Things Invisible to See (22 page)

You could watch the birds and maybe see an albatross. Cooper had seen only three since his arrival: large, distant, and unforgettable.

You could stand at the water’s edge in the breeze that smelled of ammonia—or was it iodine? what was that smell?—and the birds would dart past, crossing and swooping and crying out to each other. Those cries! Ben longed for wild geese winging south on nights chilled by the breath of the coming snow. All his life he had heard them and not known he was hearing them till Clare said, “Listen.”

He waited for the mail plane. He wrote her long letters, not about the island, but about home, yet about nothing important, as if home were nothing, a rag-and-bone shop, all odds and endings. Remember the snow? Remember Precious Gems? His memory was caving in. The air was remembering for him, turning over, saving, throwing away. One day he could not recall his brother’s face but could perfectly remember the timbre of his voice. Another day he remembered the smell of his father’s glove but not the color of his hair. He remembered that Marsha was beautiful, but he did not remember how; was it her hair—the way it fell over her shoulders? What in the world had they said to each other? Whole scenes slipped away without telling him, without even saying good-bye.

It was early evening but already dark. The water was rough, the sky heavy with clouds. A westerly wind was collecting the stink of the guano; Ben could not imagine anyone paying money for it.

And on the fifth night of the fifth month a great wind arose, and the sun withdrew and the moon turned away, and darkness settled upon the parched face of Hewitt Island. And Ben Harkissian stood at the window and heard the roaring of the wind and the beating of the rain, and Captain Cooper hunched in the raft like a turkey buzzard wearing the yellow plumage of his life vest, waiting for the sea to take him.

And the wind carried away four cubits of the roof to the west and great was the noise thereof, and Ben Harkissian opened the front door, and the water rose up in a wall to meet him and advanced with an army of ten thousand waves joined into a single wave, which rushed into the house and loosed the tables and chairs upon the tide, and the papers and planets and the animals thereon—all were lost in the tide save Cooper, who had prepared the raft, and Ben, who climbed in with him when the water rose to his knees and to his waist and he saw that the koa trees were gone and the pigweed was gone, the three kinds of lizards who lived in the pigweed were gone, and the government building was splitting, board from board, and the sea was carrying it away, tree, weed, lizard, sand, house, the island itself.

And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and the waves pounded the raft and bruised the two men curled up on the floor of the raft, and the sea tossed cold water over her children, lest they sleep, she covered them with the cold salt spray of the storm.

When the rain stopped, Hewitt Island was gone.

Cooper raised himself and looked around. The gear was gone. The food, the water, the tarps, the matches, the staff and stuff of life: gone. Water sloshed around the bottom of the raft, chilling him. They would have to bail—with what? their shoes? Ben did not move. He lay on his side in the water, his face turned from the sky.

The sea had left them the clothes they wore, the two life vests, the rags they used for cleaning the equipment, and the things Cooper carried on himself: his knife and pistol, his fountain pen, his compass, his wallet. The wallet held a hundred dollars.

He uncapped the pen and scratched it on his life vest, and the ink appeared. Faithful friend! Over his heart Cooper drew a map. To his dismay the ink ran on the wet patches, but the sun was fast drying what the sea had washed. The salt winked and glistened on his clothes, his hands, his shoes.

He drew islands to the east and to the west, as if he were redesigning the Pacific. Above the islands to the east he wrote “friendly and inhabited.” Above the islands to the west he wrote “Japs.” If the raft drifted into enemy waters, they would be shot, of course. The Japs did not waste time taking prisoners. At the bottom of the map, he scrawled something large and vague and labeled it Australia.

Tonight, if the sky cleared, he could tell by the stars how accurate he was.

On the right side of his life vest he wrote “log” and made a mark for the first day so that they would not lose track of time, would not lose their bearings, and their intelligence would not turn against them, leaving them in a backwash of madness with no map, no sign, and no way home.

He picked up the bundle of rags and threw them over the raft, counted, and gathered them up again, and under the mark for the first day he noted the speed and direction of the wind and the drift of the water, wind out of the southwest, six knots, drift of one knot, while Ben fled through the long tunnel of fitful sleep, closing the hatches over the various shapes of terror as he passed them, and woke at last to find Cooper waiting for him.

