Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 16 Golden, Not Emerald

The fog had begun to dissipate and you could see yellow sunlight streaking through its canopy. Visibility had become a few hundred yards. Portuguese soda bread, and juice and tea and coffee and water appeared on the bar in the lounge. Jay's parents were moving around. Diesel generators had been on all the time, but now the engines were fired up too and Captain Nick put them in gear. We were moving.

The clearing was fastest in front of us, to the east, where a glow grew golden. I followed Vladik onto the bow to have a better look at what was coming. In the small bubble of our visibility, we could see that we were no longer alone, although what we were heading for remained featureless opalescence and black sea.

And then, maybe because I blinked, or looked away for just a moment, or because it happened suddenly, the wall of blankness gave way to an island in full color, topped with blue sky all the way to the heavens. Surf broke at the base of auric dunes. Emerald trees glistened in the sunlit moisture of the departed haze. To the north, the isle's sandy spit thinned to water and the water to nothingness, and the bluffs to the south did the same, the water on either side perfect parentheses packaging Block Island. Was I Dorothy, about to reach her malachite city at last-Oz, but golden?

We closed the gap to a promontory, a breakwater, a man-made pile of rocks terminated with scaffolding that offered a light and a horn sounding off for boats miles away and enshrouded in the mist. Two points define a line, and a red buoy, "2," made one with the tower, "4." As far as the eye could see along that imaginary infinity, sailboat after yacht after fishing boat after cruiser after cruise ship, having come from all the mainland harbors within one hundred miles, and some even from France or New Zealand, converged on the island. The sea, the Sound, was black beneath us.

Mast tops poked out above the trees as if they belonged to ships on shore, but the y rocked back and forth inexplicably. Then I got it; the rock pile marked a cut through the lowest dunes. Their low bulk hid a bay behind them and the hulls afloat in it. We joined the parade as it entered the Great Salt Pond, or New Harbor as some called it, although it hadn't been new for a hundred years. On the sandy shore, fishermen and swimmers, waders and sunbathers and six year olds raised their heads to watch and to gawk at our extravagance. They waved their hands at us in greeting, and at everyone passing through, and we did the same.

There must have been a thousand, maybe two thousand boats in that well-protected basin. Jason pointed out the prominent features on land and sea: a house owned by a media magnate, a peninsula confiscated in a drug bust and repurposed as a bird sanctuary, a white tent set out for weddings, tidal flats rich with quahogs and oysters, an old Coast Guard lifesaving station given a new life as a clubhouse. We passed a gray tug that looked like it had been decommissioned from the Mothball Fleet. It sprayed rainbows from fat firehoses. The week of the Fourth of July is a party in the pond. Friends came from the mainland, rafting up, two, three, even six hulls deep. Mostly it's powerboat next to powerboat and sailboat next to sail, because it's only so far that polarization can be depolarized even in Oz, but there were occasional mixed-marriage breachings of convention. Swimmers swam, kayakers kayaked, paddlers paddled on surfboards, and the smallest of sailboats tacked and jibed around.

We were, at that moment, in a great channel, flanked by all the variety in motion and under anchor. Docks lined the shore at the back of the bay. We avoided them. The tug had been given a wide berth by other boats, so we dropped two hooks right near it.

Jason appeared to be racing, readying the crane to lower his RIB into the water. But who was he racing? Unhesitant, I dropped my shorts at my feet and threw my blouse off, too. I wore a swimsuit beneath my street clothes, so Ha! Then I went flying upstairs to the third deck. Boats were moored nearby to port, but not to starboard. I wiped the chrome railing dry on the starboard side, then climbed on it, faced outward from the Lucky Strike, and came to balance with my arms and hands over my head. Slowly, I swung them down and back, bending at the knees as I did, keeping my chest upright and my chin raised. Then I exploded skyward, stiff upper limbs swinging, lowers extending, and feet pushing so I was high and away from the boat's edge, left with just the slightest angular momentum. Tension in one long strand of flexing muscle from extremity to extremity pulled my legs up, and I began rotating backward. For a moment I was a plank, horizontal, arms out beside me. Looking back, I could see the boat then, all eyes on deck watching me as my head fell below my feet and I began the thirty-foot plunge to the water. Vladik locked eyes with me and shot a smile my way, so I splayed my arms and legs like a clown, heard the on-board laughter, regrouped, lined up all my parts, pointed them, stretched and lengthened to slow the rotation, and then made like a gannet for the water. Although I hadn't been off a ten-metre tower in more than a year, it all felt very familiar and very good. I beat Jason and everyone else into the seventy-degree Great Salt Pond.

When I surfaced, Jay yelled to me, laughing like a caricature of a cartoon character, "Nice bikini!"

"Tankini," I said, as I swam to the boat ladder and climbed it.