The Year of Broken Glass (21 page)

•

They are lying in the aftermaths, of the storm and of
their
storm. Drifting like the boat, without course or bearing. Just waking. “Are you okay?” she asks, passing a finger over the point of swelling at the top of his skull. “It didn't even break the skin,” she continues. “It's been two days. You've been sleeping. I've been mending the mainsail.” He focuses his eyes on the teak and mahogany inlay pattern on the ceiling above Miriam's bunk where they lie. He groans a long, long exhale. “Where are we?” he finally asks.

“A few days from Hawaii still. Three, maybe four,” she answers. “We're not under sail,” she continues in a whisper, her mouth close to his ear. “The storm passed overnight. We've been drifting for almost two days. I've been down here watching over you, afraid you might break into fever. You've been in and out of sleep.”

“I know, I remember,” he says. And the image of her arched back in orgasm above him flashes through his mind. The feeling of being in her thighs like being swaddled, and the sickness passing from him, and the coolness after, falling again into sleep. He remembers shaking, and shivering, and then receiving her around him, and the ensuing calm. “I feel fine,” he says, finally answering her question. “I'm fucking starving, but I don't know, it feels like nothing happened.” He says this in a way to address his injury and their lovemaking both, and she comprehends it as such. She runs her hand down his arm as he sits up, the blood pounding between his eyes. He's lying, of course, on both accounts, and he knows she can tell. But Francis isn't one for dwelling or complaint, for drawing out in conversation the obvious, and he feels the world coming back to him, and with it his sense of urgency.

“I'm fine,” he reiterates, easing his naked body down from the bunk. “Come on. Let's hoist the sails.”

The Tears of the World, I

THE
PEAKS
OF Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea are the first sights of Hawaii to come into view on the western horizon. Neither of them thinks to break into Dylan. The night before, eavesdropping on the chatter of various ham radio operators, Francis had overheard word of Mauna Loa's and Mauna Kea's simultaneous eruptions. Another strong quake shaking the mountains at their base. And now they're sailing straight toward the spewing mountains, just as some of the island's inhabitants, and all its tourists, are attempting to flee. “This is fucking ridiculous,” Francis says. “What the fuck are we supposed to do now?” He's noticeably irritated, and has been, more or less, since waking from his concussive sleep three days previous.

Miriam steps lightly around his moodiness, and so hesitates before addressing his concern. “We'll just have to land and see what's going on,” she finally says.

“What's going on is that people are evacuating the island. Look at all the boats,” Francis retorts, handing her the binoculars. There is a motley armada of sailboats and cabin cruisers offshore of Hawaii, headed northward to the island of Maui. Likewise, the air around the island is filled with a swarm of small aircraft, float planes and helicopters. “It's uncanny,” she says.

“It must be the float,” Francis says, and jumps down into the cabin. When he returns it's with the float in one hand and a cast iron frying pan in the other.

“What are you going to do with that?” she asks, knowing the answer already.

“What do you think?” he says, and puts the float on the cockpit deck. He lifts the pan over his head and brings it down fast and hard, as though he's clubbing an ancient sturgeon over the head. It ricochets off the float and bashes him in the shin. “Fuck!” he wails, dropping the frying pan to the deck, grasping his shin, hopping up and down on his unharmed leg. The float rolls with the lean of the boat and settles in the sternward portside corner of the cockpit. “You've got to be kidding me,” Francis yells at the float and Miriam both. “What the fuck is going on here?”

Miriam isn't sure whether to laugh, as she's inclined to do at his childish temper tantrum, or to talk him down. Given his recent trauma to the head, she decides to take the cautious approach.

“What the hell are we supposed to do with that thing?”

“We're supposed to deliver it to Sunimoto, like we've arranged.”

“Wouldn't you say the molten lava running down those mountainsides might be a bit of a sign to the contrary? I mean, first the earthquake in Vancouver, now this!”

