M. Wren - A Gift Upon the Shore

He shakes his head and for a moment seems on the verge of tears. But he won’t cry; he won’t let himself cry.

“Then how am I to know what’s good or bad?”

“You’ll have to decide that for yourself, and it will never be easy. Never, as long as you live.”

He sighs, but there is no resolution in his features. He remains silent for a while, staring out at the sea, then he turns. “I’m sorry you got hurt. For me.”

I look down at my hand, at the diagonals of burning red. “Well, you’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”

He smiles, no doubt finding it incongruous that I might be in the same situation he was. “Yes, I’d do it for you, Mary.”

“Anyway, we’ve both learned something from all this. I said you should always ask questions, but I should’ve qualified it. There are some questions you don’t ask in church.” Then I add with a crooked smile: “At least… not out loud.”

“But I can still ask questions to myself?”

“I doubt you’ll be able to stop yourself. I hope not.” I pause a moment, then: “Do you know why you’re here now?”

“Enid just said you wanted to talk to me.”

“Did she tell you I’ve chosen you to be my apprentice?”

Stephen stares at me. “No.”

“My apprentice and someday my successor as teacher.”

He seems stunned, and at first I don’t realize why, until he turns away and asks, “Why should you need anyone to be your successor?” And now I am surprised. “Do you think I’m immortal, Stephen?” He doesn’t look at me, nor even move. “It’s just… well, it’ll be a long time before you have to worry about anyone being your successor.”

“Let’s hope so, but it takes a long time to learn what you must to be a teacher. That’s why I’m starting with you now. We’ll have two hours every afternoon. Except the sabbath.”

“But I’ll never be able to learn enough to be a teacher, to… take your place.”

“Yes, you will, because you’ll never stop learning. You have it in you, Stephen, or I wouldn’t have chosen you.”

He faces me, his dark eyes reflecting the sun on the sea. Finally he nods. “Where do I begin?”

“You’ve already begun. You began when you read your first word. In the future you and I will cover a lot of subjects I haven’t touched on in school, but first…” I look down at the diary. “There’s something I have to do, Stephen. I’m going to write Rachel’s story. The Chronicle of Rachel. But it’s my story, too, and I want you to help me, to experience it with me so you’ll understand…” What? I don’t know how to explain what I want and hope of him. “‘To see a world in a grain of sand…’ Remember that?”

He nods, smiling. “William Blake.”

“Yes. Well, maybe Rachel and I are like a grain of sand, and maybe you can find the world of… of humanity in our story.”

“That book—is that your story?”

“Only fragments of it, and there are more of these books. But I never kept a proper diary. I only wrote about things that were especially important to me. The story is mostly in my head, Stephen. I have to search out the memories, then I can write the story.”

“But how can I help you?”

“By listening, by making my memories part of your memories.”

He doesn’t yet understand what I expect of him, but he’s curious. He wants to hear the story. I can ask no more now.

He pulls one knee up, wraps his arms around it. “When does the story begin?”

I have to think about that, and I realize that nothing in my life or Rachel’s is important to this Chronicle before I came to Amarna. I’ve tried to tell the children what life was like in the time before the End, to give them a taste of that infinitely complex, glittering, and terrifying civilization. I lived in a dying golden age, a time of miracles and mania. Rachel said that one of the most profound tragedies of human existence is to live at the end of a golden age—and know it.

She recognized both the miracles and the mania. Enid, Grace, and Bernadette lived in that golden age, too, but only on the edges of it; the edges of mania. They remember almost nothing of it.

I remember.

“The story begins, Stephen, when I left Portland.”

He nods. “Why did you leave the city?”

“Because I wanted to write. Not just bureaucratic semitruths and useless bulletins.” I smile at his look of confusion. “I worked for the government, Stephen, for IDA: the Information Dissemination Agency. And I left the city because it had become a place where you couldn’t breathe for the smog, you couldn’t move for the people, the homeless, the unemployed, the huddled masses longing to be fed. This country—the world, in fact—was in an economic depression. The sheer numbers were finally catching up with the resources, and what resources were left were squandered in wars. If only we could’ve…”

He’s still looking at me in confusion, and I stop to remind myself: simple, Mary, keep it simple.

“I left Portland because I had a dream of living and writing in a house by the sea. I thought if I couldn’t make a living at writing, I could get a job cleaning motel rooms, if nothing else. Shiloh Beach was a resort town, a place people came to stay for a while to enjoy the sea and the beach.”

“Didn’t you come to live with Rachel?”

“I didn’t know Rachel then. I didn’t know anyone in Shiloh. I hadn’t been there for thirteen years, since I was eleven. The house by the sea was my aunt’s; she willed it to me when she died. It was so naive, that dream. There was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know how hard the depression had hit the coast, I didn’t know about the road gangs—Rovers, Gypsies, Goolies, they had various names for themselves—I didn’t know about the squatters and migrants. Well, I knew of their existence from television and newspapers. But I didn’t understand….”

So much I didn’t understand then, still don’t. I left the city in search of a place to write because it was the one thing I did well, the one thing that seemed to justify my existence. In search of the sea that I loved with the passion of childhood. In search of a dream.

Mary Hope stared through the glass only inches from her right shoulder. Beyond the window—fogged with the heat of the bus, smeared with fingerprints, streaked with yellow spears of reflected light—was another world, and it sustained her. Phosphorescent silver shapes whisked, fragmented, past the black span of glass, but she knew them and in imagination made them whole: meadows of velvet grass; groves of alder, pale limbs winter bare; fir and hemlock catching stars in their crowns, their trunks black columns for temples consecrated to their own existence. Sometimes, when the winding of the road turned the bus southward, she could see the moon, a perfect disk of ultimate white, flickering through the black smoke of trees.

Mary sat squeezed into a seat once meant for two, now, with the center armrest removed, occupied by three adults and a baby. She hugged her duffel bag to her chest. The strap angled around her body, the buckle digging into her backbone. All her worldly possessions—all that she hadn’t sold or given away—were in this canvas bag. Clothes and cosmetics, three books, and the few thousand dollars that were her grubstake for a new life. She felt her shallow breaths on chapped lips, wondered if she could ever get used to the sour-sweet smell of tobacco and emjay smoke and liquor—all illegal here, all tolerated indifferently. Tolerated like the fetid air and the odors of overheated bodies, of mold and urine that clung to the upholstery.