Outerbridge Reach (42 page)

“No sir,” Fay said. He had a somewhat military style. “I would have to pass up that opportunity.”

“Well, tell me this,” Strickland said. “What beef do the Finns have? Has Owen got their boat or not?”

“I can give you my theory on that.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I think Matty probably planned to sail their boat in the race and mass-produce the design in the Far East. Then he couldn't pay the Finns. He didn't want to pull out of the race. So when they did the knockoff in Korea or Taiwan or whatever, he took the first one off the line.”

“To sail that one instead?”

“Sure,” Fay said. “It's a fast design, he might have won with it. Then he would have put it into production with all the race publicity. That's essentially what Browne's hoping to do. In Matty's, shall we say, absence.”

“What kind of boat is it?”

“I'm sure it's well designed. How it's made is another story. Sometimes they cut corners.”

“Browne likes it a lot.”

“Well,” Fay said, “Browne's an asshole. Sorry,” he added, “I don't mean that. He's a salesman.”

“Do you think it's unsafe?”

“Uncomfortable is more like it. A cheap boat will knock you around a lot.”

“Browne would know if it were unsafe, right? And not go?”

“Unless he's more of a salesman than I think he is.”

“What about Mr. Thorne?”

“Harry doesn't know any more about boats than Owen Browne tells him. These days Owen Browne is his fair-haired boy. Harry's busy.”

Strickland succeeded in getting back to work for a while, cutting footage of Browne and his preparations to the music of Erik Satie over WNYC. The news that evening was of terror. Bombs were going off in comfortable, progressive European cities, causing power outages and loss of life. It was the anniversary of something.

Strickland was due in Boston the next day for an appointment with the Public Broadcasting people there and he had been attempting to persuade Anne to go with him. She kept declining because Boston was too near to Maggie's school for comfort. That evening, sipping wine, boiling an egg for dinner, he could not keep from telephoning her.

“I was in New York today,” she said. “I thought of coming to see you.”

“Why didn't you? Come to Boston.”

“I couldn't,” she said. “I'd be crazy. Just come back to me.”

Come back to me, she had said. Strickland repeated the words to himself. He could not believe she was saying them to him. It made him dizzy.

“B . . baby,” he began. They laughed together over his stammer. It reminded him of when she had laughed at him in the street.

“Poor sweet,” she said. “Poor tied tongue.”

“I want you to do crazy things for me,” he told her. “I'll do the same for you. I want you to dress up for me. I want you to cut your hair.”

“God,” she said, “I love your saying that.” Hearing her, Strickland laughed to himself. “How shall I cut my hair?” she asked.

“Short,” he said. “Short as you can.” He smiled at the anxiety he sensed there.

“For disgrace. What shall I wear?”

“Silk. Skin. Something visual. So we can see where everything is.”

“And who pays for these clothes, boss?” She called him boss in imitation of Hersey. “Will you buy my clothes now?”

“I'll do anything,” Strickland said.

B
ROWNE FOLLOWED
the petrel until it disappeared beyond the black, foam-crested waves. Over the daylight hours he kept watch for the strange inverted towers he had seen at dawn. The weather turned gray and threatening.

That day's sky was too overcast for a sun sight and the navigation satellites out of range. His on-deck thermometer registered an air temperature of seven degrees Celsius. The surface of the sea was a little above two. The wind was steady from the west at ten knots, whipping aside patchy fog. Once he spotted a small floating berg a few miles off. He kept to an easterly course.

In mid-morning Browne heard his call letters recited by the frenetic Mad Max. He assumed that Max had volunteered to patch a telephone call through. Disinclined to chat, Browne had just about decided to go off the air, pleading the generator. He logged Max's signal but did not respond. Shortly thereafter, Whiskey Oscar Oscar, the high-seas operator, called out from the Jersey marshes. WOO had another call from Duffy.

“We got a minor problem with all you guys,” Duffy said. “You're off the map, so to speak.”

Browne asked Duffy what he meant.

