The Year of Broken Glass (9 page)

That night, as I considered what my response might be to all this in the awkward silence that followed Arnault's outpouring of the myth, I remember noticing suddenly that the crickets had stopped their singing. The silence wasn't only awkward, it was complete. This seemed, at the time, to lend a particular weight to the evening and to Arnault's telling, and it inspired in me a fleeting but undeniable feeling that Arnault's tale might, in fact, be less of a fiction than I'd been thinking while listening to him tell it.

“If you ever find or hear of a float that bears any of these symbols upon it, Miriam,” Arnault said, “contact me without delay.” He put the piece of paper with the many drawings in my hand. “There are those who, knowing too of the myth, would rather the float remain unfound. Or if found, unbroken, so as to keep the curse intact.”

It was with this claim that I could no longer contain myself, and I burst through Arnault's gravely serious tone with a near-hysterical fit of laughter. Poor Arnault. After all that, to feel the compulsion to cap it off with the suggestion of some conspiracy theory. Though as he rose and left me on the couch, doubled over Poseidon on my lap, it seemed it was him who pitied me.

Shortly after I used the piece of paper he'd given me as fire starter, and I've thought nothing of it since. For a moment it crossed my mind when Ferris first revealed his find, and I thought fleetingly that I might call Arnault as he'd requested. But really I've always considered him a kook, much like my dear third husband, a man born of great wealth who was never forced to grow beyond his childhood daydreams and flights of fancy. I imagined Arnault insisting that he come to see the float before anyone else is contacted, and then further dragging the whole thing into some fantastical and ludicrous scenario. I knew that even if I, out of some respect for the friendship he once shared with Horace, had the patience for such things, a young and eager man like Ferris most probably would not.

Now I'm lying here remembering the thick black clouds of ash hovering over the Cascades today, ash that is probably by now falling on the forest around me, and I can't help but consider the coincidence. Fish float found, fire in the sky. One of the particulars Arnault had told me about his magic fishing float of Mu was that it could not, in any way, be broken by anything or anyone other than he who had created and set it out upon the water, the killer of the last Sohqui. The myth said that he was to find it, and take it from the sea, and that when he did he was to break it and throw it to the depths of the Mauna Kea immediately. Arnault claimed further that if this were to not happen, if it were to be lost or waylaid, or to fall somehow into the wrong hands, that a fury of fire and water of the magnitude that took Mu and the Naacal to the ocean's depths would again be set upon the earth.

There's something about this fort, about this creepy island, full as it undoubtedly is of individuals living beyond what is generally considered sanity (I've heard Lasqueti referred to a number of times as the “open-aired asylum”), that makes fertile ground for such far-fetched thoughts. But Ferris's rendezvous was set for noon, and there's no way he could have made the exchange beforehand… unless he sold it elsewhere or had it stolen from him. Both unlikely, which leaves two options. Either Arnault's tale is true and the float possesses some conscious power to pre-emptively conjure a catastrophic earthquake in order to avoid being given over into the wrong hands, or Arnault's story is, as I'm inclined to think, hogwash. But still there is that sense in me that there may be some truth to the myth Arnault told me so many years ago. Which is why I'm here in Fairwin's fort, waiting for sleep to take me and carry me into tomorrow, resolved as I am now to break my vow of secrecy to Arnault and tell Fairwin' the story of the Sohqui and the float, so he will leave with me on the
Princess Belle
at first light to go search for Ferris Wishbone.

•

When I wake, dawn light pixelating through the shutters, it's with a sense of renewal and foreboding both, and I know this upheaval of my life brought on by the earth's is altering my sense of things, making me take and consider actions that are perhaps against my better judgment. I lie in my warm bed of lamb pelts as Fairwin' lights a candle and his little cookstove, then pours water from a large brass urn into a glass pot, setting it on the stovetop. He starts in on some strange form of stand-in-place qigong, all he would have room for amidst the clutter, patting and slapping himself up and down his body, rapping on the back of his head, his fingers tapping on his closed eyelids, all the while breathing ferociously. Then he settles back into an open-armed stance, like he's holding a large ball to his chest. His breathing eases to inaudible and I close my eyes again, not prepared yet to abandon the luxury of my nest for the bareness of the coming day, and think instead of Ferris.

