Outerbridge Reach (46 page)

Lying there, he became aware of the birds. It was the smell of them, he thought, that had made him sick and not the ocean. There were thousands, right at the edge of the soft sand on which he lay. They had black button eyes and yellow crests through which the sun and the spray made rainbows. He stood up and walked over the sand toward them.

Penguins surrounded him like wheat. The ground was slippery with kelp and guano and the landscape stank to heaven. The crowd of penguins gave way to make a path for him. Their clucking calls filled his ears, echoing off the rocks until they made a silence. It was a droll scene, he thought, the Protestant formality of the birds on their icy stone island with a black sky overhead. But the sun's upper limb shone from an edge of sky as though reflected in an index glass. Everything is measurement, Browne thought, everything I see. The sun's rays lit the penguins' crests to a thousand colors.

Ahead of him, along the penguin shore, were white shapes in the sun's glare. Ice, he thought at first. Coming closer, he saw that the white shapes were not ice. What they might be confounded him. At first they seemed meaningless and without form; closer up, they assumed a geometry with which he was somehow vaguely familiar. For a moment his attention was distracted by the sight of a young penguin besieged by skuas. The penguin was alone within a circle of disaster ten feet in diameter. No other bird came nearer. It was eyeless although it stretched its neck and strained to face the sky. One leathery flipper was raised in comic rage at things. The other hung bloody and truncated at its side. Overhead, skua gulls were wheeling. Every minute or so, a skua would descend screaming from the wheel to tear flesh from the dying bird. Browne stopped for a while to watch, then turned away and put the back of his arm across his eyes to protect them from the glare. I want a missionary woman now, Browne thought, to make a story out of this. Mother Carey tending her chickens, God's sparrows falling aslant his gaze. Creatures for sacred inscrutable reasons denied flight are brought piecemeal into the sky as meat.

The white shapes, Browne saw presently, were the bleached bones of whales. Hundreds of bones were strewn along the beach just beyond the rollers. Penguins wandered among them like the citizens of a town. He walked faster, bracing for balance with his marlinspike.

There were fin bones like skeletal wings, head-high pelvic bones and mandibles full of peg teeth the size of fists. Cages of five-foot ribs were piled like the tiers of a stylized prison to a height beyond reach. The field of bones stretched to the end of the cove, a mile in the distance. They were clean and dry. Their contours were natural and pleasurable. At first Browne was shocked, as though he had stumbled on some kind of sordidness or scandal. But the beauty of the scene, the order and grammar of the bones, put his mind at rest.

He walked patiently around the next point and saw what appeared to be black towers rising from the beach. The towers proved to be huge vats raised on three metal legs. The rocks here and the scattered bones were all burned black as though by fire. It seemed that the cauldrons had burned out of control.

A few hundred yards from the shore was a black metal shed. Browne went closer and saw that it was covered with graffiti. He stopped and stared uncomprehending at the shed's walls, unable to assign any meaning to the scrawled words.

ONIONHEAD. HOBB. TREMAGISTER. SEVEN SPIRITS.

There was a trident and the tricolor flag of some nation which Browne, who knew his flags, failed to recognize. There were semaphore characters, together with drawings of genitals and odd smiling faces.

One of the island's freak winds came up and rattled the metal roof of the building and played one curving wall to the tone of a musical saw. He was aware of darting figures on the ground. Rats, he thought at first, seeing a gray-brown blur. But when he had a closer look he saw that the creatures were not rats but small flightless birds that looked like plucked penguins. He thought they were called rails.

There was a stick covered with flaking white paint on the ground and he picked it up. He wanted to write something on the wall, to leave something there. The paint on the stick was long dry and there was nothing to write with. Be true to the dreams of your youth, he thought. He traced that, word by word, on the black wall with his white stick, although it left no mark at all.

BE TRUE TO THE DREAMS OF YOUR YOUTH.

Inside the shed, the droning of the wind in the metal frame was deafening. The pitted metal floor was burned black too. An empty bottle of Australian brandy stood in one corner.

