Michael McCarthy

Shadow-yawl

I knew somebody would be watching. That there would be some set of eyes was certain, and I knew that going in. Should have known, at least. I don’t know what he sees, or hopes to see, for I must look out on the bright ocean, as my eyes (my I) retreat into the dark cavern of my skull. The waves shoot sunlight back, just to remind me such light exists, and regrettably, it is by their light that I see. And what I see I know, what I don’t see know not. Mainly, I see absences. No radio, no flare gun, no way to cry for help. Nothing to alert others to my presence; that was the design going in. I disappeared without a trace, as I planned, as if I disappeared with my wife. I see most often, though, the absence that surrounds me, the absence of life in the dead sea-plain, nothing but distance, the only landmark the shadow-yawl, black and unreal. But I see it, so I must know it. Surely. 

Now I content myself by repeating that nobody knows where I am, or even suspects it. I chose this cheap tiny yawl not despite the fact but because I had never truly sailed before; nobody would think I could manage navigation to Hawaii. Chances are they’re scouring the coasts of California, Oregon, or Washington. Maybe I misled them as far as Canada! . . .Or maybe I’ve misled myself, ventured to waters for which I’m unprepared. But I’m no newcomer. I remember my sailing lessons in Malibu when I was young enough to dream dreams and brash enough to think them possible. The bright, bleached sun baked my pale skin a permanent red sunburn that the sailors and instructors around me shared. But their skin was calloused, weathered, aged, and scarred, and though I can’t remember a single one of them specifically, I do remember my envy. I wanted their skin, their boats, their stories, their adventures, their very lives, which I was too impatient to wait for, so I became a dictator on a boat, immediately and without being asked assumed the role of captain and brought every passenger, student and instructor alike, under my dominion. They let me, only because at that age they saw such audacity as cute, often funny, perhaps even indicative of a keen and ambitious spirit, or a grotesquely arrogant and self-serious one. You see, what I was depended on who was looking, so he who praised my—let’s call it enthusiasm—tying knots wouldn’t see me berating a clueless, teary-eyed little girl who had broken a sextant, just as that girl wouldn’t appreciate my fabulous way with knots. It’s all perspective. This is what I’ve learned, five decades after those classes, or rather what I’ve convinced myself of, for even that is about perspective. It’s all relative. Everything. 

That’s how I know the man in the shadow-yawl doesn’t see me. He sees my boat, my body, maybe even my face, but he doesn’t see me through time. He sees a man embarking on some fatuous, late-life crisis odyssey, his skin red from the voyage and not from a lifetime of voyages, but he doesn’t know where I was or am going, whether fleeing from or journeying towards. I sail just as steadfastly as him, or so it looks, so I hope that façade adequately deceives his inscrutable gaze. If not, he’ll derive from this one image of a helpless man everything: a crime, a man on the run, but no manhunt (They still haven’t found out. In a way, neither have I.). Beyond that, the impetuous little boy commandeering a boat will blitz across his mind, if only for a second, and he will have done what I can’t tolerate anyone, especially him, doing: knowing me. But right now, I’m not worried. It’s night, and the moon is a meek sliver of light. You can’t see this red by the moon.

Nevertheless, I feel eyes. You know the feeling. I look over my shoulder, but I know I’m alone, and thus not. The shadow-yawl trails, ceaselessly, but what concerns me now is the dark, nearly indiscernible image I see reflected in the dead-still, black, beckoning water. As I stare in, he stares out, and I don’t know what he sees, though I know he sees me. I’m a pale skeleton of a body, charged with the power to see, to observe, to look and look back. The water distorts the face I see, the soft, subtle waves bending my expression now into a smile, then into a scowl, soon into some pensive frown, for that’s what I feel coming on. But when all the distortions fade, the surface gives way to a deeper, blacker depth, and there, I see a reflection I refuse to recognize, a long-haired woman with closed eyes who by looking in looks out, to me, draws my gaze deeper into the depths in which she’s trapped. Around her spreads a blood-red mist, bleeding out of one wound into the expanse of the sea. And I am afraid. In something so massive, I’m so small, and my thoughts can’t contend with this, so they scatter. The stare of the woman of closed eyes casts them away, and I’m left with myself, staring, staring back, trying to comprehend something so unfathomably vast, not knowing that it’s so vast as to comprehend me.

