The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (15 page)

“And all the while these pictures passed before my mind, the clock kept up its steady beat, filling the room, as I said, and echoing in the hallway with its brash, metallic ticking. I didn't visualize the lowering of the casket into the grave. I fell asleep again. When I woke up it was late afternoon.
I could tell that by the winter shadows on the floor. I was lying on my left side and I could feel my heart beating. It was exactly in phase with the ticking of the clock in the hall. The old neighbor lady, dressed all in black, was standing beside my bed. She was rubbing my hands and arms and making little whimpering noises. Nearby on a small stand was some broth in a white bowl that did not belong to our house. Just then I realized the clock had stopped.”

High in the crosstrees, the wind continued its low whimpering cry, changing from time to time to a series of short little gasps. The hot sun burned down steadily from its still slightly westward inclination. At any time now, the Captain thought, Hoskins would be making his appearance. Perhaps he should not be lying there wasting time in a futile attempt to grasp the significance of Mueller's arcane ramblings.

Residual guilt, stirred by the knowledge of work to be done, or fear of doing nothing, forced a sigh of concern. Work and action, the aegis of his life. A protective screen? Protection from what? A question indeed. No doubt Mueller would come up with some murky answer. Was this his mission then, to seek out a kindred soul in that city of over half a million disparate personalities for the single purpose of revealing a mystery that in all probability did not exist? Kindred soul! What kinship had he with Mueller? He shared nothing at all with this fear-haunted, shadow-of-a-man, the distorted lens of his mind's eye infusing the simple reality of things with weird significance and strange dimensions while his own consistently practical mind, even since an early age, had been happy with conditions as he had found them. So there was an attempt to escape into the temporary sanctuary of forgetfulness. But a kind old lady had brought him back. No, it was the clock that had brought him back. But the clock had stopped. Yes, of course.

“Have you never listened to a clock then?” Mueller's question came back to him.

I had better things to do, the Captain thought. Yet since
Mueller had brought it up, he did remember a clock in the old house where he was born, a fine Seth Thomas with a porcelain face and bronze Roman numerals. The clock belonged to his father, Captain Lars Larson, retired master of sail and steam, and then, as befitted an aging mariner, a San Francisco bar pilot. The clock was his father's pleasure and his responsibility. He unlocked it every Sunday morning before church and wound it slowly, methodically, with a brass key of a quaint antique design. Yet it was a clock. Nothing more. And certainly not Mueller's dread symbol of time without end.

Vividly, happily—not at all like the somber passage of anomalous visions on the shifting screens of Mueller's memory—he could see his room at the end of the hall with its high-coved ceiling above an embossed plaster moulding. At the center of the ceiling and directly above his bed a gas chandelier was suspended from three chains that met in a medallion of gold vine leaves—the repository of his hedonistic dreams. All manner of adventures took place deep in that golden foliage. Often there appeared a young girl of surpassing beauty.

But what would Mueller know of all this, picnics in the park, ferry boat rides, the view from his bedroom window that faced west to where the late afternoon fog in a vast silver wave engulfed the hills and licked at the city with curling tongues of mist? And the toys that grew in size from bathtub steamboats and miniature warships to a full-fledged sailing dory with clear, white cedar planking, a dagger board and a mahogany tiller with a Turk's head knot? And what would Mueller do with such a luxury? Explore the waterfront? Sail right under the high sterns of ocean going square-riggers and gaze up at their huge rudders and iron bark rudderposts? Would he wonder at the mighty
transoms carved with exotic names and home ports like Haakon I, Bergen; Arminius, Hamburg; Reina Isabella, Barcellona; Orion, Liverpool? Would he dare sail out to Goat Island, beach his craft in a sandy cove and climb through thick brush to the crest of the mountain and gaze, like a pirate, at the city through his polished brass long glass?

Was all this not enough, he wondered, to light a small fire in the wintery soul of his dour companion? Though Mueller was no longer visible, his presence remained like a potential danger lurking on the shadowy verge of his memory. Was he asleep in the hot sun? Or was he ruminating on more of his disheartening thoughts?

“An andabata was a Roman gladiator who fought mounted wearing a helmet without eyeslits,” Mueller whispered.

“All that is ancient history,” the Captain said, impatiently. “Another time and another culture. So what's the point in bringing it up?”

“He could not see his enemy.”

“What enemy?” the Captain asked.

Since Mueller did not answer, the Captain returned to his recollections. With his eyes still closed he beheld, in three dimensions, his teak desk salvaged from a German barkentine that had gone on the rocks at Fort Point, Burma teak hauled by elephants with chains out of the rain forests of Mandalay and rafted down the Irrawaddy River, his father said. Smooth, fine-grained teak with coat after coat of glossy, hard tung oil varnish that reflected his face in its honey dark depths. Clear autumn nights, light southwest breezes whispering in the eaves and homework at his teakwood desk, the omphalos, the center of his universe, birthplace of knowledge, geography, history, compositions, literature, mathematics and dreams in the yellow glow of
the kerosene lantern.

