When they step outside, they are dazzled by the defiantly pale, gray-milk sky, and look down at their shoes, walking side by side to the car, hands in their pockets, noses, mouths, and chins covered by scarfs, collars turned up. The car is freezing. Sean is in the driver’s seat and they slowly exit the parking lot—how many times will they have to go past this stupid barrier today? They take minor roads, not wanting to go far from the hospital, just remove themselves from the world for a while, sink below the waterline of this unimaginable day, disappear into an undefined, fibrous space, into a translucent infrageography that matches their despair.
* * *
The city stretches out, becomes looser, the last suburbs fraying its edges, the sidewalks emptying; there are no more picket fences, only high chain-links, a few warehouses and the remains of old, blackened urban settlements under the freeway exchanges. After that, it is the contours of the land that steer their trajectory, guiding their drifting progress like lines of force; they drive on the road under towering cliffs, along the hillside covered with caves where isolated hobos and gangs of teenagers hang out—smoking grass, spraying graffiti—they pass houses at the foot of the hill, the Gonfreville-l’Orcher refinery, then finally turn off toward the river, as if snatched up by the sudden opening of space, and now they reach the estuary.
They drive for another mile or two. The asphalt ends, so they cut the engine: emptiness all around them, disused space, a no-man’s-land between the industrial zone and the pasture fields, and it is difficult to understand why they stop here, under a sky furrowed with dense smoke clouds that twirl fast from the refinery chimneys, then spread into dreary smears, secreting carbon monoxide dust—an apocalyptic sky. Within seconds of parking the car by the side of the road, Sean takes out his pack of Marlboros and starts to smoke without even opening the window. I thought you’d stopped, Marianne says, gently removing his cigarette from his fingers to take a drag herself—she smokes in a peculiar way, palm over her mouth, fingers tightened, the cigarette held between two metacarpal joints—exhales the smoke without swallowing, then puts it back between Sean’s fingers as he mutters no, didn’t feel like it. She shifts in her seat: Are you still the only guy in the world to brush his teeth while smoking?—summer 1992, camping in the desert near Santa Fe, a tie-dyed dawn, coral-red and monkey-palm pink, coffee in tin cans, the fear of scorpions crouching in the cold shadows of rocks, the song from Rio Bravo—“My Rifle, My Pony, and Me”—sung together, and Sean with the toothpaste-stained handle of a toothbrush sticking out from one corner of his mouth while at the other side of his smile he was smoking his first Marlboro of the day—he nods: yes—the ridge tent streaming with dew, Marianne naked under her fringed poncho, hair down to her butt, and reading in an exaggerated declamatory tone a collection of poems by Richard Brautigan they’d found at the back of the Greyhound bus that had dropped them in Taos.
* * *
I should never have made him that surfboard. Sean takes the time to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray, then abruptly leans over the steering wheel and bangs his head against it, thud, his forehead rebounding violently from the hard rubber. Sean! Marianne squeals in surprise, but he does it again and again, faster and faster, repeatedly banging the same part of his forehead against the wheel, thud, thud, thud, stop it, stop that now. Marianne grabs his shoulder to hold him back, but he elbows her away, knocking her into the passenger-side door, and while she is recovering from this, he grips the steering wheel with his teeth, biting into the rubber, and emits a deafening roar, a wild, dark roar, something unbearable, a noise she doesn’t want to hear, anything but that, she wants him to shut up so she grabs him by the neck, sinks her fingers into his hair, into his scalp, and shouts through gritted teeth: Stop it now!, pulling him backward until his jaw unclenches from the steering wheel, until his back is touching the seat, until his head bangs into and then stabilizes against the headrest—his eyes closed, his forehead burned red between his eyes by the collisions—until the roar becomes a wail. After that, she lets go, trembling, and whispers you mustn’t do that, you mustn’t hurt yourself, look at your hand—his fingers are clamped onto his knees like pliers—Sean, I don’t want us to go crazy. In that precise moment, it is possible she is talking to herself, measuring the madness that is rising inside her, inside them both, this shared madness the only form of thought possible, as if it were the only rational way out of this unimaginably vast nightmare.
They slump into each other, curling up together inside the car. But this apparent return to calm is merely an illusion, because Sean’s lamentation is worming its way into Marianne’s mind, and now she begins to think what might have been, this Sunday, without the accident, without the driver’s exhaustion, without the lure of surfing, without her son’s obsession with those goddamn waves, and at the end of this thread of dark thoughts, which she follows wearily through the labyrinth of her mind, there is Sean. Yes, Sean, that’s it, it was him, it was Sean who had encouraged that inclination in Simon, who had sparked and nurtured it, all of it, canoes and Maoris, tattoos and surfboards, the ocean, the migration to new lands, the osmosis of nature, that whole jumble of myths that so fascinated her little boy, that whole widescreen fantasy in which he grew up. She grits her teeth, fighting the impulse to hit the man next to her, this man who is groaning and whining. Yes, thinking back, it was those trips they took together to deliver skiffs, leaving behind her and Lou, “the girls”; it was their shared addiction to riding waves that led Simon, later, to take risks on his own, going out more and more often in conditions that were too cold, too stormy, and his father never saying a word about it, because he was a laidback, solitary father, an enigmatic father who had isolated himself from them to the point where, one evening, she told him go, I don’t want to live with you anymore, not like this, a man she loved but … fuck it. Yes, it was surfing that was to blame—that dangerous folly—but how had she, Marianne, how had she allowed that addiction to adrenaline to grow to such dimensions inside her own home? How had she allowed her son to fall into that vertiginous spiral, into that endless tube wave, that insanity? Yes, she was to blame too, for not doing anything, not saying anything, when her son started living his life at the whim of weather systems, dropping everything when a swell was forecast, his homework, everything, sometimes getting up at five in the morning to drive fifty miles in search of a wave; she had done nothing, because she was in love with Sean, and probably fascinated, herself, with that whole stupid fantasy—the man who built boats and fires under snow, who knew the name of each star and each constellation in the sky, who whistled complex melodies, enthralled that her son could also live his life so intensely, proud that he was so different from the others … so, yes, they were both to blame, because they had done nothing to stop this, they had failed to protect their child.
