The Lightkeepers (7 page)
Authors: Abby Geni
T
HEY COME IN
the late autumn, passing the islands in droves. I have seen them sliding through the sea like nightmares. Despite their size, the whales have an elusive quality. They camouflage themselves as waves, as clouds, as islets, as reflections of light. Blue whales. Gray whales. More than once I have found myself staring at what appears to be an empty ocean, only to observe a column of mist rising against the sky—a gasping exhalation—and realize the sea is full of bodies.
Mick is our whale expert. It is his job to count and catalog the animals’ numbers, to keep track of the males, females, and juveniles. They are heading north in search of krill. Baleen whales, the largest animals on earth, survive by eating some of the smallest. They are traveling to the ice caps, where there are fields of krill so dense they make the water opaque. Mick has been there. He has seen gray whales swimming blindly in a bath of food, singing to one another in apparent joy.
The humpbacks are his favorite. They move in family groupings, forming intense bonds. Nomadic by nature, they lack any notion of permanence or home. They are the opera singers of the aquatic world, yet most of their music falls into the subsonic or supersonic
range, beyond human hearing. Our ears are paltry, tiny things. My whole body could fit into a humpback’s lung.
Before people filled the ocean with noise—boats churning, oil rigs thrumming, undersea cables vibrating—whales were able to sing across the entire planet. Mick told me this. I was struck by the image, not of the animal, but of the music itself. A single, throbbing note. I imagined the vibration passing through forests of kelp, setting jellyfish to movement, tricking shellfish with its resemblance to thunder so they cowered in their homespun caves. One strong note over sandy, wave-swept terrain—the oceanic equivalent of deserts—where nothing could grow and no fish lingered. One strong note over coral reefs and canyons, teasing dolphins into an answering chatter, bothering the seabirds where they rested between sea and sky. Finally this music would find its audience: another whale, clear on the other side of the world.
The presence of these animals has unsettled me. They are not predators, and they are not prey. They exist outside the food chain. In some ways, they exist outside normal space and time. They live in a realm of large, slow things—tides, storms, and magnetic currents. They often plunge into the inky depths of the ocean, down where the sunlight fails. They inhabit a blue world, away from land, dipping from water to air and back again, sliding between darkness and glow. It is rare for them to come close enough to the coast to be seen by human eyes. The Farallon Islands are unusual in this way, as in so many others. Autumn in this place is Whale Season.
It is November. Early November, I think, though I can’t be sure. I haven’t looked at the calendar in quite some time.
Thus far, I have failed to photograph the whales. I have tried, but they have defeated me. They are always too far away to succumb to my telephoto lens. They are too big to fit into the frame. There is something inartistic about their bodies, too. Some quality is lost in translation. Their ears and eyes vanish among their barnacles and scars. Their mouths are oddly shaped. Their blowholes are grotesque orifices, falling somewhere in appearance between a volcano and a rectum. Even the babies aren’t photogenic. Gray whales are fifteen feet long when they’re born, clocking in at two thousand pounds.
Undaunted, I continue to work. I have climbed Lighthouse Hill and sat on the slope for hours, looking to the west, where the whales pass by at irregular, unpredictable intervals. They are mysterious. They have been cropping up in my dreams, swimming through the moonless oceans of my mind, swishing their tails, displacing gallons of water, singing loudly enough to wake me.
The other day, I saw a blue whale. I was high on the hill, trying to plant my tripod on the crumbling granite. The creature rose up without warning. The noise caught my attention first—the whistling gasp of its breath. Fifty feet from shore. A rare thing. A marvel. It was bigger than a building, bigger than a dinosaur. I knew the numbers—the amount of school buses that would balance out its body on a scale, the quantity of football fields that would constitute its spine.
But I could not capture this girth on film. I got a snapshot of its nose. Its maw, mottled with algae. A gigantic flipper flinging droplets like throwing stars. The tail, off-kilter. It reminded me of the
parable about an elephant in a dark room. One person touches the trunk and describes the animal as a tree, the next touches the torso and describes the animal as a wall, and the third touches the tail and describes the animal as a rope. My photographs were similarly fragmented. Only pieces, rather than the whole. No grandeur. No force. No sense of power and size.
I was scrolling through the images I had taken—all unsuccessful and unbeautiful—when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned so swiftly that I lost my footing. Andrew stood there grinning. His red cap was askew, the gold emblem winking at me. I skidded down the slope, flinging out a hand. Andrew caught my arm. He pulled me up, then yanked me against him. He wrapped me in a hug.