“Where are we, sir?”

“Here,” said Cooper, pointing on the map to the empty space over his heart.

We’re not lost, thought Ben, and knew they were hopelessly lost. He sat up, and the sun nearly blinded him. The sea was the deep azure he’d loved when he first flew over it. Now its awful machine had wound down to a gentle lapping.

“Sir, I still have the flashlight.”

“Does it work?”

Ben turned it on. There was nothing dark but the sea, and he pointed the beam straight down, over the side of the raft, and felt the flashlight glide from his grasp. It entered the water without a sound, its beam growing smaller and smaller, like someone walking down a road toward the horizon.

“Oh, Christ. Oh, I’m sorry, sir.”

Cooper did not answer. Neither did he look angry. He seemed to have reached a state beyond anger, a benign indifference. He looked at his watch, a gesture so absurd that Ben wanted to laugh. The next moment he wanted to cry.

“It’s one o’clock,” said Cooper. “Take the watch at one o’clock.”

One o’clock—what did that mean here? At one o’clock Ben fed garbage to the gulls and watched them dive for it. One o’clock on the island. That was when he wound the clock, just before he fed the birds. Yes. But it could not be one o’clock there now. At home it would be night. Lights turned on, fires lit.

By afternoon, thirst took hold of them, inhabited them; they could think of nothing else. The flashlight had attracted sharks. All day they hung like dark islands in the clear water below, and Cooper sat, still as a cat, mouth dry, pistol poised, licking his lips. He could not clear the taste of metal and salt, as if some secret corrosion were at work deep inside him. He could feel his body shutting down, a house closing up for the season.

Ben’s shout jarred him alive.

“Look, sir—look! A boat!”

It hovered on the horizon like a friendly sliver, though they could identify neither the kind of ship nor the flag under which it flew. Cooper pulled off his life vest and his shirt and handed the shirt to Ben.

“Wave it.”

Ben waved. He was certain he saw the boat slow down. When it glided out of sight, slipping over the curved face of the earth, he was not certain of anything.

“They didn’t see us, sir,” said Ben. He felt to blame for this. He should have waved harder. Longer. Higher.

Cooper shrugged.

“We’re near Jap territory. Nobody is going to risk losing a ship for two men.”

MISSING IN ACTION

E
VERYTHING IN THE HOUSE
reminded Helen of Hal. As she went about her tasks, she reconstructed his day for Clare.

“If Hal were here, he’d be listening to the news now” (and they knew what he would be hearing at eight o’clock in the morning without even turning on the radio: the ad for Serutan, Natures spelled backwards).

When Helen brought up the breakfast trays—one for Clare, one for Grandpa—they thought of Hal driving to the chemistry building. He’d be there by this time.

At noon: he’d be coming home for lunch.

At one o’clock: he’d be going back to the lab.

At three o’clock, on another day a long time ago, school would be out and Clare would be walking to his office. She was just starting eighth grade. She would open the heavy door of the chemistry building and slip into the grey twilight. The stone stairs to the second floor had the soft dents of steps in old churches, worn down in the center by the feet of the faithful.

She hurried past the exhibit cases of molecules, past the closed doors of offices with names printed on the frosted glass. Her father had two rooms, his office and his lab. Today she did not find him in his office, but his desk lamp shone on unanswered letters and a shuffle of bluebooks.

In the lab she dropped her books on the black counter between the sink and the microscope, and she drew up a stool. The smell of the chemicals, the rows of fat beakers, the scales and balances weighing silence under glass, the shelves of brown bottles sealed with old corks or glass stoppers, and none of this subject to fear, heartbreak, or confusion—the mystery and patience of the nonhuman rolled over her.

She sat down and opened her social studies book and was startled by a soft whir from the high darkness over the bookcase in the office. From the lab she could see, through the connecting door, a great horned owl perched on the topmost case. Her father had told her not to be afraid; it lived in the forestry building across the way and belonged to a graduate student who had raised it from an egg.

