Three Moments of an Explosion (12 page)

My mother always seemed embarrassed when I talked about the ships—children do talk about them—and when I got a bit older I asked her why and asking her made her uncomfortable.

No one minds those few adults who do want to discuss them doing so with each other so long as they don’t involve the majority who would rather not. Chomburg used to light big smoking fires on the stones of the beach when the ships appeared, burning bits of plastic and rubbish and wood and inedible fish, trying to make signals in smoke, so you would see horrible big globs of stink going up into the air and if the wind changed it made the town smell bad, so everyone asked him to stop doing it and, though with his usual bad grace, he did.

There are those who think that there are no people on the ships at all. We know what sailors are, but there may be none on any of these vessels.

Two ships have sunk in my lifetime.

The first went down when I was with my mother in the woods picking mushrooms and checking traps for rabbits. I carried the bag while she carried me—I was little—and we came out of the trees and saw pretty much the whole town gathered in front of Misha’s workshop, arguing excitedly. People started shouting at my mother as soon as they saw her, telling her what had happened and what they had seen. As soon as she understood she took me quickly down the path to the shore and we looked out at the sentence but by then the ship had gone completely under so there was nothing new to see, though I told myself there was more chop between the wrecks than there had been.

It must have been laying deep grammar, my mother said.

Then one cold morning when I was fifteen I was braced halfway down the cliff, trying to steal from a kittiwake nest. With a certain luxurious terror I was listening to my rope creak. I don’t know what alerted me that there was something to see but I looked over my shoulder as best I could, out over the water. A battered steamer was coming toward us at a good pace. It was low in the water, and still far enough away that it looked like a misprinted image.

I braced my feet on the lichen and sheer chalk. The ship did not slow. When it abruptly upended I discovered I was not surprised. I imagine some unseen squib puncturing a hole just so, timed so that as the ship passed between the weather-beaten promontories of other scuttled vessels, its bow shoved down as if under a big hand and the steamer burped black smoke and plunged under at an angle to grind to a hard rest against some sunken reef or obstacle. Perhaps against the ship I and my mother did not see sink. There was a grinding across the water and with a resonant cracking the steamer’s stern broke off and fell into the waves.

Over the next half a day the ship fussed and fiddled and sank more while people watched. It settled finally in a last configuration, jutting like an overhang over the scattered bits of its own broken tail that stuck up from the underwater rise on which they had landed. The wreck took its position in the graveyard place, among the other remnants: rusting humps of chimneys, the stumps of masts breaking the water like reaching fingers, flanks, decks, the keel of an upturned cargo ship.

These shallow acres where rocks wait below sight are the waters of the sentence. The dead vessels obtrude from the surf and discolor it in their new broken shipwreck shapes. Each is a word, assiduously placed, set to self-ruin precisely.

I spoke to Gam, who was one of those intent on decoding the sentence. You could often find Gam drawing on rough paper, marking the positions and shapes of the sunk ships from one or other point on the cliff or the shore, connecting them variously with scribbled lines, measuring the spaces between them and applying various keys. Gam was sure that, seen from the right place in the right way, the sentence would make sense. Once I saw Gam sketching from the town hall roof. No one was supposed to go up there. I promised not to tell.

Look, I said, they keep adding words. You can’t decode it or translate it yet, it’s not finished.

No ships have come for a long time.

Before this, the longest I remember without visitations was a little over a week, and it has been much longer than that.

For several days no one said anything. You might have started to detect a little anxious crinkle around their eyes when you said hello to people. You might have thought the wind felt a bit colder. More people seemed to me to be at Gam’s station, standing out under the gray sky at the cliff’s edge, staring at the sentence with more concentration than I’d ever seen before.

A certain panic has entered our days. You may not know you notice them, but all of us have had ships creeping almost silently—except perhaps for a very faint sound of engines or the crack of a sail—in and out of our vision our whole lives, and their absence is frightening. Though their presence has been a fearful thing, too. It is not good form to admit that.

Now that there are no ships people have started to talk—like children—about what they might be and where from, what they do. Theological questions normally avoided.

If they’ve been observing us, some are asking, have they stopped? Have they got what information they wanted? Why have they never come ashore?

They can’t, of course, is what others say. They have to be at a distance, to stay there, to have every man’s wish on board.

There will be a meeting in the town hall to discuss what to do. Caffey, by a long way the oldest person in the town, says everyone is making a fuss over nothing, that we shouldn’t worry, that she remembers a time (before anyone else was born) when a fortnight passed and no ships came. But Caffey has license to say all kinds of unlikely things (she lives near our graveyard and likes to scandalize everyone by saying that we’ll thank her soon enough, less effort to get her there). Even she admits that this shipless period seems longer than that other in her faint memory.

I will not go to the meeting because I know there is nothing we can do to bring the ships, if we want to, and all the talk of calling them that has started, of getting their attention, of invoking them, is foolish. I hope it is foolish because if it is not it is sinister or will soon be. Another two or three shipless weeks and the worst people in town will start eyeing the weakest. I will not go to the town meeting because I know it will be an argument between those with sense and panickers whose eagerness for sacrifice is unseemly. There will be one of the regular upsurges of rumors.

Instead of that pointless meeting I am going into the woods and asking Gam to come with me, to help me with a project.

I decided to make a start on a raft when I found the big clearing full of dead and fallen young trees. I did so always listening and ready to hide at the sound of anyone approaching, but I was undisturbed. To the dry wood I strapped big plastic containers that had once held water and were now floats full of air. I think lightning must have struck there, I don’t know, but I had been working to strip and shape the blackened wood with tools I borrowed from Misha’s workshop, and then strap and nail them together, and I had made a reasonable start but I had got bored and without either patience or expertise had stopped. I showed Gam what I had done and said I wanted help to start again. Gam made unconvincing cautious noises but got started immediately.

