The Plover: A Novel (3 page)

*   *   *

And flooding in upon him, to his absolute astonishment, was a black sadness and loneliness and despair so sudden and thorough that he sat down heavily on the deck and wept as he had never wept before in all his life. He was overwhelmed, inundated, swept away by it, his usual salty confidence shredded and tattered so that who he had thought himself to be was completely shattered and he was merely a being in a boat, alone and foolish, running away from everything that had ever meant anything to him, a coward and a joke, utterly alone, unloved and unloving. The sun strengthened by the minute and the boat steamed so remarkably than an observer might have mistaken it for smoke; but there was no man or woman or child for hundreds of miles around, and Declan felt the absence of his kind like a new hole in his flinty soul. He sobbed amid the steam, his face in his hands, until he was empty, a shell in the stern; and finally he fell asleep, his arms wrapped over his head like a shroud. There was the faintest of swells in the sea and the
Plover
rocked gently, carried west and southwest by the current, no sails set, the engine asleep in its little cedar house. Two young humpback whales slid by silently big and blue and black, on their way south, but they did not remark the boat, being intent on each other and their own vast literature, and Declan slept on through the warming morning. Tuna arrowed beneath the boat, and bonito, and marlin, and cod six feet long, headed east to eat a ton or so of the smaller residents of the continental shelf; and a mile below, as Declan slept, the
Plover
drifted over a vent in the ocean floor around which gathered blind crabs as white as snow, and nameless fish with transparent heads, and creatures never seen yet by the eyes of man; but we have seen them in our deepest dreams, looming out of the dark, with eyes like fire.

*   *   *

Consider, for a moment, the Pacific Ocean not as a vast waterway, not as a capacious basin for liquid salinity and the uncountable beings therein, nor as a scatter of islands still to this day delightfully not fully and accurately counted, but as a country in and of itself, dressed in bluer clothes than the other illusory entities we call countries, that word being mere epithet and label at best, and occasion and excuse for murder at worst; rather consider the Pacific a tidal continent, some ten thousand miles long and ten thousand miles wide, bordered by ice at its head and feet, by steaming Peru and Palau at its waist; on this continent are the deepest caves, the highest mountains, the loneliest prospects, the emptiest aspects, the densest populations, the most unmarked graves, the least imprint of the greedy primary ape; in this continent are dissolved beings beyond count, their shells and ships and fins and grins; so that the continent, ever in motion, drinks the dead as it sprouts new life; the intimacy of this closer and more blunt and naked in Pacifica than anywhere else, by volume; volume being an apt and suitable word to apply to that which is finally neither ocean nor continent but story always in flow, narrative that never pauses, endless ebb and flow, wax and wane, a book with no beginning and no end; from it emerged the first fundament and unto it shall return the shatter of the world that was, the stretch between a page or two of the unimaginable story; but while we are on this page we set forth on journeys, on it and in it, steering by the stars, hoping for something we cannot explain; for thousands of years we said gold and food and land and power and freedom and knowledge and none of those were true even as all were true, as shallow waters; we sail on it and in it because we are starving for story, our greatest hunger, our greatest terror; and we love most what we must have but can never have; and so on we go, west and then west.

*   *   *

Sweet Jesus, it’s just a bird, and just a gull at that, the bilge rats of the air, a quarrelsome greedy race that eats their own, said Declan aloud to where the gull used to be. It’s not like you were an albatross or some such gentry. Good riddance. No one barfing on my roof anymore. None of your foul and disgusting squirts and pellets raining on the boat from above, none of your toenail scratches in my lovely cedar finish, no having to notice your awful rubber feet like a fecking flying lizard, and that damned red dot on your bill. Out out, damned dot! How does it go, the Scottish play? I remember performing it in the gym, in school, the candles in the dark, the wild wind, the constant rain, all rain all day all night all winter, no one else could remember the lines:
I have many nights watched with you, and seen you rise. A great perturbation in nature! Out, damned spot! out, I say! Hell is murky! No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that. Heaven knows what she has known. What’s done cannot be undone. God forgive us all! I think, but dare not speak.
… Exactly so. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll think but not speak. No family, no friends, no girls, no gulls, no destination, no beer, no talking. Silently scuttling on the ceiling of the sea.

