by Paul Theroux
Her weakness was like a reproach—her need to sit down to look at her laptop (she’d always done it standing), or bracing herself to clutch her tablet to look at a patient’s history, or to read a temperature or a heart rate or bloodwork. She’d climb a flight of stairs and feel lightheaded and need to steady herself on the handrail—and then the griping in her gut and the intimation that she was about to heave, her mouth filling with saliva.
Just as quickly it would pass and she’d regain the confidence that it was nothing, or something she’d eaten, a chunk of bad ahi, or—powerfully—that it was a visceral reaction to her worrying about Sharkey; how nothing had been the same since the accident. But she was cautioned too, and thought, I’m probably in worse shape than he is.
With her it was physical, and these days laid her low, napping in the nurses’ room at the hospital; with him it was a dropping of his spirit, a diminishment, seeming like obstinacy, the great flame of his being reduced to an afterglow, like the ocean after sunset, blackening, going cold. There were no words for his condition; for hers there were plenty: she was weak and nauseous and easily fatigued, she felt disgusted and sad and futile.
She was no use to him; he said he didn’t need her. She was superfluous, except at work.
And that was the great thing about a job, the sustaining illusion that you were necessary, and if you didn’t show up, the work would never get done. It was the conceit of your being essential. Except for a spell as a lifeguard, Sharkey had never had a job. He knew nothing of deadlines and emergencies, nothing of budgets, of money. He lived in his passion for the water: if the surf was up, he was up, in his car or on his board, all other promises were broken, all other urgencies faded into insignificance, his whole attention was fastened onto his being on a wave, even in rain and wind, sometimes in starlight, sometimes in moonless darkness.
So the conditions of the water had always determined the rhythm of his days. The tidal variations were so small—a few feet at most in Hawaii—they hardly mattered; but the swell and the shapes of the waves were the pulse and beat of his vitality. And when, between the big swells, the surf subsided, Sharkey swam, he free-dived off Shark’s Cove or spearfished; he did not sit. Either he was active in the water or else he lay in the sand, chewing air or lightly snoring, the coarse grains clinging to his skin, the sand heating his back. And when he was rested he rolled himself down the beach to the water and flashed into the bluey-green depths among the parrotfish and shoals of manini and the needle-nosed sea eels.
He ate what came to hand—the sweet eggs from his chickens, mangoes and avocados and lilikoi from his trees, breadfruit when it was in season. He drank green tea in the morning, one strong coffee after lunch, beer at night. He browsed when he was hungry, yawned and dozed when he was tired, and when he was aroused he rolled against Olive as though body-surfing a warm wave, entered her, and rode her until they both lay ashore on the bed.
But since the accident he’d shown no interest, as though the shock to his system that had made him repetitive and forgetful had also short-circuited his libido. Once, when she mentioned this, he said, “We made love yesterday.” But they hadn’t.
These days he was asleep when she returned from work; he’d drunk a few beers, he’d eaten, the house was frosted with moonlight and skeletal in semidarkness. When he saw that the surf report was for clean conditions he was up early; otherwise he was unresponsive when she left for the hospital.
Nor had he noticed that she was wakeful, sometimes retching, and it annoyed her that she could not get his attention with her seemingly fragile health. Scrupulous in taking precautions, sometimes a pill, sometimes a patch, she knew she could not possibly be pregnant. She wanted to scream at him (as patients sometimes howled at the hospital), “Don’t you see I’m sick!” But really she wasn’t sick enough, and didn’t want to be so sick that she needed him, because what use would he be? He’d been no help at all to his aged mother. He told her, I saw her losing it. He’d say, When I get like that, hit me with a brick—shoot me.
One morning when the surf was up and he was alert, moving quickly, slapping the pockets of his shorts for his keys, his board already on the car, she said, “Joe—wait.”
“Yeah,” and rattled the keys in his impatient hand.
“You’re better off alone.”
He looked at her, irritated, deaf with detachment.
