The Glass Ocean (10 page)

He is very serious, my grandfather, not just serious, he’s livid; his face is as red as his hair, he is shouting, he is laughing, I wish he did not have this side to his character but he does and now he must show it.

And McIntyre, too, is furious, he must, of course, strike back, this he does by questioning the origin and accuracy of certain passages in my grandfather’s book,
Felix Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak
.

•   •   •

One passage that I particularly enjoy is in question, the one that describes a particular sandstone formation in the desert, southeast of Dalanzadgad, at Bayan Ovoo. My grandfather writes that the rock there
had been peculiarly deformed by the wind, coming to resemble, over vast eons of time, the traveling sledge of the legendary Altan Khan; upon close examination there may be discerned, carved upon the rock, whether by human hand or divine, the words “By the will of the Eternal Blue Heaven” (Köke Möngke Tngri). This object is worshipped by the local peoples, who leave upon it each evening offerings of food, coins, bells, sheepskins, walking sticks, even empty bottles of usquebaugh.

My mother always liked that passage, too, because my grandfather was in Bain Dzak when she was born, and used to read aloud to her from this book, when she was a child, as if, in this way, to explain his absence, of which her mother, Marie-Louise Girard, used bitterly to complain.

•   •   •

But John McIntyre holds that there is no such object.
It’s lies, all lies, a fabric of fatuous fibs. You are a fraud, sir; you have never been to Bayan Ovoo, to Dalanzadgad, or to Bain Dzak—why, if you’ve been a step farther east than Chicksand Street, I’ll eat my hat!

•   •   •

Why must they do it? Are they not hot enough? Now everyone’s dinner is ruined, and then my mother’s performance of the “Der Vogelfänger” aria is interrupted, my grandfather punctuating the amusing refrain, “
der Vogelfänger bin ich ja, Stets lustig, tra la la!,
”
with his imitation of the characteristic but disputed
mee-hoo! mee-hoo!
of the Guianian sun parrot, to everyone’s dismay. Now the concert is over; and McIntyre, monocle blazing with fury, has stomped off somewhere—and all the time there’s that ocean, that implacable, winking object, duplicitous in delft blue; and land, Punta Yalkubul, there to the south, resembling, sometimes, a wisp of fog, pearly grey in color, at other times a ribbon that has fallen loose from my mother’s hair, deeply violet, reclining—

And my father, nervously rubbing the heel of his right hand against his left wrist, poor sweating fool, the sailors make him uneasy. They are doing something peculiar down below; they are making faces at him behind his back—

Malaise and murmur, murmur and malaise.

And water. Never a shortage of that.

•   •   •

Something has to happen eventually. They can’t go on like this forever, all this floating, it has to end sometime.

•   •   •

Maybe now.

Harry Owen, unable to sleep, rises at 3:00
A.M.
; sees, by the light of a gibbous moon, as he stands on deck with his cigar, Punta Yalkubul on the horizon, dense, blue grey as smoke, slightly lighter, in color, than either sea or sky; sees it from starboard, instead of the usual larboard; thinks it looks nearer than before; then, disoriented, thinks that he is dreaming, or else that they have drifted, though there is no wind by which to account for this, and hardly any waves. A dream then. A dream wind has moved them. Who dreamed it, this wind? He has, Harry Owen has; Leo Dell’oro has; Clotilde has; they have done it, all of them, together, it is a collective dream, a collective sigh, a wished-for exhalation. This is satisfactory. Now Harry Owen can sleep. Morning, though, reveals him to have been mistaken: this is no dream; nor have they moved. A thick bank of cloud has drawn up, and approaches the
Narcissus
from the north. This is what Harry Owen saw, and mistook for land. It was gathering, even then; gathering, while they dreamed. Hugh Blackstone, tight-lipped, regards this object through his glass, then begins shouting,
Haul the jib! Take in the fore! Furl the mizzen topgallant! Clew up the main topgallant!
Suddenly the
Narcissus
awakes from its torpor, the men spring up into the rigging. Certainly something will happen now.

But no.

Now it is still, with a stillness unlike any they have known before, a stillness so utter and so complete that the sound of my mother dropping a single hairpin as she completes her morning toilet could carry throughout the entire ship—a stillness of men and nature both, as if somebody, pulling a celestial plug somewhere, has suddenly let all the
murmur
in the world run out a drain.