*   *   *

Consider, for a moment, that the longest chain of mountains and volcanoes and hills and guyots and cliffs and sheering walls on the face of the earth is invisible to the eye, unless you are plunged into the blue realm of Pacifica, which houses the Emperor Seamounts, which stretch nearly four thousand miles across the wild ocean like the longest grin there is; and consider further that only the very tail of this endless ridge, this vast vaulting, peers above the surface, and is christened Hawaii; and consider further that there are more volcanoes along that line of mountains than anyone has yet counted, let alone mountains; and let your mind wander along that line, in and out of ravines, a wilderness beyond the reach of man, a wilderness that thrashed and throbbed for millions of years without a single witness of our kind; how very many stories those mountains and valleys have hosted, battles and loves, heroes and cruelties, beings who changed the ways of their kind, last survivors of their races, ancient kings and queens, blind bards and tiny warriors, creatures beyond counting who left neither fin nor fossil, and are remembered perhaps only by whatever it is that forces fire through volcanic vent, and heats the bottom of the sea; caves and passages beyond number and explorers far beyond that numberless number; literatures and languages, songs and singers, villains and visionaries we can only dimly begin to imagine, even their shapes and sizes and colors endless and mutable; and over all this, for thousands of years, we floated in boats, utterly unaware of what was below, a wilderness beyond all reckoning or robbing; so what was it we were so sure we knew? We do not even know what it is we do not know, and what we do know passeth speedily away, inundated by what we do not know; yet on we go through the ravines, gaping as we go; having come from salted water and all headed home again; leaving behind neither fin nor fossil, but stories and voices, tales and music, shreds of memory, faint wakes of words in the water.

*   *   *

Late in the afternoon of his twelfth day out Declan saw a ship. He hove to, hungry for talk. The ship was big and rusty and silent. A hail from the railing ten feet above him.

You American?

Yes.

Fishing?

Yes.

Selling fish?

No.

My name is Enrique, said the man at the railing, suddenly expansive. I am this boat. She is mine. We are fishing also. Who says there are no fish? They are liars. Fish jump in our boat. You want beer?

No, thanks.

If you try to rob us we will shoot you. There’s no one out here.

Okay.

You American?

I am still American, yes.

You are the Navy?

No.

You have drugs to sell?

No.

Maybe we will shoot you and take your boat.

Not much to take.

No fish to sell?

Still no fish to sell.

Okay, fuck you then, says Enrique cheerfully. Good luck.

Same to you, friend.

As the bigger boat sheered off southeast, Declan noted its name, in red letters three feet high, poorly painted:
Tanets
. Isn’t that a Russian word,
tanets
? he said aloud to the gull, before realizing that the gull still wasn’t floating nine feet above the stern. Why would a Russian trawler have a guy named Enrique running the boat? Fecking Wild West out here, man.

*   *   *

On the
Tanets
Enrique strolled back to the pilot house calculating odds and percentages. Odds were that the American was a thief of some sort—why would a fisherman be so far out in such a small trawler, without a crew? And what kind of trawler was also rigged for sails? Odds were that the American was also a crazy man, in which case boarding him and taking whatever was useful would be ultimately a service to society, teaching the man that foolishness is punishable, especially at sea. But a man alone in a small boat this far out could also be some sort of agent. Probably this was some sort of subtle and complicated trap, best avoided altogether. Odds were also that the little trawler had nothing worth stealing, and violence for its own sake was poor business, usually punished somehow; Enrique was a passionate believer in retribution, not in religious terms but in general universal judicial reckoning. Not to say he was a moral man in any known sense of the term, no; he had done more than his share of illicitry, and the business affairs of the
Tanets
were complicated beyond the grasp of the most assiduous lawyer or accountant, not to mention customs agent, police officer, or harbormaster; but Enrique, while cheerfully and even eagerly flouting the laws of nations and international entities, measured odds and percentages meticulously, and was as wary as any man alive of arrogance and overconfidence, hubris and carelessly free behavior, especially in the matter of violence; violence was a tool, a means of effecting circumstances, and should be used with great care, he believed; and also simply the
possibility
of it, the prospect, the aura, the suggestion, he had learned, was better than actual execution, the former almost always serving to achieve the end desired, whereas the latter almost always led to unforeseen consequences and complexities; and the unforeseen was Enrique’s worst nightmare, the thing he fought most bitterly to avoid. Thus he left the
Plover
to herself, and the
Tanets
lumbered southeast, Enrique silently comparing charts with his pilot.