When he went out of the shed, he noticed another structure he had not seen before. It was a square house of two stories, tucked out of the wind's reach behind a hill. Beside the house was a fenced-in area that might have been a dog pen or, in some other place, a garden. The protecting hill was unnaturally round and grown with tough yellow grass. He walked toward the house, up stony, invisibly slanting ground. At close regard, it appeared to be made of wood that had seared to the color and consistency of charcoal but somehow remained upright.

The house's entrance faced the lagoon in which he had anchored. There was a charred porch that somehow supported his weight. The door was missing and he was just about to pass inside when a flourish, a bright flash like a banner, caught his eye. Looking toward the ocean, he saw a languid curve of colored cloth. The wind had a bright silk dress, gusts filled it like a sail and gave the appearance of flesh. Then he realized he was seeing a woman there. When it disappeared, he could almost remember a face, a frowning blue-eyed look.

Inside, the first room was in deep gloom, its unglazed windows nailed and boarded. Fungi grew along the walls and years of spiderwebs in every corner. The naked doorway he had entered through admitted the only light. Two of the strange little birds clattered out of the shadows, startling him. He thought the place should smell of ashes but it had the same odor as the foul wind outside. Thick gravel dust sanded his steps.

His eyes had been dazzled with an Antarctic glare and it took him a little while to adjust to the half-light. When he had, he saw a second room beyond the first. The connecting door was ajar. Behind it was a hallway from which a flight of stairs ascended to the upper floor. What light there was seemed now to be above him, but at the top of the stairs he found himself in darkness. Immediately before him was yet another door. Light was visible beneath it. He was surprised by the notion that he had been in a similar place somewhere before.

He opened the door to see an empty window open to the sea. Framed in it was the half-disc of the same setting sun that he was certain he had watched on the horizon hours before. It was impossible, he thought, as though the sun hung out of time. Browne grew frightened. He drew his breath carefully. How can it lurk there like that, he wondered, like a jack or a joker? He was reminded that he had taken liberties with time and located himself falsely. These are the interstices, he thought.

Slowly he became aware that part of the room was in shadow, unilluminated by the vagrant sun. It was a vast high-ceilinged room. In one shadowy corner was what appeared to be a high-backed old-fashioned Cape Cod rocking chair. It was piled with what he thought were quilts. Among the stack of quilts he thought he saw braided human hair. His anxiety was replaced by sexual excitement.

A febrile rush made him shiver. The pulse under his collarbone beat hard. He felt a dizzying pressure behind his eyes. At the same time, he was stirred to sudden emotion, a dear, bittersweet longing and a sense of expectation. He suspected he was not alone.

“Who is it?”

The close air was suddenly fragrant. There was a wind chime. Browne had the sense that an old game was in progress. The players were familiar and affectionate but there was an edge of conflict or pursuit. He heard mocking, sprightly music. Panic, Mozartean strains.

“Who is it?” he asked again, smiling.

The sound of his importuning voice hung in the air. The first land crab of twilight scuttled across the floor. He felt called upon for gallantry or wit. Believing that there was a woman in the room with him, he began to proclaim his undying love.

At some point, he thought she tried to warn him she was more coarse and lascivious than he understood. He paid no attention. He cried; his hands described figures in the air. The shadows, the faint music, all suggested she was less nurturing than he required, more carnal. Shameless. Free.

He decided it was only an illusion of the light, of sensual shapes and things that lingered in any old room. Drafts composed themselves into female whispers. The wind was always full of voices.

“Midshipman Browne.”

“It isn't anyone,” he said.

Browne was certain that no one was there. He looked cautiously at the sun that hung so strangely in the window, at the edge of the sky. Its suspended motion furthered illusion. He spoke to the persuasive image that he had mistaken for a wife, who seemed to want him to stay.

The deasil was sacred. It was an old principle of the sea. He moved his extended palm from horizon to horizon in a clockwise motion. Perfect order. It was always necessary in determining the relative motion of bodies to hold their courses in mind. Clockwise was sound.