“What else have we got to go on Francis? Obviously you or I can't break the thing. Maybe this Sunimoto is the man who can. Or he knows the man who can, or will be found by him. Or maybe it's all just another of the countless everyday coincidences and there's no meaning at all to be ascribed to those mountains erupting.” She feels this last point may be overextending the argument, but she makes it anyway, an attempt at some sober-minded rationale in the midst of a situation which is swiftly sliding far from the comfortable bounds of reason and predictability.

“Come on Miriam,” he grimaces back at this. “Drop it. You know as well as I do there's way more going on here. Shit. I just hit that thing so hard it should be in a million pieces at our feet. But it's not. It won't fucking break. What are we supposed to make of that?”

“I don't know Francis. But the fact is, you need to calm down. We've sailed all the way here and the only thing to do is deliver it to Sunimoto and get your money.” She pauses for a moment, an epiphany of remembrance washing over her so strongly that she can't believe it hadn't occurred to her sooner. “I'll tell you something. After Arnault first told me his story, I was skeptical, but still curious. So I did some research on what I could, on Churchward and plate tectonics, on the possibility of any sunken continents, and on Mauna Kea. One of the things I found out was that Mauna Kea is a dormant volcano. It hasn't been active for almost five thousand years. It's a post-shield volcano, which means its caldera has been filled in by various layers of cinder cones. If there's no caldera, then how are the shards supposed to be thrown into it? It seemed like such a simple and major flaw in Arnault's story that I called him to ask if he'd maybe gotten it wrong, if maybe Mauna Loa was the mountain. I told him that as I understood, Mauna Kea is less than fifty metres higher than Mauna Loa, and that height is a result of magma accumulation which has occurred much more recently than the supposed sinking of Mu. But he said no, it was Mauna Kea, the tablets from which they had deciphered the myth were quite clear, it was to be the tallest volcano of what remained of Mu into which the shards were to be thrown.”

Miriam bends down to pick up the light-blue float at her feet, then continues. “When I asked him how he thought this would be possible given that there was no longer any caldera atop Mauna Kea, he replied quite simply that the mountain would erupt, contrary to all geological precedence and predictions, and the conduit would be reopened to receive the glass. And there it is, Francis.” She points to the high mountain now in plain view on the horizon. “Just like Arnault said. And it might be we're here to do as we are. To deliver this thing to the one man who can do with it what needs to be done.”

•

German astronomer Johannes Kepler, widely considered one of the fathers of the Scientific Revolution, the contributor of a link in the chain of ideas which led to his contemporary Sir Isaac Newton's law of gravity, believed that volcanoes were ducts for the earth's tears. Tears of smoke and fire and scalding hot molten lava. Francis doesn't know that the thought he is having is one that once occupied, resolutely, one of European history's great minds. Nor is he a proponent of James Lovelock and his Gaia theories. He's unwilling to anthropomorphize the entire planet, or anything for that matter, an insulative stance not uncommon among modern fishermen. To anthropomorphize is to risk empathizing with another species or object. Sympathy is one thing. But to empathize with the object of one's own mass slaughter is a slippery slope—not one Francis has been willing to even approach the edge of.

But as Miriam steers the boat into the north end of Hilo Bay, inside the mile-and-a-half-long man-made spit of rip-rap breakwater extending across the bay, he thinks it:
the tears of the world
. It's in keeping though, with the aspect of silent sadness Francis has assumed in recent years in response to the world's dwindling and decline, antithetical to Miriam's excitement and anticipation as she cruises the boat parallel to the rock wall's inner perimeter, to its far southern end, into Radio Bay. The closer she gets to the impossible flowing and billowing of the Mauna Kea, the more an acceptance of what once seemed preposterous settles in.
Horace
, she thinks.
You kooky old sod. If only you could see us now.
And she can't help but wonder, in the light of all that's transpired, if it might be possible that in fact he can.

If Francis knew her thoughts at the moment he'd be liable to smack her. He's morose about the prospect of Sunimoto being locatable in the current state of crisis sure to greet them on land, if indeed he hasn't already evacuated the island. A cacophony of sirens can already be heard ringing out from the streets of Hilo. Francis imagines pandemonium: a state of desperate emergency, people everywhere crying out and rushing in panic to escape the flood of molten lava slowly sliding down the mountainside. Which makes his surprise twofold when they reach the dock and a very small, very calm Hawaiian man takes the spring line from his hand and helps to tie off the
Princess Belle
.

