EVERYONE WAS THROWN IN THE AIR, water rushed in, planks splitting, sails ripping (scissored by dismasted sailors as they fell), ropes snaking, the chronometer shattering in the arms of the captain, who was promptly swept overboard by a swinging boom. Into the hold seawater sprayed over the crates of mirrors, the chests of santos, milagros, and ex-votos, the spools of Professor Caldera’s miraculous wool thread, the giant clockworks and the copper sheets for the clock-tower roof, the bamboo poles, the barrels of pine tar, the cork collection of M. Lemoine (himself last seen blowing past the mizzen like a mustachioed piece of paper), the wrought-iron pipes for the heavy organ of St. Trey’s Cathedral, the mysterious black stone (en route to the museum—alas, it would never arrive), and the wicker basket that housed Professor Caldera’s green obsidian lens. Half the ship sank instantly while the wind dragged off the other by the tips of its sails, which had fallen over the wreckage like a tablecloth. Only the hold was spared, freed by the rupture of the hull and sent tumbling, a dense red cube of teak, over the tips of the waves until it was impaled on a reef. Those who had taken refuge inside waited for dawn before they urged Jamo, the highest-ranking able seaman left, to poke his head through the hatch. His beady eyes faithfully recorded the sight: land just a few hundred yards off, and closing, for the ebbing tide had already begun to shrink the distance between reef and beach. Yes, an attractive white strip of land, sunny but shaded by many stone pinnacles: a cove open only to the sea and walled on three sides by sheer shale cliffs, two hundred feet high, striated with rows of dung-white gannet nests (some 30,000 breeding pair, the shrewd Jamo estimated at a glance)—the gannet being a large seabird, equally white, with brilliant blue eyelids. “If nothing else,” Professor Caldera observed, coiling his fingers in his beard and nibbling sagely on the ends, “we can survive on eggs.”

The eminent Caldera was an inventor, jazz artiste, and optician renowned for his contributions to industry (the fantastically strong wool threads), music (his album Cool Caldera), and science (chiefly the ease with which he could diagnose weaknesses of the eye from great distances, thanks to the green obsidian lens he’d had cut to his exact specifications with another of his inventions—a heat-resistant cookie cutter—by an Indonesian vulcanologist when the lava was piping hot). For all his talents—or perhaps because of them (no genius without a tincture of madness)—he was an insufferable, authoritarian boor, and had already alienated the crew with his loud knitting and trumpeting and the intrusive green disk of light that so often fell upon their faces, a sign that he was inspecting their ocular surfaces from afar. No less irritating were the other two passengers (the wrecked ship was primarily a conveyor of cargo): Sister Agnolotta, an elderly nun posted overseas to head a new Ursuline convent adjacent to the Cathedral of St. Trey (the gigantic shipment of santos, milagros, and ex-votos was also intended for that institution), and M. Lemoine, a utopian philosopher who had established a colony of freethinkers in the same town. This had been a source of shipboard discord, though the tension had lately eased, since Lemoine had certainly not survived the disaster (or at least not in the immediate vicinity). What remained of him were the clock parts he had commissioned for his community’s main plaza, the copper sheets for its tower, the bamboo poles purchased for the construction of meditation platforms, and the collection of corks he had assembled over many years, each painstakingly cased under separate raiseable glass hatches so that the last odors of the vintages could still be sniffed. His waterlogged toupee also turned up in the sand when the survivors waded ashore, along with planks from the shattered hull, a box of nautical instruments (miraculously intact, Sister Agnolotta insisted), and the captain’s own rutter, a guide to every waterway and coast in that part of the world. (The captain himself was not among the objects strewn across the beach.)