“Some Basques blew up the satellite receiver. They're not getting your transponder signal.”

“Basques?”

“Basques,” Duffy said, “Colombians, Armenians, who knows? It was a capitalist invention, they blew it up. So you'll have to call in with a position report every twenty-four hours. Let us know if you get in trouble, because we can't see you.”

He asked Duffy how long the thing would be down.

“The company isn't giving out much information, Owen. They don't want to say exactly where their receivers are or what they'll do. Our information is, up to a week.”

Browne was silent. Then he said, “My injectors are still giving me trouble. Tell them I may be off the air a while.”

“I told them,” Duffy said. “Is everything else O.K.?”

Browne assured him that everything else was fine. He decided not to respond to any further transmissions. Let invisibility be matched with silence, he thought.

Continuing east, he saw no more of the peaks. He concluded they must have been some trick of the southern horizon. Of ice, thin light and fog.

During the night, he happened on the missionary station again. A broadcast in a language unfamiliar to him was suddenly concluded by the voice of the Englishwoman whose narratives he had listened to weeks before.

“We now conclude our lesson broadcast in Tagalog and shall broadcast in English starting at seventeen hundred hours Greenwich mean time. We shall then broadcast the same lesson in Cantonese at twenty-two hundred hours Greenwich mean time, in Korean at zero hundred hours and once again in English at zero four-thirty. Our next Tagalog broadcast will be heard at ten hundred hours GMT.”

Browne put a can of chicken broth on the galley stove. It was the first nourishment he had taken in twenty-four hours.

“I wonder,” the lady asked, “how many of our listeners are tuning to our broadcasts while at sea? Our mail indicates that we have many listeners who are serving on shipboard. Many listeners are employed in the petroleum industry. Others are fishermen. I wonder how many of our listeners remember that our Lord's first disciples found their employment as fishermen?”

Pouring out his broth into a coffee cup, Browne found himself listening to radio-drama effects that weakly replicated the very sounds of the sea that beat about his wounded vessel.

“Listeners may remember,” the lady said above the rising sounds of wind and sea, “that when our Lord was pursued by His enemies, Saint Matthew tells us that He went by ship into a desert place apart. When the multitude came to Him they were sent away satisfied—satisfied in spirit and in body as well, fed by His miraculous abundance. When they were gone He went off by himself to pray.”

Great day in the morning, thought Browne, this has got to be taped! He was overcome with hilarity. I'll dine out, he thought, on this one. There would be loaves and fishes.

Since there was no time to attach the recording unit properly, he simply put a mike beside the speaker and switched it to Record. The lady described the amphibious apostles setting forth upon Gennesaret. Grinning, he clung to the overhead bar, clutching his cup of broth, crouching over the radio.

“But the ship was now in the midst of the sea,” the lady said breathlessly, “tossed with waves, for the wind was contrary.”

He imagined himself listening with his wife. They would laugh together.

“And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea.”

“Fantastic!” Browne said. There, complete with special effects, with tame whistles and a pussycat's roar so unlike the thing itself, mighty J.C. went strolling on the briny—the hoariest, silliest miracle of all.

“They were troubled,” the lady declared.

Browne spilled a little broth in his high spirits.

“They cried out for fear,” she said.

Browne did a silent mouthing imitation of the disciples crying out for fear.

“But,” the lady continued, “straightaway Jesus spake unto them, saying—” Here the lady's voice was interrupted by that of an actor. His was the North American voice—fruity, resonant and epicene—a beach-blond, Aryan, California Jesus.

“Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.”

Browne thought he would die of laughter at the pious, bogus style.

Peter, preternaturally amazed straight man, was portrayed by an African actor—perhaps, Browne thought, the same one who played Esau. Conned again.

“Lawd, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Dee on de water.” A moment of dialect comedy.

“And He said—” breathed the lady.

“Come!” intoned the self-satisfied American voice.

Browne laughed and laughed. But in the voice of the African actor, shouting next, “Lord save me!”—when the wind was boisterous and he was afraid and beginning to sink—there was something rather sad. Something honest and desperate. In his own boisterousness, Browne was inclined to foolish tears.

