The Man Who Lost the Sea (23 page)

I said, a little embarrassed, “Not very original.”

“But very effective,” he answered.

“You think so? You really think so?”

He nodded, and that made me very, very glad. I hadn’t meant to tell him, but it slipped out in one great big blurt: “I didn’t read it.”

“No?”

“No,” I said. “I came up here and stood for a long time, thinking about … all the work I’d done to be able to read it, and about—the truth, what kind of a difference all the truth makes. And I thought a lot about people, and about … 
her
.”

“Yes,” he said, interested and … non-prying.

“Yes, about her, the things she’d done, the things she could have done. The way she used to talk to me. Do you know, people like her, who aren’t so hot with words—they have ways of talking, if you can read them, almost like a grave has?”

“I think you’re right.”

“Well, I thought about that too. And my own illiteracy …” I laughed in some sort of embarrassment and said, “Anyway, the way it wound up, I didn’t read it. I went and ordered this epitaph instead.”

“Why that particular one?”

We read it over together, and I said, “It’s taken me over a year, and a pretty tough year at that, but this is what I wanted to say to her. This is what I want her to know, now and from now on, from me.”

He laughed.

I confess to being a little annoyed at that, even after all I had gone
through with this fellow. “What’s funny?”

“
You’re
saying that, to
her?
”

“Something wrong with that?”

“Sure is,” he said. And he walked off, and when I called, he just waved, but kept on walking.

I turned to look back at the headstone, with its clean new inscription. I’d put it there because I wanted to say something to her that …

Me?
say something to
her?

No wonder he had laughed. A guy spends more than a year learning to read a grave, and then gets the silly notion that it’s reading him.

So I read it again—not the grave; I would never read that—I read just the inscription. I read what she said to me, now, this morning, new and crisp and for the very first time:
Rest in peace
.

“Thanks, honey,” I whispered, “I will,” and I went on home and got the first real sleep I’d had since she’d left me.

Once there was a man who all the time told lies and everybody hated him and diden’t trust him even when he said what time it is they woulden’t believe him so one day the craziest thing hapened he was driving his car to work in the morning, and his car slipped on a banana peal only it was reely a whole bunch of banana peals where a garbage truck had a accident and spilled on the road so he cracked a lampost.

The policemen was really mad about it and pinched the man to the courthouse and it took a while to get it all fixed. So when he got to work he was late and his boss said what hapened to you and the man said my car sliped on a banana peal and the boss said you’re a liar everybody knows that and if I got any more trouble from you out you go. And no matter what the man said they woulden’t beleive him.

So he was walking in the park afterwards and he felt real mean and low and he sat down and a funny little man sat down on the bench too and said whats the matter. And the man said everybody picks on me I am a well known liar and when I get around to telling the truth nobdy believes me anyway: The other man said gosh. I can fix that easy because I am a Magician so the man said he dident beleive in that Magic stuff and the old man said you want people to beleive you you got to start out beleiving me so the man said alright then and the Magician made a spell wich dident hurt.

So he forgot about it for awhile until he met a lady he knew and she said hello hello I’m glad to see you and he was going to say he was glad to see her but he wasen’t because he dident reely like her she gave him a pain so what came out of his mouth was Well. Im not glad to see you because you give me a pain so she got so mad she was going to hit him with her pocket book but he ran. So then
later he went to dinner were he was invited and the lady said how did you like the dinner and before he could stop he said the meat was tough and the peas taste like garbage which was the truth. So there was one more person who diden’t like him.

In the morning the boss was going to give him a raise so he called him in to the ofice and said Well how do you like working here and the man said before he could stop I dont like the work and I dont like you eather wich was the truth. So the boss fired him. Then he went walking in the park again to find the little Magician man. And he found him and said to take off the Magic spell because he said he was a lot better when he was a liar. He said the way it is now I get in trouble every time I open my mouth it seems everybody tells lies to each other all the time like Im glad to see you and I wish you luck and all that when they reely dont mean it. Well the Magician said you just dont know which lies to tell and which not to I hope you learn a lesson but about the spell your out of luck because that spell is pernamet so just work hard and watch what you say.

Then the man got a new job and worked hard as he could and when people asked him anything he just shut his mouth and worked even harder. So when he got home that night his wife said how about the new job is the work hard and he said yes wich it was she said. are you tired and he said tired Im dead so then he droped dead.

—Billy Watson

Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.

The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.

His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and
asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later … forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you
knew
that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did.… Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now.

Look what you’ve done already, making him send you away with that angry shrug of the mind (which, with the eyes, are the only things which will move just now). The motionless effort costs him a wave of nausea. He has felt seasick before but he has never
been
seasick, and the formula for that is to keep your eyes on the horizon and stay busy. Now! Then he’d better get busy—now; for there’s one place especially not to be seasick in, and that’s locked up in a pressure suit. Now!

So he busies himself as best he can, with the seascape, landscape, sky. He lies on high ground, his head propped on a vertical wall of black rock. There is another such outcrop before him, whip-topped with white sand and with smooth flat sand. Beyond and down is valley, salt-flat, estuary; he cannot yet be sure. He is sure of the line of footprints, which begin behind him, pass to his left, disappear in the outcrop shadows, and reappear beyond to vanish at last into the shadows of the valley.

