Keeper of the Light
Keeper of the Light
Ken Altabef
On a small island off Cape Cod, at the eastern approach to the Nantucket Sound, stands an ancient lighthouse. A perfect sphere surrounds the isle and its causeway, stretching a mile and a half in every direction. To the scientifically-minded, it’s an interesting anomaly, an opaque bubble impenetrable to all known matter. For the more romantically inclined, rumor has it there is a man inside that lighthouse, and each and every day that man saves the world.
It was the beginning of the day, the end of the day, the end of the year, the end of the world. Denis McCullen glowered at the swirling black mass, so close now it filled a quarter of the sky. Even after so many years it still made his skin crawl. Billowing and swirling above, the thick oily cloud writhed as menacingly as if it were alive. Perhaps it was. They didn’t know. Perhaps it was nothing more than a shadow, and yet death was in it. The death of the world.
Denis struggled with the lens, careful of the rough edges where salt air had corroded the iron. The fifth-order Fresnel, which threw a concentrated amber beam twenty miles across the channel, was not easy to move. The layered glass, shaped roughly like a beehive, hadn’t sat properly in the swivel since a shoddy replacement two years earlier.
Two years, he snickered to himself. Two hundred years? Never matter. He gripped the lens. The timing of this need not be precise, but he liked to get it over with as soon as possible. With a practiced heave, he swung the beam up, away from Nantucket Sound and into the sky.
He recalled the first time he’d done it, so many days ago, years ago. The desperation, the fear. The cloud had come from someplace across the heavens at the tail end of 1910, just a few months after the passing of Halley’s Comet. The hysteria surrounding the Comet, whose tail brushed the atmosphere amid widespread proclamations of doom and disaster, was as nothing compared to the panic caused by the cloud. The American Astronomical Society with its giant 60-inch glass and mirror eye at Mt. Wilson had tracked the thing as it cut a swath across known space, negating everything it touched, boiling away the atmosphere, carving a hole through the sky. The experts who studied such things—the movements of the planets, the alignment of the stars—scratched their heads, leaving everyone else to throw up their hands in hopeless surrender.
The religiously inclined loudly proclaimed that the cloud represented the wrath of an angry God, holy vengeance given form, a specter of judgment and immolation. As to how the people of the Earth had offended, making them deserving of such a fate, Denis held with the more traditionalist notions among his fellow Catholics. Modern society had meddled in things never meant for man, harnessing electricity and recklessly rattling the ether with radio waves. Whatever the cause, the clerics found themselves in solid agreement with the scientists on one point alone: there was no doubt what would happen when that cloud hit.
Death was on the wing and all the world held its breath in concert, helpless to halt its coming. Denis had been as terrified as anyone, staring up as that dark eye approached, knowing he had only a few hours left to live. And more than scared, he had been angry. After a lifetime of loneliness and a bitter, wandering existence he’d finally found happiness, finally a measure of peace in this place, with this woman. The thing in the sky would rip it all away.
The impenetrable black of it offended him, the inevitable crawl of it infuriated him. And in his rage, in a gesture of futile passion, Denis McCullen turned the lens of the lighthouse against it. An embittered stab of protest, nothing more. He had never expected what happened next, and to this day still did not understand it. When he cast his pathetic little light at the immense darkness, the darkness gave way.
When Denis signed on as keeper of the lighthouse at Arrow Point he’d been unaware of its long and shadowed history. Local fishermen were quick to fill in the gaps, pointing out ancient ruins amidst the breakers, all but wiped away by time and the sea, unknowable structures now reduced to a scattering of standing stones embedded in the beach. The mark of early man was on them, etched into the grim granite long before western civilization ever broached the northern continent. An ancient watchtower had preceded the lighthouse, built at a crossing of the ley lines, at a time when man still respected the mystical power of the Earth.
Turning the light skyward, shining it against the black cloud in an act of defiance that posited no chance of success, Denis McCullen saved the world. How could anyone guess that a protective reaction from the very Earth itself, a polarized energy as natural as the tides, would flow along the ancient ley lines, focused by the great lens?