The party took refuge in the shade—the day was hot, but pleasantly dry—while Jamo and Caldera (basket held daintily under his chin with both hands) explored the little territory they had. From a fissure at the foot of the eastern cliff, sweet water pooled into a cavity where silvery fish darted. Jamo raised his flashlight but could make only out a distant wall—until Caldera produced the green obsidian lens from its basket, and the cave flooded with emerald light, revealing a deep pond swirling with hundreds more silvery fish, who bobbed up, open-mouthed and squinting, to regard the newcomers. In fact, the cave (comparably humid as it was) proved a treasury of delectable meals: crayfish, crabs, bivalves, mollusks, and several highly flavorful seaweeds were massed on the surrounding ledges. Krater, a sailor with a working knowledge of edible marine life, rapidly inventoried these troglodytic provisions and drew up menus on a scrap torn from the rutter. Yet there was no obvious passage to land beyond the shale walls. A land beyond the cliffs certainly existed, for—as Professor Caldera observed to Jamo when they emerged—the pinnacles above were undulating with furious silhouettes that shouted, waved poles and jury-rigged weaponry, and gesticulated offensively as they stumbled among the shrieking gannets. “Now I know where we are,” said Jamo. “This island’s a den of wreckers and brigands, former acrobats…a troupe of goddamn saltimbanques who claim any salvage that washes up here! It must have been their lights that led us onto the reef… We won’t last long if they make it down those cliffs.” Professor Caldera nibbled thoughtfully on his beard-ends and advised Jamo to quit panicking; the wreckers, for all their acrobatic prowess, had no immediate means of reaching them. The mainland, furthermore, (here he consulted the dripping rutter) lay only a few hours’ sail nor’-nor’-east. (Jamo, bemused, pointed out that the ship had been destroyed, but the professor paid no attention. He instead contemplated a gigantic shadow that had fallen over the entire beach, the origin of which was obscure; it disappeared as soon as this paragraph concluded.)

Once the survivors were gathered, Professor Caldera announced that a party needed to return to the hold before high tide if they meant to leave the island. “Leave?” cried Sister Agnolotta. “Why would we want to do that? The Lord has clearly led us here, and provided His holy seafoods, so that—deprived of the company of young women—we might found a monastic community of celibate sailors.” Many of the sailors hastened to explain that they were homosexuals, to which the nun could only cross herself stereotypically. She insisted on joining the party regardless, in hopes of recovering her own cargo. “That may indeed be necessary,” said Professor Caldera.

The tide had not yet returned to lap at the reef, where tiny pink crustaceans skittered playfully in all directions (pelagic red crabs, according to Krater, found in these waters during El Niño phases). Inside the hold—seawater ankle-deep, the dark impenetrable until Jamo and Caldera again combined their lenses to bathe it in green light—they took stock of the cargo. Sister Agnolotta gathered dozens of metal ex-votos in the folds of her skirt and Caldera tucked a bamboo pole under his arm. The real task, and the most puzzling to all but the insistent professor, was the extraction of the mysterious black stone from its musty rosewood-and-pewter casket. The stone was heavy, rectangular, and cold to the touch. Four sailors were needed to strain it through the hatch, then drag and float it shoreward. By the time it beached, night had come on, and the teak cube stood isolated again by the starry tide. (Throughout all this, the wreckers on the pinnacles had not ceased shouting, blowing raspberries, and timidly attempting to slide down the cliff face, only to be chased back up by hundreds of outraged gannets.)

After dinner (crayfish with a raw gannet egg cracked on top, Krater’s expertise being technical rather than culinary), Professor Caldera insisted that one more task remained that evening: making tools from the wreckage. “For—?” asked Jamo. “Each item required for our escape is already at our disposal,” the professor explained. A careful assembly was required, and a close reading of the tides. It was necessary for the survivors to conceal their activities from the watchers on the pinnacles, too; therefore, all conversation would henceforth be utilitarian and elliptical. If they put their trust in him, Caldera said, he would deliver them from the island. He fixed the green obsidian lens to the top of his bamboo pole and planted it in the sand near Krater’s fire. An emerald glow shone on the cliff walls and throughout the narrow cove, while the weary sailors, who had begun to collect debris and hew tools with rocks and shells, rose as demonic shadows among the banks of nesting gannets. “All art,” Caldera mused, smiling at the gigantic silhouettes, “was certainly born on a night like this, when a stick in the hand of one man, burnt at its tip, traced an ashen penumbra around the shadow of another.” Higher still, the saltimbanques on the pinnacles continued to pace, their powder-white faces and the dusty roses and blues of their costumes almost visible in the glow of their own fire. Caldera watched their lights die down as he rested his head on a smooth stone. It would be some time before the cries of seabirds woke him. All the while he dreamed of engineering—plans and dimensions, Nautiluses in the trenches of twilight, Martians in their tripods. (He was never in his own dreams; there were only illuminating pictures.) In the glittering morning, while the survivors slept, the great shadow fell again across the cove like a bearded patriarch stooping to peer from the rocks. It traced a line down the cliffs where the birds now circled, then stretched a finger toward the teak cube on the reef, as if its caster wanted to remind itself of what was inside.




