© Michael Buckley
OK, so how about this: I’m not a writer. I restore boats.
The latest just arrived from Vietnam, bed of a delta river, concealed but scraping the bottom of anything that came along in a low tide. Lost in ’68, two men with it—Something Lindstrom and Lindsay Something.
On the day I intend to start work on it I wake up from diaphanous dreams of the mud colored boat crossing the ocean in the belly of a 747, this strange vehicle-in-vehicle (and maybe Lindstrom or Lindsay inside that?) image barely concealing a fantasy: a city. New Orleans? Maybe; it’s a low, hot city, and I step foot onto sidewalks that lead right up to the water, as if part of the city had been sucked into the swamp, and walking, I float into pieces…
“PBR,” I say later, on the dock with Merriam. “Patrol Boat River. Seen Apocalypse Now? Just like that.”
She is standing with me, staring at the muddy carcass. Fiberglass reinforced with scrap iron. Fast and tough, they say about these boats.
“Marlon Brando.”
“No. The boats they travel on—PBR. Fucking thing can do sixty in thirteen inches of water.”
Merriam’s looking at the boat, her eyes unfocused, her hair holding traces of the dawn.
“Never got that movie. Marlon Brando big and fat in the jungle. How does he maintain that?”
“Come on now,” I say. “Two guys died in this thing. Let’s be serious.”
Merriam grimaces and walks away and I regret saying that, about the deaths. Why was I guilting her? I can’t even think of their full names.
The morning goes quickly scraping the mud out of the boat. Once I work my way around to the inside I try to conjure the ghosts of the dead sailors; I invoke them with thoughts of cold beers and naked left-home sweethearts, thin-ankled in the religious shine of stadium lights, and I look across the street at Merriam’s house.
What do I know about Lindsay S. and S. Lindstrom?
What do I know about Merriam?
~
After working on the boat for half the day I’m exhausted and leave it on the dock, fighting bizarre fears that someone will lower the busted fiberglass shell into the water and steal it. I spend three hours drinking by myself, watching a movie about a desert town plagued by sand swimming demons. They pop up at strange times—or maybe not strange times, just after loveless sex, for instance, or drug use, the goddamn joys of childhood—and gulp the characters whole. Nothing left but an echo of bones crunching.
By the end of the movie my mind is loose and drifting… Thoughts of Merriam, thoughts of the PBR fixed up perfectly, carrying us both of the sharp elbow of a churned-water V, thoughts of leaning forward into the speed. And drunk like that, full of desires, thoughts connect shamelessly: I’m in New Orleans again. Mangroves grow out of banks of brown water that reflect the sun. Whole neighborhoods are swallowed in water, display windows like throats, the roofs of cars covered in river silt.
Dreaming, I remember I don’t restore boats. I’m a writer, and my experience with patrol boats consists of a few weeks when I was a teenager. Sea Cadets put together a training camp and they let us dress up in BDU’s and ride in the PBR’s with the real Navy guys. They would play this game; if one of them got behind you he would put his forefinger to your throat and say that easy. He meant it would be that easy to slit your throat if you were both crawling through one of those crazy cinematic jungles that some of us, due to the profusion of Vietnam movies, thought Americans were still fighting in…
Beyond that I’ve been drunk on stationary boats, went on a cruise once, that’s about it. Why a boat restorer? Why not paintings? Couldn’t be the symbolic resonance; it would be more meaningful and beautiful to be the caretaker of the catacombs in Paris—specifically the great wall of skulls, ministering to them all with cotton swabs and muddled whispers.
This forces me to confront fears I have about the whole writing process. When I write am I creating elaborate lies? Of course; I suppose that’s not the issue, whether I’m lying or not; the issue is whether or not I’d rather live in a fiction than in my real life. If so I’m nothing like every hero I’ve ever had. I’m not brave, I’m not comfortable in the world, I’m not, say, a mostly-content restorer of boats who is in love with his divorced neighbor.
The dream breaks. Outside, over the bay, the last chill of nighttime hangs like an invisible sheet of glass. I have fallen asleep in my clothes and I feel a hangover sitting on my chest, heavy as a schoolyard bully.
~
Despite the morbidity from the day before, Merriam comes out around ten.
“Wow,” she says. “What a difference.”
Her sarcasm makes me smile. It’s been difficult today; I’ve scrubbed the boat down to find that the fiberglass was either originally mud brown or transformed to it over the years underwater. I can’t tell if I’ve cleaned it well enough, if I’ve fully re-claimed it from the river.
“Why not take a break?”