“Poor Melissa,” he said. “Always falling down.”
“Let me go.”
He tightened his hold. My camera was pinned between us, digging into my chest.
“You’re hurting me,” I said.
He released me, stepping back. I shivered.
There was a scuffle, and Lucy appeared on the hill. I was glad to see her—a novel sensation. She was panting, her cheeks scarlet from exertion. A coil of hair trailed across her cheek. Her expression was mulish.
“You walk too fast,” she said to Andrew. “You never wait for me.”
“Look who I found,” he said.
Lucy glanced up, wiping her brow with her sleeve.
“Oh, mouse girl,” she said. “Have you seen any burrowing owls?”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this.
“They’re an invasive species,” Andrew explained. “They feed on the mice.”
“They don’t belong here,” Lucy said. “We chase them off, but they always come back. It’s a constant battle.”
“Oh,” I said.
She turned away. “Let’s check Garbage Gulch, babe. I saw a couple there yesterday.”
She did not say goodbye to me. She marched down the slope, her braid swinging behind her. Andrew blew me a kiss.
T
HAT EVENING
, L
UCY
brought the octopus into the living room. We were all downstairs, as we are every evening, seven bodies crammed into the tiny space, Galen and Forest reading on opposite ends of the couch, Mick scribbling notes about whales in the daily log, Andrew at the table, Charlene washing dishes. I was sitting on the floor, scrolling again through the images on my digital camera, deleting the duds. This is a nightly ritual. It will be months before I will be able to convert my pictures into prints. For now, they remain in a half-real state, glimmering on the screen, stored in electronic impulses in the memory card, more idea than art.
I was aware of Andrew’s gaze on my back. Galen’s noisy breathing. The odor of Mick’s sweat. The restless jiggle of Forest’s legs. There is no peace here, no solitude. I have not yet learned to tune out the constant presence of the others. I will have to acquire this skill soon, for the sake of my sanity.
Then Lucy laughed. The sound startled me. She was standing in her bedroom doorway with something cupped in her hands. She set the octopus on the floor. Evidently she had removed him from the aquarium on her bureau. She flicked the damp off her fingers. For a moment, Oliver stayed curled in a protective ball. His suckers were flipped outward, rumpled like lace. One yellow eye gleamed.
He unfolded all at once, a remarkable gesture, eight legs tumbling in every direction. The sac of his body sagged like a deflated balloon. No bones. He had no bones. He began to drag himself right toward me.
I got to my feet, backing away. I bumped into the couch. Oliver changed color, his flesh darkening from sandy ochre to furious red. The same hue as Andrew’s stocking cap. His progress made a surprising amount of noise. Suck and slide. Slither and coil. Suddenly, he changed direction. One long arm snaked to the side and tugged. His body rolled over, the skin puckered with dust.
“He can’t breathe,” I said. “Won’t he die?”
Lucy did not answer. She was watching her pet with something like pride. I found that I was standing by Mick, my fingers hooked in his sweater.
“He’s fine,” Mick said. “They can hold their breath for thirty minutes or so. Look at him run! He’s trying to find a way out of here.”
There was something both hopeful and hopeless in the scene. The octopus did not know that he was half a mile inland. He did not know about the obstacles he would have to overcome to return to the ocean. Acres of sharp, uneven granite. Gallons of dry,
unforgiving air. The predatory seabirds overhead. The detached, amused gaze of the biologists. The octopus was unaware of how trapped he truly was.
“There’s no escape,” Lucy said.
I
WISH YOU WERE
here. I wish you were anywhere.
Over the years, I have tried to reconcile myself to the fact that I write to you, and you don’t write back. I have pretended that there is something therapeutic about all of this, in simply putting pen to paper. I have imagined that by storing up anecdotes for you all day long, I will be able to keep you with me. A relationship is a two-sided thing, both parties reaching toward one another across the empty air. You may be gone, but if I keep reaching, some element of our bond may remain.
I even find myself narrating my own life, in my mind, throughout the hours—notes for my next letter to you. Sometimes it feels as though I’m two different people—the one doing the action and the one describing it afterward.
Pouring a cup of tea, I will think,
The steam billowed over the rim and filled the air with cinnamon
. Taking a walk along the grounds, I will think,
I saw five birds circling the lighthouse, climbing higher and higher on a current of air, their wings open but unmoving, folded and fixed like the flaps of a kite
. This is not the way most adults live their lives: narrating every moment as it occurs, in the past tense, as a detached observer. But for me, the act has become reflexive. I have been writing to you for so long
that I don’t feel as if something has happened until I have told you about it. The life cycle of any event begins with action, crescendos in observation, and finishes with nouns and verbs. It isn’t over until I have recorded it on the page. For you.
