What are the police going to do? Phædrus says.
Rigel looked exasperated. You can be here five more seconds or you can be here five more weeks. Which do you want?
Phædrus thought about it. OK, he said, untie the bow line.
You’ll have to untie it yourself.
What’s the matter with you?
Aiding and abetting… For Christ’s sake.
I’ve got to face these people after you leave.
Phædrus looked at him and shook his head. God, what a mess. He jumped onto the dock, grabbed the electric power cord and threw it aboard, uncleated the stern line and threw it aboard too. As he went forward to take off the bow lines he saw that people who had gathered at the office were looking down his way. Crazy how Rigel had shown up just at this minute. And he was right, as usual.
Phædrus threw the bow lines aboard, and with his hands on the boat’s bow, shoved with all his might to get the heavy hull clear of the dock. The current was already starting to move the stern away. Then he grabbed a stanchion and pulled himself aboard.
There’s an anchorage inside Sandy Hook, Rigel said. Horseshoe Bay. It’s on the chart.
Phædrus moved aft smartly over the tangled lines to get control of the boat but in the cockpit he saw the key was out of the engine. The boat was out of control now but for the moment it didn’t matter because the current was carrying it into the river and away from the dock. He jumped down below, opened the top drawer under the chart table and found the key, then scampered up again and inserted it and turned over the engine.
This would be a great time for it to fail.
It didn’t. It took hold and he let it idle for a while.
At the dock, now sixty or seventy feet away, Rigel was talking to some people who had gathered around him. Phædrus shifted into gear, increased the throttle and waved to them. They didn’t wave back, but they were watching him.
One of them cupped his hands and shouted something, but the sound of the diesel was too loud for it to be heard. Phædrus waved to them and headed out into the river toward the New Jersey shore.
Whew!
As he looked back over his shoulder he saw the water of the river between the boat and the marina become wider and wider, and the figures become smaller and smaller. They seemed to diminish in importance as they diminished in size.
The whole city was starting to take shape from the perspective of the water now. The marina was sinking back into the skyline of the city. The green trees of the parkway dominated it now and the apartments rising above the parkway dominated the trees. Now he could see some large skyscrapers at the center of the island rising above the apartments.
The Giant!
It gave him an eerie feeling.
This time he’d just barely slipped out of its grasp.
28
When he neared the far side of the river, Phædrus swung the boat so that it headed downstream. Already he could feel the open water and the distance between himself and the city start to calm him down.
What a morning! He wasn’t even dressed yet. The dock was getting really far away now, and the people who had been watching him seemed to be gone. Up the river the George Washington Bridge had begun to recede into the bluffs.
He saw there was some blood beginning to dry on the deck by the cockpit. He slowed down the engine, tied off the rudder, and went below and found a rag. He found his clothes on the bunk, and brought everything up on deck. Then he freed the rudder and put the boat back on course again. Then he scrubbed away all the blood spots he could find.
There was no hurry, now. So strange. All that rush and calamity, and now suddenly he had all the time in the world. No obligations. No commitments… Except Lila, down there. But she wasn’t going anywhere.
What was he going to do with her?… Just keep going, he supposed.
He really wasn’t under any pressure. There weren’t any deadlines…
Except the deadline of ice and snow. But that was no problem. He could just single-hand south and let her stay there in the forecabin if that’s where she wanted to be.
Dreamy day. The sun was out! Still hardly any boats in the river.
As he dressed he saw that along the Manhattan shore were old green buildings that looked like warehouses sticking out into the water. They looked rotted out and abandoned. They reminded him of something.
Long ago he’d seen those buildings… There was a gangplank going up, up, up, way up — into a big ship with the huge red smokestacks and he had walked up it ahead of his mother — she looked terribly worried — and when he stopped to look down at the cement below the gangplank she told him to Hurry! Hurry! The ship is going to leave! and just as she said this there was an enormous noise of the fog horn that frightened him and made him run up the gangplank. He was only four and the ship was the Mauritania going to England… But those were the same pier buildings, it seemed, the ones the ship had left from. Now they were all in ruins.
That was all so long ago… Selim… Selim… what was that about? A story his mother had read to him. Selim the fisherman and Selim the baker and a magic island that they just barely escaped from before it all sank into the sea. It had been connected with this place in his memory.
So strange. Other than a barge and one other sailboat way downstream, there was still nothing on the river. Far to the south, among all the clutter of buildings on the horizon, he could see the Statue of Liberty.
Strange how he could remember the old Mauritania docks from that childhood voyage but not the Statue of Liberty.
Once on a later visit to New York he had joined a crowd of other tourists and climbed up inside the Statue of Liberty. He remembered it was all greenish copper and old looking, supported with riveted girders like an old Victorian bridge. The iron staircase going up got thinner and smaller and thinner and smaller and the line of people going up kept getting slower and slower and suddenly he’d gotten a huge wave of claustrophobia. There was no way he could get out of this procession! In front of him was a very fat lady who acted like the climb was too much for her. She looked like she might collapse any minute. He could envision the whole procession collapsing beneath her like a row of dominoes, with himself in it, with no hope but to crash with the rest of them. He’d wondered if he’d have the strength to hold her there if she collapsed… Trapped and going crazy with claustrophobia underneath a fat lady inside the Statue of Liberty. What a great allegorical theme, he’d thought later, for a story about America.
Phædrus saw the deck was still a mess of lines that needed to be put away. He tied off the rudder, went forward, gathered up a dock line, brought it back to the cockpit and then, while steering back on course again, coiled the line and stowed it into the lazarette; then tied off the rudder again and repeated the process until he had all four lines and the electrical power cable stowed and the fenders brought inboard. By the time he was done downtown Manhattan was approaching.
There were rather pleasant-looking Victorian houses over on the Jersey side. Some high-rises, but surprisingly few. There was some sort of a cathedral up high on the shore and a road going up the bluffs. He could see how steep the bluffs are. That might be why there’s so little development there compared to the other side of the river.