Now Roque Beach stretched before him, glittering in the greenish sunlight. Maine was one of those places where rich people fled when the world fell apart. The small population base meant there were fewer viral outbreaks (though more militias), fewer attempts to impose quarantines and environmental interdictions—although the atmospheric effects of the glimmering were, if anything, intensified in the northern latitude. And not even the end of the world could temper the Maine winter. But Moody’s Island was too raw and remote to attract refugees from the Hamptons. Only people like Trip Marlowe called it home. And only a Marlowe would return to Hell Head to die.
He staggered to the huge rocky outcropping that overlooked the whirlpool and stared down into its vast turning eye. Expecting perhaps to see something there—his father’s battered face staring up at him; his mother with her long hair aswarm with tiny crabs. Instead there was only churning water, marbled black and green, the peeping cry of storm petrels as they fluttered above waves farther down the shore.
It was early April, but on Moody’s Island winter still held court. The sky was icy blue laced with silver. Underfoot the stones were greasy. More than once Trip nearly fell, his sneakers sliding into declivities filled with kelp and mussels and water the color of lager. His feet grew numb as he stumbled down the shoreline, periwinkles crunching like acorns beneath his heels. Sea spray and sweat coursed down his back; his flannel shirt grew stiff with rime. Stones went flying as he walked, and he swore at them, all the words he’d never been able to say aloud, all the words he’d never even been able to think—
“Shit fuck p iss shit piss fuck fuck fuck.”
The sky darkened from pale green to metallic indigo, shot with threads of lightning. The brilliance made his eyes ache. He stumbled across the beach, blinking painfully. He’d always been thin; now he looked emaciated, his eyes sunken and the corners of his mouth crosshatched with sores. He jammed his hands into his pockets, shivering, pulled up the collar of his shirt, and stared out across Grand Manan Channel, across the steely Atlantic to where a lone lobster boat plied the unsettled waters.
He had lost all track of time. He’d thought it was early when he stumbled onto the beach, but with the sun lost within lurid clouds there was no way of knowing what hour it was. The ominous sky made him think that a storm was blowing, but such portents were all but meaningless now. Fireflies no longer flew low before a rain, but clustered close upon screen windows at midday, blinking madly. Locusts brought not fine weather but sudden snows; spiders undid their webs and hid, storms or no. Jellyfish and crabs washed up on shore in the millions, and loons flew out to sea in the middle of lashing rains. Everywhere the natural order had been betrayed by the skies: you could fly from Newark to New Delhi and back again (if your navigational systems worked, if you had fuel enough, and money), and never see sunset, never see dawn; never see the sun nor true night at all, only the shifting spectacle of the world falling apart.
He turned and stepped down onto the long ledge of stone that stuck out over Hell Head like the plank on a pirate ship. Bladder wrack scrunched and popped underfoot. Acorn barnacles tore at the soles of his sneakers. When he stooped, he saw that some of them held their feathery cirri aloft, fooled by the whirlpool’s heavy spray into thinking they were still underwater.
In the distance the lobster boat appeared to stand still, buffeted by waves. A nor’easter blowing up, his grandmother would have said. What would she have thought of a storm that lasted six weeks, of the sight of the Mississippi delta spreading across the Midwest like a red stain? What would she have thought of her grandson fucking a young girl in a planetarium, then taking a drug that made it possible for him to have sex with his own double while a perverted homosexual watched?
His stomach clenched. He shut his eyes, fighting tears, then opened them. He took a few steps toward the edge of the narrow outcropping, his feet seeking familiar pockets in the stone hidden by rockweed. He could hear the grinding roar of the whirlpool, magnified by the rising gale. His clothes were soaked through, his hair stiff. The gold cross felt like a brand upon his chest.
A sharp cry made him look up. He almost lost his balance, flailing as he sank into a half crouch. When he stood again he saw a cormorant, perhaps ten yards off, futilely beating its wings as it sought to head inshore. The wind sent it keeling down and up, its long neck arcing and the yellow patch of its chin seeming to glow in the weird light. Its wicked beak opened, and it cried out: a desperate keening sound, cut off as a sudden downdraft caught the bird and it spun end over end and plummeted into the whirlpool.
The bird struck the water headfirst. For several moments it spun, caught in the curved lip of the whirlpool’s perimeter. Trip glimpsed the pale-flecked feathers of its throat, its staring eye already dulled and insensate. Its wings spread across the water like the shattered ribs of a Chinese fan. Then it fell into the center of the vortex. There was a froth of bloody spume, a prickling of stray feathers like the spines of a porcupine; and it was gone.
On the ledge Trip gazed into the black water. It seemed there should be something to show that a creature had just died there, but of course there was nothing, not even a feather. The wind wailed and sent grey sheets lashing above the waves. He could no longer feel his fingers; could no longer hear anything except the roar of wind and water. Rage built in him that something so strong and wild could so quickly be lost, and unmourned. He was shaking from the cold but still he stood there, still he gazed into that mindless eye, until finally he began to sing.
It was an old song, something his grandmother would sing to him when she returned from one of her beano nights, her breath warm with beer and cigarettes. Her reedy voice would quaver, whooping drunkenly on the chorus as she sat in front of the trailer in her lawn chair, swatting at blackflies and tossing spent cigarettes onto the dirt.
When his mouth opened he could taste the wind, its rich salt broth of decay, of fish and rotting kelp. It was a familiar taste, a familiar scent. A storm smell, that would send women running out to pull laundry from the line, and the men to the 52 Variety, where they’d smoke and swear about the ravaged ground-fisheries, the boats that no longer plied the bay.
He tried to shade his eyes. Weird blobs and jots of color swam across his field of vision.
He shook his head and stared into the boiling pit below him. He could see his breath in the heavy vaporous air above the whirlpool. When he sang the sound was harsh and bloodless as a gannet’s cry.
Spray lanced his bare flesh but he no longer felt it. He could see nothing but a slanting blur of green and grey. His nostrils filled with water, but still he sang, beating his arms against the air. He felt exhilarated, almost exalted, by the storm; by the thought that minutes from now he would be dead. He inched from the rubbery bed of sea wrack to the very tip of the protruding ledge. The stone slit through his sneaker and cut into his bare foot. A cluster of barnacles sliced his heel, and he shouted, caught his breath, and forced himself to go on.
A few inches of granite was all that held him there above the maelstrom. But he was not afraid, he had never been so unafraid. It was all a storm now, all the earth overtaken by tempest, and he was part of it, as much as the yellow foam curdling about his bloody foot, as much as the rain and boiling sky. Somewhere little crabs nibbled and fetched at the milky shreds of a cormorant’s flesh. For one last moment Trip stood there upon the ledge, blinking as he gazed upon the ruptured world.