The Lightkeepers (20 page)
Authors: Abby Geni
L
IFE IS NOT
what I thought it was. I am not what I thought I was. A photographer, a nomad, a motherless daughter. A letter-writing woman, shedding a wake of paper and words across the world like the trail of an airplane. An artist with a camera for a brain: cold, clear, calculating. A woman in black.
Galen had asked me:
What is your nature, Miranda?
Something happened to me the day I made contact with the seal pup. The day I broke the rule of noninterference. The day I crossed to the other side of the camera and photographed myself. The day I remembered I had a body.
For five months, I missed the fact of my own pregnancy. Yet I do not believe this was entirely my fault. Many of the traditional signs of the condition eluded me altogether—nausea, tender breasts, acne. The symptoms I did experience were hardly definitive. There was a plausible justification for each one.
In short, I do not think I am to blame. I do not think I am insane. I simply did not understand my own nature. Not until now.
The body and the mind are meant to be woven together: thought into emotion into sensation into senses into flesh. But for most of my life I have been rootless, unmoored, a ghost. All thought, no
physicality. I have been a person made of artistic sensibility and grief. I have imagined that my mind is paramount, my body secondary—the former an intricate instrument, the latter only a vehicle. My flesh has not factored into my identity. The subtle clues of the physical transformation of pregnancy were lost on me. The weight gain, the hot flashes—these things might have been happening to someone else. The hunger and exhaustion were dim and distant.
I was only able to see myself clearly, at last, through a lens. If I had not stepped onto the side of the camera where animals live—where nature flourishes in all its strangeness and glory—I might never have discovered my own reality.
What is your nature, Miranda?
I do not feel the need to write to you as often. Not anymore. I do not feel a desire to take photographs either. It has been weeks since I ventured across Southeast Farallon with a camera in my hand. At the moment, I have no interest in the life of the mind. Ideas, field of vision, light, death, beauty, ghosts, imagination, shadows, love—these are little things. Unimportant things.
For the past five months, without my knowledge or consent, my body has created a brand new living thing. While my mind was focused on images, and tragedy, and letter-writing, my body has been engaged in miracles.
These new thoughts arrived at the same time as the birds.
T
HERE IS NO
describing Bird Season, not really. In the whole world, there are fifty thousand western gulls. Right now, more than
half of that number are here on Southeast Farallon—most of them directly outside my window. And it doesn’t stop there. There is a great murre city tucked behind a high hill. In order to see it, you have to scale the rock face and look down from above. The murres are lovely creatures, finely sculpted. They have the tuxedo coloring of penguins—black backs, white bellies—but penguins can be comical, whereas the murres are nothing short of elegant. Above their rookery, Lucy has built a blind, inside which she can crouch. She scavenged the wood and metal from the coast guard house. She even brought up a couple of kitchen chairs from our cabin. There are a hundred thousand birds in the murre colony. In addition, there are forty thousand auklets on the islands. Twenty thousand cormorants. Four thousand pigeon guillemots.
This information is not news to me. I’ve been hearing about it for weeks from an overexcited Lucy, who looks forward to Bird Season each year like a small child waiting for Christmas. (With the arrival of her beloved avians, she has all but forgotten about her missing pet. The octopus’s tank was emptied and put away without much comment.) I have been aware that the islands will be home, throughout the spring and summer, to a phenomenal host of birds. Still, my expectations were ludicrously inadequate. I imagined that the scene would be something like a peace rally: a throng of feathery bodies cohabiting genially, swapping egg-laying tips and gossip in warbles and chirps. I envisaged a sea of nests packed together like tents at a campground.
The reality has proven to be very different. I’m not sure that anything could have prepared me, but my naïveté certainly didn’t help.
The islands are now white. The birds have stained the stones pale with their guano. Saddle Rock, which I can see from my bedroom window, looks like an ice floe bobbing in the water. The trees are coated with slime. The stench is overpowering, the breeze hung with curtains of ammonia. The air itself is toxic.