Hugh Blackstone, unpleasant over breakfast, will only say
Now we will have some weather—

Who knows what this might mean. Only that it is eerily still, that the bank of cloud grows closer, mounts the horizon, a great, grey-green fist of a cloud, shot through at the top with vivid green bursts of light. Here it is, hanging over them like judgment; but beneath the cloud is stillness, dead calm, a tepid sea, no wind, the air hot and sweet and rotten. It is unhealthy air; but breathe it they must, and so they do, cautiously, in shallow gasps, through handkerchiefs if possible. It is crackling, that air—saturated. And they are saturated. The electricity enters them upward, through the timbers of the ship, downward, through that air, the heaviness of which makes everything difficult, walking, speaking, raising to the lips a fork or a cup of tea; better to paddle through it, that would seem natural. Except that nothing is natural, least of all they, crackling with the static of the cloud.

Surely, now it will happen.

Instead they eat lunch.

Now it is coming. There is a spark, a flash of monocle, John McIntyre has begun again upon Felix Girard, calling him
fraud, fake, charlatan, swindler
. This over an unfortunate fish stew.
The entire expedition is a fraud—a trick to bilk money out of Harry Ellis—there was no intention of ever arriving in Punta Yalkubul—him at the helm is in on it, too—all of you together—crooks—cheats—thieves—confidence tricksters—!
McIntyre pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket, begins waving it around, a tiny, square ghost, brilliant white and incorporeal in the sickly grey-green light.
Here it is, a letter from your partner in crime, Arthur Petrook, laying out the entire scheme!

Now my grandfather, always fiery, turns brick red, the veins in his temples bulge as he cries out fiercely,
It is lies, all lies! I will show you, McIntyre, you scoundrel! I will show you, you rotten arse-kisser! You monster! You deformed abortion of a man! I will show you what is real science and what is bluff! Just wait!

Yes, this is it: now it has happened. They are all appalled now, my mother near tears, my father shrunk down in his corner, Harry Owen dabbing nervously with a piece of bread, Linus Starling hunching and ducking over his fish stew. And yet at the same time nothing has happened, this they are made to know by an outcry on deck, where something else is happening, something altogether bigger.

•   •   •

The great fist on the horizon has taken everything into its grasp. That is what has happened. The constriction has begun, the sky dark as ash, though with an eerie cast of yellow, all hands standing silent and staring—

(So lost are they who emerge from the saloon that they do not know where to look, what to see, looking therefore and seeing nothing but the pale, upturned faces until the mate takes pity on their confusion and points—)

—up into the rigging, where a dazzling, white-green light is sparking and spitting along the main topgallant masthead; bouncing down then onto the topgallant yard, twirling, it’s like a top, if tops were made of fire, then down, further down it goes, bouncing onto the flying jib boom end, such a dance, a flamenco I believe, before it disappears for a moment—just a moment, leaving in its wake a black afterglow, a momentary blindness, before it reappears again, assuming a playful posture just above my father’s head, his face is lit with it, lit green—

(Now they see it, even he sees it now, my father, Leo Dell’oro, as down it comes—)

—down, further down, onto his chest, onto that once-starched shirtfront that he refuses to take off, oh, how it sizzles there, it sings, it pops and hisses, it cavorts, such a performance, with his chest for a stage; a jig it dances, a clog dance, as the sky above and sea below turn blacker than black, and then with a crash it all splits open, the fist tightens and the flood comes down just as, with a soft sound, a sigh, a gentle letting out of air, Leo Dell’oro’s legs fold up neatly beneath him, and he falls, too.

•   •   •

Such a pandemonium.

It’s hard to imagine it almost, sailors running, and pigs, these squealing, and my mother, she squealing also as Felix Girard attempts to shield her with his shaggy bear’s body, McIntyre groping like a blind man with his monocle transformed into a waterfall, and what of my father, lying there like that, at the bottom of it all.

Someone ought to help him.

