The Coast (1)

The Coast

A Novel

Tony Cohan

ONE

The Island

1.

A few years ago, during my daily news searches, I began reading obituaries. This was often attended by a sense of unease, of transgression or guilt. Why did I find reading about those who had just left the party more interesting than those who were still in attendance? 

Most death notices were about people I’d never heard of and had no interest in. Many public figures’ entries went right past me. Sometimes I’d wonder why this person had been written up instead of others more accomplished or interesting. Exceptional longevity seemed its own reason to warrant an entry - a Japanese rice farmer who made it to 112, a Serbian seamstress to 113 - while news of those cut down too early brought a fleeting sadness. Most entries, though, had lived out their term in rough accord with the actuarial tables, neither notably old nor young. 

Once during this time I had a dream in which I came upon my own obituary. I read it avidly, with mounting disappointment and horror, as it seemed to describe a person unknown to me. Some details were true, others as if lifted from another life. The values were skewed, the chronology off. It omitted things I thought I should have received credit for while attributing things to me I would never dream of doing, or would rather not recall if I did, and in any event would certainly not wish to be remembered for. 

A life I hadn’t lived had been read into the record and labeled mine. I’d read about babies switched at birth, but here was an obituary switched at death. I felt a desperate desire to get this spurious document retracted. But how could I do that if I was already dead? 

I woke up in a sweat, alive and breathing but still in the grips of the fading dream. I couldn’t shake the sense that I had lost control of my own story, the narrative I’d built across a lifetime snatched away by unknown hands and reassembled into a fiction, a sham.  

But isn’t that what death has in store for us all? The portrait of us formed in the collective memory of those who live on will surely differ from the self-portrait we relentlessly propagate and burnish while alive. 

This dream, full of shock and futility, left me staring at my own existence as if from behind a pane of glass. 

Time passed, and I came across ever more obituaries of people I had known, or known of, or to whom I had been connected in some way. This was inevitable, of course, as I was drawing closer to my own end. In fact, maybe this held the simple key to my interest in the obituaries to begin with. Reading about others’ deaths reassured me that the bell tolled for them, not me. At least, not today. 

One morning, while pursuing this idle habit, I came upon an obituary in a large US newspaper for someone I had known intimately, as well as anyone on this earth. 

I was stunned and dismayed. I was also a little surprised to find her obituary here, as while Russell was known and admired for her work, she wasn’t exactly famous. Hers had been an extraordinary life, but her legacy, if you chose to call it that, could not be so easily encapsulated. 

I read on, an ache spreading in my chest as it sunk in that she was no longer here, missing her though it had been over a decade since I’d last seen her. Scrolling through the surface details of her life, I held my breath. 

By the time I finished, I realized she had borne her deepest secret to the grave.

2.

Three days later, I received an email from someone I didn’t know, inviting me to an “intimate farewell gathering” at Point Lobos, on California’s Monterey Peninsula, in two weeks. Some friend or companion or colleague of Russell’s must have culled her address book for names. A Google map link was provided. 

A cluster of mourners among the twisted pines, the guano-splashed stones, the anemones and the kelp. Russell’s ashes cast into the heaving tides, or strewn from a small buzzing Cessna. 

It sounded dreadful. 

May is my favorite month here on the island. Silvery Baltic light quickens the air, bathes the running fields of wheat and corn and mustard flowers. Deer bound through the forests, wild spume crashes the sunlit beaches. Shops and restaurants, shuttered all winter, fling open their doors, and the weekly village market displays fresh produce. Soon enough, ferries from the mainland and the surrounding countries will discharge the summer hordes; but for this month at least, the island belongs to those of us who inhabit it.

The day after the email arrived, I rode my bicycle to the smokehouse by the village harbor and parked it. I hopped the bus that runs northeast up the craggy, forested coastline. From a window I gazed out at the windless blue expanse. A freighter, destined for Tallin or Riga or Helsinki, looked as if frozen in the water. A small craft, headed for the lone island on the horizon which for centuries housed prisoners, trailed a thin white wake. 

I hopped off in front of a small, modernist art museum set on a promontory in thick woods. After a coffee at the museum cafe, I took the steep path that runs behind the galleries to the sea. 

The air cooled, trees swallowed the light. The descent brought me to a cliff high above the water. Below, a narrow inlet lay between two massive vertical rocks with enough space for a small boat to tie up. A flight of wooden stairs led to the landing. To my right, an unmarked path veered back into the forest. 

I took the inland path. Crossing a flimsy wooden bridge, I clambered over boulders and gurgling rivulets until the trail veered seaward again. From a high peak above gull-thronged rocks, I could see back along the wide curve of the bay to the red rooftops of the village, sparkling in the sun. It looked close, but I knew it would be some hours before I’d reach it. 

Re-entering the woods, I followed a series of switchbacks that eventually brought me back out further along the cliffs. There I sat on a bench carved from a boulder, sipping water from a bottle. Thick white clouds massed above me. Out over the sea, the sky was still solid blue. 

Every spring, since arriving on the island eight years earlier, I’d taken this walk. Among the island’s vast web of trails, it was my favorite. For some reason, this year I’d neglected it. This morning, on impulse, after rereading the email, I’d biked to the harbor and jumped on the bus. 

What would be the point of flying all the way to California? It wouldn’t change anything. She was gone.

I wondered what she’d died of. The obituary’s generic “of undisclosed causes” gave nothing away. There was mention of her photography, her exhibitions and prizes and awards, her work with refugees, her emigre father. All but the story untold. 

As if I’d need a Google map to find those spindrift Point Lobos trails we’d walked together. I pictured a New Age-style gathering of survivors, earnest declamations that this was a moment not to grieve but to rejoice, be glad, celebrate. Anything to duck the tragic fact. A Californian, I knew the rhetoric too well.

Unlikely I’d know anyone at the event. And what if I did? All the worse.

I closed my eyes against the glare strobing off the sea. Waves slapped the rocks below, mixing with the shrill cries of terns along the cliffs. It was too vivid. The terns’ cries were hers, the slapping waves the banging of bodies on a bed in a room in a country that could have been anywhere. 

Most men, she said once, don’t make sounds during sex. You’re emotive,  you show pleasure. 

Do you like that?

Yes.

Tears trailed down my cheeks. How could it be? Her wet breath in my ear. Her tireless exploring eyes. The warm body I’d embraced distilled to ash. Her vaulting mind erased, taking with it everything unspoken and untold. 

She wouldn’t have expected or demanded I show up at that event. Unlikely she’d ever thought about such a thing. 

Or maybe it was a ruse, I thought. She wasn’t dead. With Russell, it wasn’t entirely beyond imagining. 

This idea heartened me somehow. I stood up, stiff-legged already, and continued on the path. After a while it became a gradual descent, unwinding until I was walking through sparse forest on flat, stony earth. 

I reached the three tall standing stones, inscribed runes that had once served as navigation guides, marking the end of the trail or its beginning. I turned and looked back up the sweep of coast towards the museum where I’d begun, but clouds hid that stretch of forest now. 

Back in the village, I found my bicycle where I’d parked it and rode back to the farmhouse.