Then there is the noise. As long as the birds are awake, they are screaming. A mating pair will holler back and forth for hours. Lucy says that the gulls are communicating, coordinating important matters like who should hunt and who should sit on the eggs—but to me it sounds like some kind of otherworldly battle cry. They shout to tell predators that they are guarding their territory. They shriek some manic version of a lullaby at their own eggs. Each pair of gulls spends most of the day wailing. There are thousands of pairs on Southeast Farallon.
Our routine has changed, as you can imagine. Our presence here is unnatural at the best of times, and we always have to be careful. But during Bird Season, even the smallest of actions can have devastating consequences. At night, I have been told in no uncertain terms to be careful which lights I use. Several of the avian species are nocturnal. By flicking on the overhead bulb in my bedroom, I would be shining a spotlight on their shadowy forms, telling predators where to find them. Instead, I must now use a paltry reading lamp. In the daytime, our movements have been restricted to specific pathways carved through the crush of nests. Every square inch of rock seems to have been claimed. One wrong movement could result in a crunch, an egg oozing its contents onto the grass. Just
observe, don’t interfere—that has always been our mantra. It is a hard rule to obey during the present chaos and clamor.
There is also a new uniform to be worn on the grounds. Flea collars around the ankles (to fend off the bird lice). A mask over the mouth and nose (to ward off the smell). Thick leather gloves (to repel slashing beaks). And a hard hat, of all things (more on this later). It’s also sensible to put on a poncho, since the birds will use any method in the book to combat a perceived threat. They will void their bowels with the gusto and precision of bomber jets.
Lucy is now the undisputed queen of the islands. Each morning, she barks out orders, and we all jump to obey. A thousand things have to be done. For thirty years, people have been studying the seabirds here. This legacy is not to be trifled with. Lucy visits the murre blind every day. But there are also the storm-petrels, which have to be banded, despite the fact that they are nocturnal fliers and avian acrobats. Lucy has been staying up until two in the morning, lurking on the cliff edge and holding out a fine mesh net, trying to nab these deft fliers in midair. Bag and tag. Catch and release. Observe and record. The rhinoceros auklets must be tallied, too, which means that Galen and Forest can be found along the shore in the afternoons, shoving their hands into burrows and grabbing out indignant birds. The puffins, meanwhile, have beaks that are shaped like wire cutters and could, in a pinch, be used as such. In the wrong mood, they are quite capable of lopping off a finger.
But the gulls are the worst of all. They kill for food. They kill for pleasure. They kill for no good reason. They are expert assassins.
They soar around the islands with bloody beaks and a mad glint in their eyes. It took me a while to discover what Lucy meant when she wrote
P.I.H
. in the daily log. This stands for “pecked in head,” the gulls’ special method of dispatch.
Six chicks dead, found P.I.H. at Rhino Catacombs.
Southeast Farallon is littered with little corpses. Broken wings and caved-in skulls are common, the remains of murres and puffins covered in maggots and the juice of gull regurgitation. Downy infants, newly hatched, nestle alongside decomposing carcasses. It is a dreadful sight. This is why the auklets and storm-petrels are nocturnal—and why they dig burrows rather than building nests. In daylight, in the open, they would not stand a chance against the killing machine of twenty-five thousand gulls.
The breeding season seems to fill the gulls with an unstoppable bloodlust. They will attack each other with as much fervor as they do the pigeon guillemots and cormorants. I have seen the gulls engaging in cannibalistic orgies, tearing at a neighbor’s throat and wolfing down its eggs. They do not even limit their assaults to other birds. Packs of young males will go after seals, wheeling around a sleek, gray head and screaming, chasing an animal the size of a motorcycle into the sea. They would happily wipe out the biologists, too, if they could only get a clear shot—hence the hard hats. Mick told me recently about a gull that followed him up and down the shore, working itself into a frenzy. After painting his shoulders with guano and yelling furiously in his ear, the bird grew so outraged that it slammed into Mick’s hard hat at full speed. It broke its own neck and fell to earth, stone dead.
T
HE OTHER DAY
I was in my room, staring out the window. Lucy and the men were on the grounds on Bird Watch, but I had abstained, pleading injury. I had not yet worked up the courage to tell the others about my pregnancy. Instead, I had blamed my bad ankle, even going so far as to wrap it in gauze.
