Weary’s fridge is nearly empty, save for a few eggs, a carton of milk, and half a dish of that blasted Kanak casserole, bougna. He eats a few cold, miserable bites straight from the container, slaps the door shut. Checking Henry North’s Visa while hungry is a bad idea. He’s tired of seeing all that food. All those pricey charges at grocery stores that certainly must mean fancy wine and meats and cheeses. He misses cheese, the good kind of cheese. Since he came here, he misses large stores with shining delicacies. Here, it’s mostly fish, rice, coconut, banana, taro, yams. Root vegetables and meat cooked in banana leaves. Sure, Weary indulges in the occasional French meal at Le Saint Hubert or Café de la Paix—it’s not like they live entirely in the boondocks. Still, fruit…even fruit! There isn’t the delightful tropical abundance you’d imagine. Most everything is imported, except a handful of things—mangos, coconut, pawpaw. Those fucking Visa charges can make him get that familiar, unhelpful longing for the States. It’s a great life here, a beautiful life, but a person can’t have everything, and not having everything means always missing something.
Perhaps he’s just in a bad mood. It hasn’t helped that his assistants, Aimée and Yann, French and Melanesian, have begun an affair, fueled by once-warring cultures and long hours doing counts together. Today, Weary spotted them kissing passionately, Aimée’s skirt hiked up against the far outdoor wall of the research facility, Yann’s hips grinding to hers. It made him think of Sarah, and stolen moments, and the fire at her center. Jesus, he misses passion and grinding and fire. It made him ache and then feel sad and then furious at every large and small thing, including cheese.
Oh, yes, he is furious, but he also feels the mountain of his task, casting its shadow. God, patience is tiring.
It’s been a disappointing week, with the Visa bill consistently netting him only the grocery charges and the blip of activity at another clichéd-sounding seaside restaurant. He expects nothing from ShutR, either. Nothing from life in general. It’s the kind of day where you could just give it all up, sweep away every goal and dream and vision with one tantrum-swoop, like a child losing at a board game.
Still, he must go through the motions. Eventually, something will happen, some small piece will arrive, giving him the information he needs about the woman with the bracelet. All of those grocery bills tell him she’s still around. He just needs her name. One name! One something!
He settles at the computer, which sits on the desk in his bedroom in front of the shuttered windows. The sounds and smells of night falling come in through the screens. He opens the site. Types Mr. Aperture into the search box. If there’s only another fucking picture of a fucking beach, he’ll lose his fucking mind. Yes, that’s a lot of fucks, an overkill of them, but that’s the kind of mood he’s in. Plug your ears if it bothers you, because this is not the time for him to be his best self.
ShutR needs a serious redesign. Maybe he should write a letter of complaint. The oldest photos are posted first, so you must scroll, scroll, scroll to see what’s new. He can’t believe this hasn’t been addressed before. Then again, who even uses ShutR? Probably just the friends and family of the app’s designers, plus one wife killer.
The forest, the desert; sunsets, flowers, the garden, Walter’s chair. The beach, beach, beach.
Sailboats.
Sailboats!
Oh, God. Dear God. When he sees the final new image, he’s not even gleeful. He’s not filled with fresh hope, or with the joy of new leads. His stomach falls like a ruin. Next, his already bubbling fury turns to rage. That fucker, he thinks. A fucking boat! Henry North can just go have a fucking day on a fucking boat with another woman after Sarah! Excuse his mouth. You would understand if you knew everything he does.
Look at that. Look at Mr. Marvelous now. There’s the watery horizon, and the group of racers. There’s a lame close-up of a red-and-white spinnaker, and a heeling vessel with the crew sitting in a row along its portside. And then there she is. There’s the woman with the bracelet. Her face. Her actual self.
Weary doesn’t jump and leap; his heart doesn’t even soar. He feels quite sick, actually. He could vomit. His head begins to throb. He closes the shutters of the windows, as if in protection. Because Henry just can’t resist, can he? Weary sees the ego in the shot—the way Henry is in love with the idea of his own talent. That light on her hair, that captured glow—Henry can’t help himself. He’s got to boast that her beauty in this shot is all due to some skill and special gift of his. Nothing can make you madder than when you guess what a person will do and then they do it, because he’s with a woman, all right. And whoever she is, she is beautiful all on her own, and the way he claims that is criminal.
