Red Clocks (30 page)
Authors: Leni Zumas
“Bye!” The girl waves.
The mender waves back.
Soon it will be February fifteenth: the Roman festival of Lupercalia. And the girl’s birthday.
She and Cotter started the girl. The mender, with her body, continued the girl. For a time her clock
was full of water and blood and a kicking fish. Which is both important and not important.
He may figure it out himself, once he sees her enough times in town. But he may not. Should she tell him? All that Cotter does for her. The bread on her step each week; the nutmeg pie at Christmas. Hauling Temple’s plastic-wrapped body in his truck bed to the harbor, hoisting the body onto a borrowed boat,
maneuvering the boat in darkness out of the slip and past the breakwater and into open ocean. Without hesitation he did these things.
The girl is continuing herself. Has no need of Cotter, or of the mender.
But if she ever returns to the cabin of her own accord, she will be welcomed in. Given tea that tastes good. Introduced to Hans and Pinka and the halt hen. (She is already acquainted with
Malky.)
The mender pays for the nibs and sesame oil.
Walks back to the forest.
When the track narrows to a footpath, canopied by chain fern and rhododendron and Oregon manroot, she looks for the silver fir with the hourglass resin blister.
Hello, Temple.
Alive in the women who’ve swallowed mixtures made with her skin, her hairs, her eyelashes.
Buried in the sea.
The mender rubs leopard’s‑bane
salve into her burning calves. Lies in the dark with the cat on her chest. No more human voices the rest of the day. She wants only Malky’s growl and the
mehhh
of Hans and Pinka. The bleat of the owl, chirp of the bat, squeak of the ghost of the varying hare. This is how Percivals do.
She packed her rucksack with the anemometer and aneroid barometer, a flask of tea, two biscuits. Informed a tentful of card-playing crew she would be back in a few hours.
“If not, we’ll whistle for you,” said the boatswain, to groggy laughter.
She hadn’t been walking long when the fog flew in.
There are many names for fog. Pogonip. Brume. Ground clouds. Gloom. Mínervudottír had written
every name in her brown leather notebook. She stood now in a dense, creamy mist, the worst ice fog she’d ever known.
Was her compass damaged? Had she forgotten to bring it?
Bells and sledgehammer = fog signal
She shouted “Help” in three languages.
When her legs were too numb and trembling to lift themselves, she sat down.
No reindeer bag to crawl into.
She thought she heard the ship’s bells,
but couldn’t place their direction.
She drank ten sips of tea.
It was like sitting in a cloud.
Brother, where are the bells?
Eivør tried walking again but could see nothing in front of her except whiteness. She was afraid of stepping in a crack in the ice and dropping into the sea.
She sat down again.
Slit lambs hung in the shed, throats red.
I know which hillside.
She had no reindeer
bag.
This lamb fed from.
Survival was not assured. Her eyes were closing. She lay down
and slept until
. She tasted milk-boiled puffin—she was chewing her own cheeks.
Brother Gunni, bells are the where?
If she didn’t move, her blood would stop.
Persist,
Eivør told herself.
She stood and staggered on.
Dearest Yasmine,
I’m writing this letter from the Math Academy. It’s not as amazing as we envisioned, but it’s good.
I miss you. Always wondering how you are. What kind of school situation do they have there? Do you still want to do pre-med? My plan is marine biology. I touched a whale’s eye on the beach.
Please believe me, Yas: I didn’t want to tell anyone. I thought you were
going to die so I called them. That was the only reason.
Also: I had
a procedure
something happen. Three months ago.
When you get out of Bolt River, can we be friends again?
Love,
MATTS
Mínervudottír was found under a pane of ice. They saw her face first, as if pressed up to glass, one cheek flat and white. The blacksmith wrote later, to his wife:
I have never seen an eye opened wider
. She had removed her coat to free herself to fight the current and break the ice. Her fingernails, from scratching, were almost gone.
The search party did not chop open the water to claim
the explorer’s corpse. They may have crossed themselves, or said prayers, or simply been relieved that one less mouth was alive to feed.
