Lucy hears the ghosts at Point Nemo. For a long time, she did not know they were ghosts, and for an even longer time, she, like most people, did not know anything about the place, had never heard its name. Now, thanks to occasional news stories, more people know that soon, above a map coordinate called Point Nemo, a space station will fall out of the sky and drift in scattered remnants that will settle, finally, among their predecessors as debris at the bottom of the ocean.
Lucy hopes she will not hear the fall (the screaming, melting metal, scraped and burned by the air, mangled by gravity, smashed by water, crushed), but she expects she will at least hear an echo.
An echo is what something sends back after it has gone away.
She hears many echoes.
During her first year of college, Lucy told everybody she was a lesbian, not because she was a lesbian but because she did not want to have sex with men, and she thought that was one way to do it. (She did not want to have sex with women either, but that wasn’t much of a problem; they seemed to understand.) Telling everybody she was a lesbian was easier than telling anybody she heard voices and sounds from afar. But one night she and her roommate, Beth, drank a bottle of cheap vodka together on the roof of their dormitory and traded secrets. Beth slurred her way through boys’ names and tales of shoplifting sprees. Lucy, the world spinning around her, said, “I hear things.”
“Things? Like voices?”
“Like voices, sure. Like voices. Like but not the same as. Voices.”
“You hear things.”
“Sounds.”
“You have ears.”
“Not hearing from my ears. More like radio, radiation, vibrato, vibra…tation.”
“You hear things.”
“Right.”
“But not with your ears.”
“Right.”
They both burst into laughter and then Beth went to the edge of the roof and let puke rain down. Lucy, worried that Beth might slip or might need someone to hold her hair back from the spray, made her way to the edge as well, and once she looked over the side, she too, puked onto the dark, empty sidewalk below.
A few days later, walking back to the dorm after lunch, Beth said to Lucy, “Did you mention something the other night about hearing voices?”
“Did I?”
“I just wondered.”
“I’m never drinking vodka again.”
“Was it true? About what you hear?”
“Yes. Sometimes. I guess. But not voices exactly. Vibrations. And … yearnings. Not human.”
“Alien?”
“No. Sort of. It’s hard to explain.”
“Yearnings,” Beth said, as if testing the word on her tongue.
“That’s how I think of it.”
It was the next year, in a geography class, that Lucy learned about the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. “Point Nemo,” the professor said. He was tall and bearded and wore cable-knit sweaters. “It’s a reference to Captain Nemo from the Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Maybe you saw the movie. Good flick. Point Nemo’s the farthest point from land on the planet, at least a thousand miles in any direction. Not much life in the water, because you’ve got the Southern Pacific Gyre there, a swirling current that prevents most nutrients from accumulating. Not exactly a place that life can thrive. No shipping lanes, not much of anything, really. We drop space debris there. Deliberately. So it won’t hurt anybody. Dead spacecraft and bits of rocket mostly. They have to fall somewhere, so that’s where we aim them. Skylab is there. The Russian Mir space station. Eventually, the International Space Station will come crashing down into the area near Point Nemo. Almost three hundred items are known to have fallen there. Nobody really knows much more than that. It’s too remote to study.”
Lucy looked up the coordinates for Point Nemo. 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W, more or less. An empty spot. Something about it felt familiar—not the name, but the idea, the desolation, the resting wreckage. She knew this place, but she did not know how.
For a few months, Lucy thought she might become a cartographer. She could point the way, make the maps, chart the globe. Then, for a few more months, she settled on the idea of becoming an oceanographer. She imagined piloting a submersible into the depths. She imagined making her way to Point Nemo with fine-tuned instruments to detect the fallen spacecraft and interpret the sounds of the deep.
Then her mother died in a car crash on a winter night in upstate New York. What Lucy’s mother was doing in upstate New York, nobody knew. Lucy’s father said her mother had just walked to the car and driven off into the storm, and ten or twenty hours later the car slid through ice and snow over an embankment, down a steep hill, into a frozen brook. It wasn’t discovered for days. Lucy took a leave of absence from school, went home to the Boston suburbs, and tried to help her father cope, but help was impossible; he hardly ate, hardly slept, insisted on telling Lucy stories about her mother, the stories less narrative than flashes of memory, ever more incoherent. He started walking through the town at night, saying he was looking for her ghost, he was sure she would come back, he wanted to be haunted, theirs had been the perfect love story, an eternal love, true and perfect.
“Then why did she run off that night, Dad?” Lucy said, a viciousness in her voice she had not intended but did not dislike. “Why did she drive off into a terrible storm? Why did she leave us? Leave you?”
“It was the Scottish madness in her,” he said. “All her people. Ancestors. They clung to mountains and screamed at storms. I stole her from them. They wanted her back.”
