The Boat Runner: A Novel

A BRIEF CRACK OF LIGHT

1

I was fourteen when my father thought he finally developed the perfect inner coil for the lightbulb. He’d gone to Hamburg where he tried, again, to solicit a new account from Volkswagen. My mother was playing Chopin’s Étude in Thirds on her piano downstairs when he came home. My brother, Edwin, older by a year, slumped next to me on the floor of our bedroom drawing with pastels on a large sheet of butcher paper. Fergus, our big leg-chewing mutt, slept upside down beneath the window with his feet against the wall. In his dreams he twitched and kicked himself across the floor, digging his claws into the plaster until a rut formed one foot off the ground ringed the room. My parents’ voices were muffled until they walked into the den, where sound carried up through the heating register.

I still think it’s a bad idea. I knew she wanted him to stop crossing the border.

This will set us up for the future.

There is no future with them.

"They’ll give me a chance to supply all their headlights. What else could we want, Drika? We need secure accounts." I could tell by the groan of a loose spring that my father sat on the Biedermeier sofa next to the metal clock, his feet probably resting on the wooden steamer trunk.

It’s a bad idea. Sell more here and in France.

To whom?

There was a cold beat of tension between them. This was an old fight and hearing them start up again felt like a nervous folding of wings deep in my chest.

I got you something, my father said to her after a moment.

He always brought books home to us as presents. For my mother, he brought her books on music that she’d devour. She would come into the room, thrusting the opened pages into our laps for us to read, like she needed us to hold them to be real. I knew from reading all those books that the oldest song was the Shaduf Chant, sung by workers on the Nile River in Egypt. And that there was a concert in Breslau on August 2, 1937, that ended with sixty thousand people singing together.

The world’s largest choir. Can you imagine? my mother asked.

I knew that in 540 BC Pythagoras introduced the concept of the musical octave. In 250 BC the first organ was invented in Greece.

That long ago, she whispered. Astonishing.

When my father brought back music sheets, my mother would race to the piano to begin practicing. Monteverdi’s Vespers; Puccini’s Madama Butterfly; and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring all took shape in our home. With no warm-up she could play all of Handel’s Messiah. She didn’t tire, or the music gave her new energy. She never said. She rarely talked about her playing or responded when I praised her.

The music plays itself, she said. The musician is there to make the transitions between loud and soft. Fast and slow. Slide along those scales and you can make it work.

I knew she made it sound easy to tempt me to try, but I had no talent or patience for stringing one butchered note after another.

Books were sacred to my parents, who both longed to use them to break from what they perceived as their vulgar lineages. So my father gave books freely and we gathered as many as we could. Years before, when my father was struggling to launch the factory, he’d given me a set of illustrated Bibles. I remembered a picture from one of the books of a cypress-tree-filled valley between Nazareth and Cana. An ancient path my father said Roman generals marched over. I remembered nothing else from those books, because soon after I received the gift, when his manic efforts and drive were tipped by self-doubt and fatigue into some fatalistic downswing, he got roaring drunk, gathered up those volumes, and crammed them into the fireplace, where they curled into orange ash. As the fire bucked and flared, it cemented the written word for me as a higher power that could lift a person from basic human rage and lunacy, or drive them right back down into it.

This is a nice book, my mother now replied to my father. But there was a flatness to her voice. Disappointment. A small beat of quiet that held the larger story of their lives I had yet to piece together. Back then, I didn’t yet know how neglected she felt by my father, who gave her wealth and gifts instead of his time.

Well, I don’t know who you should sell to, my mother started in again, but if things get bad we should shut down and leave.

Now? When I’m so close? If I get this right it will change everything. This is it.

This is it, this is it. You’ve been close for ten years. Things get better, but you’re never happy. Never done.

If I get this coil right they’ll be our largest account. We’ll supply almost all the vehicles in Germany. We can leverage that to sell all around the world!

The teakettle clanked against the kitchen sink.

