by Dave Eggers
“You’ll have a bit of trouble finding a room tonight,” the man said.
“A load of birders up this weekend,” his wife said. “Someone said there were puffins here, so they’re all in search.”
“Are you birders?” the man asked.
“Yes,” said Erin. “Completely.”
“Well, I’m sorry about the room,” the man said. Now he was starting to close the door. “We’d invite you in, but you’d be sharing our bed.”
“And we don’t do that anymore,” the woman said, out of view, laughing. And the big scarlet door closed on us.
Driving aimlessly, we speculated about their sex life. At some point I said something to Erin about her possibly wanting to have a three-way with the older couple.
“Sounds like you wanna go bump in the night with Terry Jones and her husband.”
I think that’s what I said. It was a joke, but I delivered it wrong and it sounded nasty.
Erin said, with all the cheer available in the world: “No thanks. Not this time.”
I asked her what she meant by that.
“Nothing.”
“So you’ve had a threesome!”
She was quiet.
“Erin! You dog.”
More quiet.
“Who with?”
Nothing.
“Tell me. You have to tell me.”
A sigh. “It was nothing. It was weird. Forget it. You see any more places to stay? On the map? I don’t want to have to go back to Kyleakin.”
This exchange was itself a level of intimacy we’d never had. When we’d shared stories before, it had always been voluntary—titillating but unchallenging. Now I was pushing her and I felt we were very close.
“Tell me who! Another girl, or a couple or what?”
“I don’t know. Just stop.”
“Who were they? Anyone I know? I bet it was two guys!”
We were having such a good time. At the same time, I felt like I was sticking my head ever-deeper into an oven.
“It was nothing. It was weird.”
My mouth dried and I pretended to keep smiling. Why do we pursue information that we know will never leave our heads? I was inviting a permanent, violent guest into my home. He would defecate on my bed. He would shred my clothes, light fires on the walls. I could see him walking up the driveway and I stood at the door, knowing that I’d be a fool to bring him inside. But still I opened the door.
“You know I won’t stop until you tell me,” I said, still trying to be jocular.
A fog threw itself over our car and Erin turned on the brights.
“Who was it?” I asked, knowing. Almost knowing, as my eyes adjusted to the dim light now between us.
“Where is this coming from?” she asked. “Why are you obsessing?”
She looked in the side-view mirror and then rolled down the window to readjust it. I already knew I was right.
“Tell me,” I said, hushed.
She stopped the car and turned to me. “You’re being an ass. I thought you knew.”
“Let me drive,” I said.
We both got out silently and passed in front of the car, steam rising from the hood, our faces in the headlights white and terrified.
I drove faster. She was execrable. They were villains, the three of them. Vermin in Dockers. And liars. I closed my eyes and no colors appeared.
The black road devoured our headlights. I wove left and right with the double lines; they toyed with me. I couldn’t imagine a time when I’d want to talk to her or to them again. It was almost a relief.
“Tom.”
I didn’t answer. I’ve wanted to be in a war. Or a box. Somewhere where I would always know what to do.
I didn’t want to be in Scotland. Just getting off of Skye would mean something, having that bay between us. I’d go to Muck or Eigg or Benbecula or Rhum. How was it that I’d known? Far before she’d given me a hint I knew. I decided that yes, I wished she’d lied. I didn’t like her face anymore. It had reddened and dropped—she almost had jowls, didn’t she? Who was this person? She was an animal.
Two flashes of white and a boom and something black and two eyes—we hit a living thing. Erin gasped quietly, and I immediately had the strangely satisfying thought that she was so cowed by her sins to stay silent during a car accident. She couldn’t scream.
I stopped the car.
“A dog, I think,” she said.
I backed up. In my side-view mirror, a black mound marred the road, resting precisely on the divider. The brake lights were not enough to illuminate it. I turned the car around to shine the headlights on it. It was not a dog. It was a sheep.
