DAY 15: Goat and Compasses

A corruption of ‘God en-compasses [us]’

‘You sure you want to go back out there?’ Tyler asked dubiously, coherent for the moment.

‘No, I’m not sure, but duty calls.’

I gave him a mock salute, and Tyler allowed himself a smile. It was just before dawn and we were standing on a tiny back deck, down near water level and invisible from shore at this time of day. Above us, the Ragnarok’s hull rose like a cast iron skyscraper.

A little earlier, back up on the bridge, we’d watched as stooped figures on the deck, lit by lapping flames, moved back and forth. Hammering, prying, burning—looking for a weak point in the ship’s armour. They’d even brought along an acetylene torch, which worried me but just made Tyler laugh contemptuously. Loud voices called back and forth. Weakened as they were, the Awakened must have been finding breaking into a US aircraft carrier a very frustrating venture—something like trying to prise open a coconut with one’s bare hands.

After our dinner I’d slept for six hours—the most rest I’d had in a week—in a comfortable bunk. Before going to bed I’d even showered and shaved. And now here I was, in clean clothes with a pack on my back filled with unimaginable luxuries: canned food, a knife, bottles of water. And a flare gun.

During that night’s prelude to the Golden Light, I’d been—not too surprisingly—a missile flying toward some distant city, a fantastical metropolis crowded with towering spires.

Tyler had promised to wake me before sunrise and he’d come through with a series of sharp slaps to my face that finally did the trick. Then we’d made a deal. If I was able to return with Zoe, I’d shoot a flare from the beach and he’d open the back door and wait for us. I hoped that by bringing Zoe to meet Tyler I might be able to convince him to shut off the engines before they blew.

The thrumming. By now it was so loud it must have been audible all over the West End. I could only imagine the havoc it was playing on the unravelled minds of the tightly-wound denizens of Nod.

I climbed over the rail and into a dinghy that hung from a winch. Below me, the ocean churned, waves slapping against the Ragnarok’s backside.

‘Take care,’ I said as Tyler pressed a button and the winch began to lower me down to the water.

He didn’t reply, was growing distant again. He just kept his flashlight beam trained on me as I descended.

The dinghy hit the water and began to buck as I detached the winch chain and began to row toward Stanley Park. The beach around the carrier was still swarming with fire-lit shapes, but any sound they made was smothered by the noise of the Ragnarok’s engines. Even though I knew no one could see me, I felt exposed. Were those figures locked in another animal bacchanal? And if so, what shape had the Ragnarok taken on in their minds?

On the other hand, the physicality of rowing and the pre-dawn dampness in the air felt terrific. Out there on the water it was as though the madness on the beach, on the ship, and in the city was all a dream. And so I row, row, rowed my boat. The same waves had rolled along these shores for millions of years; dinosaurs once bathed in the same water I now paddled through. During the intervening millennia mountains had risen and fallen and all the plants and animals had been replaced and reinvented. But the water hadn’t changed.

When I finally made shore the sun was glowering on the horizon, and it was low tide. I beached the dinghy and stepped through the black, sucking mud at the water’s edge toward firmer ground. The seawall, when I reached it, was only about five feet high, and I was able to clamber up onto the walkway that ran along its edge fairly easily. At my feet a stencilled man marched west toward the Lion’s Gate Bridge while a stencilled cyclist headed east, back toward the Ragnarok. Deciding that both these stick creatures were nuts, I headed north—straight into the woods.

They didn’t look very welcoming. Before me, titanic cedars stood aloof, with seemingly impassable thickets of blackberry bushes around their ankles. Half of Vancouver’s vegetation had to be blackberry bushes and wherever forest met open sunlight, they took over. Not too far inland from where I stood, however, the woods would deepen and the underbrush thin out in the permanent shade. In fact, the park was riddled with trails; it was just a matter of finding one that would lead back downtown, and given that the park was bordered on three sides by ocean, eventually they all did. So a doable task.

I found the thinnest section of bramble I could, took a deep breath, and pushed forward. God, it hurt. Death by a thousand tiny scratches. My raised forearm protected my face, but my arms, legs, and neck were ripped and torn. Within a minute or so, however, the going got easier as cedars rose around me, their shade anathema to smaller plants. Soon I was on a well-established trail. I stopped and rubbed my arms, smearing blood everywhere, until the stinging’s volume died down and I could hear the Ragnarok once more.

