Outerbridge Reach (41 page)

He was steering northeasterly, sailing a broad reach on the port tack under a marbled mackerel sky. The wind was stiff but serviceable; it filled the belly of his sails and played the worthless fiberglass below like a cheap harmonica. He had fashioned tie-rods to hold the craft together out of spare wire and turnbuckles. But he knew that the next big blow would dismast him and beat the boat to death.

In the aftermath of the gale, he found himself meditating on the race's circularity, its notions of flight and pursuit. A game, if you could stand the incessant motion, made a perfectly decent life. Games were all that made things serious or gave them form. To be a serious person, it was necessary to embrace one.

Browne took comfort in his reflections, although he supposed the race was lost to him. Sometimes anger kept him from sleep and spoiled his appetite. He rarely ate or slept.

Once he spent a day that was rewarded with a night, although a brief one. He thought it delicious to see the sky go dark. There were no stars. To his bemusement, Duffy was on the line to him.

“How's tricks, Captain? Where you been?”

Browne regretted having responded to his call sign. He had no idea of what to say. I would have won if the boat had been good, he thought.

“I've had high winds,” he reported. “I've made good time. Over.”

“Are you O.K.?”

“Outstanding,” Browne said.

“I'm supposed to remind you to keep filming.”

I could say, Browne thought, that I was anywhere on the planet except for his transponder tracking me. I could be free of them all.

“I will.”

A stratagem for silence occurred to him.

“Look, I have a problem. Over.”

“What's that, Owen?”

“My fuel injectors are blocked. I'll have to clean them before I can charge the generator. I may have to go off the air for a while.”

“Is that like a major problem?”

“No. I have gas. It'll be all right. Over.”

“What should I tell the public?”

Browne could not keep from laughing.

“Are you laughing?” Duffy asked. He sounded as though he wanted to laugh too but was prevented by some caution.

“Tell it to get some sleep,” Browne said. “Out.”

Hours later, he dug Buzz Ward's crumpled letter from under the boards.

“No one knows how he will react to being alone,” Buzz had written. “There are different levels of it. My opinion is that we are much more alone in a human situation that is utterly alien to us than when alone at sea or lost in the woods or something of that nature. The point is to keep solitude from becoming a prison. The old saw that ‘stone walls do not a prison make' is valid.”

Encoffined in his grinding fiberglass walls, Browne waited out the short night. Just before dawn, the boat's power failed briefly and the masthead light went out as he was watching it. The light's going out seemed to be a part of a process that was outside randomness.

He took up the letter again, in the beam of a flashlight.

“In 1970 and '71 we had fourteen months in solitary without light. After a few months I found a hole from which I could see daylight and even sometimes people. They were local rural people, Tonkinese peasants, mainly elderly for some reason. They came to barter with the guards—some kind of scam. Often they stopped to shoot the breeze and rest. Watching them, I would think: How sane they are and how little they expect from life.”

With the return of light, he thought how strange it was that he had so doubted his abilities as a single-handed sailor that he had been reduced to lying about his experience. In the end he had managed perfectly well. He might have won if the boat had been good.

For some reason, in his desolate quarter of the globe incoming messages multiplied. An Australian voice explained the Doppler effect for the benefit of students for a radio officer's certificate. An instructor who might have been Asian American held forth on the history of spectroscopes:

“Early instruments employed a combination of electrostatic and magnetic focusing whereby ions were sorted specifically according to their mass.”

Not useful. Then there was a mad ham in South Africa, Zulu Romeo Alpha one Juliet five six three, who had bestowed upon himself the handle Mad Max. Max was apparently a teenager who traded worldwide for all sorts of collectibles. He broadcast over two assigned frequencies, voice transmission on one, Morse code on the other. Browne could catch only one end of the conversation. In Morse, Mad Max had an able, subtle fist: his pauses resonated, his dots and dashes rhymed, his silences could be downright sarcastic. His voice was a husky boy soprano with a South African drawl. Sometimes he sounded frantic.

