“Then as now, it’s difficult to tell by a man’s life and actions whether or not he is a believer,” Devi said. “Religious thought and teachings are so disconnected from daily life. A man can go one week, then another, and soon through his whole existence and not encounter God in his dealings with himself or other people.”
“Maybe when new life is created?” Ava said.
“Despite the requisite exclamations of Oh my God, often not even then,” Devi said. “The only time man usually comes into contact with faith or his lack thereof is when life ends.”
Julian lowered his head.
“You can conceive without God,” said Devi, “you can give birth, marry, live every Sunday, every Good Friday, every day without God, but it’s difficult to confront death without God—especially for the living. We don’t know what the dead do when the door closes, and darkness or light swallows them. But we know what we the living do when tasked with the burden of their burial, ritual, funeral, memorial. We have a hard time with it. A man dies quietly in the hospital. Sometimes his family is present, sometimes not. A priest is often absent, for the man has no priest and has never been to church, at least not willingly. After some medical to and fro, the body gets taken away. The funeral director brings it to a place most people rarely enter. There it lies for a few hours or days or weeks until the family decides whether to bury or cremate. Cremation is now the most popular option, for it allows the body to return to dust without any theological fanfare. I once knew a man who had made his own funeral arrangements, planned for his own disposal. He died alone in Dover, and by the time his sons arrived, a few days later, his body had already been cremated.”
“How do you know?”
“I went to Dover and sat with him before he died,” Devi said. “His sons didn’t know me at all. They were presented with a cardboard box filled with their father’s ashes and another cardboard box that held the last of his earthly belongings. His drugstore-bought reading glasses. His disposable cell phone. The Timex watch he had since the ’70s. His thirty-year-old wallet, in which there was a ten-pound note, a National Health card, a credit card, one nearly expired license, and an old magazine about eagles. That was all. The sons kept the ashes and threw the other box into the trash on their way out. There was no funeral, no memorial, no wake, no dinner. Perhaps they went to the pub for a drink, I don’t know. There weren’t even any secular words to remind anyone of the man’s life, why he lived, what he meant, who loved him. There was nothing.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Julian said.
“That’s how you die without God,” Devi said. “Anonymously. But that is not how Ashton lived. And it’s not how he died.”
Julian wept.
2
It Didn’t Have To Be This Way
LITTLE BY LITTLE, THE APARTMENT STOPPED CONTAINING traces of the man who was gone. His clothes did not remain in the empty closets, the smell of his open cologne did not linger over his dresser, his toothbrush and razor did not lie in his unused bathroom, and the old expired coconut water, courtesy of the delicate and tormented Riley, was no longer in the fridge.
The things Ashton left behind:
His accounts and insurance policies, all to Julian.
His poster of Bob Marley, which Julian tried to give to Zakiyyah, but she refused to take it.
A photo of him and Julian high in the Sierra Madres, nineteen years old, backpacks on, baseball caps on, arms around each other, beaming for the camera.
A scribbled saying on the side of the fridge. If it hadn’t been in Ashton’s large bold hand, Julian might’ve forgotten who’d written it. It was from Don Marquis and it said, “My heart has followed all my days something I cannot name.”
* * *
Julian still walked through London looking for the Café with the Golden Awning.
When he grew tired, he would find a bench, and sometimes that spot would be by the church at Cripplegate. Unmoving he sat, looking across the canal at the preserved crumbling stretch of the London Wall. He hoped that through lack of motion, he would eventually regain his strength. It hadn’t happened yet. He wasn’t growing handsome. He was getting older, grayer, thinner, flailing his helpless arms, clenching and unclenching his mutilated hand, shuffling his feet, all splintering aching bones. The Q’an Doh Cave, once a place of hope and salvation, had become nothing but a stalagpipe organ without a church, playing out the last of its quiet dirge, not in absolution but oblivion.
* * *
Julian didn’t hear from Riley.
A few times he tried to get in touch with her but remained blocked on her phone. Indirectly—through her parents or Gwen—the path to her also remained closed, and Riley remained purposefully and utterly unreachable, in the level desert sands of Snowflake, Arizona, working on herself or hiding, which amounted to the same thing.
How is she, he would ask her parents.
Not good, they would say. How do you think she is?
No one asked how he was, not even Gwen.
And it was just as well.
Julian didn’t hear from Riley, but oh did he hear from Zakiyyah.
During some inopportune time during late London mornings she would call—when it was the dead of night in L.A. He knew it was her by the relentless mournful yawp of the neutral ring.
