Float (20 page)

At the bottom of the third drop, he felt his tires bounce on sand. To keep from getting pulled back into the harbor, he struggled to get the Duck moving forward and realized the engine was dead. He’d run out of fuel and out of time and felt silly for thinking he was any match for the ruthless force of nature. He sensed the hand of the sea slip under him again, pulling him back. Then the hand disappeared as if deciding against him, and the momentum of the storm threw the Duck forward. Duncan was seized with vertigo and felt the Duck plunge downward like a diver, jerking sideways, then skidding through a vast, nameless corridor of green-black water. The last thing Duncan saw before his head hit the steering wheel was lobsters, flying through the air around him.

Duncan sank slowly beneath the violent surface of the storm, where all was still, infusing him with an unworldly serenity. He found himself suspended in a warm saline fluid, somehow mastering the replication of his own cells, watching the expansion of veins like flooded streams along transparent limbs. The minute pulse of his multi-celled heart began to beat. Over and under he tumbled in total surrender, his feet drifting, his arms spread, his spine curved in repose. From this sweet darkness, soft hands lifted him into the light, where he sensed booming waves vaulting the seawall, a tremendous crash and a withdrawing roar. Somewhere from the edge of this watery swirl came weak flashes of red and blue lights and the muffled blare of emergency vehicles. A megaphone voice cut through the noise as if shouting down from the black heavens:
Evacuate.
As he was being stripped of his clothes, he remembered saying that the lobsters were still trapped inside the Duck, and a voice close to his ear assured him that they would all be saved.

“Lovesters,” Duncan whispered before passing out again, itching to get back to the complete peace of abandon, and then he felt an annoying yank of reason on his frontal lobe.

“Don’t surrender, Leland,” said another voice.

The words “rapture of the deep” floated to the surface of his mind. The seductive killer, they called it, as cruel and efficient as a curvaceous shark. Deep sea divers, fooled by oxygen-deprived brains, sometimes froze in wonder at the beauty around them, convinced they were beyond the grasping tendrils of mortality, a delusion that holds them down until they drown.

“No,” he said. “No.” He struggled to return to the solid world, the world where Cora lived, where he used to live before he broke loose from his mooring, unable to withstand the pressure of so simple a decision as life. It was not too late to say yes. Yes to everything. Yes, yes, yes, yes,
yes.
He flapped his arms and legs, prompting his muscles to get back to work and return to physical consciousness. It was exhausting, like swimming in the air, and just when he felt he might slip back under, he felt something small and alive scamper across his chest.

“Fingers,” he croaked.

He snapped upright to a seated position as if the ferret had pressed an electric buzzer on his stomach. His eyes were open wide, and he was breathing unevenly as his heart pounded. The taste of salt water was in his throat, and he could smell his own mustiness, as if he’d been stored somewhere dark and damp for a very long time. He was naked except for a scratchy blanket, which he tightened around him. At first, he didn’t know where he was, but as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he was surprised to find himself on Seacrest’s factory floor. The fluorescent lights, which made the factory as bright as day in the middle of the night, were off. Only the security floodlights in the corners were lit, criss-crossing their beams in the air, casting shadows among the columns and tanks. The stainless-steel surfaces were clean, radiating a dull silver in the half-light of the room, creating the atmosphere of an empty church, or a tomb.

“Twenty-two minutes to high tide,” said a familiar voice. Duncan blinked at the figure in the corner as he patted his naked body for glasses.

Beaky Harrow was sitting jackknifed on the floor a few feet away, leaning against a wall, his head sunken in the stiff carapace of a yellow raincoat, still dripping water. The ferret sat on his knees. Beaky handed it a pair of glasses. “Go ahead, Fingers. He needs these.”

Fingers lifted the glasses in its mouth and ran slinky-style across the floor toward Duncan, who leaned away from the animal. It dropped the glasses within his reach and stared at Duncan with its probing little eyes.

“Beaky,” said Duncan, putting on his glasses. “What are you doing here?”

Duncan once heard that businesses often got torched for insurance money during hurricanes because emergency crews couldn’t get to them, and then the storm erased all the evidence. Not to mention that the wind accelerated the destruction. Had Osbert sent Beaky to do just that, using the trash company’s key? Duncan couldn’t remember what the contract said about who got the insurance money if something happened to the building before the loan was paid off, but he was sure it was in Osbert’s favor. Then he thought about the death clause. Maybe it wasn’t the building Beaky was here to destroy.

