The Year of Broken Glass Read online

  Every seaman knows if you want to keep a boat under good stars you don’t do that. Of course Horace was no seaman, and he was insistent that the word Tsulquate was too awkward and meant nothing to him. So he renamed her Princess Belle, after Miriam’s second daughter, Mirabelle, and it was at the re-christening that I first met his wife. Miriam, with the long legs and hair like a head full of sunlight. She wore a white sleeveless dress with little purple flowers stitched across it. Let me be clear, I rarely if ever remember such details. I’ve been a man mostly driven by my own darkness and the sea-wind inside me, and I’ve not often taken notice of a woman in my life.

  Alone is how I’ve preferred to be, with the sea. I’ve known men who’ve tried to have both and I’ve seen nothing but divisiveness and sorrow come of it. I don’t claim to be a man of wisdom, but if the sea has taught me one thing it’s this: of all that a man desires he can have and hold only a precious small amount, and even that is ephemeral and always under threat of being lost in the ever-coming storm. It may be different for those who live their lives on land, relatively safe and stable as it is, but out here the limits are well set, and no one survives well who doesn’t live within them. So I’d forgone the comfort and love of women for the sea, and it was for the first time at that christening that I felt what it might be like to be in love, or want to be in love, with a woman.

  Perhaps it was because I’d been off the deep sea for years by that point, two on the farm, one on the tugs and one in French Creek, or perhaps it was that I was ageing and it’s only natural to find someone who might care for you, be there for you, in those years when caring for yourself becomes a difficulty. Maybe I had a sense the days I would still be capable of going to sea were numbered, that eventually the sea inside a woman like Miriam would be the closest I would be able to come. At any rate, I lost myself to her as I watched her break the bottle over the bowsprit, and I’ve not been the same man since.

  It’s been one thing for me to feel as I have. It’s another to do something about those feelings. What I did with Miriam those first few years was to remain in French Creek, connected to her through her husband’s boat, which I cared for as if it were my own. Knowing the curse brought upon it with its re-christening, and that this woman whom I loved might someday sail out onto the open ocean with her clueless husband at the helm, meant the Princess Belle needed to be as seaworthy as she could be to see them through.

  It was quite some time after Horace’s death that I finally made my feelings known to her. Another thing I’ve learned at sea is that timing really is everything. It means the difference between taking the right wave broadside when turning in the midst of a storm, or taking the wrong one on the stern-quarter. It’s the split seconds in life that often make the difference. In this case I was months if not years off, and I can only say again it must have been my years on land that handicapped me. For me there’s no clarity when the day-to-day is spent in too close a proximity to too many other people.

  And so when Miriam asked me to take her up to Chatterbox Falls on the boat, I misread her. To make a long story short, she was paying her final respects to her husband while I was anticipating romance. It’s hard to believe when one feels so strongly for another that they can’t or don’t feel the same way. And perhaps she would have come to it, given time, but while she was carrying an urn of her husband’s ashes on that trip, intent on spreading them below the falls, I was carrying the expectation, as I’ve said, of a romantic voyage. The disparity of the two eventually led to my being replaced as caretaker of the Princess Belle, though in the gracious way Miriam operates it came in the way of a job offer from her husband’s old friend Arnault Vericombe, and I’ve worked happily for him the four years since. In that time, living here aboard the Naacal Warrior, I’ve come to accept the sea as my rightful bride, and I’ve thought less and less of Miriam and of women in general, forgoing even my usual excursions to brothels, learning instead to be at peace with my sobriety and my solitude. Living that first truth of the sea, keeping only what I need—my clothes, my glasses, my books and my tools—here with me.

  Setting out on this crossing in search of Miriam has been enough to blow me wide open, though. And then a day into it, Anna. Anna with her all-salt-and-tears body. Her angry eyes and mother’s wrists, elegant and strong. I’d give anything for a taste of her, while all the while she thinks of nothing but her husband. I’ve had half a mind to sabotage the main just to strand us out here, but I’m too proud of my work to do that. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a lousy engineer. No ship I’ve ever worked on has not made its crossing soundly on account of mechanical failure and I can’t, despite myself, bring myself to tarnish that record. At any rate, he’s here now, contrary to what I’d planned for or expected, and I now have a much bigger decision to make.

