Leaving the Sea: Stories (18 page)

Only one other time had the drill run this long. To Edward, that night seemed like years ago, when the workshop began, when it was just a few worried citizens finally admitting to each other how little they knew of the future. But probably it was only last winter. It was a viciously cold night and they’d waited in this very spot while the buses warmed up. He’d been so scared! But then Frederick’s girlish voice had rung out through a megaphone and everyone had hurried back for their critiques.

So there was still time. Frederick could call this off and get them back inside.

As the settlements gathered behind him, headed to separate buses, Edward waited and waited and waited, until finally Hannah approached, and, behind her, her settlement, mostly old-timers from Wellery Heights. He had only a moment for this, but he had to do it. There was nothing in the protocol about it, anyway. The protocol hadn’t been written this far. It was a blank chapter. They’d spoken so much about how after a certain point nothing could be known, and they were right. Edward grabbed his father, who looked startled, and then the two of them opened their mouths soundlessly at each other. They couldn’t hear anything. It was his mother Edward needed to know about. His mother. He shrugged
where
and he mimed other things, things to indicate his mother, which anyone else from any country in the world, during any kind of crisis, would understand, but it was no use, it was stupid. Or his father was stupid, because he either did not get it or did not want to, smiling dumbly at Edward, reflecting the mime back at him as if it was a game. Finally Edward grabbed his father’s left hand, isolating the ring finger, and held it up to him, tapping on the ring.

Do you get it now, you stupid old man? Where is she?

Edward’s father smiled, put his palms together, closed his eyes, and leaned his head against his hands. A universal sign. His mother was home sleeping. His father had left her there asleep, and don’t worry, she was doing fine.

His mother was asleep, alone, at home. In a city that might soon be empty. She was fine.

The buses traveled south. Frederick had been wrong about the highway. It was not an ugly variable. It didn’t even present a problem. Was something supposed to shoot out at them from the trees? He was no longer sure what, exactly, he was supposed to fear. In a caravan the buses climbed the on-ramp, entering a freeway that seemed reserved for them alone. They drove for hours. The driver was in radio communication, but otherwise the bus was quiet. Edward sat by himself in a rear seat, staring from the window. At this point, he reasoned, the drill should have been called. They’d done it. They’d proven they could leave quickly, if necessary. But now what? They’d never rehearsed this far, so what on earth could they be testing? Wasn’t it a pain in the ass now that they were so far from home, and how exactly were they going to get back? The buses, of course, could be ordered to turn around. But as the sun started to rise, and as muffins wrapped in brown paper were sent back, along with juice boxes and clear packs of vitamin pills, that didn’t seem so likely.

During the second day of driving, after he’d slept and woken and then slept a little bit more, he heard a commotion at the front of the bus and the bus steamed and seized and buckled as it started to slow down and pull off the highway.

Thom slid into the seat next to him.

“Holy fuck, right?”

“What happened?” asked Edward, still waking up.

“Sharon.”

As the bus lurched to a stop, Edward tried to look, but there were too many people mobbed together.

“Is she okay?” he asked.

Thom shook his head. “I don’t think so. She fell out of her seat. All of a sudden. I only got a quick look. But, fuck, man, I think she’s dead.”

It was a pretty sight. Ten—or was it more—glittering yellow buses pulled over on the side of the highway. Edward’s was the only bus that had discharged its passengers, and this was spoiling a lovely image: ragged, tired travelers wandering up and down the embankment while the passengers from the other buses, from behind darkened glass, looked on. Edward found a soft, dry place to sit. What a drill this was! Something for the record books. In a strange way he was excited for the critique. How would you begin to pick this apart? He wondered, surveying the fleet, which of the buses carried his father. Sharon had been removed, conveyed on a stretcher by some younger fellows, who’d hiked her into the woods and returned already. Without Sharon. Without even the stretcher. They were sharing a thermos down in the grass. One of them sang something. Edward wasn’t sure what the holdup was now, even while Frederick and some others, including the mayor, huddled in conference down in the shadow of the last bus.

