Our problem now: how to find an uncaptained ship of Jews and the righteous among crustaceans in a vast sea. The current pulled us north and we followed its words. We would keep a clear eye for what lay before us, what lay around.
The deck was still, little sound but the soughing of the wind and the steady crosscutting of the men’s snores. Columbus, ever an expectant human breaker for the transcendent fizzle of his God’s unpredictable power surges, positioned himself at the convergence of the bow gunwales and waited. Moishe, grateful to be more than ballast aboard a barrel, tied a hammock between the starboard shroud and the mizzenmast, and slept. The watch slept also, save for the boy uneponymously manning the wheel.
From the fore-crosstree, I watched the phosphorescence of the sea. A mantle of blueish-white covered nearly all the dark water north of us, its edges wavering and trembling within half a mile of the ship. We floated in a sea of liquid radiance, an unearthly, blue glare. The ocean was a vast aurora of blue fire overrun by heavens of almost inky blackness. Iridescent spittle from the lips of Columbus’s God on the dark velvet of a Torah mantle.
Only a moment before, the still water had reflected an entire hemisphere of spangled constellations, and the outlines of the ship’s spars were projected as dusky shadows against the Milky Way. Now the sea was ablaze with opaline light, and the yards and sails were painted in faint tints of blue on a background of ebony. A vivid electrical fire was upon the ocean. As I stood farklemt upon the quarter-deck, this sheet of bluish flame suddenly vanished, causing, by its almost instantaneous disappearance, a sensation of total blindness, and leaving the sea, for a moment, an abyss of blackness. But as the pupils of my eyes gradually dilated, I saw as before the dark shining mirror of water around the ship, while far away on the horizon rose the great luminous appearance that had first attracted my attention and that was caused by the lighting up of the haze by areas of phosphorescent water below the horizon line.
I thought to call out, “Gevalt! It comes again!” but felt hushed as if in the presence of something sacred. Again the great tide of fire came sweeping up around the vessel and we floated in a sea of illumination that extended in every direction and beyond the limits of vision.
Then I heard, over the radiance, a song. A distant singing. Like the sombre keening of whales, a hollow sorrowing of such beauty that my wings felt lifted as if a sigh had gathered me in its breath and was pulling me toward the warmth of its body.
An island surrounded by phosphorescence. Women swimming near the shore, singing. Their naked bodies rising above the water, dappled in bright light, then sinking again. Brown bodies spangled with radiant life.
“Moishe,” I called. “This is worth waking up for.”
“What’s your rush?” he grumbled. “So, nu, the farkakter Messiah will be born shpeter mit a tog—a day later.”
The singing coiled around us, a honeyed murmuration, an undulating nigun, a writhing shimmy of smoke. It found Moishe and he woke.
“Our ship has been sighted? We’ve got the map? The …” But then he slid from the hammock, and stood mesmerized at the gunwale. Columbus rose and stood beside him. Together they slipped off their clothes and fell into the sea, swimming toward the singing maidelehs.
Before long, the crew, too, glided like sleepwalkers from where they kipped and dived into the luminous dappling of dark water. Only the boy at the helm remained. The lapping water and the sinuous song lulled him to where, I imagine, he dreamed whatever populates a boy’s nodding Eden and he slept with a smile.
And I, too, found my brain rippling warm with the song’s phosphorescent brindling, which caused me to follow the men toward the island’s shallows.
A woman, moon-luminous like the flesh of a pear, soft and glistening as kreplach in soup, stood waist-deep in water, her arms on Moishe’s shoulders. Her eyes, swart and steady, transfixed him. She whispered but who could tell what she said, for her voice was the susurration of lapping water, speech without words. Columbus, too, stood before a machesheyfeh enchantress lost in a distant horizon. The crew wandered somnambulant toward the dark shadows of the forest beyond shore, where naked, both men and women stood waiting between the tangle of branches.
I heard birds—what I was sure were parrot calls—from within the trees. Then I saw, beside a fire on the beach, the extended shadow of a parrot, long and anamorphic, a smear of darkness, a shadow road. Then the pure Harlequin form of the parrot-in-itself appeared to me. I flew toward him, my brain a substance between twilight and lokshen pudding.