Already criminal.
Weary turns on his desk light, and the bulb hums like an insect. He leans forward, squinches; takes her in. So, here she is. His nose practically touches hers on the screen. He’s wondered who it will be, and now he knows. She’s lovely. She weirdly and wrongly looks happy, even if she also looks slightly perplexed. She looks too happy to know.
What comes to Weary’s mind, what fills his battered spirit (which only moments before was ready to surrender but which now begins to flicker with new life), is the story of the virgin princess in The Metamorphoses. As she walks by the sea, that creep Neptune, the God of the ocean, leers at her. He tries to flatter her and get her attention, and then, rebuffed, he attempts to take her by force. When he tries to rape her, though, the crafty, determined Minerva—always the one with a great idea—turns the princess into a crow. Her arms darken with soft plumage, her shoulders turn to feathers, and she lifts from the ground and sails high into the air, up and away from that asshole.
Round of applause for Minerva. Go, Princess Crow! It’s inspiring, come to think of it.
Very inspiring. He gets up, invigorated, once again ready for battle. He makes some coffee. He gets to work. First, he combs those Visa charges again. Had he missed something? A boat charter? An unusual expense to a new company?
No. Of course he hasn’t missed anything! You don’t check a Visa bill fifty times a day and overlook a boat charter.
All right. So, Henry paid cash. Or she chartered the boat. Or she owns the boat. He must find out who the boat belongs to.
He just needs the woman’s name. Now that he’s seen her picture, it feels like she’s only inches away.
He studies the images on ShutR. Those sailboats. It’s a race, which means race photos, and race photos mean there’s the slight possibility that Henry’s boat is in one of them, too, floating in the background. Regatta, Parrish, he tip-taps. Three regattas in the San Juans in one weekend? Good God. Which regatta? Enlarge, enlarge. All right. Very good. A part of a name on one of the boats. Val on one side of the sailors’ legs, rie peering from between two others.
He works into the night. Who can sleep now? He checks the lists of registered boats for all three races. Valkyrie. Class B, Spring Series Regatta in the San Juans the previous weekend.
Next. Search for Spring Series Regatta. He hunts for the photos taken by the race boat photographers, and any other participants. There are hundreds. Hundreds! He rubs his forehead. He urges himself on. He tells himself to remember Minerva and the Crow Princess. He pours more coffee. After a few hours, he switches to wine, because his head is spinning from caffeine and his hands have started to tremble.
In each photo he finds, Weary clicks and enlarges and searches the horizon. He’s looking for a boat out there, one with a woman in an orange T-shirt on board, and a man…Well, Weary knows what he looks like. Can you spot smugness in the pinpoint dots of a photo? Can you spot ego, blown large and tight to the point where a burst is easy and inevitable?
Hours pass. His neck aches, and the damn cramps start up in his legs. He stretches. He walks a loop around the room. Rolls his shoulders. At this hour, it’s him and the papillons de nuit, the hundreds of species of moths that come out only at night. He can hear the click of their wings against the screens.
The bottle of wine is almost gone. He’s exhausted. He should have gone to bed long ago. His eyes are bleary, but not too bleary to see that Radical Rapture (who came in third overall, by the way) posted photos of the race, important photos, critical photos, because there it is, the flash of orange on a boat just off of Radical Rapture’s starboard side. It’s a beautiful shot. Well, the shot itself is just okay, but it’s a perfect capture of a wooden vessel with two particular passengers aboard. Weary can’t see faces. They are both hunched over something, maybe a cooler. But he sees something more valuable.
The boat’s name.
The Red Pearl. It sounds like the name of a Chinese restaurant, if you ask him, the old kind of Chinese restaurant with red leather booths and murky aquariums and menus with pictures that resemble crime-scene photos. The boat looks like a piece of shit. If Henry chartered that thing, what was he thinking? Clearly, his standards have plummeted, or maybe he’s just being careful not to blow through the house money and his cashed-in pension. Either way, Henry North would praise his dilapidated choice. He’d declare it vintage or an antique—a classic. He’d call it The Grampus or something. Jane Guy, something from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. He’d hit it with a little Poe legitimacy, lame but handy. Then, he’d privately sigh with relief the minute he was able to ditch it. People like Henry, that’s what they do with everything and everyone in their life.
