Glimmering (40 page)

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Authors: Elizabeth Hand

BOOK: Glimmering
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They had a small audience for the launch—Mrs. Grose, Diana, Doug from the Beach Store. Jason had made his farewells, stiffly, during his last visit; finally collapsed into tears and let Martin hold him. Martin had hoped Dick Graffam might come, but the weather was clear, no clouds that he could see; Graffam would be out fishing. It was high tide, waves lapping at pilings and gulls swooping overhead. On her jackstand the
Wendameen
gleamed cerise, reflecting the bright sky.
“You ready?” Martin clapped a hand on Trip’s shoulder.
“I’m ready.” Trip grinned.
“Let’s do ’er, then.”
Diana and Doug helped them spread rotten vegetables along the ways, cabbages and zucchini and stalks of jewelweed which spurted clear liquid when you broke them. Martin removed the wooden gate that held the boat within her cradle and, with a flourish, tossed it into a patch of withered tiger lilies. The boat creaked, its bow angling down—it looked monstrously huge up there, a terrible lion whose cage had been flung open—and began to slide forward.
“She’s coming!” yelled Martin. Doug cheered. Diana waited at a safe distance with a pail of sand to throw onto the ways, to slow the boat if necessary. Martin and Trip stood to each side, armed with crowbars, but they didn’t need them. As though in a dream of sailing through the sky, the
Wendameen
slid down the launching ways as Martin and Trip walked alongside, both of them gazing up and laughing for sheer wonder.
“Look at her!” yelled Trip. “Holy cow, she’s gonna
do
it!”
And she did, leaving a crushed trail of green and red and brown in her wake, like the track of some immense slug: she swept down the gravel beach and into the bay. There was an awful moment when she listed to one side, and the cradle seemed to be caught. Martin gave an anguished yell and ran down the shingle, but before he could reach the water she righted herself. Trip and Doug held two of the lines, walking out onto the pier. Martin followed, so excited he could scarcely talk.
“We did it! We did it!”
Trip turned to him with shining eyes. “You did it,” he said, and looked out to where the cradle rested in the shallows, the doors of Martin’s Camry showing faint yellow from beneath dark water. “You got her in the water . . .”
But they didn’t leave that day; and by the next morning a storm broke. It raged for almost a week, hurricane winds, Trip and Martin frantic that the
Wendameen
would sink. She didn’t; but she was damaged, so that there were more repairs to make. And another week slipped by, and another; more bad weather, and more time passing still. Until when they finally did get under way it was late in December, an insane month to be sailing, but what was to be done?
They made their farewells quickly. Everything had been loaded below, containers of water and extra foul-weather gear, lines and charts, sleeping bags and mildewed wool blankets that Mrs. Grose forced on them, just in case.
“Godspeed, Martin,” she said, and held her pug to her breast. Her tortoiseshell eyes were bright with tears. Looking into them Martin knew what she saw for him, but he was not afraid.
“Right,” he said softly, and kissed her. Diana gave him a small mesh bag with a few onions in it. Doug produced a six-pack of Blackfly Ale. And Mrs. Grose gave him a bottle of brandy, almost full.
“It may make things easier.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, her fingers lingering against his neck. “Oh, my dearest Martin . . .”
He drew back gently, trying not to cry. When he looked down she smiled and shook her head.
“It is not such a bad world to be leaving, Martin,” she whispered, and turned away. Martin and Trip boarded. They would motor out of the harbor, and hope for a northerly wind once they got beyond the point. Martin started the engine. Greasy black smoke rolled across the deck. On the pier everyone cheered.
“Good-bye, Martin! Good-bye!”
Martin grinned, Trip at his side in John’s weather-beaten anorak. He raised his hand in farewell. The boat moved slowly, noisily out into the bay. Behind them Mars Hill grew smaller and smaller, the waving figures on the pier no bigger than gulls. Then they were gone, and Mars Hill with them. The
Wendameen
was under way.