Of course I’m not the first person to build a raft, or a canoe, or a coracle. It is not allowed but people do it sometimes. Mostly they get found before they put out to sea. Sometimes townspeople disappear and the story goes that they rowed out and their craft held and that now they are somewhere else; or if, as is often the case, they disappear when a ship is visible on the horizon line, stories inevitably start that our lost neighbors are on that ship. Broken boats do wash ashore.

Gam worked out how best to tie the thin trunks together. I said the raft didn’t have to be strong, or to last long, only strong enough to go out a way and back again. Gam asked where we were going and I looked in a way that said don’t be stupid. I said that maybe what we needed was to see the sentence up close, that maybe that was how you crack it.

We finished some time after dark but I had a hand-crank torch and I was certain the meeting would continue into the small hours (it did). Gam and I lifted our raft, and each with a crude oar over our shoulders we hauled it through the fringe of woods and down a long route, away from the town (though its low lights still illuminated us through the bushes where it was closest), past fat pillars of rock and to the sea.

Every few minutes Gam would say that this was a bad idea and that we should not do this, not, to be fair, because it was not allowed, but because it was dangerous. Neither of us could swim more than a bit. I did not argue because I knew curiosity would win by the time we were by the water.

It was cold but not too cold at first and the wind was low. The spray slapped us like angry hands and made us gasp but that was all. We pushed the raft out into the low surf.

We were rowing for longer than I had expected. Even a few yards from the shore we were both quickly sodden and vastly colder. There was an almost-full moon but the diffuse gray light was impossible to do much with. It made the foam glow and it rose and fell and confused us. The currents were insistent and we were lucky that they seemed to want only to pull us straight back to the pebbled beach rather than across our route, so though we had to strain we did not have to triangulate or do anything except row as hard as we could through our shivers, directly out, until our hands were terrible messes. It was a very stupid thing to do and I am fortunate I did not die. Gam tried to keep our spirits up by talking incessantly about the ships of the sentence and the ships that visited. About the anxiety they brought. That surprised me: the sea was eliciting confessions. Gam admitted to hating the ships, which made me raise an eyebrow.

What are we going out there for? Gam said and I did not have much of an answer.

Bits of ship architecture began to emerge from the shadows ahead into the light of the torch. We bobbed between extrusions thick with shellfish and guano as I considered the slanting floors, decks, dissolving doorways blocked by weed in the black water below. We had not aimed for any word in particular, we could not have done with our crude raft and in the dark like this, and when we felt the nasty scraping of our underside against corroding metal we both started. We lowered ourselves carefully over the sides, gasping at the cold, and our feet touched down on the roof of some old ship, a roof that rose, a steep metal meadow of growth and decay on which I shone our light, out of the chop of the channel.

We pulled our raft out of the water and sat heavily on the metal rise as the surf sounded. Across what now looked like a mile of low water we could see the lights of our town and the ghost outlines of the cliffs.

When I had my strength back, I stood and shone my light around. We were near the apex of a pyramidal mount of rust broken by what had been windows. From the water a little way off jutted a bow like a whale’s head. Beyond that was the side of what I think was a tugboat. We were in an archipelago of ruin, and between each corroded specimen, each word, the waters swirled in complicated microcurrents.

I wondered aloud if we should go on to another, maybe the tower of girders near the farthest rocks. Gam did not answer, was too busy staring into dim vistas of wreckage and gasping that we had done it, that we were here.

Colonies of birds shuffled a bit and a few of them took off but mostly they were untroubled by our arrival, and I imagined that they were used to things hauling themselves up from the waters to sun or moon a while.

Does the sentence make any more sense from here? I said. Gam did not answer but startled me by taking hold of me from behind and turning me around and trying to kiss me. I suppose I had known this might happen. I tutted and pushed and we wrestled for a while on the slope of the old metal. I shoved and Gam stumbled and trod on a decaying anemone abandoned by the sea and skidded violently and fell. Gam’s head cracked on the corner of the metal. I stepped forward but I was not quick enough and Gam pitched into the sea and was caught up by the gnarly undertows threading between the wrecks and yanked under as if by ropes much faster than you would think natural. Quickly I pointed the light but I could see only swirls and spray and the black water, and a bit of blood mottling the last of the ship’s paintwork, discoloring the remnants of a painted logo, of which we know from the books.

I probed with my oar. Water tugged it and I wondered if it had sucked Gam down into the body of this word, to go up and down its stairwells for a long time. I put my hand into the cold but I had no way to know what shards and sharp edges were below.

Gam did not reappear. I waited a long time. When I saw the lights of the town hall go out I pushed the raft back into the waves of the bay and rowed for the land.

I was only one person, with one oar. On the other hand this was the way the currents wanted to take me. I think it was about the same amount of effort and time to reach the stones of the shore where I kicked and pulled the raft apart to set its pieces adrift, before sneaking, exhausted, back to my house where I knew my mother would be sleeping.

People said Gam must have gone to sea, which I suppose was not untrue. Some wondered if, rather than by water, Gam had picked through the trees and down the sheer channels of the gorge, impossible and impassable as we all know they are, and had got to the mainland that way.

That would be enough to have Gam spoken of in approving disapproving awe forever, but on top of that some people are saying that it’s Gam we have to thank for the return of the ships.

In the late afternoon of the third day after we paddled out to the sentence and Gam didn’t come back, there was a sudden immense rumbling in the bay. I was not there but I heard about it from Tyruss, who was, who was looking sadly out to sea. There were a series of percussions and booms and the biggest wrecks of the sentence all lurched ponderously, suddenly, at once, in many directions. They came down shattering themselves and each other. Every word fell apart in water that was, Tyruss said, quivering.