Zorba’s mother had run off with another troupe (they had a bear), but his father was also gifted, if stifled in his craft by excessive self-consciousness. Once, as he leaped from a bench onto the roof of a tavern, a thought—“How is this possible?”—sprang into his head; he landed wrong and shattered his legs on the tiles. After that, he decided his children would be better off without an education that encouraged intellectual speculation. Hobbling among them with his staff, swearing and hissing like a vulture (in profile he resembled the poet Dante), he taught them only lessons to which their bodies could respond—pure slapstick, treading on rakes, tripping downstairs and bouncing up unhurt—and, being so devoted to this one idea, entirely forgot to show them how to market themselves. To onlookers they were simply six giggling, acrobalancing youths and a dying man with fierce eyes and a sharp beak. When the moment came, in the wastes, Zorba didn’t even think to bury him. On later wanderings they sometimes came across the old man, curled up like a tumbleweed and withered by the sun, his lips browned like a leather bag into which desert life had crept. At last Zorba threw a tarp over him and pinned it with four rocks, less to dignify the body than to hide it from his younger siblings.

It happened with a rapidity that still surprised him. Zorba had learned (he was the only one old enough to remember the days before his father began his lessons) that the aged were conscious of the brevity of their years, certainly more than the young; yet the events of his life had tumbled on him like objects dislodged from the top shelf of a closet. Now he was father to his five siblings, charged with guiding them through the inland villages and along the dunes and pinnacles of the coast. How had they managed in his mother’s time? He struggled to remember. One midday, they banged their bench in a portside square and waited for the crowd to gather; they wore the bright costumes their father had sewn them on desert nights. When a few onlookers appeared, the saltimbanques could only stare and clear their throats awkwardly. At that moment a ship was seen far below, driven onto the cliffs by the wind. The villagers rushed to see what remained; a luxurious mass of salvage lay scattered on the shingle, inaccessible—or so it appeared—until the saltimbanques, who had followed along, leaped and vaulted over the rocks to collect it, for which they were handsomely paid. Had their parents made a living this way too? It didn’t matter to Zorba, so long as it kept them fed. In time they learned to light the torches themselves, and to draw ships into dangerous waters; they brained the survivors and peddled the loot to crowds attracted by their acrobatic feats and pratfalls.

A shadow had seemed to hover over them all those years, as Zorba dimly recalled—the shadow of a man of prodigious size, leaning forward in a seated position, one arm stretched out before him, as if to guide them toward a predetermined end.

The day before, once it was clear there were survivors, the saltimbanques had cartwheeled and pole-vaulted to the cliff’s edge. They had never worked this stretch of coast. The cliffs were too steep for an easy descent (their peripatetic life had, in truth, taken a toll; they no longer moved with the same agility)—the gannets were too fearsome, the sun was too glaring. Zorba regarded his siblings with concern. He could no longer ignore their growing weakness; they were clearly unwell, their pallid complexions barely concealed by thick makeup. They wore the same costumes, though the colors had faded: Zorba in his harlequin lozenges, Oval in his red jester’s cap, Lilith in her flowery bonnet, Devil in his ochre shorts and sand-pink tunic, and the two youngest, Sturgio and Gray Kelly, in the brightest, best-preserved outfits—fresh azure for the boy and applause-gathering salmon for the girl, who had only to curtsy to become the darling of a crowd. (What he saw displeased him: Lilith sitting on her own, still as a carving; Oval staggering—ever since a crate of scotch had washed up he’d been unpredictable; Devil lost in his sketchbook, filled with acrobats happier than himself and tiny women perched precariously on the rims of cocktail glasses; only the two youngest still frolicked joyfully and looked at him with trusting eyes.)

