Float (21 page)

Adoniram looked out at the wild storm for a minute and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Those mattered. But they got washed away as easily as the words that didn’t. It is an unfeeling and undiscriminating force out there.”

“I wish I could be so unfeeling,” Duncan said, a bit stove in with emotion.

“No, you don’t. Feeling is the portal to experience. There can never be enough.” Adoniram raised his voice to be heard over the mounting wind. “After I rowed away from this very beach in 1977, I set out to stage my death. I was disgusted with art and I was disgusted with the world. New life comes to those who give it up, as my evangelist father used to say, so I made a leather coracle with my own two hands, stretching layers of goat leather over a wooden frame, whipping the skins together. I sewed the sails myself and cut down a small oak tree for a mast, then headed for the jagged cliffs of Western Ireland. I set the boat free to wash up on the rocks upon arrival and swam to shore with nothing but the hair on my head. I stayed there for close to twenty-five years, studying the Neolithic rock formations of a lost world, exploring the dolmens and the cromlechs, looking for answers. I lived in a stone hut I built myself in the abandoned hills. At night I read Churchill’s multi-volume account of his war, which I found in the village dump. By day I earned money caddying for rich Americans at Ballynahinch, which is where Beaky found me.”

Duncan stared at Beaky in disbelief. “You play golf?”

He shrugged. “I do whatever it takes to win over clients.”

“He convinced me to move back,” said Adoniram. “It was time.”

“And it was time for me to leave New York,” said Beaky. “I bought the quarry.”

“As a cover, we encouraged rumors to the effect that we were refugees from the late-nineties Rhode Island mob breakup. Humans are always ready to believe the worst in others. Beaky in particular seemed to thrive in that persona.”

“It wasn’t all that different from the New York art scene,” said Beaky.

“The quarry made money, but not enough for all that I needed to do, so Beaky started an informal loan operation to tide us over. He gained a reputation as a bit of a thug, but it couldn’t be helped. Someone had to bail the boat while I rowed.”

“I do whatever I have to for my artists.” Beaky smiled at Adoniram.

“In the meantime, I found peace in the solidity and whiteness of the stone. This time I wasn’t just rearranging the material by drawing in the sand. Now I was actually mining the material—the very earth itself—discovering its secrets, changing slab to rock and rock to gravel, performing daily the miracle of transformation. Not unlike the way you turn fish scrap into fertilizer here, in this building. Both of us, Duncan, we smash delusions about permanence and beauty that we project upon the hogwash the rest of the world calls art.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” said Duncan, wrapping the blanket tighter around him as the waves got stronger and higher right outside the window. “I just process fish waste.”

“Don’t belittle your powers.” Adoniram rested his stick against the window and put both his hands on Duncan’s shoulders. His face held an expression of deep concern. “Or your capacity for love.”

“Love?” said Duncan, but Adoniram had already turned back to his subject.

“The quarry was my canvas,” he said, holding his arms wide apart as if describing a fish he’d caught. “I wanted to find a return to meaning and remembered everything I’d learned from Churchill. He wrote that ‘all the great things are simple and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.’ So for years, after the crew left for the day, I used a backhoe to arrange and rearrange the gravel into those words before the delivery trucks came to take it all away in the morning. I felt as if I was sending those sentiments out into the world. It was very satisfying. I was quite complete. I felt that it was possible for the world to be saved as long as at least one person learns something and acts on it. I called it my Churchill Series. But my education was not yet done. One day, as I was walking along a newly dynamited site, I fell into a natural split in the earth. I came very close to death, but there was a strong presence in that crevice that pulled me back to life. It pulsed with gravity. When I came to, I was a different man, transformed by my experience, the very experience I had sought but could not achieve by faking my death in 1977. It took days to crawl back up to the light, and I was dehydrated and half-mad, and I was covered in a dusty substance. Can you imagine what I found, Duncan, deep inside the earth?”

Duncan shook his head. It was hard taking in this story with the entire North Atlantic ocean banging against the building the way it was.

“
An ancient ocean bed
. A living ocean that had been transformed into a thick crust, as dried up as a dusty slab, but recognizable nonetheless. I saw the future.”

