Forget the Sleepless Shores Page 19

  The wind hissed snow from the eaves, a momentary dust-devil of silhouettes across the floor, his bare feet, the faded and salt-rotten cloth. Anger did not warm him, but his skin shivered with something other than December; he stared stubbornly at the drowned boatsteerer, who did not stare back. Brass and polished, the verdigris crusts that buttoned Ezra McKay’s coat shone briefly as shadow eclipsed them, the bottle lifted and lowered again. Then the dead man sighed, or hawked his throat clear: Alex would not have balked to see him spit anything that came out of the sea, fire coral, phosphorescence, sea urchin’s roe, but instead he pulled himself up in his seat and Alex realized, with the uncomfortable surprise he had put off , that his eyes were a living man’s, light-colored, unconsumed by the sea. Out of his shipwreck face, Ezra McKay said, “She loves you.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “She was born for the salt house, remember; she don’t love the same way. But she loves you as well as she can, the way you mean it, and that holds her. But not for much longer. Tides draw out and they come back, but they come back different. She’s never the same wave twice.”

  Alex whispered, “Is that what you came to tell me? What I already know?”

  “Do you?”

  His salt-clogged voice, not unkind, the thin drip of water from his sleeve that smelled like low tide and uncovered mud: Alex could read him as easily as sea-chipped slate, driftwood scuttling with small crustaceans; a tidepool that reflected back another face. Of course I have bad dreams, he had told Annata, some morning over dim sum at the China Pearl; far enough into their relationship that he had stopped counting the dates, not so far that he had stopped wondering if each would be their last. And then I kick their asses. She had laughed and they had flipped a quarter for the last steamed pork bun. She slept miles away now, on the other side of waking. With a gesture that might have been apology and might only have been resignation, the boatsteerer nudged the bottle at him. So we’ll pay you with the foresheet and a promise from the sea! Reckless with dream, as though he could drink down all the sea-fancies that she murmured over their child, into his mouth, in their bed, he stepped forward into the damper cold that hung around Ezra McKay and took the bottle from the drowned man’s hand.

  Whatever its contents, he felt at first only the weight of the thick, flawed glass: cloudily green and streaked prismatic, so swirled and silted up with old sand and bits of barnacle that Alex held it gingerly, more than half sure it would dissolve into seawater in his grasp. But when he tilted the bottle, liquid clinked and washed inside, and no one had ever been poisoned in a dream; he tasted salt on the rim, the sunburned iron of seaweed, and he drank.

  His mouth flooded with thirst. Braced for brackish water or whiskey or the brown-sugar fume of rum, he gagged on brine; choked and coughed as violently as though he had breathed the drink in, until he realized he was spitting sand. Nor any drop to drink— The onion bottle slammed down on the desk, still clenched in his fist; he held himself upright on its shelves, hauling in air. A sliced-jade bookend was bald and cold as a skull beneath his hand. His eyes were spilling over. He felt too much as though he had been punched in the throat to shout; he tried, “Ezra—” but his mouth tasted like the glacial currents off Greenland, like the try-works’ greasy black smoke and orchids in sweltering profusion, coal tar and kelp and the moonlight lay as solidly across the floor as the ribs and creamy teeth of flensed whales. The clean-starched rustle of gingham he had kissed a girl in; caribou fringes and sealskin that he pushed back to get at her moon-pale belly, her darker hair. For I am fatigued from my long night’s journey. Besides, I am wet unto my skin. The bones sank out of sight in the darkness and the cold closed over his head. “Please.” He heard himself like a stranger, pleading with demons or the indifferent fall of dice: “Just stay out of her dreams.”

  “I can’t.”