To protect myself and my baby, I have been spending a lot of time in the house. The noise is muffled there, at a remove. I do my best to ignore the thunder of wings, pretending that the chorus of clucking and cackling has a soothing quality, like an atonal symphony. On top of everything else, there is one lunatic gull that has claimed the entire front porch as his personal nesting area. Most birds manage to hold on to, at most, a few bare inches of rock. But this gull is bigger, stronger, and crazier than the rest. We call him Kamikaze Pete. He does not eat or sleep; he just fights, all day long. There is a permanent smudge of bloody crimson on his face. Each time I step onto the porch, Kamikaze Pete appears out of nowhere, walloping my shoulders with his wings and pecking with such ferocity at my hard hat that it makes me see stars. We have all taken to using the back door of the cabin for our entrances and exits.
Now, seated at the window, I caught sight of an elephant seal moving among the nests. The animal appeared to be an adult female, albeit underweight and undersized. She was at some distance from me, making her way toward the water. The image was odd, like a boulder rolling down a snowy hillside. She had a pattern on her shoulder: a birthmark in the shape of a star. I watched her
shuffle toward the sea, dislodging the birds, who rose around her with exasperated squawks.
Almost all the elephant seals are gone. The females, pregnant, have moved on. The males, with no harems remaining, have abandoned their precious territory. The pups have taken the leap too, diving into the surf, chasing fish, tumbling and playing, vanishing into the blue. The animals that linger are the ones who cannot leave. The frightened, the sick, the lame—the seals who are unwilling or unable to brave the ocean. This is no place for them. This is no place for anything weak.
The female was already in trouble. I watched her lumbering awkwardly, favoring one of her flippers. Perhaps she had a deformity. Perhaps she had been injured. A few gulls were soaring above her, tracking her. They had not yet worked up enough courage—or ire—to attack. But it was only a matter of time. The seal limped among the nests, and her pursuers screamed and circled.
One gull dived. Another followed suit, closing its wings and plummeting. The seal picked up her uneven pace. The birds began to shriek in a kind of ecstasy. My heart was in my throat. There was nothing I could do to stop this.
Something happened—a flash of beaks—too quick for me to follow. The seal bellowed in pain. Her face was bloodied. The birds dove again, their beaks glinting in the light like bullets. They were aiming for her eyes. They snatched the whiskers off her snout, clumps of fur from her head. She could not defend herself. She could not reach the water. She screamed again, and I saw a gull
rising with something in its mouth. A dark, glistening orb, trailing a skein of blood.
After that, I turned away from the window. Mick later told me that the birds had picked the seal’s body clean. There was nothing left but bones.
A
FEW DAYS AGO
, I sat down with Mick. It was a breezy afternoon in May. The others were away on Bird Watch, as usual. Lucy had taken Forest and Galen with her to the murre blind. They had brought the video camera to film the birds in secret—the ultimate voyeurs. They would not be back until nightfall.
I brewed a pot of tea. I poured two cups. I handed one to Mick, who was sitting on the couch, watching me with eyebrows raised.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
He paused before he replied, taking a long, contemplative sip.
“I know,” he said.
I stared for a moment, then sat down beside him.
“
I
didn’t know,” I said.
He shrugged. “Well, I’m smarter than you.”
He took another pull of tea, inhaling the steam. I hadn’t touched mine, though I drew some comfort from the warm mug in my palms.
“You’re pretty far along, aren’t you?” he said. “I’d say you’re into the second trimester. The jawline—the breasts—and you’ve got the mask of pregnancy on your face. The pigmentation of the skin, right here.”
He reached toward my cheek. I batted his hand away.
“I’ve been watching you for weeks,” he said. “I’ve got three sisters and about a dozen nieces and nephews. You were never going to be able to hide it from me. The way you walk. The way you get up from a chair.”
“You’re the first one I’ve told,” I said.
“Really?”
“Really.”
My conscience gave an uncomfortable squirm. I had sent home several postcards in the past month, all of them bland, frivolous, and mendacious. Perhaps it was unforgivable that I had left my father in the dark. If anyone deserved to know—to be prepared—it was Dad. He was my only real family, after all.
