Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

Kurt Hackberry and Katherine led Arn inside while Phyllis poured forth weeping apologies and panting gratitude to the Booths. “No harm done. Thank God he’s all right. I’m glad I was here to lend a hand,” Rodney said, and was surprised to realize that he meant it. Despite the evening’s calamities, his heart was warm and filled with an electric vigor of life. The electricity stayed with him all the way back to number thirty-three Naiad Lane, where, in the echoing kitchen, Rodney made zestful love to his wife for the first time in seven weeks.

—

Rodney woke before the sun was up. The maritime fetor of the house’s salt walls and recollections of Arn Nevis’s near death merged into a general unease that would not let him sleep. Cora stirred beside him. She peered out the window, yawned, and said that she wanted to photograph the breaking of the day. “I’ll come with you,” Rodney said, and felt childish to realize that he didn’t want to be left in the house alone.

Cora was after large landscapes of the dawn hitting Triton Estates and the western valley, so the proper place to set up was on the east coast, in Port Miracle, with the sun behind the lens. After breakfast they loaded the Ford with Cora’s equipment and made the ten-minute drive. They parked at the remnant of Port Miracle’s public beach and removed their shoes. Most of the trucked-in sand had blown away, revealing a hard marsh of upthrust minerals, crystalline and translucent, like stepping on warm ice. Rodney lay on the blanket they had brought while Cora took some exposures of the dawn effects. The morning sky involved bands of iridescence, the lavender-into-blue-gray spectrum of a bull pigeon’s throat. Cora made plates of the light’s progress, falling in a thickening portion on the dark house-key profile of the western hills, then staining the white homes scattered along the shore. She yelled a little at the moment of dawn’s sudden ignition when red hit red and the sea lit up, flooding the whole valley with so much immediate light you could almost hear the whong! of a ball field’s vapor bulbs going on.

“Rodney, how about you go swimming for me?”

“I don’t have a suit.”

“Who cares? It’s a ghost town.”

“I don’t want to get all sticky.”

“Shit, Rodney, come on. Help me out.”

Rodney stripped grudgingly and walked into the water. Even in the new hours of the day, the water was hot and alarmingly solid, like paddling through Crisco. It seared his pores and mucous parts, but his body had a thrilling buoyancy in the thick water. A single kick of the legs sent him gliding like a hockey puck. And despite its lukewarmth and viscosity, the water was wonderfully vivifying. His pulse surged. Rodney stroked and kicked until he heard his wife yelling for him to swim back into camera range. He turned around, gamboled for her camera some, and stepped into the morning, stripped clean by the water, with a feeling of having been peeled to new young flesh. Rodney did not bother to dress. He carried the blanket to the shade of a disused picnic awning. Cora lay there with him, and then they drowsed until the sun was well up in the sky.

Once the drab glare of the day set in, the Booths breakfasted together on granola bars and instant coffee from the plastic crate of food they’d packed for the ride from Massachusetts.

Cora wished to tour Port Miracle on foot. Rodney, with his bad ankles, said he would be happy to spend the morning in his sandy spot, taking in the late-summer sun with a Jack London paperback. So Cora went off with her camera, first to the RV lot, nearly full, the rows of large white vehicles like raw loaves of bread. She walked through a rear neighborhood of kit cottages, built of glass and grooved plywood and tin. She photographed shirtless children, Indian brown, kicking a ball in a dirt lot, and a leathery soul on a sunblasted Adirondack chair putting hot sauce into his beer. She went to the boat launch, where five pink women, all of manatee girth, were boarding a pontoon craft. Cora asked to take their picture but they giggled and shied behind their hands and Cora moved on.

At the far end of town stood the desalination facility, a cube of steel and concrete intubated with ducts and billowing steam jacks. Cora humped it for the plant, her tripod clacking on her shoulder. After calling into the intercom at the plant’s steel door, Cora was greeted by a gray-haired, bearded man wearing something like a cellophane version of a fisherman’s hard-weather kit. Plastic pants, shirt, hat, plus gloves and boot gaiters and a thick dust mask hanging around his neck. His beard looked like a cloudburst, though he’d carefully imprisoned it in a hairnet so as to tuck it coherently within his waterproof coat.

“Whoa,” said Cora, taken aback. Recovering herself, she explained that she was new to the neighborhood and was hoping to find a manager or somebody who might give her a tour of the plant.

“I’m it!” the sheathed fellow told her, a tuneful courtliness in his voice. “Willard Kamp. And it would be my great pleasure to show you around.”

Cora lingered on the threshold, taking in Kamp’s protective gear. “Is it safe, though, if I’m just dressed like this?”

“That’s what the experts would tell you,” said Kamp, and laughed, leading Cora to a bank of screens showing the brine’s progress through a filter-maze. Then he ushered her up a flight of stairs to a platform overlooking the concrete lagoons where the seawater poured in. He showed her the flocculating chambers where they added ferric chloride and sulfuric acid and chlorine and the traveling rakes that brought the big solids to the surface in a rumpled brown sludge. He showed her how the water traveled through sand filters, and then through diatomaceous earth capsules to further strain contaminants, before they hit the big reverse-osmosis trains that filtered the last of the impurities.

“Coming into here,” Kamp said, slapping the side of a massive fiberglass storage tank, “is raw water. Nothing in here but pure H’s and O’s.”

“Just the good stuff, huh?” Cora said.

“Well, not for our purposes,” Kamp said. “It’s no good for us in its pure form. We have to gentle it down with additives, acid salts, gypsum. Raw, it’s very chemically aggressive. It’s so hungry for minerals to bind with, it’ll eat a copper pipe in a couple of weeks.”

This idea appealed to Cora. “What happens if you drink it? Will it kill you? Burn your skin?”

Kamp laughed, a wheezing drone. “Not at all. It’s an enemy to metal pipes and soap lather, but it’s amiable to humankind.”

“So what’s with all the hazmat gear?” asked Cora, gesturing at Kamp’s clothes.

Kamp laughed again. “I’m overfastidious, the preoccupation of a nervous mind.”

“Nervous about what?”

His wiry brow furrowed and his lips pursed in half-comic consternation. “Well, it’s a funny lake, isn’t it, Cora? I am very interested in the archaebacteria, the little red gentlemen out there.”

“But it’s the same stuff in fall foliage and flamingos,” Cora said, brandishing some knowledge she’d picked up from a magazine. “Harmless.”

Kamp reached into his raincoat to scratch at something in his beard. “Probably so. Though they’re also very old. Two billion years. They were swimming around before there was oxygen in the atmosphere, if you can picture that. You’ve heard, I guess, the notion that that stuff in our pond is pretty distinguished crud, possibly the source of all life on earth.”

“I hadn’t.”

“Well, they say there’s something to it,” said Kamp. “Now, it’s quite likely that I haven’t got the sense God gave a monkey wrench, but it seems to me that a tadpole devious enough to put a couple of million species on the planet is one I’d rather keep on the outside of my person.”