  This cellphone I’m holding in my hand was given to me a year ago by Jeremy Gibbon. I first met him also through Horace. Shortly after the re-christening of the boat he invited me to the Glass Globe to share Christmas with his family. It’s true Horace and I took an instant liking to each other. Of the books I keep, the works of Herman Melville are prominent, not only for their sheer volume, but for their importance to me. Once a whaler, always a whaler, I suppose. Herman said that friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is the only truth. That’s how it was with Horace and I, despite the fact that he was a piss-poor excuse for a seaman and I was jealous of both his boat and his woman. Still, I would have turned down the invitation if it weren’t for my even stronger feelings for Miriam and my inability to deny myself the opportunity to be around her. So I went for three days and nights and that’s where I met Jeremy.

  He was a scrawny little schoolboy then. He must have been no more than twenty-one. Miriam’s daughter, Mirabelle, had met him at school in Montreal and they’d been dating for a number of years by then, I think. Long enough that he was spending the holidays there with her family instead of with his own, though I’ve since learned that his own isn’t much of a family at all as far as holiday get-togethers go. He’s the only child of two American foreign aid diplomats and he spent his childhood moving from one poor, war-torn region of the world to the next. By the time he began his secondary studies at McGill—Montreal being the closest thing he has to a home city as his parents keep a rural farmhouse in the Gatineau Hills—he’d studied at ten different international schools, having been moved almost once a year throughout his whole childhood, quite often from father to mother and back to father, pinballing between his parents’ different postings, living in hotels or guarded rentals, even at times in refugee camps. As he tells it, his longest stint in one place before he moved as a young man to Montreal was inside an armoured compound in Kigali, Rwanda, where his parents were given a rare posting together for two years following the genocide.

  After he completed his studies at McGill, Jeremy joined the Peace Corps and spent a number of years living in East Africa. As I understand it, the distance eventually put an end to his relationship with Mirabelle, so you can imagine my surprise when Arnault came down to the boat a couple of years ago, Jeremy Gibbon in tow. Freshly shaven, in clean blue khakis and a button-up shirt, I almost didn’t recognize him, though I’ve yet to forget a face. He’d put on plenty of pounds since I’d last seen him that Christmas many years past, and he’d acquired a businessman-like air he’d not had back then either. As it turns out, after his time in Africa Jeremy did an MBA at Stanford, and his visit with Arnault was precipitated by his need for venture capital investors.

  While Jeremy was living in Benin, building schoolhouses and irrigation systems and mud cook-ovens in the poorest of poor people’s homes, he’d lost his closest friend at the time—a young African man who was his neighbour and as Jeremy tells it now, his “dark doppelganger”—to a kerosene house fire. When he was at Stanford he and his new best friend, now his partner and president of B Light Social Enterprises, brainstormed on Jeremy’s desire to rid the poor, rural world of kerosene lighting, and the
y eventually came up with the B Light (as in, “Let there be light”) Suntorch, a little plastic lantern filled with LED lights, topped with a small solar panel and equipped with another auxiliary panel to be mounted outside the owner’s home or on their roof. For ten bucks, or six months’ kerosene costs, they offered the peasants of the world a safe, clean, environmentally friendly way to light their lives. It was ingenious, and the timing couldn’t have been better. Over the years it has made Jeremy a reasonably wealthy man, which is why this cellphone he’s given me presents such a dilemma now.

