The Year of Broken Glass (14 page)

Holding the float fills Francis with a feeling of presence, of reverence, of being in possession of something sacred, even perhaps of being in its possession. It's a feeling he's felt since he first lifted it from the waters of Porpoise Bay, but holding it now he can't be sure how much of it is inspired by the object and how much by the events of the past week, by the stories Miriam has told of its mythological powers. If pure belief were possible it would be made so on a night such as this. But Francis has always had a hard time with Step 2:
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
It's why he stopped attending AA meetings years ago. Faith's not an answer for him, it's delusion. Though in the suspension of time and space that blooms in perception when the sailor crosses the barrier of the continental shelf, the living ocean deepening beneath, in the dark of the new moon beyond the limits of the cities' light-surge, a fold of
anything's possible
opens that even the staunchest atheist would be liable to fall into.

Francis shuts the lantern's fuel off and it hisses and flickers out, leaving him again with the boat's creaking and clinking and the unfathomable stars. The glass feels warm in his hands, in contrast to the cold wind curling around them. What if the stories of the Naacal and the Sohqui are true? Sunken continent or not, it doesn't rule out the possibility of an unacknowledged, anciently ancient civilization. It doesn't nullify the possibility of some super-spiritual curse. There's no question the ocean, the whole earth, is in the throes of an extinction crisis. And what of the Mayan 2012 thing, or is it 2018? It must signify
something
. Pop-fluff. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Francis knows better.

He takes the float back inside and stows it away in its tote, safe and unaffecting. Above the bunk, in the upper salon cabinet, are the stores of alcohol. A row of shiny bottles holding liquids of clear and amber and gold. He considers, then takes a bottle of single malt, a single glass, and returns to the cockpit. He's feeling good, substantial, surprisingly grounded given the lack of ground beneath him. So good riddance.

He pours himself a drink. Sweet Scotch. The stars are like little bells ringing above his temples. Sweet music. He drinks to Willow and the Wichbaun blood humming behind his ears. He drinks to Anna and her variable ugliness and beauty. His mother asleep in her filtered air above Fourth Avenue, and Miriam in her wide forward berth below, dreaming to the rhythm of the hull sliding through the sea. Jin Su curled around Emily, warm in Svend's spare bed, enwrapped in the cocoon their two hearts keep spinning, synchronized, in the little microcosm he'll soon call home.
   

•

One hand on the taffrail, one hand guiding his stream, he recites to the nightscape while pissing into the wash:

Man's sole gesture of defiance
at a hostile or indifferent universe
is standing outside at night
after the requisite number of beers
and with a graceful and enormous parabola
trying to piss on the stars
failing magnificently

It's all he remembers of the only literature course he ever took, Introduction to Canadian Poetry, an easy second-year credit. It's a poem by Al Purdy entitled “Attempt,” though he remembers neither the author nor the title, and couldn't say now if he was asked what precisely the word “parabola” means. But he does recall that the single most common cause of fatality at sea amongst fishermen worldwide is falling overboard while pissing off the deck. The thought sends a second shiver down his spine as he zips himself back up.

•

He considers his choices, the mickey of Scotch soundly downed, and decides on a bottle of Jägermeister, for old time's sake.

•

Her smell is of lavender and ice. Of red wine and coal smoke. Of sweet grass. Of thyme. All these things at once. It lures him to her door. He stands, swaying slowly, wanting to enter.
The dragon's lair
, he thinks, and sucks in the ensuing chuckle. He puts his hand on the doorknob and twists, then comes to his senses, realizes he's being creepy, and goes back out on deck.

•

His vomit projectiles out into the wind, into the dark.
How many sailors follow that overboard?
he wonders.
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.

•

It's another song by The Boss, “Local Hero,” that's been playing through Francis's mind since they set sail from Neah Bay.
These days I'm feelin' all right, 'cept I can't tell my courage from my desperation. From the tainted chalice, well I drank some heady wine.
He belts it out at the top of his deep, booming voice. He bellows Bruce up at the stars. Then he sobs, big drunken breached-levee sobs, because Anna and Willow and Cosmo and Mom; because if Miriam's right then Jin Su and Emily too; because the ocean is so wide and the stars are so many; because his moments of joy are so few.

