And now he adapted to yet another life in which the lively cadet moved among the legion of ghosts he couldn’t reach. Scorching sun, frigid nights, the press of their grating, unconquerable hunger. Eddie felt his body devouring itself, an agony like gnawing teeth. They lay prone upon the raft, too weak to look for food or ships, occasional brief squalls relieving their thirst. Eddie was skeletal and frail; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d urinated. He was a corpse, little more, yet even as his body failed, his thoughts whirled with elastic new freedom. Eddie understood what he’d seen in the opium dens of Shanghai: people draped and torpid, but their minds must have ranged as his did now, careening through clouds of sound and color like a spirit unleashed.
The bosun’s visible shrinking mirrored Eddie’s own, their wild hair and beards a mockery of their withdrawing flesh. The bosun was less afflicted by the sun, which lacerated Eddie’s skin through his tattered garments. His only relief came from floating in the sea. At least once between sunrise and sunset, he shook off his paralysis enough to lower himself into the water, clinging to the sea anchor line. Only at these times did Eddie escape the assault of gravity, which leaned on his frail bones like a heel grinding him onto pavement. The pleasure of floating, of being submerged, was worth even the stinging aftermath of salt drying in his sores. The bosun helped to pull him back onto the raft; Eddie hadn’t the strength. They never spoke. For long spells they lay side by side, gazing into each other’s eyes. Eddie regretted having missed the chance to ask his friend about Lagos and why he’d gone to sea, whether he was Catholic, his best memories and worst. It was too late for stories. They had left language behind, even the root language of the sea.
Once, as they lay on the raft in daylight, Eddie became aware of a gentle weight beside them. He opened his eyes and saw an albatross, white and awkward, her massive wings folded at her sides like artists’ easels. The bosun was asleep. Using some vestige of strength, Eddie slashed at the bird with the pocketknife, trying to slice her head from the neck. The albatross dodged him easily, rising a foot or so in the air and settling back down. She cocked her head, watching him curiously with her bright black eyes.
The next day Eddie lay shivering although the sun was hot. The bosun held and tried to warm him. “Good man,” he said, and Eddie recognized a version of his own endearments to the dying cadet so very long ago. He wanted to object, to correct the bosun with a range of facts that faded into colors before he could force them into language. Eddie hardly moved, hardly breathed, conserving the last of his energy, slowing things down nearly to the point of death in order to live another hour. He would die to stay alive, to savor the sensuous gallop of his thoughts toward some truth he hadn’t yet perceived. He no longer knew if it was day or night, whether he was alone or with the bosun. He recalled his younger daughter—her mind locked inside a body condemned to stillness. His discovery of their likeness pierced Eddie with such intensity that he cried out, although no sound came. Mashed against the raft, longing to float, he remembered Lydia in her bath, her relief and laughter at the pleasure of lying suspended in the warm water. But Eddie had turned away, appalled by her misshapenness. And for the first time, the only time, the crime of his abandonment assailed Eddie, and he cried out, “Lydia! Liddy!,” his harsh choked voice shocking him as he groped for the child he had abandoned—the family he had abandoned.
Eddie lay stricken, Lydia’s name like a coin in his mouth. Then a light, wafting sound filled his ears, a voice he dimly remembered—not Anna’s, certainly not the bosun’s, but one that spoke in a bubbling, giddy rush, a lolloping prattle like the chattering cheerful nonsense of birdsong. Eddie broke away from the body on the raft and followed this sound to its source as if it were music drifting from an open window. He stopped to listen, straining to catch hold of the chuckling babble like two hands clapping to capture a bright ribbon snapping in the wind. He was following Lydia, and she was breathless, she was laughing, her words coming not in sentences so much as waves, a language he’d once discounted but now, at last, could understand, Papa Anna run Mama see the sea Mama clap Anna see the sea Papa kiss Anna run to see the sea the see the sea the sea the sea theseatheseatheseatheseatheseathesea, the words becoming a monotone, a simple back-and-forth, the plucking of a string, the beating of a heart: his heart, her heart, one heart. Here it was, the truth that underlay all the rest, like stirrings from the bottom of the sea. And only now did Eddie feel the bosun’s arms still around him—he’d been there all the while, had never left. “Coming soon,” the bosun said. “Coming soon, my friend. Almost done. God is with us yet.”
?PART EIGHT
The Fog
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
“You might have given it a bit more thought beforehand!”
Nell, hissing in the morning sunlight a block from Dr. Soffit’s office. If not for the mothers and children wandering Central Park in their church hats, she would have been shouting.
“Thank you for stopping him,” Anna said.
“I shouldn’t have. You’d be all done by now, and that would be that. We could even—” She glanced toward Fifth Avenue. “We could probably still go back.”
“No. Please.” It felt to Anna as if the pleasure she took in breathing the cold dry air had nearly been lost to her. “Please, no.”
“Stop saying that!”
Anna grasped her friend’s arm, feeling something close to love for this cranky, glamorous protector. “Thank you, Nell.”
Nell stiffened, then relaxed. Anna’s effusions of gratitude seemed gradually to appease her. Or perhaps Nell’s outrage had begun to bore her, compared with the interesting new shape Anna’s trouble had assumed. “So. You’re in it to the bitter end,” she said softly. “You’ll have to go away. But I’m warning you: the good places cost an arm and a leg.”
“I’ve some money saved.”
Nell laughed. “Darling, the money comes from him. You tell him straight: if he wants his nice life to continue without conversations between you and his wife that are likely to make things pretty hot around the house, he pays. Simple as that.”
“He’s gone.”
Nell cocked her head. “Nobody’s gone until they’re dead. Find the fiend and make him pay or you’ll end up with the nuns, which I don’t advise,” she said. “Nuns are not fond of our type. I’ve that on good authority.”
“I mean he’s—gone.” Spurred by Nell’s incomprehension, she found herself adding, “Overseas.”
“Ah, a soldier. Why didn’t you say so?”
Anna hadn’t any answer, but none was required; Nell had fallen into thought. “It was a stolen interlude,” she reflected, uttering this phrase as though it placed Anna’s predicament in an entirely new category. “You were living in the moment and so was he. No thought of consequences.”
“. . . True,” Anna allowed.
“But say, why spoil your figure and waste a year of your life when you can be done in thirty minutes? Unless . . . if he shouldn’t come back . . .”
“He won’t. I’m certain of that.”