It wasn’t long before a signal was given and the buses revved up again. Edward stood and joined the orderly line his settlement had formed to board their bus, but the door didn’t open and their driver never appeared. Where was he, and who was supposed to drive them now?

Frederick and his crew had already boarded their buses. One by one the other buses wheezed into motion, crawling from the side of the road to join the highway. His neighbors reacted differently to the situation that dawned on them, but Edward stood out on the shoulder to watch. Of course the windows of the buses were dark, so he couldn’t see, but in one of them, perhaps pressed against the glass, perhaps waving at him this very moment, waving hello and, of course, good-bye, was his father. So Edward, just in case, raised his own hand, too. Raised it and waved—thinking,
Good-bye, Dad, at least for now
—as the other buses built up speed down the highway and disappeared from sight, leaving the rest of them alone in the grass by the side of the road.

M
y father’s costumes were gray and long and of the finest pile, sometimes clear enough for us to see through, though there was no reason to look too closely at that man’s body. He preferred not to move. He was not one for excursions. My brother and I accomplished most of the required motion for him: we collected and described the daily food, oiled the Costume Gun, gathered yarn each morning after a storm, and donated any leftover swatches of fabric into our mother’s kill hole out on the back platform.

My father threw handfuls of our mother’s fabrics in the morning and studied how they fell, diagrams in cloth that could have meant anything. His body was hunched and foreign. He grimaced with each gesture, his face often decorated with cotton bracings. When the disarray proved baffling to him, he brought in my brother for consultations. I sat on the bench and watched them crouch at their work. I could not read fabric. I had a language problem. My brother spoke a language called Forecast. It consisted of sounds he barked into a stippled leather box. When my father wrapped my brother’s hands in cotton waffling, my brother could tap out a low-altitude language on the floor, short thuds of speech that my father held his listening jar to. On those evenings when the sky was stretched too tight and the birds struck against it like pebbles on our roof, my brother slept off his Forecast expulsions in a sling hanging from our door. He cried softly inside his mesh bag while I dotted our windowsills with listening utensils, in case a message came in the night.

It would be so nice to think that a boat was not involved, that instead we lugged our things overland in wagons. At least overland we might have been sighted from the air. We would at least have not encountered so many empty platforms, floating alone at sea. My father might have been less tempted to perform so many jettisons.

If I could choose, I would picture my family stopping for small circles of bread in a safe location by a lake. Trapdoors would be carved into the soil there. We would spread our blankets and curtsy down to the food. I would send my father out on a scouting mission while my brother and I ate our bread. He would return to us with a bag of sharp utensils, his mouth sore and bleeding. He would report of mountains in the distance, a possible road. If I could control the outcome, we would not have believed him as he stood there telling his story. We would have remained near the safety of the lake, performing elaborate superstitions under cloth. My brother and I would have attacked my father with chopping motions until he had been silenced. Keeping maybe some of his hair, just in case. Keeping his costume, should we need to become him one day. When the time came. When my father’s space was hollow enough for another body, possibly one of our own, to fit into it.

I wish I could say it was not a house we lived in, but admitting to the house is crucial. It gives a certain picture that will be required, in the end, when we are dead: my father, brother, and me, ducking under bags of sharp salt suspended from the rafters to keep the indoor birds sufficiently wounded, too tired to fly away. A house where birds performed a required orbit that affected how a man aged. A house where the flight of a bird might keep your costume young. Our windows fashioned of lens material for the sun to photograph us.

It is a necessary picture, the three of us walking in a crouch, our faces sometimes cut. It will be fine to be remembered that way. I prefer a picture to a written report. A written report would be sure to fail my family. If the sun has witnessed our behavior, perhaps one day we will reappear on some horizon, and we will again walk the earth and inhale some of the world’s harder wind, to keep it off the bodies of those people not yet born.

The day in question was not much of a day. The sun paused at the horizon until a cluster of hard, black birds burst from the woods. They tore a path into the sky that the sun could fill, and the sun then commenced to stretch the space around it until something passing for daylight occurred. A smarter family would not have been fooled. A smarter family would have pursued a longer concealment within a cloth camouflage. But it was an accurate enough form of light; it showed the smallest, softest version of my father I had ever seen.

