Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (64 page)

9.

A Plague of Snakes, Turned to Stone

(11/4/2012)

It is difficult to believe this can continue much longer. The seasons are not changing. It seems as though it will always now be late summer, earliest autumn, here in Stonington, as though this horror has frozen time. And yet we move through time, and we speak, and our thoughts occur, and that which bears a vague resemblance to day and that which bears a vague resemblance to night comes and goes. We get hungry. We run out of ammunition. We kill. We forage. All these factors assure me there must continue to, at the least, exist some
facsimile
of time. It’s like a forgery by an unskilled counterfeiter. God makes a copy, but he gets it wrong. Or, he gets it different.
The world I have known is lost in shadow
. That shit from the sea, it warps time. Invokes a time dilation that exists between here and, possibly, all the rest of the world. Or – if not a gravitational time dilation, not us beyond the perimeter of a Schwarzschild radius where time comes to a grinding halt on the singularity of a collapsed, frozen star, then a subjective time dilation, happening in my mind. Have I written that already, on some other page? Does it matter if I have?
And the stars are black and cold. As I stare into the void.
Tonight is tonight, and I sat down and opened my notebook and took up my pen to write about tonight. Today, tonight. Both. About how they have been peculiarly quiet. That happens sometimes, the quiet days. The lulls. In a way, they’re worse than the day-to-day war we are not here waging upon foes we have not come to defeat. Not in the strictest sense. No. Not the way the few remaining survivors of Deer Isle are fighting. The way the military and the CDC are fighting. You, Bête, you will know what it is I mean. And the pain, it’s getting so much worse. There are days now when Sixty Six has to venture out alone. She never seems to resent my inability to accompany her. Is she relieved? Would she rather do her work alone? Can’t say, haven’t asked, won’t even hazard a guess. Stepping outside today, slinking from our attic because we needed to restock our provisions, because somewhere another domino needed toppling to a faraway effect, we left the attic and realized at once it would be a Quiet Day. I walked along behind Sixty Six, keeping up as best I can despite the pain in my legs and stomach. She found two cans of Heinz baked beans and a can of brown bread in the looted shell of the Fisherman’s Friend Restaurant on Atlantic Avenue. This is very close to the public library, and she’d stopped for a couple of new books. We sat at the end of one of the wharves and ate. She read and ate. I only ate and watched the sticky sea which was so still today that it seemed almost to have solidified. How and why do I force myself to observe those waters, bereft of so much as even the suggestion of waves? I do not know, Bête, my love. The tides do not rise and fall here any longer, so the horror holds a greater sway than does the moon. Up there where the constellations shift about, might be there is not longer a moon, or never
was
a moon. Consider that! But, we sat together, eating. Me, chewing but not tasting. Just grinding my jaws. Her reading
David Copperfield
, between plastic sporkfuls of baked beans. (
I had considered how the things that never happen are often as much realities to us, in their effects, as those that are accomplished
.) There was a cramp, an especially bad one, and I vomited everything I’d swallowed into the sea. No. Onto the sea. My puke spattered across that pearly surface and lay there. Not sinking. I think it’s alive. Have I said that? That I think what the bay has become is alive? I wiped my mouth and stared up at the resilient buttermilk August-September-in-November sky.
We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened
. Sixty Six turned a page. She did not seem to notice I’d been sick, but I am sick a lot. Old hat. Like bullets and blades and blood and ichor. We no longer find the remarkable at all remarkable. I wiped my mouth and said, very softly, “What out there do you miss? Do you miss anything at all?” She continued reading, not raising her eyes from the novel. “What
would
I miss? No.” I wiped my mouth again and spat. “Where did you learn to shoot?” I asked, and I admit I was talking just to hear my voice. The world here grows more silent every day. “Nowhere,” she replied. She told me how she’d never held a gun before the X came to her and sent her here. “What was there to learn?” she asked. “It’s all mathematics. Nothing but a sort of trigonometry.” For no reason I can now recall, I then recalled that it was Thursday. On Thursday nights there are films in the National Guard armory. Sixty Six likes to go. Mostly they screen – yeah, Bête, this part is bizarre – these fucked-up old Disney cartoons, Donald fucking Duck in the army, in World War II.
The Vanishing Private
; there’s the only title I remember. Jesus, I’m making less sense than usual, but I had to use more of the dope than usual to so much as sit up and hold the pen. Maybe
you
know why my being made sick is necessary to this experiment – if that is the word – but it is lost on me. Back to the wharf. Sixty Six sat her empty can aside, and I asked if she were going to the movies tonight. She shrugged. All of this was playing out through the fog of pain and drugs dream-like. I don’t question that sensation anymore. I reached into a pocket of my jacket, the variegated camouflage one I took from the aforementioned armory (no one tries to stop me from doing anything, not here). A small ammonite like the one you wear on the silver chain around your neck, sister. My tiny black
Hildoceras bifrons
from our trip to Whitby. I held it out to her, its whorl shining dully in my palm. She set her book down and stared at it, seeming truly and totally mystified. “Why?” she wanted to know. Suspicious. “I don’t know. I want you to have it, that’s all. Maybe because you keep saving my life out here.” She took it; I hadn’t thought she would. “People don’t give me things,” she said. “I just did,” I said. “You miss things,” she said. “You miss what you had before, you and your sister. Your science. The fossils.” Practically a sermon, that many words from Sixty Six all at once. It actually made me smile. “Yeah, I do. I miss Bête, and I miss what we did.” Sixty Six let the ammonite tumble from one hand to the other. “Not just the sex,” she said. “Not just the sex,” I replied. Have I mentioned that, sometimes, the internet is still accessible from the island? Just now and then. One of the terminals in the city hall hasn’t been smashed, and I’ve sat and used it a few times. “I see what you read online,” Sixty Six said to me. “You want to go back.” “Don’t you?” “Back to what?” There was a long silence then. I heard sirens off towards town proper. I don’t know why they still bother with those, but the sound was a welcome interruption on a Quiet Day. “Okay,” I said. And then I talked about the last thing I’d read online. Others might have been scouring the web for news of the outside world and whether it has any fucking idea what’s happening here. I don’t. Last time (and Sixty Six was with me, searching through old file cabinets, though I cannot say for what) I read
PLoS One
and an article on a newly discovered freshwater mosasaur from Hungary,
Pannoniasaurus inexpectatus
, and sitting on the wharf I explained to Sixty Six that paleontologists hadn’t thought that mosasaurs lived in freshwater. Only, here’s the thing, Bête. You’ll not have read this article, I don’t think. Because
this
was the December 19, 2012 issue of
PLoS One
. And we’re back at time dilation. “Look at this,” Sixty Six said, and that she was talking so much, it was starting to freak me out. “Look at this,” and she pointed at the little ammonite in her hand. At the center of its whorl. “It begins
here
, and it goes round and round and round, and it’s always growing larger from the center. What begins as a point becomes very wide before it ends.” I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. She understands the heart of it, doesn’t she? Every minute action, or omission of an action; every breath we breathe; the shedding of every dead skin cell; every trigger pulled; every man and woman on this island who crosses our path – it all echoes through eternity, growing larger and larger in its consequences as the whorl goes round and round about. Oh, oh. What did I just write? I should not have, should have kept that bottled. I ought to
destroy
this page. I ought to
burn
it and swallow the ashes. Don’t follow me, Bête. Whatever happens, don’t follow me.
Fais que ton rêve soit plus long que la nuit.

