OFF THE EAST COAST of North America whalers head for the Horn. Cutting through the waves of glowing seaweed in the bioluminescent surf off Hatteras Island, they head for the breeding grounds. Ghosts.
And so, what if someone told you, whispered in your ear, you, you are exceptional. Shh…the rules do not apply—but don’t look down. Yet you look down. Or maybe you’re on a hill and build a city but the hill was never empty, what then?
Hometown. City of your birth. Ghosts everywhere.
The first white Christian child born in North America entered the world at Roanoke but went missing at the age of three and her body was never found. Some say she was born un-locatable. Others say little Virginia Dare was only location. Contemporary investors split on the impact of her disappearance. Under the right circumstances, would her absent bones spur or deter investment? Was she warning or cause? Girl or brand? Coal-mine canary or kick start? Futures unpredictable, stockholders revolt, board meetings devolve—so perhaps her body is to blame? Or never mattered at all, a pin drop in a map of colonial imagination, Virginia Dare.
Flickering in and out of accountability, Raleigh closes his eyes. Half-filled ships wreck against rocks on foreign shores. He paces…I am spirit…I am spirit…Trembling, Raleigh doffs his blame-taking body for the cutting-edge technology of economic imagination, the joint-stock entity. Co-creating a new world, incorporating over and over until he is no longer a blamable individual with a body, but a simulacraic choir of self-replicating cells, a new form of life. Raleigh, founder and corporation, strides forth. Toward sunset! Angels ring; sailors shout through a spray of seawater and sun.
Shaking off his losses, he sets sail for El Dorado and catches, in the periphery, the spectral child Virginia racing along the Outer Banks as his ship sails past. He squints but cannot make her out, seeing at once a milk carton with a child’s face then a sad man surrendering on a horse. She stops and begins to turn in a circle, Santa-doubting-Shakespeare-sister Virgin Queen of tobacco fields rending her Quantico dress and laughing. Training his mind, Raleigh turns his intention toward El Dorado (which rumor has is many miles up that wet jungle-mouth delta of Orinoco to the south), only he doesn’t know where it is. So many things have happened since he left that he can’t tell how far he’s come. And because he’s never been to El Dorado and it’s only an idea, he can’t tell how close he is. He practices EMDR and taps…I am spirit…I am spirit…
The problem of location has never been simple. Do you fix a point and aim at wherever you want to go? Or do you locate yourself in relation to the shore, memory, and landmarks?
Baleen whales navigate this way. Toothed whales do not. Early sailors preferred celestial navigation—best to rely on something outside the grasp of this world—but celestial navigation doesn’t solve the problem of unknown shores and cloud cover, which is why dead reckoning is the fallback of sailors.
A fixed beginning, speed, and trajectory.
Dead reckoning is how wolves cross snowy hillsides, how pumas slip between desert ridges in the night. Out of satellite range in open ocean without lighthouse beacon or buoy, dead reckoning is a sailor’s final hope. But solve one problem and it has puppies. Give a man a fish and it’s not his fault, but teach a man to fish and he eats everything in the ocean.
Starting point, mode of transport, goal.
Rome, St. Augustine, Hill City;
Gravesend, Roanoke, El Dorado;
Nantucket, Essex, the Great Offshore Grounds…
Raleigh takes the bridge and calls to his sailors. Never forget the depths of this world! He shouts, though they cannot hear him over the squall, Strangers! He shouts. Shh…strangers. We are strangers to these waters, only cartographers. Mark your head. Look sharkish! And tell me what you see. A sailor, peering across the lens of curved horizon, frames the sea. L7…I spy…I spy with my little eye a sun, a cloud, a mast…I spy…I spy with my little eye…a sister, a highway interstate system, a statue of Jefferson Davis.
A song breaks out:
They grew to the top of the old church tower
They couldn’t grow any higher
They locked and tied in true loves knot
The rose around the briar.
Raleigh never saw the tidal estuary at what would someday be Camp Lejeune or the river that fed it or its relationship to the ocean of moon jellies or the pods of right whales heading south to give birth. And who can say what happened to him when they cut off his head? Did he wander a Christian bardo? Did he explode into a Shinto grapeshot of small ticking souls haunting tobacco fields in the New World? Did he return as a barnacle bound to a whale swimming southward coming ever closer to but never making it up the hot humid delta river-mouth he was certain led to El Dorado?