When Merriam asks this I feel sympathy behind her voice. She can tell I’m hungover. We sit down in the gazebo behind her half of the duplex, which was constructed by her from plywood slats she found in an alley. She’s painted them white and coaxed morning glory vines to grow over them, hanging purple flowers that, in this state, remind me of judgments.
Merriam mixes me a Bloody Mary and we eat peanut butter sandwiches. She tells me about her first husband. He collected slot machines. The basement was full of them, in the dark like an army meant for the afterlife, full of rolls of mints instead of coins. Hours an hours of polishing the machines, restoring tiny bulbs that spasm in unison when the reels line up, thousands of dollars spent on parts, hundreds of hours spent waiting for the parts to arrive in the mail; “I’d like to say he loved the slot machines more that me and that’s why I left him,” Merriam says.
“But you can’t?”
“He cheated on me. Can you believe it? All that obsession over slot machines. I thought if he ever broke my heart it would be because he loved the damned things so much. Instead he met a girl on the internet. So banal.”
I like to think that when Merriam and I talk about her first husband, we are really talking about the potentials and pitfalls for her and me.
“One day we’re all consumed by our obsessions,” I say.
Merriam raises her eyebrows, bored.
“Literally. Your ex is probably in the basement right now, turns around, doesn’t see a one-armed bandit sneaking up behind him. Out of nowhere it bites him right on the ass and the others swarm. Eat him alive. Guts all over the lights and mints.”
She smiles. “Naw. He lives in Torrance with the internet girl. He sold all the slots.”
~
Later in the afternoon Merriam and I are on the dock. She is in a folding lawn chair, her head tilted toward the sun. I’m staring at a picture of a PBR I have taped to the rim of the deck. The boat is in full flight, angled out of black, glassy water.
I decide to come clean.
“You’re a character in a story,” I say.
“Ah yes. Evil villain. Sex appeal. Crystal fortress. Monocle?”
How do I say this? I’m a writer and you’re a character in my story. In real life I am, right now, writing these words on a yellow piece of paper. I chose your name from an ad for free online dictionaries that appeared on my computer screen shortly after beginning the story.
“No. You’re a character in my story.”
“Oh? What’s it about?”
“Well, restoring boats.”
“Can’t it be about ninjas? And snowcones?”
I laugh. “The things you say.”
“You say,” she reminds me. “Right? If we’re still playing this game?”
“I guess. You know, I wasn’t going to write about you. About any woman. I promised myself I wouldn’t write about love.”
Merriam shifts her weight and shows her teeth in a certain way. What was it? The word love? While writing, remember—love is either a fistful of sparklers or poorly done sutures. Reactions vary.
“Wasn’t going to write about lost love, love gone wrong, love gone wrong and lost, then, you know, the regret after?”
“Lordy.”
“That’s why no women characters.”
“So if not love, ninjas, or snowcones, what were you going to write about?”
“A lost city.”
“Which?”
“Been having dreams about New Orleans.”
“Cliché.”
“I know. Maybe San Francisco? I was young in that city.”
“ Sure, Ann Rice. New Orleans and San Francisco. Crucifixes and velvet. Homoerotic wrestling matches between ancient Turks…”
“OK. London?”
She doesn’t answer for a long moment. Then finally:
“So when are you going to start writing?”
“I’m doing it now, Merriam. You’re in the story. So am I.”
“Oh. Forgot.”
“And I’ve never done this, told a character what I’m telling you. I guess I’m just wondering if I use writing as a crutch. Like, an arpeggio? and the rest is just noise?”
“What is the rest?”
Merriam’s voice is quiet; I wonder if she is falling asleep.
“My wife just had a baby.”
“Masoltov. You must be happy.”
“More than anything, I’m afraid she’ll die.”
Merriam opens her eyes and looks past me at something—the picture of the PBR hung on the real PBR?
“It’s not too late to put me in a happier story, you know.”
~
Over the next month I work like a lunatic, dawn to dusk, and even quit drinking. Merriam and I have these wonderful long conversations and we discover constellations of serendipity between us: feelings about how things should be in life, relatives of ours that knew each other in faraway parts of the world, slow songs that our hearts imprinted upon during junior high dances. Some nights I sleep at her house. On the couch, once she has disappeared into a back bedroom, it feels like her side of the duplex is floating on three inches of held breath.
And finally, about six weeks after I got the PBR, it is restored. It cost me a fortune and cracked my fingertips bloody from smoothing out the non-reflective, non-echo veneer, but it is done.
Sometimes, as a game, Merriam asks me what I’m doing in my real life.
