Blown Read online

  Also by Mark Haskell Smith

  Fiction

  Moist

  Delicious

  Salty

  Baked

  Raw: A Love Story

  Nonfiction

  Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race for the Cannabis Cup

  Naked at Lunch: A Reluctant Nudist’s Adventures in the Clothing-Optional World

  BLOWN

  A NOVEL

  MARK HASKELL SMITH

  Copyright © 2018 by Mark Haskell Smith

  Cover design by Bart Heideman | uncanny.design

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is set in Garamond Premier by

  Alpha Design & Composition in Pittsfield, NH.

  First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: June 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2814-0

  eISBN 978-0-8021-6575-6

  Black Cat

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For MacKenzie & Steven; Jon & DLD

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Mark Haskell Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  At Sea

  Previously, Onshore …

  Becalmed

  Poseidon

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  AT SEA

  Neal Nathanson thought about drinking his own urine. Isn’t that what you do when you’re out of water? Wasn’t that what the Chilean soccer team did when they crashed into the Andes? Or was it the Chilean miners? He was sure someone from Chile had survived some kind of ordeal by drinking piss.

  He slumped back on the deck of the wrecked sailboat, lying like a corpse amid the twisted metal and cracked wood, the tangles of rope and cable, feeling the hull bob and roll, powerless against the swell and surge of the open ocean, the horizon bisecting the world into water and sky.

  He wiped the salt spray off his glasses with his shirt and put them back on, blinking at the nighttime sky, looking at an infinity of stars and planets and galaxies and supernovas and black holes and red giants and white dwarfs and whatever else was up there. There were way too many, all piled on top of each other, and he didn’t recognize a single constellation.

  He missed New York City. The traffic, the noise, the light pollution. The universe isn’t so vast and oppressive when you can’t see it.

  Neal knew that ancient mariners had navigated by using the stars, and now that he thought of it, there was probably an app he could have downloaded about marine navigation but there wasn’t time. Besides, the boat was state of the art, with a full tech package: there was a backup hard drive for the computer, a streaming weather update, a satellite-guided navigation system with charts and maps, even an emergency distress signal; you could send an email and make phone calls. Of course none of the electronics worked once the seawater got in them.

  He had no idea what happened to the sail. Torn off. Sucked into the abyss. Eaten by sea monsters. Who knew? The boat was destroyed. The interior cabin had been cracked like an eggshell, the doors blown off their hinges. Neal was grateful the thing still floated. But where was everyone? Had anyone else survived?

  And what happened to Bryan LeBlanc? He started this. It was all his fault.

  Neal picked a piece of peeling skin off his sunburnt forehead, rolled it between his fingers, and popped it in his mouth. It tasted salty, like prosciutto. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do, eating his own dead skin, but he’d been unable to catch a fish or a bird or even a fucking mosquito, and he was starving. Not starving like he used to feel on his way to dinner at some new bistro all the way out in Brooklyn; he was authentically starving, he hadn’t eaten in three days, not since he choked down the final chunk of moldy Camembert.

  On the positive side, he’d surpassed his weight-loss goal. It was not easy to be upbeat in this situation, but he didn’t want to succumb to despair and be one of those guys you read about in the news who gave up and died. It had been easy when there was food on the boat. He’d managed to make it last for over a week, but now he’d gone days without eating anything. Weren’t there lots of stories about people adrift for months? How did they survive? He realized that he was experiencing an unhealthy level of anxiety. It felt like a panic attack.

  Neal took a deep breath. He needed to be calm. Rational. This current state of affairs called for proactive solutions. He wasn’t going to lie there and wait for the seagulls to peck his eyes out. If he had to, if it came down to it, he’d drink a cup of piss.

  He rolled onto his belly and slowly pulled himself up. His legs were wobbly and he got dizzy if he stood too fast, so he took his time, using the wheel for balance, making his way into the cabin. The interior, which had once looked like a serene and stylish room in a boutique hotel, now resembled a bedroom after a tornado. Or the inside of a dumpster. He fished an empty wine bottle off the floor and made sure its screw-top fit. The bottle had to be airtight. That’s the first rule of flotation.

  How many messages had he cast into the sea? So many he’d run out of paper. What could he say that he hadn’t already said? How could anyone rescue him if he didn’t know where he was? After rummaging in the cupboards he found a soggy paper bag and tried to write, but the paper disintegrated in his hand.

  He took out his wallet and removed his last business card. It still looked impressive, still said NEAL NATHANSON, DIRECTOR OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, and had the name of the investment bank he worked for, the Wall Street address, phone number, and email. He turned the card over and thought about what to write, wondering how to sum up his situation as clearly and succinctly as possible.

  He wrote the word fucked on the back of the card and slid it into the bottle.

  Neal screwed on the top, giving it an extra twist to make sure it was tight, then staggered to the doorway.