As Denis swung the beam up toward the cloud, now as then, a bolt of earth energy coursed up along the iron struts of the tower and shot through the lens, shattering the jeweled surface into a million fragments as it surged to meet the black cloud. Denis had witnessed this same miracle every day for a hundred years, but found it no less amazing each time. A few shards bounced back into the lighthouse tower. Denis was ready for them without having to think about it, turning away to protect his face. He didn’t cover his eyes because he wanted to watch. Denis saw the cloud begin to recede, pushed away by the force of the blast. But this time, the cloud wasn’t what he wanted to look at.
This time, fear and rage forgotten, thoughts of solemn duty put on hold, he was more interested in the snow. The view across the Sound from the lamp room was spectacular all year round, but never so much as when a light snow dusted down to meet the sea and kiss the beach with frost. It rarely snowed this early in the winter, and in his tenure at Arrow Point he’d witnessed this miraculous sight only once before.
It was a gentle snow but thick, slowly wafting down. And as he watched, the flakes stopped in mid-air, held still for a second, then two, frozen in place, and then began to drift lazily upward, swirling back the way they had come. For a precious minute, it was snowing upward.
Denis stood amazed, grinning like a child.
Kaela called his name and he turned, smiling. “Did you see?” he asked, pointing at the sky. “The snow?”
She shook her head; she’d been climbing the stairs during that frozen moment, coming to tell him that his breakfast was ready. She smiled back at him, waif-like, drinking in his delight, a light filigree of snow frosting her raven hair, her cheeks flushed pink by winter’s icy tickle. She wore a sheepskin coat against the chill and the wool at her cuff roughed his skin as she took his hand.
Her hand had cooled with the December air but, clasped in his, it was also warm because she loved him.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
Quite often after breakfast she would sing to him on the watch deck. Kaela knew an impressive catalogue of folk songs from Cyprus and the Sporades, learned on silver-bright mornings in her mother’s arms, a treasured slice of her childhood that she carried always with her. She sang as winter reversed into fall outside their windows and the dead oaks sprouted withered leaves of crimson and ochre and yellow.
As Kaela’s vocals filled the air with spirited melody, Denis clapped along, providing his own off-beat accompaniment. She sang the Galatiad, the song of the secret lovers Galatea and Acis, who carried on their affair beneath the watchful cruelty of the Cyclops Polyphemus, the two eventually transforming into a river, flowing together. It was one of Kaela’s favorites and Denis wondered if she saw in it a charmed reflection of their own lives, with her father cast in the role of the Cyclops. As she moved along the circular watch deck, Kaela seemed a perfect gypsy, hair billowing freely on the autumn breeze, a blue and white summer dress fluttering this way and that, carefree and laughing. She couldn’t keep perfect pitch, but her audience of one never seemed to mind and she danced on with wild abandon, covering her mistakes with an extra flurry of the hem of her dress or wave of her arms.
She loved the mornings most of all, especially the way the early sunlight played against the striking landscape below. The open-air watch deck offered a glorious panoramic view of the island. Of course, to appreciate the beauty, one had to first ignore the ugly black cloud receding against the featureless gray bubble of the sky.
As the seasons played out backwards, the woods blazed with fall color, stands of silver maple erupted in yellows and reds, and the thicket of scrub oak circling the lake painted itself rusty brown, gold, and purple. The autumn colors burst forth from the bare branches like fireworks, a living pageant of color. Kaela danced across the catwalk, waving a red bandana, with that rouged and gilded foliage as backdrop, until the leaves all turned a uniform green and Kaela fell, exhausted, into Denis’ arms, the bandana set loose across the Sound.
The best time for a swim, they had learned, was shortly after noon when early fall turned to late summer. And the best place for a swim was the lake on the south of the island. Nantucket Bay was far too choppy. Good for splashing and frolicking, but when they wanted quiet time, or if they wanted to see the sky, it was always the lake.
At first, they’d been able to see through the bubble. Denis knew a thing or two about naked-eye astronomy as taught aboard ships, and he marked Orion’s movements against the night sky. There was no doubt about it. Time was passing normally for those outside the bubble, while its two occupants lived each day as a year in reverse, the black cloud retreating into the sky. But time could stretch backward only so far until, like an elastic band, it shot forward again, resetting itself at the end of each day.
The stars were gone now. After perhaps twenty years or so, they could no longer see the other side. With repeated resets the surface of the bubble, marred slightly with each backward turn of the clock, became increasingly worn like a phonograph recording played too many times—such scuffing eventually faded their sky to a sheet of opaque gray.