He thought of himself heading around the world, congruent with the sun and stars. All that whirl, so much true and apparent motion.

“Look what connects me to them,” he told the illusionary woman. He referred to his wife and daughter.

There were bone hooks fastened to his flesh, inserted under the muscle so that he could swing free. Hide lines bound him to a pole, the central pole, the axis of the world. He swung around, in the ancient deasil motion, at varying angles to the blue horizon, supported by the trusty hooks beneath his ligaments. The line groaned as it turned on the bit. He himself sang in the grip of the hooks, glad to be there, exhilarated by the dips and turns. The rational, algorithmic Sun Dance. Such was love.

I'll make my fortune on the Japan Ground, Browne thought, bring my pretty ones silk and amber. Many before him had thought the same.

All at once Browne was certain that he was alone after all and that he had better get out of the familiar house. It was difficult to isolate and address hallucinations, which were part and parcel of sailing alone. It was hard sometimes to distinguish them from the genuine insights which only the sea provided. Sometimes you had to take the bitter with the sweet.

In the next cove, he found more bones and another familiar sight. An ancient steam windlass coiled with rusted wire lay on the rocks together with a welter of ventilator tubes, riveted funnels and iron boilers.

He started back then. Coming in sight of the ash house, he stopped for a moment and looked anxiously at the single window on the second story. He wanted to see someone there. Yet he was afraid of seeing her. That was typical of him, he thought, to be afraid of what he wanted.

That made him consider all that he had learned about himself. From a certain point of view, Browne thought, there were things about himself he hardly dared reflect on. Can it be, he thought, that everyone has this much to conceal?

It was difficult, and every day had its secrets. Every hour had some unsuitable reflection. The longer everything stretched on, the greater the weight of subterfuge. It was necessary to live and then to justify, to balance the calculated and the true. It was necessary to experience life correctly but at the same time compose it into something acceptable.

He stopped and turned back toward the house. He felt truly exhausted, ready to fall asleep on his feet. How restful it would be, he thought, if he could put himself to one side and put things on the other. When he looked at the horizon again, to his great relief the sun was down.

O
NE DAY
Thorne's office called to say that Harry had consented to go on camera for Strickland's film.

“Seriously?” Strickland asked Joyce Manning. “What made up his mind?”

“Frankly, Ron,” Joyce said, “I think he's always been curious about your operation. He told Duffy he'd personally pay you off.”

“Sounds ominous,” Strickland said.

Harry came alone to the Hell's Kitchen studio. “I wanted to have a look,” he explained. He did not seem favorably impressed. They talked movies.

“I have friends in the picture business,” Thorne told Strickland. “They take a lot of shit from highbrows. But they're very good at what they do.”

Strickland was taking his own sound. When he had tested the level, he aimed a camera at his guest.

“Really? What is it they do?”

Thorne laughed humorlessly. “You might say they anticipate popular taste. Across the country and across the world. I think that's pretty good.”

“Your friends in pictures used to manufacture popular taste,” Strickland said, “when they owned all the tools. Now they're just gamblers.”

“You seem to know all about it.”

“Everybody does. People in that business don't know from one season to the next what will sell for them. It's a pseudo-rational process. They're medicine men. If it rains, they say they did it. If not, they blame someone else.”

“But it appears,” Thorne said, “that you couldn't cut it out there.”

“I took my business elsewhere. I found other things to do.”

“Really?” Thorne asked. He took his glasses off and squinted at Strickland with a hard smile as though it were easier to see him that way. Strickland kept filming. “Less trivial things, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“I suppose you think Hollywood films are trivial. A lot of them are. Documentaries are more serious.”

“We try.”

Thorne watched him with what seemed to be myopic pleasure at the filming process.

“The guys in L.A. make a lot of trivial pictures about trivial things. Maybe that's bad. Other people make trivial pictures about serious things. Like the Vietnam War. They trivialize what's important.”