A wave rose from the ocean and filled the window before them. Duncan stepped back as it slammed into the building. “Do you have a dry cell phone?” he said. “I’d like to see if my wife is okay and let her know I’m alive.”

“Your wife is just fine.” Adoniram took Duncan by the blanket and brought him closer to the glass. “As it happens, I’d been playing around with micro-art at the time, doing installations that could only be seen under a microscope. I was feeling guilty about the diesel I was using for the backhoe, so I wanted to explore art that had a small carbon footprint. I scraped some of the dust on a slide, and lo!”

“Lo?”

“Yes, lo. That’s when I identified the dust molecules as diatoms, a type of phytoplankton which forms the basis for the entire marine food chain. A single-celled workaholic that sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, when it dies, sinks to the bottom of the ocean carrying that carbon with it, making the air fit for humans.”

“Kills pests, too,” said Beaky. “The cells have sharp edges that can slice through the soft underbelly of a slug.”

“Slice?” Duncan’s hand went to his throat.

“But like our friend the eel, this useful creature of the sea is dying off because of warming waters. What we’ve done to the ocean is enough, as Churchill would say, ‘to disgust a sow.’ But the more research I did, the more I realized I had something extraordinary on my hands. When I looked them up, I found out that they were mega-celled diatoms that hadn’t been seen in the oceans in millions of years. My particular diatoms were not just dead, they were extinct.”

Duncan looked outside and felt the ocean very close by. “Dead and extinct. Hmm.”

“The bigger the diatom, the more carbon it absorbs—a savior in the form of a single cell. The thing to do was to reintroduce the giant diatom to the oceans, execute a truly major art installation on a global scale. No filming, no websites.” He put his arms around Duncan’s shoulders.

“You can’t reintroduce a dead species,” said Duncan, removing his arm and almost losing his blanket in the process.

“In art you can. ‘Irrational judgment leads to new experience,’ as Sol LeWitt, my old comrade in conceptual art used to say. The diatom died so that we could live. In return, we will symbolically restore it back to the ocean.”

Duncan thought uneasily of the death clause. “What has this got to do with me and Seacrest’s?”

“Transformation and distribution. I needed both of those things to complete my vision. The vein of diatomaceous material was thick. It was laborious to even retrieve it from deep in the earth, but retrieve it we did. The quarried chunks were crushed and compressed, then, bit by bit, brought here at night, where Annuncia and Wade powdered it in the grinder and integrated it into your fish scrap and seaweed powder. Come spring, it will be distributed as fertilizer, shipped out to farms and gardens and parks around the world, where drain-off will take care of the rest. Everything flows to the sea in time. It’s the sea’s biggest asset, and its biggest liability. I’ve put Beaky in charge of global marketing.”

They both looked at Beaky, but he was looking at his watch as he stood up from the floor. Fingers was on his shoulder.

“Why go through all that trouble?” asked Duncan. “Just dump it in the sea.”

“‘Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically,’ said Sol. My concept is to integrate it in a substance that will be spread haphazardly and unsuspected in different environments around the earth, and that is the path that must be followed. But dumping is also a part of the plan. Because dumping in the sea has destroyed the sea, we are going to launch the new installation by tossing a symbolic barrel into the deep tonight.”

“High tide,” said Beaky.

There was a symphony of violence outside, a destructive cleansing and reordering of the world from top to bottom. Duncan did not understand how the building stood the force.

“We’d better get out of here,” he said, feeling his words get absorbed into the noise of weather outside. “My mother says this place is going to collapse at high tide.”

“
My mother says,
” mimicked Adoniram. “But who knows? Maybe the old gal is right. Water is always trying to get back to where it came from, and it once covered the earth. It is time, perhaps, to return to being an aquatic ape, as your friend Slocum suggests.”

“Not
my
friend,” said Duncan. “You’re the one he gave the jellyfish processing rights to.”

“Jellyfish.” Adoniram shook his head and turned his attention back to the sea. “Brainless and spineless, and yet we’ve let them take over the ocean. They adapt and reproduce quickly—far better than we do, eh Duncan?”