But at the lake they still had the reflection of sky on water. When the summer wind was still, the surface lay a luminous blue feathered with white. By midday the black cloud had diminished to a coin equal in size to the rippling oval of the sun, a dark twin sharing the sky. They stared at the sky in the lake for quite some time before breaking the surface with their bodies and churning the heavens with their rollicking and splashing. The water was warm in the late summer and they had the sunshine if not the sun itself, warm on their skin. Denis tied a rope to a convenient overhanging branch and Kaela perfected swinging dives into the limpid pool. Denis dove for treasure in the murky depths. Of course, he found none, save the woman in his arms.
The lake was their own private oasis, complete with a perfect stretch of beach. They often lay naked on the sand, Denis making a study of the patterns in the drops of water drying on his wife’s smooth, flawless skin.
“How long has it been?” she would ask.
“Hard to keep track, living a year every day. A hundred years or two hundred?”
“Oh, we could stay this way a thousand years, two thousand. Our own world. Every day a perfect day.” She sat up, knocking all the little pearls of water loose and ruining his game. “Everyone in the world gone, and only us, starting each day over. Forever.”
Denis nodded in solid agreement. Wildflowers sprung up beside the water, coaxed by the honeyed sunlight. The only thing missing from the perfect scene was birdsong. Starlings used to make their nests in the pines, flitting above them, but over time they’d all dared across the barrier and were gone. None had drifted in to replace them. So many things had been lost to them. They didn’t have moving pictures, the world’s fair, a radio or telephone, high fashion, Isadora Duncan, or a friend in the world. They didn’t need the world. They had the stream, the pools, April showers, sunny days. They had laughter. They had each other.
Denis regretted none of it. He could do without the world which had served him up nothing but bitterness and thankless toil, savage beatings at the hands of raving quartermasters, two fingers lost to frigid North Atlantic swells, nights in friendless seaboard towns and scornful looks from those who considered themselves his betters, but he quavered when he thought of all that Kaela had lost. He’d given up nothing, but she had forsaken everything: wealth, status, family. All for him.
At thirty-five, Denis had felt a little childish hiding from her father’s wrath at Arrow Point, but life had taught him the futility of opposing the rich and powerful. Giorgio Itasca was a self-made millionaire, a self-made shipping magnate, a self-made pompous ass. The vainglorious might fight someone like him, but they could not win. Denis was without a cent, a third-class crewman on a cargo freighter, but firm in the conviction that there were some things in life far more important than money. He first glimpsed Kaela from the deck of the Phaedra when she was eighteen, walking beside her father along the pier. He returned a year later, took a job as a construction hand on Itasca’s Cypriot villa annex, and managed a chance meeting. The odds were against him, but he had a poetic heart and she read the blazing devotion in his eyes. The age difference was inconsequential, but the gap in social status was impossible. So they did what they wanted, what they desperately needed, and they ran. A year later they were married on this very island by a Nantucket priest sworn to secrecy, with Denis’ brother George and his wife Greta the only witnesses.
“Are you content, Denny?” she asked.
“More than content. As happy as I have ever been, and more than I ever imagined possible.”
She rolled on top of him, her dark eyes glistening, her delicate lips gently parted. As her weight settled against his hips, he pulled her toward him, burying his face in the forest of her night-black hair. She pulled back again, her tender smile hovering just above his own. He had given up wondering what she saw in him; her contented, amused gaze answered eloquently enough, obviating the need for bothersome particulars. It was enough to know that she was satisfied. She feathered him with kisses, her lips brushing velvet against his neck and chest. They made love in slow languorous movements, each so fully acquainted with the preferences and desires of the other, Denis burying his face in the hollow of her neck, inhaling her quickening breath, smelling of bayberries and coriander. He measured her expression as she flushed from excitement to release. Her hair, wild after their lovemaking, fluttered against his cheeks, tickling his lips.
He closed his eyes.
A moment later, he was startled awake by what seemed a desperate, piercing cry. A flash of cold sweat, as if he’d just experienced the recoil. But it was August, the middle of the day. It could not have been the recoil.
Kaela lay still. He watched her face, disconcerted in sleep, as if she were disturbed by some dark dream.