10.

Throwing a Donner Party at Sea

(5/13/2114)

Today is Friday, though for many aboard the village barges scattered about the globe, and so on the
Argyle Shoestring
, the distinctions between days and weeks and months tend to blur. But not for Ahmed Andrushchenko, who obsessively marks off each date on calendars he makes himself. Bartleby Johnson has never seen the point of it. Sure, the tier farmers and hydroponics need to know the growing seasons, and there are still those who celebrate Christmas, Ramadan, Easter, Chanukah, all the host of High Holy Days, Boxing Day, Launch Day, goddamn May Day and St. bloody Valentine’s Day. There is that peculiarly nostalgic minority. Johnson, he figures it’s the norm ashore, that the terrestrials rejoice as a matter of course. But it’s raw on the waves, and most old ways have been set aside for the monotony of the deep. Today is Friday, and he’s repairing the aft solar-sail array. It’s tedious work – especially with such jerry-rigged replacement parts – but it beats to hell and back passing the afternoon with Ahmed. His latest tiresome obsession is the trans-Neptunian object 90377 Sedna, which by his calculations (and century old astronomical charts) has recently overtaken the dwarf planet Eris as the farthest known celestial body orbiting the sun. That, and news of the civil unrest in the Greater Republic of India.

Better
, thinks Johnson,
that I spend however many hours dangling from this catwalk, suspended above the abyss with a wrench and spanner
.

He is undeniably fond of Ahmed. They’ve been quarter mates for eight years now, ever since Johnson came aboard in Portugal. But the prattle wears on one’s nerves and wears thin. So, times like this he is grateful to be a mechanic, frequently called out to keep this ramshackle cobble-together from breaking apart to scatter across the waves and send them all to the drowning.

Johnson is replacing a shot rivet at the base of the heliogyro when the sirens sound that mean another vessel is coming alongside. He uses both feet to shove off the hull, swinging his harnesses around for a better view. It’s an FS Navy ship, a high-speed trimaran wearing the name
Silver Girl
. Never a good sign, the Navy bothers sending a trimaran this far from littoral. A voice booms from the
Silver Girl’s
loudspeakers, notifying the barge that it will be boarded in five minutes and to ready the ramp right quick. Johnson curses, takes a firm hold of the crisscross network of safety lines, and hauls himself back up onto the widowmaker. By the time he’s unbuckled, navigated the jibboom and bowsprit, then climbed down to Red Tier, through his spyglass, across two hundred yards, he can see the Navy men are filing onto the barge, two abreast, armed so that it will be obvious to everyone in the village that they mean business. This isn’t some sort of routine inspection (not that they’d ever send a littoral trimaran for an inspection).