Fergus stood up, scratched at the carpet, walked a tight circle, and fell into a ball, knees and elbows clunking the ground.

I also came up with a solution for keeping the boys busy. It will help with the Volkswagen account too, my father said loud enough so she could hear him from the other room. I leapt from bed and kneeled over the heating vent. Then my father walked into the kitchen, where it was harder for me to hear. Several minutes later the teakettle whistled, and I heard my mother yelling.

Are you kidding?

Edwin, come listen, I said to my brother.

Not now.

Edwin. Listen.

Not now.

I knew not to engage him when he was like that.

It’s a good idea. It will make them good citizens, my father said.

Good German citizens, she screamed.

I looked at Edwin. Did you hear that?

Hear what? he said.

I went back to bed and patted the mattress. Fergus shot up and jumped up with me. He stood panting in my face until I scratched behind his ear enough that he sat down and eased his head onto my legs. He stayed like that as I went to sleep wondering what my mother meant.

In the morning I bounded down the stairs, where I found my father already awake and working in his lab. My mother’s busy movements made it clear that they had avoided another fight and gone right to icy silence. For breakfast she served wild blueberry crêpes from a cast-iron skillet and covered them in syrup and churned butter. She wore her hair-strand gold necklace that held a pendant my father brought back from Norway and silver earrings from Poland. Edwin and I ate with our arms shielding our plates from each other. There were oil and vinegar bottles and a brandy decanter in the center of the table that we’d often douse the other’s food with if he let down his guard.

I was desperate to ask my parents what they had been talking about, but asking questions would let on that we could hear them through the ductwork, so I ate and listened for my father.

My father founded the Koopman Light Company, which manufactured lightbulbs in the village of Delfzijl, in Holland. The village sat on the west bank of the Ems Estuary, across from the mouth of the Ems River in Germany and south of the open waters of the North Sea. The company was our town’s largest employer, and he ran the business side of it from the factory’s office in the center of town.

When my father wasn’t at the factory, he spent his time in the dark laboratory attached to our home, where he worked on modifying his production lines and improving the factory’s output. He was always working. My mother said he never wanted to be saddled with his father’s farm so he worked in a frenzy, intent to get away from that life, and did what he could to surround us with art and industry to become as refined as heirs to the royal family. We would gauge his moods by how he came out of the lab. If he walked quickly, with eager purpose, it was because he was happy with the work he’d done and was ready to be with his family. If he came out slow, hesitant, he would usually be distracted for the rest of the day, his mind fogged by whatever needed to be done, done again, or done better. He’d spend a few half-present hours in our company, fidgeting constantly, looking out the window, hounding us about the daily vocabulary our private French, German, and English tutors assigned, saying, Study your words, boys. You have to be able to name the world. Or, The Dutch are the lords of languages. Then he’d stand up and head back to his lab.

If we were ever allowed into his lab it was because he missed us after traveling to secure sales contracts. He’d go as far east as Moscow, as far west as Morocco, and over to Britain, but he still did most of his business with Germany and already had their Auto Union account, supplying headlights to most Audi, Wanderer, and DKM models. Still, we all knew the thing that kept my father manically rattling through our house on edge, we all knew Volkswagen was the big prize.

That morning, as we finished our crêpes, he emerged from his lab and looked at us sitting at the table.

Can we talk for a moment? my mother asked.

Of course, he said.

In private.

In a bit then, love.

Our mother mouthed some coded message to him as she violently stacked our plates and walked to the sink. I looked at my father, who, at a lean six feet six inches, towered over almost everyone.

Boys. Come on in, he said and waved us into his lab.

Mysterious surgeon-like tools, curved like fishhooks, sprawled over his workbenches. Long blowing irons leaned in the corner. Around them on the floor were unsuccessful gobs, each plum-sized, burnt, warped, reflective as uncut diamonds. On the shelf were books about Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and studies in electrical currents. My father went right to work with a pair of long, needle-nose pliers and set a coil and filament into place. Then he placed the bulbous glass casing over the assembly and used a vacuum pump to suck out all the air.