Its wool was black and its eyes were almost white but also gray and blue. They reflected the car’s lights flatly. There was blood coming from its mouth. Its head was twisted. Oh God, said Erin.
There were two white sheep by the side of the road. They were speaking to the dead black sheep. They made tentative steps toward the middle, where the black one’s body lay. They wanted the dead sheep to get up and get going.
Erin and I both said Oh my God, oh my God, look at that. I thought, for the first time in my life, that the known science of the world was going to be changed by something I had witnessed. This communication between sheep, this cognizance of mortality, was surely unaccounted for.
“Should we pick it up?” Erin asked.
I considered this.
“No. It’s in the middle,” I said. “It won’t get hit anymore—it’s not in anyone’s way. We should leave it.”
The two sheep looked toward the car and spoke to Erin and me. How could you? They brayed at the car. Don’t you have enough? You fucking monsters!
“Oh God,” Erin said, “now they’re talking to us.”
Both sheep stepped toward the car. Quickly they picked up speed and started jogging at us.
“They’re really scaring me,” Erin said.
I backed up. I backed up fifty yards. I stopped the car again and watched. One sheep was still talking to us and the other had turned again, had resumed talking to the broken black one.
We drove then, both of us now very awake. As we slowed through Portree, a small town of tall clapboard taverns and inns, shops of woolen goods, I was half-broken but only when I concentrated on it. Fuck those people. I moved my mouth when I thought this, and then I smiled. Erin saw me smile and she didn’t smile in return because she knew why I was smiling.
The hotel in Portree had been awarded too many stars—it was well-made and charmless. Twelve different newspapers fanned out on a heavily lacquered table in the drawing room, a robust fire chewing its cereal in the corner, the ceilings were vaulted and the beds canopied, but there was a sickly tint to the lighting, the smell of rain and frustration coming from the walls. The only softening touch was a cat, sleeping atop the bar. It yawned at me, showing its plasticine teeth.
We got a suite with two rooms.
“Tom,” she said as we stepped up the quiet stairs.
I didn’t answer her.
In the suite I closed my half from hers with a white sliding door. I changed and jogged down the steps alone, determined to claim the dining room as my own. Around my table, unspeaking couples were watching me and breathing into their plates. I looked out the picture window. The moon’s reflection was sketched loosely with chalk on the black flat bay. The silverware was too heavy.
I woke up to coughing. Erin stumbled into the bathroom to do it but that only made it louder, slapping against the tiled walls. The sun was just coming up. She blew her nose. I opened the sliding doors in time to catch her emerging from the bathroom, naked below her small T-shirt. With the bathroom door open, she was backlit in gold. She turned the light off and was black again.
“Sorry,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”
I squinted at her. Her legs were thinner than I’d expected, softer. I thought of white glue.
“I feel like hell.”
I was thrilled. God had acted quickly. Erin wa
s transformed: yesterday strong and quick-moving, now frail and sour. She threw back a shot of Nyquil and passed out.
I slid the doors and slept until nine. I wanted to be gone, but I worried about what the hotel staff would think of me leaving my one-armed friend alone, sick, while I flitted about the island. I left and told the man at the desk that Erin was resting, not to disturb her.
It was mid-afternoon and wet but my head was clear. It was more difficult to be angry at Erin while she was asleep and I was driving, away and alone. I was at Kyleakin, the tiny town of intersection with mainland Scotland, and stopped before the bridge ready to take me back over. I could leave her. I had a change of clean clothes in the car. A small group of buildings to the right, a small castle’s ruins just beyond.
I stopped at a hostel. Everyone in the common room was young and pretending to be poor except, to the left, in the cafeteria, a family of five, Russian, eating spaghetti while assembling a jigsaw puzzle.
At the counter, I asked about a boat.
“We have one rowboat.”