“Good and bad,” I say. “Seems like I’m always reminding myself that things are beautiful. Otherwise I’m sad and lonely.”
Merriam smiles at me like I’m an infant who can’t control his feet and hands. Relax, her smile says, we can joke about it, but we live here, on the water, within sight of a boat restored to pristine condition.
___________________________________
Pirates
© Michael Buckley
Finally, and it was last ditch, a last gesture, I took her out in All London.
“I’ve wanted to do this forever,” Syllas said. We were in The Complex; it was late, and janitorial programs were cleaning the offices, shutting the lights off when they were done. Darkness was climbing the edges of the hallways. “Where did you get the tickets?”
I lied.
“Friend of mine had them. This is something you’ve wanted to do? You should have mentioned it.”
We walked out along Santa Monica Boulevard. I felt the lies I’d told about the tickets trailing along, tied to my shoes. It didn’t bother me. The terrible realization that I loved Syllas had been sitting in me like heaped garbage in the sun: I would do anything to be alone with her.
I described the evening.
“I guess you’ve read about it. All London is the latest in shimmer cities, it contains all of London’s history. You can wander wherever, whenever you want. I figure we’ll start with dinner somewhere, maybe the Crystal Palace?”
We could see All London from where we were walking, a warmer quality of light bleeding out into the fluorescence of the modern boulevard, a sort of symmetrical distraction from the slosh of the canals to our right.
If this doesn’t do it, I thought, it can’t be done.
Syllas talked about her day.
“The beacons from the drone ships cued in today. They’re descending to Landing Site Two.”
“That right? Imagine…”
Of course I knew the drone ships had arrived at Europa. It was all we talked about—my little carbuncle of The Complex, a labyrinth of cubicles, was dedicated to analyzing the samples we got back from Jupiter’s moon. Talk around the office had been bitter lately. The occurrence at Landing Site One, just a few days before, had everyone buzzing.
Was it even possible? Pirates?
We queued outside All London and Syllas continued talking about work. I was distracted; All London really was extraordinary, an old-style stone wall amidst the woven glass of the city. People like us waited outside in groups (or not like us, people with money to burn on tickets into the newest shimmer city), waiting casually, while actors in Elizabethan leggings passed through with glasses of hot wine. There would be no actors inside All London; it was absolutely and perfectly computerized so one wander easily from Victorian London to darker Celtic London to emerge in a mithric hall Roman London, and on, perhaps, to the future.
“Don’t you wonder what the pirates are doing with the specimens?” Syllas asked.
We had just been handed glasses of wine and I touched mine to hers.
“You look lovely tonight,” I said. She shifted her feet and looked away, so I addressed the previous topic. “Pirates—probably teaching the specimens anti-science mumbo jumbo. What else?”
We waited awhile longer. Finally we were let through a portcullis in the wall. It was gently lit inside; Syllas was still talking about something besides All London and I fought the urge to shush her; candlelight, torchlight: We emerged from the portcullis into Westminster Abbey. The ceiling stretched in darkness overhead and the famous dead welcomed us: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde; a burley figure stood off in sepulchral dimness, making shadow puppets with his hands for groups of children—Beowulf?
Our walk through Central London began in the Victorian Period. Gilded carts and caparisoned horses, men in suits or uniforms, women trailing dresses over the sidewalk stones. Syllas gasped.
“Amazing!” she said. “How do they do it?”
“Shimmer cities? Two basic programs,” I answered. “One reads your physical reactions, the other projects what you want to see.”
“But how does it know?”
“Oh, it’s interesting. The program hides visual cues we associate with different historic periods. It’s very subtle, but say you’re walking through the late twentieth century and you see a sword in an antique dealer’s window, and the bio-feedback units all around us—nano-feedback, Syllas, we’re breathing them in!—register a quickened heartbeat. Viola—the period shifts. More swords, knights, King Arthur.”
“Even fiction?” She said. “How wonderful.”
As if by cue the city changed around us. It was subtle, I could almost believe we’d always been walking through a Medieval city. Lower buildings, more stone, stretches of darkness from which voices boiled.
“Well, at any rate,” she said, “the pirates should be communicated with.”
She probably would’ve continued speaking, but I cut her off.
“Syllas! You said pirates, now look.”
All London had shifted time periods again; we were along the South Bank, on a narrow path between stone buildings. Moored up to our right, in a narrow berth, was a small wooden ship. Men crawled all over it, singing and shouting, bare-chested in the fog. Their voices were weather-worn and loose with booze; I think I recognized Drake on the forecastle—he made eye contact with Syllas.