•

Miriam rises before daybreak, dresses warmly, and comes to the cockpit shining a little hand-held flashlight. They're using house lights only when necessary now as it's been days since they last ran the main and they've discovered the tow-generator provides only a nominal amount of amperage. The beam catches first the gleam of the near-empty bottle of Jägermeister and the drinking glass, then the image of Francis curled up on the stern bench, cradling both, fast asleep. She smiles to herself at the sight, then descends below, returning with some woollen survival blankets. She takes the bottle and glass from his hands, and tucks the blankets over and around him. She's in the afterglow of her second consecutive dream of Yule, still a-swim in tenderness and affection, so she places a long, soft kiss on Francis's forehead. Then she pours herself a drink and sits back to savour the residual dream-flow; the contrast of the warm liquor and the cold, cold wind.

The Looming

FRANCIS
SPENDS
THE rest of the day sleeping it off and puking it out. He won't eat. Miriam drinks a pot of coffee after dinner and stays up well into the night keeping watch. They haven't seen another boat in almost three days, but she's heard horror stories of massive cargo ships barrelling over boats the size of the
Belle
, crumpling them like pop cans. The wind goes slack in the sails some time before dawn, and the softening swells lull her fears to rest. Exhausted, she clips to the jack-line and lowers the sails. Then she sets the radar alarm with a twenty-mile radius and curls up in the cockpit on the same bench seat Francis slept atop the night before, wrapped warm in the survival blankets and some of Horace's thick sweaters. His was that British man's smell of aged cheddar and mothballs, and the faintest trace still lingers in the wool. She thinks of how proud he would have been to be out on the high seas, on the
Princess Belle
, drifting across the thirty-fifth parallel, the fabled northern horse latitudes, with plenty of water and provisions, and a good steady British motor to power them through. Horace trusted technology, provided it was engineered properly and built flawlessly, which it was sure to be if done by British minds and hands. She says a little prayer to his ghost, and has a laugh at the irony, having presently put her life, and Francis's, solely in the hands of a Japanese radar. Then she drifts as the boat does, off into sleep.

•

When she wakes it's to the sound of a lone humpback exhaling, a great burst of air startling her from sleep. All she sees upon bolting upright, her worst fears of cargo ship collision sending a shot of adrenalin to her blood, is the plume of sea water drifting away from her and the tail flukes descending as the whale sounds. Then nothing. She scans the water around the boat, but the whale must have surfaced once, then dove.

She's oriented now, though, having walked the length of the deck to the bowsprit, then back to the cockpit. She's wide awake, which makes the mountain peak she sees suddenly hovering over the eastern horizon, a snow-capped precipice floating, solitary, north of the rising sun, all the more unbelievable. They haven't seen land for almost two days now. They couldn't have drifted back that far while she slept? She does a double, a triple take, but there it is. Jumping down into the nav station, she checks coordinates on the GPS, and sure enough they've drifted southeast of their position, but barely, it's only been four hours since she set the radar alarm. She pops her head back out of the cabin and it's still there, clear as day, so she slides Francis's stateroom door open, leans in and shakes him awake. “You've got to get up, Ferris,” she says. “You've got to come see this.”

Francis wakes easily, having more than slept off his stupor, dresses and hurries to the cockpit. “You're sailing us back?” he asks, squinting up at the mirage on the horizon. He's instantly annoyed. “Look Miriam, I know I fucked up, but it's no reason to give up…”

“I'm not,” she interrupts him. “I didn't. I don't care about that. We've been sailing on course. We're almost two hundred miles off the coast of central California.” Miriam's excitement is settling into a reverent awe now—now that she knows Francis sees it too and she hasn't gone mad.

“That's impossible. There's no way we could see that if we were.”

“Go check our position. You'll see,” she says, not taking her eyes from the horizon, the pale-orange morning sunlight flashing in them, widened and entranced. Francis descends to the nav station and does as she has just done, then hurries back up on deck with the binoculars in hand. “Jesus Christ,” he says, peering through the binoculars at the mirage.