“Can’t find my new sunglasses!”
As soon as he started to swear, she left. And driving to the hospital, always the same road, feeling the potholes with her hands on the steering wheel, she repeated the sentence she’d practiced, the tactful farewell—You’re better off alone—then thought, No.
“I’m better off alone,” she said in the mild mumble she used in the car, talking to herself—talking, because saying something aloud helped her remember, filled her with resolve.
Luana always asked how she was feeling, and because Olive said, “Fine,” and Luana didn’t believe her, Luana kept asking, as on this morning.
“I was wondering,” Olive said, instead of replying directly, “is there still a vacant room in the nurses’ quarters?”
Approaching her, arms out, Luana smiled in sympathy, almost in gratitude, and she embraced Olive in a motherly hug, her whole soft body pressed against her, as if to give her warmth. Their foreheads touched, Luana’s sweetened with soap, her thick arms enclosing Olive.
“Yes, got one for you,” Luana said, and seemed sure that this request for a room meant that what she suspected was true: Olive was ailing.
“Because I’m going to start working nights.”
“Sure,” the woman said, and hugged her closer, feeling that this was an excuse for the ailment—or was it the guy?—and she did not want to give any details.
Olive moved some of her clothes from Sharkey’s closets and drawers on a day of big waves, and as she was putting them in her car he texted her that he was all right—reassuring her, as though she might be worried about him. He did not ask about her.
He never asked. On the high-surf days she drove to Sunset or Waimea, or farther down the road to Alligators or Leftovers or Marijuana’s, and found him with her binoculars. It was as though he were not a man at all—certainly not one who’d been jarred by an accident (“I ran into a drunk homeless guy”). No, he was like a rare form of marine life, a sea mammal in the foam, the water dog he claimed to be, slipping down the face of a wave and riding it nearly to where it broke, and instead of crawling to shore, cutting across the lip and paddling and diving beneath the waves until he was out to sea, in the lineup again, preparing to drop in.
At the end of the day he would go home, drink a beer, make himself an omelet, and sit, lit by the sunset, inhaling the last of the light into his body. He was fine. He said so in his occasional messages, telling her he’d had a good day, less like a text to his lover than an announcement to an anxious world, eager for the latest bulletin from Joe Sharkey.
He didn’t ask, but she was not well, with a sourness in her gut, fatigue, and lightheadedness. Her being among other women was a comfort, for their sympathy and gentle manner—and most were nurses, trained to be healers. She knew they were scrutinizing her out of concern for her well-being, not out of nosiness—niele, as Luana called it. Luana, in the room next to hers, took to sizing her up and putting a motherly arm around her when, in the evening, they headed to Emergency for the night shift.
Olive felt compelled to say, “You mustn’t fuss. I’m really all right, you know.”
But her denial made her self-conscious, and Luana’s smile seemed an understanding that something was wrong.
“You never eating nothing.”
“I eat enough.”
That seemed lame too. All the nurses ate together in the hospital cafeteria; it was impossible to hide anything from them, especially from their nurses’ watchfulness.
One night, admitting a woman who showed signs of having overdosed—limp, nauseous, dizzy, with depressed breathing: all the signs;
she’d been left by a man who’d hurried away—Olive struggled with the woman, who was heavy, her flesh cool to the touch. She put her on her side in a recovery position and went faint. She staggered, but she was caught in her fall by Luana, who took over, urging Olive to lie down, then sped the woman to the doctor on duty. She soon returned to Olive, who lay doubled up.
“I’m better.”
Luana frowned. “I’m thinking for a long time, Ollie—how you know you not hapai?”
They used the word all the time at the hospital. That thought had occurred to her, that she might be pregnant, but her periods were often irregular or late, so she’d kept an open mind. And what was this? Only a week or a little more of nausea and fragility. And she related it to the disturbance she felt, provoked by Sharkey’s strangeness.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s we do one test,” Luana said, pulling open a drawer and poking at small plastic boxes. “You need to make shishi.”