Edwin and I always wanted to be his assistants in the lab and knew to immediately grab our safety goggles off the hook when allowed in. I put mine on and watched our father work. I was in awe of him then. He wore soft wool pants and a spun horsehair jacket fitted by a tailor in Amsterdam. The brown jacket was one of five he rotated through each week. His graying blond hair was brushed back by his tortoiseshell comb and held into an off-center part by an antiseptic-smelling pomade. As a nervous habit, he slid out a Swiss watch with a gold-plated case, gilt hands, and an enamel dial that was pinned to his vest by a chain, which he rubbed with his thumb, then tucked away neatly without checking the time, and kept tinkering at his workbench. We would study his every move. In a lot of ways I was afraid of my father. His size. His drunken meltdowns. The barriers he put up between his vocation and family. But I also loved him so much that it felt like my life and identity were built on the tangled interplay of those two emotions, resulting in a deep pull to be near him when he was working.

Edwin, get me the small canister of black gas.

You told us not to touch that one, Edwin said.

Today you will.

Edwin went to the steel-mesh-covered gas locker, undid the latch, and returned with the cylindrical canister held away from his chest like it was some hot, holy thing.

My father fumbled with a glass bulb that fell to the floor and shattered. This happened often. Without a word, he picked up another, crunched over the glass, and walked to us. I studied the broken glass and imagined picking up several shards, laying them side by side by side to see different reflections of how we all fit together. A mosaic of our family. Watch what I’m doing, Jacob, he said. He hooked up a release valve to the canister, filled the bulb with shimmying vapors of gas, sealed the bulb at the copper base setting, and screwed that fixture into one of the dangling sockets he hung for testing his lights. His open palms cradled the bulb.

Now, Jacob, turn all the lights off.

When I flipped the switch the room went black.

Now hit your switch, Edwin.

When Edwin hit the power, a searing white worm burned around the thin coil in the bulb before the filament ignited in an electric whorl, and it flashed into a pulsing glow that our father held out as if offering us some luminous bird. We stared into his palms like he held the crystal future—a future that would turn out so different from what any of us could have imagined in the lab that morning, huddled together.

It’s only now, a lifetime later, I can find these first words about my family, which I always knew would bring the whole of it howling out like a fever dream.

Boys, my father said in the lab, a man I met in Hamburg gave me a good idea of something you can do this summer.

Do we have to go work in your friend’s factory? Edwin teased.

My father took a mock swat at his head. No.

Do we get to go on the next trip with you? I asked.

I’d like to take you along every time I leave, he said. Then he reached his long arms out so a hand cupped the back of each of our necks. But I’ll tell you what. I have an idea that might be fun. Your own little trip. It’s a summer camp. It might be good for you. You’ll practice your German.

That night, after eating dried apricots and apples roasted over the fireplace, I tried to get my brother to talk about what the camp might be like. Neither of us had ever been away from our family long. I wanted to talk it over with Edwin, to express my concerns, but he began to draw and soon his attention faded from me. He covered another large sheet of butcher paper with etchings, working in circles so his finished project looked like a constellation wheel.

His side of the room was covered in stacks of smooth and textured papers, sketchbooks, knives and peels of pencil shavings, brushes, tubes of paint, a jar of turpentine, and an easel that looked like a giant praying mantis when I caught it out of the corner of my eye in dim light.

Edwin had a book called The Greatest Drawings of All Time that he slipped his own sketches between the pages of.

Just to keep them pressed, he said.

Our sports almanac is just as big.

I’ll use that one next, he said, but page after page of his own work found their way between the covers in what must have been a small allowance to his own sense of talent.

I understood why he did it. I daydreamed about being a prodigy like my brother. I imagined greatness in sports, art, music, and industrial invention, and if those dreams came with tangible scraps, I would have squirreled them away in lofty bindings too.

