Under the Wave at Waimea

by Paul Theroux

  “The cure for an unhappy love affair, ‘Wait twenty years.’ That’s what you said.”

  “Sunny Jim” Olive sometimes called him, and had often said that his great surfer smile and his beautiful teeth and sunburned and satisfied face, even the scar on his cheek from the old dog bite, showed he didn’t worry—she meant he didn’t reflect, but that seemed like an accusation. He would have said himself that he wasn’t a worrier and not reflective but active. All he wished for were sunny days and big waves.

  “I’m not into sitting around, man,” he’d said. But he was sitting now, and in his enforced idleness, resting his back, allowing his sore foot to heal, he became reflective, remembering vivid images rather than stretches of time that involved his saying, “And then . . . and then . . . ,” which he hated.

  “I had two boards in South Africa. I asked the African guy who drove me to the beach to help me with the second one. He says to me, ‘I don’t carry.’”

  Olive said, “Sometimes a whole year or a whole trip or a whole relationship is summed up in an image, or an injury, or a something someone says. ‘I don’t carry.’”

  “One thing that stands for everything.”

  “But you told me about that too. Your African driver. It was Jeffreys Bay.”

  His fingers flew to his cheek as though he’d been slapped. He’d told her those stories before? It was bad enough to repeat yourself and be boring, but the look on Olive’s face was one of pity, as though she was hearing an old man blab about the past. Repetition was the trait of the bore, and it was lazy-minded, arising from indifference, or contempt: to the bore, all listeners were the same, and repeating a story meant that it didn’t matter whom he was telling it to, filling the air with his talk was a sort of compulsion, the bore being above all an impatient listener, whether a celebrity bore or a hero bore.

  But the other implication, that he hadn’t remembered telling the story before—that shamed him too, as much as his being a bore. He had been quietly proud of his memory. His good memory had made up for his poor education, and no one knew or cared that he’d dropped out of high school. Travel had taught him, and he could recall the peculiar curl in the contour of a barrel and the slope on the face of the wave that drove him to go left on the heavy wave at Teahupo‘o in Tahiti, and the soft lips of his first lover, Nalani, whom he’d kissed in the darkness of an old van after school, and the down, like golden leaf fuzz, in the declivity in the small of her back. He remembered names; his memory for details he’d been told was phenomenal. He often said, “I forget nothing” or “I am cursed with total recall,” when he felt his head was buzzing with trivia, his whole life and all its sounds and images crowding his brain. Some memories he would have been happy to delete, many things he wished to forget—scenes and accusations that visited him at night—but he was burdened with them.

  Or so he thought. Now it seemed that by some obscure puncture his memory was leaking, as Olive was reminding him, and that he had no access anymore to his memory. He associated the smiling droning bore with the celebrities he’d known. One characteristic of the celebrity—so many of them idolizing surfers—was that he or she was on familiar, even intimate terms with the whole world.

  That was the oddity of fame, not that everyone seemed to know you but that you were always confiding to strangers, speaking in general, everyone a potential ally or well-wisher, as though on a lifelong campaign, the guest of honor at every table, the brightest light at every party, always the talker among rapt admiring faces—it seemed that way. You were everyone’s friend, holding conversations with the multitudes, and so you had no real friends, but that didn’t matter, because the intensity of one intimate friend, or a loving wife, was an obstacle to talking to the world. The world was your friend.

  The surfer celebrity was the sort of hero who strode into a room, smiling, with confident eyes, and a hush fell, and the celebrity spoke to the room and did not linger; after the talk—no questions—the celebrity departed. Because of being known so well as a power figure, the celebrity was like a visiting friend—his history in everyone’s mind, no introduction needed, and he launched into his talk so self-assuredly that it could pass for the authority of preaching. No one answered back, there was no defiance or disrespect; the celebrity’s presence indicated agreement, since he was the superior elder brother, not to be challenged.

  Sharkey had spent his big-wave-riding years as one of these golden men, and though he’d become over time friendlier and more detached, he was sought out by other celebrities, surfers, or visiting musicians or writers—rockers and names.

