.
“What do you mean?” George said. “Like books and stuff?”
“You have books?”
“Sure,” George said with a shrug. “I’ll bring you one.”
So he did. The next night, George presented Martin with a ratty paperback with a picture of a pistol and a pair of broken eyeglasses on the cover. Martin took it home, and over the course of the next day, he read the entire thing.
The plot centered on a police detective who was investigating
the kidnapping of a child. It didn’t make much sense to Martin, but all the voices of the characters were endlessly fascinating. In this book there were people who grunted and cackled when they talked, who sneered and whispered and said inappropriate things. They were nothing like his father and nothing like George or the people he constantly talked about.
“You have any other books?” Martin asked George.
“I don’t read much, but my parents have tons,” George said. The next night he gave Martin another.
It became an addiction. At first, he took one book a night from George, but after a couple of weeks, he was demanding three or four. All day he would sit on the rock outcropping and read about pirates and doctors and magicians and lots of people who kissed and lots of people who killed and lots of people whose lives changed in an instant. As far as Martin was concerned, all the books were classics, because they were all full of such surprises. They distracted him from life.
The meetings with George became less about friendship than they were about exchanging books. By the end of the summer, George didn’t even bother leaving his yard. He would simply place an old wooden lobster pot full of books next to the flagpole, and Martin would grab what he wanted and return what he had finished.
It didn’t even occur to Martin that this arrangement might bother George. After all, George had his own family and his own life full of stories, and if those things bored him, then he could always pull a book off the shelf. Martin had taught him everything he could about the island. What more was in it for George?
One night, Martin got his answer to that question. When he opened the lobster pot in search of books, he found just an envelope with his name written on it. Inside, there was a single sheet of paper. On the paper was an address.
It meant nothing to him, so he quietly made his way to George’s window and gave it a tap. Almost immediately, George’s face appeared. He had been waiting.
“It’s his home,” George said.
“Whose home?” Martin asked.
“Your dad’s. Before he came here.”
Martin stared at the address. It was a simple string of numbers and the names of a street and a town. He assumed it was the farmhouse where he and his father had lived when Martin was a baby. It was impossible to picture a place, though. It was impossible to imagine them anywhere but on the island.
“I told you about the Internet, right?” George went on. “You can find all sorts of things with it.”
“Thank you … I guess,” Martin said.
“He left, didn’t he?”
“How do you know that?”
“You taught me the island,” George said. “How to watch people. Some of us don’t sit around all day reading books, you know.”
“Oh.”
“I haven’t told anyone,” George assured him. “People try to ignore you and your dad.”
“I know.”
“Is that why you try to ignore us?”
“What do you mean?”
“I was your friend, Martin. Your only friend.”
“You still are.”
“We’re going home tomorrow. I know it’s been a while, but I’m gonna miss telling you stories. Helping you out.”
“I’m gonna miss—”
George stopped him right there. “Do you wanna come with us?”
This was the question Martin had dreamt about being asked. Now that he was being asked, it was also the most frightening thing he could imagine. The world he had read about was so big and so strange and so unlike the island he didn’t know if he could handle it. Besides, his eleventh birthday hadn’t come. His father had promised to be back by then. Together, they would finish the machine.
“No,” he told George. “No thank you. But can you do me a favor?”
“Maybe.”
“Go to the address,” Martin said. “Tell me what you see there.”
“It’s on the other side of the country,” George explained.
“Is that far?”
Then George looked at Martin as if this were the first time he had ever laid eyes on him, and asked, “You gonna be okay here, all by yourself?”
“Of course,” Martin said, less than convincingly. “I’ve already done it for months. Besides, my father will be back and everything will be fine.”
“I’ll be back too,” George assured him. “Next summer. Count on it.”
On a morning in early autumn, after the summer people had left, Martin celebrated his eleventh birthday. He did so by climbing up to the rock outcropping and watching the ocean. For the last time, he waited for his father.
It was midday and the tide was high when Martin saw a smudge of white on the horizon. It was his father’s skiff, its bow pointed toward the island. A rush of pure joy grabbed Martin, and he hurried down from the outcropping, into the woods, past the cabin, to the ladder. He almost slipped on the ladder’s steps, but he made it to the rocks unscathed and just in time to see the boat floating a few hundred yards offshore.
He waved his arms and called for his father, but there was no response. The skiff, flat-bottomed and wooden, with slats for seats, rocked back and forth on the water. There was no cabin, so Martin could see why no one waved or called back: it was empty, except for a leafy branch of a tree that was resting on the seats, as if it had broken off and fallen inside during a storm.
Martin dove into the frigid water. The tide was on its way out, a wind was picking up, and the current was pulling the skiff back to sea. Martin couldn’t let it get away. He had to know if there was anything else inside, any clue that his father had recently been aboard. But as hard as he swam, it was not nearly hard enough. Before long, the skiff was near the horizon, disappearing almost as quickly as it had come.