Waves burst over Lucy’s skin and sang through her blood. She knew the origin now of the sounds she heard, the ghost echoes. The empty place far from anywhere, the nowhere of nobody. Point Nemo, she thought, yes, of course, the sounds floated there, swirled and pealed, the voices of debris. All these years, the wordless voices had called to her, yearned for her. The drone and thrum of air-blasted, void-tempered, salt-scoured, barnacled metal whirling in starved waters.
“She fled,” Lucy whispered to her father in a razorblade voice. “She fled you. It wasn’t love you gave her. It was slow rot.”
She dashed out the door into the frozen darkness, spent the night on a bus station bench, considered how far she might get before her credit card reached its limit or her father canceled it, pitied herself for failing at everything so far in life, listened for sounds and voices, pitied herself again for being abandoned by everyone and everything she ever cared for, laughed at how pathetic her pity made her, walked out of the bus station, bought a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store, smoked until her lungs hurt, tossed the pack away, and found herself at home, midday, her father radiant and peaceful as he sat in the warm and silent car in the closed garage, the aroma of exhaust filling the entire house.
Lucy does not think about that day or the night before it. If her thoughts go there, she reroutes them to the sky and lets them fall, flaming, to a sunless sea.
One summer, in between jobs (waitress, office temp, store clerk, something), Lucy drove the car her father died in to the site of her mother’s crash. The spot was more or less halfway between Seneca Falls and Lily Dale, towns with deep histories, one of liberation, the other of parting the veil between here and beyond.
Lucy lit a cigarette. She told people she only smoked during the summer, since in the winter cold she could see her breath just fine, and that’s what she needed: to see her breath, that proof of life.
Lucy climbed down the embankment carefully, down to the brook whose humble water tumbled eventually into the Allegheny River, which led to the Ohio, which led to the Mississippi, which led to the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, the South Atlantic, the South Pacific. She sat on a rock and let her fingers tease the water. Since her father’s death, she had not often heard the vibrations and voices of the ghostly debris in its empty depths of ocean, only now and then a shadow whisper in the night, a tinny drip of electronic memory, a submerged hum from long-gone directional couplers and orphaned transistors. At the brook, though, a cascade of pulses and rumbles murmured around her while the water caressed her hand. Startled, she stood up and nearly fell backward, but caught herself, as if buffered by the pipe-organ moans resonating within her skin. She had always known that the body pulled from the shattered glass and mangled steel was not, in any meaningful sense, her mother; here at the place itself, jostled by reverberations, she felt a simultaneous presence and absence, something like her mother or the memory of her mother, but also not. Her mother had been here, died here, her vibrations rippling into the landscape, absorbed but still resounding, transformed in the flow of the world’s currents.
The moment passed suddenly. Lucy’s hands were dry. Twilight spread across the horizon.
She lit a cigarette to summon some strength and to give herself a reason to breathe. Once she finished smoking, she scrambled up the craggy embankment, put her father’s car in neutral, stood behind it, and pushed it over the edge.
The crash below thundered shockwaves against the night.
“The perfect love story,” Lucy said. “Eternal and true.”
She lit another cigarette and walked down the road. After a mile or so, she stuck her thumb out as cars passed. A woman in a blue pickup truck welcomed her, chatting for an hour’s drive about chicken feed and silage, before leaving Lucy where she wanted to be left, among the people who talk with the dead.
Lucy’s best friend in the town, the only person who really accepts her, is Cassilda, who has been here many years, seen many things, yet has somehow still held on to her curiosity about younger people, whether the ones who come to the town in search of psychics and mediums to heal their woes and balm their griefs, or ones like Lucy, who aren’t so sure why they have made their way here, but know it is (for now, at least) where they need to be. She lets Lucy live in a cabin behind her house, which sits between the upper and middle Cassadega Lakes. The cabin has no electricity or running water, but there’s a little potbelly stove that keeps it warm in the winter, and that’s really all Lucy needs. She works as a cleaner at a hotel in town and sometimes gives tarot readings for a bit of extra money. She earns enough to buy food and to pay Cassilda a couple hundred dollars a month for rent.
A few nights a week, Cassilda and Lucy make dinner together and play card games, mostly gin rummy, sometimes blackjack, sometimes double solitaire. When they first knew each other, Cassilda invited Lucy in to watch movies or tv shows, but she quickly figured out that Lucy did not like television screens or computer monitors. “They’re too loud,” Lucy explained. Without outlets or appliances or even any wires in the walls, the cabin was ideal, a place where she slept more peacefully than she had in many years, maybe ever before. Cassilda didn’t question. There was plenty to do together aside from watch tv. Cassilda liked cards. The first divination work she had ever done had not been with tarot or Lenormand but with a pack of playing cards she stole from her parents, and she still knew few pleasures greater than holding and dealing ordinary cards.
“Maybe,” Cassilda said one night, “you should go to Scotland. Find your people.”
“My mother’s people.”
