From the master’s cabin comes a creaking as the chair turns in its screw swivel where again the mate’s forgotten to have a wiper do what a wiper does and wipe it, the oil darkening the machined steel spiral to keep the steel from screaming through this last passage before winter shuts us down.
The hull heave creaks a rhyme with the chair’s as groaning she lays off each black and bitter trough past the Marathon radio buoy.
Shoreward through the glasses he sees the strangest thing. Nestled along the highlands is a mirror ship, or at least a mirrored cabin, twin broad oblong windows above running lights look out upon the water, those windows and the green light within them so much like the light the master sits in, so much like the windows he looks through, he could think them an echo, a doppelgänger.
The master’s cabin is fitted like a cruise ship, wide bed and wide windows, stereo CD and satellite color television (both flipped off) and the all-bands radio on which even now some old poof on CBC propounds an idiot’s theory that “all the music that’s ever been can now become a background against which the impulse to make listener-supplied connections is the new foreground.”
Briefly he thinks to climb the few steps to the bridge and have a look through the infrared night lenses but instead (as always) settles for the old pair of black grained binoculars with brass fittings and finest German optics, a gift from his dead wife years before following his first commission.
Comes heave and heave in rhyme again. Klaxon sounding shift change. With the red eye of the remote control he shifts stations from the artsy drivel on CBC , seeking signals, passing Petula, (since these old binoculars seek light in light, unlike the night lenses which seek warmth as much as light, this is no coincidence; it is possible to discover the current frequency on the digital FM tuner within the doppel-cabin of the Continental town car on the headlands), scanning past woggy reggae and passing beautiful music, finally settling in on Bach recordings broadcast from Toronto, an insomniac’s piano songs woven from the dead wife’s tune.
It’s a good idea this night to sing a song for insomniacs. Creaking in the passenger cabin adjoining the master’s (every ship’s a cruise ship now, eh? even a garbage scow's got a ruddy fuckin’ sunbather...) the twilight doctor cannot sleep. (This is no coincidence either, but rather the “facts” of the story– history if you will: the twilight doc’s booked passage on lake freighter bound for French Canada along the St Lawrence where there’s a symposium on death upon a royal mountain. He can’t know who’s waiting for him on the near shore as he passes. Neither can the captain have known how, like the fluoroscopes in old shoe stores from the time of his first commission, the night lenses might have seen through flesh to the singing bones on the stones of the cold shore.)