  Miriam was one of the first people Jeremy went to for money with his idea, and just as she had with me, she tactfully pawned him off on Arnault. Which, at first, was a match made in heaven. Arnault invested, and took a keen interest in Jeremy and his endeavour. This was reciprocated by Jeremy’s interest in Arnault’s Churchwardian ideas, his obsession with all things Mu. Jeremy became as curious about and involved in Arnault’s Children of Mu as Arnault did in the momentous fortunes of B Light and in the triple-bottom-line world of social enterprise and First World altruism which was the legacy given to Jeremy by his parents. At a certain point it seemed Arnault was always headed overseas to see Jeremy, or else off to some conference on the Naacal that Jeremy would also be attending.

  Arnault, I think, was so tickled pink by Jeremy’s success, and by the validation his interest in the Children of Mu offered, that he failed to see him for what he was: an ambitious, self-congratulatory, self-driven young man with an angel’s tongue and a head full of devil’s ideas. It has been to his own detriment that he’s done so, and thus far to my gain, though I’m not sure where my best interests now lie. There’s that old saying, it takes a rat to sniff out a rat, and Jeremy and I are in many ways of the same ilk. We both see the angles and play them all to our own best advantage.

  He came to me shortly after he and Arnault had their falling-out. They’d both been first-hand audience to the Sohqui myth tablets found in the Marquesas and had contributed together to the efforts to decipher the symbols that were their text. It was in the aftermath of that deciphering that their friendship fell apart. They became polarized in their ideas of how to respond to this new, potentially world-altering prophecy. Arnault felt, as is plain to see, that in discovering the tablets they’d been entrusted by the same power that cast the curse to see now to its proper undoing. He felt it was clear that humans had done their penance, that enough of us had come to see our wrongs clearly, and that we were now being offered a miraculous means of redemption. I didn’t know, nor could I guess, what other view Jeremy could possibly have on the subject until he showed up at the boat a few months after Arnault informed me of his withdrawal from the group of investors supporting B Light and of Jeremy’s expulsion from the Children of Mu.

  He came at night, alone, and from the moment he stepped into the cabin I knew his visit was of the secretive kind. I almost immediately asked him to leave, not wanting to get caught up in anything which might lead to the kind of situation I’m in now, standing at the bow of this boat as it cuts quickly through black water beneath a bright full moon, trying to decide which is the lesser of two evils, to give up the chance for money or for love, though it may be, if I play things properly, that I can still find a way to come out of this with both.

  Jeremy cut to the chase at that meeting before I had much of a chance to decide whether I wanted to hear him out or not. He offered me this phone and said there could very well come a time when I might have information he required, and that if I were to use the phone to share that information with him I would be greatly rewarded. He slid the phone across the galley table toward me as he said this, then picked up my pack of cigarettes beside it, took one out, and lit up. A clear gesture of dominance. I had a mind to snap the little rich prick in half right then and there. But any man of my class will understand when I say that, hate the money men as we may, they’re the hand that feeds us, and breaking that hand only ever leads to one’s own hunger. Better to polish the rings on each finger, take what crumbs are offered, and learn to turn the anger elsewhere, inward if it must be, because a little of that eating at the insides is a lot better than the body eating itself for lack of nourishment. I took the phone, but first I had to ask.

  “So what’s the deal?” I’d said to him, lighting myself a smoke as well, so that we were both sitting together in the cloud of our making, reluctant confidants, co-conspirators now against the man who’d given me the best living I’d ever managed, and Jeremy the chance to build the company of his dreams and grow rich in doing so. “What could you possibly have against Arnault’s preparations? Why wouldn’t you want to help the prophesy be fulfilled if the float is found?”

  “When the float is found,” he’d said in reply. “Not if. It will be found. The tablets are very clear. It will be found soon.” I was less sure of his and Arnault’s convictions then than I am now, after all that has happened since Anna’s husband found the float, but I wasn’t interested in that argument then, I wanted an answer to my question, so I just flicked my ash into the tray between us and sat back, conceding the point, and he continued.

  “I’ve seen all kinds of horrors in my life. Piles of bodies five feet high lining the streets. I had a friend in Kigali who watched his uncle disembowel his entire family, his pregnant sister—my friend’s mother—included, because they were Tutsi sympathizers and he was Interahamwe. In Calcutta I knew a girl who was forced to suck off the landlord as part of her family’s rent every Friday. She was fifteen when I knew her and had been living like that since she could remember.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve seen my share of such things.”

