The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories Page 11

  Was all this not enough, he wondered, to light a small fire in the wintery soul of his dour companion? Though Mueller was no longer visible, his presence remained like a potential danger lurking on the shadowy verge of his memory. Was he asleep in the hot sun? Or was he ruminating on more of his disheartening thoughts?

  “An andabata was a Roman gladiator who fought mounted wearing a helmet without eyeslits,” Mueller whispered.

  “All that is ancient history,” the Captain said, impatiently. “Another time and another culture. So what’s the point in bringing it up?”

  “He could not see his enemy.”

  “What enemy?” the Captain asked.

  Since Mueller did not answer, the Captain returned to his recollections. With his eyes still closed he beheld, in three dimensions, his teak desk salvaged from a German barkentine that had gone on the rocks at Fort Point, Burma teak hauled by elephants with chains out of the rain forests of Mandalay and rafted down the Irrawaddy River, his father said. Smooth, fine-grained teak with coat after coat of glossy, hard tung oil varnish that reflected his face in its honey dark depths. Clear autumn nights, light southwest breezes whispering in the eaves and homework at his teakwood desk, the omphalos, the center of his universe, birthplace of knowledge, geography, history, compositions, literature, mathematics and dreams in the yellow glow of the kerosene lantern.

  And his books! Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; Melville’s Moby-Dick, Typee and Omoo; Nathaniel Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator; and the stained and broken-backed volume of Madame Bovary kept hidden in a drawer. Those were the bright times, of preparation for his voyages of discovery, his quest of the Grail. Bowditch was his armor and sword. Sun time, star time, hour angles, right ascension, declination, azimuth, fabulous words, like the crown and scepter, symbolizing the power and the glory. Mathematics was its essence. A knowledge of mathematics separates the deck hands from the officers, his father said. It is the queen of the sciences. But for him it was more. It was an adventure into abstraction with no guidance but the rules of the game. So what mattered the lateness of the hour when a problem was to be solved, an equation learned. To be too conscious was no illness, he reflected, it was a joy.

  What more could a boy want? And what more could Mueller say, the Captain wondered. There was no refutation, no gloom to be cast over those happy reminiscences. Yet he was certain that Mueller would come up with something. Whoever or whatever he was, he was anathema, a paradigm of pessimism, the negation of life. The essence of Mueller was non-being.

  No matter, the Captain concluded, he would soon be free of his disturbing intrusions. Before long the crew would be back, the lines cast off and the Caspar would be on her way North to Eureka and beyond. Once through the Gate, he’d take the North Channel past Point Bonita. With a land wind blowing, the sea would be calm in the lee of the mountains. By evening, the wind would be gone, the air clear, and the night sky awash with stars from horizon to horizon.

  6

  Except for the soughing aloft, not a sound could be heard either on the ship or on the dock. Nor from the deck chair beside him. Maybe Mueller had finally grown tired of talking and had actually gone to sleep. Or, and this was almost too much to hope for, this querulous passenger of his would turn out to be a figment of his imagination, an unconscious anxiety manifesting itself in the form of some melancholic doppelganger.

  “Some mysteries are best left unsolved.”

  It was Mueller again, and by the ominously low pitch in his whispery voice, it was obvious more would follow, a chilling epilogue, no doubt, the Captain thought glumly, to the happy memories of his youth.

  “Fabulous dreams are often close companions of fabulous fears, which they either complement or destroy.”

  “Destroy what?” the Captain asked, trying to conceal his agitation.

  “The fears that provide the vitality of ambition and of life itself.”

  Now how could anyone possibly respond to such absurd assertions, the Captain wondered, angrily. Yet he felt compelled to say something, if only to refute Mueller’s arrogant certitudes.

  “You do not mention faith, which transcends all fears and clears the path to fulfillment.”

  “Faith is the shield of the fearful. It can protect one from the fear of death,” Mueller conceded, “but not of terror unbridled, of fading forever and never dying.”