“Lord save me,” he repeated.

“O thou of little faith,” asked the cool J.C. reproachfully, “wherefore didst thou doubt?”

“And when they were come into the ship,” declared the Englishwoman, “the wind ceased.”

Afterward, Browne put his broth aside unfinished and lay in his bunk. Why on earth, he thought, broadcast such pointless, foolish, unconvincing stories over thousands of miles of empty sea? He found that he could not put the question out of his mind.

It was amusing to consider the personalities behind the voices. The English lady with the fussy, overpunctilious diction. Who was she, and what was her life? A smarmy American, an African, a complacent Torontonian. Alone with them on the ocean, Browne sometimes found it difficult to remember that they were not inventing the stories they enacted. He discovered at some point during the hours of darkness that he was still weeping. People were sentimental about religion.

Unable to sleep, he kept thinking about the story. Very sweet, he thought, but after a while he decided there was something sinister about filling the air with false promises. Homely as these little presentations were, a sly skill underlay them. People were vulnerable. In certain circumstances it was hard for the mind to resist examining them over and over.

Slavery, Browne thought—we are enslaved to these strange stories. Hidden voices, bought and paid for, endlessly repeated them. Out on the ocean you had no option but to listen and recognize and ponder as though you had the other half of the dollar bill. They kept making you recognize yourself on their terms. It kept a man from being free.

Concealment was a constant theme. Someone was always being played for a fool. The very process of telling the stories was a game of withholding. Every narrative was reversible and had its outer and its inner side. They were all palimpsests.

They start the stories for us, Browne thought, but we have always known the endings without knowing it. They lead us to water and they make us drink, if it really is water and not wine. Again and again these demands for blind trust. Jump, leap and He may or may not be there. And you—spread-eagled over the ocean—may or may not fall and sink when the wind is contrary. When the wind is boisterous and the sea so big and the boat so small. Endless games. Deception without end, infinity to one, all against all. And on the wind, amplified through the stratosphere, stories to give it form. To keep us absolutely fast in the ice and darkness. Stories like false dawns. But ice, darkness, boisterous winds, and false dawns were all true things that had to be lived out.

If we didn't have the other half of the bill, Browne thought, if we didn't know the end of the stories, we might actually begin to understand. The stories only reinforced our ignorance.

Then suddenly Browne thought: Christ (walking on the water!), what about the stormy petrel? Because in Joshua Slocum, circumnavigator and master of hallucination, a connection was made between the stormy petrel and the story he had just heard. Quickly, but with all the calm he could muster, he sought among his books until he had found both his King James Bible and his copy of Commodore Slocum's
Sailing Alone Around the World.
He remembered quite clearly that at some point old Slocum had traced the origin of the petrel's name to the same lame miracle, Simon Pedro Pescador shuffling off across the deep. In his impatience, Browne could not find the reference in Slocum, although he was sure it was there.

Of course, he had seeen a petrel that morning. Connections were always being invited. Also he remembered the petrel he had seen in the doldrums. They lived so impossibly far from every appearance of hope, on Providence itself, it seemed. Mother Carey's chickens, a sailor had to feel for them. Scattered broadcast from her apron was the grace, the corn, littering the remotest latitudes.

If I were to entertain for the moment, Browne thought, a notion of some strange causality that might apply only on the ocean—why a petrel? Why that morning?

He put the books aside and lay back. Why should there be petrels at all, he thought, if not for some purpose? What was the need? What message in all those wings? Why petrels? They weren't beautiful. To occupy the emptiness? On behalf of what? Because we're out there, for us? For me?

The tape recorder clicked off. He started rewinding it to listen but at the last moment became afraid of what he might hear.

S
TRICKLAND
sat watching his Central American documentary in a studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Vultures were on the screen. Startled, they scattered from the corpse of a burro. The tracery of their plumage as they rose and their spread wings made the composition suggest the blossoming of some fatal flower.