The Year of Broken Glass (36 page)
I enter the medic room and see him for the first time since Smith and I hauled him in off the deck two days ago. It's dark in here, a towel tacked over the small porthole and all the lights out. By the hallway light casting in over my shoulder I can see he's as gaunt still as he was when he first came aboard, his damaged body sunken in on itself. He's on the edge, and will go easily over, having next to nothing in him to fight for the air I'll keep from his lungs. I close the door behind me and its little click wakes him. He turns toward the sound and there's fright in his eyes as he struggles to set them upon me. I walk to the opposite end of the room and take the towel from the window, letting the last of the day's light into the antiseptic whiteness. I'll ease him into this and I'll find out what's become of Miriam while I do so.
I pull a chair up close to his bedside so he can bring me into focus through his weakness. I've been close to death before, much as he is now, stranded in the aftermath of a wicked storm for nearly two weeks alone inside an inflatable life raft on the Indian Ocean. There was no relief in being finally rescued. It gets like that, or at least it did for me. The closer I got to death the more I wanted to finish the journey. I can see that same disappointment in this man's eyes, the pain of being forced to find desire for life again when death has already been resigned to, and I'm almost inclined to think he might hold the pillow over his own face for me.
“I'm Figgs,” I say to him. “I'm the engineer.” He only nods, and only slightly, in reply. “I was a good friend of Miriam's at one time, when her husband was still alive.” He nods again. “You want some water?” I ask, and again he nods.
I draw him a glass of water at the sink, then set it down beside him and help him sit, arranging his pillows so he's propped up on a forty-five-degree angle. I drop one down at my feet as I do this, for later, then I hold the glass to his lips and help him drink. Smith has him hooked up to a couple of different bags so it's awkward accomplishing all this, but I do it to put him at ease. I think a man ought to die as he ought to live, with as much dignity and grace as this world will offer, and if it will be my hand that brings death upon him then it will be a hand of light turning him to the darkness. He manages a meek “Thanks,” as I take the glass from his lips, his voice passing through them like wind through a dry, hollow reed.
I can hear the thrumming of Arnault's chopper approaching outside the room's walls. He radioed in ten minutes ago to let Smith know he'd be arriving, to be ready for his landing, as we'll be steaming full speed from here as soon as he touches down. We're ten miles or so off the coast of Maui and Arnault's been gone the better part of the day. If he told Smith what he's doing on the island, or even which island he's on, Smith hasn't let on. When he came down to inform me of Arnault's approach, I knew now was the time to take care of this. They'll all be rushing out to the deck to meet Arnault as he lands. If you can count on one thing about people at sea it's that their boredom eventually gets the better of them and they'll go running like clockwork to the slightest stimulus.
“What happened to her? Where's Miriam?”
He closes his eyes when I ask this, and when he reopens them they're glazed over with the look of tears, though none form, his ducts likely too dry. But the look is unmistakable, and I can see in it instantly that he loved her, and that he watched her die helplessly, against his best efforts and every bit of his will. I'm not sure what kind of response I'd been expecting, but it wasn't this. I suppose I assumed she'd drowned, or been taken or killed in violence, but I can already tell by the grief in his eyes that hers was a death of a different nature. She told me once after Horace passed away that she figured he was the luckiest man in the world to go out so quick and easy the way he did. No drawn-out fuss. An acute pain perhaps, but then an end almost instantly following. The only way to go. “How?” I ask. “How did she go?”
“Blood,” he manages, though I have to lean in close to his lips to hear him, and he has to repeat it so I do. “Blood.”
“Did you do it?” I ask him. I know the answer. Still something, perhaps what I'm about to do, makes me ask it. He moves his face once side to side in reply.
“Inside her,” he says now, and I'm starting to get the picture.
“Did it go on for long?” I ask, the thought of Miriam suffering as she must have starting to burn inside me. He nods in reply. I want to ask him why he didn't help her, but I can see in his eyes he would have done anything, would have given his own life to save hers, and I'm starting to see that he might want this death I'm here to give him more than I know. Or as much as I've known during those times in my life when I've felt I couldn't live with the things I'd done or seen.
“Did you love her?” I ask, and there's the flame of jealousy stoking inside me again. Both these extraordinary women. He's had both of them. He's had the love in his life I've never been granted, and I can't comprehend why it's been like this, how he's been so fulfilled as I've been left so devoid, so vacant, except to say that for whatever reason, all that I've had in this life I've taken by guts and sweat and force. Nothing has been easily given, and it's been my own folly that I've waited for love to be as though it should be the one exception, the one thing I shouldn't have to snatch from the jaws of a life that won't relinquish to me the slightest sustenance without a struggle. So be it. This man's had his share of what will be mine for the taking. He can be with Miriam in heaven or hell, it's of little concern to me now where she is and where he's going. I hear the faintest “Yes,” slither off his tongue as I reach down to grab the pillow from the floor. I lift it before his face, his eyes wild with fright as he realizes what I mean to do.
There's a deceleration of time that occurs in such moments, a honing of the world down to a singular tunnel of space. In this his mind and my mind are conjoined, and as I press the pillow down over his mouth and his nose and his eyes, it's like I'm doing so over my own. We both give only the slightest struggle, his in his body's weak resistance and mine in the slight stirring of emotion, the one that makes murder a counterintuitive act, that makes most people so certain that what I'm doing here is the gravest of wrongs, though they're all only the perfect storm of circumstances away from doing the same themselves. I lean in on him as his feeble hands try one last resistant grasp on my forearms before they slacken, and it's then that I come back to the world and hear the commotion approaching from beyond the door. Quickly I pull off him, drop the pillow to the floor, and kick it beneath his bed as I sit.
