Glimmering

“Right,” he said softly, and kissed her. Diana gave him a small mesh bag with a few onions in it. Doug produced a six-pack of Blackfly Ale. And Mrs. Grose gave him a bottle of brandy, almost full.

“It may make things easier.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, her fingers lingering against his neck. “Oh, my dearest Martin…”

He drew back gently, trying not to cry. When he looked down she smiled and shook her head.

“It is not such a bad world to be leaving, Martin,” she whispered, and turned away. Martin and Trip boarded. They would motor out of the harbor, and hope for a northerly wind once they got beyond the point. Martin started the engine. Greasy black smoke rolled across the deck. On the pier everyone cheered.

“Good-bye, Martin! Good-bye!”

Martin grinned, Trip at his side in John’s weather-beaten anorak. He raised his hand in farewell. The boat moved slowly, noisily out into the bay. Behind them Mars Hill grew smaller and smaller, the waving figures on the pier no bigger than gulls. Then they were gone, and Mars Hill with them. The Wendameen was under way.

It took them over two weeks, dropping anchor at night to sleep within the shadow of pine trees, or offshore from sandy beaches along the Cape, or within sight of the drowned ruins of aircraft factories in Connecticut, the submarine works in Groton. Trip was seasick once, Martin often; he wished he had some Dramamine in his stores, or at least a pair of sunglasses. Above them stretched endless channels of phosphorescent green and violet and gold, with here and there a rent showing the great darkness beyond, the brave wink of a star and once a nacred tooth Martin knew must be the moon. Below them the sea reflected the sky’s broken face, with an underlying gesso of copper green. Martin felt they were not sailing so much as they were suspended within some vast crucible: just a matter of time before the Wendameen and its passengers were smelted down, given back to ore and ash and bone.

They saw strange things, journeying south. A pod of whales who breached to starboard and followed them, mountains moving with great belching sighs, enameled blue and silver in the night. A creature like an immense brittle basket star, twice as large as the Wendameen, its central arms radiating outward like the sun before giving birth to an explosion of smaller arms, all writhing upon the surface of the sea as the omphalos turned slowly, counterclockwise, and breathed forth a scent like apples. Rippling mats of phosphorescent plankton colored like Easter eggs, pink, pale green, blue; gulls nesting upon unmoored buoys, that rose to squawk at the boat’s passage and so revealed their eggs, large as an infant’s skull and pied with glowing silver.

To all of these wonders Trip seemed oblivious. If Martin pointed something out—a dismembered tentacle the size of a telephone pole, a school of flying fish—Trip would only shrug, and smile.

“Didn’t see that when I was out with my uncle,” he said, sitting beside Martin on deck one evening and watching as a single fin, long and serrated, sliced the water near shore. “Guess they don’t have them up by us.”

Martin shook his head and leaned over the rail, trying to see if the fin made for shore; to see if perhaps it might clamber there on shaky new legs. “They didn’t used to have them anywhere, Trip,” he said.

And amongst all these, other things. Ruins of houses, roofs floating like Dorothy’s farm felled on its way to Oz, porches where terns rested and barnacles massed thick as wet concrete. Uprooted trees whose leaves had turned to bronze but had not died, had grown instead long streaming bladders and filaments that moved whiplike across the water’s surface. Other boats—abandoned trawlers that sent a chill through Martin as they drifted past; battered sloops with patched sails and sailors who hallooed and waved but did not approach; a dinghy that appeared full of birds and clothes, and which Martin tried very hard to keep Trip from gazing into as the Wendameen passed it with terrible slowness, the gulls scarcely lifting their heads from worrying small heaps of bones.