732: “She was failing,” . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 42 begins
42
“SHE WAS FAILING,” said Ariane, “so the point of the deception changed. Now we wanted to get to Rarotonga before she died.”
“So the trade winds picked up.”
“Something like that. It became a kind of race—”
“Against death.”
“Yeah. We made the Marquesas and picked our way through the Society Islands, and we were scrambling, you know? All the sail was out. Every day I would race through the errands, the shopping, because I was afraid that—”
“—you’d miss the big event.”
“Landfall,” she said.
I was ashamed of myself. I held her a little tighter.
“The shopping,” she said, and sighed. “I used to enjoy that. I shopped in character, within the fantasy. I’d been transformed, and so had Babbington. It had become foreign, colorful.”
“Fisherfolk piloted ancient boats along the timeless river—”
“I went to the familiar places in an unfamiliar state of mind, and everything was exotic. The pharmacy, the market—”
“—where housewives in traditional garb haggled over the foodstuffs as their mothers and their mothers before them had—”
“I’d found another village inside my childhood home.”
“You’d created another village inside your childhood home.”
“You’re right, but that’s beside the point. The point is that on the day when—on the day—I’d been delayed. It was just one of those days when every little thing goes wrong.” When she realized what she had said, she gripped my hand. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Never mind. Go on.”
“Actually, it was a day that had begun beautifully. There had been rain in the night, and there was fog on the bay, but the fog began to lift at dawn, and there was a complete rainbow, the full arc, end to end, the sort of thing that makes you say, ‘This will be my lucky day.’ ”
“—despite the efforts of the village elders, who had tried to teach the young people that omens are easy to discover and easier to misinterpret, especially under the influence of wishful thinking.”
“At the pharmacy, my girlfriend, Tina, wanted to tell me about her engagement. At the market I had to wait for the stock boy to unpack the cantaloupes—which I served almost daily, because one of the guidebooks had said that they were the same size and shape as breadfruit, which I couldn’t get, of course. And then I stopped at home, and I had to listen to my mother, who wanted to talk to me about the Ernies—”
“—who were sailing a course for hell.”
“More or less. Big Ernie was in that gang, that motorcycle gang, and Little Ernie kept picking fights with my father, who kept warning him that he could arrange to have him shanghaied.”
“And eventually did.”
“Yes, but that was still a while off.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 732, Mark Dorset considers Travel: Ocean Voyage; and Plans and Schemes from this episode.
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