* * *
The mist that has formed on the windows is starting to trickle in drips when Marianne says, surfing was the best thing you ever gave him. He says, oh I don’t know, and they both fall silent. The best thing had been the process of making things, what it moved inside him, the use of foam and resin instead of supple wood to build canoes. In early December, he had gone to the Landes to pick up polystyrene boards from a “shaper” on the coast—a wiry-bodied man in his fifties with a red Apache scarf tied around his head, gray-bearded and ponytailed, wearing Tahitian bermudas, a specialist fleece, and fluorescent flip-flops: an old hippie, basically, who barely said a word and never made eye contact, who surfed whenever he could, the luminescent screen of a portable weather station constantly relaying wind and swell forecasts; Simon had spent a long time thinking about those materials, which were new to him, studying their density, their resistance, before opting for the extruded polystyrene boardstock foam rather than polyurethane, before choosing epoxy resin rather than the cheaper polyester resin; he had spent a long time watching the shaper as he planed and sanded, and had then loaded everything in his station wagon, driving through the night, thinking about making his board, mentally tracing its shape, obsessing about its solidity, and all this in secret.
* * *
They get out of the car to go for a walk—let’s go outside, Marianne said, opening the door. They leave the car behind on the path, parked against a thicket of brambles, and cut across a field, taking turns to clamber through the barbed-wire fence—first her, then him, one foot, then the other, back held flat, each holding the wires above the other’s head, below the other’s stomach, watch out for your hair, your nose, your eyes, don’t get your jacket caught.
Winter woods and fields. The ground is a cold soup that slops and sucks at their shoes, the grass crunches, and the cow pies, hardened by frost, are like scattered slabs of black rock. The branches of the poplar trees scratch the sky like talons, and the copses are full of crows as big as chickens. This is all a bit much, Marianne thinks, we’re going to freeze to death out here.
* * *
Finally, they reach a place where they can see the river, the vastness of the sky coming as a shock. They are out of breath, their feet soaked, but they move toward the riverbank, drawn close to the water as if magnetized, stopping only when the field begins to slide slowly into the water, which is black here, tangled with wet branches and decomposing stumps, with the corpses of insects that winter has killed and rotted, a brackish mire, completely still, a fairy-tale pond beyond which the estuary is slow, dull-colored, pale like sage, the fold of a shroud. Crossing it seems possible but dangerous: there are no wooden pontoons here, no boats moored nearby, no kids with pocketfuls of flat rocks come to skim them on the water’s surface, tracing a trajectory of low, graceful bounces, making the aquatic spirits dance in their wake; they are trapped here by these hostile waters, hands sunk deep in their pockets and feet sunk deep in mud, facing the river, chins buried in their collars. What are we doing here? Marianne thinks, wanting to scream, but her mouth, wide open, makes no sound at all, like in a nightmare. But then, far off to their left, they spy a dark ship, the sole means of embarkation visible in either direction, a solitary craft that, by its presence, points out the absence of all the others.
* * *
I don’t want them to cut him open, I don’t want them to skin and gut his body. The chromatic purity of Sean’s voice, toneless, sharpened by cold like a blade in ashes. Marianne slips her left hand into the right pocket of Sean’s parka, her index and middle fingers burrowing into the black hollow of his fist, opening it up, carving out enough space for her other two fingers to join them in there—all this without Sean turning his head. To their left, the rumble of the freighter grows closer, and the color of its hull comes into focus: an oily red, the exact color of dried blood. A bulk carrier with a cargo of grain, it goes down the river toward the sea, holding to its channel while here everything widens—a confluence of rivers and consciences—toward the formless and the infinite, toward disappearance. And suddenly it looms huge, so close that they imagine they could reach out a finger and touch its hull; it passes, casting a cold shadow over them, the water frothing, folding, turning turbid in its wake, and Marianne and Sean watch its long body—260 feet, at least three thousand tons—as it files past, a red curtain sliding gradually over reality, and I don’t know what they are thinking about at that second: probably about Simon—where he was before he was born, where he is now—or maybe they’re not thinking about anything, their minds entirely captured by this vision of the world slowly vanishing and then reappearing, tangible, utterly mysterious, and the ship’s prow cleaving through the water affirms the searing pain of the present moment.
The wake bubbles and then grows calm, smooth. The freighter moves away, taking its noise and its movement with it, and the river regains its original texture, the estuary setting everything ablaze, a radiance. Marianne and Sean turn toward each other, holding hands, their arms stretched out to the sides, and caress each other with their faces—what could be more tender than this gentle brushing of skin on skin, the edges of cheekbones sliding beneath flesh?—and end up leaning into each other, forehead to forehead, and Marianne’s words imprint the static air.
* * *
They won’t hurt him. They won’t hurt him at all. Marianne’s voice is muffled, and Sean lets go of her hands and takes her in his arms, his sobs melt into the breathing of nature, and he nods, okay, we should go back there now.