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CHAPTER 3
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Crowmarty Sousa had never left the archipelago of the Azores, not once, not even for Lisbon. He said the air turned thin the moment you lost sight of the Atlantic, and thinner still anywhere the ocean wasn’t loud enough to interrupt your thoughts. His was a lineage of volcanic soil and slow-cooked stews, of fishermen who had no interest in the mainland and farmers who could tell you the day’s humidity by the color of their goats’ tongues. He was born in the same yellow house his grandfather had built with surplus NATO cement; the kind that glowed faintly at night if you stared long enough and believed too much.
At thirty-five he was, by official record and unanimous consent, the Chief Postmaster of the Autonomous Region of the Azores -- a title with more weight than it seemed. Crowmarty didn’t just deliver mail. He curated it. Letters came and went under his supervision the way relics moved through the Vatican: deliberately, mysteriously, occasionally not at all. He kept a collection of stamps in his office that could only be viewed in moonlight. He insisted that certain telegrams should only be opened at sea. He spoke four languages fluently, and five others badly, though no one on the island could ever quite pin down which was which. Children whispered that he had an extra finger he kept folded back during business hours.
No one could quite recall when he’d been appointed. He had a bureaucrat’s calm but none of the pedigree. Some assumed he’d simply always been there; a boy who had shadowed the mail boat captain, then manned the sorting rooms, and by degrees drifted into power like a storm taking shape over the water. Others suspected his role had less to do with logistics than with oversight -- that Sousa was watching who sent what to whom, and how often. He lived alone in a narrow house off the Rua do Contador, above a shuttered photography studio. A faded transceiver sat on the windowsill, always on, though it rarely made a sound. He wrote letters by hand, always in black ink, and folded them with such precision it was said a Sousa crease could cut off a fingertip clean.
He kept a careful ledger of undeliverables. Not just mail returned, but messages never sent -- letters found unmailed in dead men's drawers, postcards in bottles, forgotten dictaphone reels, pieces of burnt telegrams salvaged from attics. In some cases, he filed these under the recipients’ names anyway, in case they might still arrive. He smoked only when it rained. He distrusted tourism but welcomed weather balloons. He once grounded a cargo plane on a technicality that couldn’t be found in any published regulation. And every few weeks, in the dead hours between late post and early fog, Sousa walked to the cliffs near Nordeste and watched the horizon, scanning for lights that didn’t belong to ships. He said he was watching for patterns, but never said whose.
Some said his oddness began early. The result of too much solitude, too many books in the wrong languages, or an inheritance of silence passed down like a family heirloom. But others, particularly the older women who remembered when his ears stuck out from beneath a knit cap, believed it had to do with the plane.
On the afternoon of February 8th, 1989, when Independent Air Flight 1851 disintegrated into the side of Pico Alto, Crowmarty was just a child and home with a head cold. From the upstairs window of that yellow house, through fog and television static, he watched a shape fall wrong from the sky. It made no sound that reached the valley -- only a shiver in the panes, and a moment later, the electricity blinked out.
He didn’t speak for two days.
He never talked much about it. When asked, he would say only that the air changed that day. That it lost something it had never quite gotten back. He visited the memorial once a year, never on the anniversary, always alone, always early. People assumed he knew someone on the flight. He didn’t. Or if he did, it wasn’t the sort of knowing that could be explained aloud. It wasn’t just the crash, some would insist, but what came after. The noise and hush, the men in plain clothes who stayed too long, the cables that were laid and never removed. Things passed through the post that month that couldn’t be traced or translated. And Crowmarty, still a boy, began to take notes. He’s kept at it since. The watching. The categorizing. The belief, quiet but absolute, that messages have gravity -- and some messages, even undelivered, keep trying to land.
It was in the middle of a Tuesday sorting that the package arrived. No customs slip. No sender’s signature. Just a heavy envelope, cream-colored and coarse, the kind that made paper cuts feel ceremonial. The return address was a single word, handwritten in red ink that had bled slightly in the humidity: WESTINGHOUSE.
Sousa didn’t blink. He logged it into the private ledger he kept behind a false panel in the postmaster’s desk, next to a dried sea urchin and a spool of telegraph wire no longer manufactured. The delivery instructions were precise. The envelope was to be brought to the Regional Archives -- Arquivo Regional de Ponta Delgada -- at 14:42 on the 17th of the month, no sooner, no later. It was to be surrendered only to the named recipient, whose name was listed, inexplicably, as just Doyle, A.
He ran his thumb over the envelope again.
