“So how do you know where you are?” I asked. “I can’t see anything out there.”
Rick tapped a circular glass inset in the dashboard. I leaned over and saw a white line revolving slowly around a screen. In its wake, a ghostly outline faded slowly until the line passed once again, refreshing its vigor.
“Didn’t use to be able to do this run at night,” Rick remarked with satisfaction. “Not till we got this baby. Cost plenty, but it’s doubled our mobility.”
The gadget was some kind of radar, I supposed. The ghostly outline was an image of the shoreline apparently moving past the boat, which remained eternally stationary in the middle of the screen. For some reason I thought of David, the still center of a world which seemed to move around him, safe and navigable, and something gave way inside me. “It will only get better,” the psychiatrist had advised me. “You will have bad patches for a long time to come, but they will be farther and farther apart.”
I was having one now. It was not just his death I was grieving for, I realized, but the brief life which had preceded it. Children are vectors aimed at the future. All the doubts and anxieties about how they will turn out are balanced by the knowledge that their course and final destination are ultimately out of your hands. Whatever happens to them will happen when you are different, or dead, and the world an unrecognizable place. But no such perspectives existed in David’s case. The only things that would ever happen to him had already happened. His death seemed to make a mockery of his ever having existed at all, and of my continuing to do so. For the first time, I understood why Rachael had decided that she could not go on.
As we emerged into the open channel, the waves grew steeper. We passed a large unladen oil tanker coming the other way, its high sides towering over us. Later a car ferry crossed our bows, decked out in lights from stem to stern. It was almost eleven o’clock by my watch when Rick finally eased the throttle and the roar of the motor died away to a gentle gurgle. The boat wallowed lazily on the slight swell. A few moments later, I made out a light in the darkness up ahead.
“Are we there?” I asked.
Rick’s head moved in what might have been a nod. He had hardly spoken a word to me the whole way. If the rest of Sam’s friends were as much fun as Rick and Lenny, this was going to be a visit to remember.
The boat crept imperceptibly toward the beacon. It was impossible to tell how far off it was, and I thought we still had several hundred yards to run when the light suddenly loomed overhead and we bumped heavily against something. The boat tipped, the door of the wheelhouse opened and Sam was there, flinging his arms about me.
“Phil! It’s so great you’re finally here, man!”
His manner couldn’t have been more different from his cool response on the phone. He stood there slapping me on the shoulders and grinning delightedly. I smiled at him with real pleasure. Sam’s was the first familiar and friendly face I had seen in what seemed like a very long time. My earlier doubts about the wisdom of coming were swept away.
As we stepped off the boat, I saw that there were three other men standing on the pier beside some kind of hand-truck.
“Get the stuff unloaded, guys,” Sam told them casually. “Bring Phil’s bags too. I’m going to take him straight up to the hall. He must be wiped out.”
I was slightly surprised at this peremptory tone, but the men obediently climbed aboard the boat and set to work. I also thought it kind of strange that Sam made no attempt to introduce me. Still, this was his scene, not mine.
We walked along the pier to a trail winding up a wooded hillside. The only sound was our footsteps, the only light the faint glimmer of the moon behind a screen of high cloud. Superficially, Sam had hardly changed since we met in Minneapolis. His body was as spare as ever, his features as sharp, his hair as long. But something was different. He had a new poise, a gravitas, a centered, controlled energy. The very exuberance of his greeting revealed a confidence that had been lacking on that previous occasion, when he had been so stiff and guarded. Now he could permit himself what seemed like a genuine and spontaneous display of affection. In all our previous dealings, I had always felt older and more mature than Sam. Now the relationship seemed to have been mysteriously inverted.
“How come we had to take a boat to get here?” I asked.
“Because it’s an island.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“An island? You never told me that.”
Sam’s smile was visible even in the half-light.
“There’s a lot of things I haven’t told you, Phil. This way, you get to find out for yourself.”
This sounded more like the old Sam.
“So where the hell are we?” I demanded.
“We don’t usually use the boat to go all the way to the mainland,” he said. “But Rick was doing a Costeo run anyway, so we figured we might as well do it this way instead of hassling around with the ferries.”
I couldn’t decide whether he’d evaded my question deliberately, or was just continuing his earlier train of thought.
“So anyway, how’ve you been doing?” he asked suddenly.
The question startled me. Stupidly, I hadn’t given any thought to how I was going to answer it. The last thing I wanted to do was to discuss what had happened and “how it felt,” but I couldn’t very well avoid the subject. Or could I? Sam’s question had sounded casual enough.
“Oh, not so bad,” I replied.
“Really?”
This time I thought I caught a little edge to Sam’s tone, but I decided to bluff it out.
“And how about you?” I demanded.
He laughed.
“Just great. Everything’s going according to plan.”
“And what plan’s that?”
“God’s plan,” he replied.
I decided this had to be a joke.
“You aiming to crack the televangelist market, Sam?”
“How do you mean?”
“Those smoothareno sleazebags with toops and bad dye-jobs you see on TV They’re always talking about God’s plan for humanity and stuff like that.”
“We don’t have TV here, man. That shit just fucks up your head.”
This was a great relief. It now made perfect sense that David’s kidnapping hadn’t penetrated this lost colony of born-again hippies. I could remain anonymous, instead of having to play the hackneyed role I’d been dealt by fate.
“But there’s a plan all right,” Sam added softly. “It’s just that those suckers don’t know what it is.”
“And you do?”
“That’s the only thing I know,” he replied in the same quiet tone. “And the only thing I need to know.”
“Keats,” I retorted pertly. “‘Ode to Beauty.’”
Sam stopped and turned to me. For a moment I thought he was angry. Then he smiled.
“Still the same old Phil. You were always so fucking smart, man! I was amazed at the stuff you knew. Like just then. I didn’t even know that was a quote, but you spotted it right away. Awesome, man!”
I felt embarrassed by his effusiveness, embarrassed for him.
“Everything we say these days is a quotation,” I replied. “Just like everything we think is a rerun of an idea someone’s had before. These are the latter days, Sam, the end of history. The new’s all mined out. All we can do is recycle postconsumer materials.”
“Right!” he cried. “That’s so right!”
He clapped his hands together in his enthusiasm.
“Jesus, I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you here, Phil! You’re someone I can talk to about this stuff. You really get it. The latter days, the end of history, that’s it exactly!”
My embarrassment redoubled. I had meant the whole thing as a joke, but Sam had taken it literally. I shrugged.
“That wasn’t original either. The idea that everything’s been said before has been said before.”
Sam leaned toward me and touched my chest with his forefinger.
“But what if there was something that hadn’t been said before? What if there was something which no one had ever even thought before? Imagine the power of something so fresh and original in a world where everything else is grubby and secondhand! It would be like a nuclear explosion!”