“Waiting,” said Beaky, contemplating the ceiling. “Waiting for the tide to turn. What’re you doing here?”

“I don’t need to explain why I’m here. It’s my factory. Still. In spite of you and your blackmailing photo.”

Beaky turned to him with an exaggerated look of surprise, like a Kabuki actor. “Blackmail?”

“You plan to ruin me for disposing of a couple of bird bodies?” said Duncan. “Is this Osbert’s plan to get control of the company? Because if that’s your scheme, I intend to fight you every step of the way.”

“Please, Mr. Leland.” Beaky took Duncan’s tie out of his pocket. It was wet, and the red stripes seemed to bleed into the yellow background. Fingers stood up on his hind legs. “We’re just trying to keep you out of trouble. You’ve got to think of your public image. It’s a valuable commodity to us all.” He made a quick motion with the tie, and Fingers came scurrying to him. “I showed you the picture as a way of saying be more careful. It’s my job to keep an eye on you.”

“You’re not going to use the photo against me?”

“If we wanted to exact harm, Leland, we would have just let nature have its way with you and let you get washed back out to sea right now. You’re a lucky man.” He teased the ferret with the tie. “We were pulling into the lot when we saw the Duck get tossed onto the last scratch of beach. With effort, lots of effort, we chained your axle to the Benz. There was a monumental tug of war between us and an outgoing wave, I can tell you—our boots and ears filled with water, couldn’t open our lips for drowning, but we won you. Won you from the sea like a prize marlin. Lucky us. Tied your Duck to the loading dock.” He flicked the tie. “Poor Fingers nearly drowned in my pocket. We had to revive him under the hand dryer in the bathroom.”

“We?” Duncan stood up with a groan. He felt badly bruised all over, and his bare feet were cold against the cement floor. He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and found his socks hanging to dry on a heat duct and put them on damp. The rest of his clothes were still too wet. He limped over to the window that faced the parking lot, and through the rain he could make out the flashing emergency vehicles in the street, trailing flood evacuation warnings behind them. On higher ground, a black Mercedes was chained to a light post to keep it from being washed away. When a wave retreated to gather strength he saw that the seawall was gone, and when the wave rushed back in it smacked hard against the sea side of the building. His mother was right. It was coming this way. Through the horizontal rain he could see the barge-like shape of the Duck floating at the dock meant for trucks. The water had to be three feet deep in the lot. It was coming in fast. Another few feet and the water would start pressing against the windows. There was no way out. He could not possibly get to Cora’s from here. He went back to his dripping clothes and pulled his cell phone out of his pants to call her, and water poured from the seams. He picked up the phone on Annuncia’s desk in her office, and it was dead. This meant that he couldn’t even activate the alarm system to be saved by the police. He saw his wellies propped up against the wall to dry upside down, exposing the white crosses painted on the bottoms.

“Where are the lobsters?” he asked.

“Set them free,” said Beaky. “That photo of your dad in your jacket pocket—I dried it off and put it on your desk. Needs new glass.”

Duncan turned to him. “How do you know that was my dad? You’ve met him?”

“Who else would you have with you on a day like this?”

Duncan ran his hands across his face. “You people aren’t supposed to have the keys to my office.”

Beaky took something out of his slicker pocket and handed it to Fingers, who came jingling over to Duncan with the goods. “Very funny,” Duncan said as he picked up the keys at his feet. They were not his keys; his keys were off somewhere with Syrie and her little dog. These were Annuncia’s keys. They were all there: one to her office, one to his, one to the storeroom, and one for the loading dock door. The one to the building itself wasn’t there. “Did Osbert give you the trash company’s key to get in the building?”

“The trash company,” said Beaky. “There’s an interesting subject.”

Duncan followed Beaky’s eyes to the far end of the room and saw someone move in the shadows. His waterlogged brain made out the figure of a man staring out the window, facing the storm head-on from the sea. He twisted slowly around, like a creature on the bottom of the ocean.

“Osbert?” said Duncan.

Using his walking stick, the man took a step out into the half-light of the room. “Don’t come any closer,” Duncan said. “If anything happens to me, they’ll know it was you.”

