Metamorphica by Zachary Mason

Author:Zachary Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

33

ELYSIUM

Menelaus was Helen’s husband. After many travails, he brought her back from Troy. The gods deemed him noble so they gave him a good after-life.

I wake in the dark to the water whispering over the hull. The stars shine through the open hatch, the timbers creak, and behind everything is the sea’s polyphony. The boat glides purposefully through the night, borne by the current. There’s no one else aboard, and no one else for miles. I close my eyes.

When next I wake the boat has run aground and the cabin is full of light. Waves lap against the hull, and the day is passing, but I lie in my hammock watching a square of sunlight slide down the wall, over the floor and into my eyes, and I could lie here forever, savoring the slow passage of time, but instead I rise and gather my notebooks, dip nets and collecting jars.

On deck the day is blinding. The prow has incised the wet sand of one island among the innumerable islands where the tide pools punctuate the low black rock. I put on a hat made from a piece of canvas, stained with salt and tar, worn, like my ragged trousers, in grudging concession to the sun.

I shimmy up the mast but see no sails, no glittering towers, no distant mountains, just the sun’s glare on wet rock and water, the glittering ripples in the channels, the incandescent white clouds like burning towers in the east, and it’s just as well, I think, this loneliness, this nothing.

I pick my way barefoot over the sun-warmed rock and sit by a pool where blue crabs skulk among the translucent anemones and tiny eels flee my shadow for the safety of thick weed. With my face inches from the shining water I see the black mollusks, the branching corals, the darting fish the size of pebbles, and for a moment I seem to intuit the totality of all the lives in this pool, and their indifference to me.

I pull my net through the water and draw up a crab. It explores my hand lethargically, unalarmed by its sudden translation into air, its steps pricking my palm. I set it down on a stone where it works its palps incuriously as I draw it in the notebook dedicated to its species.

I flip through the notebook’s thousands of drawings and as I go back through the months the crabs’ shells become rounder, their claws longer. I have an intuition for an order in the way the animals change across the miles and the years, and one day when all my notebooks are full (there are crates of blank ones in the hold) it will be time to approach this mystery, but that day is far away, and for now I’m happy just recording life in its profusion.

In the afternoon the water’s tone changes as the tide starts to rise. I move my equipment back to the boat, then stand a moment by my pool, which I’ll never see again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.