They did the test together, Luana manipulating the test tube and the litmus paper while Olive sat watching, wondering, listening to the clatter outside the room, keenly aware of the anxious questions of the injured, the smells of illness and disinfectant.
“You hapai,” Luana said, and hugged her.
11
Leftovers
Holding her fists at her side, Olive stood in the darkness of the lanai, in a cloud of fragrance from the night-blooming jasmine, watching him through the wide opening of the sliding screens. Sharkey looked caged, squatting under the glare of a floor lamp, digging at the cuticle around a fingernail like a monkey in a grooming ritual, his teeth bared, his hair wild, his tattoos gleaming on his golden skin. He wore only his board shorts—he’d been surfing; crusts of sea salt glinted on his shoulders, salt crystals also dusting his hair and his sticky arms.
As Olive stepped into the light he twisted his head—also a monkey move, swiveling his eyes—and, looking up, he ceased grubbing with his fingers and flashed his teeth at her. In her green nurse’s scrubs she was easily seen in the panel of light from the window.
She thought she heard him grunt—or was it a word?—and drew back, a little afraid. She’d been away a week, in silence, and had never run from him before. She did not know what to expect and was so short of breath in her anxiety she couldn’t speak—in any case did not know what to say.
He sometimes smiled when he was furious. He was smiling now. She took another slight step backward.
“Pass me that towel, eh?” he muttered.
She slid the screens apart, kicked her slippers off, and walked through, shutting them behind her, and stooped to pick up the rag that lay beyond his reach. Handing it to him, she drew away, bowing involuntarily.
With the rag in his fist he worked the cloth over his sweaty face, clawing his hair at the same time, another ritual she knew. Then he dropped the rag and began examining his toes. Even from a distance—she was about eight feet away—she could see that he was scratched, the cuts showing as pale scores and grooves and reddened skin.
“You’ve been out?” The words lumped and seemed to catch in her throat.
“Like I said, yeah.”
When would that have been?
“Got pinched in the barrel—gas-chamber action.”
He made a noise softly, kek-kek, that might have been a laugh. He was calm, and so, reassured, she took a seat in the chair near where he squatted.
“Tossed in the foam ball.”
He splayed his fingers, showing how they were badly scratched, then he crooked them like monkey paws.
“Motion in the ocean,” he said. “And after all that I got planted on the rocks.” He gathered himself and hopped upright and stood, grunting again, walking away from her, round-shouldered in his fatigue. “Never mind. A good day. How was yours?”
Now he was lit by the open refrigerator, leaning at the shelves, poking at plastic containers of leftovers—broccoli, pasta sauce, salad, cubes of raw fish.
“I’m hungry.”
Either this was all an elaborate show of being cool, or else he hadn’t realized she’d been gone for seven nights, and that seemed impossible.
But that was all. He halved an avocado, pried out the pit, filled each half with ahi poke, and gave one to Olive.
“Have a beer.”
“Not for me.”
“Wine—I think there’s some in the fridge door.”
“I’ll pass.”
“You joking?”
“I’m off alcohol.”
“You practically killed a bottle yesterday.”
She stared at him with such incomprehension he shrugged and went to the table and began eating, swigging beer, while she watched, not touching her avocado. When he was done he yawned, said, “I’m beat,” and went to bed.
“I’ll put these plates away,” Olive said.
Like that, she moved back in with him.
* * *
He was up early the next morning, heading to Sunset to surf—she saw him on her way to the hospital: he was sitting on his board, rocking in the swell, small in the water, with the immensity of the ocean behind him shimmering in the clear dawn light that gave the wide surface of the sea the texture of fish scales.
He was alone on the lift of the wave, still there when it passed, and she slowed her car to watch him. She thought of pulling over to see him take a wave, but she knew his skill and it was enough to see him so solitary, rising and falling on the swell, riding his board as always like a horseman on the steep hill of water, waiting to catch a wave and drop in.