The boat, laying on the gray shore of rocks and sticks, everywhere black seaweed like the hair of a hundred dead mermaids, was overturned and silver. I untied the knot, righted it and dragged it to the water. I pushed it in and jumped from a rock, trying to keep my feet dry. The water here would be brutal. The tip of my right foot came into the boat wet, but otherwise I had done it. I was in the boat and it was moving from the shore. I was shooting out into the bay in this borrowed boat and I was alone and could be going anywhere.
But the boat was facing the wrong way. All I could see was the shrinking of that beach and those buildings. For a rowboat passenger all was adventure, facing forward, but for the rower it was work, the shoveling of coal in the furnace-room. I rowed until the hostel was vague and the castle ruins were a smudge. The water was smooth and the rowing easy. I was heading into the ocean.
I’d never owned a boat but now felt I’d wasted so many years. I laughed and laughed at the simplicity of it all, this boat, this water. I couldn’t believe how stupid it was. I could pinch all this between my thumb and forefinger.
I rowed for twenty minutes and then heard barking. I looked to the shore, for a dog running along the beach. But I saw no dogs. I turned around and found myself fifty feet from a pair of rock islands breaking the water’s surface, parallel, black, each the size of a bus. One was barren, but the one beyond it, about a hundred feet farther, was being busily evacuated by at least forty seals, platoons of seals, all barking and flopping and diving to get away from something. But what?
Oh.
I turned the boat and rowed away from the rocks; I felt terrible for upsetting them. I rowed quickly so they would return. I was halfway back to the shore when they began jumping back aboard their rock.
I turned the boat around again, heading back toward the seals. I wanted to see them, had to. This time I stayed low, rowing slowly, almost imperceptibly turning my head periodically to check my direction and the state of the seals. The seals were not acting in a uniform way. They wrestled. They barked, they leapt on each other. Some would dive into the water and others would appear, shooting from the ocean as if falling from holes in the sky. It annoyed me, exasperated me, all their movements, without sense, all their bumping into each other, their flesh rubbing and undulating, all their noise. I expected these animals to be orderly. Their bodies were sensical, their cells and veins were mathematical. Was not everything, on a cellular level, well-maintained, logical and unimproveable, like a honeycomb? At some point, though, up the developmental ladder the order is lost and there is this, the bouncing and barking, everything foul.
And my feet were wet. My ankles were wet. I looked down. The boat was sinking. It was only a few inches above the water, which was plowing cheerfully through a hole under my seat. I tried to row but the boat was done for, immovable. The hole was enormous.
To shore it was five hundred yards at least. I’d freeze before I made it. I realized with clarity that I might die here, and could think only of what the three of them would do the weekend of my funeral, reunited again. I left my pants and shoes and belt in the boat and jumped before I could guess at the shock to my chest. My arms flailed but soon found a rhythm and I swam for shore, the car keys in my mouth, the sun now gone and the wind coming in. I swam with a necessary fury. I swallowed the coldest water.
On the beach I rose and felt huge. The Russian children from the hostel saw me emerge and ran back inside. The world had tried to kill me but there were explosions within my chest and I’d won. I had reached shore and would soon be inside the car, heat heaving. I would change clothes and be new.
Driving back to the hotel I knew that Erin was just a human in this world—her foibles weren’t worth being angry about. She couldn’t control herself if she wanted to, and all I could do, as someone who was capable of survival in any circumstances, was to have charity for Erin. Like a rat, she would mate with whomever or whatever she shared a cage. I had no anger anymore. I wanted to embrace her, to forgive her, to stroke her like a pet.
I came home to Erin and wanted to celebrate. I entered her room as she was waking up and slithering to the bathroom to vomit. I watched her lower her head below the toilet’s rim, heard the sound of water being poured into water. I needed contact. I wanted her to see me alive. I wanted to eat her vomit—anything to put my mouth on hers.
“You awake?” I asked.
She was kneeling in front of the toilet.
“Not for long. Can you excuse me for a second?” she said, closing the door slowly.
“Sorry,” I said, and went back to my own room.