Edwin spent hours that night working on his hands and knees. I woke much later to the scent of beeswax candles and saw his shadow hunkered over some new dream image he couldn’t wait to bring out of the paper. The lump of his body dark and still, his extended arm swaying and twitching, conducted some unfolding vision to life. Behind him the old steel radiator jutted out of the wall, a bleached-white square rib cage that hissed and ticked and warmed his midnight painting sessions. He filled an old cistern with water, wet his fingers, and rubbed dabs over the ink lines so they blurred. The shapes loosened at the corners, and the color bled across the watermarks like he created some new set of rules for form.

Our father bought him the easel, but he still preferred to do all his drawing leaning over the floor. He kneeled on the paper, somehow never tearing it, as if when drawing or painting he became weightless and floated over the work.

Edwin. What do you think that camp will be like? I tried to break through. Why doesn’t Mom want us to go?

Edwin gave me a look like I’d said something really stupid, and kept drawing.

I got out of bed, snuck down the stairs, and shuffled into my father’s lab. I lay down on the floor in the dark. The smell of burnt chemicals hung in the air, and slivers of glass speckled the floor. It became a sort of dare to myself to lie down without getting cut, and I never succeeded. Some jagged shard would always drive beneath my skin. Those little wounds made me feel closer to my father, like we both understood something about his work that went beyond words.

No light came through when the door was shut. I turned a flashlight on and swept it across the floor and the glass shone back like a crystal rug. The beam of light lingered on the tops of chemical canisters and gas welding tanks. I pictured my father bending into the shower of molten orange as sparks bounced off the dark faceplate of his helmet—the blue-tongued coalescence of metals drawing him closer to something that only he could see among the raw materials. I studied the beaded melding points of the castings and bases he made, and how each joint somehow balanced the metals in intricate and subtle curves.

I picked up the welding rod and imagined the blue flame liquefying steel and binding it together in more fascinating ways. An art form. I thought we were all supposed to have some kind of art form. My father had his lights, my mother her music, and Edwin, who beamed with talent and potential, took wide slabs of butcher paper and mimicked every shape in the world, as if practicing for some larger swath of canvas, maybe even a cathedral ceiling, that would surely come later. In the dark I imagined turning the blue tongue of fire on my own chest to crack it open, to pull out my own hidden talent, my own art form, whatever it was.

Late the next evening, I was reading at the top of the stairs, petting Fergus, when my mother’s younger brother, Uncle Martin, came to our house. In socked feet, he stood almost as tall as my father, near two meters, but he had muscular arms and a V-shaped back from years of hauling in fishing nets. Under his raincoat he wore a gray French seaman’s sweater for which my mother had sewn thick black elbow patches that cracked white at the bend. Under his sweater was a host of faded gypsy tattoos covering his chest and arms. A compass sat on his right shoulder, a large portrait of Neptune stretched across his stomach, and a bare-chested woman with wings and blue-tipped nipples soared across his rib cage. A paragraph in Latin scrolled along his upper forearm, and between his shoulder blades sailed a schooner at full mast with the words Flying Dutchman, etched in bold blue India ink, arched over the topmast. The top of the h crawled up the side of his neck like an arterial vein.

Don’t get any ideas, our mother said when she first saw us idolizing his tattoos.

He’d taken his shirt off while wrestling with Edwin, me, and our best friends, Ludo and Hilda. He let Hilda knock him down and took it easy on Ludo, whose left arm had dried up and coiled from a bout of polio he’d survived as an infant.

When we asked about his inking, our mother said, He didn’t have a proper upbringing, so he couldn’t help himself. But you boys dream of it, and I’ll scrub the ink off of you with a fistful of sand and gravel.

Like my mother and father, almost everything I knew about Uncle Martin’s life came from stories other people told of him. He rarely, if ever, spoke about himself, which gave him a sense of mystery, as if mystery were the language he moved in, his mother tongue.