And what after all did she see of his life as a surfer—what did anyone see of the figures rocking in the water? Not much, hardly anything, and so what she knew of this passion of his was negligible. His real life—the life he lived in the waves—was unseen and almost unknowable.
No one onshore, few even in the water, saw the surfer with any accuracy. On a day of good waves she often had trouble picking him out of the lineup of seven or eight bodies, some fighting the boil, others aiming their boards through the crest, a few behind it all bobbing and thrashing, levering their boards into position. They might have been dolphins, alike in their sleekness and size, anonymous in the beauty of their movement in the rough water and the whiteness of the wind-blown chop, the grace of their buoyancy.
She surfed but could not call herself a surfer—he had encouraged her to improve, bullied her at times to join him; yet even then she knew she would be too preoccupied to watch him. No one but the surfer knew what the surfer was able to do; the surfer was alone on the wave, the succession of waves, a set of seven typically, and chose one and rode it to shore, becoming an individual at the nearer break. Or wiped out and was lost in the foam, and sometimes—without anyone seeing—the surfer was tumbled over the falls and held down and drowned by the wave he was riding, tossed as though from a bucking bronco and trampled to death in the suds.
People had praised Sharkey on the North Shore, he said—mobbed him, touched his arm for luck; women hugged him, men too, some of the women eager to loop a lei over his head so that they could kiss him, as was customary. He was a speck in the surf, an insect skittering on a great wave’s face, but he was for most just a famous name, Joe Sharkey, big-wave rider. His life on the water was hidden. He might, for all of that, have been a fish—sometimes flipping himself free of the sea, twirling across the surface, causing shouts, but most of the time beneath the water, squirming and flashing.
Olive had heard—first from others, then from Sharkey—that his greatest ride had taken place on a high broad marching wave one hundred miles at sea, the wave face eighty or a hundred feet, an immense jawline—witnessed by no one. The jet ski that had towed him out to Cortes Bank had toppled on the far side; the skipper of the boat that had taken him there had been fighting a wave of his own.
“Did you see that?” Sharkey yelled when they found each other, the boatman and the man riding the jet ski.
Neither had seen him. That he was upright at the e
nd of his ride, on his board, waist-deep in froth, was proof that he had ridden the monster. But between the takeoff at the top, tipping himself across the face of the wave, and his howl of joy at the end of it, standing on his board and skidding through the mass of broken water and pools of foam, he had been hidden.
He was hidden from her now. She had returned to live again in the house without his having remarked on it, as though she’d never left. She needed somehow to get his attention. She knew she had the means. The thing was to tell him her news at the appropriate time.
He was entirely self-absorbed, another effect of his solitude—his hidden passion and achievement as a surfer. But it was the apparent selfishness of sick people too, preoccupied with their ailments. She accepted that, because she saw that though he was alone, he was never lonely. But it worried her that his solitude had intensified since the accident, to the point where he seemed in a stall, repeating himself, seemingly oblivious of time passing, lost and left behind, in a bubble.
Part of his memory had been left behind on the rainy road at Waimea, where he’d killed the man on the bike. He needed reviving, he needed to begin living again, he needed new things to care about—new waves, bigger waves; he needed to care about her. And who was his victim, the nameless corpse on the road, the man he had killed?
She thought that her refusing alcohol might make him wonder. But he didn’t ask. He ate, he drank, he slept, he hugged her; and when the surf was up he was in it.
Always disappointed in fine weather when the waves were small—“flat to a foot”—he was becalmed at home. She waited for one of those days, a Sunday when she wasn’t working, and bought a bento and some trays of sushi at Foodland and suggested they have a picnic at Three Tables Beach. There they sat on their towels, balancing the trays on their outstretched legs.
“Might see a late whale,” Sharkey said, and studied the break at Rubber Duckies. But the swell was so gentle a snorkeler was crossing where days before the waves had been head-high.