I watched Sky News at the bar and drank two drinks I’d never had before, both with whisky, which I’d always loathed but now felt was the only appropriate drink for someone like myself, someone who could save his own life. It was late in the afternoon when I checked on Erin again, sliding the doors and finding her dressed and looking almost normal.
“You’re up.”
“I am. I feel good.”
“I just heard you in the bathroom.”
“Yeah, but that was the last one. I’m empty. I feel good. I want to drive somewhere,” she said.
We drove.
We had the windows open and everything smelled wet, every blade of grass promising blooms. The roadsides were fenced and the sheep stayed clear. We got out three or four times by the coast, walking on wet brown paths to look down to the gray sea far below, past the hillside sheep and small white homes.
The rain came. The wind was strong and the air was scratched in straight lines, sky to earth. We got out once, at Moonen Bay, to walk on the shore of a small beach of large round stones, and were soaked in minutes. She spoke.
“Thanks for being good, Tom.”
I nodded. I shook, drenched. She knew nothing.
As the day went dark we found ourselves near the top of the island. I was driving and Erin was looking at the map. She had found a lighthouse she wanted to see before it got too dark.
At Loch Mor we walked down a spongy hill to a valley. The sun was dropping then dropped, leaving a sky of frilly reds. The moon appeared too soon. The valley sloped around a teardrop-shaped lake, pink with the bizarre fuchsia bursts of the late-coming sunset. Violet heather bruised the green weedy ground as we jumped down. This was a place conceived in a burst of emotion by a melancholy boy.
I grabbed Erin around the waist and picked her up, throwing her over my shoulder. Look at this place! I wanted to say, but I chose to be mute, to punish her, perhaps. I put her down and she jogged away from me.
I caught up with her as she leaned against a rock wall, facing the teardrop lake. My eyes focused on a broken white rock cleaved with moss. Does the rock cleave, allowing the moss, or does the moss cleave the rock? She put her chin on my chest.
“This is nice,” she said.
“Where’s the lighthouse?” I asked.
“It must be beyond that.”
She was pointing to
a huge outcropping, forty feet high, the shape of an anvil turned on its side. We followed a path as it swung down and to the right, sloping into the valley. The lighthouse couldn’t be seen. When the path leveled out we walked to a cliff—a drop of eighty feet to a rocky beach and a malevolent surf. The moon now was high enough to reflect on the lake in a nickly shimmer.
Where we expected the path to end and the ocean to begin, the path instead continued, down, through another smallish valley, at the end of which was the lighthouse, on what seemed to be the very blue-black edge of this world. Erin gasped. The lighthouse was not alone and small, but huge, and surrounded by a cluster of dark buildings. It looked like a penitentiary complex, with fences and guard towers.
“Let’s go down,” I said.
“You can go,” she said. “I’ll watch you from here.”
“I won’t go alone. But I really want to see it.”
“Sorry,” she said. “That’s too Witch Mountain for me.”
We turned and the wind swept into the valley, its motives suspect. We pushed against it and walked up the hill, toward the car. Erin’s jacket had no zipper or buttons; she held it closed with her hand. I pointed to a cluster of sheep far to our right. In the dark wind they looked ghostly, conspiring. They knew about the one we killed.
“Let’s run,” Erin said.
We did, up the path, and reached a small supply shed and rested. I was hot with my own exertion, and out of the wind it was much warmer. Erin had her back and head against the building, heaving. The sign on the shed, now just above our heads, said BEWARE WINCH OVERHEAD WHILST IN USE.
I leaned into Erin. I held her very close, and then kissed her hair.
“Sorry,” she said, speaking into my chest.
“For what?”
“The lighthouse was my idea.”
“Don’t say sorry.”
“I am, though. I’m sorry in general,” she said.
Her face was red and rough; she looked so cold. I leaned into her again, and rubbed her back with my searching hands. The cold and her thighs had aroused me, and I was dizzy with the wind.