  “Faith is so tightly bound up with the mysterious vacillations of feeling,” the Captain rushed on, “that no amount of reason can alter it once it has taken root, nor discourage its growth, nor plant the seed of a new faith.”

  He paused to consider his statement, its scope and significance, then realized that he had either lost his thread of thought or that he had had none to begin with.

  “I once had a book,” Mueller said, “a slender, pale green volume that, in my innocence, I felt certain held the key to the secret of the universe. Neither the Bible, the great works of philosophy, nor the wisdom of the sages engendered in me such glorious hope.”

  “And the book?” the Captain asked, apprehensively.

  “Hartman’s Elements of Analytic Geometry.”

  “Hope in geometry?”

  “Not only hope, but the entire gamut of emotional experience from pleasure to terror.”

  “Pleasure, yes. Hope, conceivably. But terror?”

  “You, of all people, must know that to be born with a reasoning mind is reason enough to know terror all the days of one’s life.”

  “To be too conscious . . . ,” the Captain began, hesitated, then withdrew into silence. Yet though his mind was clear and his senses alert to the undiminished whine of the wind, and even to the sound of retreating footsteps across the deck, he was powerless to stop what he intuited Mueller was about to tell him.

  “Had it not been for my father,” Mueller began, “I would have left school and wandered about. I would have taken odd jobs in the fields, in the factories, in the gold mines. I would have written simple poetry, expressed my nature. But there was my father, a tired little man, pottering in his garden, dreaming perhaps of the high days of his youth and waiting for me to perpetuate his waning life.

  “I plunged deeper into my studies. The night stars I saw no more and only a little of the sun. Then one night I was working. A simple problem. An asymptote, a line sweeping down in a beautiful curve to meet the x-axis at infinity. The solution of the problem was infinity. There, I marked it so with the sign of infinity, the eight on its side. Tired, I looked at the symbol and retraced it with my pencil. It was a simple problem, the answer was infinity. No. It had two answers. I marked the coordinates, laid in a line approaching the y-axis. A beautiful curve sweeping up to infinity. Infinity on both ends. I marked it so with the sign of infinity, the eight on its side. I retraced the sign with my pencil. It grew deeper and blacker. It was a simple problem. The answer was infinity on both ends.

  “Outside my window I heard the whispering of the sea wind, low in its tone as the voice of one who has come far and is weary.

  “The problem was solved. It was clearly intelligible, set down in an equation, the coordinates marked, the curve drawn in. The answer was infinity both ways. How far to infinity? A long way, a weary way. And then what? Nothing perhaps, only infinity again. An endless journey growing smaller, whispering away into nothingness.

  “Pallid moonbeams, slanting through trembling black leaves, lighted the bare walls of my room above the shaded lamp. A cold light, polarized light, electromagnetic waves vibrating in but one plane, cast off light from the sun, but still a cold light. And the answer was infinity. It held, for there was no meeting of the lines, only in that one place which was no place.

  “The pine branches rustled. The sea wind murmured in the autumn night, whispering low and hollow as it slipped away over the hills into the darkness. An endless journey, on and away, sweeping down the curve to infinity.

  “But there were two answers, the beginning and the end. Two curves joined in the
fullness of the moment. The upswing of the wind’s dark emergence from the sea. A fleeting passage, movement and a voice under the clear night sky, sad in its tone, the sadness of despair. Then onward into the endless night.

  “Slowly, as slowly as time bearing the weight of the universe, my mind received the image of the thing that was nothing. Cold, vague, beyond dimension, flowing as the wind flows. The mind that had reached for the substance found only the shadow. And the shadow was nothing, only the absence, unseen by the eyes, but appearing.