Not asking my parents or Uncle Martin about their early lives was one of those things I knew. Whispered to me at birth. Traced on my skin by my mother’s fingers. It was just in me. But of course, that led to the creation of a great antenna to gather any fragments of news about them I could find into my own private mythologies.

I knew Uncle Martin left home in 1912, when he was fourteen, to get away from his fisherman father he never got along with. This part was shrouded in silence as my grandfather’s name only rose to my uncle and mother’s lips with vitriol. I knew Uncle Martin joined the crew of a schooner ferry that ran cargo between Rotterdam and England. After that, he did his time in the Dutch Marines, which according to him was the happiest he’d ever been. He went back to sea after the marines because that was all he really knew. For years he jumped ships that followed old whale roads to the Dutch colonies and around the world. Then, when I was six, he bought a fishing trawler and started running it out of Delfzijl to be close to us, the only family he had.

He often took us fishing. Once the lightbulb factory started turning large profits, and our father could spend more time doing what he wanted, he began coming out with us on Uncle Martin’s boat. We’d cruise together into the Ems, past the Frisian Islands, and into the North Sea. Our father became so enamored with the water he bought a leisure boat for himself, which was the first of its kind in our town’s harbor.

I have a gift for you guys, Uncle Martin said as he walked into our home that night. He held out a dusty-looking bottle of liquor. This is Prohibition-era American liquor. So good it was forbidden.

Where’d you get that? my father asked. He held the bottle up to the light to study the label. Gray with black letters. Old Hermitage Sour Mash Rye. 62. Broad Street. Boston. They went into the living room and sat on the couches. I lay on my stomach and leaned down the stairs to see them. My father still held the bottle. It’s contraband.

No, nothing to worry about, Uncle Martin said. Let’s give it a taste.

My mother caught Uncle Martin’s eyes and nodded her head toward my father.

You know. I came over because I thought maybe the boys could come out on the boat for the summer?

My father turned the bottle so he could read the back. I’ve made plans for them already.

Oh yeah?

My father looked from the bottle to my mother. His jaw was set, and even from where I watched I could see the pounding of blood at his temple. Yes. They’ll be working at the factory as well.

He’s worried about his Volkswagen account. Everything’s about Volkswagen.

Drika.

Well, it’s true.

That’s because it will set us up for the future.

That’s what you said about Auto Union.

My father swung toward her. Auto Union paid for this house. Built the factory. Go ahead and say something bad about that.

You have most of the country’s cars already, Hans.

Stop it, Drika. Just stop this. Like I don’t see you setting Martin on me like this.

My mother turned and saw me at the top of the stairs. Go to your room, Jacob.

Okay. I’m sorry, I said.

My father looked up and anger melted from him at the sight of me, the way it always did. He hated being angry, coarse, or drunk in front of us and skulked around like a shamed dog after behaving so.

Go study your words, Jacob, he said and smiled.

From the heating vent, I heard them talking about the camp. Mostly my mother protesting sending us away and pestering Uncle Martin to help change my father’s mind.

You could go out on the boat with them, Hans, my mother said. Spend some time with your boys.

If my father heard her, he said nothing.

Edwin pencil-sketched a dark silhouette cutting through a stand of trees. The trees had enough depth to draw the eye into the suggested shadow. That was something he practiced. Shadows. I caught him after he put one of our mother’s dresses on Fergus and chased the dog around the house to study the way folds in the fabric played with light.

You fancy dogs now? I teased him.

He didn’t respond and acted like he didn’t hear me. I wondered if he registered any of the tension below the floorboards the way I did. That antenna of mine caught every shifting speck of frustration and pulled it into the endlessly burbling core of my body.

In the end, after my uncle left and my mother and father had a screaming match that felt like it would split the foundation of our home, but crested and fell into the long, apologetic chords of exhaustion, it was agreed that we would go out for a weeklong fishing trip with Uncle Martin, return home to pick up our father who would accompany us to the camp, then come home from camp and work in the factory until school started.