  “I know what you’ve seen, Figgs. You’ve seen bars and brothels in rough port towns full of fifteen-year-old whores and men with nothing but hate in their eyes. You’ve seen some violence and some poverty. You’ve lived and worked with mates who couldn’t kick the smack and were walking wraiths. But have you ever seen a father cut his son’s arm off at the elbow while soldiers half his age rape his wife and his daughter? There is no limit to the vileness of humanity when it’s driven in desperation beyond sanity. If we see these kinds of things in our wealthy world it’s only rarely, if ever. They’re freak episodes, not the endemic symptoms of poverty. We’ve had the assistance of our technologies so long, we don’t even realize the half of what’s in our nature, what we’d be like, were like, without it. Those people doing those things, that’s what we are, given the impetus, given lesser conditions than you or I are accustomed to. We take for granted the superiority of our reason in the West, and that doesn’t come without some legitimacy, but I’ll tell you this much. Take the buffer our technologies have given us from our own selves and from nature away, and we’re back to the baseness of every other species. It’s all about survival, and the people I’ve known in my life, and I’ve known both the richest and the poorest, they’re all the same. It’s their circumstances that differ. And what makes those circumstances different is access to wealth and technology.”

  “What does that have to do with not wanting to see the prophesy fulfilled?”

  “The tablets say that there will be brought upon the earth a great shift, a sea change, as a result of the Sohqui extinction. It is Arnault’s belief that fulfillment of the cursed fisherman’s quest, the shattering of the float, is the only rightful outcome. But nowhere in the tablets does it say that this must occur, or even that it should. As our technologies have become more advanced and ubiquitous, so has the abundance of the natural, non-human world been diminished. There is no question of this. But there’s also been a great diminishment in human suffering. We’ve built a society here in the West where a majority of people can live long, reasonably healthy and happy lives if they so choose, relatively free of tyranny, scarcity, discomfort and disease. It is thousands of years of our ancestors’ toil and struggle and suffering upon which we stand with that choice. Arnault subscribes to a Garden-of-Eden environmentalism, and in so doing he makes much of all that
’s been lost and little of what we’ve gained, all the while living with all those comforts and conveniences as a wealthy man in the safety and plenty of the First World, as if it’s all just a matter of course. What do you think will happen if the float is broken and cast into the Mauna Kea? Do you think the Sohqui will reappear and with all their magic bring about a fundamental change in who we are? There is ample evidence of war and vulgarity and oppression amongst the Naacal. It was them who fished the Sohqui to extinction. They were no different than us Figgs. They were us.”

  “But they weren’t, because they didn’t have our technologies. You misunderstand Arnault. He believes in our advancements as much as anyone. And he believes that if we’re given another chance, if the abundance of the world is restored, this time we’ll have the foresight and the tools, the technologies, to use it and care for it properly.”

  “Right. And we’ll all do it together, in cooperation. One big family of brotherly love. And what do you think, Figgs? Do you think we’ll all just calmly share that renewed abundance?”

  “I don’t know, Jeremy. This isn’t about what I think.”

  “Yes it is. It’s about what every one of us thinks, or perhaps doesn’t think. It’s about when and how we don’t think, or that point at which our thinking changes from the kind we are engaged in here to the kind that’s hard-wired to survival. We’re a complicated animal, but that’s all. If Arnault’s renewal were to come to fruition its only real outcome would be to postpone the inevitable, and in so doing proliferate and prolong the kinds of human suffering I’ve seen. We are right now coming to the fullness of our waxing as the animal world is waning. It’s only natural. And as we’re able to rely less and less on the non-human world for our survival, we’ve been forced to develop and proliferate our technologies to take its place, and we’ve had to cooperate in doing so. It is our common connection, our reliance upon the tools of our making, and therefore upon each other, that will bring us closer and closer to the end of suffering.”