This is Kevin March, reporting. Back to you, Bob.
Okay, now I’m at that spot where if I go left, and it’s wanting to pull me that way… hold on. Okay, I see the other route. Gotta paddle hard for a while. Please hold.[20]
Okay—whew!—the waterways meet in some places here where I know they’re supposed to be separate. Looks like five hundred feet or so and I’ll be out of the either/or zone.
Straightforward float now. On my left to the east are the tops of palm trees and among them rooftops of what must have been river-to-the-sea homes. More telephone poles lining the flooded road.
All abruptly ends and now I cruise this channel. The sun rises ochre brass and carnation pink into a sky brushed with cloud wisps. I can’t see it yet, but the sea is there ahead of me. I’m here.
Looking for a place to pull off and walk to the Matagorda peninsula’s beach. It’s part of the long barrier island stretching for miles on the Texas coast. Hopefully, that nature park is still there. I think most of the Colorado’s floodwater veered off to the west. We’ll see.
Man, it’s beautiful out here, isn’t it Mags? The only thing is the smell. Can’t see them yet, all those whales that beached themselves the morning of.
There it is. Look at that, Maggie! Gulf of Mexico.
Looks like a dredger there in the mouth got turned over. The beach here—on the east side of the river to my left, right before the long seawall creating the channel out to the mouth—the sand is white. Lumpy sand dunes with tufts of grasses. I can see some buildings to my left. Must be the nature park. All these beautiful white sandhill cranes standing around. Hundreds. Their heads moving down to the sand, back up to look at me.
Running this kayak onto this beach before the seawall and I really do wonder if this has been a dream. It doesn’t seem real. None of it has. Not since the moment I heard those sounds. Part of why I had to record this story. Just to try to make it real for myself. It’s been like recording a dream I just had. Sometimes that was literally true, huh?
I wouldn’t do it to you. Don’t you hate that? When you’ve invested your finite life’s time in a long book; or you’ve watched some movie and at the end it was all just a dream. The Wizard of Oz pulled it off, but other than that, it’s like, what the hell, are you kidding me?
Not a dream. This happened.
So, what is this? What’s happened to me, the human race? Dr. Jespers was on to something, and that something required the action of an intelligence we don’t understand. Mr. Fleming took a stab. I lean their way. I haven’t asked this so directly yet, and neither did my friends who were with me. We danced around it. Too big a question. You’re not going to get any facile exposition here, dear reader, no end-of-tale Scooby-Doo explanatory rehash. Sorry. I just don’t know what happened. Yet.
What will you make of it, I wonder? Will you liken it to Old Testament wrath, like Noah with his flood and couplings of kinds? A Rapture in which all adults are taken?
On the SAT it’d say or D, None of the above. Maybe that’s what I choose as I find myself walking this half mile across white sand to the seawall, weaving between dunes with my dog, these grasses grazing my legs, carrying my trombone case, my $1,000 binoculars, and my boat bag with the dregs of jerky and sunflower seeds, Professor Fleming’s letter, Dr. Jespers’s paper, and Kodie’s note.
If I’m wrong about everything, if you’ve all survived this, and you’ve listened up to now—because I don’t know what comes next—Mom, Dad, Martin, Mr. English… just know… I’m really glad I did this. It has kept me company, kept me whistling on this swollen river past all those graveyards.
I wish I could click my red sequined heels together three times, say there’s no place like home, and wake up and it’s game day and I’ve got some explaining to do but it’ll all work out.
Once you dream the dream of sleep, you don’t ever dream again, the dividing line between dream and reality erased. The line between the old world and new one gone.
My answer? Yep, it’s D, None of the above.
So, there you have it. My first book. First draft. Finito.
As they say in ham radio-speak: Over and out.
I’m pinning[21] the microphone to the inside of my shirt now, running the wire down under my clothes to the device in my back pocket. I want to keep telling you what’s happening, but for obvious reasons I can’t keep a running commentary of everything, nor can I reflect on it or fill out the full picture in the way, hopefully, I did earlier. I want you to hear it all. Listen to the constant ambient sounds of sea and gulls crying.[22] I’ll be describing visuals to you mostly. And some of what I’m feeling. Deal? It’s this or nothing, and, well, we’ve come this far. It’d feel wrong just cutting it off behind the seawall. After all, this is what we came for.
Waking life abuts dreaming life.
Okay. [sigh] Moving forward.
Whaddya say, Miss Maggie, shall we climb to the top of this wall to see what all the fuss is about?
Stepping nearer to the wall. Way beyond it I hear a thudding, the squeak and scream of stressed wet wood.
In the shadow of the seawall now. I feel sick.
Though I haven’t seen a kid for days and miles, now I hear them.
Oh—
Their song welcomes. You hear that?[23] One note. Beautiful. Layered harmonics, and though it comes from their throats and out their mouths, it is sourceless, endless, and without rhythm. They sing for my arrival. They rejoice!
Listen to that!
Climbing up the sandy slope to the top of the wall now. Scrambling on all fours. Would be easier without the trombone and binoculars.
I hope you can hear that. Beyond that low, constant sound of the breakers, the clatter of surf on hard pack, its hissing retreat—I hope you can hear it. Though they’ve sung and hummed their lullabies to me often on this trip, it’s never been like this. This is… I don’t know. Divine.
I stand atop the seawall. I look down on the beach now [sounds of KGM’s fast and heavy breathing].[24]
They fill the beach. All those little faces… facing me. Hundreds of thousands.
My eye is drawn out to the horizon. Blue and gray. Darker than sea and sky. There’s something out there.
Way beyond the white line of breakers, something… I see a… Is that a deep-sea oil-drilling platform? Yeah. Gotta be. But what… sits on top of it? Can’t be a helicopter. It’s as big as the platform. The indistinct winged thing I think I’ve been seeing wasn’t so big as to take up all the space on a drilling platform. But it’s so far away. It heliographs fiercely whenever I try to look at it. I don’t see it when I’m looking through the binoculars though. It’s when I take them away and squint. That’s when I see the shape.
Naked eye, there it is, shimmering, bouncing that sunlight at me. Through the binoculars, it’s not there. Yet it is. That space is… full. It’s opaque and it shimmers. I see the ocean through it.
Don’t have time to ponder this quirk of ocular physics because just as I’m noticing this thing out there, they sing louder with harmonics that want to split my head with euphoria. Listen to that! I feel a rising, blooming, bloodwarm… joy. This scene, the sea, the breeze, the scree of birds, the singing of multitudes of children, my feet rooted to the top of this seawall. It’s glorious.
23
There is a pause here. KGM wants us to listen. The sounds of singing and humming grow louder.
24
Ambient or non-vocal sounds as well as voice descriptions, e.g., whispering, shouting, will be inserted between brackets instead of footnoted for the remainder of the document as the sounds often directly impact, edify, and sometimes modify what is being said.