And his books! Jules Verne's
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea;
Melville's
Moby-Dick, Typee
and
Omoo;
Nathaniel Bowditch's
The American Practical Navigator;
and the stained and broken-backed volume of
Madame Bovary
kept hidden in a drawer. Those were the bright times, of preparation for his voyages of discovery, his quest of the Grail. Bowditch was his armor and sword. Sun time, star time, hour angles, right ascension, declination, azimuth, fabulous words, like the crown and scepter, symbolizing the power and the glory. Mathematics was its essence. A knowledge of mathematics separates the deck hands from the officers, his father said. It is the queen of the sciences. But for him it was more. It was an adventure into abstraction with no guidance but the rules of the game. So what mattered the lateness of the hour when a problem was to be solved, an equation learned. To be too conscious was no illness, he reflected, it was a joy.

What more could a boy want? And what more could Mueller say, the Captain wondered. There was no refutation, no gloom to be cast over those happy reminiscences. Yet he was certain that Mueller would come up with something. Whoever or whatever he was, he was anathema, a paradigm of pessimism, the negation of life. The essence of Mueller was non-being.

No matter, the Captain concluded, he would soon be free of his disturbing intrusions. Before long the crew would be back, the lines cast off and the
Caspar
would be on her way North to Eureka and beyond. Once through the Gate, he'd take the North Channel past Point Bonita. With a land wind blowing, the sea would be calm in the lee of the mountains. By evening, the wind would be gone, the air clear, and the night sky awash with stars from horizon to horizon.

Except for the soughing aloft, not a sound could be heard either on the ship or on the dock. Nor from the deck chair beside him. Maybe Mueller had finally grown tired of talking and had actually gone to sleep. Or, and this was almost too much to hope for, this querulous passenger of his would turn out to be a figment of his imagination, an unconscious anxiety manifesting itself in the form of some melancholic doppelganger.

“Some mysteries are best left unsolved.”

It was Mueller again, and by the ominously low pitch in his whispery voice, it was obvious more would follow, a chilling epilogue, no doubt, the Captain thought glumly, to the happy memories of his youth.

“Fabulous dreams are often close companions of fabulous fears, which they either complement or destroy.”

“Destroy what?” the Captain asked, trying to conceal his agitation.

“The fears that provide the vitality of ambition and of life itself.”

Now how could anyone possibly respond to such absurd assertions, the Captain wondered, angrily. Yet he felt compelled to say something, if only to refute Mueller's arrogant certitudes.

“You do not mention faith, which transcends all fears and clears the path to fulfillment.”

“Faith is the shield of the fearful. It can protect one from the fear of death,” Mueller conceded, “but not of terror unbridled, of fading forever and never dying.”

“Faith is so tightly bound up with the mysterious vacillations of feeling,” the Captain rushed on, “that no amount of reason can alter it once it has taken root, nor discourage its growth, nor plant the seed of a new faith.”

He paused to consider his statement, its scope and significance, then realized that he had either lost his thread of thought or that he had had none to begin with.

“I once had a book,” Mueller said, “a slender, pale green volume that, in my innocence, I felt certain held the key to the secret of the universe. Neither the Bible, the great works of philosophy, nor the wisdom of the sages engendered in me such glorious hope.”

“And the book?” the Captain asked, apprehensively.

“Hartman's Elements of Analytic Geometry.”

“Hope in geometry?”

“Not only hope, but the entire gamut of emotional experience from pleasure to terror.”

“Pleasure, yes. Hope, conceivably. But terror?”

“You, of all people, must know that to be born with a reasoning mind is reason enough to know terror all the days of one's life.”

“To be too conscious . . . ,” the Captain began, hesitated, then withdrew into silence. Yet though his mind was clear and his senses alert to the undiminished whine of the wind, and even to the sound of retreating footsteps across the deck, he was powerless to stop what he intuited Mueller was about to tell him.

“Had it not been for my father,” Mueller began, “I would have left school and wandered about. I would have taken odd jobs in the fields, in the factories, in the gold mines. I would have written simple poetry, expressed my nature. But there was my father, a tired little man, pottering in his garden, dreaming perhaps of the high days of his youth and
waiting for me to perpetuate his waning life.

“I plunged deeper into my studies. The night stars I saw no more and only a little of the sun. Then one night I was working. A simple problem. An asymptote, a line sweeping down in a beautiful curve to meet the x-axis at infinity. The solution of the problem was infinity. There, I marked it so with the sign of infinity, the eight on its side. Tired, I looked at the symbol and retraced it with my pencil. It was a simple problem, the answer was infinity. No. It had two answers. I marked the coordinates, laid in a line approaching the y-axis. A beautiful curve sweeping up to infinity. Infinity on both ends. I marked it so with the sign of infinity, the eight on its side. I retraced the sign with my pencil. It grew deeper and blacker. It was a simple problem. The answer was infinity on both ends.

“Outside my window I heard the whispering of the sea wind, low in its tone as the voice of one who has come far and is weary.

“The problem was solved. It was clearly intelligible, set down in an equation, the coordinates marked, the curve drawn in. The answer was infinity both ways. How far to infinity? A long way, a weary way. And then what? Nothing perhaps, only infinity again. An endless journey growing smaller, whispering away into nothingness.

“Pallid moonbeams, slanting through trembling black leaves, lighted the bare walls of my room above the shaded lamp. A cold light, polarized light, electromagnetic waves vibrating in but one plane, cast off light from the sun, but still a cold light. And the answer was infinity. It held, for there was no meeting of the lines, only in that one place which was no place.