  “The lamp cast its short cone of whiteness in a circle on the paper. There the lines were clear and black, the equation set down in formulated order, the conclusion, ultimate, absolute, unvariable, the end of the end, the end of all things, x = ffi, y = ffi;. And the curve on the paper, like the sun, a moment of light bound by darkness, born to flame, to burn out, finally to become a dark star clinging to its orbital track, or to fall away and drift in the void, alone with the winds of space.

  “Outside, the wind whimpered like an endless dying. It breathed the chill of late night through the half open window. I turned out the light. The moon had set, the room dissolved in darkness. I was alone with the wind. Slowly, the image that had formed crept deeper into my mind to flow like a downward coldness into my chest, a paralyzing flux that spread through all my body.

  “For a moment I was held by the magnitude of a fear that passed beyond the verge of time and space, crushed down with suffocating closeness in timeless, drifting wind, aware only of the ether hum of eternity. I closed the window and pulled the shade. I flung the heavy drapes across. Then I fell back in my chair exhausted and listened to the beating of my heart.”

  Though the Captain could no longer feel the heat from the sun, nor hear the whistling of the north wind above him, his mind had grown suddenly lucid. “It seems to me,” he said, “that you were not seeking pleasure in the abstractions of mathematics as much as an escape into self-forgetfulness. But once the problem was solved and the answer set down in formulated order, a new and much greater problem arose proving that self-forgetfulness is no impregnable asylum.”

  “Between every action and every thought there is a perilous moment,” Mueller said, “in which the abiding consciousness of one’s essential nothingness rushes in like a cold wind from infinite space. To extinguish the intervals of nullity and keep running is the game of life.”

  7

  CAPTAIN: “The third noble truth proclaims the release from sorrow is by the extinction of the ego with its desire for pleasure, its sense of duty, and its fear of death.”

  MUELLER: “There is only one release from ego. All others are self-deceptions.”

  CAPTAIN (sighing): “So familiar. I once knew someone who looked like you, thought like you, spoke like you. Somewhere, I’m sure.”

  MUELLER: “I have a common face so I wear no mask. Therefore, everyone sees in me someone they once knew but can’t quite remember. They’re troubled. They think of me between times. They search their memories. Still they’d rather I be masked.”

  CAPTAIN: “The fruit from the tree of knowledge is sometimes bitter. Truth is bitter.”

  MUELLER: “There is no truth. One man’s truth is another man’s fable.”

  CAPTAIN: “There is faith.”

  MUELLER: “The dead end of hope.”

  CAPTAIN: “I have known honorable men. I have practiced honesty.”

  MUELLER: “To avoid the appearance of the fact that death ends what life begins.”

  CAPTAIN: “Nothing ends and nothing begins. That’s the appalling paradox.”

  MUELLER (sounding pleased): “So you recognize the dilemma?”

  CAPTAIN: “The terror beside which death is sweet. To keep from thinking the unthinkable I have studied, worked, read, learned much, accomplished much, all in the approved fashion. I have spared others pain, even to suffering myself. To be busy with good works is the highest good.”

  MUELLER: “To whistle, hum a tune, pace the floor, count one’s heartbeats to ten times ten thousand.”

  CAPTAIN (weakly): “I have known love.”

  MUELLER: “Still the paradox intrudes.”

  CAPTAIN (after a long pause): “Tell me. Who are you?”

  MUELLER: “Do you need an answer?”

  CAPTAIN: “No.”

  MUELLER: “Then you know me.”

  CAPTAIN (wearily): “The voice that whispers from the bottom of the well.”

  MUELLER: “You have struggled against me, tried to lose me in this dark alley or that crowded street.”

  CAPTAIN: “One way or another, yet necessarily I believe.”

  MUELLER: “But no longer. Not now.”

  CAPTAIN: “Even now.”

  MUELLER: “There are no roads left. You have travelled them all.”

  CAPTAIN: “There is one.”

  MUELLER: “Ah yes, so I must leave you.”

  CAPTAIN: “The end of our game?”

  MUELLER: “The game is ended.”

