I
said, "You made this too?"
"Yup."
Toby came down, and I moved to make room for him. "Just put your bags
there—"
He pointed
at one of the cushioned berths. "We'll motor over. Not enough wind; we'd
have to tack back and forth. Just as fast this way."
I
turned from the frog mask and put my bag down then removed my camera.
Toby
stared at the old Konica. "Boy, that's an antique."
"I'm
a photographer." It was the first time I'd spoken those words in a long
time.
"Don't
most people use digital cameras these days?"
"I
don't." I glanced around the cabin. "Do you have a mirror? I feel
pretty gross."
"No
mirrors." His gaze remained even, but his eyes narrowed as he added,
"You don't have a mirror on you, do you?"
"Would
I've asked for one if I did?"
He
leaned back against the ladder, still staring. Not at me; at my camera.
"There's
a mirror in that," he said.
"Yeah?
There's a mirror in
all
cameras. This kind, anyway." I was starting
to get pissed. "Is this some kind of superstition? No women on board,
no—"
"Put
it away." His tone was less patient now; vaguely threatening.
"Here—give it to me and I'll stow it."
I started
to snap back—I hate people touching my stuff—then shut up.
Something
in his expression intimidated me. Usually I can tell if someone's going to
freak on me; there's that smell of damage, like the smell of a spent match that
signals an explosion a few moments later.
There
was no hint of that to Toby Barrett.
But
there was something else, just as powerful—a sense of occlusion, of an intense
self-possession, like an emotional force field. Like the rocks I saw out in the
harbor, their edges hidden by mats of seaweed, all their menace beneath the
water.
I
shoved my camera back into the satchel and handed it to him. Toby opened a
cupboard and stashed the bag inside then opened another cupboard that held
clothes. He picked up a heavy black wool sweater, gave it a cursory sniff, and
tossed it to me. "See if that fits. It's your color."
I
took off my leather jacket and pulled on the sweater. It was bulky and mouse
eaten and smelled of cedar and lanolin.
But
it was warm. I was just able to squeeze my jacket back on over it. rubbed his
beard and glanced down at my boots.
"You
got some pretty big feet there. But not big as mine. I don't know if I've got a
pair of shoes to fit you. Maybe Aphrodite'll have something."
"I
like to wear these. They're ... comfy."
"I
bet. Those steel tips look lethal."
"They
are." I lifted one foot to display a black full-quill ostrich-leather Tony
Lama cowboy boot worn smooth as eelskin by nearly twenty years of wear. I'd had
the soles and heels replaced more than once. The steel tips were customized for
me, no longer shining but dull gray.
"They
won't keep you warm, though," said Toby. "We'll see what we can find
for you on the island."
He
moved back to the ladder, lifted it and set it aside, revealing a pair of doors.
He opened these then stepped into a small engine room. His voice echoed back to
me.
"Got
to hand crank the engine. This could take a minute ..."
I
heard the rhythmic sound of a handle turning. There was a small sputter, the
smell of diesel. Toby swore under his breath.
I
turned and gave the cabin a quick once-over. The portholes were so crusted with
salt that only an opaque, pearly light filtered through them. The woodstove was
black from use, as was the cookstove. All of the metal flatware was tarnished.
Everything had a comfortable sort of glow, but nothing gleamed or glittered.
I
frowned. It was weird, but also weirdly methodical, and that was puzzling; as
though there were some pattern here that just escaped my recognition. I sat on
one of the berths and looked around, trying to filter out all the
stuff
—the
shelves, the books, the tools—and concentrate on what, exactly, ordered the
space around me. What made it lucid; literally, what made it shine.
Or
not.
You
learn to do this as a photographer. You're always searching for light—its
source, its distance; always measuring how diffuse it is, how long it's going
to last. You think about the same thing when you're in the darkroom printing.
As I
sat in
Northern Sky,
I began to see more and more darkness around me,
despite the fact that there were no curtains drawn, despite the fact that it
was early morning of a cloudless early winter day. Another minute and I began
to lose a sense of perspective. The cabin seemed larger than it was; the
darkness at the bow crept toward me until it enveloped the outlines of berths,
bookshelves, the gimbels' copper mouths. Everything blurred to a deep
russet-brown, like a sepia image foxed with mold.
Toby
Barrett may not have had something to hide, but he certainly cultivated the
shadows. At the very least he wanted very much to preserve the illusion that he
was safe from scrutiny, even if he was in a tiny cabin with no doors or
screens.
A
sudden roar shook the boat.
"Got
it!" Toby ducked out of the engine room. "For a minute there I was
afraid she wouldn't start."
He
shut the doors, threw the ladder back into place, and disappeared up the
companionway. I clambered after him. He was already in the cockpit, tiller in
hand.
"Have
a seat," he said. An unlit cigarette protruded from one corner of his
mouth. He brought the boat about until the nearest of the islands was ahead of
us, lit the cigarette and took a long drag. "Want one?"
"Just
give me a hit off that," I said and took it from his mouth.
The
cigarette tasted of diesel fuel and hashish. I passed
it
back to Toby
and stared out at the dark bulk of Paswegas and the archipelago behind it.
"How come you don't use a powerboat?"
Toby
shifted the tiller. He sat straight backed, oblivious of the wind and
icy
spray,
his eyes fixed on the island. "How come you don't use a digital
camera?"
"It
feels weird to me. Like a step is missing. Or a wall."
"A
wall?"
"Well,
not a wall exactly. But you get used to having something between you and
whatever it is you're shooting. Maybe it's just that you have time to worry if
the picture's going to come out or not. With digital it all happens
immediately."
"And
that's a bad thing?"