The only discomfort in their lives was the recoil, when time lurched forward again in the early morning, pulling them roughly out of sleep, twisting their stomachs violently inside out. Sometimes Kaela, who had a weak constitution, gagged or vomited as Denis got up, pulled on a wool sweater and ascended the tower stair to his waiting business with the dark cloud.
It took them a few days to understand the bizarre circumstance that had ensnared them. The first day, after watching the lens blow itself apart, Denis rejoined the others in the lighthouse. His brother George and his wife were visiting, and they had decided to spend the day together, in quiet pursuits, even if it be their last.
Denis told them what had happened in the lamp room, the fateful blast of light, the reprieve accorded to the world by his unwitting hand. During their picnic lunch by the lake, they watched the writhing inkblot move back up the sky. A miracle!
That night, the recoil stirred them all out of sleep for the first time as if some ghostly hand had seized their innards and wrung them inside out. An intense sensation of dread led Denis unerringly to the tower window. Again the cloud was there. Close. As close as it had been the day before. He rushed to the lens, which he found no longer shattered but whole and unbroken. He did not hesitate. He redirected the beam and the events of the previous day played out again. The lens erupted, releasing the white-hot discharge from the bowels of the earth, forcing the slow retreat of Death in the sky.
To their amazement, the food they’d consumed the day before was still in the pantry, the containers unopened. The gift of fresh eggs George had brought from Boston sat yet again atop the counter, made to reappear by the invisible hand of some unseen magician’s trick. Their clothes were not where they had left them, but where they had previously been. The chest of drawers George and Denis had been building in the sitting room was again disassembled and awaiting their tender care. As explanation for these wondrous happenings, they had not a single reasonable theory among them. During the next day, amid a repeat of bizarre weather which took them again from winter through fall to summer, they discovered the bubble, a barely noticeable haze arcing up and around the island like filigrees of frost lacing a windowpane. And in the wee hours of the morning, came again the recoil.
Theirs was a universe in and of itself; the bubble preserved the world around it while remaining wholly apart. Time was irrelevant and if magic existed anywhere in the world, it was with them. As each day reset itself, Kaela remained forever nineteen years old, perpetually young and beautiful, and in love. Denis would do anything to preserve their life together. Almost anything.
As they lay on the beach, Denis pulled up a handful of sand, weighing the grains in his palm as they rushed to slip through his grasp, drawn inevitably back down. He flung it away. The image upset him. What was sand anyway, but fractured shards of rock and shell? He had answered her question of his contentment too quickly, the answer not quite a lie because it was so close to being the truth. He could have lived this way forever and been happy for it, except for the one thing. One tiny little thing. They dared not speak of it lest it shatter the spell, but unspoken or not, he could bear it no longer.
Denis blew gently against Kaela’s eyelids. Her eyes fluttered open.
“You fell asleep,” he said.
“I was having a dream of Time.” She shook her head, casting aside sleep’s last cloying tendrils. “You were there. We were caught up in a flow of quicksilver. I’ve always thought of Time as a river flowing steadily downstream, but there are eddies in any river, this one a circular pool of mercury. We let it take us, round and round—”
“A calliope ride…”
“Mmmm. That puts us back just where we started. Is that so bad?”
“Not at all, in the right company,” he said. “If it were just the two of us…”
Her face deadened as if he had just dared to call a ghost by name, and she stood for a moment, silent. She picked up her dress, angrily shaking out the sand and hugging it to her chest. “What happens if you try to scoop quicksilver up?” she asked, angrily. “Try to hold it in your hands? What happens then?”
“I don’t know.”
Her unanswered question seemed to walk silently beside them as they went looking for mid-summer wildflowers, huckleberry and peppermint, in the meadow to the west. A series of flat, radiant stones glittered amid the abundant green, forming a natural walkway through the narrow glade. As he looked down, one lone tear spattered against one such stone.
That evening, as the summer cooled toward spring, they enjoyed an outdoor supper. They dined most often in the field just below the tower, on the promenade by the sea which they had nicknamed Mermaid Avenue. Kaela was a fine cook and she worked wonders with their dried stores, fixing meals so delicious they could almost forget they were eating the same food every night.
Often, after dinner, he would tell her romantic stories while she sat on his lap, eyes closed, smiling. He devised epic sagas to her immense delight, featuring his hot-tempered ancestor Bloody Bill McCullen, a daring swashbuckler who had a disgruntled but basically good-hearted kelpie as a first mate and a mermaid for a wife.