**

The shadow-yawl is crafted of a dark wood, lacquered, smooth, luxuriant but not snobbish, stylish but not gaudy, just enough to indicate a suavity in aesthetic distinction on the part of the sailor, who must have been proud when he first brought it to the dock, who must have bragged to the other sailors about his purchase, who must have insisted they see the wooden detail, the spacious cabin—and if you look here, you can see the strength of the rudder and there, you can see the newest solar panels—and on and on and on until the sailors around him must have admired it, nodded their heads in half-hearted approval, and assured him, Yes you picked a fine boat but then asked him, Where are you gonna go. To this, the sailor would stammer some response, not a good one, for he predicted only adulation, but he would respond nonetheless and say that he would go to . . . Tijuana! Or Hawaii! Or maybe South America! Anything, really. Anything to prove that he wasn’t a vain braggart—or wasn’t just a vain braggart because he had some self-awareness—anything to show he had as sturdy sea-legs as anybody (like a petulant child in a sailing class, red in the face?), and he would go, anywhere, anytime, since the sea called out to him, enticed him to its isolated waters where a spindrift twirls sunlight at its fingertips, where light journeys down blue after blue shades until it vanishes in those dim depths, where ego, wit, and daring are well-matched with the omnipresent, omnipotent, omnivorous sea. That said, the owner of the shadow-yawl was tested, and though he didn’t lose, he didn’t win. Like any test of mettle, it sanded him down to his innermost core, obliterated what was there to reveal what always and irrevocably would be—however small, however weak, but all the same indestructible. That dirty, unwashed, agonized mass of flesh in the belly of the shadow-yawl—that’s what’s left. He needs nothing now after glimpsing the depths of his sea.

So he isn’t what you’d call a master of the waves or even the master of his own vessel. Unable to harness the currents and winds for his aims, he must yield to their whims and go where they carry him, without feeling, without regret, without hope, only a tireless patience, almost inhuman, to sustain him. Brought to random shores unprepared, he stands with a quizzical look, a gnawing dismay displayed as momentary confusion. Who wouldn’t be confused? Delivered without the fulfillment of deliverance, each voyage’s end just a beginning to another, wave after wave after wave collapsing around him. But after so long, he begins to hear the message contained in those waves, reads the lines of those crests, hears syllables in the quiet roar; it is the ocean’s tongue, these sounds. Though he sits and listens attentively like a good student, he is, sadly, only beginning to learn to interpret the ocean’s message. Hard to tell, yes, with the squalid, aged condition of his yawl, all the time he must have spent learning, listening . . . I imagine him pensive in his cabin—he once gazed at the stars and felt they were his guide, but he abandoned them long ago, seeing nothing in their cold austerity he could not see in himself—staring at the floor, almost unaware of the ocean rocking him back and forth, back and forth, for the mind is steady, all that matters, sheltered behind the skull and his aged, grimy, and tired skin, all of it balanced on the fist under his chin (It’s much too cliché to imagine him with a long white beard). Just as the sea is steady, so too is the mind, as with the course, and the yawl.

It first appeared just before the four-hundred-mile mark. I thought little of it. Far too early to be the police or some investigator. Probably another sailor, maybe a companion, but most likely a mere passerby who will relieve the monotony for a day and then recede into the distance forever, unremembered. But we follow the same course, or he follows me, for he has remained behind me for four days now, inching closer day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, right now, when it is becoming clearer but still almost indistinguishable from the darkness around it. It rocks gently with the waves, like a slow metronome, counting time, but this doesn’t disturb me yet, not more than the waves. They threaten something larger, something unstoppable, something so much stronger than what I foresee my yawl surviving. Somehow, I don’t feel this way about the shadow-yawl. In it, I detect nothing truly human, no trace of anything fragile, indecisive, or meek. Only a force dark, mighty, inexplicable. Nothing that could possibly break.