  One of these was Hunter Thompson, himself a talker—a shouter when he was drunk—and seldom a listener, gravelly voiced and unpredictable, attracted to the recklessness and tribalism of surf culture, the available drugs and the drinking, the stew of hangers-on, the promise of sex—sex was like a handshake here, a way of getting acquainted. When there was no surf there was nothing to do except raise hell.

  Hunter had become Sharkey’s friend. Everyone in Hawaii knew Sharkey; everyone elsewhere knew Hunter, it seemed. In the fractured days after the accident, in what he thought of as his convalescence, Hunter Thompson was often in Sharkey’s thoughts—he mentioned him to Olive, he talked about the derangement of celebrity, the famous person, known to all, looking for listeners.

  “In actual fact,” Olive said again, with as much tact as she could, “you’ve told me that before.”

  The softened words still stung Sharkey, especially as Olive had listened to an hour or more of his talk, and he realized that he’d bored her, as Hunter had often bored him, telling the same drunken stories in a hotel room or over the phone from Woody Creek at three in the morning. But his embarrassment was brief; he quickly forgot what he had told her and how she had responded.

  “He liked me. We had plans.”

  She nodded and decided not to say, “So you’ve told me.”

  She was surprised by his solemn, reflective tone, as though he’d just remembered these incidents and was imparting them with reverence for the first time. She knew they were old settled memories that he’d told her before. Why he was repeating them she had no idea, but if she commented too often he’d be self-conscious; so she listened, as though hearing them for the first time, because he spoke in tones of discovery and wonderment.

  Sometimes her patients, stunned by a drug or waking from surgery, behaved in this muddled way, and so she listened to Sharkey, trying not to seem clinical or detached, to his earnest recollections as he walked her backward through his memories, as though on a path they’d traveled together. He seemed to believe that everything he said was a stark revelation, while she squirmed, pitying him for his obvious repetition. None of it was new to her.

  At what point would he realize he’d told her all this before?

  “Earthquakes,” he said, and a smile flickered on his lips. He did not hear Olive’s shallow sigh. “Great occasions for meeting girls—I mean, hooking up. They run out of the building and cower in a street or in a doorway. I get next to the chicks, hugging them during the tremor. There’s no rush on earth like it—better than a wave. ’Quake foreplay, ’quake sex.”

  “San Francisco,” Olive said.

  “We were in the doorway”—he hadn’t heard her—“and the car alarms are going off and the windows breaking—glass shattering in the street—and we’re snatching at each other, insane, like it’s the end of the world. And that’s how the world will end, destruction and orgies.”

  “And you spent the night with her.”

  “Another time,” he said, gabbling now, his eyes fixed on his sore foot, which he was flexing, “I’m in a hotel in Bali—surf meet at Uluwatu—and there’s a fire alarm. Everyone is evacuated and standing in the dark in their bathrobes, seriously worried, except me. I put my arm around this gorgeous woman and reassure her, and she thanks me as I stroke her. There’s no fire. But the sudden event, maybe fear, has bonded us. I head back to her room with her and we get it on—panic
sex.”

  It gave him such pleasure to relate these ridiculous stories, as though for the first time, that she stopped saying she’d heard them before.

  “Getting married? Big mistake. ‘Why should I have to share you?’ ‘Why doesn’t anyone talk to me?’ Good thing we didn’t have any kids. Her family wanted them, so they could have them to themselves. Big pressure, because her family was involved. Women in Hawaii live close to their families, so they’re always making bad decisions, and the family sorts it out. Kids, bills, all the crises. They ended up hating me.”

  “You were young.”

  “And I was young.”

  Olive withdrew, she took refuge in her work, but on her return home Sharkey was glad to see her so that he could lead her back into his past, all of it known to her now.

  “We used to paddle into the big waves. Then they towed us. These days the young guys paddle into bigger and bigger waves. It’s the boards. Smaller, lighter. And the guys are more intense.”