“Sturgio, Kelly—keep watch.” They skipped hand-in-hand to the edge of the pinnacle and saw what they’d seen the day before: the shadows moving on the water and the cove walls, their tools hammering rhythmically and enigmatic words barely audible (“Three violet to beam!” “Mirror on stone edge!” “Mast-step!” “Waterline!”—nonsense). The teak cube remained planted on the reef. Figures trickled from its hatch, hauling more objects ashore (this time, though the saltimbanques couldn’t know it, the pipes of a heavy organ), while a small man in a charcoal suit paced the sand, his hands clasped behind his back and the tufts of his beard clenched between his teeth. “Get a better look,” Zorba barked, clapping Devil out of his sketches. Devil climbed weakly over a few rows of nests before a gannet clamped onto him by the seat of his shorts and chased him back up, shrieking. It was, in any case, impossible to see what was happening below.

“The beach’s flooded!” Sturgio and Kelly called excitedly at noon the next day. Zorba jolted up and crawled to the edge. It did look that way—a shimmering silver plain where the sand had been—but as he squinted, shading his eyes, he made out the beard-chewer strolling placidly across it. “Mirrors…?” said Zorba. “Must be dozens—Oval, go see.” The plump jester set down his bottle of Macallan 12, lifted his pole, and muttered as he judged the angle—with a call of “Oop” he vaulted into a dark cleft between two pinnacles. All the saltimbanques screamed and came running. “I’m fine,” they heard after a while, “but I don’t know how to get back up. I’m really stuck.”

“I’m sorry, Oval,” Zorba called down. “We’ll free you.” As he glanced back at the beach, he saw that the great shadow had fallen over the survivors, as it always seemed to do when the saltimbanques were about to get a good look at their activities. Zorba spat in disgust, though he felt a pang in his heart. That shadow had fallen over him once. He’d been under it—that much he knew.

(Suffice it to say that the saltimbanques spent days extracting Oval from the cleft. They had to lower water and food—their customary snack of dried meat sticks—and slowly ease him up with ropes. They moved together as they used to when they were younger and haler and the act still worked perfectly. “We love you, Oval,” the children shouted to him. “Love you, too,” he answered hoarsely, visible only as a gently smiling circle of floury makeup far below. Zorba swore they would have him up soon; then they’d go kill the bastards who’d done this—meaning the survivors.)

It was evening on the sixth day when they pulled Oval to safety and watched him sprawl across the rocks, his stomach heaving. “Catch your breath,” ordered Zorba, flush with success, “then lower me down so I can hear what these rascals are doing.” The saltimbanques wearily formed a human chain and lowered Zorba headfirst until the sea-roar and the pounding of hammers filled his ears. Two figures were arguing below—an old nun and the beard-chewer. He could make out part of what they said.

AGNOLOTTA: You’re insatiable! Don’t force them to keep at it, they’re exhausted… Besides, it’s sacrilege!

CALDERA: Sister, they can relax whenever they want—if they’re not too worried about being massacred by these clowns.

AGNOLOTTA: But destroying sacred images—incarnations of His supreme love!

CALDERA: Think of it more as building a kind of…nautical church…

AGNOLOTTA: St. Trey didn’t die a martyr so you could plop him on your poop!

CALDERA: We’ll talk it over tomorrow. When we’re safe.

AGNOLOTTA: But—

CALDERA: Tomorrow, Sister… Tomorrow…

“Tomorrow?” Zorba strained for more, but a gust of wind set the human chain swinging. They dangled comically—to observers; laughter rose from the shadows below—and dangerously—to the saltimbanques, who scrambled up with extreme difficulty and lay in the dust afterward, disentangling themselves. Zorba pounded the dust with his fists, shaking feverishly; he had glimpsed something in the moment before they hauled him up: long and low against the cliff face, a strange shadow… “Tomorrow… We have to get down there tomorrow…” But the exhausted man was soon asleep. Only in his dreams, which were anything but restful, did he realize what he had seen.