**

. . . I hurt. My arms, my legs, my back. All over, I ache down to my bones, the first of all my sensations. Before I feel the rocking of the sea or smell the briny air or squint at the angry sun, I feel pain. Elderly stiffness and illnesses of unknown, unknowable origin, from which I thought myself immune through all the usual remedies: exercise, a healthy diet, fresh air, vitamins, and above all a purpose, something to drag me out of bed and push me forward, wherever forward leads. It’s this purpose that compels me to leave the cabin and meet the sunrise, stare it down, as I must, as I have forced myself to do, stare down the astronomical, the vast, the infinite. Every night, I wake hourly to check the course, ensure I’m not lost, and before I can rest, it’s dawn. I can’t tell whether the ocean is so fierce, the sun so violently bright, or whether the shadow-yawl is really there, or if these are only the outgrowth of my sleeplessness. The hot and beaming sun seems as large as the sky, infinite even, which of course it isn’t. What it contains is infinite. And what it contains is all a matter of staring because everything is a reflection of sight, every act of looking out really one of looking in, so my feelings towards the sunrise are no mystery. Something crept into the beautiful, killed it, and now the sunrise sickens me. The boat rocks back and forth, again and again, back and forth. It upsets my stomach. I think I’m getting seasick.

Which never happened to me before. When I was a child, I took it as a matter of pride. More than that, a sign that the sea had chosen me by some ineluctable logic as its surveyor, its conqueror, its king, and though I’ve reached the age where superstition ought to die and a sensible outlook ought to take root, I still believe this, despite myself, because of myself. The idea drove me to the sea again; without it, I would never have bought this boat or learned how to sail again, or left the dock in the first place. But now, I see what most do from the shore: the infinite, alien, unsolvable monotony of waves. As a child, I sought to understand them through force of will alone, smirking at the glints of sunlight in their crests as if they were some archaic calligraphy only I could read, but now, I am as illiterate as anybody else and have come to resent that child, the child I’d sought to emulate in this journey, who served as a model for courage, action, and commitment, traits nobody who’s young can truly have but must earn with grit and age and time. And I have not earned them. 

So I take it as appropriate retribution for my rashness that the shadow-yawl sits in the middle of the growing blade of sunlight slowly spreading over the horizon. Why should I enjoy the privilege of the mid-ocean sunrise when I haven’t the mettle to be here, when I have merely floundered this far in a sorry, pathetic yawl pushed and pulled by wayward winds and currents? In fact, I have destroyed this sea with my presence, robbed it of its wild totality, asserted something human, manipulative, and foolish: a tiny little sailboat captained by a tiny little man who thinks he can survive here, who thinks he can escape the shadow-yawl, even as its gaze affirms its strength and my aching affirms my weakness. He has mastered the sea or has allowed the sea to master him, a sea more beautiful than I can bear, blue, deep, calm. Something horrifying crept into the beautiful, killed it, fled, went to sea . . .

Now, the sea is returning to its tempestuous self. The sun risen, the waves have grown huge, threatening a fatal swell, and there are all the signs of a storm. A big one. Dangerous. The only possible conclusion. And I am afraid, and unsteady. I think I’m getting seasick. The sky has gone from black to yellow to orange to . . . red. And red has infected the sea, too, the blood-red mist burning from the bottom of the ocean until all the water is red and reflects the blood-red sky and the waves, blood, hurl my boat up, back, down, and forth. The shadow-yawl sits still, stable and terrible and ceaseless, the only point I can look to, but I can’t look to it because it sickens me, so I close my eyes, and the swaying overcomes me, throws me to the floor. I crawl over the side and with all the strength that remains in my body, I vomit into the ocean.