My father woke early and opened four jars in the doorway. He tuned the radio dial to Englishville and we heard a series of recent horizon songs made with a slow, old-fashioned breathing style. In between the music, one of the more famous years was being described by a girl whose voice had to project through a wooden mouth. Her mother apparently had designed the mouth of an old man, so the girl could not be recognized. The antenna of our radio had been soaking in honey overnight. After wiping down the tip, my father pushed it through the ceiling until the music became louder.

The three of us crouched down at the writing hole in the center of the room. It was moist that morning, rimmed with foaming soil, so my father fitted the mouth with scraps of linen and then reached his arm deep into the hole. We each took our turn. Above us the sky sounded like a waterfall. My brother held his breath and smiled when his arm went in the hole, as if he could stay like that forever. The radio would not keep still, buzzing on the countertop as if an animal were trapped inside it. Some other family must have died that day, because our house had too much electricity. If too many people died, there would be lightning in our room. If the men on our road stopped breathing, we would be blinded. We would not be able to honor the kill hole. A fine spray of crumbs blew from the speaker until the air in the room seemed filled with insects.

We packed our things into clear burlap sacks. Father took down the wind sock and inhaled the last remnants of yesterday’s air for strength. He passed the sock to my brother, who lazily wiped his face with it before fitting it onto an unused portion of his costume. He spoke three Forecast sentences into his scarf before kissing it and wrapping it around his neck. The language made me drowsy. The three of us rolled our bodies in the Costume Smoother and checked ourselves for wind drag. Father unplugged the four corners of the house and kicked at the baseboards to set the decay timer. He coordinated his kicks with the Bird Metronome until the room became recalibrated and silent, more hushed than I had ever heard it, which made me want to stay there and hold my breath, to take a silence bath, to rub my sleeves and groom myself clean in that brand-new air.

There was nothing for us to do then but wait. I watched my father greasing our windows with oil, drawing pictures of us against the glass with precise, thin lines. In the picture, from what I could decipher, my father was standing in full costume, tearing a piece of bread in half for my brother and me, who were crouched on our heels with our hands raised. It would be a long time before someone looking into the house with a Cloth Diviner could determine that we had left the premises, that the picture of these three men exchanging bread was merely a decoy, erasable, made of oil. With the right manipulations of the hand, those three men could be made to do anything. By then we would be far off on the water.

I wish I could say my father’s name. I do not know the grammatical tense that could properly remark on my father. There is a portion of time that my own language cannot reach. A limitation, probably, in my mouth. In this portion of time is where my father is hidden. If I learn a new language, my father might come true. If I reach deep into my mouth and scoop out a larger cave. If I make do with less of myself, so that he might be more.

It would be easier to hold a magnifying glass to the scrap of my father’s shirt that still remains. To focus a hot cone of sunlight through the glass onto the fabric that once concealed him. Then the last of him could be burned, and in the sound of the flame a small message might be heard. I wish that his name occurred in nature. I could point to the sky and my gesture would indicate him better than any of my own noises ever could. I wish that there was a new man who looked like my father. I could grab hold of him if he rowed by. I could enter his clothes so that he would never float. Hide in the extra space between his body and the cloth. Drag him down into the water, the two of us sinking double-time, down to where the people are waiting, their reaching hands just beyond my sight now as I stare into the water.

When the boat appeared, my father pulled it in with his rope and loaded our parcels down below. He attached long bronze wires onto the stern that fluttered in our wake, creating the turbulence of a much larger boat, a decoy trail for any Cloth Monitors watching us escape. We would produce a commotion of foam. An attack would be less likely. I was asked to spray the south-facing wall of our house with writing, a script to poison travelers if they ever became stranded at our house, to prevent them from living the way we had, to keep ourselves from becoming repeated. I used one of the safer, mouth-borne languages for the project, restricting myself to words that indicated only those things that could be concealed with burlap. When I was finished, and the wall of our house was like a language trap, I still had some writing left over, which I smeared out carefully over the sides of our boat until it had spread into a translucent glue.