  He looked at the boat. It had been a pretty awesome boat, sleek and unadorned, as if designed by a Scandinavian architect. A Beneteau Oceanis 38.1. Neal knew that because he’d found the owner’s manual. He wondered if it had any salvage value. Would his boss be able to recoup some of the money?

  Neal figured that it would be the kind of boat he’d buy if he had an offshore account full of illegally skimmed millions and liked sailing, but he was now pretty sure he didn’t like sailing.

  He chucked the bottle out into the night and waited for the splash.

  Neal might have dozed off, might have fallen into a mini-coma, if that’s even a medical condition, but he woke with a start. He blinked, trying to get the abrasive crunch of salt out of his desiccated eyes. Was that a light? In the near di
stance? He blinked again, wondering if he was hallucinating.

  But the light continued to glow, moving on a course perpendicular to wherever the current was taking him.

  He needed to send a signal.

  There was no power, no flare gun, no flashlight. Neal thought he could potentially ignite some tangles of rope, but they were hopelessly snagged in what was left of the rigging.

  The dot of light was moving away. This required him to make an executive decision. He would explain it to his boss later.

  Neal hobbled into the hold and lifted one of the large duffel bags stacked on the floor. He reached into a cubby and took a bottle of lighter fluid—something he’d considered drinking only a day ago. He carried them out to the front of the boat—the prow was what they called it—and unzipped the bag. He knew the duffels contained a mix of currency; there were euros and dollars, yen and yuan, and a grab bag of bills from various Caribbean islands and Mexico. Neal upended the bag, and neatly wrapped bricks of money fell onto the deck. He recognized some notes from the Dominican Republic—old-school guys on one side and a building that looked like a bad hotel on the other—and some Jamaican bills that had a pissed-off black man in a suit and tie on the front. The stack was almost three feet high; it was a lot of money, over a million US, but like the saying goes, “You can’t take it with you if you’re dead and the seagulls are pecking your eyes out.”

  Besides, it wasn’t his money. Not exactly.

  Neal emptied the lighter fluid on the bills and struck a match. The stack ignited with a whoosh, sending him tumbling backward. He scrambled away from the flames, crawling aft toward the cockpit.

  He stood and scanned the horizon. The dot was still there, still visible. Maybe not a mirage after all.

  The smell of burning resin and wood jolted him. The currency was burning, but now part of the boat was too. For a brief moment Neal considered getting a fire extinguisher and putting it out. But then what?

  As the prow began to burn with real intent, Neal dragged the remaining duffel bags out of the hold and stacked them at the rear of the boat. They weren’t that heavy, but there were nine of them. He stared at the bags. Why had he risked so much for money that wasn’t even his? What had he been thinking? A burst of flames shot up. He remembered the life raft he’d discovered when he still had the energy to scavenge. He dragged it out and opened the lid, triggering automatic inflation. The life raft began to grow bigger and bigger, crowding the cockpit, forcing him to move and shuffle and try not to get knocked overboard by the very thing meant to save him. It took all his strength, but he managed to shove it over the side and into the water. He was careful to tie it so it didn’t drift away and loaded the bags into it.

  He looked toward the light. It appeared to be coming closer, but it was hard to see clearly now that the entire front half of the boat was engulfed in flames.

  Chlöe zipped up her jacket and studied the guy she’d just hauled out of the life raft. He was, if she was being charitable, a fucking mess, ragged and smelly like kelp, like something that might wash up dead on a beach. She’d given him some water, warned him to drink slowly, and watched him guzzle it, puke all over himself, and then pass out on the deck. She didn’t know if he was unconscious or dead—not that it made much difference to her; she’d have to put him ashore as soon as she could.

  She had watched his boat sink. Funny how the ocean snuffed out the flames so abruptly—one minute it was a raging inferno, flames shooting fifteen feet into the air, plumes of black smoke swirling off the heat, and then it was gone, the stars returning and the water calm. Like flicking a switch.

  She bent down. He looked completely stonkered, his face sun-roasted and peeling with a patchy, scruffy beard, and his arms and legs were pocked with scrapes and scabs and festering cuts. She could tell he wasn’t a sailor; even in his emaciated state he was soft and doughy, like a corporate drone, a salary-man, maybe a dot-com billionaire trying to prove his manhood by going to sea. She could tell he was probably a nice-looking guy on a normal day. Cleaned up and drinking a bottle of Shiraz at a fancy restaurant, he might even be the kind of guy she found attractive. But then she liked men who were physically her equal, and they were hard to find.

  Chlöe knew she should follow maritime protocol and relay news of the rescue to her team, but she didn’t. Hers was supposed to be a solo circumnavigation, from Melbourne to Melbourne, a big spin around the globe without any companion. Would the media understand that she had saved this poor sucker’s life, or would they call her a fraud for not being solo 100 percent of the time? She shuddered at the thought of what they’d say on social media. No one would hesitate to thoroughly shame her. The bad press would kill the project. Her sponsors would abandon it and then she’d be broke, ruined, an embarrassment for the rest of her life. A sane person would’ve let the guy go down with his ship.

