The Lightkeepers (15 page)

22

I
N A PLACE
like this, it should be hard to keep secrets. Southeast Farallon is small, and the cabin is smaller still. All of us live on top of each other. We all know about Lucy’s crying jags. We are all aware of Galen’s nocturnal restlessness, pacing his room with quick footsteps. We all know when Mick engages in a late-night snack, banging around the kitchen at three in the morning. Until recently, I had begun to think that I knew everything there was to know about the islands.

But as it turns out, there has been a secret right under my nose for months.

Last night I woke to the sound of voices. It is January, the heart of Seal Season, and the archipelago is never quiet, regardless of the hour. The males boom, the females grunt, and the pups squeal all night long. Their constant noise sets my nerves on edge. It is a perpetual reminder of mating and birthing and suckling. I do not want to think about these things. I do my best to tune out the roar. Now I lay awake, assuming I’d heard wrong, mistaking animal sounds for human speech.

Then it came again. A man’s voice. Someone was outside the window.

My heart began to pound. I sat upright, tugging the blinds aside. It was a bright, moonlit night. The landscape was a jumble, the familiar contours transformed into a lurid black-and-white photograph. Gradually I saw that there were two figures moving on the slope. They had been talking, but they were quiet now.

The scene continued to clarify as my eyes adjusted. It was a bit like watching the shape of an undersea stone coming clear through the ruffled surface of water. The silhouettes belonged to Mick and Forest. I recognized the former’s bulk and the latter’s delicate slimness. They were heading away from the cabin. They were whispering together. Forest laughed, a high-pitched sound, something I had never heard him give before. Then he leaned in. Before my eyes, the two men kissed.

It registered as an electric shock. There was no mistaking what was happening: it was a passionate, abandoned, drowning-without-each-other sort of lip-lock. There had been a line of radiant blue separating their frames, but now they merged. Forest went up on his toes. They swayed back and forth.

I reached for my camera. It was an automatic reflex. Tomcat, one of my digital SLR instruments, was settled, as always, on the night table. I kept it there for emergencies—a shark attack, a whale sighting, the return of the ghost. I did not think. I merely acted, lifting the camera to my eye.

Mick’s face came into focus, all snowy planes. Forest was harder to track. I kept zooming in on the back of his head. Their hands met in space, fingers reaching. I still had not adjusted to the firework display of stars on the Farallon Islands. Cassiopeia
and Orion blazed above the horizon like configurations of torches. Mick and Forest paced with a practiced step across the granite. They were moving toward the coast guard house. Mick was almost skipping. Something—a bird calling, a seal barking—made them pause and gaze to the left, toward the ocean. At the door of the coast guard house, they engaged in a funny little pantomime, each attempting with exaggerated politeness to give way and allow the other to go first.

Once they were inside I adjusted the focus, skimming frantically across the windows. The upper story was as lightless as a black hole, nothing there but the whirling and flickering of the bats. Biting my lip, I waited. One minute passed. Two minutes. Then something pale darted across my lens.

Mick and Forest had stationed themselves in the moonlit hollow of the living room. I sat up straighter. It was more difficult now to keep an eye on them. Since they were framed in the window, the slightest shift from side to side could remove either of them entirely from my field of vision. And they were moving fast. I watched them kiss hungrily, almost angrily. Mick was unbuttoning Forest’s shirt.

I began taking pictures. Because it was tricky to catch a glimpse, I wanted to keep what I caught. The sound of the shutter echoed around the room like gunfire. I snapped Forest’s marble rib cage, bare to the navel. I snapped another wild kiss, Mick’s hands flying upward in a blurred, avid surge. I snapped Forest tearing off his own scarf and flinging it aside. Soon they were both unclothed. The window cut off their bodies at the waist. Still, it was easy enough to follow what was going on. Forest swiveled so his back touched Mick’s
belly. Two moon-pale torsos moved in concert. Mick wrapped his arms around Forest’s chest, and I marveled anew at Forest’s slimness, not an ounce of fat on him. At first their dance was tentative, graceful. Mick buried his cheek in Forest’s shoulder. Forest’s head rocked back. I heard the cry he gave, a moan that would ordinarily have passed for the rowdy wind or the rumble of the elephant seals. He threw out a hand, bracing himself against the wall.