After dinner, Kaela wandered away. She’d always been fond of solitary walks on the beach at sunset. It took him a long while to catch on, a delay he attributed to men being much thicker than women, and even longer to make up his mind to talk to her about it. But now it had to be done. He followed after her, leaving the picnic things where they lay. A delicate silver tray, the lone carryover from her former life, the wooden bowls, the dented, mismatched cutlery and frayed linen. There was no need to carry any of it back to the tower. In time, it would all find its own way home.
Denis watched as Kaela bent to pick up a flat piece of shale and carried it to a bed of marigolds in the shade beneath a stand of wilt-pine. She probably used the same stone each time, he thought. She knows just where to find that flat stone, just how to set it up. Such a practiced look on her face. How many times?
One day Denis had set about building a rowboat so that they might spend an afternoon drifting lazily on the lake. He spent an entire day in a heroic effort to make a seaworthy craft, using wood from the cabinetry he and George could never finish assembling. The second coat of pitch had barely dried in time for a sunset cruise. Of course, the next day it was gone.
They could not make their mark here. They could change nothing, build nothing that would withstand the recoil. Their existence was entirely wraithlike, insubstantial.
How many times had she laid that flat stone?
Was this marker for the child they had just conceived, he wondered, or in memoriam of the one from yesterday, lost in the recoil? Or the one before that? Erased. Like so many of their children.
Denis strode toward her. A low pine branch switched against his bare arm, stinging a thin red welt across his skin as he crossed the thicket. He came up behind his wife as she knelt among the marigolds.
“How do you know?” he asked. “We only made love this afternoon.”
“A woman just knows.”
“Does it happen every day?”
“Only sometimes,” she sighed.
“Today?”
“Yes.” She turned to look up at him, still kneeling by the flowers, eyes glittering with sorrow. The sky was, as ever, a featureless gray, but the lake burned scarlet as daylight rapidly dwindled away, casting her sadness in shadow.
“We can’t go on like this,” he said. “You know that.”
She began to sob and turned away as hopelessness poured out of her eyes. They were so happy together. She had hoped never to speak of this.
“He–”
“–or she–” Kaela interjected.
“–deserves a chance,” he said.
“No matter the cost?”
For a moment he thought he might not have the strength to answer. His gaze trailed away, settling upon the little slab of shale, the nameless marker. How great must the sacrifice be, how many pregnancies erased?
“You can’t put up another one of those markers,” he said, “Not another one. How few hours would it stand? Just until the early morning, when the recoil puts it back.” He knocked the marker down. “Not this time. Not one more. You know I’m right.”
“You need me here with you,” she said.
“Yes. But now I need you to go.”
They knew it was possible to leave, because George and Greta had gone. On the second day, George decided to row to the mainland and return as soon as he learned anything. They watched him don his straw hat with comically exaggerated determination and tread along the causeway to pass effortlessly through the bubble. Hours later he did return, but could only stand outside, unable to traverse the barrier, pressing his hands against its surface. No way back in, he stood soundlessly battering against it. Greta hesitated not a bit. She ran down the causeway, plunging herself out after him. Denis and Kaela watched as their friends embraced on the other side. George signaled for them to follow, but Denis held back. They didn’t dare leave. They still had the death cloud to contend with, and Denis was convinced the lighthouse beam was the key factor. If no one remained to shine the light…
After a while George and Greta shrugged, blew them kisses, and waved good-bye.
“Don’t turn around,” he whispered.
Don’t turn around. They had already said good-bye a hundred times. He’d wiped away her tears with his hands, his shoulder, his face; and she had wiped his. Now she stood before the bubble, far out along the causeway, facing the uncertain future. She seemed small, doll-like, as if she’d already left him. He felt old, as if all two hundred years had suddenly crashed in upon him like a tide at the beach, as if being perpetually thirty-five was a fantasy made of delicate glass, which must now end.
Kaela paused before the bubble, that opaque cataract, that evil eye through which they could no longer see. And he could tell that she was trembling, probably weeping, but he would not wipe away the tears now. Not this time. Not ever again. Please don’t turn around, Kaela. Step through. Resolution wanes in these final moments. You must be strong.
“What do you think it’s like,” she had asked him, between tears, earlier that day, “out there after so many years? What kind of world?”