It was a compromise of sorts. A neat and orderly parceling of our time.

2

In early July, my father brought us to the docks to meet Uncle Martin’s boat, the Lighthouse Lady. On our way through town, we saw Father Heard, the parish priest, who was also one of my father’s best, if not only, friends. The two of them founded and kept afloat what seemed to be the only Catholic Church in the north. Father Heard led a man named Samuel to the church by his left arm. Samuel had no control over his right arm. It shot out over his head and frantically scribbled, as if writing some great, unknown sentence in the air. Everyone called him the air-writer. Samuel mostly wandered the town all day and lived in an apartment his father had set him up with before he died. His father had left money in his will to have Father Heard keep watch over his son. My father hired Samuel to clean the factory and the town’s church so he had something to do. My mother said Samuel had been touched in the head, but Ludo called him retarded when no one else was around.

Ludo lived with his mother and father in a row of brownstones three kilometers beyond the church. Ludo’s father was a carpenter. His mother worked at Koopman Light on the factory floor.

The morning shift was starting soon, and the town seemed alive with people flowing to the factory. Most of them I’d known long enough to pick out their gait at first light. There was Edward Fass, who was thick-chested, rough-hewn, and as scarred up as a cutting block. He worked the assembly line and was known for his loud mouth. Gerard Van Den Bosch and his wife, Annie, both worked as accountants for my father. They walked from the early morning café with an old widow, Maud Stein, whose husband was one of my father’s first employees. Most of the town had some connection to my father’s factory, which meant he was often treated with a sort of deference that came with an emotional remove from other families.

When we got to the dock we boarded the boat. Uncle Martin was going to bring us back in six days’ time to pick up our father and Ludo, who had persuaded his parents to let him come to camp with us. Then we would cross the Ems and board a train to the summer camp in Germany.

During our first morning on the Lighthouse Lady, Edwin and I set out long nets and spent the afternoon picking cod, herring, friar fish, hake, flounder, mackerel, and an occasional squid from the gill nets and tossing them down a chute to Uncle Martin who sliced them up and pitched the entrails over the side for the seagulls.

We started close enough to shore to see long-legged shorebirds run back and forth at the edge of the surf. Oystercatchers kept following the waves so they could dig with their beaks into the newly packed sand before they raised their wings and ran away squawking from the next incoming wash. All day they danced like that.

The estuary was eighty kilometers across at its widest point. Uncle Martin knew every ledge, sandbar, and current around the clock and tried to teach us about navigating a vessel. You have to be able to picture the wind on the map too. How it works on water, he said as I looked at all the charts.

He let me steer the boat straight across the channel where there was a shelf underwater that dipped to the deepest point of the Ems; we couldn’t see land on either side. To me, the Ems itself seemed alive and I wanted to keep going as far out to sea as possible.

On our second night we passed over the drop-off after the West Frisian Islands. The water was deep, gunmetal blue and calm enough that we could see it sloping off the horizon before sunset. We’d been hitting on a ten-kilometer shoal of herring when Uncle Martin came out on the decks and said, We’ll set the nets out one more time, and he tongued the gap where his canine tooth and bicuspid used to be before he lost it in what he called a collision with a lead pipe. Spit in his mouth made a popping sound from the suction between the pock in his gums and his tongue.

Ahead of us herring broke the water, jumping and falling back. When we wrapped up the net with one of our holds full, we went farther out than I’d ever been before, as far as Den Helder.

I walked into the wheelhouse, where Edwin tried to keep up with Uncle Martin’s exercise routine. Uncle Martin was shirtless. His tattoos pinched and strained as he did deep lunges, push-ups, sit-ups, and then bent-knee pull-ups from a bar he’d mounted on the overhead.

Did those hurt? I asked. The needles, I mean.

Martin ran his palm along his forearm. Needles. Is that how you think I got these?

Yes.

No. He lifted his fists to his face and rubbed a knuckle into each eye socket. Do you know how the sun can turn your skin pink, then red before it peels and flakes off?