  CAPTAIN: “And the loser?”

  MUELLER: “I concede. But I made you earn it. Farewell now.”

  CAPTAIN: “You are still going north?”

  MUELLER: “Back to the cold and the darkness, to the land of the unblest barbarians.”

  CAPTAIN: “Wait. Go with me.”

  MUELLER: “I have work to do.”

  CAPTAIN: “Keeping men busy?”

  MUELLER: “Spreading the WORD.”

  CAPTAIN: “The word for no word, the cold beyond panic.”

  MUELLER: “Only for those I can reach.”

  CAPTAIN: “Go with me and leave men in peace.”

  MUELLER: “They will not let me. I am their strength. I will unite them. Eventually.”

  CAPTAIN (reflecting in the enclosing darkness): “You have been a fearful goader with your fork, a stern disciplinarian.”

  MUELLER: “Do you regret me?”

  CAPTAIN (adrift now in full blackness): “No, not really since . . .”

  MUELLER: “Since what?”

  CAPTAIN (fading): “. . . there was . . .”

  MUELLER: “Was what?”

  CAPTAIN: “. . . no other choice.”

  EPILOGUE

  Hoskins, tears flowing down his grizzled cheeks, stood on the gangway platform staring vacantly at the black Ford panel moving slowly down the dock amid clouds of screaming gulls in startled flight. Near the corner of the warehouse the panel pulled over to let a cab pass through, then disappeared into the alley that led to the street.

  Oblivious to the cab and the circling gulls, Hoskins continued to stare after the departed panel. Then suddenly, almost desperately, he jerked a large, checkered blue kerchief from the back pocket of his dungarees, wiped away his tears, then blew his nose angrily. “God damn son-of-a-bitch,” he sobbed. “God damn it to hell!”

  The cab, a shiny new Checker, pulled up in front of the gangway and a man in a dark blue business suit got out, paid the driver and hurried toward the ship.

  “Now who the hell is this?” Hoskins muttered, torn between anger and grief. “Probably the weirdo passenger old Midnight cleaned up the cabin for. Well, he better go right back to where he came from because he won’t be goin’ nowhere on this old tub.”

  Before he could yell down to hold the cab, the man, struggling with a big briefcase, a heavy overcoat, and what looked like a portable typewriter, was already puffing up the steep incline. He paused on the deck to get his breath, then introduced himself.

  “My name is Mueller, William Mueller.” He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to Hoskins. “Here is my ticket. I’ll be going as far as Astoria. However, if the Caspar is going to call at Portland, I’ll stay aboard for the trip up the Columbia River.” His low pitched voice was barely audible above the wind. “You must be Captain Larson.”

  “I’m Hoskins, the chief engineer. If it’s the skipper you want, you’re just thirty minutes too late.”

  “But it’s only one o’clock,” Mueller said. “Mr. O’Hare, t
he agent, told me you wouldn’t be leaving until two or three this afternoon. I had hoped to talk with the Captain before departure and then get to work as soon as possible.”

  “Talk? Work?”

  “I’m from the University Press and we are doing a book on the steam schooners of the West Coast. So far our research is based mainly on Captain Larson’s articles in the Shipping News and other periodicals. However, since he is the only living authority on the subject we deemed it indispensable to talk with him in the environment he knows so well. From his writings, he appears to be a man of intellect and, at the same time, a warm humanitarian.”

  “He was all that and more,” Hoskins said, gloomily. “He was the only man I ever knew who was afraid of nothing.”

  “Was?” Mueller asked. “Where is he now?”

  “You passed him on your way in. He was in that black Ford panel on his way to the morgue.”

  The Caspar

  Because of the high tide caused by the rains and the heavy south winds, it was possible to tow the old Caspar far up into Richardson’s Bay before she ran onto the mud. The tug carried her anchor out from the bow and the deckhands shackled her chain onto the mooring bitt. Then they went away and left her to rot.