“I’ll bet it’s just the same. People don’t change,” he replied in a faltering voice. “Taller buildings and faster horsecars, I’d imagine. You’ll be fine.” Truth be told, he was not so sure. She’d been raised in wealth and privilege, swathed in fine French silks and primrose lace, all of which she cast away in favor of his company. Nineteen years old, and alone, she returned to the world with nothing. Nothing but a whispered prayer, his undying devotion, and an intense hope for what she carried inside her womb. As far as he was concerned, this was the bravest thing anyone had ever done. How much easier to stay with him? How much easier for them both. And yet, impossible.
One more step and she’d be gone. He watched, shivering, trembling in horror, but he could not regret the decision they had made. She stepped through slowly, sinking face-first into a sea of milk, and vanished, leaving not so much as a ripple behind. Did she linger on the other side, he wondered, did she turn, calling his name, and beat her fists against the barrier? He had no way to know. So he chose to imagine her striding confidently down the causeway, stepping out of one life and into another. Denis took consolation in this: she would never be alone.
Alone.
Alone, he had good reason for getting up in the morning but not for much else. Each day the recoil woke him from cold dreams, almost a blessing, its wrenching pain practically welcome if such a thing were conceivable, its rough touch his only companion.
Each day, each year, he mounted the slick steps of the tower to perform his duty. In the past, repelling the cloud had been an act of self-interest as he began each new day with nothing in mind except to spend the day with her. But now it was merely a duty, a responsibility that rested not on the shoulders of a cleric or a wizard or some great man of science, but had fallen upon him, a common seaman, a lighthouse keeper. Death loomed again. And again. With nobody to prevent it except the man alone in the bubble. He stood for hours on the causeway, within a hair’s breadth of the barrier. In darkly melancholic moments he was tempted to step through, consigning the world to oblivion. But he would never do that. He would forever hold the line.
He turned the lens each day, setting light against the seething darkness. There was only enough fuel in the lamp for a week, but because of the recoil it would last forever.
He gave no more thought to Bloody Bill McCullen or mermaids or kelpies. What use fanciful tales if there was no one to share them with, no eager grin, no anticipatory raised eyebrows, no questing eyes. No appreciative smile.
He studied the featureless gray of the bubble with a fevered intensity, sometimes imagining he saw a crack here or there, or a frantic shadow assaulting the other side. The quiet was unnerving, the solitude complete. All the animals and birds had drifted out through the barrier and none could enter to replace them. The erratic weather had killed off all the junebugs, crickets, and caterpillars.
He spent a lot of time among the rocky crags near the ocean. He avoided the lake—its cheery reflection irritated him now. Memories of the happy life they had lived lapped cruelly at the beach. He took long walks on the shore, but only at night.
Time passed, the days blurring into each other as the years raced by, running like weak soup, eroding canyons down his cheeks.
And one day, as the last man on earth dozed dejectedly on his pallet, there came a knock on the door.
Denis thought he’d imagined it, as he had imagined so many sounds in the night of late. But it came again. A determined rapping at the door. Good Lord, he thought, I’ve passed in my sleep, I’ve forgotten to shift the beam, the end has come. He turned over and closed his eyes, pressing his face against the bedding. If it be the Grim Reaper at his door, he damn well wasn’t going to answer.
The door creaked open. After all, there was no lock.
A figure stood framed in the doorway. Tall, broad at the shoulder, the man seemed dressed for adventure—hiking boots, khaki pants, a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway back, a strange long-billed cap on his head. The hat, which Denis found as ridiculous as a jester’s belled foolscap, was emblazoned with the face of a leering buccaneer and a logo which read: Pittsburgh Pirates. The stranger wore a pleasant grin that bore close resemblance to brother George, but there was Kaela in his face as well and Denis knew who he was even before the stranger said, “Father?”
Of course he was father, not Dad. There was a difference. Dad was someone who took you for walks in the woods and to boxing exhibitions, who taught you to fish, or how to handle a rifle. Dad was someone who gave you piggyback rides at the cost of his sacroiliac. What do you call someone who gave you life and nothing else? You call him father.
“This isn’t possible,” muttered Denis. An instant later, a hopeful glow flashed behind his eyes, “The barrier?”