“Francis Wichbaun and Miriam Maynard,” he says. “Welcome to Hawaii. My name is Tito.” They both look at him with incredulousness and incomprehension, to which he laughs a warm, friendly laugh. “We have a car waiting to take you to Mr. Sunimoto. I will explain while we drive. Please, come. As you can well see, time is of the essence.”

•

It's insane, the feeling of moving so quickly within such narrow, confined margins only moments after stepping from a three-week cruise on the open ocean. They're in a white SUV with tinted windows from which they watch the countryside of green fields, macadamia and palms careen by as the driver barrels the vehicle up the winding asphalt. Tito explains how and why it was he was there awaiting their arrival prior to their landing at Radio Bay. “Mr. Sunimoto is an exceedingly wealthy man, and he is a man with only one desire. To find what it seems you might possess there,” he says, indicating the blue tote set behind them in the back of the vehicle. “When the mountains exploded, as we'd expected they would, we knew it to be a sign that you were close, and so Mr. Sunimoto has had me stationed at Radio Bay waiting for you since last night. It is the only easy moorage in Hilo, so it was a safe assumption you would arrive there, which you have. And welcome to you! Although it is not the most ideal of circumstances, we are more happy to have you than you can imagine.”

Francis's head is spinning and pounding and he is having trouble getting his bearing, his grounding, as the vehicle moves at a fast clip winding further and further out of town and into the hills. He grabs hold of Miriam's hand and grips it tightly in his. “Pull over,” he says. “Now! Pull over.” Tito has his driver pull over and Francis falls from the vehicle and ejects the contents of his stomach onto the roadside. Outside the air-conditioned SUV, the day is oppressively muggy, and Francis breaks into an instantaneous sweat. He retches again, then scans his sightlines.
Where the hell am I?

“Are you all right Mr. Wichbaun?” Tito asks from his unrolled front passenger window. Francis wants to say no and run. Nothing feels all right to him. Not this place, not Tito, not driving farther and farther away from the boat toward the slow river of lava flowing down the Mauna Kea. But he knows he can't be sure of his instincts. That they've been altered by his time at sea, his injury, and his being enveloped in Miriam's presence these past three weeks. He's an animal out of his natural element—all the green is too green, too bright, the air too humid, the earth beneath his feet too dusty, yet dark—and so he's without power, which may be all that is giving him pause. He climbs back into the vehicle and takes the bottle of water offered by Tito. “It's going to be okay,” Miriam whispers in his ear. “We'll deliver this thing, get your money and we'll be gone.”

The driver idles the car by the roadside while Francis drinks. “You're all right then?” Tito asks. Francis nods. “Good. I'm sorry to have to ask you to do this,” he holds two black sheets of cloth out as he says this. “But could you please tie these over your eyes.” It's not a question, quite obviously.

“You're kidding, right?” Francis says, looking to Miriam for backup.

“I'm sorry Mr. Wichbaun. Mr. Sunimoto must maintain absolute secrecy as to the whereabouts of his home. I'm sure you can understand.”

“No fucking way,” Francis says, feeling instantly claustrophobic at the thought of wrapping his face in Tito's black cloth. Miriam takes his hand. She's feeling uneasy too at the prospect of being taken blindfolded up into the hills of a foreign island by these two strangers, but she trusts enough in those who originally put her in touch with these people to not let it get the better of her.

“Again, I'm sorry Mr. Wichbaun. But there is no way we can proceed from here without you putting on the cloth. It's for your own protection, too.” Tito drops a cloth in each of their laps. “Not proceeding is not an option. So you must please put these on.”

“I don't like how this is going,” Francis says, and he tries to open his door, which is locked. “Open it,” he says to Tito. “Open it!”

“Please put the blindfold on,” Tito says, no longer with the soft and patient tone he's thus far maintained.