When I bring myself to look down, it, too, is red.

**

The ocean once called out to me. From my shoreside home, I heard the waves grinding the beach into finer and finer dust, the tide dragging land back into the ocean, the crashing of waves a roar primal and unmenacing, pleasant even for a cursed few, certainly for me, for I was marooned there, but still close enough to the growling, glistening, glorious sea to harbor a longing few will ever know, a longing that demands total abnegation, total sacrifice, total supplication. Predictably, I thought for the great bulk of my life, as some people do till the day they die, that I could have both, enjoy the safety of commitment but have the sea as my solace, my refuge, and my true self. I lounged comfortably on the shore, not knowing I was stranded, and watched the sun fashion a blade of light on the water, a sword pointing towards me, its tip glistening in my glass of wine, star-like, and I twirled the wine glass in one hand and held my wife’s hand in the other, binding me to a woman only five years my senior but so much closer to the grave . . . Her other hand was empty. She didn’t drink wine. Not good for her health, she said.

I remember when she once called out to me, too, when her hair flowed like falling water and every word she spoke was poetry. Her tanned skin, so much like sand, seemed but a vessel for her eyes, fabulously blue, which held the promise of the sea and in which I saw the sway of oceans. And I swayed with her, danced to the tempo she set so that I may learn the movements of that concatenation of land and water, trace the shoreline of her body, and learn the contours of her sea. That was the closest I came to love: relentless infatuation. Beauty held us through; beauty was the current that carried us.

Until it didn’t. Her hair turned grey and her skin went pale and her blue veins surfaced to remind her—remind me—that the heart, the veins, the arteries are such brittle things . . . that we are such brittle things. Everything was brittle, always aging, changing, and there was nothing in my life that was not in some way a harbinger of the grave, even blooming flowers, verdant lawns, and young people a reminder that my life had passed—passed me by?—and that I withered by the hour. I looked into my wife’s face, tried to see her eyes, but I knew they didn’t see me. I was already becoming a stranger, our home an alien place, the beach foreign and unknown. Just as her skin had faded, so too the blue of her eyes. I looked at this face and by seeing her, saw myself, saw that I had grown old with her, not too far behind.

Then, the sea began to roar, fiercely, ravenously. It kept me awake at night, when everything around me turned blue in moonlight. My brain flitted from one abortive escape plan to the next, panicked and tired and scared, for I was trapped by the inescapable. How could she sleep? How could she live? The oblivion of forgetting came closer by the day, distant memories going black, then last month’s trip, last week’s swim, yesterday’s newspaper, until the reason she walked into a room (the whole reason she was there!) disappeared into that creeping black mass. Black that was really deep blue. Sweating coldly in the night, I felt submerged in water, drowning, weighed down by the blanket, the house, the blue fate my fingertips traced in the veins of her forearm. When I thought I’d run out of breath, when I thought dark blue would fade completely to black, rather than scared, I was angry, angry that I was dying with her, angry I had allowed myself to become old, angry I had refused to hear the call of the sea: Go, now, quick! Go while there’s still time!

So I did. I studied, I prepared, I did everything, planned my voyage to the last conceivable detail, my escape, my never-ending journey. And when it came time, I cut every tether binding me to my life, sawed through every rope holding me to the dock. And I, well, I . . . —there’s nothing I can say. Words would only disturb the silence I fought so long to get. The urge could have been anything. Resentment? Revenge? Despair? I don’t know. All I know is that I had to conquer the sea, not survive it, not pass over it but claim it for my control and by conquering it conquer all that came with it, the unknown depths, the pits, the reefs, the iridescent life, and the dark monstrosities, death, life . . . everything. I couldn’t leave her behind. To let her suffer, to know she would wither, to leave the transition from this light to darkness to my imagination—I can’t bear to think of it. I had to incur death in my fight against it. Her eyes, no matter where I was, would watch me. So I forced them shut.