It is odious to lose a woman’s body to this wilderness,
wrote the blacksmith to his wife,
but we hadn’t the strength to retrieve it
.
Where does the book end?
It has to stop somewhere.
She has to step out of it.
Mínervudottír: A Hole.
Most whales, when they die, don’t wash up on beaches. Their carcasses fall to the ocean floor, where they are consumed over time by foragers big and small. A deep-sea whale fall can feed scavengers for fifty years or more.
Osedax,
types the biographer into her computer,
is a
bone-eating worm.
She peers through the slatted blinds at the heat-slicked lawns and palmettos and fire bush. The air-conditioning is jacked so high she shivers. Dad’s condo is a stucco box fastened to a row of other boxes, each with a tiny lanai overlooking the community center. It’s not all bad, he says. The community center has a barbershop and shows movies. Every Fourth of July, they serve
a decent whiskey punch.
Archie never set foot in Florida. The idea of a retirement village appalled him, and Ambrosia Ridge sounded like a porn name. One of their last arguments was about his refusal to visit. The biographer didn’t love retirement villages either, but Dad was here now. Archie called her a pious bureaucrat and hung up.
She calls toward the bedroom: “I’m turning down the AC, okay?”
“Be out in a sec.” His bedsprings jounce.
“Don’t rush. Breakfast is still in progress.”
It will take him time to emerge. When he walks, his pain is conspicuous—the hunched-over shuffling, the pausing every few feet. He waves off the biographer’s questions about treatment options. She needs to call his doctor herself.
Once her father has shambled in, she explains the Faroese meal laid out on
the coral-laminate countertop: boiled puffin eggs (chicken eggs), wind-dried whale blubber (pork bacon), and Shrovetide buns (canned-dough biscuits).
“My doctor says I can’t have bacon”—he crams a strip into his mouth—“but blubber is allowed.”
“Why can’t you?”
“When you’re old, they like to prohibit things. How else are they going to fill up those twelve-minute appointments? No bacon, no sugar.
And no amorous exertion.”
“Dad.”
“Oh, relax.”
The biographer chews and stares out at the man-made pond. Like many things at Ambrosia Ridge, the pond is depressing and soothing in equal measure. The aerator generates a round-the-clock fountain, proof of fraudulence; yet the little fountain, throwing beads of green sunlight, is actually kind of pretty.
“Let’s toast to your mother.”
She lifts
her cup. “To Mama.”
Dad lifts his. “To my dear heart.”
The refrigerator whirs. A distant lawnmower revs its motor.
“Should we also,” says the biographer.
He nods.
“To Archie,” she says.
“To Archer, who was the sweetest little boy.” Clears his throat. “To go from such sweetness to—”
Pawning their dead mother’s jewelry.
Pushing a steak knife into the fat of Dad’s upper arm.
“Peace,” says
the biographer.
They raise their cups.
Dad eases himself down off the high stool. “This goddamn chair is hell on my back. I’ll just stand.”
She really needs to call his doctor.
“So today is my birthday,” she says.
He slaps his forehead. “What? Jesus, did I forget?”
“We don’t need to celebrate, I just—”
“Answer: I did
not
.” He takes a folded envelope from his shirt pocket. “Happy birthday,
sweetheart.”
“Wow, Dad, thank you!”
Inside the envelope is a gift certificate for Rose City Singles, good for two months of online membership and three speed-dating evenings.
MEET SINGLES IN OREGON AGES
40
+
.
“Okay.” She takes a long sip of coffee.
“An unconventional gift, I realize, but it might prove useful?”
He lives at Ambrosia Ridge. He’s in acute physical pain much of the time. She says
mildly, “Thanks,” and sets the certificate next to her plate.
“I am a fan of the Shrovetide bun,” says Dad, buttering his third.
“I’ll buy more dough before I leave. You just twist open the canister and they bake themselves.”
“I wish you could stay longer, kiddo.”
“Me too.” Despite the gift certificate, this isn’t a lie.
Reasons I can’t:
- Job
The school term ends in June. But she might
apply for Fivey’s position. There are some changes she wouldn’t mind making. Fewer bubble tests, more music classes. Social-justice and meditation curricula.