It is known that Raleigh’s physical head was embalmed by the Crown and handed to his widow in a velvet bag, but as embalmers tend to guard their secrets, the exact method of its preservation is unknown and traditional approaches vary by region. Some involve soaking a head in saltwater. Others prefer to bury it in hot sand.
Sun flashes on the sea.
Sometimes Lejeune and Raleigh sit at a fold-out table on deck of the Neva and play cards. For Virginia! shouts Raleigh when he lays down a winning hand. For the canal, says Lejeune. A Confederate captain circles the table, a long line, a through line, a red line.
Livy opens a letter from Cheyenne. It says: What’s the secret of empire? Location, location, location…
Livy crumples the note and throws it into the ocean. A white paper flower, it blossoms on the water’s surface unshaping itself in the waves.
Livy shades her eyes.
Inescapable, whispers Raleigh, inescapable, all this salt and light.
At night, the well was an illuminated pinprick on the edge of the world. Though the sea was quiet, and though the well was only a speck, Livy’s ears filled with the buzzing and deafening alarms and sounds of metal slamming metal she’d heard when they’d passed the massive oil rig in Alaska. She had the sense that they were not moving forward at all but were caught in a whirlpool, circling around the exact point where it had all gone wrong.
Raleigh emerged from the cabin for the last time and went to the starboard rail. He extended his arm then lunged, reaching for something close but unattainable in the flush of dementia.
“It’s in their heads!” he said. “Perfume and cigarettes and transmission fluid, cures for epilepsy and solar systems, whole solar systems!”
Livy tried to calm him but he didn’t know her.
Just before dawn, he shook her awake.
I have terrible things to confess…terrible things…
She sat up to listen, but he was gone.
Livy went above. The sea was full of constellations. The North Star was beyond the curve of the globe. She relieved Marne on the bridge.
Captain’s got the con.
Captain’s got the con.
As they closed on the rig it looked less like a deep-sea well and more like a sinking ship. Covered by a low fog but just under the crown block, affixed to the tower, Livy saw the flag of her homeland. In the predawn light it appeared in grayscale: its stripes, bone bars over black; its stars, the whites of the eyes that seemed to Livy imprisoned in the darkness. It pillowed once in the wind then was pressed by a breeze flattened over the struts, sunken against its emaciated ribs. On the deck below was a child with tangled hair waving so frantically it seemed she might fly. Livy could barely make her out, dressed as she was in fog and shadowed in violet light.
And what if someone said to you: You were conceived in a cracked lighthouse that has no keeper. While there might be a faint glow up top, it is only a ship’s lamp.
Ask me a secret. Whisper. I won’t tell. Promise?
…I still love my country…
You have no country.
…I love the idea of my country…
Whose idea?
My idea, mine. That exceptional flame. A country not yet born.
Below the derrick, Virginia Dare covers her eyes with her hands as the sun torches her hair gold. She yells over the water with all the power of her three-year-old lungs words garbled in the din of whale song and ghosts. Her ankles are in the water. She looks in all directions to see how to swim. Baleen whales navigate by memory, but she has no memory. Toothed whales navigate by echolocation, but she cannot even hear herself. She slaps away the water, now over her knees.
On the horizon, a bright line shot in either direction as the corona of the sun touched the water behind them. Livy squinted in the advance of the coming glare and made an aperture with both hands, a ghost ring to target the oil rig unblended by reflection. Just before sunrise the fog rolled back to reveal the drilling platform. It was at the waterline and Livy saw that it was sinking, slow and inevitable. Then the sun like a scythe cut the sea from the sky. A beveled and perfect lens signaling through space: We are here! We are here! It swept over the waves and began to climb the well strut by strut until it reached the flag, which caught fire in the flash of dawn. Call-and-response, moving together, like swifts, like submarines, listening to the sound of shapes, toothed whales cross the ocean. Sonic and concentric waves radiate out from their great bodies filling the space between locations with an unceasing chant: How close? How close? How close?