But still, I feel them everywhere. I try to sleep for the night but can’t. I have to affirm what I already know, so I crawl out of the cabin, grabbing onto ropes to keep myself balanced amid the violent waves and stare at the shadow-yawl, dark, opaque, inscrutable. Those are the eyes I failed to see, bobbing up and down with the water, the ones that aren’t really there but that are more present, more real, than anything else, more real than the water, more real than time, more real than the storm, which I can feel inside me. It’s coming, no doubt it’s coming, and I am not ready.

The waves make me dizzy. Each is a behemoth unto itself. In all this darkness, I can’t orient myself, so I stand a confused, filthy, foul-smelling mess. Pathetic. The sea has turned against me, its most devout worshipper. In braving the vastness, the shadow-yawl found the vastness in itself, while I by sailing into the wayward, the random, the cruel unleashed all of these in myself and lost what I thought I could never lose: myself, who must brave the storm. Myself, who must find courage. Myself, who I do not wish to save.

**

The gales blow my boat into a wall of water, and the water floods my yawl—the drain has already gargled and died—as I hurry to empty the cabin with my small orange bucket, try to keep the water-weight from sinking me, so that I will ride the towering waves one after the other, even though they pain me, even though they hurl me against the side of the boat forcefully enough to break bones, even though the hull, main, and mast creak and weaken and bend to the point of snapping—despite all of this, I continue, stooped and tired and afraid because I am mortal. The wind screams around me and stretches the sails to their extremity. Catch the wind and I fly from peak to peak and crash back into the water; go against it, and it throws me back into the waves. Either way, I’m drowning, slowly, violently, for the sea itself smothers me in rain. I can’t see anything, only this haze that obscures what I know is there, the haze that is what’s out there, the fury, the hunger, wanting me to die, pounding me into the boards of my boat that crack under the force of waves, that will break and sink to the bottom of the sea where it will wither into nothing, and nothing will be left, not the yawl, not me, nothing. So I tie down the sails, catch the wind, and steer as best I can, and I throw the life-jackets, too, because I am no fool; I hear the screaming, feel the jabs, know my doom, all of which I defy because I’m mortal. Yes, mortal. Heir to the irresistible urge to dominate and master, too restless to stop, too certain for caution, too proud to admit defeat, but weak enough to break. Hardly a sailor at all, just a speck in a storm itself small but greater than anything I’ll know. As I weave through the valleys the waves forge and collapse, I have dreams of calm waters and steady breezes, my mind inventing an inexistent Elysium, the one I thought I’d find through will and wit and some dose of fortune, but which was only a fog of a dream, solid from the land but vaporous when I sailed to it. The rain, the waves, the storm clouds were all that awaited me. This the shadow-yawl knows, moving black through the gray storm. Its pilot is truly there, part of the storm—I see it, skilled, flawless, a true mariner—but it exists for my eyes only, an extension of the sea, the underside of a dream come to reveal itself, and the cruel fallacy of my hope come to avenge itself. It is but another force, the most damning, I am powerless to stop,  which I have dodged, evaded, and outwitted until my end—now.

The hull has cracked, and more water has already leaked in than I—or the drain, poor little thing—could ever purge. As I notice this, I lose my grip on the rudder, and the wind tears my sail in half, reducing my yawl to an oversized bathtub. I deserve this: the torment, the dismemberment, the evisceration is all my due for my quest into the sea. All that’s left is the final wave to do me in, sink me, smother me, kill me. I see my death, far-off, towering, moving impossibly fast, and soon near me. I don’t tense up, and I don’t close my eyes. I keep my eyes open to the greatest, most beautiful wave I’ve ever seen, water rising skyward, poising to collapse, the sea, like me, for a moment calm. And then it comes—