“If you keep saying pirates, we’re going to keep ending up here,” I warned her, then corrected myself. “Now. Or then, rather.”
Syllas was staring, fascinated, at the pirates. It was a shock to me; I was sure she’d have fallen quickly in love with All London. (With the accoutrement of it, at least—the lighting, the cobbled streets, the songs sung down the cobbled streets!) And then I’d imagined her love would bounce back toward me; she’d recognize that all along, ever since that night six weeks ago, she’d loved me, as I did her.
I cupped her elbow and led her away. As I did, Drake, or whoever the pirate was meant to be, called out to her.
“These programs,” I said. “Little pushy, aren’t they?”
Away from the Thames we passed through wooden theatres and bear-baiting rings—Elizabethan, I guessed—then turned a corner onto a stonier London. Women in drawn-on stockings rushed past us on the street, ducking into blacked-out houses, stage whispering about flying bombs.
“Shall we eat here?” I said, and was brave: I laid my hand on her lower back.
“I suppose.”
We found a blacked-out tavern. People crowded the floor, smoking and whispering (why whispering?, I wondered, the bombers can’t hear you!) and the barman agreed to serve us, weaving through the legs and elbows of the crowd on the floor to bring us two gin and tonics.
“Might consider stayin’ away from the windows,” the barman said, leaning close to us. “Air raid is on, an’ Hitler himself might be in the sky tonight—one of those bombs hits close, these windows will go horizontal. O—and our special is trotter pie.” He walked away.
“Is that why they’re sitting on the floor?” Syllas asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing to worry about, Syllas darling. This stuff’s all ambience. We can’t be hurt here.”
I raised the glass and proposed a toast.
“To an unforgettable night in All London.”
She sipped; I looked in her eyes and felt my bones electrify. Ever since that night six weeks ago, when I’d seen her home following a celebration—the first drones had just launched—I struggled for a word to describe her eyes. A word I could say to her and she would take me (again!) into her arms. Her eyes were liquid. (No: crying.) Sugary. (Sugary eyes? What?) Melted pits of sugar. (Nazzers, she’d smack me.)
“You have lovely, liquidy, sugary eyes,” I said.
Before I could try to swallow the words back down, a bomb went off in the street behind us. The concussion shook the table, people screamed, shards of hand-blown glass fell like musical fireworks.
“I don’t really like it here,” she said over the noise.
“You mean now, not here.”
Syllas touched her fingers to her throat and looked over the huddled patrons on the floor. Some were dabbing at tears brushing glass out of their hair.
“I feel awful for them,” she said.
“Come on, Syllas. They’re computer programs.”
She shifted in her seat. I raised the gin and tonic to my lips and when I lowered it it was a mug of water-cut rum and we were in a candlelit tavern.
“You said it again?” I asked.
Syllas smiled. It was more celebratory here (now, I mean); the tavern was tunnel-like, rooms upon rooms, and we were in a forgotten corner of it. Laughter and singing poured by us in echoes—and sea shanties, and snippets of French—and Syllas picked at some raisin bread that had been left at the table.
“What is it, Syllas, about pirates?” I asked. Get it out of the way, I thought, then I could tell her how I felt six weeks ago after making love to her, looking out of her bathroom window onto her lawn in the moonlight, still a little drunk, feeling my life change direction like a booster rocket.
“I don’t know,” she said. “To tell the truth, I’ve always loved pirates. When I was a girl I had these toy wooden ships. My father built them from a kit. I was fascinated but he’d never let me touch them—but then he passed away. I was eight, and the ships were mine. I left them on a shelf. I never played with them.”
“Sounds like he was quite a man,” I said.
Syllas smiled in a strange way and seemed to see past me.
“I had a chronic dream about the ships. They would sail out while I was asleep then come back in the morning and I’d imagine all the adventures they had while they were gone. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“It is pretty unrealistic. And remember—these pirates that grabbed the drone ships from Landing Site One weren’t romantic buccaneers. These are religious fanatics we’re talking about.”
“I know.”
There was a loud ruckus nearby in the tavern. A mass of humanity went by, bound together, all of them struggling to wrench something from a few screaming men held in the middle.
“Rowdies,” I said. “And the service here sucks. Mind if I change the period again?”
She shrugged. I looked around the room for a subtle cue, something the program would use to test my response to a different time period. I noticed the toe of a saddleshoe poking out from the ragged mess of a discarded mop and I tried to force my heart rate up. A moment later it was the nineteen twenties; men in suits sat around the room, gazing from the towers of their straight backs into the eyes of the ladies.