  “The fuck you can’t!” This time he banged the bottle down like an argument, rattling loose pencils, paperclips, desk-drawer debris; all unseen. With his eyes as blue as the North Sea, the scars of frostbite and lost tempers wintering out on the Cumberland Sound and his tousled hair hid the worst, “I don’t care if you’re Jonah himself, you stay the fuck away from my wife—”

  The black flukes smashed down on them. Broken-backed in the maelstrom, breathless with the frigid sea, Alex lost his hold on the bottle and heard it shatter, distantly, into another icy spray at his feet. But there was no floor beneath him, neither planks payed with pitch nor the barnacle-whitened breach of a whale’s back; he had fallen against the window where his lost breath pearled upward in a silver rush, but the panes were breaking up around him in slabs of moonlight, rotten ice under his hands. Papers scattered like petrels to the wind, spindrift from the berg-green waves. Half seas over, and the other half pulled him down. Or there were sponge-riddled hands clenched in the cotton of his undershirt, his face so close to the boatsteerer’s that the details of wrack and decay blurred like tears and what gripped him was only human, passionate, furious with sorrow; the hoarse and rising shout that was barely speech, and he fled from it into the seething waters, the seventh wave that hurled him dry and sweating into his own sheets: “Damn you, is she all you love?”

  No shore in sight to strike out for, and Alex sat up so sharply that the bed creaked and swayed beneath him. He heard seagroaning timbers before he remembered box springs, too rustily loud for the night wind and the snow and Annata half-curled away from him into the pillows, the drying tangles of her hair, her murmur that might have been his name. “Shit….” There was a bitter tin taste in the air; he groped for the windowsill, pushed the sash down against the greyer shade of dark that fanned icily over his hand. Under too many blankets, he had sweated his silhouette into the sheets. The snow was whispering behind the shade. He wiped his face against his forearm, piled the covers back onto Annata’s side of the bed; from the other room, a child’s voice was crying threadily, doggedly, as though no one had come to comfort her and no one ever would. No consolation for anyone, Alex mumbled, “Go back to sleep, I’ve got her.” Tumbled in her dreams, as pale-faced as foam and her hair like red weed, his wife sighed a word he could not make out. His shirt slid and clung across his shoulders as he moved, as wet and warmthless as the clothing of a drowned man.

  **

  By moonlight, he walked his daughter down to the returning tide. Cast in silver, the sliding plaits of foam and the crunch and scrape of shells underfoot were the words they did not speak, her fingers that loosened from his only reluctantly as she stepped past him into the spilling white line of the waves, the sea that mouthed ceaselessly at the land, someday to drink it down entire; far enough up the curve of the beach that he could trace the coastline only by its state-park lights and the constellations it blocked out, the lighthouse’s Fresnel eye dimmed and blazed, a monument to shipwrecks and safe harbors, nothing to guide either of them home. The wind had freshened, cooler than the night air that smelled like tears and sweet rain and the aftermath of love. Small lights moved far out on the horizon, trawlers, lobster boats. The last summer of their landbound lives, Alex and Annata had driven out to Cape Cod to watch the Perseids, short-tempered with one another, touchy, mute with wonder at the stars that rained into the Atlantic: the tears of Saint Lawrence, the daughters of the monster slayer and the princess saved from the sea. The writer without words and the mythographer’s wife who had outstripped her husband, becoming not the telling but the thing itself. Beside him, the girl who had been born Adrian Marcinko skinned her tank top over her head, stepped out of her shorts; her skin took the moon like nacre, as hard-muscled and slender as a diver. The beat of blood in his throat was difficult enough to speak through; he whispered, “I keep losing you both.”

  “You shouldn’t live so far inland.” Perhaps she had earned the right to tease him, or she meant the words for truth; he smiled faintly, enough that the expression reflected in her eyes. “Come back to Boston.”

  “Or New Bedford?” Nor had this been any easier the last ti
me, when she had twisted from his arms like a seal into a slow breaker that hid her beneath its welter of foam and never come up for air; he had paced up and down the granite-studded shore, scanning each crest and trough with the heartsick anxiety of a parent whose child could drown, until long after moonset and the early autumn stars. The same desolation that Elizabeth McKay might have felt, each time the Galatea sailed for the Sandwich Islands or the Arctic grounds and she had nothing to do but count the months and watch the sky and open her door, one night in meadow-sweet June, to a dream stolen from the ocean’s changeable heart. Half-seriously, “I could just walk into the sea….” But his daughter was shaking her head, and he knew that his one gift would not reach that far: the last souvenir of a fisherman’s son born in the year of the first elevator and the Second Opium War, small sea-change, and another man might have thrown all the postcards away. He could not unsee them; he had drunk memory, not Lethe. He said instead, “Then you’ll have to keep walking out of it,” and the way her hair sleeked down her shoulders as she half-turned toward him chilled him.