Principal Stephens.
A good job for a pious bureaucrat?
Or she could work outside the apparatus, as the Polyphontes do.
After the body of Eivør Mínervudottír sank to the bottom of Baffin Bay, west of Greenland, it entered into many other
bodies.
She is menstruating when she dies. Strips of burlap wadded into her crotch unfurl in the water, making a brief red cloud. A Greenland shark smells the blood from two miles off; turns in a slow, silent arc; and aims his sleek bulk in the blood’s direction.
Crumbs of her skin drift up into the brine channels. Reindeer fur and flannel threads catch on ice dendrites reaching down from the
undershelf.
After the apex predators have had their fill, the smaller ones feast: hagfish, lobsters, limpets, clams, brittle stars. Then the amphipods, the bone-eating worms, the bacteria.
A narwhal hunting for air holes drags its shadow across her.
Krill gnaw green blooms of algae off the ceiling of ice.
The explorer comes, over time, apart.
Weeks after digesting Mínervudottír’s flesh, the
Greenland shark is caught near the western coast of Iceland. The fishermen lop off his head and bury his body in gravel and sand, heap it with stones that press out the shark’s natural poisons (urea and trimethylamine oxide). After two or three months, the fish—by now fermented—is sliced and hung in a shed to dry. The pieces grow a brown crust, a shocking smell. When citizens of Reykjavík eat the
shark on December 25, 1885, they are eating Eivør Mínervudottír.
She did not leave behind money or property or a book or a child, but her corpse kept alive creatures who, in turn, kept other creatures alive.
Into other bodies she went, but also other brains. The people who read “On the Contours and Tendencies of Arctic Sea Ice” in
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
were
changed by the explorer. The English translator of her notebooks was changed by her. Mattie, hearing her tell of the
grindadráp,
was changed. The biographer, of course. And if her book has any readers, Mínervudottír will persist in them.
She brought in research that helped pirate ships penetrate the North, guns cocked, drills whetted.
And she brought:
If wrecked in this vessel, we wreck together.
And she brought:
The name I like best is “pack.”
Instead of applying for the principal job, the biographer could spend the summer at Ambrosia Ridge baking Shrovetide buns, calling doctors, and starting her next book. Go as Dad’s date to the Fourth of July picnic.
She could stay in the fog-smoked mountains, applying or not applying, breathing in the Douglas-fir and Scotch pine. The waves thumping,
spilling, sucking back.
She wants more than one thing.
To write the last sentence of
Mínervudottír
.
To write the first sentence of something else.
To be courteous but fierce with her father’s doctors.
To be a foster mom.
To be the next principal.
To be neither.
She wants to stretch her mind wider than “to have one.”
Wider than “not to have one.”
To quit shrinking life to a checked box,
a calendar square.
To quit shaking her head.
To go to the protest in May.
To do more than go to a protest.
To be okay with not knowing.
Keep your legs, Stephens.
To see what is. And to see what is possible.
Some details of European animal trials are taken from E. P. Evans’s
The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals
(London: William Heinemann, 1906).
“City born of the terror of the vastness of space”
: W. G. Sebald, “And If I Remained by the Outermost Sea,” in
After Nature,
translated by Michael Hamburger (New York: Random House, 2003; first published in German by Eichborn AG
[Frankfurt am Main], 1988).
Details of blindness curing and drum shattering are taken from Francesco Maria Guazzo’s
Compendium Maleficarum,
translated by E. A. Ashwin (London: John Rodker, 1929; first published in Latin by Apud Haeredes August [Milan], 1608).
“Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest
… And not one syllable is thine”; “Has moved amid this world’s foundations … when tossed by
pirates from the midnight deck”: Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
(London: Richard Bentley, 1851).
“When I lay with my bouncing Nell
, I gave her an inch, but she took an Ell: But … it was damnable hard, When I gave her an inch, she’d want more than a Yard”: John Davies of Hereford, “Wits Bedlam” (1617), in
A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature,
vol. 1, by Gordon Williams (London: Athlone Press, 1994).
