The Year of Broken Glass (29 page)

Some doctors say that, on account of the natural anaesthetics the brain produces within a few days of it being denied nourishment, the process of dying by dehydration is not as painful for the sufferer as it might seem. Some even suggest the experience includes hardly any discomfort at all, since the coma-like state that is soon reached negates any perception of pain. Others refute this, saying the pain is excruciating, as can be seen in any sufferer's agony. Regardless of what the sufferer actually experiences, death by dehydration isn't pretty. The skin hangs loose from the flesh and becomes dry and cracked and scaly. Nosebleeds, on account of the skin cracking, occur frequently. Highly concentrated urine burns from the bladder while the eyes sink into their orbits and the sufferer dry-heaves as the stomach lining dries out. Those are the early symptoms.

Convulsions begin as the brain cells burn and coughing brings up thick secretions from the dried-out respiratory tract causing the sufferer to fight for breath. Within five days the parasympathetic nervous system is impaired as a result of toxic buildup, the regulatory mineral balance of calcium, potassium and sodium thrown out of whack, and the muscles stop working, including, eventually, the heart. There are claims that people have survived as long as three full weeks without fluids, but of course the irreparable damage to their bodies and brains was done long before they actually died. Francis knows he doesn't have long to live without water, and so he starts tearing into the walls of the boat.

With the claw-side of a hammer he strips away the mahogany panelling, exposing the lengths of wiring and hosing beneath. He follows the water line to its source, sucking what little drops of water he can from it as he goes, until he comes to the tank buried behind his bunk in the stern. He rips the panelling away and exposes the bulk of the tank's stainless steel sidewall. Cutting into it is another matter, and as he thrusts the claw repetitively at the shiny steel, he wonders if there will be enough water in the tank to replenish that which he's perspiring as a result of his exertion. By this method he manages to tear away enough of the sidewall to get his arm in with a cup in his hand and scoop up that which the pump couldn't draw. A few litres. He mops the rest up with paper towel, wringing it out into the plastic and steel bowls and cups that survived his temper tantrum. He plugs the sink and sets these down into it, and when he's done he stands for a long time and contemplates these precious vessels, a few days' worth of water at best.

And then what? Is he supposed to just sit here waiting for the rescue that should have already arrived? For the miracle of wind that won't blow despite his prayers and self-effacing promises to be a better man, to come clean to Anna and Jin Su both and be a steadier father to his children? It's the deep-seated though vague vestige of his grandparents' Catholicism coming to the fore in him, in his time now of utter desperation, staring into these cups and bowls of what little time he has left, an image of himself he hardly recognizes—bearded, sunburnt, scared and broken—staring back.

Life Is But a Dream

IT'S
AGAINST
OUR basic nature to do
nothing
in the face of imminent disaster. Which is why those long-ago sailors threw their valuable horses to the sea, perhaps a bit rash given that a boat will usually drift free of the subtropical high within a couple of weeks (though who's to know if that was widely known and trusted knowledge in those days). Regardless, it seems equally true that it defies our nature to do the most sensible, prudent thing in such circumstances; it's a rare person who thinks well and clearly under real stress, the kind brought on in life-threatening conditions. Francis, far as he is from being one such person, decides.

First he transfers what water he has left into the two empty champagne bottles—careful as he's ever been not to spill a drop—corks them, and wraps them in Horace's wool sweaters. He collects the survival blankets from the emergency closet, the first-aid kit and a survival suit. He takes pillows and blankets and clothes from his stateroom, rolls of toilet paper and sunscreen from the head. Cans of fish and veggies (the water they're preserved in more precious than the food itself), a good knife, spoons, a can opener, a flashlight, candles and a box of matches. Sheets, shower curtains and rods for shade-making. All this he places with the fishing rod, gaff and tackle into the dinghy. Then he writes a small note.
Paddling due south in a white dinghy. Find me.
He duplicates this twice and tapes one to the galley table, one to the nav table and one to the cabin door. Then two last things, binoculars and a compass, and he climbs down into the little boat, unhitches the line from its bow cleat, sets the oars in their locks, and heads out with renewed vigour and hope, rowing for Hawaii.

•

Both the vigour and the hope fade fast. He'd begun to think the
Belle
was genuinely cursed, and thought maybe if he rowed free of her he might eventually cross paths with some other mariner. Could it be though that it's he who is cursed? It's not hard to get sucked down into the whirlpool of such thoughts when thoughts are all one has. The mind is a creative angel or monster, depending on the tilt of one's life. Francis's mind, being angled so steeply toward the bad, has turned ugly. What is left for him in the wake of his last burst of optimism is a fatigue that makes every joint ache and muscle sear with pain, weighing upon his eyes until even the middle and near distances grow blurry and his eyelids become almost chronically heavy. He begins to lie down on his bed of salty blankets more often than he rows, losing sight of the difference between the life he dreams and the one he wakes to inside this endless, unsheltered blue, where he spills finally the last drop of water, sweet with the tinge of champagne, across his cracked and swollen tongue.

Blue

SPLAYED
OUT
IN the heat of the sun pounding through his shower curtain shade cover, his body stiffened and sweltering with dehydration, Francis hears the voice of an angel singing in his ear. Joni Mitchell.
Blue… Songs are like tattoos. You know I've been to sea before. Crown and anchor me, or let me sail away…
He hears her as though she were right there in the boat with him, her piano fingerings floating down from the cloudless heavens in accompaniment. When he occasionally comes to, he prays for the less angelic tone of Annie Lennox instead to fill his ears, but neither her song nor rain falls upon him. Just the relentless rays of the sun. When something finally, suddenly, shrouds him in shadow, he's too far gone for it to cohere across the distance his mind has receded to. He hears a great rumbling in the shadow and thinks it must be the thunder of death, his brain in his boiling skull imploding, the end of the world, and sees a vision of the black-footed albatross, god-sized, its dark wings wrapped around the flame-forked, furious sun.