  He could not swear anymore that her fingers were not linked with translucent webs, her brows as questing and feathery as sea pens. The fronds and vesicles of rockweed hung more heavily in her hair than green algae. Even the half-known bones of her face flowed a little as she breathed, in time with the surge and eddy of the waves that deepened around her, and drops flung up from their collision flecked her hips like scales. The tide had already filled her eyes.

  Any words he could invent to stay her for another aching moment, and Alex said gently, “She’s waiting for you.” This smile, she had inherited from no one but her great-great-grandfather.

  “She always is.”

  He held her even as she receded from him, into the depths that had he had watched unclothe themselves from her with the afternoon tide; even after her shoulders had roughened with coral and cockles and his skin smarted stickily beneath his shirt, sea nettles and crowns-of-thorns, wherever her arms had tightened most fiercely around him, she was no more than a foxfire wake among the fishing boats before he closed his eyes. As though he could imprint her on the dark there, a bioluminescent tattoo, but phosphenes bloomed like plankton over her track and beyond the seal of his eyelids, the waves hushed and roared to themselves. He knelt on the tide-runneled stones, no harder than the words he had not spoken at the last, and began to gather up her sandals and her shorts, her shirt that had floated ghostly off the sand.

  From the boardwalk where no gulls called and only the marram grass bristled around him, Alex looked back once, as though on the night sea he could catch a glimpse of Annata as once he had dreamed her, wilder and more beautiful than her daughter, with lionfish spines at wrist and elbow and a nautilus iridescence flicking from the least movements of her hands, black pearls and blue amber in her hair that had not lost its fiery color but thickened into restless anemones; a mistress of drowned kingdoms, all the wealth and peril of the sea that she had claimed for herself. No face so comprehensible, no surety in dreams. He saw the black plain of waters, rippling with the quarter moon.

  AND BLACK UNFATHOMABLE LAKES

  If a man who fights monsters becomes a monster himself, what of the woman who sleeps with him? Who can watch his eyelids flicker at night, tracing the paths his life has taken through dark woods and cemeteries cold with dawn, fire and fresh-whetted wood, and papers, papers, papers? Sometimes she thinks he should have stayed a scholar, safe within his stacks of meticulous routine, never sent himself out like a saint to the gates of hell, so raw to the world and all the darkness in it that she has seen him flinching even as his blows strike home. A hunter, always, but of conjectures and lemmata, the only dead he grappled with the authors of forgotten books. But she would have died then, and been worse than dead, in the town where she once thought to have lived a bride; if he stays awake over his notes and researches until the candles blow themselves out and she turns over in their empty bed once more, she does not wish it was behind university doors.

  He never asked her to marry him. She watched him kill the man who would have torn her throat out and made her love him for it, claw her way out of her own grave to slink in his blond-browed shadow and smile when he brought the next sweet-breasted sacrifice home; he knew she would feel only a shackle’s weight in a ring, coffin-thuds in the bells of their wedding peal. They travel decorously, a good doctor and his wife. Their daughter displays her mother’s hyacinth-curling hair, her father’s slim height and his fever-edge as well as his steel-cut eyes—a thin-skinned child, prone to night terrors and pain at the unrightness of things, weeping with fury when she cannot check the cruelties of other children or the bewildering humanness of the strangers they pass. (Will you teach her stakes and crosses, my love? Will she learn to fight shadows with shadows, polish her pistols with garlic and wolfsbane and turn out her pockets for rowan twigs before bed? Will she save a boy in a black forest and hold him so tightly, he hears her heart hammering all the things she never studied how to say? Will she feel alone, even wrapped round her lover at night? Will she know she is loved?) In the beds of guesthouses and the sleeper cars of trains, on bracken that smells like his hair when he comes in from a night’s hunting, clean and faintly of woodsmoke, like a prowling cat, his lean clever hands move over her body with all the fierce and frightened desire of the night she reached to touch him beside their fire, when she first put her hand along the sharp angle of his jaw and felt the scarring under his chin, her once-betrothed’s bite. He turned his mouth to her palm and kissed it softly and even then she felt him trembling, her unquiet man.

