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The wave of love is a transient hut
Waters the shell and we are the nut
But I saw a match struck outside the barrel
Karim wakes up, and doesn’t remember how he got home.
But he’s a professional investigator, he can figure it out.
The dust on his clothes, the ache in his arches, and the motor-oil street-scent lingering on his skin tell him that he stumbled out of the attic, through the house, back out onto the sidewalk, then dragged ass on foot up Van Ness to Lombard and all the way back to the marina. He’s not even underneath his sheets— he must have passed out as soon as he walked in the door.
He feels woozy, weak, like he’s just run a marathon on an empty stomach. He probes his memory, to see just how far back the darkness goes, and finds that he can’t quite get a grasp on anything that happened after he reached the top of the ladder…
Sitting up in bed, still wearing his Giants t-shirt, Karim’s eyes fall on the table where he’d left the envelope for Mo, just in case.
It’s still there. And as he looks at it, something awful wrenches through his mind, pain but not physical— a dizzying dissonance, a vertigo of the mind, there is something very wrong, or maybe there was—
He’s knocked flat on his back in bed again, pressing his hands against his head until it dissipates. Which it does, eventually, after a few moments that seem like an eternity.
What the hell was that?
Before Karim can dwell too deeply on the bizarre sensation, there’s a knock at his door. He thinks immediately of Nina, and gets up to answer it.
But it’s not Nina. It’s a kid. Ten or eleven years old, a towheaded boy with a cherubic face, straight out of a JC Penney catalog.
“What do you want?” says Karim, blinking against the sunlight. Seeing the angles of the shadows outside the boat, he realizes suddenly that it’s the afternoon. Almost evening, even. How long was he out for? How late did he get back? What happened up in that attic?
The kid says, in an incongruously clipped British accent: “Sorry, do you have a spare, um, terminal puller? My mum dropped ours into the bilge, the pump battery is all messed up... It’s kind of gross.”
“What? Oh. Yeah,” says Karim. “Listen, kid— what’s your name–”
“Charlie.”
“—listen, Charlie, you just let me get out of my PJs here, and I’ll run it down to you. What slip are you in?”
The kid gives him an address just a few doors down. Karim nods, closes the door gently, and heaves out a deep sigh. There are so many things he should be doing right now, first, before anything else— checking in with Mo, calling Nina, anonymously leaking that video of Michelle to KNTV, pulling up some self-hypnosis tutorial on YouTube to try and dig out the memory of whatever happened last night— but he’s grateful for the interruption, because, honestly, none of those things sound particularly fun.
Karim watches through the circular porthole of his front door as Charlie walks away. And seeing the boardwalk framed through the window, he’s immediately hit again with that horrible feeling, a chasm in his mind rent wide open, stretching itself black and impossible around his very existence—
A rose window…
He stumbles backward; his hip catches hard on the edge of the table, and the jolt of pain that rockets up his side sends him into a fit of loud cursing. When he falls silent his hip is still throbbing but his head has cleared again, the haunting scared away.
Jesus, the mercury— how many micrograms were coursing through his bloodstream even now? Had he really gone and given himself permanent brain damage, on account of some insane wild goose chase?
Back here in the familiar environs of Karim’s home, Ruskin’s hillside mansion and the house on Nob Hill both seem like distant dreams, dramatic scenes play-acted out by some absurdist parody of himself. Some other man, far more irresponsible and irrational than Karim had ever known himself to be.
“I’m going to sue the shit out of you, Ruskin,” Karim mutters, pulling his dusty, sweat-stained shirt and pants off into the hamper and donning a fresh crewneck and jeans. He brushes his teeth and chugs a glass of water, then lifts a panel of the kitchen floor and retrieves the terminal puller from his storage space.
Tool in hand, he heads out down the dock to Charlie’s boat. The late afternoon sun is spring-bright and beaming, reflecting off the water of the marina in dancing patterns along the bows of docked vessels.
