He was back on deck when the first jag of lightning forked the horizon. Fifteen seconds later, the thunder arrived in a long, rolling peal, like a grumpy god clearing its throat. The air had picked up, too, in the disorganized manner of an approaching squall. Michael unhooked the self-steerer and took the tiller in his fist as the rain arrived in earnest: a hot, needling, tropical rain that soaked him in a second. About the weather, Michael lacked any strong opinion. Like everything else, it was what it was, and if this was to be the storm that finally sent him to the bottom, well, it wasn’t like he hadn’t asked for it.
Really? Alone? In that thing? Are you crazy? Sometimes the questions were kindly meant, an expression of genuine concern; even total strangers tried to talk him out of it. But more often than not, the speaker was already writing him off. If the sea didn’t kill him, the barrier would—that blockade of floating explosives said to encircle the continent. Who in his right mind would tempt fate like that? And especially now, when not a single viral had been seen for, what, going on thirty-six months? Wasn’t a whole continent sufficient space for a restless soul to roam around in?
Fair enough, but not every choice came down to logic; a lot came from the gut. What Michael’s gut was telling him was that the barrier didn’t exist, that it had never existed. He was raising his middle finger to history, a hundred years of humanity saying, Not me, no way, you go on ahead without me. That or playing Russian roulette. Which, given his family history,wasn’t necessarily out of the question.
His parents’ suicide wasn’t something he liked to think about, but of course he did. In some room in his brain, a movie of that morning’s events was constantly running. Their gray, empty faces, and the tautness of the ropes around their necks. The slight creaking sound they made. The elongated shapes of their bodies, the absolute, unoccupied looseness of them. The darkness of their toes, bloated with pooled blood. Michael’s initial reaction had been complete incomprehension: he’d stared at the bodies for a good thirty seconds, trying to parse the data, which came to him in a series of free-floating words he couldn’t stick together (Mom, Dad, hanging, rope, barn, dead), before an explosion of white-hot terror in his eleven-year-old brain sent him dashing forward to scoop their legs into his arms to push their bodies upward, all the while screaming Sara’s name so she could come and help him. They’d been dead for many hours; his efforts were pointless. Yet one had to try. A lot of life, Michael had learned, came down to trying to fix things that weren’t fixable.
So, the sea, and his solo wanderings upon it. It had become a home of a kind. His boat was the Nautilus. Michael had taken the name from a book he’d read years ago, when he was just a Little in the Sanctuary: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, an old yellowed paperback, pages popping loose, and on its cover the image of a curious, armor-plated vehicle that seemed like a cross between a boat and an undersea tank, entwined in the suctioning tentacles of a sea monster with one huge eye. Long after the details of the story had fallen away from his mind, the image had stayed with him, seared into his retinas; when it came time to christen his craft, after two years of planning and execution and plain old guesswork, Nautilus had seemed a natural. It was as if he’d been storing the name in his brain for later use.
Thirty-six feet from stern to bowsprit with a six-foot draft, one main and one headsail, masthead-rigged, with a small cabin (though he almost always slept on the deck). He’d found it in a boatyard near San Luis Pass, tucked away in warehouse, still standing on blocks. The hull, made of polyester resin, was sound, but the rest was a mess—deck rotted, sails disintegrated, anything metal fatigued beyond use. It was, in other words, perfect for Michael Fisher, first engineer of Light and Power and oiler first class, and within a month he’d quit the refinery and cashed in five years of unspent paychecks to buy the tools he needed and hire a crew to bring them down to San Luis. Really? Alone? In that thing? Yes, Michael told them, unfolding his drawing on the table. Really.