I lowered the camera for a moment. The sensation was an odd one. For the first time in a long while, I was remembering desire. The spark of hunger. The pull of lust. That part of myself. But the memory was faint, distorted, as though from a dream. Once upon a time, I had experienced these things. But that had been another life. I remembered it now the way a ghost might. All mind, no body.

After a while, the inevitable happened: Mick and Forest tumbled onto the floor and vanished. I waited, my heart hammering. Perhaps their lovemaking would not last long. Perhaps they would reappear. The wind picked up. The sea roared in the distance. Mick and Forest stayed out of my sight.

I sat back on the mattress, brushing my hair out of my face. So many things made sense to me now. The more I considered the matter, the clearer it became.

To start with, there was the issue of cohabitation. The cabin now had six people and only five bedrooms. Charlene, as the lowest member on the totem pole, lodged in a bedroom that was quite literally a former closet. (Her bed took up the entire floor, and the decorations on the walls were racks of coat hooks.) In the past, Andrew and Lucy had shared a room. Until now, however, I had
never understood why Mick and Forest had also chosen to share. It would have been a great deal more practical for Forest to bunk with Galen—his fellow shark addict, on his same schedule.

Other questions were now answered, too. Forest’s reserved nature. His impenetrable demeanor. His stillness and silence. In his presence, I’d always had the feeling that he was keeping himself under tight control. Now I understood why. He was hiding a key facet of his personality, the core of his nature. By the same token, Mick’s lack of romantic interest in me no longer felt like an insult.

I flicked through the pictures I had just taken. Mick smiling as Forest nuzzled his throat. Forest laughing in the wake of a hearty kiss. Their arms tangled, fingers entwined.

For the first time, my conscience pricked me. Obviously, both men had put a premium on secrecy. They shared a room, after all; they could easily have engaged in their romantic adventures there. But the cabin was ancient and creaky. I shuddered, remembering the many times I had been an unwilling audience to Lucy and Andrew’s trysts. Mick and Forest, it seemed, regularly risked injury and illness to keep their relationship hidden from prying eyes.

I considered deleting the snapshots. But the photographer in me would not allow that. They were a chronicle, and any chronicle was sacrosanct. A few of them were quite beautiful, too—I had been able to catch the energy of those fiery embraces, the motion of two bodies swaying together. I would hide the camera under my bed. From now on, I would not use it publicly, just in case.

Eventually I realized how tired I was. It was nearly one in the morning. I lay down. I wondered how often Mick and Forest had
made these late-night journeys during my time on the islands. I wondered how they managed to behave so normally the next day. Rising at their usual hour. Greeting each other casually, like friends, like colleagues. Showering one another’s sweat off their skin.

A
T DAWN
, I awoke with a frightened jolt. I had been dreaming about Andrew. This often happened; it was a nightmare I could not seem to escape. Sometimes I had to relive the rape—breath on my neck, weight on my belly. Sometimes I saw the ghost again, glimmering in the corner of my room. Sometimes Andrew was bloodied and battered in these dreams. Half-dead in the darkness above me. His head bashed in. Dripping fluids and brain matter onto my pillow.

This time, though, I shook off the nightmare fairly quickly. I was doing mental calculations. On the night in question—the worst night, the night everything had changed—I knew exactly where everyone in the cabin had been. I had considered it many times. Galen: drunk and incapable. Charlene: lost in music, headphones on. Lucy: asleep. Mick and Forest: out on the grounds.

Until today, I had thought those two were whale-watching by moonlight. It was a silly explanation, but it was the only one I’d been able to come up with. Now, of course, I knew the truth. My mouth was dry. I sat up in bed, shoving the blanket away. Outside the window, the fog was so thick that I could not see the ocean. It had been two months since Andrew had assaulted me. On that night, Mick and Forest had slipped away to the coast guard house to make love.