In the morning, he sprang to his feet, seizing the cudgel he reserved for wet work. He was certain, for once, that he knew what was happening, and what to do. But he was off by a matter of hours—it was already too late—the object was on the tide. The saltimbanques could only gaze in stupefaction until the glare of the escaping ship forced them to cover their eyes. Zorba recoiled, blinded, while in his ears rang the cacophonous pinging and chiming of the vessel, from the decks of which the survivors (not least Sister Agnolotta) gesticulated ferociously and shouted gratuitous insults.




P.S. A description of Professor Caldera’s ship is in order. When the saltimbanques recovered their sight, they perceived a low, angular craft, still too brilliant to observe directly on account of the professionally silvered mirrors that formed its hull, and the hundreds of tin and pewter milagros and ex-votos with which the copper sheathing had been fastened along the waterline (ringing and beating like departing angels, Zorba thought to himself—just exactly like guardian angels leaving us behind for good; and indeed the hands and eyes of the ex-votos appeared to flicker and close in the sun, while the wooden heads of the santos protruding from the spars turned away as the ship took its nor’-nor’-easterly course; that dead Christ at the stern had surely shut his eyes against them, too, if perhaps with some regret—his mouth did gape in agony). Amidships stood a mast of bamboo poles lashed together and braced by other saints and angels (bent martyrs and outstretched nuns, enjambed as construction had necessitated—swords and trumpets springing from their mouths and eyes). What stretched from the mast, rather than sails, were dense parallel and cross-hatched layers of Caldera’s miraculous wool thread, dyed five pleasing colors (violet, green, yellow, blue, red—the latter two being the longer threads, which had been reserved for rigging). Beyond what the saltimbanques could see, we might add that the organ pipes had been bent into ribs, stringers, and knees; the mysterious black stone served as the ballast keel; the joints between the mirrors and the copper sheaths had been caulked with pine tar; and the cork collection (still fragrant with wine) had been packed for floatation and shock absorption into the lower compartments and along the bilge. The chimes audible to the saltimbanques came from the gears, springs, and escapement of the giant clockworks, now converted into winches, capstan, and windlass. One of the enamel clock faces—a plump sun smiling over a grassy hill—had become the binnacle, while the other—a content, rather feline moon—stood at the stern, where a rudder made from teak planks soon steered the survivors well beyond the gaze of the figures despairing on the pinnacles.




P.P.S. Read no further if you prefer to avoid disappointment. Professor Caldera’s invention, while seaworthy enough for the distance required, does not of course make the crossing easily. This is due in part to the silvered mirrors that form both hull and decking. Extra care must be taken to avoid shattering these surfaces, and no crew can remain particularly effective when every task must be performed on tiptoe. Even more troublesome is the disorientation caused by the sky’s bright turquoise reflection on every inch of the vessel. The survivors see themselves elongated and inverted, like the Hanged Man of Tarot, while the tiny hands, hearts, and eyes of Sister Agnolotta’s milagros rattle constantly in their ears, and the giant clockwork never stops booming the hours. As night falls, the moon and the Milky Way appear with perfect clarity beneath the sailors’ feet—or rather beneath their outstretched arms and legs, for they are now prostrate with vertigo. This idea of Caldera’s was completely idiotic; it makes no sense to them at all. They turn to him accusingly, but Professor Caldera—an obvious invention—has ceased to exist. The ship has drifted beyond the reach of the great shadow that so often fell across them. Worse still is the fate of the saltimbanques, who can only cling to their pinnacle as light fades. “What did you want from us? What did you do to us?” These are the questions in the mouths of Zorba and his siblings. They, too, have turned toward the last location of the shadow, which was that of the author, but it is not to be seen, because the story has been resolved, the desired word count reached, and they no longer serve a narrative function. •





Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio. His work appears in 3:AM Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Burial Mag, minor literature[s], and elsewhere.

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