But I had not told him, because I could not tell him. There were no words. The words were unready, unripe. I could never find them on my tongue or the tip of my pencil. They were somewhere else, floating, slippery, half-formed.
I felt a splash of hot liquid across my arm. My mug of tea had begun to tilt. The room seemed to pivot. The ceiling was twisting like a cap coming off a bottle. I thought I was going to faint. A moment later, Mick had his arm around me. He shoved my head between my knees, his hand on the back of my neck.
“Breathe,” he said. “Nice and easy. That’s right.”
“Sorry,” I gasped. “I haven’t actually said it out loud before.”
Spots danced in front of my eyes. Mick rubbed my nape.
“Congratulations,” he said. “I guess.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
I inhaled in rhythm with the movement of his hands. His fingers tracked up and down my spine, guiding my breath.
“I know what happened,” he said.
“What?”
“I know who the father is, I mean.”
“Goddamn it, Mick.”
“It was Andrew, right?”
I punched him. I used all my strength. The blow was wild, glancing off his upper arm. Mick observed the action with the bemusement of a cat watching the flight of a bumblebee. He dusted off the place where I had struck.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re in a tough spot. I’m sure it’s been hard.”
I stared down at my lap.
“But I did the math,” he went on. “I know it wasn’t me.” He held up a finger. “Definitely wasn’t Forest.” A second finger. “Sure as hell wasn’t Galen.” A third finger. “So that just leaves—”
A silence fell. The weight of the fetus was heavy on my spine. These days, it was all but impossible to find a comfortable pose. The baby’s girth could not be contained; it was always pressing on my bladder or lodged beneath my diaphragm, crumpling my intestines. Kamikaze Pete broke the stillness. With a shriek, he rose outside the window, his wings beating inches from the glass.
It was an awful word:
father
. It was an unanswerable idea. Under the circumstances, I could not lie. I could hardly blame an old boyfriend for my situation. I couldn’t make up a story about
going to a bar—a stranger, a one-night stand. My only hope was to stall and evade. I had practiced a few noncommittal responses in preparation for this conversation.
That’s for me to know and you to find out. Oh, let’s not get into it. It’s my little secret.
Pathetic quips. Useless and unconvincing. I had not been able to think of a decent solution for the quandary of the baby’s father. Despite all my fretting, all my planning, I hadn’t come up with anything good.
“I’m sorry,” Mick said again, softer this time.
“Thanks,” I said.
“So tell me. Let’s hear the whole story.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on,” he said. “The curiosity has been killing me.”
Outside, the roar of the gulls ticked up a notch, as though someone had adjusted the volume on a vast outdoor speaker.
“We don’t talk about the past here,” I said.
The words had a hollow sound to my ears, but Mick nodded. His expression became solemn, as though I’d given the correct passcode.
“Let me get you some more tea,” he said.
He got to his feet. With that, the subject was closed.
A
WEEK LATER
, on a rainy afternoon, Galen left a book on my bed. There was a Post-it note on the cover in his distinctive, meticulous script:
For Miranda.
It was a volume I had not seen before, which made me suspect he had been hoarding it. Galen has a cache of goodies in his room—seal stones, bird skeletons, shark teeth,
who knows what else. This area is off-limits to the rest of us. We are all aware that there are treasures behind that cracked wooden door. Galen keeps oddities, trophies, and relics. He keeps animal skulls, feathers, and tiny mouse skins. Once, long ago, he told me that his collection even contains a few mementos from the human side of things as well. Love letters. Forgotten items of jewelry. Interesting hats.
I turned the book over in my hands. It seemed to focus on the history of the Farallon Islands. I flipped through it idly. I was not sure why Galen wanted me to read it, but I was not about to disobey an order from him, however indirect.
I settled in bed, on my side, so the baby’s weight would not be balanced on my spine. At first—I will be honest—I wasn’t really paying attention. The radiator clunked. A drizzle pattered the windows. I leafed through the pages without much interest. It seemed that the islands had always had a dubious reputation. The Miwok Indians of California had viewed the place as a sort of earthly perdition, where the damned were sent to dwell forever in perpetual hardship.
I yawned.