  He had wooed her with his stories once, and now she was near to being repelled, except that she was so sorry for him in his plodding in circles.

  “My mother wanted me to stop surfing. She saw me lose a contest—I was just a kid—and she mocked me. But when I became successful she boasted about me to her friends. She was weak and hypocritical. Yet I was so sad when she died.”

  Olive was surprised by his solemnity—it seemed stagy and forced. But he was frowning, as though he’d just remembered these things and was speaking about them with reverence for the first time. Why he was repeating them now she had no idea, but if she mentioned that, he’d be self-conscious.

  When he’d wooed her with stories, he’d held her attention, because all of them were fresh, and her eyes had brightened as he spoke. He was a good talker, and it surprised her that, storyteller that he was, he had never written a line—he was stumped with a pen, he’d doodle a little, then crumple the paper. But it didn’t matter. He had stories.

  Testing him, because she’d suffered all day with the memory, she said, “You killed a man a few weeks ago. You don’t even know his name.”

  He shook his head, as though correcting her. “Ran into a drunk homeless guy.”

  * * *

  She roused him early the next morning, before he could protest. She said, “You’re coming with me, don’t eat,” and he sat stunned and sleepy in the car.

  “‘Nobody heard him, the dead man,’” she said on the road.

  “Which one?” Sharkey said.

  “It’s a poem. We learned it at school.”

  “Poem,” he said, expelling the word in a flat breath, as though it were meaningless.

  “The dead man moans,

  I was much too far out all my life

  And not waving but drowning.”

  “Dead men don’t moan,” Sharkey said. “Dead men are gone.”

  Olive looked sideways at him and, seeing that they were near the emergency entrance of the hospital, decided not to reply. Sharkey allowed himself to be checked in, Olive doing the talking. He was booked for an MRI and assigned a cubicle. Olive left him in the care of a nurse, and glancing back, she saw him being handed a flimsy hospital gown and cloth slippers. When she stopped in after lunch he was cross-legged on the bed; and the next time she looked in he was being wheeled back to his cubicle, a big man in baby clothes but still smiling.

  After the long day he crept to the sofa on the lanai and, like a cat folding itself, curled into a ball of repose. He resumed staring at the setting sun, in the posture of the previous day.

  He began to speak.

  Olive said, “Park it,” and then quickly, “I think you’ve told me that before.”

  Waiting for the results, because Olive asked for the specialist at Queen’s to read the scans, Sharkey sat, sometimes curled and catlike, sometimes in his yoga posture.

  “The doctor cleared you,” Olive said in a disbelieving whisper two days later.

  “What doctor?”

  Instead of answering that, she said, “I’m worried about you.”

  “Olive—the fretter.”

  His lazy boast, always, was that he never fussed, and he was contemptuous of anyone who claimed to care, as though they were revealing a weakness.

  “The best doctor at Queen’s read your MRI.”

  “What doctor? What MRI?”

  “‘He’s good to go,’ he said. You’re fine.”

  Sharkey smiled as though at a child too small to understand and needing to be humored. He said, “Of course I’m fine. Listen, there was no hospital, okay? I’ve been surfing awesome waves.”

  Was it the conspicuous humiliation of the hospital gown, having to submit to the tunnel of the machine, or the long, almost all-day delay in Emergency? But he remembered nothing of it.

  She said, “Except for the hospital and the tests, you haven’t left the house.”

  He began to laugh, but softly, and then he stopped and nodded, as though he’d become aware that he was mocking her for inventing the trip to the hospital and the scan.

  He glanced at Olive in pity for not understanding him, as though she were someone adrift in a sea of uncertainty and seeming to believe she was safe, just bobbing in circles and liking the rise and fall of the swell and never realizing she was lost. All this time, his soft, accommodating smile.

  The sun was setting again into the seam of the horizon, the last of the light flashing on his face. He was remembering the barrel of a wave. Olive was watching him. When he turned to her, she was horrified by the sight of him: his wide-open eyes were unlit, dull, and disappointed, his face waxen, no light behind it. She remembered the man on the road, his martyr’s death mask of surrender. Then Sharkey resumed talking in the darkness, another story she’d heard before.

