I went in and felt the couch, and it was cold. But there was such a calmness in me! A kind of glow, an upwelling, as if I stood in an artesian well of kindness and love. I felt I was being welcomed to this house….
Now I suppose I won’t send this letter. You will think I am losing my mind. Certainly I have considered it. Too much sun out here, California weirdness, etc. etc. No doubt it is true. A lot of things seem to be changing in me. I who spent a night with geese and coyotes, I who saw crows burst out of a tree— But I didn’t tell you about those things either. I’m not sure I could.
Still—and this is the important thing, yes?—I am happy. I am happy! You would know what an accomplishment that is. So if I have ghosts I welcome them, as they have welcomed me.
I suppose I can always cut this section and leave the rest.
10
For several nights running I barely slept, falling only into that shallow nap consciousness where part of the mind feels it is awake, while another part feels an hour passing between each thought. I would wake completely around three, feeling sick, unable to return even to the miserable half sleep. Toss and turn thinking, trying not to think, thinking.
At dawn I would get up and go to the canteen and drink coffee and try to write. All day I would sit there staring at the page, staring into the blank between my world and the world in my book. Until my hand would shake. Looking around me, looking at what my country was capable of when it was afraid. Seeing the headlines in the newspapers scattered around. Seeing my companions and the state they were in.
And one day I stood up with my notebooks and went outside, around the back of the canteen to the dumpsters. The book was in three thick spiral ring notebooks. I sat cross-legged on the concrete, and started ripping the pages away from the wire spiral, about ten at a time. I tore them up, first crossways, then lengthwise. When I had a little pile of paper I stood and threw the pieces into the dumpster. I did that until all the pages were gone. I tore the cardboard covers away from the spirals, and ripped them up too. The twisted wire spirals were the last things in.
No more utopia for me.
After that I returned to the canteen and sat just like before, feeling worse than ever. But there was no point in continuing, really there wasn’t. The time has passed when a utopia could do anybody any good, even me. Especially me. The discrepancy between it and reality was too much.
So I sat there drinking coffee and staring out the window. One of my dorm mates, he sleeps a couple beds down, came by with his lunch. Hey Barnyard, he said, where’s your book.
I threw it away.
Oh, no, he said, looking shocked. Hey, man. You can’t do that.
Yes I can.
Next day, same time, he came by with a ballpoint and a gray lab notebook. Something from the hospital no doubt.
Here, man, you start writing again. Deadly serious look on his face. You got to tell what happens here! If you don’t tell it, then who will? You got to, man. And he left the notebook and walked away.
So. I will not write that book. But here, now, I make these notes. To pass the time if nothing else. I observe: there is less desperation here than one would think. There is a refusal of despair. There is a state beyond panic. There is a courage that should shame the rest of us. There is a camp, an American internment camp, where every day people are taken to the hospital, where the others help them out, and carry on. There is a place where people on the edge of death make jokes, they help each other, they share what they have, they endure. In this hell they make their own “utopia.”
Life at sea suited Tom. Nadezhda and he had a tiny cabin to bump around in, a berth barely wide enough to fit the two of them. At night the rhythmic pitch over the groundswell translated to the roll and press of her body against him, so that she became an expression of the sea, an embrace of wind and wave. He had forgotten the simple pleasure of sharing a bed. At dawn, if she was still sleeping, he rose and went on deck. The raw morning light. There he was, on the wide ocean’s surface, where a few constants of light and color combined to create an infinity of blues. To sail on a blue salt world, ah, God, to think he had gone a lifetime without it, almost missed it! It made him laugh out loud.
At dawn he had the deck almost to himself. Those on watch were usually in the bridge, an enclosed glass-fronted compartment spanning the deck just before the mizzenmast. Once he came across a group that had stayed up all night, to see the green flash at sunrise.
The crew was about equally divided between men and women, and most of them were in their twenties. Their work, their play and their education all spilled into one another. Partying and romance kept them up late every night; they were the most high-spirited group of young people Tom had ever seen, and he could see why. Quite a life. The young women were especially rambunctious. That first rush into an independent life! All youth responds to it, but some are aware it wasn’t always like this, that even their parents didn’t have such opportunity. So these women cavorted like the dolphins that surfed in the bow wave during certain magic dusks and dawns, tall, dark, hair and eyebrows thick and intensely black. Tom watched them like Ingres in the baths, laughing at their sexiness. Perfect dark skin, rounded limbs, heavy breasts, wide hips, like women from the Kama Sutra who had stepped off the page and forgotten their purpose, become as free as dolphins.
Occasionally he went down to the ship’s communications room and called home. He talked to Kevin and learned of the latest developments there, and gave advice when he was asked. He also called Nylphonia and his other friends from time to time, and conferred with them about the search through Heartech’s records. There were tendrils of association between Heartech and the AAMT, but they were tenuous. “We’d probably have to bust AAMT to get Heartech, and that won’t be easy.”
“I know. But try.”
Thunderheads, slate below and blooming white above, showed how high the sky really was. A line of them lofted to the south like a stately row of galleons, and then the ship was underneath them. Ganesh rode waves like low hills, wind keening in the rigging. The sailors on watch wound the sails in on power reels, touching buttons on the bridge’s huge control board. The masts’ airfoil configurations shifted, metal parts squeaking together. Tom and Nadezhda sat in chairs behind and above the sailors, looking out the broad glass window. Their captain, Gurdial Behaguna, dropped by to look over the helmswoman’s shoulder at the compass readout. He nodded at them, left. “He’s pretty casual,” Tom said.
Nadezhda laughed. “This is a small blow, Tom. You should see it in the North Pacific.”
Tom watched spray explode away from the bow, then come whipping back on the wind and crash to invisibility against their window. “That’s the return route, right? So I suppose I will.”
She smiled, reached for his hand.
Another day later Tom went aloft with the bosun, Sonam Singh, who had on a tool belt and was going to do some repairs on a tackle block at the starboard end of the main moonsail yard—that is to say, the sixth and highest sail up the mainmast, above the main course, the topsail, the topgallant, the royal, and the skysail. It was as high on the ship as you could get, some two hundred and forty feet above the deck; to Tom it felt like a million. He looked down at the little mouse-sized people scurrying around the model ship down there, and felt his hands clutch at the halyard. They were climbing the weather side, so that the wind would blow them into the halyards rather than away from them. The mast’s movement was a slow figure eight, with a couple of quick catches in it. Glancing behind he saw the broad V of the wake, its edges a startling white against the sea’s brilliant blue. Fractal arabesques swirled away from the ship’s sleek sides. The horizon was a long way away; the patch of world he could see was as round as a plate, and blue everywhere.