The next chapter was about Bird Season—about the eggers. I pricked up my ears a little, reading with greater urgency. The story began with a man who had the unlikely name of Doc Robinson. In the 1800s, the gold rush was on. Doc Robinson came to San Francisco, like everyone else, to make his fortune. But he was an uncommonly wily fellow. In between panning for nuggets and having his heart broken over the plethora of fool’s gold, he noticed
something no one else had yet perceived: there weren’t enough chickens in California. All the beloved foods that were made with eggs—pastries, omelets, mayonnaise—were absent from daily life.
Even then, Bird Season on the Farallon Islands was notorious. The archipelago was as yet untenanted—a bare, stripped sculpture of stone, a nautical hazard, a spooky silhouette against the dusky horizon. Passing sailors had returned to the mainland with tales of more birds than there were stars in the sky. Hundreds of thousands of eggs, there for the taking. (The gulls had not yet achieved their current supremacy. The ruling force, throughout the summer months, had been the murres.) Doc Robinson had heard these stories. It did not concern him that the murre eggs looked nothing like chicken eggs. They were not smooth, ivory, palatable orbs. Instead, the murres laid green-blue spheres the size of softballs, with leathery, freckled hides. Often their eggs were marked by what appeared to be letters in an unknown alphabet. It would not do to cook them outright: the whites were translucent, the yolks as red as blood, and they tasted fishy. Unappetizing, to say the least.
However, they could be used as a substitute in baking. Doc Robinson gave up on gold. He voyaged to the Farallon Islands and collected a couple thousand murre eggs. Upon his return to California, he made a passel of money and retired in triumph as cakes, muffins, and soufflés once again appeared on menus.
Thus began the onslaught of the eggers. Anyone who wanted to make a few bucks followed Doc Robinson’s example, renting a boat and heading out to sea. There wasn’t enough gold to go around, but for those who were greedy and reckless enough, there
were more than enough murres. The men soon took to wearing “egg shirts” with pockets stitched onto every available bit of fabric. In this garment, one person could carry two hundred eggs. The hapless birds were unable to defend themselves against these unaccustomed predators. There was no governmental oversight, no sense of environmental balance. Nobody paused to consider what would happen if the vast majority of murre eggs on the planet were harvested and consumed.
But the islands, then as now, were a dangerous place. The work was risky. The book painted the picture for me clearly: a man’s body weighted down by the uncomfortable heft of two hundred fat eggs. His balance would be affected. He might stumble on the rocks. Guano coated the pathways. Waves washed in, filling the air with spray. Bruises and broken bones were common. A certain percentage of the eggers vanished. They took a wrong turn and were claimed by the sea.
With a sigh, I put the book aside. I began the process of extricating myself from the mattress. The baby was kicking determinedly at my midriff, urging me to rise, pulling me back into the present, away from stories and shadows.
I
AM STILL
realizing the simple fact of my pregnancy. This idea shines in my mind at all times, throwing everything else into sharp relief. The baby’s movements are forceful now. A punch to my rib cage. A scrape down my spine. Sometimes, in a room filled with biologists, I will have the sensation of listening to music that no
one else can hear. I will close my eyes, absorbed by the interior flicker and pulse of life. The sensation is so intense, so all-consuming, that I will lose track of things. The world will fall away. I will forget where I am: in the cabin, on the islands, on the surface of the earth—I might be anywhere. The universe seems to be condensed inside my body, encompassed and circumscribed by my own skin.
I have been aware, all along, of how I should feel about my situation. Ennui and despair. Confusion and fear. If Andrew had lived, I might now be planning an emergency trip to the mainland. I might be scanning the yellow pages—our beat-up, obsolete copy—looking for abortion clinics. I might be counting the minutes until the alien invader could be removed from my body.
But Andrew did not live. He drowned. The islands took him away.
And so, this does not seem like his child at all. The two things feel entirely unconnected. There was an assault, an act of violence, somewhere in the past. There is a marvel, a gift from this place, here in the present. The memory of the attack—dark and hateful—is like an old star, disintegrating, crumbling into dust, barely visible alongside a powerful new sun. As the weeks have worn on, what I have experienced, more and more strongly, is wild, wordless, unreasoning joy.
The baby will be mine—mine absolutely.