  There will be other children, born in other towns; other places where a woman who speaks three Continental languages can make herself of use. She teaches where she can, takes secretary’s work where she cannot; sometimes he leaves and comes back to her, other times she sees him next in some remote village where even the priests cross themselves as he goes by, weary and disheveled in the dawn-light with his hands hanging dusty at his sides. He has killed things that bleed and things that burn, things that were once human and things that never came close, things that wept themselves into river water as he chanted them away. The world is full of monsters and he does not hold himself responsible for them all, only the ones he can find. Her scholar-soldier, who saved her the night she saved him, holding him in the moon- and fire-crossed darkness as though she saw in him nothing to fear. Neither of them lies to the other, speaking love. She did not know her first monster when she met him. She knew her second, and she made her choice.

  THE FACE OF THE WATERS

  ‘The clue you’re looking for at thirteen down,’

  She said, ‘is river-stairs, and learning that

  Will cost you.’

  —Sean O’Brien, “On the Toon”

  She took the cigarette with fingers as cold as scallops, her nails in the streetlight slicked with a glass-eel gleam. “Of course it’s bad for me,” she agreed. Smoke trailed through her words, lingered where her breath did not fog in the chilly air. “But you think that’s so much better?” Her gesture scattered sparks like a comet’s tail, hissing out as they earthed themselves on wet bricks and bollards. The waters of the canal slopped patiently at their feet, as dark and opaque as time.

  Beside her in the shadow of the old toll office, Julian Elmslie shivered and dug his bare hands deeper into the pockets of his coat. He was still drunker than he would have liked, not so wasted that he had stopped feeling like a fool—nearly forty and slamming out of the flat after a shouting match with his boyfriend, pulling on his coat like a ham actor playing the part of a disgruntled husband as he stormed up Ledsam Street, the righteous adrenaline already draining and the d’escalier conviction of having been in the wrong stealing in. The mobile in his pocket was silent and reproachful as a stone. He drifted toward the Flapper more out of inertia than desire, head bent and coat open to the rain misting sideways over the enameled colors of the narrowboats moored on the far side of the footbridge at Cambrian
Wharf; seated alone beneath a barrel-curve of backstage-black brick and old posters, he drank steadily through two rounds of local post-punk and walked out on the third when he realized his ears were ringing as numbly as the music, all sludgy, chunky guitars and feedback that swirled like silt through the blurred violet of the stage lights. Somewhere behind the thrashing drums the vocalist was doing something he broadmindedly supposed was singing, lung-wrenching glassy wails like she was fighting for her life in a shipwreck. The overtones followed him out onto the pavement, clinging inside his skull. The temperature had dropped disorientingly for June, as if the solstices had gotten confused; his face felt feverish in the rain, or perhaps it was a consequence of ordering his ales based strictly on their names. He was trying to recall what had appealed about High Wire Grapefruit as he doubled back across the locks, a shortish, thinnish man in an army surplus coat the color of wet slate, his bramble-brown hair curling scrubbily in the damp, five o’clock shadow just starting to silver in, when the sudden slipperiness of stone under his next step knocked it out of his head forever. He flailed for a comical, useless second and fell. In the slow motion before he struck first kerb and then water, he could hear the brainweasels like a well-worn record, Oh, well done, if there was a way to make a night worse, trust you to find it—a stupid, drunken accident, a casualty worthy of a tourist who thought navigations were a setting on Google Maps. The lit-up balconies of the Flapper wheeled out of his vision, their reflections scattered white and crocus-yellow across the rain-pocked skin of the canal. He wondered if he had managed to end the fight with Oliver badly enough that it would mostly annoy him to be asked to identify the body.