“Something like that,” she agrees. A perfectly clear image suspended in a cloudless sky. She takes his hand in hers, she can't contain herself, she needs the connection to keep steady on her feet. There's the sense of an immense, godly energy coursing through her, through him. They have to hold each other as they stand, watching for minutes that seem like hours, each of them surrendering to this inexplicable appearance, this otherworldly vision, until eventually it dissolves into the distant blue.

•

The wind stays down all day, so they cruise under power on a course to magnetic southwest. By sundown the fuel tanks measure half-full, but they're sure to catch the trade winds soon, as reliable a source of propulsion as any diesel engine. The weather is warm suddenly, balmy, and they strip down to shorts and t-shirts and soak up the sun. They scrub the deck and clean the cabin. They each shower, and Francis replaces a burst seal on the galley water pump, the only breakdown thus far. They knock on wood, both feeling so optimistic, so smiled upon, they almost don't think to do so, each assigning as they have a disproportionate spiritual weight to the sighting. They have been shined down upon. Their quest, their association, blessed.

At sunset, they watch the sky together again, both with their eyes fixed on the blazing ball of deep, darkened orange as it falls. The instant the last of its circumference sinks below the horizon-line an instantaneous flash of bright emerald green ignites across it, a burst of light and colour radiating laterally and upward from where the sun has fallen.

Flotsam and Jetsam

THE
SLACK
HEAT persists. They deliberate in the morning, questioning their fuel consumption, but both are beginning to wonder, on account of yesterday's sightings, if indeed there is something to Arnault's tale. They both think and say so, unashamed now at admitting to themselves, to each other, that each has always given some credence to the possibility. They've both felt since the outset that this voyage may be about much more than retrieving some money. Perhaps time is more of the essence than they can even possibly imagine. So they motor onward, holding their course straight southwest.

So far, by virtue of the changeable weather and their only-just-getting-to-know-each-other banter, they've more or less avoided the onset of boredom which is to be expected on such a trip, and is indeed the norm on any open-ocean crossing. The mind needs something to munch on, so once the exhilaration of being beyond sight of land subsides, the great, irreducible magnitude, the vast unending blue, becomes, well, reducible. The reverent mind becomes irreverent. A piece of garbage, a white Styrofoam cooler, say, or a plastic dinner plate, floating by on the flat sea becomes an occurrence.

They are both starting to sink into this state of mind, despite the remnant exhilaration spilling over from yesterday's sightings, and so, with nothing more of chores or cleanup to keep them busy, they decide on a mid-afternoon bottle of wine. Miriam brings from her special stash spot below—the storage locker beneath her bed, though Francis doesn't know this, having found the liquor cabinet, obviously, but not her wine, which he's noted she seems to have a fair quantity of—a Chardonnay of fine vintage from the Burgundy hills of France. It is, as far as she's concerned, the finest bottle aboard, and she brings it out now to toast the majesty and magic of yesterday.

The miraculous mountain in the sky was in actual fact a type of optical phenomenon known in the lexicon of meteorology as a looming. Currently, there is a deep temperature inversion on the coast of California caused by the particles of volcanic debris still floating in the lower atmosphere from the multiple eruptions which took place last week, the remnants of which have blown down with the north wind over the past few days, holding the sun's heat trapped above the cool northerly air below. The light rays carrying the image of the mountain peak to Francis and Miriam's eyes were refracting, bending as they bounced off the lid of warm air downward toward the dense, cool air rising off the ocean. They began beyond the geometric horizon, arcing over the distance in a manner somewhat parallel to the circumference of the earth, but Miriam and Francis's minds assumed the light rays to be straight, as they normally would be, and so saw a mountain peak hovering where clouds would. In this way sailors throughout the centuries have seen visions of “ghost ships” sailing in the sky; real ships that were positioned well outside the sailors' standard line of sight, just as the looming peak Francis and Miriam saw was far beyond theirs. Loomings are the most common of the superior mirages, and every time a person stops to watch the sun rise or set over the horizon one is seen, if just for a few moments, as the sun's image rises to or descends from view before or after the sun actually does.