Slip 23 is home to a rugged-looking craft named Our Mutual Friend. Karim spots Charlie waving to him from the deck, so he steps across the gangway and boards the ship, holding up the tool.
“Hey, kid. Where do you need this?” he asks Charlie, who is sitting crosslegged on one of the deck benches, a comic book splayed open in his lap.
Charlie points around back to the stern, but before Karim can wander over, a woman emerges from behind the mast. She’s wearing overalls and a stained work shirt, her hair the same flaxen gold as Charlie’s.
She spots the terminal puller in Karim’s hand. “Oh, thank you so much,” she says, taking it gratefully when he offers it out to her. Her accent is even more posh than her son’s. “I’d properly welcome you to our home, but we’re dealing with a bit of a situation down there…” Her eyes dart nervously back towards the hold.
“No, it’s fine,” Karim says. “Go.”
“I’ll be right back up with this, just hold tight!” she says. “Charlie, come with me, you’re gonna help mummy out with the pump.”
The kid rolls his eyes, ignoring her, obviously reluctant to part with his precious reading material. But then Karim gives him a conspiratorial nod, a sly grin that says I know how moms can be, I’m on your side, but you should probably go , and Charlie hesitates for barely a second more before jumping up to join the blonde woman. They disappear together behind the mast, down into the hold, and Karim is left standing on the deck, alone. Gulls circle overhead, crowing at the sinking sun.
Karim remembers being that kid. Too smart for his own good, always wishing the grown-ups would notice him, help him out, think he was cool…
“Can I help you, brother?”
Karim turns around to see a man coming towards him, off the boardwalk onto the boat. The man is tall, rugged as the ship herself, wearing a navy shirt unbuttoned to the chest. He has dark hair, graying at the temples, and clear eyes that are the same as Charlie’s. This must be the father.
“Oh. I’m just from down the dock— I lent, uh, your wife my terminal puller… Supposed to wait up here till she’s done.” Even though he had been invited on board, something about the man’s body language makes Karim feel like he’s been caught in the midst of a home invasion.
But at Karim’s words the man’s face breaks out into a warm grin; his shoulders loosen and he leans forward. “A neighbor!” he says, and offers his hand out for Karim to shake. “Desmond Hume,” he says, by way of introduction.
“Karim Washington, nice to meet you. Great ship you got here.”
Desmond steps back, looks around at his own ship admiringly. “I’m going to have to agree,” he says. “She is a beaut.”
“You come all the way from the UK?” says Karim.
“Well, historically speaking, yes,” says Desmond, “but no, we haven’t been around those parts since Christmas. Just came up from Los Angeles last week, actually, and before that we were in Puerto Vallarta. We’re off to Portland tomorrow morning.”
Karim nods. “You’re full-timers? For how long?”
“Since before Charlie was born,” Desmond says, a note of pride detectable in his voice. “A few breaks here and there, but we’ve been sailing for over ten years.”
Karim lets out a low whistle, impressed. “That kid probably doesn’t even know how to walk on dry land,” he says.
Desmond smiles. “You might be right, brother. But it’s a beautiful thing, you know. We’re very lucky, Penny and I.” He looks at Karim as though he’s reading something in his face, something silent and invisible, and says: “Have you got children?”
Karim should have known this question was coming. “Funny you ask,” he begins, “because actually—”
But as he thinks of Mo and her face at the door last night, his recollection involuntarily slides forward in time to the house, the tunnel, the attic, the window, and there’s that silent howl inside his head again, that horrible roar of a vacuum where the memory of whatever he saw should be—
His knees threaten to buckle underneath him, but then there is a firm grip on his shoulder guiding him backwards and down onto a seat, and Desmond’s hand is at his face, pressure on his forehead, grounding him, bringing him back to the present waking moment.
Karim blinks. Desmond’s head swims into his field of view, wearing a concerned expression.
“Jesus, I’m sorry,” Karim says, immediately embarrassed by this moment of physical weakness in front of an older man he barely knows. “Had a weird night last night…”
“Your nose is bleeding,” Desmond says.