Westinghouse. Of course he’d heard the name. Who hadn’t? Stories filtered in like fog from the mainland -- about numbers stations that repeated nothing but a single name, about synchronistic clocks, about a man in Belgium who’d opened a radio and found a tooth wrapped in tinfoil stamped with a “W.H.” Even out here, on São Miguel, where life moved slower and news arrived by ferry, the legend had reached him.
Crowmarty didn’t believe a word of it.
He chalked it all up to the usual mainland nonsense: campus cults, disaffected grad students, mythologies constructed to hide more boring truths.
Someone always wanted to feel chosen. That was the engine behind it, in his opinion. This envelope? Just another artifact in someone’s theater of mystery. A prank, maybe. Or a test. Still, he followed the instructions. Not out of belief, but out of a quiet habit he’d developed since childhood -- an urge to respect the shape of a ritual, even if you doubted its power.
On the 17th, Sousa arrived at the Arquivo Regional forty minutes early. It wasn’t his usual style. He preferred punctuality over anticipation, and he generally regarded early arrival as a symptom of desperation or misplaced Protestant work ethic. But something about the envelope, the red ink, the ritual of the thing, had gotten under his skin.
The woman at the desk wore a sweater the color of unwashed teeth and had the complexion of someone who spent her days buried beneath fluorescent lighting and paper dust. She glanced up at him, then at the institutional wall clock behind her, which ticked like it was mimicking a bomb.
“I have something for a Doyle, A.,” Crowmarty said, placing the envelope flat against the counter, as if it might be radioactive.
The woman didn’t reach for it. Instead, she squinted at him like a faulty lens trying to focus. She read the attached instructions: “Expected at fourteen-forty-two,” she said, each syllable clipped and oddly emphasized, like a broadcast signal from another era.
Crowmarty checked his watch. “Yes. I know. I’m early.”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly, “so is the storm,” she said without elaboration.
The lights above them flickered once, twice, then held steady. Somewhere in the building, a printer whirred to life and immediately jammed. Crowmarty felt the envelope pulsing slightly under his palm. Or maybe it was just his own pulse, refracted. And then, almost exactly on time -- not early, not late -- the front door let out a mechanical sigh, and in walked a man of about twenty-seven, hunched in the shoulders the way archivists and sinners tend to be. He wore an expression that hovered somewhere between suspicion and sleep deprivation, and his eyes -- flickering with the effort of constant decoding -- moved straight to the desk.
The woman spoke first. “We’ve been expecting someone,” she said in a voice touched with something like amusement, or warning.
Asher stepped forward, brushing off the faint embarrassment of arriving into what felt less like a government building and more like a waiting room for fate. “I’m Asher,” he offered, tone halfway between confident and questioned, "... Asher Doyle?"
Every head in the room turned toward him, except for one: Crowmarty’s. He was already standing at the desk, elbow perched jauntily, envelope in hand like some antiquated courier in a Ministry of Interruption. He turned now, eyes wide with the theatricality of someone who’d just seen a miracle, or worse -- someone he owed lunch to.
“Well I’ll be dipped,” Crowmarty muttered, and held up the envelope. “I'm Crowmarty Sousa, head of the post here in the Azores. Came bearing this. Said to be delivered at exactly 14:42, to one Doyle, A. Though I note with some concern that it says ‘Doyle, A.’ Which could just as easily be... a typo. Or a code. Possibly an accusation. In any event, I doubt I need to see your identification.”
The envelope -- thick, official, and closed with a red seal that looked waxy but resisted all known thermodynamic laws -- seemed to hum in the air between them. Its face bore no stamps or barcode, only the return address, a single word:
WESTINGHOUSE
Everyone in the room had gone completely still.
“I suppose I’m meant to open it?” Asher asked, already taking it, as if he’d just been passed a Eucharist laced with uranium. No one answered. They simply watched. A gallery of the underpaid and overworked, bearing witness.
He cracked the seal -- it broke with a sound like a paper cut sighing -- and pulled out a single document, folded precisely three times, as if origami were the last defense against chaos.
The top page read:
CONFIDENTIAL. NOT TO BE REPRODUCED.
Below that:
Pan American Airways, Clipper NC18603
Crash Date: Monday, 22 February 1943
Approach Vector: Lajes Field, Azores
Incident involved mechanical failure mid-descent. Partial wreckage located on the western coast of Graciosa Island. No official recovery. Unaccounted cargo noted: “1x sealed diplomatic pouch, origin: unknown.” Recovery classified. Investigation concluded: inconclusive. See Appendix Q for revised timeline (suppressed).
Asher sighed.
Crowmarty peered over his shoulder like a nosy uncle trying not to look like one. “I take it this isn’t related to the library’s overdue fine system.”