The night Ferris dined at my home he and I were in the kitchen with his big oaf of a friend Svend snoring soundly on the couch, and strange old Fairwin' Verge gone off to bed. I'd arranged earlier in the evening, with more ease than I'd anticipated, to have a buyer pay Ferris $150,000 for his float. So naturally his spirits were high, celebratory, and I'd played on that all evening, fixing a succulent feast of oysters and crab, thyme-roasted potatoes and a spinach, pear and chevre salad, with a dessert of chocolate ganache cake and a gooseberry reduction. I'd brought from my cellar fine wines: a '73 Chateau Margaux and a '84 Chateau Latour, among others. So there we were, pleasantly full and mildly intoxicated, comfortable in conversation, sharing the task of washing the evening's dishes, a task that, despite its mundane domesticity, has always seemed to
me to possess a hint of the romantic in such a circumstance—two complete strangers sharing a very commonplace household ritual.

“So, a fortunate weekend for you,” I said to him, wiping the last of the cheese and crab-shell bits into the sink. I rinsed my hands under the tap, then turned to him seated behind me on my wide maple island. I ran my hands up and down his thighs to dry them, looking up into his eyes with unveiled intent. My side of the air between us was electric; bolts of it rushed up my fingers to my breasts as I touched his legs, something I hadn't felt in so long I'd forgotten or given up on its possibility. “What are you going to do with all that money?” I asked, which I understood immediately to be the wrong direction in which to steer the conversation. I lifted my hands from his legs as his eyes winced.

He looked away. “It's complicated,” he replied, and slid drunkenly, more drunkenly than I'd expected, from the counter. Then he slipped away from me into the living room, where he lifted the float from its tote on the floor. Holding it at eye level, he stared into it like it was a crystal ball, as though he were viewing within it his future, swaying on his feet ever so slightly as he did so.

I poured our wineglasses full and carried them as quietly and elegantly as I could into the living room. I'm not an unrealistic woman. It was clear to me that Ferris is of the calibre of man who can pick and choose his women, so I knew if I was going to have any chance with him it was going to be then and there in my own home. I seated myself on the chaise lounge, trying to give him space to come back to me from wherever it was my question had sent him off to. Svend coughed and buried his head under a pillow on the couch opposite us.

“Why is this thing worth so much money?” Ferris finally asked, a perplexed and incredulous, almost angry look on his face. “That's a good question,” I offered in reply, holding his wineglass up to him. “I can't say I entirely know.”

He looked down at my answer and the proffered glass of wine in seeming disgust, then carried the float into the kitchen. He placed it on the counter and pulled a drinking glass from the drying rack, which I'd stacked, I'll admit, in a rather haphazard, drunkenly fashion. The other glasses tumbled one after the other to the counter and floor, shattering around Ferris's feet.

“Fuck!” he yelled, grabbing the float which had been set in rolling motion by one of the toppling glasses. He wheeled quickly around and moved toward me, which is when his feet slid out from under him on the scattering of glass. As he fell the float ejected from his arms onto the island. It rolled toward me across the wood, and it was all I could do to stand in time to see it drop from countertop height to the floor.

I rushed first to Ferris to see that he was all right, helping him up. “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed, brushing the glass from his jeans and shirt. “The float!” We both stepped over the glass to the far side of the island, where I reached down and lifted it off the floor. I turned the overhead halogens on and we inspected it in the bright light. Not a scratch. Ferris sighed in deep relief, glass shards still glinting on his shirt and in his hair. I swept him off, looked his hands and feet over for cuts and embedded glass, then suggested he take a shower down the hall in my ensuite bathroom.

While he did so I swept the glass from the kitchen floor and wiped a few small drops of his blood off the fir. I recall being aroused again by the rawness of this, dipping my pinky finger into a spot of it and taking it to my lips. I could hear the sound of the water falling across his body, and had half a mind then to disrobe and slip into the shower with him uninvited. Instead I waited, and finished wiping the glass from the floor with a wet cloth, listening as the water stopped, and shortly after as he stepped from the bathroom and the springs of my bed flexed as he lay his body across it.