“Ah, shit,” says Karim, pressing his sleeve to his face. “I should go. You can get the tool back to me later… Need to lie down…” He tries to stand up, but his legs are still weak, and he collapses back onto the seat.
He expects Desmond to offer him a Kleenex, maybe some water, or perhaps an aspirin. But instead the man leans in, and asks:
“What year is it?”
Karim is extremely confused. “Uh, 2016.”
Desmond is examining Karim very closely now, as if he were a doctor of some kind, diagnosing a fatal malady. “Have you recently been exposed to any high-level electromagnetic radiation?”
“What? No! I mean, I don’t think so...”
This situation is getting strange, too strange, rapidly uncharacterizing itself as the distraction from previous strangeness that Karim had hoped it would be when he left his boat. And now Karim feels like he’s regained enough strength to get up, but when he tries it’s not his legs pushing him back down, but a gentle yet insistent hand from Desmond.
“I think you’d better rest a bit here, brother,” Desmond says. “In my experience, you don’t want to be in motion while this is going on.”
Karim wipes the last of the blood from his nose onto the sleeve of his not-clean-anymore shirt. “ Your experience? Are you saying you know what this is?”
Desmond sits beside him now. “Well, I’m not sure, but I think... Do you want to tell me where you were last night? Before this started?”
“That’s the problem,” says Karim. “I can’t… I can’t remember. And every time I try to remember… that’s what happens. Plus,” he adds, “even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe it. I’m not even sure I believe it.”
Desmond says, “Try me.”
There’s something about the way he says it, beatifically confident, as if this sun-browned Scot were a guru come all the way to San Francisco with the sole intent of listening to Karim talk. It makes Karim almost forget how illogical his last few weeks have been, makes him think that if anyone were going to believe his story, it would be this man.
“Well, it started with a missing girl…”
And so Karim tells Desmond the whole sordid tale, a bit abridged, leaving out some of the more sensitive information (such as the multiple felonies he’d committed) but keeping the basic structure intact. Mrs. Vu, the game, CURI, the clinic, Marlowe, SYZYGY, Ruskin, the house, and of course Nina. And Mo.
Maybe it’s Desmond’s calming presence at his side; maybe it’s the way that he’d started at the beginning and gone from there, moment by moment; maybe it’s just that he’s saying it out loud into the sea-salt breeze, instead of letting it all fester inside his head— but as Karim nears the ending with trepidation he finds the telling becoming easier, not harder. The vertiginous darkness is receding around those last few moments.
He’s remembering as he’s speaking, the sentences concurrent with the sensations he’s reliving. He closes his eyes, expecting that horrible feeling again, but it’s being held at bay by the sound of his own voice as he recounts:
“I walked up to the rose window, and I opened it. There was a light, spilling out from behind it. And then I saw her. Nina. OA. She was rising up into the sky like an angel, right in front of the window, the city behind her. Then… from inside the house, a bird flew out. A white dove, I think— and it tore something, broke something… and Nina fell. Dropped, like a stone. The light changed. I looked out the window, down, I saw her on the ground. But it wasn’t the street outside the house I was seeing…”
And he’s remembering, really remembering now, and as he does, he understands why his mind tried so hard to make him forget, protested so violently against recollection.
The overview. The impossible overview.
Nina, just an actress on a stage; his own boat, just a set, plywood and paint; the Bay itself, just an electrified miniature, its lights flickering out. And Michelle, reaching up towards him, reaching out from inside of someone else, someone that looked like her but wasn’t her—
Desmond stops him there. “You remember now?” he asks.
Karim nods, opens his mouth to continue the story, but Desmond interrupts again: “Don’t tell me, Karim. It’s not mine to know. What you saw, that’s yours.”
“What I saw... was not possible,” Karim says.
“What you saw was real ,” says Desmond, his tone a validating authority that is like a balm to Karim’s tempest-tossed mind. “And I know, because I recognize that look you’ve got on your face right now. It’s the same look I had, when I saw into another world. A different world. The physical symptoms, too. That's what happens, when you reach across those boundaries.”