After I had walked for a while, there was a rustling in the brush and I spun around, fully expecting to see some demon-hunter, cudgel poised to heave ho into my skull. Instead, I saw a boy of around eleven, red-haired and freckled, thin and vulnerable-looking. Jeans and a T-shirt hung from his body like afterthoughts as he watched me with an expression of—approximately—mild interest. Perhaps it was my recent stint of stillness out in the dinghy, or perhaps it was my comparatively well-rested state, but I surprised myself. Rather than try to talk and repeat the error Tanya and I had made the first time we had encountered a group of these children, I simply sat down on the hard-packed earth in the centre of the trail and waited. The boy seemed pleased, as though I’d done exactly what he’d hoped, and immediately sat down opposite me. I felt the familiar puppet pull toward speech but forced myself to ignore it.

During the silent powwow that ensued, the sun rose above us and the world coloured itself in, a little blurry and not quite between the lines. No golden light, just a daydream moment like when we stare at a tree out the window or the lines on our hands and they become so vivid and concrete that time and thought stop.

And then start again.

Some sort of impossible abyss is crossed each time we move. I sit still, pencil in hand, and then I begin to write. How does that happen? How does stillness become motion? It’s the Paradox of Xeno: to move an inch, you need to first move a half an inch. But to move that half inch you first need to move a quarter inch. But first an eighth, a sixteenth and so on until we learn that motion is, in fact, impossible. And so the boy and I sat, shadows rolling gently across our faces, disdainful time passing us by.

Then, simultaneously, we looked up.

The sun was high in the sky, and all around us were children. How many? Dozens. Silent and observing, just like their sister, Zoe. Soft shadows mottled their heads, and I saw how thin they were. Somehow I’d come to assume that these kids were otherworldly apparitions, phantoms untethered from the trials of Nod. But now I saw it wasn’t true: they were as human and hungry as any child from a World Visions appeal, with eyes as large and round as those of children from velvet paintings. What had they been subsisting on for the last couple of weeks? I stretched my mind across the park. Maybe the contents of a couple of plundered refreshment stands and some muddy creek water. Blackberries and huckleberries. Not much.

The children turned as one and began to walk. My erstwhile companion hopped up and joined them, so I did too. Deeper and deeper into the woods I went, pulled along in their wake as they spread out and then ran with an amazing lightness and sureness of foot. I could barely hear a thing besides my own black bear thump as I blundered along behind them, but I saw some wonderful things.

The trees grew taller and taller while the curled ferns and spindly huckleberry bushes became greener and greener. So many different shades of green—I’d no idea. Giant cedars flung their arms out in exclamations of frozen motion. Fat mushrooms seemed to bop, mad with excitement, though safely tethered to the ground. All around us the world was doing a toddler’s pee dance.

The entire afternoon was a kind of benign swarming: the children would disperse, then gather around some object of interest—a tiger lily or even a candy wrapper some jogger had dropped a month ago. They—we— would examine it then move on in a constant focussing and dilating flow. Occasionally we’d stray into a patch of berries and the children would pick and share them, hand to hand, then gulp them down, Seattle-dust and all.

As evening approached and the light began to wane, we slowed our pace. And as things slowed, a sound grew: the Ragnarok, of course.

There was a shrill new edge in its engine’s upper register, a high-pitched whine that frightened me. The sound affected me like a baby’s cry: an irresistible demand. And so I came back into myself, back into narrative and a sense of urgent mission.

I shook off my pack, unzipped it, and reached for the flare gun Tyler had given me. Then I grabbed the hand of the nearest child, a girl of about six, and began to march toward the sound. As though connected to one another by invisible threads, the rest of the children trailed after us.

Soon I could see the bridge tower through the trees. Its white electric lights were cold and static, but the fires raging on its deck looked warm and alive. Our path emerged onto the seawall within a couple of hundred meters from the ship’s prow. The crowd’s attention was focussed on the flames on the deck, and for the moment, no one saw us.

The children gathered around me, watching and blinking while I raised the gun in the air and fired. The flare arched up into the sky and exploded above us, lighting and freezing the scene. I felt thousands of eyes swivel in their sockets, could almost hear the moist sound of that movement in the same way a million silent raindrops become a deafening torrent. I prayed that Tyler was up there in his bridge keeping an eye out for my signal. I wasn’t going to be able to introduce Zoe to him in time, so if anything was going to touch his heart, it was going to have to be this tableau.

On the beach, a blur of shapes began moving toward us, the nearer ones taking on human form as they spilled out of the dusk. The children did nothing, just stared at me while I stared at the horde, a football field—no, a parking lot—away.

Time for us to go. I turned and ran. The children first followed then floated past me like leaves driven by a storm, disappearing in dozens of different directions.

Eventually I stopped, exhausted and unable to hear anything over the frenzied tomtom of my heart. Then as my heart slowed I became aware of an almost total silence, but it took me a few moments to realize what that silence meant: the Ragnarok’s engines had shut down. In my mind’s eye, I saw Tyler loading up one last syringe, then shuffling below deck to lie down on a clean white bed for the final time.