Yes.

Well. I spent too much time on decks without a shirt on, is all. Lost so many layers of skin I started seeing these faint images emerging. He traced inked lines on his flesh with his fingertip. They got clearer with time, as more skin burned away.

I studied the fluted and hooked tattoos.

So we have pictures etched into our bodies? I asked.

Deep down. At the truest version of ourselves. Uncle Martin winked at me.

I didn’t know what to say, but liked the idea that drawing as he did, maybe my brother was able to see the pictures beneath other people’s skin?

Through the window, we saw the large shadow of a German navy ship cut across the swells like an enormous gray dorsal fin.

We’ll be seeing a lot more of those, I suspect, Uncle Martin said.

Even from a great distance the ship dwarfed Uncle Martin’s boat, though his was one of the largest trawlers in the Ems’s fishing grounds. He had had it custom-built, a thirty-two-meter, steel-beam trawler, with a high-whaleback bow and slow-turning high-torque engines to power it through rough waters.

Uncle Martin kept exercising as the ship slipped into the horizon.

The knife he always wore on his belt was on the console. I picked it up. An American sailor had taught him how to make the scrimshaw handle. Whalebone. Sanded smooth and polished. He pencil-drew a rudimentary drawing of a man hugging tight to the upper mast beams of a rigged ship. To me, the picture symbolized some ultimate freedom I’d yet to really understand. Though of course I was young. I would have drawn the sailor with his hands out to the wind. What did I know about holding on for dear life? When the drawing was as good as he could make it, he carved along the pencil lines with an old dentist tool, then poured and wiped away ink until it dyed the grooves.

Should have had you draw that one for me, he said to Edwin and pointed to the knife I held.

Was I born yet? Edwin asked.

No. I guess you weren’t. Though even as a baby you could have done better than that. That one took me a heap of hours to make.

I held the heft of the handle and swung the blade in front of me, back and forth, back and forth, always keeping the steel moving the way Uncle Martin had shown us.

Have you been to the South Pacific? Edwin asked.

Yes, Uncle Martin said.

Is it like the paintings?

"Which paintings?

The Gauguin paintings.

I don’t know those.

Edwin put his hand on the gunwale, looked out at the water, and was silent for a moment. Is it so bright and lush that the colors seem distorted?

I’m not sure that’s what I was looking for onshore. Uncle Martin grinned at me.

I’d like to travel like you did, Edwin said. Bring an endless sheet of canvas and hundreds of brushes to capture everything I see.

Well. You can go anywhere if you’ve got enough fuel or wind. That’s the secret of boats. The world opens up to you. Though to be honest, it can be as much a curse as a gift.

How so? Edwin asked.

You see the whole world, but you do it alone.

That was the first time I really thought of how in the middle of the sea there is no break, no leaving. Prior to this, boats always meant the roar of props pushing water. All the science and industry behind each rivet that composed a vessel felt like a poem to people in motion, to wild souls pushing offshore.

Uncle Martin spread his legs shoulder-distance apart and began another set of deep-knee bends. Edwin jumped in and tried to keep up but lost his balance on the pitching deck. I sat down and watched the water. For as much as I loved this boat, my uncle, and the sea, I knew I’d be more comfortable working in my father’s lab when I grew up, where I was a door away from my family.

What was your favorite place? Edwin asked.

I liked South America. Argentina, Brazil, and Dutch Guiana. There are Dutch that settled there. Some of the women have Dutch and native blood and are so exotic it’s impossible not to fall right in love with them. Those were hard places to leave. But I’m a North Sea man. This place calls to me. Besides, I need cold water to keep my heart primed.

I walked into the holds. On the table sat a pile of small tools, a microphone, and a disassembled green radio housing I hadn’t seen before. I picked the radio up but dropped the microphone.

Don’t touch that. Uncle Martin’s voice boomed down the stairwell.

I put the microphone