  10

  Hapai

  While Olive worked every day at the hospital, Sharkey sat as though immobilized, yet smiling his sleepy smile—repeating his stories and imagining that his days were full of sunlight and big waves. She could not convince him that his life was emptying, narrowing, closing in on him—closing in on her too. He was unworried, yet she felt the onset of uncertainty that extended to her body as a physical imbalance, at times producing dizziness, a feeling at moments of vertigo. Was it loneliness that provoked the sensation that she was toppling forward?

  Often in this mood she was weakened by a wave of nausea passing through her. She wanted to tell him, “I am not feeling well. Therefore I’m alive.” In the house with him she became mournful—lonely, a feeling she seldom had when she was alone—and at times she went outside or back to the hospital to cure herself of loneliness among her friends.

  “You stay okay?” Luana, the shift nurse, asked.

  “A little pukey.”

  Luana hugged her, big warm damp arms and hair thick with coconut oil. “You take something, sister. It’s a shame.”

  “It’s a sign of life,” Olive said, thinking of Sharkey’s delusion of health in his weird confinement of repetition.

  But Luana’s question had startled her—she had not thought she’d looked so obvious in her discomfort. Olive’s nausea was unusual. She had arrived early so that she could meditate awhile before she signed in. But life goes on, she thought, emptying her mind, and was heartened: if she was sick, she’d get well.

  She sat in a lotus posture under an awning on the roof, with a view of the sea, and she inhaled the day, using her breathing exercises to clear her head and settle her stomach. It seemed to work; a sensation of weightlessness lifted her. But when she lay flat on her back in a corpse pose a new thought intruded: there was nothing like this variation in Sharkey’s day-to-day—no friend, no yoga, no questions. He sat smiling. Was he holding his breath? His past crowded his present, and the rest was a void. She knew that much of what he’d claimed he’d done was boasting or invention, but that was how heroes lived, inhabiting their own myth with such conviction that other people were persuaded. Yet most people’s lives, no matter how humble, were marke
d by incident, the rise and fall of hope, the swelling of self-belief, the looking for more, and always the waking to a new day.

  Olive saw that Sharkey’s repetitive life, more serious than a delusion, was like a terminal illness.

  Yet the man was functional. He ate, he slept, he limped in his garden, feeding his geese and chickens, plucking blossoms, squinting at the sun. Perhaps this was how prisoners or monks lived their lives, shuffling in narrow spaces, pausing often, adjusting themselves to their confinement, like animals in zoo enclosures, learning how to repeat their small steps: pacing, drowsing, blinking, head-bobbing, vegetating—functionless behavior, with the shallow breathing and slowed heartbeat of someone buried alive.

  And if you interrupted them in their pacing, asked a question, you got the same answer, and perhaps a monologue—something circular, the thought that had been stewing in their mind.

  Or was she imagining his condition, exaggerating his passivity and drowsy routines? He was an energetic surfer, but he was a panting animal too. A lion pounds after its prey across the savannah and seizes it by the haunches to devour, roaring and tearing with its teeth, and gorges itself, and then lolls and naps, yawning under a tree, days of this, long periods of grunting repose. The monk seal on a wave, the water dog of the Hawaiian coasts, tossed in surf, diving for food, rolling in the swells nipping at fish, until at last exhausted, noses to shore and bumps up the hot sand above the tidemark and sleeps. He was that lion, he was that seal.

  Tending to his chickens, he seemed himself: gathering eggs, feeding his geese and ducks, picking lilikoi and avocados, making his meals. Something might not be working inside him, a nerve circuit might have died, yet he was alive. But the stories, the smile, the head-bobbing—her worry was their sameness, and her anxiety wearied her.

  He took no notice of her. He was asleep when she set off for work; he was tired on her return, so she saw only the limp man, doddering in his fatigue, and was often grateful, because she was tired too and hadn’t the strength to rouse him, even less to listen to another story she already knew.