"Maybe
not bad. But different."
I
hesitated. I was surprised to hear myself admitting this. I'd never really
articulated it before, certainly not aloud.
"Maybe
it was just too much trouble to keep up with it all," I said at last.
"Everything changed so fast. I guess I just didn't care enough
anymore."
"What
kind of pictures did you do? Magazine pictures? Anything I would've seen?"
"I
doubt it. I had only one book, and not many copies were printed. My stuff was
pretty dark. Dead people. I shot the downtown punk scene in New York for a
while, before it went belly-up."
"A
dead scene," said Toby. He flicked his cigarette into the water.
"Yeah,
I guess."
"So
you must know all about Aphrodite's photography. That's why you're here, right?
You must like her work."
"Yeah."
I shifted, trying vainly to get out of the wind, and bumped my knee against his.
"Her pictures of the islands. She took those forty years before Photoshop,
and people still can't figure out how she did it."
"I
never got the impression she was that well known. She just had one or two
books, right?"
"Yeah.
But they were influential books."
"Maybe
your book will be influential someday. Maybe it's influential right now and you
just don't know it."
I
shook my head. "No. She was a genius, even if she was only a kind of minor
genius. I was just lucky. If you can call taking pictures of dead junkies
lucky. I wasn't even very good at that."
My
back was starting to ache, from the cold and being hunched against the wind. I
stood, balancing myself against my seat, and gazed out at the island. It was an
unwelcoming sight, thorny-looking evergreens and spiky outcroppings of black
and gray stone. The buildings scattered across the rocky hillside looked as
though they'd been thrown there and forgotten, falling down houses and gritty
trailers.
"So
that's where you live," I said. "What about your friend back in the
bar?"
"Gryffin?
No. He just comes up sometimes on business." He craned his neck to stare
past Paswegas. "You ever hear of someone named Lucien Ryel? He was pretty
well known ten or twenty years ago." Lucien Ryel?" I looked up in
surprise. "Yeah, sure." He lives out there—"
Toby
pointed to a low gray shape on the horizon. "Tolba Island. I've done some
work for him over the last couple of years. He doesn't winter over.
He's
got
a power boat, a Boston Whaler."
"Lucien
Ryel," I said. "No shit."
In
the early 1970s, Ryel had been the force behind the English prog rock band
Imaguncula. He was famous for performing in drag, something between that guy in
A Clockwork Orange
and a Balinese temple dancer. He left Imaguncula in
1980 and went on to produce house music in Manchester Manchester before
becoming an expat in post-Wall Berlin, where, as far as I knew, he had
disappeared.
"What
the hell's he doing up here?"
Toby
shrugged. "He's only here a few weeks every summer. He's another one came
to the commune for a while, before my time. He even wrote a song about Oakwind.
Liked it here enough that he bought an island too. I was never into his music.
I had one of his albums when I was in college, but I never played it."
The
boat hit some choppy waves, and I clutched at my seat. "You okay?"
asked Toby. "You could go below if you feel bad. You look a little
green."
"I
told you, hangover." I waited until the sick feeling passed, then said,
"What is it with people buying islands?"
"They
used to be cheap—you could buy an island for, I dunno, fifty thousand dollars.
Maybe less than that. Not anymore. Lucien's place, Tolba—back in the nineteenth
century they quarried granite there. Cut columns and blocks for some big
cathedral. When that was built, they cut it for houses. You've heard of a
company town? This was a company island. One day someone showed up and told
everyone they were shutting down the quarry. So everyone had to leave the
island."
"You're
kidding."
He
turned, adjusted the tiller, and blinked into the sun. Ahead of us the harbor
of Paswegas opened up. Neon orange and red and green floats bobbed in the
water. A small bell buoy clanked as we passed it.
"There
were quarries on a lot of the islands here," said Toby. "Vinalhaven,
that's where they got the stone for the Brooklyn Bridge. In the 1890s they were
paving city streets, New York, Boston. They didn't have asphalt back then, so
they used stone. On Lucien's island, you can see all these great big blocks of
granite they left and quarry holes everywhere. He bought that place cheap and
hired me to do his heating system. A real big modern-looking place—folks call
it the Stealth Bomber. But he's easy to work for. And he's got deep pockets,
and he only comes at the end of the summer so I see him maybe once a year. He
lives in Europe the rest of the time."
"Doesn't
this seem like a weird place for someone like that?"
"What's
weird about it?
You're
here."
I
gave up. After a few more minutes we entered the harbor, passing a solitary
lobster boat moored alongside a red float.
"Everett's
boat," Toby said.
He
brought the
Northern Sky
to a mooring and dropped anchor. I retrieved my
stuff from the cabin.
"Weather's
changing," Toby said when I got back on deck. He untied the dinghy and motioned
for me to climb into it. "See those clouds? That's a front coming in.
You're not planning on leaving today, are you?"
"I
don't actually have a fucking clue what I'm doing."
"That's
the spirit," said Toby.
He
rowed toward the pier. The harbor was even smaller and grungier than Burnt
Harbor's. Busier, too. Paswegas may only have had thirty year-round residents,
but half of them seemed to be hanging around the dock. Two derelict pickups
were parked in front of a boarded-up building with a sign that read live bait
coffee. One truck had cardboard covering half its windshield; another had no
windshield at all.
"Beaters,"
Toby explained as the dinghy drew up alongside the pier. Pilings black with
creosote poked from the water. Budweiser cans floated past a ladder where a
cormorant stood with wings outstretched, its eyes dull as uncut garnets.
"No ferry service here, no mailboat anymore cause there's no post office.
Everyone shares those trucks. You keep your good vehicles in Burnt
Harbor."