“Ask for your autograph? Show you a shell from her collection?”
“She spit on me,” Ness says.
We fly along in silence.
“Why?” I finally ask.
“Oh, it wasn’t the first time it’s happened. It’s all the things you have planned for your story, I’m sure. My father rolling back the green initiatives when they ended up not being as profitable. All the oil exploration the company has done under my watch. Videos of flooded homes, of major cities underwater, the expense of the levees around New York, Miami, Boston. All the breakwalls going up around the world. Pick a reason.
“What was important for me was the timing of this incident. There I was, trying to find myself on the shore of my namesake, obsessing over this question of what my father saw in his unborn son. You see, I spent those days around the loch pretending to be my father. I tried to see the town through his eyes, tried to imagine I had a new wife whom I knew to be pregnant, and a future child that I knew was going to be a boy. I thought of what the place had been like back then, what my father might’ve seen, the world I was going to be born into.
“My father was taken with the lore of that place, but also the tourism. This was the hint I got from my mom. He told her that the people there hate what their community has become, but that they need it. They hate the signs everywhere, the glass boats on the water, the subs that take gawkers out on fruitless dives, the statues and the stuffed purple sea monster toys, but they can’t let go of it. They can’t stop. You see?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
“We’re the monsters,” Ness says. “The Wildes. My father was a monster. His father and his grandfather were monsters. And he knew I’d become one too—”
At this, whatever holds Ness together, whatever keeps his emotions at bay, cracks. And he bends forward and weeps in his hands. Five or six shuddering sobs before he gets himself together. I am too stunned by the breakdown to react, to lean forward and put a hand on his shoulder, to offer him a shoulder to cry on. It is the most unexpected thing I’ve seen from a man full of surprises.
Just as suddenly, he sits up, presses at his eyes with his fists, and takes a deep breath. He doesn’t apologize or seek anything from me, just continues his line of thought as if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t seen this small fissure in his otherwise perfect shell.
“Everyone needs what we provide.” He swallows and composes himself further. “This plane? All the jets out there? The people who fly on them? They need us. They need the oil. It doesn’t matter if we get it with greener methods these days, doesn’t matter that we haven’t had a major spill in forty years, that we’re investing in alternate forms of energy. My great-grandfather did none of those things, because nobody cared back then. By the time his son was born, everyone had their fuzzy picture of who we were, the ugly legend. And the more they needed us, the more they hated us. It kept them from having to blame themselves.
“My dad saw that at Loch Ness. He saw people blaming a monster for all the things wrong with the world at large. He saw how we do this all the time. You want to know what the worst of it is?”
“What’s that?” I ask, my voice a whisper.
“The people who live around that loch, their monster doesn’t even exist. They had to create it.”
Part IV:
A Dive Too Deep
28
I wake in the middle of the night to the soft bump of landing gear hitting some unknown tarmac. Ness has moved to another seat, one that faces forward, and is peering outside. My only sense of how long we’ve been in the air is the two meals we were served. It felt like an eight-hour flight, but it could’ve been four or it could’ve been twelve.
The air outside is humid. I imagine we’re in the Caribbean, where I know Ness owns several islands. It occurs to me that I don’t have my passport, which might get interesting. The mystery of our destination will soon be solved by the nationality of the jail I end up in. But we don’t head for a customs building or the small airport when we deplane. Our bags are moved directly from the jet to an idling helicopter, and our trip has now taken on the air of the absurd.
It only gets crazier.
The helicopter takes us up and out to sea. I’ve ridden on a lot of helicopters in my line of work, and the mix of exhilaration and terror never lessens. I gaze down at the airport and then the wider land for hints about our location. The sporadic dots of lights from homes and a few moving cars reveal the outline of a small island. Tiny, in fact. I’m not great with distances, and our altitude and the dark make it even trickier, but the entire island looks to be no bigger across than Manhattan is long.
“Bermuda?” I ask. I have to raise my voice over the noisy rotor. This helicopter isn’t as sturdy and well insulated as the one we took from Ness’s house.
“Tristan da Cunha,” Ness says, which doesn’t solve the mystery of where in the hell we are.
“Never heard of it,” I confess.
“It’s about as far from anywhere as you can get.” He leans close so we don’t have to shout. “About twelve hundred miles from Saint Helena and fifteen hundred from South Africa.”
“You brought me to the Southern Hemisphere?” I ask incredulously.
“You wanted to see what led me to those shells, right?”
I settle back in my seat. The scope of this story has shifted yet again, and not for the first time, I wonder why Ness is even taking me on this journey. He confessed as to the veracity of the shells on the plane. With the verdict no longer in doubt, that leaves only his justification. But why care what I think?
Suddenly, an answer to this last question falls into place.
The last time Ness made me keep something off the record, he gave me a glimpse of the truth in his grandfather’s journal, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to write my piece afterward. Perhaps he hopes he can do the same here, that he can show me some validation that would make the highly illegal seem perfectly okay. Maybe I was right to suspect that he’s working on an eco-education program, some way of raising awareness of species that have gone extinct. He said he wanted redemption. This fits. It all fits, but I don’t see how it will keep me from writing a piece about it. Unless he wants me to write that story. Unless I’m a tool for his ultimate redemption.
I hate that my mind goes to places like this, but it does, like filings to a magnet. When Ness takes an interest in something out the window, I lean across to check for myself, to get my thoughts elsewhere. Below, I see the lights of a ship. My stomach sinks as I realize we’re going to land on it.
Rain beads on the window—the stars and the moon are obscured as we drop through the clouds—and I wonder what the chances are that we left a rainstorm, flew however many thousands of miles to the other side of the globe, and are landing in yet another shower.
Red and white flashing lights illuminate the aft deck of the large ship. I can see a giant ‘H’ marked out on the deck. The helicopter touches down with a jarring double-bounce and a thump. Ness steadies me as I lurch into him. Men with glowing orange cones signal one last thing to the pilot, and then the door opens, and a man in a jumpsuit holding a large umbrella helps me out of the helicopter.
“Welcome to the Keldysh,” the man says to me. He shakes Ness’s hand. “Hello, boss.”
“Lieutenant Jameson, Maya Walsh of the Times. Maya, this is Lieutenant Jameson. First mate on this vessel.”
“You can call me Jimbo, ma’am.”