Wonders of the Invisible World (37 page)

We found Paolo and Sharon sipping drinks with plastic penguins skewered onto their stirrers. “Isn’t this wonderful?” Sharon sighed, gazing at the bottom of the world, which had been approaching for days, it seemed, without getting much closer. “I could live like this forever. I sat in the Jacuzzi and then went for a swim, and by that time I felt so good I went on deck and thought up some themes for my next piece, which will incorporate some of the whale songs we heard. I have a synthesizer that can do those sounds. I thought about references to Bach, and maybe U2—like the whole planet making music.”

She glowed, ivory and sunlight. Paolo glowed bronze. I glowed fungus, the way I felt. But Alex gave me a little private smile, as if I had done something right. I picked a plastic seahorse out of a drink called an Ice Breaker, and drank half of it. It was salty and so cold my facial bones ached in the aftermath. Alex, who seemed to carry the lecture schedule with her even when she was stark naked, pulled it out of the air and consulted it.

“Lights in the Abyss,” she read. “Luminosity in Fish.”

I dropped my head in my arms, groaning. My nose bumped against the plastic seahorse; it smelled oddly dank and briny. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can,” Alex said calmly. “We’ll go dancing again afterward. I promise. We’ll find every band on the ship.”

“It’ll be better,” Sharon sighed, “when we reach the pole. They’ll take us out on boats to see the penguins and things.”

“How can this ship have so many bars?” I asked the seahorse. “I swear it wasn’t this big when we got on it.”

But they only laughed. Alex finished her drink and went for a swim; Sharon went to buy a tape of the whales’ songs. That left me with Paolo, who excused himself and headed after Alex. I ordered another Ice Breaker and watched an enormous ice cube in the distance. It looked delicate, ethereal, a floating palace rising out of the glittering blue. I watched it a long time; it never came any closer.

Much later, I contemplated the luminosity of Sharon’s hair on the dance floor of yet another bar, and wondered where we were all going, and if we would ever get any closer.

The next morning, in the lecture room, I stared at something huge, alien, with a metallic mouth that kept taking bites out of a fossil reef on some sunny island. It kept eating as, on another screen, the lecturer showed us brilliant branches of coral colonies, and the tiny polyps opening on them like night flowers to feed in the dark, while the parrotfish, who also ate coral, slept. The monster machine kept grinding away at the reef as she spoke. Finally, one of the three other people who had made it out of bed that morning asked.

“A resort,” the lecturer said without expression. “The island is owned by a very poor country. The government is trying to create jobs and to increase its revenues.”

I heard Alex take a breath, then loose it slowly. Polyps or poor people? The lecturer showed us another coral colony. The metallic monster kept soundlessly chewing.

So did we at lunch. In apology for something I didn’t catch, they served mountains of lobster tails, crab legs, shrimp. A boat trip, Sharon sighed, to take a closer look at the iceberg. I watched, mesmerized, as her full lips, the red-pink of coral, closed and sucked.

“What’s the matter with the boats?” Alex asked, peeling a shrimp.

“Nothing,” Sharon said, swallowing. “There’s something wrong with the water.”

“Too choppy?” I guessed, though I hadn’t felt anything. Paolo said something, then translated it.

“A tanker hit the iceberg last night. They’re having trouble containing the oil.”

Alex got up wordlessly; I followed her to the glass walls of the restaurant. But they were tinted; the water looked normal, full of ice floes, sea birds and light. The ice palace had floated past us during the night; it seemed farther away now. One end of the tanker stuck out from behind it, on its side and bleeding. Small boats, trawlers, Coast Guard cutters hovered around it, like gulls around a dying shark. I expected Alex to be upset; she only said absently, “There are other boat trips planned.”

Maybe, I thought incredulously, I had eaten the wrong side of a flounder under a full moon in a month with the letter “K” in it. I was hallucinating the entire cruise. Alex drifted back to the table. She didn’t look at Paolo. He didn’t look at her. Maybe I was hallucinating that, too: the effort they made not to look at each other.

“Don’t you find this inspiring?” Sharon asked, as I sat down again. “I mean, musically? I’ve been dreaming music.” She cracked a lobster claw, and squirted lemon on it, catching me in the eye with acid. “Oh, Jeff, I’m sorry.”

I blinked away lemon tears. I had lost my napkin on the way to the window. Alex stared at me, then passed her napkin over. But it was too late; my other eye had started tearing in sympathy. I couldn’t stop it. I stood up finally, red-eyed, trying to laugh, while Alex kept staring, and Sharon kept making musical noises, and Paolo looked at his plate. I left them there.

I missed the afternoon lecture, and dinner. I roamed around trying to find the deck in the complex corridors, wanting to hear gulls, waves, wind. Arrows pointed every direction but out. I gave up finally, after climbing up more stairs than I thought the ship had decks for. I found a quiet bar with small tinted portholes covered with plastic green wreaths. A tape kept playing five Christmas carols arranged for synthesizer and marimba over and over. I drank beer and ate cold shrimp, tuna sushi and caviar, and watched trawlers on a screen spread nets that scraped the ocean bottom clean of fish, coral, sponges, sea squirts, urchins, starfish, beer cans, broken bottles, torn sails, and spilled them all onto the deck. The fishers picked through the dying animals, threw out everything but shrimp.

I drifted out finally, to find Alex at the evening lecture.

She wasn’t there.

But I was, so I stayed and watched whales sounding, dolphins leaping, orcas spy-hopping, coral polyps and anemones blossoming, bright reef fish cavorting, kelp swaying. Every now and then something the lecturer said penetrated.