*   *   *

The problem with the ocean, Declan considered, was that it was so
wet;
otherwise it might be a sort of lovely billowing playground, a place where you could fall and not be hurt, make a mistake and be forgiven. But no, here nothing was forgiven, you paid thoroughly for the slightest mistake, darkness fell not like a mercy but like a hammer, and this was where moist went to heaven. Everything was moist beyond reclamation, the fish, the birds, the bedraggled garbage floating on the surface, even everything above the surface, like the mist that some days never could haul itself fully up into being a self-respecting cloud. It was inconceivable that anything whatsoever on the boat would ever be dry ever again. Even his tiny bunk below, which he had built meticulously fitting the boards together in endless overlay and overlap, to keep out any hint of spray and fog, now smelled like a sleeping bag left in a dank basement for a long winter, and felt like a cold coffin rather than the cheery redolent cedar study he had envisioned. His books were beginning to swell, his skin itched from moist clothes and grating salt, his crackers wilted, his spirits flagged. Also while we are on the subject of general complaints about the ocean, he thought, the colors are nothing to write home about. The ocean blue, my butt. Mostly it’s puke gray, when it’s not evil green or some shade of foul charcoal that gives you the seasick willies if you stare at it too long. Now, if the thing were
transparent,
that would be cool, you would be fascinated all day and knocked out all night by the light show. Who designed this thing? Where do I file my complaints? Who’s in charge here? You can see why so many people who lived out here were nuts and mystics. The thing’s
designed
to make you crazy. There’s no pattern to it, no organizational principle. Whatever you are sure of is sure to not be at all what you were sure it is. People imagined seeing islands and vast monsters. You can see why the old people thought it was the end of the earth; it
is
the end of the earth. It’s not even really part of the earth. I don’t see no earth out here. You see any earth? he asked the gull, out of force of habit, but realized, again with a pang, that not even the gull had stayed with him, and he was inarguably and utterly alone. Darkness having fallen suddenly like a fist, he urinated copiously over the stern and went to bed.

*   *   *

In the morning he went over his charts carefully and realized that he was approximately at the edge of what he had always thought was the wetter half of Oregon, if you considered Oregon in the larger sense, which is to say not merely the four-hundred-mile-wide dry part with mountains and wolverines and settlements, but also the four-hundred-mile-wide wet part adjacent, also with mountains and major predators and settlements; and this is not even to mention the four-hundred-mile-deep part, which he called Subterroregon, or the four-hundred-mile-high part, which he named Atmosphoregon, although he had sometimes daydreamed of voyaging to the peak of Atmosphoregon, to the physical boundary called the critical level of escape, after which you have essentially left behind planet, air, and time; an idea that appealed greatly to Declan, although he would have to steal a rocket to make the trip, an idea that did not appeal to him. Whereas the wetter half of Oregon, the four hundred miles of impacific ocean adjacent to the four hundred miles of dirt Oregon, appealed deeply; he even had topographic charts of it, labeled Wettern Oregon, which an oceanographer friend of his had drawn in exchange for fifty pounds of fresh halibut. This guy, remembered Declan with a grin, was a kick—he had legally changed his name for a while to an adjective, he played the flügelhorn in a jazz band that deliberately played only such events as weddings between Lutherans and Presbyterians and baptisms of babies named for animals, and he had once flensed a whale by himself, over the course of three weeks, on the beach, living in a tiny blue tent above the high tide line. He was one of those guys who seemed electrified by everyone and everything, the kind of guy who totally lit up when he saw a sparrowhawk helicoptering over a corn shock, the kind of guy who liked every kid he ever met and every kid liked him, the kind of guy that dogs leaned against so as to get their bellies and ears rubbed at the same time as only dog people know how to do properly so that the dog makes that crooning mooing moaning humming thrumming sound of Delighted, the kind of guy who liked all kinds of music and liked finding new music even more than digging the music he already loved, the kind of guy who when he walked down the street in a foreign city the old sour grandmothers shuffled out in the street to pinch his cheek and scold him affectionately for his silver earrings and braided beard like the beard of a goat in a jazz band. But he had been wounded by a storm, this guy, his little daughter hit by a bus driver when she was five years old waiting for the kindergarten bus, and his light was dimmed, and by now no one thought he would ever get it back. Declan had often asked him to come for a long voyage on the
Plover,
man, let’s go fish for salmon in Alaska! let’s go surf the Island of All the Saints off Mexico! let’s steal a rocket and shoot for Venus! But now his friend was the kind of guy who said quietly
nah
and went to go give his daughter a bath, which took a long time and was best done with aforethought, so as to get her safely cantilevered in and out of the tub, her huge gray eyes staring hungrily at everything, her close-cropped hair starting to turn white despite her youth.