Glimmering

Trip’s voice was clear and sweet and piercing, as pure a sound as Martin had ever heard, and loud—he sang like someone who had been given to it as parents used to sell their sons to bel canto; born to it.

Martin listened, amazed and a little frightened. Was this what the boy had been hiding all these months with his self-contained silence, not a voice but A Voice?

Or—with a shiver Martin recalled the luminous vistas they had seen, moon like a rabid eye, krakens and coelacanths rising from Buzzards Bay—had something happened to Trip these last few days?

Let me go home
I want to go home
This is the worst trip
I’ve ever been on.

Trip stood, hand on the tiller, head thrown back. His voice died into the slap of waves and gulls keening. For a moment he stared up into the shimmering sky, gold and purple sequins stitched upon his skin. Then he lowered his face and gazed at Martin, with a look of such joy that Martin felt suddenly shy in his presence, as though he had glimpsed lovemaking through a keyhole and been caught.

He stammered, tried to cover his embarrassment with uneasy laughter. “How did you—you can sing… ?”

Trip grinned. “Yeah. It’s what I did, before. What I used to do…”

He glanced down at the tiller and then at Martin. Without a word Martin stepped over and took it from him.

“I—you think maybe this would be somewhere you could leave me?” Trip frowned, looking at the silhouettes of broken buildings lining the shore, the spires of skyscrapers that pinked the sky behind them. “I mean, it’s like downtown, right?”

Martin looked at him, wondering if this was an attempt at irony.

“No, this isn’t exactly downtown, Trip.” Martin raked damp hair from his face. “Do you have any idea where she might be? This woman you need to find?”

Trip stared at the shore. Finally he said, “No. I guess I don’t. I mean I only actually saw her here once.”

Martin resisted the urge to shout in frustration. He mopped his face with a bandanna, eased back until he could perch upon the edge of the coaming. A shadow passed across the floor; he glanced up but saw nothing. “Okay.” He wanted to crawl into his bunk belowdecks and fall into blind sleep. “Okay. So you saw her once—where was that? Do you remember an address, or anything?”

Trip nodded. “That big place at Times Square—the Golden Pyramid or whatever it’s called.”

“The GFI Pyramid.” Great, this is fucking great, I’ve sailed five hundred miles so this kid can look for someone he doesn’t know in the middle of Times Fucking Square. “Okay. That’s a start, I guess. I guess we could find someplace to tie up and walk—”

“I—I need to go alone.” The boy’s voice was strained. “I mean, I know you brought me all this way, I don’t mean to be like rude or something, but I—she was, I have to—”

The boat surged shoreward as Martin yanked the tiller too hard. He shot Trip a furious look.

But his anger gave way when he saw Trip’s expression, irradiated with a desire futile and intense as his own. Trip’s gaze remained fixed on shore. Unexpectedly he turned. For the first time since Martin had found him upon the shingle at Mars Hill, Trip extended his hand and touched Martin’s.

“Thank you,” he said. “If we could maybe pull up here, somewhere—I could go.”

Martin sat dumbly, waiting to see if there would be more. There was not.

“All right.” He turned away, blinking back tears; feeling old and ill and immeasurably stupid. What had he been expecting? Not the prince’s magic kiss but more than this, certainly—a concerned hand on the shoulder, a low voice asking Will you be all right? Won’t you tell me what it is, isn’t there anything I can do?

A minute passed. Martin nodded. “I’ll pull up here.”

He brought the boat around, steered her toward where a mound of blasted rubble, brick and stone and concrete, had fallen into the harbor, forming a sort of quay. Small dark shapes sloped along the stones. There was a putrefying smell. Martin felt a spike of mean triumph, what a god-awful place; then despair, and fear.

“This doesn’t seem too safe, Trip.” His mouth was dry. “Are you sure—”

Trip nodded, then hoisted himself down the companionway ladder into the cabin. He returned with the knapsack Martin had packed for him. Some canned beans, dried fruit from Diana, extra clothes, sunscreen, socks. Water purification tablets past their prime. Over his arm John’s anorak; John’s cable-knit sweater dangling halfway to his knees. He stood awkwardly, as though trying to think of something to say; then dipped his head and stepped up on deck.