The man in the doorway shook his head. “It still stands, I’m afraid. May I come in?”
Denis waved him in and as soon as he was within arm’s reach, hugged him close. He held on for quite a while, not even a little embarrassed by the tears streaming down his face. Then, seized by a sudden horror, he pushed his son roughly away so he could ask, “Your mother?”
“She’s fine.” The young man, several inches taller than Denis, gazed down at him with undisguised adoration. Denis had so many questions to ask he hardly knew where to start. How was she really? Did she blame him for sending her away? Had she gone on with her life? Remarried? It had been a long time. He wouldn’t blame her. From this myriad of questions, Denis stumblingly chose, settling by chance upon the one perfect question whose answer spoke to all of them. He asked his son’s name, which turned out to be Dennis McCullen.
Denis felt suddenly stronger than he had in years, and hungry. He bade his son sit down at table while he drizzled water over a crusty slab of ship’s biscuit and laid out salted pork, rice, and warm beer.
“How did you live?” he asked.
“Mother had an inheritance. No legal claim to it after all that time, under the bizarre circumstances, but that didn’t mean the Itasca family wouldn’t recognize her. After a simple DNA test—I’m sorry—that’s a medical test, a way they have to see what family you come from. We were well provided for.”
Denis nodded. It was better than he’d dared hope. His misgivings about the type of reception a young pregnant woman might receive alone in the world was a heavy burden now lifted.
“You said the barrier still stands…?”
“Yes, it goes a mile and a half in every direction, even skyward. They have to keep the air traffic away from it—”
“Air traffic?” asked Denis, breaking off a piece of the ship’s biscuit but not yet willing to suspend conversation long enough for chewing.
“Flying machines. Jets. Helicopters. And some idiot tried to climb the dome once—”
Denis waved him off. All that could wait. “Not yet, not yet. I need to know how you got in.”
“It’s sort of difficult to explain in a way that you’d understand. Having been conceived in this place, moving backwards through time, my atoms have a reverse temporal signature—a slightly irregular spin. That makes me just a little bit different than most folks. Not so you’d notice standing next to me on the bus, but on some level, I have a kind of negative polarity relative to the barrier.
“You see, the barrier itself—the entire bubble—is constantly moving backward in time, and that’s why it can’t be breached from the other side. Not unless somebody invents time travel I guess. But, like I said, I’m different. The barrier is still one-way, but for me it’s the reverse. The same way that you can leave but never return, I could get in but I can never pass out again.”
“You can’t leave?” said Denis, his tone the sharp rebuke of a father shocked by the foolish behavior of his child.
“No, I can’t. And no one else can get in either. Not that they’d want to. Few people even believe this place exists anymore.”
“Why not? Don’t people remember the panic of 1910?” asked Denis, incredulous. “The end of the world?”
The younger man cleared his throat. “Well, kind of…a lot of time has gone by. The whole thing is generally regarded as sort of a myth now. Not many people think it actually happened, that it’s just part of the mystique of the null-bubble. A made-up story.”
“But the cloud. The cloud. I thought by now, with all these marvels of which you speak, I thought they would have figured out what it is, how to get rid of it. Surely—”
“You don’t understand, Father,” said Dennis. “The cloud is trapped inside the bubble. They have no way to access it.”
They sat in silence for a moment, as Denis tried to take the measure of the man who sat across from him. Thankfully, he had removed the ridiculous cap. The young man’s attitude seemed much too cavalier, even a bit sappy, all smiles and barely-concealed excitement, but that could very well be explained by a meeting with his long-lost father. Did he know what he’d gotten himself into? Did he really understand the curse he’d undertaken by coming here?
“How old are you, son?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“So young! I wanted you to have a life—”
“But I did! Father, I’ve walked under the sea, surrounded by the living rainbow of the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve been to Japan and Australia. I climbed the Great Pyramid at Gizeh and stood nose-to-nose with the Sphinx. I was married for five years to the most wonderful woman on Earth. From the comfort of my living room, while snacking on pizza, I watched a team of men set foot upon the planet Mars.”
Denis’ jaw gaped. He wanted to hear every fantastical detail but it would all have to wait. More pressing business first.
“If you can’t leave, at least we’ll be together,” Denis added. “It won’t be so bad. You’ll see.”
The younger man slapped his hand on the flat of the table. “That’s not what I want,” he said firmly. “For her.”