“Do you know what this is?” Asher asked, not really expecting him to.
“I mean, I know what it says,” Crowmarty replied, scratching his neck. “A ghost plane full of secrets belly-flopped into the Atlantic during the war and someone’s been quietly panicking about it ever since. Which I suppose explains the envelope.”
Asher turned the document over. On the back was a small note, handwritten in faint graphite:
“The wreckage was never recovered.”
Crowmarty tapped the note like he was checking a pulse. “Funny thing about that.”
Asher glanced sideways, “yah?”
“I might know where she is,” he said, casual as a cigarette after lunch, “the wreckage, I mean.”
“You might?”
“Well, I know where she washed up. Sort of. An islander with a voice like crushed ice flagged me down once, mid-ferry, just to hand me a blurry photo and a smoked mackerel. Claimed the plane’s bones showed up on the beach during a solstice a while back.”
Asher squinted, “and you believed him?”
“I said he gave me a mackerel. I didn’t say anything about belief.”
A silence fell, during which Asher revised several internal settings, including but not limited to:
'acceptable sources of information' &
'standard reactions to wartime aviation wreckage casually surfacing on a beach.'
“So, you’re just -- offering to take me there?” Asher asked, suspiciously.
Crowmarty shrugged like he was relinquishing custody of a mildly cursed umbrella, “you seem like someone in need of context.”
Asher glanced down at the document again. It was still there: wartime font, official-looking seals, a clipped report dated Monday 22 February 1943. A Pan Am Clipper flying boat, en route to Lisbon, had veered off approach and plunged into the sea near the Azores. No survivors. Wreckage allegedly missing. Until now.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Asher said, resigned to his fate. This postman seemed friendly enough, and Asher's intuition told him he had nothing to fear.
“Music to my ears,” Crowmarty clapped once. A wall calendar fell off its hook in protest. “We’ll need boots, plausible deniability, and maybe a thermos. I have a boat with all three by the docks that can get us there.”
They emerged into the sticky daylight like minor characters in someone else’s flashback. The road was gravel, the car was borrowed, and the horizon sulked under a sky that couldn’t decide on a genre. “Just to be clear,” Asher said as they bounced past a church shaped like an apology, “you’re telling me parts of the aircraft washed up? Recently?”
“Recently? Oh, well -- maybe bits and pieces
recently. The wreckage has actually been there for years.”
“And nobody’s retrieved it?”
Crowmarty gave him a look usually reserved for tourists who ask if sardines have feelings. “It’s the Azores, mate. Sometimes things arrive just to leave again, only slower.”
“That’s either very poetic or very dismissive," said Asher.
Crowmarty shrugged. “Isn’t it usually both out here? The Azores are like a waiting room the Earth forgot to finish decorating. Everything’s passing through -- storms, birds, fishermen, signals bouncing off the ionosphere. Even the tectonic plates can’t decide where they belong.”
Asher opened his mouth to respond, but Crowmarty wasn’t done.
“And Westinghouse, well -- if she exists, she’d feel right at home in a place like this. Always arriving. Always leaving. Stuck in the echo between transmission and reception.”
"Wait --" Asher surprised now, "you know about Westinghouse?”
Crowmarty gave a noncommittal snort, “’course I do. Spend enough time in liminal places, you pick up the local myths. Saints, sea monsters, rogue signals, return addresses. Westinghouse’s just another one of those -- like St. Elmo’s fire with a VPN.”
“You never mentioned it.”
“You never asked,” Crowmarty said, “besides, talking about Westinghouse out loud is like trying to explain jazz to a vending machine. You either hear the melody, or you just want your crisps.”
Asher narrowed his eyes: “You don’t believe in it.”
“I believe people need it,” Crowmarty said. “That’s not nothing. Westinghouse is a scaffolding for all the things they can’t quite file under coincidence. Your plane crashes. Your dead letters. Your ex-lovers who show up in dreams wearing the wrong face but saying all the right things. Humans are pattern machines. We’re wired to see shapes in clouds and codes in static. Westinghouse’s just what happens when enough people squint the same way for long enough. Call it a ghost. Call it a myth. Call it a memetic parasite that feeds on paranoia and shortwave radio.”
“And you?” Asher asked, “what do you call it?”
Crowmarty smiled, but there was no joy in it -- just a sort of weary elegance -- “I call it a story. A very old, very sticky one. You don’t have to believe it for it to shape what happens next.”