But recently, I have not written to you. I have not been able to. Something terrible happened—so terrible that it took away my words.
During that time, I have tried to write. God knows I have tried. But I could never seem to begin. My mind has been empty. I have taken out paper and pencil, sat staring for a while, and walked away, leaving the page blank. The other day I sent my father a postcard that said simply,
Status quo.
A big, fat lie. I could not write the truth. When Charlene has settled deferentially beside me at the kitchen table, asking how I am, I have made noncommittal noises and shaken my head. I have said nothing of consequence. Even my usual narration, internal and constant, has deserted me. Mick and I have taken our customary long walks in the chilly air, pushing through the fog. Holding his arm, steadying myself, I have been as silent as a stone.
I
T ALL BEGAN
on a November evening. The afternoon was long and exhausting for everyone. A broken window. An injured auklet. A choppy, treacherous ocean that kept Galen and Forest on land against their will with nothing to do but sulk. For my part, I spent the hours on the grounds, attempting to get a few good images of the humpbacks. I was on the coast with Charles, my dear old friend
and camera, for far too long, forgetting to eat, straining my ankle on the rocks, freezing myself to the bone. The humpbacks remained unhelpful. Despite my best efforts, they were in a coy mood, bobbing offshore, a glimmer of eyes and flippers. I came home with nothing to show for my efforts except a sore leg and the sniffles.
By dinnertime, we were all worn out. Mick boiled the pasta as Andrew assembled a fruit salad out of the remainder of our canned goods. Every detail of that meal is still illuminated in my mind. Lucy’s braid, slung around her shoulders like a snake. Galen’s thumb, wrapped in a bandage. Andrew’s red stocking cap, with the little flash of gold on the side, a tiny phoenix stitched onto the fabric. How sick I am of seeing that hat. The conversation was rapid and ardent, though a lot of it, even now, zoomed right over my head. Galen and Forest sniped at one another in undecipherable biologist code. Lucy chattered on about common murres. Andrew did not say much. He sat there looking bored. His few comments were a bit risqué, I noticed—the relatively enormous size of a barnacle’s penis, the aggressive mating habits of the gulls. I could not tell if he was watching me or if I merely happened to be in his line of sight across the table. Charlene was a spot of color. She mostly asked questions, and I found it reassuring that someone else was confused too. I never asked questions. I was too far behind, left in the dust.
What’s a common murre
? I might have inquired, or,
Who cares whether sharks mate for life?
Only blank stares would have resulted.
We had wine. Remember that, because it will be important later. It has never been my habit to drink; I don’t particularly like the sharp bite of alcohol, much less the ensuing mental muddle. I
am not a person who enjoys a confused mind. But Mick had been storing a few bottles under the porch for weeks, hiding them from everyone. That night, we all needed a little cheering up. That night, I figured that it would be festive to raise a glass—or three, or four—with the rest of them.
I went to bed late. I remember cannoning into my doorjamb, under the impression that it had moved a few inches to the left. I could hear Lucy’s soft voice in her bedroom downstairs. Galen, I knew, was out cold on the sofa, a bottle still hooked in his limp fingers. Charlene was in her room with headphones on. She often listened to music before bed, claiming it helped her sleep. In my drunken state, I’d found amusement in watching her work the apparatus over her mane of red.
I heard a sound in the corridor. Mick and Forest were whispering. Then the front door creaked. They were outside on the porch. Evidently they were heading off to whale-watch by starlight. This was a wild risk, but I was too tired to consider its ramifications. The wine had reduced us all to drunken fools. I lay down in bed, feeling that my body was an enormous weight, one I had been carrying far too long. As I drifted off, I caught sight of a shape in the corner of the room. It was moonlight—I was almost sure it was only a streak of moonlight. Pale and gaunt. A suggestion of movement. I was already tumbling into sleep.
My dreams were fitful. I was in a courtroom facing an angry judge. I was being accused of taking a life, an act I held no memory of. The jury seemed to be made up of the biologists on the islands. Lucy, in particular, looked forbidding.
