Abby Geni - The Lightkeepers

I have enjoyed what travel does to my mind, too. My mental baggage is as spare and well-organized as my suitcase. I don’t have romantic relationships, only brief, incandescent trysts. I don’t have friends, only coworkers. Every new connection has come with a built-in expiration date. This is fine with me.

After all, I have you. You know me better than anyone else ever could. While you were alive, I loved you as passionately as a daughter can love a mother. Ever since your death, I have written to you ceaselessly. I have told you everything. I have left nothing out. I have had no desire to bond with the people around me — braving those awkward getting-to-know you sessions, figuring out the equilibrium of the relationship, calibrating the level of intelligence and compassion on both sides, stumbling toward shared experiences, whispering secrets, getting attached. I have never had to bother with all that. Not when I could write to you instead.

Your death taught me what happens after love. I have no interest in reencountering that depth of loss.

So I have moved and moved again. I have moved here.

I FOUND MYSELF considering this matter today during a conversation with Mick.

I had planned to lounge around the cabin, reading and napping at intervals. Sleep and I are renewing our relationship with open arms. Any horizontal surface seems to whisper to me, enticing me to lie down and rest for a minute, or maybe an hour. Time is still fluid for me, hard to keep track of, but it is getting better, clearer.

Mick, however, had plans. I was stretched out on the couch, book in lap, when he approached. I was feeling a bit nauseous, probably due to the food. As usual, we had been noshing on snacks of dubious origin and date. The previous night’s dinner had been canned chickpeas and Spam, with canned mushrooms thrown in for good measure. The radiators were clanking, warming my toes. Dust motes twirled on the air. Somewhere nearby a mouse was gnawing and scratching inside the wall. Mick asked me to accompany him with all the chivalry of a swain requesting a place on his lady love’s dance card. I sat up, brushing the hair out of my eyes.

“Yes, please,” I said.

He kicked at the carpet. “If I don’t get out of this cabin, I’m going to go stark raving mad. Everyone is working. There’s a hole in the rowboat. A catastrophe. Galen and Forest are out there fixing it. They’ve got Charlene with them. And Lucy — she’s busy. You’ve got to come with me. It’s got to be you.”

I held up a hand.

“Stop trying to convince me,” I said. “You’ve already made the sale.”

An hour later, I was shivering beneath my coat. The Janus trolled over waves the size and shape of desert dunes. The roll and plunge, the tug of the current, seemed to be doing some damage to my equilibrium. I gripped the bulwark so I would not fall over. Mick was oblivious. A little distance from the cabin had worked like a tonic on his mood. We were heading toward Asia, leaving the archipelago in our wake. The line of islets had become tiny once more. It was disconcerting. For the past few months, those shorelines had encompassed what felt like the whole world, the borders of the knowable universe. From this vantage point, however, the islands looked scrawny, insubstantial, like a row of rubber ducks in a bathtub.

“Sit by me,” Mick shouted. He was settled at the rudder, steering with a practiced hand. I staggered over and collapsed on the bench. I wished I had thought to bring a hat. A warm stocking cap would have helped ward off the chill.

“I don’t see any whales,” I said.

“They’ll be by,” he said serenely. Then he did a double-take, his eyes narrowing. He looked me over, head to toe.

“What?” I said.

“Mel,” he said slowly. “You didn’t bring your camera.”

I groped for the strap that I habitually wore around my neck like a favorite locket. I had transported six cameras to the Farallon Islands in all. One had perished, of course. Dead and gone and buried. During any given week, I would rotate through the five that remained, depending on my mood, depending on the circumstances. Jewel, for instance, was a large-format camera. To use it, I had to first lug massive, heavy equipment over the rocks — my tripod, my light-tight film boxes, my changing bag, my light meter. Each shot required preparation. I would duck under the dark cloak. The rest of the world would fall away, sounds muffled, erased by the cloth. I would breathe in the musty air. For a moment, only the image and I would exist — a glimmering rectangle, the horizon flipped upside down, a meditation on vision and light. I would never have brought Jewel onto one of the boats. Normally I would have taken one of my digital SLR cameras along — Gremlin or Fish Face. But none of these precious instruments was with me now.

“It’s like you’re missing an arm,” Mick said.

“I feel naked,” I cried.

He snickered. “Plus, you might get in trouble. I assume somebody’s paying you to be here. They’ll be mad that you missed the whales.”

He pivoted the wheel, and we swung to the left, my stomach lurching. Then he frowned, his brow knotted. I watched what seemed to be a ponderous internal conversation going on in his brain.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

“You’ve never asked me that before,” I said. “Nobody has, actually. Except Galen.”

“I’m asking you now,” Mick said.

His tone was aggressive, almost suspicious. I looked at him in surprise.

“Fine,” I said. “The way it usually works is that I get an assignment. I’ll be sent to a specific place to get specific images. I’ve traveled all over — the mountains, the arctic, the desert. But this time it was my choice. I wanted to come here. Nobody asked me to. I made it happen myself.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

“I applied for a grant to do a personal project,” I said. “The islands aren’t that expensive. One of the cheapest places I’ve ever stayed. I’ll have to coast on my savings for some of it. There’s a gallery in D.C. where I’ll be able to show my photos when I’m done. I’ll make the circuit of the usual arts-and-crafts fairs, too. I might even be able to get a book together. I was lucky. I rarely get to stay anywhere this long.”

“Bird lice. No hot water. Spam. Lucky mouse girl!”

“This is the beat I wanted,” I said, staring at the waves.

Mick nodded. I fell silent. There was more I wanted to say, but I found that I could not quite explain.

Over a year ago, I had first glimpsed an image of the archipelago. On a lazy afternoon, I had stumbled onto a snapshot — and that was all it took. Saddle Rock, silhouetted against the sea. White spray breaking on the cliffs. Islets of bare stone, like the skeleton of some massive sea creature, long extinct. I had gazed at that image, stunned and enthralled. It might have been a photograph of loneliness. The Islands of the Dead — they had taken my breath away.

For the first time, I had been pulled to somewhere. In the past, I had craved motion for its own sake. To go from. To go elsewhere, anywhere, away. But the call of the islands had been unmistakable. It was magnetic. It was gravitational.

I could not say these things to Mick. In truth, I did not understand it myself. I had to come here. It was that simple. It never felt like a desire or a wish; it was a requirement, a command. I’d begun to do research, and everything I had learned only made me want it more. Mist without end. Blood in the water. Tetchy biologists. A hundred thousand mice. Sea lions birthing their pups on the granite. Storms like the judgment of a vengeful deity. Shark Season. Boats that had to be lowered into the sea by crane. Mysterious deaths. A lighthouse beacon crying out to an empty ocean. I wanted it all. I was a woman possessed. I was falling in love.