Here, at last, things looked pretty much as they always had. No sand, just rocks everywhere, smooth and rounded by aeons of pounding waves. Braids of kelp and bladder wrack, stony hollows filled with periwinkles and goose barnacles; every now and then the fractured puzzle of a broken sea urchin’s shell, the astral shadow of a starfish or sand dollar. If you stared at your feet as you walked along the shore, you might almost imagine the world was as it had been, as it should be. But a glance at the bruised sky, the reflected glare of purple and gold put the lie to that.
The gravel path petered out beside a shriveled stand of rugosa roses. For a few minutes Martin stood and watched the lobster boat disappear into the glowing horizon. In the storm’s aftermath the day was calm and almost windless. But the air had a nasty bite: there was no hint of warmth or snowmelt, none of the vernal promise that usually followed a spring nor’easter. Martin frowned and thought of returning to his cottage, but that would mean facing a sink full of dirty dishes and a recalcitrant hand pump. He began to walk once more.
He kept his head down. Now and then the wind would bring a strong scent of the sea untainted by that poisonous stench of dying krill. He picked up three flattened Budweiser cans and a single brown bottle and shoved them into his canvas sack to be traded later at the Beach Store for credit. Spray stung the back of his neck. He walked slowly, hoping for a find that would match his best days of beachcombing. A twenty-dollar bill, all but worthless now, prized for its novelty value; a diamond engagement ring, hocked for food; the Bakelite casing of an old radio, miraculously intact save for its plundered electronics.
Nothing so exciting today. A broken skate’s purse, many broken razor clams. The nubbin of a brick, too small to bother adding to his salvage walkway. Ubiquitous and seemingly innumerable petrified rubber bands that had once kept luncheon lobsters from pinching hungry picnickers. A dead gull lay upon a bed of kelp, feathers matted, small black crabs spoiling at its breast. A few yards farther on a gang of its fellows squawked and beat their wings just above the beach. Martin lifted his head, surprised because he had not smelled the salt-rot of beached whale or dolphin that almost daily drew skeins of gannets and shearwaters, petrels and the lovely white fulmars that almost alone of birds possessed a sense of smell that helped them find the dead.
But the dolphin was there, its pale grey body barely glimpsed beneath the moving shroud of seabirds. Martin’s step quickened. He always checked on the stranded animals, to report to Jason at the Woods Hole lab; another sad and terrible task, pressing his hands upon their sides only to feel the great proud hearts fall silent, the splendid envoys turned into grey slabs of stinking meat that protein-starved locals sometimes butchered right there on the beach, fighting off the greedy seabirds with sticks.
This time, though, it was different. This time it was not a dolphin, but a body.
“Oh, fuck,” whispered Martin.
He began to run. Shouting and waving his arms so that the birds screamed and lifted into the bright air. He reached the body, sliding on the dank stones and falling into a crouch beside it. He flinched, his breath catching in his throat.
It was a young man; a boy, really. He was naked save for a torn pair of pants twisted around his legs and an ornate cross hanging from a chain around his neck. His skin had turned the color of the sea, greyish green and blotched with bruises, pinked crescents where fish had nibbled but all bloodless as a sponge. Seaweeds wrapped about him, ropelike strands of kelp and maidenhair. His right hand lay upon his breast, broken at the wrist so that it curved outward at an impossible angle. When Martin moved it oh so gently he saw black grit under the fingernails, a cloudy white scum that was soft flesh. On the third finger a gold ring glinted dully. His hair was so thick with dulse and laver it looked red, but beneath the weed Martin could see a frayed blond mat heavy with sand. His face was scraped raw, a cusp of exposed cheekbone so startlingly white it was like a wedge of mother-of-pearl. A tiny fish louse had embedded itself upon one swollen eyelid. With a grunt of disgust Martin pulled the parasite loose and flung it into the sea. The eyelid fluttered open and revealed a blue iris in a crimson bed. It stared at Martin, insensible as a stone.
But alive: he was alive.
“Shit!” Martin fell backward onto the rocks. He had to hug himself, hard, to calm down. He leaned forward again and placed a hand upon the boy’s chest.
Yes. Alive, though less a heartbeat than a faint pressure, like another finger there beneath the cold rind of skin.
He had no time to think, to worry about moving the boy and so finishing the sea’s job of killing him. He knelt and took him in his arms, gasping not because the boy was heavy—he felt like nothing so much as a sodden bundle of cloth—but because he, Martin, was so much weaker now. With a groan he stood, turned, and stumbled up the rocky headland to his cottage.
He laid the boy upon his bed, taking care to put an old wool blanket beneath him. Then he rushed to boil water on the big kitchen woodstove, gathered towels and antibiotic ointment, latex gloves, and isopropyl alcohol. There was no point in trying to phone for help. Even if the phone were working, no ambulance would come. The hospital was too far away and too poorly equipped now to do much more than offer the reassurance of watching its few doctors complain about the lack of money, medicine, staff.
He cleansed him as best he could, scraping off sand and salt, shreds of seaweed and torn skin. What at first appeared as a blackened hole in the middle of his forehead proved instead to be some kind of cross-shaped scarification. Still, despite his wounds, there was no odor of decay; his flesh, though battered, seemed free of infection. Martin set the broken wrist as best he could, splinting it with the wood he used for frames and an old coat hanger. Finally, he swabbed the cuts with antibiotic gel. The broken skin stirred like small mouths beneath his gloved fingers.
Throughout the boy remained unconscious. Young man, Martin corrected himself. His face was too badly bruised to get a sense of how young, but his hair where it had not been torn from his scalp was long and blond, his musculature lithe. He pulled a sheet over the boy’s exposed body, checked the room’s woodstove to make sure it was warm enough. He removed his gloves and took them into the kitchen, to boil and save them. Then he stepped onto the front porch.
Outside the light had shifted, from violet to pale lavender. The sea was calm. Gulls flew above the island like sparks, flickering from indigo to gold as they rode the wind. Martin’s heart ached to look upon it all, so unspeakably lovely and strange that it preempted any effort to capture it on canvas.
Or anywhere else, it seemed. When he left San Francisco, the most common topic at parties and funerals was of how hard it was now to write, to paint, to compose or sing or dance. Chatter online dealt with the futility of even trying. Only Leonard Thrope and his cohort of mori artists seemed able to endure what the world had become, and profit from it.
Martin was determined to find another way of seeing. When he first returned to Mars Hill, he had sat outside with notebooks and drawing paper, canvas and palette knife. All for nought. The glimmering transfixed the eye while it froze the heart: he could stand and stare at the sky for hours, awed and terrified, then go back indoors and face his empty canvases not with disappointment but mere relief, that they offered a void that he could safely contemplate, an abyss that did not defy comprehension. After a few weeks he gave up. What need was left in the world for art? Nature had taken up its own knife and was scouring the page; they had all become the canvas. He turned and went back inside.