Coils

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Clickaderick. Clickaderick.

Starboard, two degrees.

Click. Click.

… And through the half-built drowse-dream, words unlaunch a thousand ships, burn my topless towers, aluminum. Sweet, and fleeing… Fled now. What—

“You’re a strange man, Donald BelPatri,” they came. “Things have happened to you.”

I did not turn my head. I feigned sleep as I sorted my senses. The world had slipped away again, as it sometimes does. Or had I? Still here, now, though, us, as I’d left us, but moments before. Here: The roof of my houseboat, Hash Clash, puttering along, maybe a kilometer an hour, through the mangrove channel that winds southwest along the flank of Long Key, about halfway down from Miami toward Key West. Warm, cool, light, dark. Flick, flick…

We were running on the new autopilot, a Radio Shack model, which matched information from the recently installed government navigational beacons along the waterway against its programmed-in map, seasoning the mixture with a little radar as a charm against collisions. The channel here was quite narrow, with places where two houseboats would be pinched in passing—which also meant it was sufficiently shady to make extended periods of summertime exposure comfortable. More than that. Pleasurable. And that was all I really cared about. But—

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