IT HAS TAKEN us less than a week to make it to Hawaii. Now what? Vericombe and his first mate—a bald, very small, very serious man named Smith—rarely descend from the captain's deck. The one time I ventured up they gave me a polite tour of the instruments and such, then made it quite clear that I was to leave and not come up again unless invited. So I've turned my attention in the opposite direction, down to the engine room instead, befriending Figgs over the past week. I ran out of smokes two days into our passage and I've been bumming them from him ever since.

He's down in the engine room or out on deck doing repairs and maintenance most daylight hours. But at night he's always in his quarters, the forward fo'c'sle. Between him and the towering aft cabin where the rest of us sleep is the open steel deck, and below it the hold, probably sixty feet long by twenty feet wide by fifteen feet deep, which Vericombe has, as Figgs tells me, “stuffed with enough diesel to keep us running till the end of the world.” Funny he should state it as such given all that he's told me over the past five days. I now know where the name of the skiff
Sohqui
comes from, and with that knowledge I've picked up a basic understanding of all that Ferris's finding of the fish float has us caught up in.

I come down here to smoke with Figgs every night once I've put Willow to bed. I'm too full of anxiety and upheaval to sleep much. It's getting more and more difficult to keep Willow calm too. My ill-ease is infectious I'm sure, especially to my own son. But Willow is a good, level-headed eleven year old. He's self-sufficient really, for a kid, and as I watch him sleep in the bunk beside me at night by the passage light leaking in under our stateroom door, I can only guess at what he thinks and feels of all that has gone on this past month. The quake. His father's leaving. And now this. Us on this boat with these bizarre strangers. He doesn't say much, which isn't uncommon, though he's been even quieter than usual the past couple of days, which tells me he's starting to feel the strain of it all. Tumultuous or not, what with Ferris and I fighting, our home has been a stable one for Willow for as long as he can remember. Aside from trips to my hometown to visit his grandparents, we don't travel, on principle, and we're fairly reclusive and routine-oriented people. So I know this is a lot for Willow to absorb, and I keep waiting for his nightmares to return. It's been a couple years now since they desisted last, but being the mother of a child who is haunted the way Willow is, the worry is never far from my thoughts.

So I don't usually stay long visiting with Figgs, dreading the thought of Willow waking without me. We share a smoke, a story or two, then I return to my bunk. But tonight we've been talking for hours. We're on our fifth, maybe sixth smoke each. Figgs has been telling me more about Mu and the Sohqui, and I have to admit I'm a sucker for the magical beauty. The mystery. I read fantasy throughout my entire childhood, Tolkien and Lewis and later Marion Zimmer Bradley. It might be safe to say that I secretly enjoyed reading the Harry Potter books with Willow more than he did. Figgs usually seems indifferent as he tells me of the Naacal, but tonight he's engaged and it's got me wondering if he actually believes in it all. So I ask.

“Do you know why I became a marine engineer?” he asks me in response. Figgs has a voice both rough and smooth at once, like the sound of broken sea waves raking back on a pebble beach. It's a voice easy to get lost in listening to. “Those engines back there. The reduction gear and the pitch of the wheel. Those are all things I know you know very little about. My father was the son of a poor farmer. I grew up in Odessa in a two-room house with five sisters. A marine engineer is someone who has knowledge that very few people have. And so we're always useful. There is always work because not very many people know how to keep boats running, but many depend on them doing so. Maybe it's the same with these kinds of things. Arnault Vericombe is not a stupid man, I can tell you that. He's spent much of his life learning about the Naacal, and he's seen and read the tablets that tell the stories I've been telling you. I won't be the one to question his knowledge now. Not while the ship's going down.”

He takes a long drag from his cigarette and butts it out in the ashtray beside his bunk. He's been lying on it with his feet up, in shadow, while I sit at his small table and chair beneath a dim light fixed to the ceiling. “It's a big ship Anna. And it's one I don't have the first clue how to keep running.” This is the first time Figgs has pointedly mentioned the state of the world. Of course I'm dying to get into it with him. It's so much of what I've made my life about, I'm a bit of a junkie at this point, one who hasn't had a good fix since Ferris left.

“Do you think anyone really does?” I ask, looking for more.

“That's the question, isn't it? The big question.” He pulls his burly body up and sits facing me as he says this, his bare feet now out of the shadows.

“It is the big question, you're right,” I reply. “It's the only question now, I think. So, do you think someone's got an answer?”

“I think a whole lot of people have an answer, Anna. Everyone's got an answer. Which is why none of them are enough. Look at the accords. They're all full of you-give-me-this-and-I'll-take-from-you-that. It's not about keeping the whole ship afloat. No. People don't give a shit about the ship, they just want to know that the little section they're floating on isn't going to go down with the rest. And they'll do whatever it takes to keep thinking so, because life otherwise is overwhelming and intolerable.”

“And don't you think that's exactly what Vericombe and his cronies are up to here? They've got this fantastical idea in their heads, and it sure helps stave off the reality of what's really going on doesn't it? Just imagine if all we really had to do was break a glass ball and poof, the fish stocks replenished and the corals unbleached. Wouldn't that be something.”