I decided not to waste time.
“It’s simply this,” I said. “What we did recently really meant something to me. You haven’t mentioned it since! I mean, Syllas, we were together that night. You were…”
Words failed me. I thought of the flesh around her nipples—so tender that it aroused in me a profound desire to protect her—I thought of her wrists; when they were laid against my sternum I had felt like a cage of birds dropped from an airplane and falling. I gulped at the glass of champagne in front of my right hand.
She looked at me, then when I met her eyes, looked away. A waiter passed, read the tension at our table, and kept walking. How can a nation of people be so boisterous and rude—thinking the English here, of course—then a couple hundred years later live like animated corpses?
“I’d been drinking,” she said. “Nothing against you, I mean. But to be honest, I’ve been thinking about leaving for awhile now.”
“Leaving?”
“Well, yes. One day walk out of The Complex and act like I’m going home but just keep walking.”
“Oh? To where?”
She paused, sipped her champagne, and grinned.
“Hop a ride on a drone ship, in one of the specimen compartments. I’d ride through all of that space and emptiness. And when the ship drilled through the ice on Europa and sucked up its samples I’d say hello, alien sea life, pleasure to meet you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’d never survive the trip. No one goes out there, there’s simply no reason to.”
She let the comment hang in the air, but we both knew that some people did go out there; some people quit their scientist jobs, took up a crazy religion, and one day arrived at a drone launch bay with knives and pistols and hijacked the damn things into space, where we, of course, expected they would die, and they did not. The pirates.
As if reading my train of thought, she said:
“They wanted to see Europa, and the living things there, for themselves. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“No,” I said, “it’s not,” and I could think of so many reasons why it wasn’t beautiful that I couldn’t begin to enunciate them.
We ate our meal in silence.
Afterward we walked out of the glass doors of the restaurant into some time period I couldn’t identify—the streets were mud thoroughfares separating a few darkened, wooden structures, and people shambled past in animal skins stuffed with straw. They smelled, even at a distance, of gum disease. I could hear the Thames digesting its banks a hundred yards away.
“All London isn’t what I thought it would be,” I said.
“Me neither,” Syllas agreed, and my heart rose, “but I like it,” she continued, and my heart fell.
We picked our way through the mud. I guess we were both happy with the new time period we were in, because it wasn’t changing. I decided to play my last card. The evening was spinning out of control, and I wanted more than anything to feel her lips against mine.
When the mud sucked off one of her shoes I grabbed her elbow and kissed her. I gave it everything I had—pushed all my emotion, all the words I couldn’t say—into the meeting point of our lips.
When I pulled away from her we were no longer standing in mud. The time periods felt fractured around us; behind her was light the way it used to look, warm and fragile. From behind me fluorescent light poured into the space between us from some future London.
I went to kiss her again.
“Wait,” Syllas said. “This night has been nice, but let’s not stand here and do this. Let’s walk. Find another place.”
My heart cued its own beacon, the only time that night.
“Look behind you,” she said.
I did. Central London was all screens and lights changing color mid-flash, and the light beams tangled in the middle of the cobbled walkways to form standing adverts for champagne, for garments that hummed musically to reflect the wearer’s mood, other things I couldn’t understand—
“It’s the future,” Syllas said. “Go in and get us a couple drinks. I want to know what they’ll drink in the future. Then we’ll walk.”
“All right,” I said.
I brought back a couple gaudy glasses of sparkling, smoking liquid, and Syllas was gone. So was the time period she had probably walked into; 1970’s London lie like a featureless face where the lamp-lit past had been.
I looked for the rest of the night, but in a way, I already knew. I’d never see Syllas again. As dawn fell onto the Pacific Ocean I stood near the gates of All London, telling an attendant that my girlfriend, my fiancé—I was tired and kept inflating our relationship—was still inside.
“Impossible,” the man said. “When we turn off the constructs everything disappears. They’re off, and there’s no one in there.”
A couple days later Syllas’ cubicle in The Complex was cleaned out. I was too busy to think about it; the drone ships from Landing Site Two had brought back canisters full of arm-sized worms that needed to be kept at sub-zero temperatures to survive, blind and full of teeth. We spent long shifts pouring voltage into the worms and collecting skin and stool samples, bits of food from their teeth.
They were hardy things, and sometimes late at night, after everyone else had left The Complex, I switched off the overhead lights, turned up the voltage in the worm tank, and watched the things thrash and bite at each other, at the glass, at the alien ice water, as I tried to craft new words to describe them.
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