The boat was small enough to question its own seaworthiness and loud enough to drown out any such doubts with engine noise alone. Asher clung to the side; a man negotiating with Poseidon. Crowmarty, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease, legs crossed, sandwich in hand, eating with the serene confidence of someone who could name every kind of barnacle in Latin and had once done so during a customs inspection.
“Bit green around the gills there, professor,” Crowmarty called over the din.
“I’m fine,” Asher said, then dry-heaved with the dramatic timing of a soap opera actor. “Perfectly academic.”
They bounced over a particularly malicious wave. Asher nearly ascended.
Crowmarty offered him a thermos, “ginger and questionable wisdom. You’ll hate it.”
Asher hesitated for a moment, something about taking drinks from almost-strangers echoing in his mind, but thought better of Crowmarty and so sipped and&then gagged, “you were right.”
“You’ll live,” said Crowmarty with a chuckle.
They cruised past a volcanic outcrop shaped uncannily like Richard Nixon’s profile. Gulls wheeled overhead in Morse code approximations of laughter. Eventually, Asher managed to wedge himself into a tolerable balance between nausea and existential despair. “So this whole thing,” he waved vaguely at the horizon, “-- Westinghouse. You don’t buy it?”
Crowmarty shrugged, “buy her? No. I lease her short-term, under an alias, with a fake mustache. You know the type.”
“You’re gendering a codebase now?”
“Call it a linguistic reflex,” Crowmarty said, tearing off a piece of sandwich like it owed him money, “she’s got mythic shape. There’s a rhythm to it. You hear ‘Westinghouse’ and your brain fills in the silhouette. Shadow in a radio dial. Prom queen of the global subconscious.”
“I don’t think of it as a she,” Asher said.
“Not yet, maybe. Give it time.”
Asher rolled his eyes and stared out to sea, which, unfortunately, stared right back. “You’ve heard the stories though?” he asked after a beat.
“I’ve heard versions,” Crowmarty said, “some say Westinghouse is a rogue agent from the early days of ARPANET. Some say it's a marketing strategy that got too good at disguising itself. I once met a bloke in Velas who claimed Westinghouse was a misfiring German grammar AI that became sentient after trying to translate Hegel.”
“And what do you think?”
Crowmarty chewed, then dabbed at his lip with a suspiciously antique-looking napkin. “I think whatever Westinghouse is, she leaves a hell of a paper trail for something supposedly secret.”
Asher gave him a look, “you said she again.”
Crowmarty grinned, “I know.”
“Just so we’re clear,” Asher said, “you don’t believe in Westinghouse, but you’re taking me to see the wreckage they may or may not have sent me a file about?”
Crowmarty beamed like he’d just sold a haunted toaster on Craigslist. “Skepticism and tourism aren’t mutually exclusive.” They rode in silence for a few minutes. With some flourish, Crowmarty flipped a switch on the dash and the radio crackled to life, its reception patchy and salt-laced. After a few seconds of fizz and static, a voice emerged -- clipped, British, and weirdly soothing, like a lighthouse speaking in its sleep.
“Hebrides. South or southwest, four or five. Occasionally six later. Moderate or rough. Rain later. Good, occasionally poor.”
Asher listened, unsure whether he was hearing a weather report or a eulogy.
“Dogger. Fisher. German Bight.”
The cadence was unmistakably that of a system describing the end of the world in code. Crowmarty adjusted the volume and settled back into his seat with the air of someone who’d done this many times before. Maybe too many.
Asher closed his eyes, letting the voice seep in: the disjointed poetry of invisible coastlines and winds behaving badly, an archipelago of conditions no map ever captured. There was something deeply unconvincing about how calm it all sounded -- like a government trying to reassure its citizens that the ocean still respected borders. And yet, it held him. Not unlike Crowmarty himself, whose dry cynicism masked a kind of attentive devotion: to this place, to the work, to the quiet theater of the absurd they were adrift in.
“Fair Isle. Rain later. Good, becoming poor.”
Maybe Crowmarty had it right. Maybe it was better to regard Westinghouse -- and everything orbiting it -- with the same stance one took toward the shipping forecast: not as truth, but as a pattern worth noticing. Something impersonal, deeply human, and subject to revision. A murmured litany of zones and pressures and probabilities, always arriving just ahead of the weather, and just behind what actually happened. It didn’t matter if you believed in the forecast, only that you listened to it. You didn’t need it to be right -- just consistent enough to feel like someone, somewhere, was paying attention. Maybe that was what Westinghouse really offered, at the bottom of all the myth and menace: not a revelation, but a rhythm. Not certainty, but a suggestion that the signals meant something, even if the message never quite came through. Asher thought about tarot readings, the I Ching's hexagrams, the cold flare of a knowing he couldn’t name. Were those any less dubious than a file from a maybe-organization pointing him to wreckage off a volcanic island? Maybe the real trick wasn’t to believe or disbelieve, but to learn how to live with reception. To stand in the static and try to pick out the shape of the storm.