Anna comes into the room in a rush of excitement. “He got it!” she blurts out as she approaches the bed. Willow, Arnault, Smith and Fairwin' all enter the room behind her, Arnault holding the float in his arms. He turns the bright overhead fluorescent on. Oscillating as I am in that state of heightened, piercing perception I just went into with Anna's husband, the float comes into enhanced view in my eyes, and I could swear there is a swirl of colour whirling inside it, like it has its own centrifugal energy, its own orbited centre. An entire world in that orb of glass.
“Wake up Ferris,” Anna is saying to her husband from the opposite side of the bed. “Wake up.” She shakes him at the shoulders as Smith leans across me. “Oh my God, he's not breathing!” she yells out, hysterical, as Smith palpates his neck for a pulse. I slip out from beneath him and step back behind them all.
Smith looks up at Arnault quickly. “The resuscitator,” he says, and he immediately pries open the unbreathing mouth and seals his lips over it. Arnault begins rifling through the cabinets beside the sink. “Other side, under the anaesthetics,” Smith instructs him, then breathes again, trying to give back to the body the breath I've just taken from it. Anna's husband is still here, I can still feel him, not inside me but locked like a shackle around a link of chain, so that now it is me who feels suffocated, feels the need to struggle for release. I'm about to leave the room when Arnault tears the ventilator from its bag, attaches the mask to the tube, and hands it to Smith, who sets it down over the face I've just leaned the full weight of my life upon and starts to pump.
As soon as the breath comes back to the body Arnault leads the kid, who's now holding the float in his hands, to his father's side. Then he turns toward me, looking me square in the eyes. I have the sense he knows, which doesn't occupy me as much as it maybe should, lost as my concern is in the sight of Anna falling over her husband, tears gushing from her eyes. “Get a tray from the galley and a hammer,” Arnault commands me. I slip out of the room, freeing myself from the spellbind between Anna's husband and myself.
In the galley I retrieve what Arnault requested, pausing for a second at his drawer of well-sharpened knives, considering⦠but that's just the intensity of the past few minutes getting the better of me. There will be other times, and better ways, and so I come back to the room with the tray and hammer. Arnault takes them both from me and sets the tray down on the bed beside Anna's husband.
“Hold your father's hand,” he says to the kid, taking the glass float from his hands and putting the hammer in its place. The float he sets down in the tray. “Lightly, son, just as we talked about. Start by cracking it a bit, so we don't lose the pieces.” Anna's husband is still unconscious, but everyone else is riveted to the child. He taps at the glass with the hammer, to no consequence. “A bit harder,” Arnault says.
Standing as I am in the doorway I can hear a distant thunder pulsating the air. I step from the room out to the galley and look out the window. I can see the silhouettes of two choppers coming straight at the boat against the last light in the southwest sky. Gibbon. I run back into the room as Arnault nearly screams at the kid. “Smash the fucking thing then!” Willow brings the hammer down on the float with all his force, but it just ricochets off.
“Arnault,” I say, but he doesn't even turn in response. He tears the hammer from the kid's hand and puts it in the unconscious hand of Anna's husband. “Here,” he says tersely, putting the kid's hand over his father's. “Now. Strike it like this. Hard.” The kid does, but still nothing happens.
“Arnault!” I holler at him now, and he turns to me finally as something explodes out on deck. Then there's another explosion that shakes the boat violently. I run down the hallway, through the galley and out onto deck.
Arnault's chopper is in flames and there's black smoke billowing up from below the cap rail of the bow. I watch as a fire blaze issues from one of the circling choppers and slams into the hull, again shuddering the boat across its length. The alarms start wailing under the compressive thunder of the choppers and Arnault comes out on deck as another shot issues from one of them and again the hull is torn open and set ablaze.
We each have our duties in such a scenario, and mine is to get the pumps drawing from the bilge. I jump back into the cabin and start to the back of the hallway. Smith is before me in the middle of the passageway, fumbling frantically with a phone in his hands. As I arrive at his side I see it's a red Motorola, the duplicate of the one Jeremy Gibbon had given me, and as he looks up at me the panic in his eyes is laced with the kind of terror that comes over someone when they suddenly recognize that it is only by their own mishandling of circumstance that things have turned terribly wrong. But there's no time for that, not now, so I push past him and through to the engine room access, where I look below and see water swirling in. I drop down the ladder and land in it up to my shins. The wash-down hoses on this boat both draw from different thru-hull ports, and on each one there is a ball valve that can be switched over so the intake is rerouted to two screened wide-diameter pipes in the bilge: one under the main engine, and one on the other side of the bulkhead separating the engine room from the hold.
I slosh over to the main and plunge my arm into the water, feeling for the first of these valves. As I get my fingers on it another artillery slams the boat, throwing me face down into the water. I emerge just as another tears open the sidewall of the engine room and the sea rushes in, a gushing white torrent, and I go under again and feel my body slam against the steel stairs I've just descended. Then I'm blind and inside it, the dark sea, I'm inside it and there's no escaping this time. It's inside me, and in this there's a completion, a perfection, just as I've always wanted and dreamt there would be.
IF
HE
SPEAKS of it at all it's in the middle of the night. He'll wake beside me, feverish with sweat, in a terrified panic. That's also when he'll allow me to make love to him. It's always one or the other. He'll climb on top of me and put himself quickly, fully inside me, or else he'll start talking. When he does it's more like he's telling himself the story than he is telling it to me, staring up at the shadow of the bars on our bedroom window cast across the ceiling. We lie beneath it together like two captives, staring up at it as he speaks. A couple of nights ago, after he'd finished telling me again about the man he sees in his dreamsâthe man with the roughest of hands, the smell of bearing grease on his skin, the look of death in his coal-black eyesâhe said to me how odd it was to him that the shadow never shifted.