Karim doesn’t quite know how to respond to this.
Desmond looks out over the bow of Our Mutual Friend , across the marina. He points at the horizon, due west, towards where the sun is beginning to sink lower in the sky.
“Across that ocean,” he says, “a long time ago now, I had almost reached the end of a very strange time in my life, when I had an experience… similar to yours. I was put into a machine, a device that could kill anyone that stood inside. But when they turned it on, I didn’t die. Instead, I was shown a place where things were different. Better. And once I’d seen it, after they turned the machine off, I became obsessed with trying to get back, with trying to take us all there… I did some things I shouldn’t have done, helped some people I shouldn’t have helped, because I thought if I could just go back, none of it would matter.”
He shakes his head sadly. “It took a dear friend of mine sacrificing his life to keep me alive, for me to realize that my place was right here, in this world. With Penny, with Charlie. And I was ashamed— it’s not something I should’ve ever, ever forgotten. But seeing a thing like that, like what I saw, like what you saw... it can do that. Drive you far out past the person you think you are, if you let it.”
There’s an enviable distance Desmond has to his story. Karim can hear how many times he’s turned it over in his mind over the years, how it’s become smooth and shining, a medallion of self-knowledge hanging where Karim only has rough-edged, quivering uncertainty.
“Ruskin said the house was calling to me,” says Karim, slowly, as the tears that had overwhelmed him up in that attic threaten to swim out of his eyes again. “That it had something to show me. Everyone else who looked through that window ended up dead, dying, insane. Gone. Michelle— she went through it, ended up there— so why am I still here? ”
Desmond thinks for a moment. “You mentioned Mo was in labor last night.”
Karim swallows, hard. “Yeah… yeah. I have a son now, I guess…”
“Or a daughter,” says Desmond.
“Is that it?” Karim asks, wonderingly. “Why I stayed. Why I could look through and survive. Because of Mo…? Because the baby was being born... right at that moment?”
Desmond shrugs. “Could be that, aye,” he says. “Or you could be like me— with a chance talent that lets you survive things that others can’t. Could be both, even. Or neither. But I don’t have all the answers, brother. I just have some idea of how to move forward, after a thing like that.”
Karim can’t keep the desperation out of his face as he looks at Desmond now. Desmond looks back, serene, his hair blowing in the wind off the water.
“What do I do?” Karim says.
“Right now, you’re probably feeling like you want to run away,” Desmond calmly says. “Like you want to leave all this behind, forget it ever happened. Is that right?”
Karim nods. That’s why he’s on this boat right now, after all. He didn’t want to plug in his phone and check for messages from Mo when he woke up. He didn’t want to think about where Nina might be. He wanted to blame it all on the mercury, on recklessness, on temporary insanity, make it into something that could be avoided, explained away, put behind him.
“It’s a natural reaction,” says Desmond. “Men like us, we spend our lives running away. From the things we think we don’t deserve, from the things that scare us, because they get to the very heart of what we truly desire.”
He gestures at the deck of the boat. “This ship started out as an escape. As a way to protect myself and Penny, to keep my family always moving, away from the destiny that was chasing me down. But it wasn’t until I was made to face that destiny head-on, see it through to the end, that this place was able to become a home.”
As if on cue, a child’s laughter rises up from the hold, drifting across the ship towards the two of them. And it pulls at something deep inside of Karim— easily accessing that place that he had kept so carefully guarded, right up until the moment he opened that window, when something inside of him had opened as well.
“Take it from me, brother,” Desmond says. “Don’t let yourself get forced into it. You’ve got to be brave, you’ve got to take the path that presents itself, even when it seems impossible. Especially when it seems impossible.” He sighs, wistful. “I wish I could have gone and met my future willingly. Would have saved me a lot of time being tied up, shot at, thrown in wells and such.”
“Ouch,” says Karim.
“Aye, it was hell on the back,” says Desmond.