My bedroom was cold at first, but it began to grow warmer until I was sweltering, even sweating. I threw off the sheet without fully waking. The dream shifted. The octopus appeared, slithering over the mattress, groping my flesh with his suckers. I could not get him off me. He was slick and wet, smelling of salt, his tentacles surprisingly rough. The dream changed again. I was undergoing torture now—some medieval device, two slabs of stone crushing me between them, like a flower being pressed and dried. It seemed vital that I remember the name of this device before it took my life. I could not remember it. I could not move my arms.
Gradually I realized that someone else was there. Breath on my cheek. Weight on my chest. Another presence. Something was shaking—the whole island, or else the bed.
It took me a long time to understand what was happening. That was the fault of the wine and the dreams. It was difficult to sift out the reality of the situation. I was still half-aware of the octopus, his suckers palpating my skin. There was pressure on my hips, pain in my belly. I could still hear the rough voices of my torturers, the squeak of their ropes. Then I understood the noise to be the bedsprings.
A man’s shape. A man’s body on top of mine. The medieval vise was, in fact, his rib cage, squeezing the breath out of me. His face was in shadow.
I was still calm, waiting for the dream to shift again, waiting to wake up. Maybe he would morph back into the octopus, tiny and damp. Maybe he was one of the medieval torturers. Maybe he was a stranger—a stranger had broken into my childhood bedroom—I
was not in my father’s house—no stranger could have come to the islands. He must be someone I knew. My legs were stuck beneath his. My arms were stuck beneath his. I was no longer dreaming. The octopus and the ropes were gone. But the man remained. The terrible weight of his limbs held me captive.
I should stop there. You can imagine what came next. I will say only that it did not hurt—not exactly. Physically, it was just unpleasant. In retrospect, that does seem odd to me. I would have expected there to be an immediate, protective response: tensed muscles, torn tissue, pain. But my body, stupefied by wine and sleep, had stood aside to let him enter. In such a state, it could not distinguish between what he was doing and the act of love.
Then the sheet slipped off his shoulder. In the moonlight, I saw blond hair. A pale forehead. It was Andrew.
In that moment, everything splintered. I opened my mouth to scream for help. At once, his hand slammed across my lips. A kind of seizure overtook me. I wriggled like an eel, snorting against his fingers. I kicked against the dense, bony burden of his calves. His eyes were lifted above my head, a little dazed; he looked like a man on drugs. His hips went on pumping like a piston, but the rest of him was dead weight. He was in no hurry. He kissed me clumsily on the cheek, like an inexperienced teenager making the first move on a date.
I arched my spine, trying to work my arms free. I could not get even a few fingers loose. His palm was too broad and flat to bite. As rapidly as it had come on, the seizure passed over and left me limp.
After that, it gets harder to remember. Minutes or hours might have passed before he left me. I cannot tell you all the bizarre
thoughts that passed through my brain. Lucy asleep in her bedroom downstairs. Charlene hidden inside her music. Galen, who was supposed to know everything that transpires here. Mick and Forest out staring at whales. Explorers on the moon. You—you—you. Your coffin. Your gravesite. Your bones, your musculature, crumbling into the earth. All the material elements that had once made up a living woman. Tiny particles of you, strewn across the world, carried on the rain. How we are broken down to just the essentials.
Andrew was still moving. He was panting and sputtering. I let my gaze roam around the room. I could feel the heat of his breath. I ignored him for a splash of moonlight on the wall. A tall, slim shape. One beam radiated outward like a raised arm. The curtains moved, and the figure trembled.
The ghost was coming into focus. I could almost see the dial swiveling on my mental camera, pulling her into greater and greater clarity. The swing of her nightgown. Her bony wrists. The plane of her cheek.
She was nothing like I had imagined. She was at once more and less real—raw, ethereal, icy. Her body was of an indeterminate density, shifting in the murk and moonlight. Her torso was a pearly smudge, her fingers as distinct as piano keys, her legs lost in a haze. Her eyes were dark holes. There was something weary in her expression, as though corporeality had cost her a great deal.
For the first time, I understood why ghosts were antithetical to photography. I was certain that she would never have turned up on film. She was like a column of salt dropped in water—soluble, permeable, mixing with the surrounding matter. The camera would
not have been able to perceive her the way I did. Its mechanism was designed to replicate the action of the human eye—precise and objective—rather than the subjective, suggestible mind. I could not tell whether she was beautiful. Her face was too elemental to register inessential qualities like symmetry or shapeliness. Burning eyes. An oval skull. I could not find her mouth among the shadows. Her hair drifted in a wind I did not feel. Then her arm swung in a gesture of entreaty. The intent was unmistakable. A welcome, from one ghost to another.