If I had to be any other thing than what I am, thought Clare, I would be that owl.

After supper, Helen said, “He’d be taking his walk now.” Hal would walk as far as the Blue Door magazine store (which he never entered) and turn around and walk back. Helen and Clare knew at what time he reached the store; he was so regular in his habits you could set your watch by him. At any hour of the day, they could look at each other and say, “Well, he’s getting ready to leave the office,” or “He’s reached the magazine store, he’ll be on his way back now,” and sometimes it seemed that Hal had never left, only that they came and went at different times, and they kept missing him but would run into him very soon.

When loneliness washed over Helen like a huge wave, she straightened their closet and arranged on the top shelf the effects of their life together. Her hats, his cameras, her pocketbooks, his sock mender, which always made her smile. Hal knew she was only too glad to darn his socks, but he had been a bachelor for so long that he did not expect her to do the things he had always done for himself, and he loved gadgets that performed small services. In the time it took him to plug in the sock mender, wait for it to warm up (about fifteen minutes), put his sock on the mending platform with the hole exposed, arrange the patch (fifty cents for a package of five), and press it into place with the heating arm, Helen could have mended a dozen socks. And likely as not, the patch would fall off minutes after he’d pressed it on, and he’d sit on the edge of the bed with the sock mender in his lap and repeat the process, swearing quietly. He never said anything stronger than “Hell” or “Hell’s bells.”

At lunch and dinner, for which Clare and Grandpa came to the table, Helen read Hal’s letters aloud. He wrote about sunsets, flowers, and fogs; you’d think he was living alone in nature. But of course the censor read everything first. The simplest statements were suspect. The censor had even paused over “I hope Clare is better” and had underlined it.

WAR EFFORT GOES UP IN SMOKE

“I can’t believe it’s finished,” said Nell.

Nell had volunteered to sew everybody else’s squares together if she didn’t have to knit one herself. She wasn’t unpatriotic, she explained, but counting stitches drove her crazy. Helen had finished Nell’s square but then Clare had sewn them together because Nell found she broke into a rash whenever she got near wool.

But now she shook out the afghan with as much pride as if she’d knitted the whole thing.

“Debbie, you take the other corner,” she said.

Mrs. Lieberman took the other corner.

The lady from the Red Cross said, “It’s wonderful, just wonderful.”

But Debbie said, “Girls, I can’t understand why you all did the smoking cigarette. I thought you were doing a dog, Marie.”

“I changed,” said Mrs. Clackett.

Helen searched for her own square among the multitude, as one hunts for a familiar face in the newsreel. Mine has more smoke than any of them, she thought. Billows and billows. All the others showed a thin line of smoke straying from the glowing tip. She wondered if she’d made the smoke wrong.

KEEP AWAKE! THE ENEMY NEVER SLEEPS

When the air-raid whistle blew, Vicky had just finished putting Grandma to bed for the sixth time, and now she stumbled toward her own room, turning off lights as she went.

“Fred, are you going to bed in your shoes?”

“It’s only eight o’clock,” came Fred’s voice from the dark space that was his half of the bed. “When I hear the all-clear, I’m going to get up.”

“I’m so tired I could fall asleep right now,” said Vicky and flopped down beside him. “Six more weeks to go. I just can’t believe she cut up the ration books. I feel like I signed up for the duration.”

They lay side by side, listening anxiously.

“She’s still moving the furniture,” whispered Fred. “What if she turns on the light?”

“I unscrewed the bulb,” said Vicky.

Footsteps fleeing down the stairs unsettled them both.

“Fred, you go after her this time.”

He found her playing with the dead bolt on the front door: an angry ghost looking for the way home. White nightgown, white braids springing from either side of her head like handles on a jug, mottled and milky by the light of the full moon which poured through the glass on both sides of the door.

“I just want to see if Vicky locked up.”

“She locked the door,” said Fred.

“It doesn’t feel locked.”

“Oh, it’s locked all right.” He rattled the knob.

“And the lights don’t work.”

“Grandma, it’s a blackout. Because of the war.”

“War?” she repeated, genuinely surprised. “Who are we fighting?”