He looked at Crowmarty -- humming now, faintly, in time with the forecast -- and felt something loosen in his chest. There were worse guides to have. Worse states of mind to inherit. Worse gods to chase.
An island ahead began to resolve into color: green cliffside, red fishing nets, whitewashed houses like leftover punctuation. Asher watched the water shift, the swell growing shallower, tugging at the underside of the boat like a child dragging a parent by the hand. There was something uncomfortably tender about arriving this way -- not by air, not through some sterile port of entry, but on a small boat nudged forward by weather and trust. Like the island had to allow you in. Like it had to mean it. He thought again about patterns -- the kind you read into weather, or voices, or wreckage. The kind Westinghouse left behind like contrails, visible only after the fact. Maybe Crowmarty’s skepticism wasn’t the rejection of meaning, but its rewilding -- letting it exist without domestication, without control.
The radio crackled as the shipping forecast cycled back to the beginning. Crowmarty reached forward and killed it with a practiced flick.
The engine coughed. Land approached. Asher braced.
The boat scraped against the dock with the weary thud of something that had done this many times before. Crowmarty tied it off one-handed, the way someone lights a cigarette while steering -- unconsciously competent, vaguely theatrical. They stepped onto land that didn’t feel entirely solid. Not unstable, just -- responsive. The boards of the dock flexed, the earth beneath the grass felt springy, and the wind moved in a way that suggested it was listening in.
“This way,” Crowmarty said, nodding toward a barely discernible path winding up a low rise, “the cove’s on the other side. Tide’s right for it.”
Asher followed, backpack slung loosely over one shoulder, shoes already collecting salt. They walked for a minute or two in silence, the only sound the distant call of seabirds and the occasional clink of metal from Crowmarty’s bag.
“You ever been out here before?” Crowmarty asked, not looking back.
“No,” Asher said, “not really supposed to be here now.”
Crowmarty chuckled, “best way to arrive.”
They crested the rise. The cove lay just below, ringed by rocks like molars, tide pulled back to expose wet sand and kelp. Something glinted near the far end -- not natural, not recent. Crowmarty didn’t point. He didn’t have to.
They kept walking. “PhD,” Asher said suddenly, as if the word had been pressing on his chest. “Ethnography. Cultural narrative structures in post-secular American fringe groups.”
Crowmarty gave a small whistle, “that’s a hell of a mouthful.”
“It’s supposed to be,” Asher said, “gives the illusion of authority. I wrote a whole chapter on ley lines once and got praised for my
‘skeptical sensitivity’ -- whatever the fuck that means.”
Crowmarty nodded like he knew, “so you’re studying these people.”
“I was,” Asher said, “now I think they’re studying me.”
Crowmarty raised an eyebrow.
“I got... invited in,” Asher continued, “sort of. There was a process. Some spiked drink. Then I fell through a telephone portal. Not a metaphor. A literal telephone. Pay phone, actually.”
Crowmarty just kept walking, “happens sometimes."
“I met an old hippie woman who knew everything about me -- says her name is Just Nicole. And a man who is, as far as I can tell, also a duck. Name’s Scout.”
Crowmarty gave him a sideways glance, “you sure you’re not writing a novel?”
“I’m not sure of anything, anymore.” Asher said. And he meant it.
They turned a corner in the path, and the brush fell away like a curtain. The cove opened beneath them -- all white sky and mirror-flat water, too still, too staged. Palm trees frozen in the offshore wind. The quiet had a peculiar weight to it, as if sound had been suspended in resin. Even the gulls seemed fake, their calls oddly modulated -- like an imitation of gulls played from a distant speaker, and then Asher saw it. The wreck.
He didn’t move. Couldn’t. A pressure built in his ears, behind his eyes -- memory overlaid on the present like an old transparency. There it was. The plane: the same hulking shape from the W. House initiation film, down to the angles, the posture, the light. Real now. Here. The ruined body of a Pan Am Clipper lay half-submerged in the sand, bleached to bone. Windows fogged. Fuselage scabbed with rust and gull droppings. Letters trailing along the hull in fractured blue: P_A_ _ M_RI_A_
“It’s the plane,” Asher said, barely a whisper, “from the film.”
Crowmarty didn’t answer. He stood beside him, hands on his hips, looking at the wreck like it was a bad omen he’d seen too many times.
The gulls called again and the sky pressed in closer.