Huddled on the mattress, I gave a whimper. Mick was my friend. He was a true friend, maybe the first I’d ever had. If he had known what was happening, he would have stopped it. He would have protected me.

I could not be sure of the others. I could not be sure of any of them. No one had been a witness to my assault, of course. But even if they had, I did not know how they might have reacted. They were biologists. Cold. Impassive. Uninvolved. If Forest had been in the cabin that night, I could imagine him putting a pillow over his head to block out the noise. If Charlene had caught the creak of bedsprings, she might not have thought it was her place to interfere. Galen might not have leapt into action either. He might have analyzed the situation, head cocked, listening. He might have studied my rape as he would observe the struggle of a lost seal pup.

Lucy was a wild card. She disliked me, and she had loved Andrew. Her mind was a dark morass. I could not begin to parse her motivations, let alone predict what she might have done if she had woken in the night to the sound of muffled cries above her, her boyfriend’s heavy breathing, the clang of my headboard.

But I knew about Mick. He would have fought for me. He would have saved me.

For the first time, I wondered if Andrew had been aware of this too. He might have made a similar calculation, tallying up the location of each biologist, weighing the risk. He had chosen a time when he would not be overheard. He had waited for footsteps on the porch, the murmur of Mick and Forest’s voices. In his quest for romance and release, Mick had left me vulnerable. He had left me all alone.

23

T
HE ELEPHANT SEALS
are giving birth. Throughout the month of January, the females have appeared by the dozen. I am enraptured by them. Unlike their male counterparts, they are beautiful in the traditional manner of seals: smooth and rotund, their faces vaguely canine, their black eyes filled with pinniped intelligence. I have photographed more births than I can count. The pups are charcoal-colored when they arrive, slimy and blind. More blood on the rocks. They uncurl their bodies, sticky with amniotic gel, teeth flashing. The females sing to them in booming, grating voices. They are imprinting themselves on their newborns. They are telling each pup which scent and voice belong to its mother.

The elephant seals have altered the architecture of the islands. They have made the coastline soft. They doze in heaps, the gray mountain of their bodies jeweled with small, dark shapes—the pups slumbering and keening and nuzzling. Nearby, the alpha males lord it over their domain. Each is the master of forty or fifty females. They parade up and down the shore, inflating their noses to make a cry that sounds like a drumbeat. The members of their harems snipe at one another good-naturedly. They spend their days nursing. Their milk is some of the richest in the animal kingdom.
The babies gain ten pounds a day. I have photographed this too—coming back to the same family each morning, watching the infant swelling like a balloon.

The pups have to be careful. The rookery is not a safe place. The roar of the elephant seals is louder than the ocean. The babies must navigate through a landscape of identical figures, picking their mother’s individual call out of the chorus. More than a few have died. Some have traveled the wrong way across the grounds, leaving the pod behind, lost and gone forever. Some have drowned, too little and helpless to swim. Though the females are watchful and conscientious, the males are too aggressive—or too large—to pay attention. A few pups have been killed by their fathers, who are massive enough to crush them beneath their immense bulk without realizing it.

I still dream of the lost seal pup Mick and I saw on the grounds. I still follow it through the mist. I still listen to it crying for its mother.

The other day I was on Marine Terrace with Jewel, my large-format camera. I was attempting to capture yet another birth. The labor of an elephant seal is not an arduous process. The mother naps between contractions. The baby emerges without undue fuss. With my head beneath the black cloak, I found myself thinking about guillotines. My brain—my eyes, my visual cortex, my artistic sensibility—was separated from my body by a fall of cloth. I was gazing through the viewfinder, framing an image of the new mother lolling on her back, nipples exposed, her infant pressed against her, drinking assiduously. Then I straightened up. I removed the cloak
from my head. I felt cleaved somehow, as though I had been decapitated, as though my mind had been separated from my flesh and organs, floating on the air.