 
 
It took them over two weeks, dropping anchor at night to sleep within the shadow of pine trees, or offshore from sandy beaches along the Cape, or within sight of the drowned ruins of aircraft factories in Connecticut, the submarine works in Groton. Trip was seasick once, Martin often; he wished he had some Dramamine in his stores, or at least a pair of sunglasses. Above them stretched endless channels of phosphorescent green and violet and gold, with here and there a rent showing the great darkness beyond, the brave wink of a star and once a nacred tooth Martin knew must be the moon. Below them the sea reflected the sky’s broken face, with an underlying gesso of copper green. Martin felt they were not sailing so much as they were suspended within some vast crucible: just a matter of time before the
Wendameen
and its passengers were smelted down, given back to ore and ash and bone.
They saw strange things, journeying south. A pod of whales who breached to starboard and followed them, mountains moving with great belching sighs, enameled blue and silver in the night. A creature like an immense brittle basket star, twice as large as the
Wendameen,
its central arms radiating outward like the sun before giving birth to an explosion of smaller arms, all writhing upon the surface of the sea as the omphalos turned slowly, counterclockwise, and breathed forth a scent like apples. Rippling mats of phosphorescent plankton colored like Easter eggs, pink, pale green, blue; gulls nesting upon unmoored buoys, that rose to squawk at the boat’s passage and so revealed their eggs, large as an infant’s skull and pied with glowing silver.
To all of these wonders Trip seemed oblivious. If Martin pointed something out—a dismembered tentacle the size of a telephone pole, a school of flying fish—Trip would only shrug, and smile.
“Didn’t see that when I was out with my uncle,” he said, sitting beside Martin on deck one evening and watching as a single fin, long and serrated, sliced the water near shore. “Guess they don’t have them up by us.”
Martin shook his head and leaned over the rail, trying to see if the fin made for shore; to see if perhaps it might clamber there on shaky new legs. “They didn’t used to have them
anywhere,
Trip,” he said.
And amongst all these, other things. Ruins of houses, roofs floating like Dorothy’s farm felled on its way to Oz, porches where terns rested and barnacles massed thick as wet concrete. Uprooted trees whose leaves had turned to bronze but had not died, had grown instead long streaming bladders and filaments that moved whiplike across the water’s surface. Other boats—abandoned trawlers that sent a chill through Martin as they drifted past; battered sloops with patched sails and sailors who hallooed and waved but did not approach; a dinghy that appeared full of birds and clothes, and which Martin tried very hard to keep Trip from gazing into as the
Wendameen
passed it with terrible slowness, the gulls scarcely lifting their heads from worrying small heaps of bones.
Hourly they grew closer to New York. Alongshore unbroken darkness, save where fires leapt upon distant hillsides or burned within windowed towers. Snow and freezing rain that made the sails brittle as ice. The occasional terrifying surge of power through the grid, horizontal lightning that ripped through hamlets and towns and cities, erupting sometimes as flame from atop high-rises, or roaring from radio towers and airport beacons before it all collapsed once more into the endless bacchanal night, the great serpent stirring and then falling back into uneasy sleep. New Haven’s breakwaters, flooded now, a channel buoy still blinking from the tip of a skeleton tower. Ships black and huge as islands, freighters or cruise ships or factory ships, that seemed immobile, unmovable, in the lavender dusk but were gone before the rippling red false dawn. It was these that unsettled Martin most; but they sailed on, past bell buoys tolling unseen beneath the remains of bridges and ferry landings. Drowned mansions. Defunct factories rising from webs of girders and shattered gantries. The art deco splendor of an amusement park, the roller coaster’s spine rising like a dream of dragons from emerald water.
And Trip gazing upon it all unperturbed, unmoved.
Unknowing?
wondered Martin. But could not bring himself to ask, could not bear to think what answer he might receive: that the boy had seen it all before, that the drowned kingdoms were not new to him, or strange; that the scoured ruins of the earth belonged to Trip more than they had ever belonged to Martin.