“I have a set from India's sunny clime! I have an ivory set from Thailand, the western game but the rooks are elephants with tusks. I have a mahogany set carved on Devil's Island by a convict. Dreyfus? Monte Cristo—Cuba's finest cigar. I have a Persian set, Kaz, the original game still played up the Khyber. I've got a set out of walnut as well. Coconuts? I've a loverly bunch of those!”

He also went in for impossible jokes, available to Browne only in fragments.

“It wasn't the feather or the ten shillings, yer honor. 'Twas the mean low cunning of the bastard.”

He seemed part pitchman, part voluble, greedy child.

At sunrise, when Browne went up on deck, there was a pale blue shimmer over the northeastern horizon. Staring at it, he saw something inexplicable.

In the center of the glow was what appeared to be an inverted mountain range. Peaks hung upside down like stalactites, their points barely touching the surface of the sea, thickening to a central mass a few degrees above the horizon. It was as though an upside-down island hung suspended there.

He stood for a long time staring at the strange sight. The inverted peaks were delicate and beautiful, flashing ice colors as the sky lightened. He turned the boat toward them. After about thirty minutes the sight vanished. But where the line of ice had been, a single petrel soared on the wind, ranging ahead of the boat at a constant bearing, as though it were leading him on. Impelled by some urgency like hope, Browne steered his vessel after the bird's passage.

S
TRICKLAND
stood with the telephone to his ear, watching Pamela Koester attempt to open a bottle of no-salt vegetable juice. Her first efforts to twist the cap off having proved unavailing, she had begun to bang the top of the bottle against the side of the refrigerator. Each blow was harder than the last. Her eyes took on a cold fanatical cast. The tip of her tongue protruded from one corner of her mouth. Strickland intervened. Without putting the phone down, he walked over to Pamela and took the juice away from her. He had his partner, Freya Blume, on the line.

“We can proceed with the film,” Freya was saying happily. “We seem to be provided for.”

That morning a number of people connected with the Hylan Corporation had been indicted, including Hylan himself. No charges had been lodged against Harry Thorne.

“Good,” Strickland said. He wrapped a dish towel around the juice cap, gave a sharp twist and handed the open container to Pamela. Pamela threw her head back and drank greedily. “Because I have a few subjects lined up.”

“As counterpoint, you mean?”

“Yes. As layoff coverage. I think we'd like to hear from some boat people. We got some pithy commentary from those guys on Staten Island. We might have a little more of that.”

“Honestly,” Freya said, “do you know what those guys are talking about? Can you make it comprehensible?”

“I don't know,” Strickland said. “Maybe it doesn't have to be.”

All day he had been trying to reach Altan's former chief designer, a man named Fay. When he had left yet another message on the man's machine, he saw that Pamela had succeeded in spilling juice all over the tiles of the kitchen area of his loft. He shouted after her.

“Can't you clean up after yourself? Don't be such a child.”

He went into the main loft space and saw her huddled on cushions near the great window, leaning sulkily on her fist and looking down toward TriBeCa.

“I didn't pay my maintenance this month,” she said. “I'm really worried.”

“What about your dad? Maybe while he's preparing for death he'll think of you fondly.”

“His mind,” Pamela said, “has been poisoned against me.”

Pamela's recent social ascent had led her to a position as a hatcheck girl at the Marabout Club, the young new year's most dashing. It had slipped away when she was discovered attempting to steal a Caius College, Cambridge, scarf from one of the club's prominent customers. Pamela felt particularly ill-used, since she had not coveted the scarf for herself but as a gift for a new boyfriend.

“Don't look at me, Pamela,” Strickland said. “I don't believe I'm suited for nurturing.”

“I know that.”

“These are lean times for me. I'm not from Hollywood.”

“I understand,” she said. “Can't I stay here for a while?”

“I'll loan you the money to pay your maintenance. If guys are harassing you, leave town.”

“I will,” she said. “In a couple of days I'll go to the Cape. To Provincetown.”