Karim is leaning forward now, pressing his hands into his face, breathing into his palms. Desmond puts a solid hand on his shoulder, not saying anything.
“Fuuuck,” Karim groans, and then sits back up. He looks at Desmond. “It’s just gonna get crazier from here,” he says. “I can feel it. I’m never gonna have a normal life again.”
Desmond nods. “To be at the beginning of one’s story is a privilege,” he says. “It would be highly irresponsible of me to say I miss it all, the adventure, the madness,” and here he glances down towards the stern, where Penny’s motherly admonishments are mingling now with Charlie’s laughter, growing louder, “but I do, sometimes. Don’t tell Penny I said that.”
“Mo… I should call her,” says Karim, thinking out loud.
“Ah, you should,” says Desmond. “And you should let her be what she is to you, no more, no less.”
“What do you mean?”
Desmond pauses, as though he’s trying to fit a thought the length of a novel into a single sentence.
“Well… you need her, don’t you? She’s your guide, your lifeline. She’s what has and will keep you grounded. She’s your constant.”
“My constant,” says Karim, rolling the taste of the word around on his tongue. “I like that. Yeah, yeah… That’s what she is.”
Penny and Charlie emerge onto the deck just then, looking accomplished. “All fixed,” Penny says, coming towards Desmond and Karim. “We’ll be set to launch tomorrow morning now.”
“What’s so funny, Charlie?” Desmond asks his son, who is grinning, the last of the laughter they’d heard from below still lingering in his face.
“Mum was saying curse words when she was fixing the pump,” Charlie says, “so I started saying them too, and she got mad, and said even more of them, and so I—”
“Alright, I get it, you little foulmouthed devil,” Desmond says lovingly. “You can go back to your comic book now.”
Karim gets up off the bench, and Penny comes to him to hand back his borrowed tool. “Really appreciate it,” she says as he takes it, and then she looks to Desmond, who is now standing up beside Karim. “Sorry if my husband talked your ear off,” she says. “He’s a bit too friendly for his own good sometimes.”
“No, it’s— it’s fine,” says Karim. “Really.”
The sun has dipped below the buildings to the west of the marina now, the sky lit up a brilliant orange. Charlie has set himself up again in the corner of the deck, leaning against the side of the boat with his comic book propped up on his knobbly knees.
Penny clears her throat. “Desmond, are you going to invite your new friend to stay for dinner or am I going to have to do it for you?”
“Of course!” Desmond says, turning to Karim, but before he can make the offer, Karim has his hands up and is shaking his head.
“I appreciate it,” he says, “but I think I’d better go. I’ve got a phone call to make.”
Desmond nods approvingly. “Very well, Karim,” he says. “Can’t argue with that. But we’ll be out of here early tomorrow, so...”
He moves to shake hands again, but Karim can’t help but to lean forward and wrap Desmond in a tight embrace. When he steps back out of the hug Desmond is looking at him proudly.
“Thank you,” Karim says. There isn’t much else to say.
And Desmond says, “I’ll see you in another life, brother.”
***
“Des, what could you have possibly said to that man?” Penny says, as Karim disappears down the dock and back into his boat amidst the evening glow.
Desmond laughs. “Just what he needed to hear, is all.”
Penny leans her head against Desmond’s shoulder. “Who is he?”
“A good man, I think,” Desmond says. “With some hard choices ahead.”
“I see,” says Penny. “Well, I’ve got a hard choice too, which is whether to ask you if you remembered to defrost the chicken while I was fixing the pump, or just assume that you didn’t and simply start berating you right now.”
Desmond groans good-naturedly, and Penny rolls her eyes, and Charlie turns the page of his comic book, and the gulls circle overhead in the dying light.
And back on his boat, Karim is picking up his phone and dialing Mo, and he’s picturing her face, that smile, that one thing holding him down, across the divide of dimensions, bringing him back from the brink, every time. And he’s ready to tell her what he’s known this whole time, but never had a word for before tonight: she’s his constant.