My brother and I held hands in the low morning wind while my father fitted the Travel Costume onto us, adjusting the straps so that my bigger, softer body would not bulge from the fabric. We kissed before saying good-bye to each other, even though our bodies would be staying close. We would share an outfit, which meant that we had to alternate moving about the boat. Only one of us could be in charge of a costume. A bird or man might think my father had only one son on board. I went fully limp first, and issued small motion commands to my brother, who had stronger legs, a stronger back, and better eyes.

The day was mostly a crude alphabet of sounds, like one of the Southern languages recited through a gauze filter. It made my father cross. He rowed crudely, chopping at the water as if it were ice, and we slid away from our home in jerking strides. Animals may have been responsible for the noises we heard, but I saw little that was living, only clean geometries of clouds above a rigid tree line, and a shore that receded the more you stared at it. We sailed the narrow waterway until the houses grew small and pale, whitish blurs on the horizon, and the water thickened beneath us.

For hours we saw only my father’s back, tilting against the long oars. On the shore were long descriptions scrolling in the tree line, sentences indecipherable without the proper cloth filter. We had only so much burlap to spare, and the messages did not seem crucial. We were always choosing what we needed to know, yet I had trouble leaving those sentences unread. I thought they might have been placed there for us. My brother moved our costume to keep me from seeing the shore. I saw only the wake behind us, a trail of foam that produced a language of bubbles so intimate I was ashamed to decipher it.

When the sun was directly above us and our shadows were deep inside our own bodies, my father produced the first parcel. There was a cheese that we had been saving. There was a bread. The bread was wrapped in a stiff sheet of wool. It was given to me to undress it. First I held my hands in the water. If I closed my eyes, the water felt as loose and grainy as soil, with bits that broke gently against my touch. My hands were smooth and glistening when I removed them, and the bread unraveled easily. We kept the items of the parcel near our persons, in contact always with our costumes, in case witnesses from the far shore had been employed. In case, my father said, someone was given a reason to come out there after us. We used the cheese and bread without much motion. Someone watching could easily have assumed that we were sleeping. After we ate, I shot a thin piece of wool into the water as an offering.

I have a photo of my brother that is simply a picture of an empty field. I am collecting empty spaces for him that he might like, spaces safe enough for entry. There is a scratchy yellow grass growing wild, a dried white mud, nothing much alive in the air. Trees with shriveled limbs corkscrew over the field, providing a cage of wooden protection. No people there, least of all my brother, least of all even an artifact of his several costumes. There is no clothing. I could throw this photo into water, to feed the image enough for my brother to grow in it. It seems a safe enough place for him to enter, a place with none of the warning signs that in the end kept my brother from going anywhere. He could live in this field, if only I could make him grow there.

We rowed on because my father told us to. Words were exchanged that I could not use. My brother had spent his ration of bread to brace his mouth for brand-new utterances that hurt me to listen to. My father had an angry body that he kept turned away from us. I held my head low and watched the water flowing around us. Signs posted in the channel told of families that had come and gone. Cursive script on wooden placards, counterweighted with buoys, like simple billboards on a road. Short, orbular lights mounted on the signs cast oily images of the various fathers on the water, spotlights of men’s faces as if projected from the bellies of birds. The current was troubled enough to dissolve these fathers’ faces as it pulled us along, until we were sailing directly over wavy versions of these men as we tried not to read of what had happened to them, who they were, what they did, why they failed.

The signs, in the end, gave way simply to sticks and platforms as we gained the ocean, weeds coiling up out of the water around them. We saw no more writing for hours. My head became blank and I remembered an old song a woman used to sing. It was a song built of pauses and breath, with notes that were just the words a person might use to procure food, yet once I remembered it, it seemed crucial to my own breathing, and I worried that if I forgot to keep time with the song, to hum it always, I might fail to breathe, I might lose my own time for good.

It was early afternoon by the time my father showed his full face to me. I did not care to see it. It was too big. Anyone could have been inside it. He required me to see him there in our boat on the water, and I obliged as much as I could. My brother, I suspect, did his best to look away. I felt the costume pulling at me, tight as a muscle.