“We have so thoroughly decimated the population of whales on this planet that only five percent remain alive.... More than thirty percent of the fish in every ocean...six million tons of fish per year...everywhere in the open sea we find oil, garbage, toxic chemicals...over one hundred million barrels of oil per year.... Heated wastewater from manufacturing processes provide false signals in the wrong season for spawning to begin.... Lobsters and catfish acquire a taste for oil.... Shorelines are dying.... Coral reefs are dying.... Over one thousand species since the century began....”

Someone sat down beside me. I looked at the trail of smooth ivory hair over my hand. Sharon put her lips to my ear, whispered, “We were worried about you.”

Her mouth lingered; I felt her breath. I stirred a little. No one else was in the room; the lecturer spoke grimly, her eyes wide, gazing at the empty chairs. If she spoke with enough passion, enough love, enough fear, people would materialize on them, begin to listen. Sharon rubbed my hand gently beneath her hair.

“Come on.”

I shook my head, stayed to the end. The lights went on. The lecturer rewound her video silently, collected her notes. I followed Sharon out. Everywhere in the vast and complex ship sailing to the end of the world, people congregated, talking, drinking, dancing, swimming, shopping, eating. Sharon led me up, continually up. I heard music at every turn of the stairs: rock bands, jazz bands, classical quartets, Christmas choirs, jukeboxes, waltzes, whale songs. I couldn’t see out anywhere. It was too dark. Or maybe the ship had sealed itself up because what was out there we didn’t want to see. We kept going up, passing elaborate rooms full of oak and gold leaf, decorated with enormous, beautiful, unreal trees, and gardens under glass. We walked on carpets an inch thick that changed colors like certain fish. After a while, I got used to Sharon’s slender, tense fingers holding mine. On every screen I glimpsed, whales surged upward blowing spume; seals clapped; penguins waddled; all the children of the sea played in the sea while we sailed serenely into the dark.

A G
ift
T
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B
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S
imple

I received the vision as I danced. I was the turning auger, the wheel spun around its center, the end of the circle moving to meet its beginning, to complete itself, without beginning and without end. I remember speaking of what I saw; sounds like shining gold bubbled up in me, floated out of my mouth. Across the room, in the light, I saw her, our divine Teacher, Mother Ann, the Word Incarnate, Daughter of God, in Whom He was well pleased. She smiled upon me, well pleased, and spoke.
Yes,
she said.
Do this in memory of me.

And I turned and I turned in the glory of her light.

The next morning I was awakened before dawn, as always, by the rumbling motors of the delivery trucks in the A&P parking lot. The lot was on the other side of our pond and beyond the thicket of wood surrounding it, but I always heard them. I never minded waking then. The rest of the world was quiet, as it must have been in Mother Ann’s time over two centuries before. Darkness hid the malls and offices and houses; our community might have been surrounded by dreaming farms again, with only a sleepy cricket still singing, and a bird beginning to rustle in a tree. In those peaceful moments I thought about my vision, the way I thought about something made with my hands: testing the design I had chosen, the material, making sure they conformed, with proper strength and simplicity, to the purpose I had in mind. Before long our cocks cried awake the sun, and the cows in the barn, and the traffic on the thruway, which began its morning flood toward the city. The soft chime that Brother Michael had programmed into the system above our doorways sounded for morning prayer. Sister Lisa and Sister Tiffany stirred in their beds, yawned. We all got up silently, knelt in prayer in our nightgowns until the chime sounded again. Then we rose and bade each other good morning. We turned our backs to one another and dressed quickly, talking about the household chores and who would do what.

“I need to change the oil in the truck this morning,” Sister Tiffany said. “Brother Greye wants to pick up lumber later on, for his chests.”

“Then I’ll help him with the milking,” Sister Lisa said. I heard her snapping the bib onto her denim milking skirt. Turning, I saw her flex her knobbed, reddened hands experimentally, as if they were stiff.

“I’ll do the beds,” I said. “And the dusting. And take the laundry down.” I opened a window wide to let the brisk autumn air in. The light was lovely, the color of old gold, from all the yellow yarrow and the dying leaves. Sister Lisa stepped to a mirror, began to pick her white braids apart. She grimaced once, absently, as at a sudden pain in a joint. I wondered if she saw herself anymore in the mirror; if any of us had seen ourselves for years. We were so used to our faces, we never saw the changes in them. There were no changes in our lives, so why should there be in our faces?

“I’ll make bread this morning,” Sister Lisa said, “after milking and breakfast. I think Sister Jennifer wants to work in the wood shop all day.”

I combed my own hair, a short and simple task. For some reason I remembered vividly what shade of red it had been when I was younger. I realized then how it had faded, day by day, year by year, since—when? When had it begun to turn? What year, what day had I begun to turn from young to old?

Sister Tiffany grunted suddenly. A button popped out from under her hands, spun across the floor. She gazed at me, flushed and wide-eyed. “It wouldn’t close,” she said of her skirt band. I retrieved the button from under a chair.

“I’ll mend it,” I promised. “Leave it here.”

“But it won’t close. It must have shrunk.”

“It’s all right. I can put a panel in it.”

“A lot of things have been shrinking lately.”

“Maybe it’s the laundry soap.”

She gazed down at herself as she reached for a skirt with some give in the band. “Is it,” she asked with wonder, “what they mean by middle age?”

We both looked at Sister Lisa, still so thin she wore the skirts and blouses of the adolescent girls we had cared for, before they left us. But her hair had no color left at all; it was ghostly white. Along the center of her head, where she had parted her hair in the same place every morning for decades, I could see her scalp.