The roar. The rain. The sea surging beneath me, the sea whom I loved, the sea whom I loathed, the sea who betrayed me. The sea lifts me up—and up and up and up higher still—leaves me there for just a moment . . . its last gift to me. This moment of stillness and solace. I pretend it’s infinite—this rising—see it as the truest sign of the sea’s love for me: that before it kills me, it would give me one last shock of its glory to remind me why I loved it. But then it drops me, and I, the broken yawl, and everything broken fall. And fall, fall, fall—

**

The dead of night in the middle of the sea is as dark, as lonely, as you would think, even though the stars provide unmoving points by which you can orient yourself, even though the moon, though faint, still shines. But if you look at them long enough, sit yourself in a yawl, alone, undisturbed for weeks with nothing to do but stare—and just stare—you’ll see that they too move, maybe not fast enough for us to see but enough to prove that we have nothing stable to cling to, nowhere we can go for guidance, nothing but drifting matter of various shapes, sizes, and lusters and that a sailor, even the most trained, skilled, and attentive of seamen, who knows where he’s been and where’s he’s going, is lost, for between gone and going sits is, where the past and the future are two deep, black, boundless chasms from which you can’t escape and into which you’re unwillingly plunged, sinking, struggling, drowning in the now. And they watch you, the stars; they become eyes since at this point there’s nothing that doesn’t remind you of your failure: the stars glimmer but you have no sextant to measure them, a sail flaps heartily but uselessly in the night wind, the boat it would power is smashed into chunks of driftwood that suspend you in the cold sea, little flecks of matter that will float through currents until it is sanded into dust that will spread throughout the sea, just like you, ground and dissolved and diluted until there’s nothing—no sign at all—that you were ever really here.

That’s the sound of the sea, that grinding, that roar. But now, it’s only silence—the consumptive growl sated by shipwreck, me—and waves cradle my old carcass as they did decades ago. I’m weightless in a hopeless sea, buoyed only by the ocean’s mercy, which is really cruelty, since death would better come now than later—anytime is too long for me—so in a little time, the ocean will bury me and the altar of starlight will ascend away from me, the water cup my ears in preparation for a greater silence, but I know this silence I hear now is the sea’s reproach, tender yet stern like a scolding parent: the slow waltz of little waves, baby-like rocking, the soft, eventual warmth of bone-chilling water. I deserve also—does it go without saying?—the quiet smack of water against the hull of the shadow-yawl, motionless beside me, only a few yards away, watching me, waiting, but I don’t wait: I know. It won’t save me. It will only sit there as a reminder of my folly, my weakness, my stupidity, a testament to something I don’t understand, never will, because my gone is all but done, and I have no going to do. I’m drowning in the now under the burden of both, so I loosen my grip on the driftwood and let myself sink.

And I fall, my body relaxed, my muscles loose, my eyes open to the growing darkness—might as well see it one last time. I feel my fall slowed, cushioned almost, by the water, so eager to admit me, toward something staggeringly cold, unfathomably vast . . . so, so dark. As I fall, the twinkle of stars and faint sweeps of moonbeams fade, and around me grows what I thought wasn’t real but now can’t deny: the red, blood-mist spreading around my periphery, spreading over me, as the last whispers of light die in these depths, snuffed out by the passing black hull which will persist long after my yawl and traverse waters too vast for me to brave. It shuts out the light. The blood-red rises over me as I’m pulled to the dark, bleeding, living host of the person who journeyed from my home to greet me as I die, who pulls me deeper and deeper, who was the red mist. Now that she holds me in her merciless arms, she carries me from the blood-red to the black. Then everything is gone.

Michael McCarthy's work has appeared in Cleaver, The Adroit Journal, and Prairie Schooner, among others. This is his first published work of fiction. He works as the Book Reviews Editor for Catalyst, an online magazine. He is also seeking publication for his first poetry collection Steve: An Unexpected Gift. You can find him on Instagram @michaelmccarthy8026