I myself felt oddly detached. The sight of that pulpy gash, the trickle of red — I found these things engaging, rather than upsetting. I was glad to see Forest injured. Hurt, not killed. Already beginning to heal. He’d been dinged — Mick’s phrase. The islands were dangerous, but they did not have to be deadly.
At last Mick leaned forward and severed the thread with his teeth.
“Done.”
“Thanks,” Forest said.
He glanced down at his wound. He flexed his ankle, teeth bared in discomfort.
This is how we know we’re alive, I guess: we continue to feel pain.
16
YOUR DEATH MADE me into a nature photographer.
I was always going to be an artist. There was never any question about that. I need to take pictures of the world around me the way a whale needs to come up for air. For as long as I can remember, I have been driven by beauty. I am talented; I don’t mind saying it. Photography was a given. Nature was the wild card.
If I were a different sort of person, I could have made my bones on babies and anniversaries. I could have been a wedding photographer or a portraitist. I would have been happy enough. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all. The camera is nothing more than an eye that records what it sees. I could have found beauty in an ordinary life. I could have settled down. I could have had stillness and permanence. I could have mined art out of the raw ore of the visible realm.
But you died. That changed everything. Your death sent me skimming over the planet like a rock across a pond. A nomad. A lost soul.
For most of my life, I have been interested in the journey, rather than any particular destination. I never cared where I ended up as long as it was somewhere new. I like feeling rootless. I like airplanes and buses. I like waking up without being certain where I am. I like owning next to nothing. Six cameras (now five). A light meter. A tripod. A changing bag. A couple pairs of jeans. Nothing more.
I have enjoyed what travel does to my mind, too. My mental baggage is as spare and well-organized as my suitcase. I don’t have romantic relationships, only brief, incandescent trysts. I don’t have friends, only coworkers. Every new connection has come with a built-in expiration date. This is fine with me.
After all, I have you. You know me better than anyone else ever could. While you were alive, I loved you as passionately as a daughter can love a mother. Ever since your death, I have written to you ceaselessly. I have told you everything. I have left nothing out. I have had no desire to bond with the people around me — braving those awkward getting-to-know you sessions, figuring out the equilibrium of the relationship, calibrating the level of intelligence and compassion on both sides, stumbling toward shared experiences, whispering secrets, getting attached. I have never had to bother with all that. Not when I could write to you instead.
Your death taught me what happens after love. I have no interest in reencountering that depth of loss.
So I have moved and moved again. I have moved here.
I FOUND MYSELF considering this matter today during a conversation with Mick.
I had planned to lounge around the cabin, reading and napping at intervals. Sleep and I are renewing our relationship with open arms. Any horizontal surface seems to whisper to me, enticing me to lie down and rest for a minute, or maybe an hour. Time is still fluid for me, hard to keep track of, but it is getting better, clearer.
Mick, however, had plans. I was stretched out on the couch, book in lap, when he approached. I was feeling a bit nauseous, probably due to the food. As usual, we had been noshing on snacks of dubious origin and date. The previous night’s dinner had been canned chickpeas and Spam, with canned mushrooms thrown in for good measure. The radiators were clanking, warming my toes. Dust motes twirled on the air. Somewhere nearby a mouse was gnawing and scratching inside the wall. Mick asked me to accompany him with all the chivalry of a swain requesting a place on his lady love’s dance card. I sat up, brushing the hair out of my eyes.
“Yes, please,” I said.
He kicked at the carpet. “If I don’t get out of this cabin, I’m going to go stark raving mad. Everyone is working. There’s a hole in the rowboat. A catastrophe. Galen and Forest are out there fixing it. They’ve got Charlene with them. And Lucy — she’s busy. You’ve got to come with me. It’s got to be you.”
I held up a hand.
“Stop trying to convince me,” I said. “You’ve already made the sale.”
An hour later, I was shivering beneath my coat. The Janus trolled over waves the size and shape of desert dunes. The roll and plunge, the tug of the current, seemed to be doing some damage to my equilibrium. I gripped the bulwark so I would not fall over. Mick was oblivious. A little distance from the cabin had worked like a tonic on his mood. We were heading toward Asia, leaving the archipelago in our wake. The line of islets had become tiny once more. It was disconcerting. For the past few months, those shorelines had encompassed what felt like the whole world, the borders of the knowable universe. From this vantage point, however, the islands looked scrawny, insubstantial, like a row of rubber ducks in a bathtub.
“Sit by me,” Mick shouted. He was settled at the rudder, steering with a practiced hand. I staggered over and collapsed on the bench. I wished I had thought to bring a hat. A warm stocking cap would have helped ward off the chill.
“I don’t see any whales,” I said.
“They’ll be by,” he said serenely. Then he did a double-take, his eyes narrowing. He looked me over, head to toe.
“What?” I said.
“Mel,” he said slowly. “You didn’t bring your camera.”
I groped for the strap that I habitually wore around my neck like a favorite locket. I had transported six cameras to the Farallon Islands in all. One had perished, of course. Dead and gone and buried. During any given week, I would rotate through the five that remained, depending on my mood, depending on the circumstances. Jewel, for instance, was a large-format camera. To use it, I had to first lug massive, heavy equipment over the rocks — my tripod, my light-tight film boxes, my changing bag, my light meter. Each shot required preparation. I would duck under the dark cloak. The rest of the world would fall away, sounds muffled, erased by the cloth. I would breathe in the musty air. For a moment, only the image and I would exist — a glimmering rectangle, the horizon flipped upside down, a meditation on vision and light. I would never have brought Jewel onto one of the boats. Normally I would have taken one of my digital SLR cameras along — Gremlin or Fish Face. But none of these precious instruments was with me now.
“It’s like you’re missing an arm,” Mick said.
“I feel naked,” I cried.
He snickered. “Plus, you might get in trouble. I assume somebody’s paying you to be here. They’ll be mad that you missed the whales.”
He pivoted the wheel, and we swung to the left, my stomach lurching. Then he frowned, his brow knotted. I watched what seemed to be a ponderous internal conversation going on in his brain.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“You’ve never asked me that before,” I said. “Nobody has, actually. Except Galen.”