The words rang out through the lighthouse like a pair of gunshots. The smile was gone, his face flushed a healthy shade of Irish.
“What?” Denis saw determination in his son’s eyes, the firm resolution of a man, not a boy. He liked what he saw.
“She’s been waiting a long time, Father.”
“If you’re twenty-eight,” said Denis, “Kaela would be, what, forty-eight?”
“Yes. Forty-nine tomorrow. And she ages a year each day that passes here. So, you’ll have to hurry. You’ll leave first thing in the morning, just as soon as you show me what to do with the lens.”
“Forty-nine…” Denis tried to imagine Kaela’s face aged with the years. He found he could see her clearly, her knowing smile, her wild beauty mellowed by time but not tamed.
His mind swam with the possibilities. He was still only thirty-five. A reprieve from this personal purgatory would be a gift beyond imagining but by passing through that milky doorway he would be consigning his son to oblivion. How could he leave Dennis alone in this place? And how could he not, with Kaela waiting on the other side? “Do you know what you’re saying? Do you understand—”
“I know all about this place, and all about you,” said Dennis. “Mom made sure of that.”
“I meant for you to live your life and be happy,” said Denis, “not to trade places with me. Not to take on my burden.”
“Why not? You took on ours, you took on the whole world’s burden.” Once again Denis saw a new side to this strange man at his table, a wisdom and maturity which his pleasant demeanor had conveniently hidden. There’s so much I don’t know about you, thought Denis. And if I do go, only one night to know my son. Such little time.
“And besides, I was happy,” added the son. “For a time. I was married for five blissful years. My wife died, Dad. She died. You didn’t cause the cancer that took her from me. It just happened. So you see, I had my chance. I had my happiness but it’s gone. And don’t you dare tell me there’ll come another, or I’ll belt you one, father or no.”
Denis scooped some curried rice into his mouth to cover the beginnings of a coy smile. He was saddened by his son’s loss, no doubt, but couldn’t help an incredible swell of pride just then. Kaela had done so well with their boy. How hard that must have been, without him there to help.
“I left some gear down at the end of the causeway,” said his son. “I’ll go and pick it up.”
“How did you know you’d get through?”
“I didn’t. I just had a hunch. We’re terrific ones for hunches, us McCullens.”
Denis smiled at that. He had no choice but to agree. “All right, let’s us two have a walk.”
It was mid-summer on the island. Denis squinted against the shouting sunlight as if he’d been asleep for years. The pair strolled along Mermaid Avenue. “What was that you said about flying machines?”
Dennis began regaling his father with the wonders and technology of his time, but cut himself short. “That’s not what I want to tell you about. You’ll learn all about those things soon enough, even take a ride in one I’ll wager. Let me tell you about Olivia.”
“Who?”
“My wife.”
“Tell me.”
If Denis had any doubts about the fitness of his son for the task ahead, the items at the end of the causeway dispelled them all. There was no need to wonder if his son was the right choice to be the world’s guardian, to keep this lighthouse in perpetuity, to stand alone, the last bastion against the dark. What had he brought with him? Not scientific equipment with a goal toward analysis and finding a way out, but a boxboard full of paints and a canvas. One single canvas. He knew what he was doing.
The best time for painting, he found, was late in the afternoon when summer began its fizzle into late spring. He set up shop in the long grass below the lighthouse tower where the meadow afforded rich, unobstructed sunlight. With slow and precise care he applied details to the painting, often spending hours on the highlights of her hair. He still hadn’t gotten it right, the expression of wistfulness about the eye, the playful turn of her lips. But there was plenty of time. In the 1890’s Claude Monet painted the facade of the Rouen cathedral seventeen times, in varying shades of daylight, until he got it right. Each one a masterpiece.
In the forty years since he’d met his father, Dennis thought often of his parents. They were likely gone now. He could only wonder what changes were going on in the world he protected, what new technological marvels were being developed in think tanks and laboratories and home offices. He believed that eventually they would find a way through the barrier. If not, he was content. As far as he was concerned he’d taken his chances, played his cards. He had already died long ago, holding Olivia’s hand in a hospital room in Philadelphia. All the rest was just an extra moment, one beat of the heart, no time at all. Perhaps it would not be forever. No way to know. He would be here, still painting. Her face.