“It’s a lovely country.”
“One day, maybe I’ll go. Or I could go to Nova Scotia and meet my father’s people. Or not. No. Definitely not.”
“Where would you go if you had all the money and time in the world?” Cassilda asked.
“Point Nemo,” Lucy said, then explained where it was, and what was there.
“Do you think it’s the source of everything you hear?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I could ever know that. We aren’t really meant to know sources, are we?”
“No, probably not,” Cassilda said.
What Lucy told her got Cassilda curious. She read a bit about Point Nemo and about space debris. She asked Lucy more and more questions, asked her old friend Margaret to do a ritual with animal carcasses, a ritual that had not been performed in town for at least a century. They only made it halfway through before Margaret said they must not continue, it wasn’t safe.
Cassilda began to have trouble sleeping. One night, she came into the cabin and asked if she might sleep there with Lucy, the house was too loud. Lucy welcomed her into the warm bed and they lay together in the silence, soon asleep.
Nobody seemed to think it strange when Cassilda removed her television, but the appliances out on the lawn got some stares, and when she and Lucy began tearing into the walls and dismantling the wiring, some of their friends asked if everything was all right.
“Too noisy in here,” Cassilda said. “Can hardly hear ourselves think.”
Margaret proposed that they ought to come over for a séance. Another friend, Julia, suggested a cleansing ritual. Julia’s husband, George, wondered if an exorcism would be appropriate. Cassilda laughed. “No demons, George, just electricity. The real ghost in the world.”
Men haul the appliances away and bring a big old iron kitchen stove that Cassilda bartered for. There’s the remnants of a chimney buried in the kitchen wall, and a carpenter and a mason come to clean it out, fix it up, and attach the iron stove.
“That should do it, don’t you think?” Cassilda says as she and Lucy cook a stew.
“We’re like homesteaders,” Lucy says, smiling.
Later that night, they tear out the telephone wires.
Finally, the house is truly quiet.
Lucy knows there are rumors now that she has moved into the house, whispers of romance and Sapphic pleasures. The gossip doesn’t bother her. She wishes she had some capacity for intimacy with Cassilda, but she doesn’t feel any more lust these days than she did in college. They share the house because they get along well and it’s easier than being alone. Now that the house is quiet, Lucy has become quite fond of it. They are working to turn the front parlor into a place for card readings and small gatherings, maybe bring in some money, but the competition here is fierce, with every other house displaying a sign for some sort of psychic work.
It doesn’t really matter, though. Cassilda has money saved from an inheritance. Lucy has quit working at the hotel and has even stopped smoking. She and Cassilda live a good life together, stable and quiet. It is all Lucy has ever wanted.
Cassilda wakes screaming, her hands pressed tight to her ears. Bedsheets like chains around her, she kneels, coils into herself.
Lucy wakes, too, but she lets the currents move through her. She is long familiar with the worst of the hammering vibrations, but Cassilda has never heard them before with such force, has not learned to step aside, to be a vessel and not a wall. Lucy has come to think of these moments of particular intensity as transmissions. There is something different in this one. Often, the transmissions are calming, even beautiful, a hum or trill from the depths of the world. Sometimes the vibrations pull at her gently, like a child’s hand tugging a shirtsleeve for attention. She only remembers two or three previous times when she heard anything like tonight’s banshee howl, and one of those was the night her mother drove away into the storm.
Mercifully, the event is brief. Silence returns.
“What was that?” Cassilda asks, eyes frantic, face sweaty, hands trembling.
Lucy puts wood in the kitchen stove and lights it and begins to make tea.
“Lucy, what was it?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy says. “Not for sure. I think it might be the space station. I think … I think it’s getting ready to fall.”
Margaret keeps asking when Cassilda will sit with them again. After Cassilda cut off contact with many of her old friends, Lucy began to go to their weekly sittings in her stead, first out of curiosity and winter boredom, but now with some fondness. She has encouraged Cassilda to renew her friendships, but Cassilda has taken a strong stance. Margaret, Julia, George, the bunch of them, they’re all frauds in Cassilda’s eyes now.
“Why do you want to humor them?” Cassilda said when Lucy proposed they at least make an appearance at the winter solstice gathering.
“Because they’re good people.”
“So they tell themselves. We had all sorts of ways to convince ourselves that what we did was good and helpful and decent and meaningful. You showed me otherwise.”
“People joining together matters,” Lucy said. “Everything else is interpretation. You heard before, you felt before. Just as they do, in their own ways. That hasn’t changed.”
“Why do you really want to do this?” Cassilda asked.
“Because I miss them. I enjoy their company.”
Lucy went to the solstice gathering by herself. There was a bonfire and then a séance in Margaret’s big house. It was too loud and unfocused for Lucy to hear any real resonances, but she enjoyed the theatre of it all. (Julia was in especially fine form, manifesting ectoplasm from her mouth.)
