Junk Mail

by Lucy Bucknell

He set sail on the thirteenth of February with his unpublished novels and short stories; also diaries, letters, poems, and a seven act play. His intention was to throw it all overboard, without ceremony, and put his writing career out of its misery. He'd never write another word. He had cleared out every cupboard and desk drawer, gone through the attic, the basement, looked under the beds in the guest room; there wasn't another page to be found, or none that belonged to him. There were books of course, hundreds of books. They'd both always been big readers. (She might still have been for all he knew. She'd gotten sick of his writing long before he had and vanished without a trace.) So there were books that they'd bought, books that were given to them, books that came down in people's wills. There were books and books, but none with his name on the cover, nor would there ever be; he'd finally got this straight in his head.

The problem was he was terrible. He stank. Couldn't write a check without choking. For thirty-odd years he'd been contriving, tale after tale, character after character, designing with precision their settings, their worlds, their remarkably complex relationships, and for thirty-odd years he'd been a hack. Less than a hack. He couldn't get over the hurdle to hack. Editors ran when they saw him. His work was narrow, awkward, unimaginative. The characters were flat and conventional, the trouble they got into banal beyond belief. It was a wonder he could type the stuff out it was so tiresome. He was just no good, no good at all.

And so, on this particular Tuesday, he set out in a rented sailboat, planning to destroy all the evidence, clear his name of the unspeakable failure. On his return to dry land, he'd be free. He'd never chance upon a poorly crafted paragraph again. His house would be clean, his soul would be clean. He might become an attorney.

Five miles out he hit bad weather. He wasn't much of a sailor really; it was the romance of it that made him choose a sailboat over a Boston whaler, that made him go to sea in the first place when he might simply have thrown the stuff in the fireplace and been done with it. He liked the idea of dumping the manuscripts overboard, trailing the pages like breadcrumbs in the wake of a wooden-hulled boat moving eastward. You see now what was wrong with his writing; he had these cloying notions.

So he hit bad weather—bad weather hit him would be more accurate— and he had no idea what to do. He couldn't even operate the radio to call for help. "Mayday, mayday," he found himself yelling into a piece of equipment that might have been radar. In any case, nobody responded. The boom was whipping back and forth, every line pulled loose, sails flapping. He had mainsail, jib, and whatever the other one's called all flying. The sky was black, the waves were mountainous, the wind was full of salt water. Pretty soon the boat went over. Something knocked him on the head and he was dragged under by a loose line coiled around his ankle. It looked grim. After a prolonged moment of terror, he lost consciousness.

Whether instinct or a fortuitous current bore him up again, I don't know, but soon enough, he bobbed to the surface. The sky was already clearing, the sea becoming docile; but when he opened his eyes, there was no boat; or at least, no visible boat. An overturned boat, he realized, might be quite close by and simply out of sight beyond the swell. He struggled to raise himself up but it was hopeless. More terror. Sharks, drowning, gradual dehydration, these thoughts were running through his mind when a spar floated into view. We have heard enough about survivors adrift on a spar and neither he nor I have a clear idea what a spar is, so simply say that he grasped it and was carried by more fortuitous currents to an island.

On the island there were palm trees and fresh streams, an abundance of fruit. No doubt after a week or two, he learned to collect shellfish from the rocks, possibly even devised a net out of his torn clothing, though the clothing would have to do for a shelter as well, unless he learned how to use palm fronds. But these things are all beside the point. What happened on the island was this. He walked all the way to the right, then all the way to the left. He walked back and forth sideways and lengthwise. He zigzagged and spiraled. He called out at the top of his lungs. He wrote the word "help" in the sand with large stones. Wrote it again down the beach. (He wouldn't have written more even if he'd had pen and paper. He hadn't forgotten what he was doing here.) He climbed a palm tree and tied his shirt at the top like a flag then was cold all night and had to climb up again next day to retrieve it. He dug out ponds in a stream for bathing, learned to juggle papayas, recited everything he'd memorized in childhood including his times tables.

And of course he watched the horizon. All the time, consciously and unconsciously, squinting out through the bright air. He never saw anything but water. And sky. A lot of sky, which one afternoon filled with clouds, and then wind, and then rain: a storm as sudden and as fierce as the one that had overturned his boat. The palm trees bent almost double and his "help" signs were all washed away. Night came. The wind dropped, the waves settled. At some point he drifted off to sleep.

He woke with the sun on his back, rose, dusted off the sand, and went down to the shore to check the damage. There was none of course. The only thing to damage was the shore itself, and how could you judge that? The trees might have been uprooted but they hadn't been. Everything looked exactly as before except for the signs, which he immediately went about restoring. This is when he noticed the pages, strewn about on the beach like shells. Pages filled chockablock with writing; longhand, type, type with longhand over the top. He picked one up and read. It was remarkable, quite beautiful, poetic even: a description of a duchess arriving at a ball. Another page featured a farmer forced to give up his land. Here was something about a woman in tears; a boy in the woods with his dog. None of the pages matched each other, but they all had a force nonetheless. He ran up and down collecting them, thinking to sort through and possibly assemble a whole story. And then it struck him (as it probably has you a long time ago), they were his pages, pieces of his own work.

His first instinct was to fling the stuff down again, but he couldn't. It was interesting. It was stirring. It was good. He looked out over the water to the horizon. As far as he could see, the surface was littered with paper. An ice floe or an armada, sails shining in the sun.

Why didn't it sink? Why didn't it tear? Where had it been all this time? Nitpickers will find fault with the story, but in fact this is how it goes.

It took nearly a week for everything to come in. It dried quickly in the sun and he was able to collect and collate unmolested by wind. The only thing missing was page 110 of The Gazebo. He set about making bark covers. In another two weeks, all the novels were bound, the short stories as well. The diaries and letters he crated in a hollowed tree trunk thinking it presumptuous to bind them himself. It should perhaps be done posthumously. The poems he wrapped in cloth (a pants leg), and the play, he decided to produce. There were over thirty-five characters, but he knew all the roles cold. At intermission he drank coconut milk. The thing came off without a hitch. He stayed up all night writing rave reviews in the sand, and in the morning there was a boat on the horizon.

It tacked slowly back and forth, growing larger, brighter. By eleven o'clock he was saved. The first thing he asked for when they (Italian Merchant Marine, if there is such a thing) pulled him on board, him and his vast collection of books, was a pen. He had an idea for a novel. He wanted to get started right away.

Lucy Bucknell teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.