Stretched across the sky is old mourning-cloth, with starlight burning holes in it, and between the holes the black is absolute—wintertime, mountaintop sky-black.

(Far off on the horizon within himself, he sees the swell and crest of approaching nausea; he counters with an undertow of weakness, which meets and rounds and settles the wave before it can break. Get busier. Now.)

Burst in on him, then, with the X-15 model. That’ll get him. Hey, how about this for a gimmick? Get too high for the thin air to give you any control, you have these little jets in the wingtips, see? and
on the sides of the empennage: bank, roll, yaw, whatever, with squirts of compressed air.

But the sick man curls his sick lip: oh, git, kid, git, will you?—that has nothing to do with the sea. So you git.

Out and out the sick man forces his view, etching all he sees with a meticulous intensity, as if it might be his charge, one day, to duplicate all this. To his left is only starlit sea, windless. In front of him across the valley, rounded hills with dim white epaulettes of light. To his right, the jutting corner of the black wall against which his helmet rests. (He thinks the distant moundings of nausea becalmed, but he will not look yet.) So he scans the sky, black and bright, calling Sirius, calling Pleiades, Polaris, Ursa Minor, calling that … that … Why, it
moves
. Watch it: yes, it moves! It is a fleck of light, seeming to be wrinkled, fissured, rather like a chip of boiled cauliflower in the sky. (Of course, he knows better than to trust his own eyes just now.) But that movement …

As a child he had stood on cold sand in a frosty Cape Cod evening, watching Sputnik’s steady spark rise out of the haze (madly, dawning a little north of west); and after that he had sleeplessly wound special coils for his receiver, risked his life restringing high antennas, all for the brief capture of an unreadable
tweetle-eep-tweetle
in his earphones from Vanguard, Explorer, Lunik, Discoverer, Mercury. He knew them all (well, some people collect match-covers, stamps) and he knew especially that unmistakable steady sliding in the sky.

This moving fleck was a satellite, and in a moment, motionless, uninstrumented but for his chronometer and his part-brain, he will know which one. (He is grateful beyond expression—without that sliding chip of light, there were only those footprints, those wandering footprints, to tell a man he was not alone in the world.)

Say you were a kid, eager and challengeable and more than a little bright, you might in a day or so work out a way to measure the period of a satellite with nothing but a timepiece and a brain; you might eventually see that the shadow in the rocks ahead had been there from the first only because of the light from the rising satellite. Now if you check the time exactly at the moment when the shadow
on the sand is equal to the height of the outcrop, and time it again when the light is at the zenith and the shadow gone, you will multiply this number of minutes by 8—think why, now: horizon to zenith is one-fourth of the orbit, give or take a little, and halfway up the sky is half that quarter—and you will then know this satellite’s period. You know all the periods—ninety minutes, two, two-and-a-half hours; with that and the appearance of this bird, you’ll find out which one it is.

But if you were that kid, eager or resourceful or whatever, you wouldn’t jabber about it to the sick man, for not only does he not want to be bothered with you, he’s thought of all that long since and is even now watching the shadows for that triangular split second of measurement. Now! His eyes drop to the face of his chronometer: 0400, near as makes no never mind.

He has minutes to wait now—ten? … thirty? … twenty-three?—while this baby moon eats up its slice of shadowpie; and that’s too bad, the waiting, for though the inner sea is calm there are currents below, shadows that shift and swim. Be busy. Be busy. He must not swim near that great invisible amoeba, whatever happens: its first cold pseudopod is even now reaching for the vitals.

Being a knowledgeable young fellow, not quite a kid any more, wanting to help the sick man too, you want to tell him everything you know about that cold-in-the-gut, that reaching invisible surrounding implacable amoeba. You know all about it—listen, you want to yell at him, don’t let that touch of cold bother you. Just know what it is, that’s all. Know what it is that is touching your gut. You want to tell him, listen:

Listen, this is how you met the monster and dissected it. Listen, you were skin-diving in the Grenadines, a hundred tropical shoal-water islands; you had a new blue snorkel mask, the kind with face-plate and breathing-tube all in one, and new blue flippers on your feet, and a new blue spear-gun—all this new because you’d only begun, you see; you were a beginner, aghast with pleasure at your easy intrusion into this underwater otherworld. You’d been out in a boat, you were coming back, you’d just reached the mouth of the little bay,
you’d taken the notion to swim the rest of the way. You’d said as much to the boys and slipped into the warm silky water. You brought your gun.

Not far to go at all, but then beginners find wet distances deceiving. For the first five minutes or so it was only delightful, the sun hot on your back and the water so warm it seemed not to have any temperature at all and you were flying. With your face under the water, your mask was not so much attached as part of you, your wide blue flippers trod away yards, your gun rode all but weightless in your hand, the taut rubber sling making an occasional hum as your passage plucked it in the sunlit green. In your ears crooned the breathy monotone of the snorkel tube, and through the invisible disk of plate glass you saw wonders. The bay was shallow—ten, twelve feet or so—and sandy, with great growths of brain-, bone-, and fire-coral, intricate waving sea-fans, and fish—such fish! Scarlet and green and aching azure, gold and rose and slate-color studded with sparks of enamel-blue, pink and peach and silver. And that
thing
got into you, that … monster.