Still, our work continues. Lucy has been captivated by the local population of pigeon guillemots. These birds look exactly like their landlocked counterparts—the gray, ordinary pigeons found scarfing up peanuts on the National Mall—but they are actually seabirds. They forage for food by diving to the ocean floor, plummeting up to 150 feet underwater in search of a meal. Lucy has been nattering on about “alcids” and “two eggs, rather than one” and “incubating for four weeks.” She has been hurrying all over the grounds with a handful of bands. She has been sighing a lot about how hard it is to tag the birds alone, how much Andrew loved this work.

Mick, of course, is busy with the elephant seals. The weather is still too wild to take trips in the boat. It may be a while before Captain Joe can safely visit the islands. In the meantime, Mick is trying to identify his favorite pinnipeds by their signature markings. The other day he came dashing into the cabin, almost too excited to speak. He had glimpsed a double birth—twins—a rarity. He and Charlene were so pleased that they went into the kitchen and celebrated with glasses of Perrier.

And I have been snapping images of everything. A creative surge has overtaken me; I eat, sleep, and breathe photography. Curtains of rain lashing the shore. Clouds strewn like pebbles above the horizon. A flock of puffins spinning over Lighthouse Hill. The image of a guillotine still lingers in my mind. The sensation of weightlessness has remained. There is a wonderful violence to the act of
photography. The camera is a potent thing, slicing an image away from the landscape and pinning it to a sheet of film. When I choose a segment of horizon to capture, I might as well be an elephant seal hunting an octopus. The shutter clicks. Every boulder, wave, and curl of cloud included in the snapshot is severed irrevocably from what is not included. The frame is as sharp as a knife. The image is ripped from the surface of the world.

L
AST NIGHT, THE
clock had just chimed midnight when I shuffled down the stairs. Recently, I have often found myself thirsty in the evenings—almost painfully parched, as though all the blood in my veins has been replaced with sand. Yet that same weightlessness persists. It was a cold, blustery night. I did not bother to turn on any lamps. A draft curled around my feet as I stood in the kitchen. I shivered. I was not all the way awake. It took me a while to realize that someone was speaking. At first I thought it was the wind or an elephant seal barking. I reached for the faucet, fumbling in the darkness. Then a single word caught my ear: “Dead.”

I set my glass on the countertop and strode out of the kitchen, my head cocked, listening hard. There was, after all, a light in the living room. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that Charlene’s bedroom door was outlined with a glimmer of gold. A voice was coming from inside, floating through the wall.

“Andrew,” Charlene said.

My breath caught. The darkness in the room was overpowering. The sky outside was overcast. No moon, no stars. Only the
glow from Charlene’s room could be seen. It might have been the only light in the whole world. No one else should have been awake, let alone cloistered in some secret conference, discussing matters best left alone. For a moment, I stayed on the razor’s edge, willing myself to walk away.

Instead, I gave in. Stepping closer—moving carefully over the creaky floorboards, past the octopus’s cage—I eavesdropped. Charlene’s tone was soft enough that I could catch only phrases, here and there.

“The night he died—”

“At first I wasn’t sure—”

“Andrew coughed—”

“He wasn’t alone out there—”

It did not take me long to put the pieces together. I shook my head. I knew now what story Charlene was telling. She had told the same tale to me over the Christmas holiday. I remembered her eager expression, her dancing hands. I had not been a good audience. Anything to do with Andrew was not worth a second thought, in my opinion. I had shown no inclination to analyze the matter, to ponder and speculate. Now it seemed that Charlene had chosen to confide in someone else.

I wondered who she was talking to. I wondered who else was in that room, seated on the bed, as silent as a cloud. I never caught the sound of another voice. I listened to the rise and fall of Charlene’s words as I might have listened to music, following the chord progression rather than the notes. Then I began following the rise and fall of the wind and the tide instead. The breeze howled. The waves
crashed. In the distance, the storm-petrels were crying—their day just begun, the flock gathering, preparing to do what was necessary, ready for their nocturnal journey.