“And you'll hang with your junkie friends up there and get in deeper.”

“It's the only place they'll take me in,” she said. “It's like home.”

“All right,” Strickland said. “You can stay here today and tomorrow. I have to go out later.” He sighed. “I'm so tired,” he said, “of seeing people fuck up.”

“Really?” she asked. “I thought you couldn't get enough of it.”

“I guess I've finally had enough. Maybe I'm losing my nerve. Maybe I'm getting old.”

Pamela studied him. “You look sort of old.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Strickland.

“But happier,” she added. “You look happier lately.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don't know. You look sort of up. Where do you have to go out to?” she asked.

“Out on the job. Up to Connecticut.”

“To Brownes'?”

“That's right.”

She looked at him sidewise. “Are you fuckin' her? I bet you are!”

“Mind your business.”

“But, baby,” she cried, “what about us?” For a moment Strickland thought she was serious but she let forth a burst of her chat-tery ersatz laughter. “Can this really be the end?”

Informed all at once by a burst of unsound energy, she went to the bulletin board where he had fastened a few dozen pictures of Browne and his family.

“Let us have a lookitchere,” Pamela crooned, imitating a pimp's drawling manner. “Lessee her one mo' time.” She held a picture of Anne at arm's length, inspecting it under one of his pole lamps. “Hey, she's a honey, Strickland. She's old but she doesn't look it. She'll never look old.”

“Under forty,” Strickland said.

“She should be ashamed of herself,” said Pamela. “At her age. With a cute little daughter. And a really excellent husband. Fucking a mean, street kind of guy like you.”

“I am not,” Strickland said, “a street kind of guy. Put the picture back.”

“Afraid I'll get it dirty?” Pamela asked. “With my ho's hands?”

Strickland turned away from her to look out of the window. It was a gray, drizzly morning.

“Boy, I wouldn't be fucking you if I had a husband like Owen.”

Strickland turned in amusement. “Wouldn't you?”

“Hell no,” said Pamela. “I'd be true.”

“Women do seem to like him,” Strickland observed.

“Fuckin' right,” Pamela said warmly. “He's real.”

“I suppose I don't get it.”

“That's right,” she said. “Because you're a carnival-type person and he's a high-class guy. She's got her brains in her pussy.”

“You seem to feel very strongly about it.”

“You don't know what love is, Strickland.”

“Everyone says that.”

“You're a seducer,” she told him. “You got 'em fuckin' before they can turn around.”

“There's a place for seduction, Pamela. Sometimes people have to be told what they like.”

“You're like a hot handful of pistachio nuts,” Pamela said. “That's my image of you.”

“Go home,” he said. “Put the picture back. You take too many drugs. You've been under the life too long.”

She walked back to the wall, singing to Anne's picture:

“Go tell mah babee sistuh

Don't do what ah have done—”

In Strickland's film
Under the Life
there was a sequence in which Pamela belted out a few giggling choruses of “The House of the Rising Sun.”

“So what are you gonna do, Ron? Run off with her?” She pinned the photograph neatly back on the wall. “What?”

“I don't know,” Strickland said.

“Crazy for love,” Pamela said. “Who woulda thunk it.”

Having finished the vegetable juice, Pamela began drinking red wine. Strickland joined her in a glass.

“You know,” he said, “there's a level on which she's never been got to.”

“You can do it,” Pamela said, “if anyone can.”

“I'd like to,” he said quietly. Pamela looked at him and shivered. “What's the matter now?”

“You're a freak,” she said.

Strickland sighed. “My dear Pamela. Who took you in? Who taught the cultivated world to love you? Who understands?”

“You,” she said.

“Exactly.”

She turned to him with the kind of sneer that had teeth at the edge.

“A freak. Out of the carnivals. You're an
attraction.
Just like your mother.”

“Well,” Strickland said after a moment, “Moms was a strong joint.”

When Pamela went out, he worked at his monitor through the afternoon. At around four, Fay returned his call. They talked about boats and whether Fay would appear in Strickland's film.