•   •   •

Why have I done it, put him in such a position, he’s out cold, helpless, but now Harry Owen has him by the armpits, and this other one, Linus Starling, takes him by the feet, this is unfortunate, that it had to be Linus Starling, why have I done this, my poor father, and together, with much effort, they carry him back into the saloon, lay him out on the table like the Christmas goose, he’s at the center of it all now, and they’re all there, crowded around, as many as can fit, seeking shelter from the deluge, soaked like rats the lot of them, trying to wring themselves out.

Look at him
, says Linus Starling,
he’s steaming.

It’s true. Steam is rising from my father’s sopping clothes.

He’s unconscious of this, mercifully.

It’s damned hot in here
, says Harry Owen.
Better unbutton him.

Unpack him’s more like it
, Starling says.

It’s too bad Linus Starling has to be involved in this. My father never liked him. Yet all the same it’s true, as they unbutton the proud shirtfront they find that Leo has a second skin, he’s lined himself underneath with all sorts of stuff, letters, drawings, pages torn from magazines, bits of textile—

Hey, ho!
says Linus Starling,
what’s this?

He holds up what appears to be a crumpled swatch of material, a bit of stuff that might (were it larger) be used to make a curtain, or upholster a chair.

It looks like one of Petrook’s bits
, says Harry Owen, remembering.
No doubt something Dell’oro picked up off a pile in Bury Place. He’s a compulsive gatherer of the worst sort, you know.

I remember, too, my father in that hot dark room in Bury Place, shoving something into his pocket. It’s come back to haunt him now.

Hey, ho!
says Starling,
it looks just like Madamoiselle Girard!

Don’t be a fool, Starling—

Harry Owen takes the bit of textile away from him, carefully spreads it out on a corner of the table where my father is not, sighs over it a little, what, after all, can he say? It is a woven exotic miniature my father has stolen, the image of a fair servant girl kneeling before a beautifully brocaded elephant, presenting to it a jewel, an emerald, perhaps, the image very small, yet it cannot be denied that Linus Starling is right, it bears a startling resemblance to my mother, who, standing just to the left of the table wringing out her hair, sees it, and gives a tiny gasp, that is all, just a gasp, and then turns away, pretending not to have seen. They all pretend—some things, after all, are better unseen—yet this cannot be avoided.

Hey, ho ho! Here’s another—and another—

Continuing the unpacking, this Linus Starling has rolled my father over and found, pressed against his back, drawings of Clotilde. He’s so exacting, my father. Here she is: Clotilde at the taffrail, Clotilde in the saloon, Clotilde bending over to button her boot—

Poor unconscious father, peeled like an onion to the vulnerable, milky-white core, all the secrets of his heart and body ignominiously exposed. They’ll make a feast of him now for certain.

Poor silly fellow. He cannot help it. Who can defend against my beautiful Clotilde? Gentlemen, even I cannot. Certainly not a silly fellow like this. Owen, Starling, when the rain stops, take him below and put him to bed. And take all that stuff with you, eh? Put it away somewhere safe.

So my grandfather has rescued him, for now.

And my mother, what about her?

Now she’s seen it. Now she knows. She’s gazing at my father contemplatively. He’s a pale, unshelled creature, laid out there on the table for her delectation, every bit of him, every scrap, every fragment of his poor disarticulated soul exposed. But she says nothing. Nothing. Only turns away.

That’s not like her. Something has really happened, now.

•   •   •

When the rain has done its battering, they take him below. At seven he’ll wake, confused, asking Harry Owen if he’s dead.
No, by no means. It was nothing; just a corposant, St. Elmo’s fire. A kind of electrical discharge brought about by the storm—quite harmless—

Harry Owen can hardly bear to look at him now. He does everything not to look, his gaze averted, over my father’s shoulder, or down, in the direction of his feet.

He is thinking about that night on the Embankment, the frightening absence. And this, the subsequent voiding. It is difficult to be a gentleman about this.

My father, though, sees nothing amiss, sleeps again, for him there’s nothing but oblivion, despite the storm. Brief violent downpours, thunder and lightning that shake the ship, this continues until dawn. Probably nobody sleeps, except my father, who sleeps so poorly, in the best of times.

•   •   •

In the morning the sky is clear, it’s as if nothing has happened, nor have they moved. Punta Yalkubul is once again a purple ribbon dropped by a careless girl, tapering away narrowly, like a ribbon, to nothing at the ends.