  She had prepared for all kinds of problems—de-mastings and shipwreck, shark attack and pirates—but rescuing someone was a complication she hadn’t foreseen. She was hoping she could discreetly drop him off at the next small port, maybe Paramaribo in Suriname, and be back on her way without anybody noticing. For sure the guy couldn’t complain; she’d saved his ass. And if he was some kind of big shot, maybe she’d get a new corporate sponsor. Every little bit helped.

  Chlöe stepped over her unconscious passenger. It was close quarters; the cockpit of her boat was designed to be piloted by one person and wasn’t what you’d call spacious. She squeezed past the duffels and into the galley. She’d caught a wahoo earlier that day, a twenty-five-pounder, and was keeping it cool in the sink. Normally a fish that size would feed her for a week, but her guest looked like he hadn’t eaten in a while. He’d be hungry when he woke up.

  She carried the fish out of the galley, slapped it down over the transom, and unclipped the folding knife from her shorts. She was about to gut the wahoo when she hesitated. She looked over at the guy, passed out on the deck. She noticed the rise and fall of his chest. In the excitement of rescuing him and watching his boat sink, she hadn’t given a thought to what was in those duffel bags. She’d helped haul them aboard. What was so important that he saved them? Her satellite phone beeped. She picked it up and sent a quick SMS in reply. The midnight check-in was one of the protocols developed to keep her safe. She ducked into the cabin and scanned her instruments. Everything looked good. The GPS was still marking her location. There were no storms on the radar.

  Chlöe squatted by one of the duffel bags, turned on her headlamp, and pulled the zipper. She wasn’t sure what she would find. Drugs? Guns? A dozen severed heads? She was prepared for almost anything, but she actually gasped when she saw all that money. There was a lot of it. More than she would ever make in her life no matter how many corporate sponsors she had or how many times she sailed around the world.

  She pulled out a neatly bundled stack of bills. They were mostly euros. Brick after brick of bright yellow two-hundred-euro notes. They were pretty: a picture of a doorway on one side, a bridge on the back. Chlöe laughed. A stack of these could open some doors, that’s for sure. There were other bundles of euros: green hundreds, orange fifties, purplish five hundreds. She opened another bag and found that it was filled with American dollars. Bundles and bundles of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. The dollar wasn’t as pretty as the euro, but it gave off a kind of gravitas, a no-nonsense aura that took her breath away. Another bag held bills from India, with a picture of Gandhi, and Australian currency, green bills with a portrait of Dame Nellie Melba, the opera singer. Chlöe had to admit that it was strange to put an opera singer on money. Birds were more popular: pheasants on Taiwanese money, cranes on the Japanese yen, Canadian grosbeaks. But an opera singer was better than birds.

  Chlöe hadn’t grown up rich. Her parents owned a little seafood restaurant in Melbourne, a neighborhood place that had locally caught specials every day, although mostly they did a brisk business in takeaway fish and chips. It was her dad’s love of fishing that meant she spe
nt most of her childhood on the water. She learned to fish, she learned to sail, she learned to cook, which condemned her to a nomadic life of working on yachts, preparing gourmet dinners for the one-percenters, then trying to look the other way as the millionaires got drunk, popped Viagra, and mounted moisties half their age, screwing on the deck, acting as if the crew was invisible, just part of the furniture. The best trips were when she delivered the yachts: her and the crew sailing from Sydney to Macau or Bali, while the millionaires flew in their private jets.

  She picked up a stack of Swiss francs. Where did this come from? What was the guy going to do with it? She knew what she’d do. If this was her money, she’d open her own restaurant in Melbourne, a classy wine bar that served fresh oysters. Then she’d buy one of those swank modern condos by the river. With this much cash she could be the one having a root on the deck of a yacht. She liked the sporty types—the pro golfers and surfers—sunburnt men who were gorgeous and blond and athletic, with big tools packed in their budgie smugglers. That was one of the things she learned working on millionaires’ boats: the richer you are, the more attractive the lover you get.

  With this much cash, she could do anything she wanted. For sure she wouldn’t have to sail around the world trying to raise awareness for a fucking disease.

  Neal opened his eyes and blinked up at the sky. The sun was breaking the horizon, the color changing from cool indigo to bright hot blue. He smacked his lips, feeling the flakes of dried skin and crackle of scabs.

  “It’s alive.”

  He turned toward the voice.

  “I’ll give you some water, but if you chunder on my deck again you can fucking swim home.”

  Neal tried to speak, his vocal cords making a salt-encrusted croak. He nodded and reached for the bottle but discovered his hand wouldn’t move. His right hand had been lashed to the railing by some kind of industrial-strength plastic tie. Neal looked at the woman sitting behind him, a few feet away, her arms across the top of the steering wheel. She seemed to shrug, almost apologetic, and said, “Just a precaution.”