“But it’s not me. And it never was.” Osbert’s severe black suit made his body disappear in the darkness and cast his face in shadowy contrasts, making him look like an Old Masters portrait. It was the first time Duncan had ever seen him without his sunglasses. “Call me Adoniram.”

“Adoniram?” The roar of the storm accelerated, and Duncan felt his voice get suctioned out of the room. “
Adoniram?
” He tried to remember what the artist looked like in the old clips he’d seen on the New Adoniram Project website—the gangly, bearded young artist with a ponytail down his back. His hair had covered most of his face, so it was hard to tell. And yet. Thirty years, a shaved face, a wider girth, and a shorter ponytail—this was the same man who scratched words into the sand with a stick and called it art.

“I thought you were dead.”

“There are always two deaths,” said Beaky, without looking up from Fingers, who was executing some sort of a leaping war dance at his feet. “The one the world imagines, and the one you keep to yourself.”

“When you start to believe your own PR, it’s time to leave,” said Adoniram, the man formerly known as Osbert. “I grew sick and cynical with the world, and death seemed like the ultimate peace at the time. I was young. I should have been braver and just admitted what I thought of my art instead of running away from it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Duncan, shivering slightly under his blanket.

“I shouldn’t have filmed the happenings,” said Adoniram, studying the knobs on his stick. “The integrity of time-based art is inseparable from its transience and its embrace of loss. Record-keeping intellectualized the experience and made it a commodity, and it became part of the culture industry
.
But all negatives have some positives, and documentation kept the happenings alive all these years, and that I don’t regret. When the film clips surfaced on YouTube, they sparked a revival of my work by way of the New Adoniram Project, of which you became unknowingly, but significantly, involved.”

Duncan struggled to let this information sink in. The sight of Osbert being no longer Osbert threw him off, and he was still not sure if his life wasn’t in danger. “Why haven’t you revealed yourself? You’d be a huge hit.”

Adoniram looked up from his stick and smiled. “They would say I rose from the dead, and we all know where that leads to. Having said that, I am intrigued by the New Adoniram Project. It’s fascinating to see how theory evolves, and this whole business has helped move my new work forward. When I saw you and the factory on YouTube, I saw that Seacrest’s would have a significant role in it. The timing coincided with a breakthrough for me, and I could see what had to be done.”

“Done?” Duncan didn’t like the sound of that. He turned to Beaky, half-expecting to see a revolver trained on him, but he was tickling the ferret’s stomach with the tie. “What does Beaky have to do with all this? Is he your hired gun?”

“Beaky is my art dealer,” said Adoniram, and the two men exchanged a smile. “It was always tricky work, asking patrons to fund art that can’t be owned, and once I was dead, it made his job even harder. He went back to New York City to represent a new generation of artists.”

Beaky choked out a little laugh, and Fingers jumped sideways on the floor. Duncan looked at them all. “You’re not the mob? What about the trash company?”

“Rumor and fiction mixed with garbage. Although there’s really no reason why we couldn’t process municipal food waste along with the fish waste. Faster and cleaner than composting. Could be quite profitable. It’s something to consider.”

“Eight minutes to high tide,” said Beaky, studying his watch. “Another ten or so after that before it turns.”

“So what did you want Seacrest’s for if there’s no garbage?”

“Access to your equipment.” Adoniram held out his stick to a blue barrel in the corner. “Come closer, Duncan. Let us look out upon the great mystery while I tell you a story.”

The building shuddered from the force of the storm. There was no way out right now, no escape to Cora or Ten Bells, but if anything happened, at least it could be said he went down with his ship. He stepped around Beaky and the ferret and ducked under a conveyor belt to reach Adoniram. They stood side by side at the window, with the full power of the storm only inches from their faces on the other side of the glass. The sea had risen to right below the panes. The tight new energy-efficient windows were keeping even a drop of the waves from entering, but when the sea itself got past the sill, the glass could not possibly withstand the pressure. It would give.

“I think we should go upstairs to my office,” said Duncan. “It’ll be safer there.”

“Don’t think.” Adoniram touched his chest with the stick handle. “In art, the trick is to go directly from the eye to the heart, skipping the brain altogether. The words I used to write on the beach were merely forms, symbols of our culture—it was immaterial what the words meant. My goal was to bear witness to time and tide washing away the foul human stamp on nature.”

Duncan flinched when a wave slammed against the glass then disappeared into the night. “Were the words immaterial even in your last work, ‘God Help Us’?”