It might be that crate of black market quinoa, flax, and soy they bartered for a while back. Or it might be the two fugitives they (very unwisely) gave sanctuary down on the Houston wharves, on a Texas run six months ago. Or it might be…

Ahmed.

Johnson shoulders through the throng of worried, frightened, and curious onlookers blocking his way. He moves as quickly as he possibly can, and once there’s almost a scuffle when he overturns a melon cart. But by the time he’s made it to the front of the crowd, one of the Navy men has hauled Ahmed from below decks and is leading him in cuffs towards the ramp. Ahmed’s head is down, and he doesn’t see Johnson. They take Ahmed Andrushchenko away, and not once is there eye contact between him and Johnson. Two midshipmen in hard-shell hazmat suits are carrying Ahmed’s footlocker with as much care as they would handle a nuke. A major reads off the charges to anyone who cares to hear them, and before half an hour has passed the
Silver Girl
is rapidly putting distance between them, tacking westward towards shore. In another fifteen minutes, it’s only a glint on the horizon.

On his way back to his quarters, Johnson is intercepted by another mechanic – a hulking Scotsman named Galbraith – who wants to know what the fuck
that
was all about.

“He was
your
bunkmate, yeah? Figure you gotta have a notion, yeah? What was in that fucknut’s footlocker?”

Johnson shakes his head, and he tells Galbraith, “No idea. His business was his own. But you swim quicktime, you can ask ‘im for yourself, yeah?”

“You are a lying cocksucker!” the Scotsman shouts after him.

Yes, I am. Yes, I most surely am
.
But so are we all.

Ahmed traded a box of chips and circuits for it almost a year back, so long Johnson can’t even recall the name of the barge he found the trunk on. But he does remember the contents. Nothing he’d conjured on overly long, and, truth told, he’d not ever thought of the trunk in quite a long while. But now, now, now it was fresh in his mind as that busted rivet on the sail. Mostly there’d only been an assortment of musty old books, a case of roundabouts no machine on a dump like the
Argyle Shoestring
would ever be able to spin, and an assortment of motion cubes – equally fucking useless. Among the books was a volume on advanced chess tactics and another on cosmological inflation theory, and Johnson, at first, had assumed those were the reason Ahmed had bothered haggling for the lot. Until he’d pulled a shiny lead cylinder from the jumble. There was a Category A UN 2814 biohazard designation pressed into one side and also the lid of the cylinder, along with a date: 18-2-13.

“No,” Johnson had told him, grabbing for the cylinder, no matter how it was scaring him shitless. “That goes right the fuck overboard.”

“Screw you, Bartleby,” Ahmed said. “It’s mine. It cost dear, and it is mine.” There had ensued a tussle that ended in Johnson sporting a newly chipped incisor and Ahmed an eye that would go black and blue as storm clouds. But Bartleby had given up. He threatened to report Ahmed to the selectmen, but that hadn’t made any difference. He threatened never to play chess with Ahmed again, and, again, no dice. Johnson sat on the floor below the porthole, sweating and teasing the damaged tooth with the tip of his tongue.

“You ain’t gonna open that, you crazy son of a bitch. Even you’re not that daft.”

But then Ahmed did pop the seal. There was an audible hiss, and a subsequent series of clicks as the cylinder released the inner capsule. A fog of liquid oxygen or nitrogen billowed from the violated artifact, and when it cleared Johnson saw what had been shut away more than one hundred and one years: clamped firmly in place between steel rods, a glowing tube, maybe thirty-five, maybe forty milliliters. Whatever was in the tube had a pearlescent quality about it, and it glowed ever so slightly in the twilight filling up the cabin.

“You got no inkling what that shit is,” Johnson said.

“Isn’t that the marvel of it?”

“I ought to murder you in your sleep, you bastard. Slit your throat, toss that shit overboard myself.” Johnson hadn’t meant it, but he was frightened, and his tooth hurt, and he has always been apt to blurt such threats in the heat of the moment.

“If you gotta, then you gotta,” Ahmed shrugged, and he gazed in wonder at the pearly tube before shutting and sealing the cylinder again.

So
, thinks Johnson, sitting on the edge of his bunk,
so somehow the military got word and come for it. Might be they’ve been doggin’ that can around for tens and tens, and Ahmed gets it, and they get Ahmed. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

“Fuck.”

That’s when Johnson happens to glance at the shelf that holds Ahmed’s books, and right off he notices one, and only one, is missing.
The White Queen
.

“Fuck us all,” he whispers and lies down and stares at the underside of Ahmed’s bunk. Soon enough, it’ll be someone else’s bunk.