I washed my hands again in the sink and loosened my hair from the bun I'd kept it wound in all evening. It fell beyond my shoulders, still long and shiny, though whitening and thinning, as I ran my hands over my breasts and belly, wondering for a moment if I was up for this, if I truly had it in me still. Then I took a last sip of wine from my glass and left the kitchen, dimming the lights as I walked down the hallway to my bedroom, where I found Ferris splayed across my bed, naked but for a towel around his waist, asleep.

I approached the bed and tried to rouse him, placing my hand lightly on his arm and quietly calling his name, but he was done. The sight of his still-wet and muscled body was a bit too much for me. I leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, my breasts alighting as they brushed across his naked chest, and the next thing I knew I was practically running down to the beach house. There I knocked on the door until Fairwin' answered, then proceeded to have my way with him. It was a rough, unfulfilling fuck, he and I having never had any spark, and both of us too old for our libidos to make up for its lack. Though it did serve to attenuate my desire enough that I could, in its easing, drift off to sleep beside Fairwin' in a bed that has since been washed away by the sea.

Now I'm lying on Fairwin's floor thankful both that I was not swallowed by the sea along with the Globe House yesterday morning, and that Fairwin' made no mention before bed of that evening and what, in my inexcusable lust, I'd instigated between us. Recasting it all in my mind as I have this morning I feel a touch shameful and every bit the fool, and it has put in question for me the very premise of my being here. What is it that I'm after, the float or Ferris? It's disorienting, everything that's occurred in the past twenty-four hours, and I feel as though I can't trust my own sense of direction, like I'm a ship unanchored, unpowered and drifting. So I resolve to slow down, to get in touch with Arnault Vericombe, and to keep his myth to myself until I'm able to do so.

ARNAULT WON'T ANSWER. I try his numbers several times without success as Fairwin' and I hike down to Boat Cove to harvest oysters. Fairwin' barters with the other islanders for what he can't find or catch in the forest or sea. The rice we ate for breakfast, for instance, he trades for each fall with salmon he cures in a small smoker below his fort. It's his one transgression, he says, the rice that forms the main carbohydrate staple of his diet, grown and shipped up from California. Otherwise, his is the five-mile diet, and those five travelled by foot or by oar.

We each carry with us two plastic five-gallon buckets procured from the Blue Roof Bar and Grill in False Bay. After an hour and a half's walking we reach the bay, a beach of jagged and barnacled rock giving off to a long littoral sand-flat. There are old Salmon Enhancement Project signs along the roadside fence bordering the ravine and the little creek trickling down to Boat Cove. Once the object of some of the locals' best intentions and efforts, the creek is now clogged with blowdown along its length, the mouth jammed with stormed-in driftwood. I remember when spawning-ground enhancement work was the new idea, it was going to save the salmon, and for a time every environmentally concerned citizen was out there cleaning creek beds of debris, building fish ladders, digging, planting, fencing. Then it was on to the next thing. Water quality, clearcuts, organic gardening, emissions… Now, some twenty years after these signs were set in the ground so hopefully and proudly signifying our efforts at atonement, the salmon are nearing extinction.

If only Arnault's prophecy were true. If only everything, if only anything, were that simple. Though I have always believed that indeed there are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio… and so I haven't ever gone to the extremes of Fairwin' Verge, my über-hippie hermit friend picking his way adeptly over the beach, filling his bucket with some of the hundreds of oysters clinging to and strewn amongst the rocks. He says this will be one of the last harvesting days before the algae blooms turn the bivalves toxic, so he's stocking up.

For my part, I walk more tentatively over the inhospitable rocks. I suppose the past fifteen years living with Horace's money, on beaches of fine sand, in luxury, have left me soft. I fill each bucket half-full, not wanting my arms stretched down to my ankles by the time we've ascended back to the fort. Which I suppose is emblematic of our varied approaches, Fairwin's and mine, of the different lengths (pardon the pun) we are willing to go to.