The Red Pearl, he types. Charter. Parrish Island.
It’s so easy. All you need is one right piece, and bam. Sail the beautiful waters of the San Juans on the beautiful Red Pearl! Clearly, the boat’s owners are weak in the adjective department, but why quibble? Jan Stephenson and Dave Lovell, plus a phone number, thank you very much.
Weary is so close to her now.
He checks his watch. It’s eight in the evening there, too late for a charter office to be open. Then again, the Red Pearl doesn’t exactly look like it is part of a business with a receptionist and a 401(k) plan. What’s there to lose?
Weary dials. The phone brrrr, brrrrs across the miles. No answer.
He hangs up. Tries one more time. Why not?
More ringing. Weary is about to call it a night when, much to his surprise, there’s a voice on the other end.
“I told you not to fucking call anymore.”
“Jan? Dave? I’m looking to rent one of your boats…” Weary asks.
“Oh, hey, man, I’m sorry. Yeah, it’s Jan. I thought you were my girlfriend.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“She just threw my goddamn keys off the dock!”
“That’s awful. What a shame! I’m sorry.”
“Blond, twenty-five, and crazy, what’re you gonna do.”
Weary hates this man. He’s a bargain-version asshole from the asshole catalog, Weary guesses, lacking a Ph.D. and Italian leather shoes. Honestly, he wants to tell the twenty-five-year-old, If you’re going to spend time with assholes, at least they should take you out to nice dinners and pretend to have manners. “I was calling about your boat. The Red Pearl?”
“Yeah, sure. I got that, but the Sunsurfer has a little more speed, if you want to ski.”
The guy sounds drunk. His S’s spin out and crash like a bad day at the racetrack.
“No, a buddy of mine just took out the Red Pearl and loved it. Henry North?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“He went with…Damn. I can’t drink like I used to,” Weary says.
“Tell me about it.”
“Totally forgot her name.”
“Isabelle? I never seen him before, but she’s a local.”
“Isabelle, that’s right.”
“When do you want it? Are you from around here? You sound, like, a million miles away…”
Weary hangs up. Really, why waste another second? That guy won’t even remember the call in the morning. Weary has what he needs anyway. There won’t be too many Isabelles on an island that size.
He shuts down his computer. He feels like he’s just survived a typhoon. Like the windows shimmied hard and the roof threatened to blow off, but he’s okay. He’s better than okay, because, while there may be a mess out there, he’s less frightened now, and he’s alive.
Isabelle.
He undresses, gets into bed. After Virginia and Sarah, the name Isabelle is as gentle as a flower petal. This is a worry. He hopes she’s stronger than she sounds. Tomorrow, he’ll find out everything about her that he can, starting with her last name.
He is so exhausted, he expects to conk out the second his head hits the pillow. But this does not happen. Stupid coffee, plus wine—uppers and downers, how do the rock stars do it? Fears lurk in, performance anxiety, the weight of the world. He should have eaten a proper dinner.
All blueprints need flexibility, and no strategy can predict every potential problem, especially from this distance. He is working in the dark. How to go forward, yet exercise due diligence? As he lies in his bed, he tries to think like a careful physician. What is the best way to cure the cancer without killing the patient?
Watchful waiting—isn’t that what it’s called? It’s too early for step one, his first contact; he knows that. But he will observe every move as best he can for now and act accordingly. Any huge change or terrible danger on the horizon, any tumor encroaching on a vital organ, well, like it or not, ready or not, he’ll have no choice but to tip the whole thing over, alert the authorities, if they haven’t been alerted already. Weary doubts that’s even happened. He has to do everyone’s job. That’s why he’s here to begin with. He’s rock star, physician, researcher, destroyer. Lover, fighter, seeker of justice, too high from coffee and suddenly starving.