When she got home, Lucy found Cassilda had covered the front parlor floor with cedar branches. Bag amulets hung from threads nailed to the ceiling, the bags’ flannel filled, variously, with chalcedony, agate, chrysolite, salt.
The whole house smells of cedar now.
Cassilda sleeps in the parlor and says it is peaceful.
Every morning, Lucy walks to a gas station and buys the New York Times. She is looking for information about the space station. It will fall soon, she knows, but she does not see anything about it in the newspaper. Perhaps they do not want to scare people. There is nothing to be scared of. That is the point of Point Nemo. There is nobody anywhere near it, not even any fish. It is a place of emptiness.
Lucy worries about Cassilda, who spends all her time in the parlor now. She barely eats. They had a composting toilet installed in the bathroom, but Cassilda won’t leave the parlor long enough for that, she says it is too dangerous and vulnerable, so she has a red plastic bucket for a chamber pot. Lucy empties it for her when she can.
Lucy spends most of her time in the cabin rather than the house. The house is always cold, since there is only the kitchen stove and a fireplace, and especially at night it is usually close to freezing, but in the little cabin the potbelly stove keeps everything warm. She has suggested to Cassilda that they could both stay in the cabin, or at least sleep there, but Cassilda says it is too far, too dangerous. She must stay in the parlor until the sky is clear and quiet again.
“I fear—” Lucy begins, her voice catching in her throat.
“Don’t fear,” Cassilda says. “Fear is noise. We’ve done so well to lessen the noise. Listen. I know you can hear it. The quiet beneath it all. So beautiful. So beautiful.”
“Will you come outside with me? Come out and look at the sky?”
“Not yet,” Cassilda says. “Soon.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
Lucy wakes in the cabin. It is almost spring and the mornings are crisp, bright, refreshing. She makes her way to the house and the kitchen. She will get the stove going and cook something before walking down to the gas station to get the paper. Perhaps Cassilda will eat some eggs and toast this morning. Lucy should probably get more bread when she buys the paper. She meant to do that yesterday (or was it the day before?) and forgot.
The house feels more still than it has recently. Cassilda’s nervousness usually rattles through the floors and walls in the morning, but not today. It has been a difficult winter, uncertain, portentous. Spring will be better.
As the wood in the kitchen stove begins to burn, Lucy peeks into the parlor. Cassilda lies peacefully among the cedar branches in the middle of the floor, swaddled in wool blankets. She seems as small as a baby. Lucy kneels down next to her. She is about to ask if Cassilda wants any breakfast when she notices that her eyes are open, dry, unblinking. Her skin is ashen.
Lucy touches Cassilda’s face gently, then pulls the blankets down and holds Cassilda’s hand. The body is cold.
A body without life offers no resonances, no vibrations. The life is elsewhere, dispersed. Lucy has long known this. Nonetheless, she cannot bring herself to let go of Cassilda’s hand, cannot stop trying to warm it with her own.
The waters of the world soon cry out. The currents rush around Lucy as she holds Cassilda’s hand. The walls of the house shake, the floor trembles. Cedar branches float upward and swirl between the gyrating amulets suspended from the ceiling.
Lucy lets go of the hand and makes her way unsteadily to the front door. Tides now twist the gravity of the world. The thrumming songs of the deep seas rise as a chorus through Lucy’s veins and her bones hum with the force of lust flashburned long ago into entombed debris. She opens the front door and listens to the crying whispers from another side of the world.
Lucy steps into the front yard. A wind whirls, then slows to a breeze, then the breeze settles to stillness. The lakes throb in the distance like the skin of a drum.
The air and molecules and atoms of the world are primordial, unchanging. This is the air Cassilda breathed and Lucy’s parents breathed, the air her ancestors in Scotland and Nova Scotia breathed, and they themselves, now scattered molecules, drift always through its currents. Here and there, now and then, motes fall from the void beyond the sky, plunge down as dust and ash, jostled by wind, rain, snow; held in ice, magma, amber, ocean; inhaled; exhaled. All is, all was, all will be.
The memory of Cassilda embraces Lucy and gently lifts her head. Lucy closes her eyes so that she and Cassilda may open themselves to the sky, may listen together to Point Nemo, may hear the symphony of falling steel, titanium, aluminum, silicon, copper—all afire and drifting down from blue starlight, drifting down to the salty dead water, scattered by the maelstrom, and finally at rest at the bottom of the world, ready to sing.
| Matthew Cheney is the author of the novella Changes in the Land (Lethe Press), collections Blood: Stories (Black Lawrence Press) and The Last Vanishing Man (Third Man Books), and books of nonfiction from Bloomsbury Academic and punctum books. Recently, he edited Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller for Third Man Books. He lives in New Hampshire and works at Plymouth State University. For more information and writings, visit matthewcheney.net. |  |