Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss

We went outside. “What, you’re no fun?” I said.

“Not much.” The door banged shut behind us. Gryffin set down the bag and buttoned his jacket. He raised an eyebrow as I snagged my beer. “Isn’t it a little early for that?”

“Beer. It’s what’s for breakfast.” I cracked it and took a sip. “Your mother would know.”

We trudged back uphill. “What’s with all the coffee brandy?” I asked. “Looks like Suze is stockpiling the stuff.”

“That’s Allen’s Coffee Brandy, the Maine drug of choice. It’s lethal—70 proof. That’s how a lot of people up here get their Vitamin D—they mix it with milk and get an extra buzz from the caffeine. Kills more people than heroin does.”

I took another pull at my beer. “That’s disgusting.”

“Pot kettle black.”

“I hate sweet shit,” I said.

He angled off toward the path I’d first taken with Toby. I let him get a few steps ahead of me, then slid my hand into my pocket. I found the keys I’d nicked, felt around till I located the hole in the bottom of the sea urchin. The keys just fit, though a bit of the shell broke off as I poked them inside. I removed the sea urchin from my pocket and held it, a spiky little fist in my palm. Then I set it down at the edge of the road a few yards from the store.

It blended in nicely with gravel and rocks and dust-covered moss. “Bye-bye,” I said and hurried after Gryffin.

We walked without speaking, skirting the pine grove and taking a different path toward the water. I finished my beer, reached over to tuck the empty into the paper bag Gryffin carried. A flicker of distaste crossed his face, but he said nothing.

“So,” I said. I was feeling better. The beer made me feel warmer, and everything had that benign, soft-focus look it gets when you drink in the middle of the day. “This commune everyone talks about. Any of those guys still around?”

“Oakwind?” Gryffin stopped to shake a stone from his shoe. “Not really. Most of them were clueless as to how to actually build a house, so their places fell apart over the years. There’s a couple of them left.”

He put his shoe back on and began walking again “Mostly they got sold when the hippies went back to Wall Street or Julliard or wherever. Some people went native and stayed here. There’s three or four folks around Burnt Harbor. Here on Paswegas it’s just Toby and Ray, I think. One or two guys on the outer islands, but they’re not people you want to mess with. I’m talking about guys who live in old school buses and survive on blocks of government cheese.”

“And Allen’s Coffee Brandy.”

“And Allen’s Coffee Brandy,” Gryffin agreed. “Old Toby, now, he’s just a few steps ahead of them—he lives on rum and Moxie. He keeps an apartment here down by the harbor, but he stays on his boat until the weather gets really bad.”

“What about this guy Denny?”

He fell silent.

“He’s a burnout,” he said at last.

I waited, and after a minute he went on. “The winters were too hard for most of them, so they split. The ones who stayed tended either to be the most together, like Toby, or the most burned out. Like Denny. Lucien Ryel, he was together. Together enough not to live here year-round, anyway. You know who he is? He owns an island not too far off.”

“Yeah, I gather he’s a local celebrity.”

Gryffin laughed. “Who told you that? Toby? Around here, someone hires you and his check clears, he’s a celebrity. Lucien’s more like another has-been. We have a lot of them, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“What about you?”

“I’m a never-tried-to-be-something.”

We were high on the seaward side of the island now, near a line of misshapen firs that formed a bit of windbreak. They leaned away from the water crashing far below, as though trying to flee from it. Beside the trees were two huge boulders. Gryffin walked toward them and gestured for me to follow.

“See that?” He stopped and pointed across the reach to a long shadow that seemed to hover just above the water’s surface. “That’s Lucien’s island. Tolba Island. That means “turtle” in the Passamaquoddy language.”

I squinted, but distance and sea-haze made it hard to get a fix on the place. I popped the lens cap from my camera and focused, took a few shots then lowered it again. “It doesn’t look like a turtle to me.”

“Yeah, me neither. I guess when you’re on it, it does. I wouldn’t know—I’ve never been there. Toby says he’s got a whole compound—recording studio, main house, hermit’s cave…”

“A cave? Really?”

“No. That’s just what Toby calls it. It’s where the caretaker lives. Denny.”

“I thought Toby was the caretaker?”

“Toby? No. Toby did a lot of the work, but he’s never lived there. And Lucien lives in Berlin—he only comes here for a week or two in the summer. He wanted Toby to stay out on the island and watch the place for him, but Toby said no. So he got Denny to do it.”

“Better than living on a bus,” I suggested.

“Yeah, I guess.” Gryffin gave me a resigned look. “Denny was the guy started the commune. He was around our house all the time when I was little. He and my mother, they had a thing. It ended badly.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. When I was really little, I was always scared of him. When I got a little older he was gone, but by then I thought he was, like, Charles Manson. I could never figure out what the appeal was, for my mother and everyone else.”

I thought of Phil. This guy she was involved with, he and I did a little business, back in the day .

“Probably he had really good drugs,” I said.

Gryffin nodded. “I remember at Putney, this girl—big druggy—she died of an overdose. When they did the autopsy, the medical report said her brain looked like a Swiss cheese. And I thought, Christ, Denny Ahearn’s brain looks like that and he’s still alive .”

“Maybe that’s what happened to the girl from the motel.”

“Drugs?” Gryffin shook his head. “I doubt it. Not Kenzie.”

“No. This Denny guy. Maybe he kidnapped her or something.”

“Uh-uh. Denny never leaves the island. I mean, he might come over once or twice a year to get some groceries, but that’s it. Toby brings him whatever he needs when he’s out there provisioning Lucien. Denny’s a total hermit. I mean, he’s just sane enough to be on this side of AMHI.”

“AMHI?”

“Augusta Mental Health Institution. State loony bin. If he were down in Portland or someplace like that, he’d probably be on the street. But here—well, he’s pretty normal.”

“Normal?” I stared at him in disbelief. “Ever hear of Stephen King? I mean, you were the one who brought up Charles Manson.”

Gryffin looked exasperated. “You’re from away, so you don’t get it. Half the guys in Maine look like Charles Manson. Especially here down east. There’s a lot of survivalist types living off in the woods; you can’t go arresting them every time someone wanders off the Appalachian Trail. If you could even find them.”

“But you know right where Denny is.”

“Yeah, and it’s a good place for him.” He stared out at the bulk of Tolba Island. “Guys like Denny, maybe they know what’s best for them. Stay away from the rest of us. Some people just don’t play well with others. If they want to hide and waste their lives, that’s their business.”

I didn’t say anything, just stood beside him, gazing at the water. After a minute I peered at his face.

“What?” he demanded.

“The green ray.” I extended my finger. He flinched, and I stopped, my finger hovering an inch from his cheekbone. “There—in your eye. That weird speck of green. I’ve never seen that before.”