Duncan bristled. Was this a dig about his own reproductive problems? “I don’t see how we’ve ‘let’ them do anything.”

“But we have. We’ve killed off so many marine species we’ve created the empty space for jellyfish to fill. We let them spin out of control, and now we must do something to control them. Slocum’s recipe is promising. The total amount of plastic trash in all the oceans is a hundred million tons. Sea turtles are eating plastic bags instead of jellyfish. If we could use jellyfish matter to replace even some of those plastics, it would create a delicious circle. While I was getting my stomach pumped at the hospital, I realized that it’s not enough to work in symbols, such as words in gravel or extinct diatoms in fertilizer. Lying in the emergency room, I wanted to recreate nature’s churn, restoring balance back to the universe. The Diatom Project is the artistic expression of the concept; the Jellyfish Project is the tangible application.”

“The universe notwithstanding, I could have held the rights to process the tangible jellyfish as well as you,” said Duncan. “You stole it out from under me.”

“Not stole—protected. Annuncia convinced me that you seemed too fragile to take it on right then, and it was too important to fail. However, having seen your determination to get here, I’d have to reassess. I wouldn’t have credited you with so much fire. ‘Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.’”

“Sol LeWitt?”

“Churchill!”

“It’s time,” said Beaky as he climbed up onto the forklift.

“How did you get Annuncia to go along with all this? To betray me?” He waved one arm over his head and held onto the blanket with the other.

“There is no betrayal,” said Adoniram. He carried his body like a dancer as helped Beaky maneuver the barrel onto the lift, and for a moment Duncan saw the young man on the beach. “We all have your best interests at heart. And the world’s interests. Of all the people in town, only she—who would have been a young girl when I was living here—saw past the sunglasses and the age. She imagined a dense beard and knew who I was. The woman has a vision as strong as my own. I had hoped she would be here by now, but the storm must be beyond even her powers.”

He wielded a metal tool to pop the top of the barrel; then, with Beaky’s help, he used both hands to pry the lid off. A little wisp of grayish-white ash rose up, like a ghost.

Duncan touched the diatoms and rubbed the dust between his fingers. “So smooth. It doesn’t feel as if it could cut through a slug.”

“Tell that to the slug,” said Adoniram. Then he picked up his stick and with elaborate care used it to write in the powder.

MERCY

They considered the word without speaking, even as the building shuddered from nature’s assault.

“You can’t beat a nice ritual, can you?” said Beaky, who then took over from Adoniram, pressing the barrel lid back on and hammering down the edges. Then he unscrewed a spout on the lid and set about to attach it to an exhaust hose. The waves continued to slam hard against the window.

“We really should move to the other end of the room,” said Duncan.

“J. M. W. Turner, the great painter of light,” said Adoniram, cleaning his hands with a Handi Wipe, “used to tie himself to the mast of a ship and sail into the middle of a raging storm so that he could thrill to its fury. He offered himself totally to the experience. To achieve greatness, we must all give ourselves over to greatness.”

“I’ve had enough thrills for tonight.”

“Time,” said Beaky, tapping his watch.

“Won’t your powder just settle to the bottom of the sea as soon as you shoot it out there?” asked Duncan.

“No,” said Adoniram. “Dust rides the currents across the sea for a long time. When we scatter a loved one’s ashes on the sea, they go farther in death than was ever possible in life. Come, Duncan. Stand next to me.”

Out of the darkness, Duncan saw a sailboat rise up sideways in the harbor before being quickly yanked back down to some black, watery hell. He hoped it was just another boat that had come loose from a mooring field and not one full of crew. He thought of Nod, and his heart sank.

“Did you know,” said Adoniram, gazing out at where the boat had been, “that the United Nations estimates that there are more than three million shipwrecks on the ocean floor?”

“Seems reasonable to me,” said Duncan. “I was almost one of them not so long ago. Nod could already be there.”

“Don’t give up on your brother,” said Adoniram. “There’s always hope. I’d like you to do the honors of throwing the switch.”

Duncan looked at himself. “I’m not dressed for the occasion.”