One night they anchored in mid-channel. After a makeshift meal of spongy fried potatoes and the last of Diana’s rosemary they sat on deck, facing shore and watching the sky convulse above them, a slowly turning wheel of purple and indigo and a bruised red that was almost black. Martin had Mrs. Grose’s farewell bottle of brandy beside him, and every now and then poured a jot into an enameled mug. He poured some for Trip as well. The boy didn’t drink it; he balanced the cup on his lap, every now and then raising it to his face to sniff it warily. The air felt dank and viscous. It wasn’t hot, but Martin still broke into a sweat.
Maybe that was the brandy, he thought, or just fatigue. He took another sip from his mug, and winced. A strange indefinable smell hung in the air, like burning dust or gunpowder. In the distance a silvery flare leapt from a high promontory, as though something there had exploded soundlessly.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
He nestled the mug against his chest and glanced at Trip. “What?”
“The sky.” Trip’s voice was subdued. He stuck his chin out to indicate the lurid tableau above them. “It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse.”
Martin looked up. He shrugged, feeling a sliver of cold where the heavy night air nosed down his shirt. “Is it? I guess I can’t tell, anymore. Maybe we’re just getting closer to the city—you know, more houses, more lights . . .”
“No.” Trip raised the mug to his lips and took a sizable mouthful. “Ugh—!”
Martin laughed. “It’s not beer
.
You’re supposed to
savor
it—”
Trip swallowed and took a cautious sip. “Okay.” He grimaced.
Martin leaned back, gazing into the sky. “How much worse could it get?” he said. “Diana was talking about those space stations they’re sending up at the end of the month—I mean, joint Japanese/American technology, how can we lose?”
Trip shook his head. “I don’t know.” His eyes in the infernal light seemed translucent. “It’s like it really is the Rapture . . .”
“The Rapture?” Martin stared at him. “You mean the end of the world? You think this is the end of the world?”
Trip nodded. “The Last Days. That’s what John Drinkwater used to say. My choir director,” he added at Martin’s quizzical look. “And my grandmother—”
He took another sip of brandy. “—she totally believed in all that stuff. If she could see me now—”
Trip traced the outline of the cross branded on his forehead. “Man, if she could see me, she’d definitely think this was it. The end of the world. The end of the fucking world.”
Martin listened, fearful lest the boy stop: it was the most he’d heard Trip say of himself since he’d found him on the beach at Mars Hill. Beneath them the
Wendameen
rocked gently. Finally he asked, “Is that—is that what you believe?”
Trip gazed upward. Streamers of gold spun from the ominous spiral, slid down to disappear behind that far-off promontory where something burned, smoke like dark thumbprints against the lurid sky. After a moment he shook his head.
“I don’t know. I guess. Or no—no, maybe I don’t.” He frowned. “I mean, if I really thought that, probably I wouldn’t be doing this—”
He opened his hands, cradling the mug of brandy. “I mean, I wouldn’t be letting you take me to New York,” he said. “To look for her. If I really thought it was the end, I guess I wouldn’t care.”
Martin looked away. Because Martin
did
think it was the end—for him, at least—and somehow that didn’t stop him from caring at all.
“She’s your girlfriend, then? This person you’re going to find in the city?”
“No, she’s not my
girlfriend
,” he said “Actually, I hardly even know her.”
“Was she—is she someone you knew from—well, your church?”
“My church?” Trip drank the rest of his brandy, then reached for the bottle and poured more into the mug. “No. She wasn’t exactly a churchgoing girl. I mean, I doubt she was saved or anything like that. She was foreign, for one thing. Russia or someplace, I forget.”
“But—so you want to save her? That’s, um, thoughtful.
”
“No, I don’t want to save her. I just want to—to see her again. That’s all.”
He turned away. His profile against the burning sky looked sharp, almost cruel, the hollows of his cheeks touched with flame, his eyes colorless. Martin’s heart clenched. He tried desperately to think of something to say, something that might redeem the moment, save him from looking pathetic as he sat there staring at this boy as though
he
were the Rapture, his last best hope of sunrise.

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