For hours he would sit at the island, elbows on the granite, eyes closed, phone pressed to his ear, and try not to hear the unendurable lament of a stricken woman—now married to someone else—the up and down modulation of outrage and anguish, punctuated every few minutes by a desperate, hoarse refrain. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
Zakiyyah didn’t require Julian to speak. She required of him nothing but the phone squeezed to his ear.
“It didn’t have to be this way!”
“It didn’t have to be this way . . .”
After weeks and months passed like this, she stopped calling.
Her silence deafening, Julian reached out to her himself.
The new husband answered her cell phone. “It’s not a good idea for you to talk to her anymore,” he said. “Especially in the middle of the night, when she should be sleeping, or doing other things. It’s just making her feel worse. We are trying to have a baby, and this is screwing up all our plans.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Julian said, feebly trying to argue, to persuade, to convince.
“Maybe,” the husband said as he hung up. “But that’s the way it is.”
Julian didn’t call her after that. His pose remained the same, even without the phone at his ear. Head bent. Eyes closed.
It didn’t have to be this way.
A line of love.
A line of hate.
It didn’t have to be this way.
A line of grief.
A line of rage.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Zakkiyah recalled the days.
The years.
The joy.
The fights.
The life.
It didn’t have to be this way.
She talked of L.A. with him by her side.
The bars, the hikes, the Space Mountain rides.
She talked of London, where she thought things were great.
But they weren’t, Z, Julian wanted to say. They weren’t. Things were already in a spiral, and I couldn’t see it, and you didn’t want to see it.
It didn’t have to be this way.
She sobbed for the future that was so close, yet never came.
Sometimes exclamation.
Sometimes a whisper.
Sometimes he could barely hear her.
It didn’t have to be this way.
Z . . . Z . . . please, you’re going to be okay.
But now that she stopped calling, he heard her nonstop, a raw siren wail in his head.
I will never love another man like I love him, never, she said.
He never heard from Zakiyyah again.
He never heard from Riley
again.
It didn’t have to be this way.
* * *
Every morning when Julian woke up, he was cold. And when he looked outside, it was raining.
He never left the house without an umbrella.
On the weekends, if he ventured out at all, he wore his waterproof boots.
He pretended he went to work. He got up in the morning and put on his suit and walked to Notting Hill Gate station and rode the Circle Line all day. He’d change for another train somewhere, get off at a stop he’d never gotten off before, walk around, staring at the coffee shops, maybe have some lunch in a pub, read, and head home.
There was no way Julian could go back to Nextel with Nigel still there. It was impossible. Julian knew he could never face him, which was a blessing for Nigel, really. But in August Julian heard that Nigel died of acute alcohol poisoning. Julian wanted to thank someone but didn’t know who.
After Nigel’s death, he returned to work.
He stayed until October. He only stayed as long as he did because he liked the reactions of civilized people to his mysterious deformity.
“How did you say it happened?”
“I fought a Maori warrior to the death.”
And they would look benevolently at his slow-moving body and say, sure you did. But you won, right?
“Right. Otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here telling you about it.”
“Of course you wouldn’t. Malcolm, come here. Jules, tell Malcolm what you just told me.”
“I fought a Maori warrior to the death.”
“A Maori! Roger, come here, listen to this.”
Julian enjoyed being mocked. It reminded him of the old days. But soon even that got old.
After he took the payout and resigned, he spent the winter hanging around the boxing gym. Nobody mocked him there. You couldn’t shock those people with fucking anything.
“A Maori warrior? Bloody hell, that’s fantastic! Omar, come here, listen to this. Our Jules fought a Maori.”
“He did? Is that how you lost half your hand? Incredible. But he got it worse, right? Or you wouldn’t be standing here telling us about it. Dead men tell no stories. Rafa, come take a look at Julian’s hand, he fought a fucking Maori warrior.”
“No fuckin’ way!”
Julian had been going to Nextel in his leather dress shoes. They were soggy and misshapen because the puddles by the Underground, near Fitzroy House, never dried. It was like being in his water-logged fur boots on the Antarctic ice, sitting in the boat, drinking whisky with Edgar Evans, talking about igloos in barren lands. The shoes never dried in England, all sodden near Sainsbury’s where Julian still bought his milk, reflexively, despite knowing he would never drink it, because he didn’t eat cereal. Ashton had been the one who had cereal.
Ava, who had moved into Ashton’s room, made no comment about Julian’s dairy purchases. She just threw out the milk when the expiration day came.
Sometimes when the weather was not great in London and the wind howled, Julian would remember something he didn’t want to in the damp chill and double over. That described his life pretty well. Always trying to avoid remembering something he didn’t want to.
Once in Invercargill, where the wind also howled in freezing circles, Shae said why are you always like this and he said why are you always like this. They fought like they’d been together a long time, and weren’t on their best behavior anymore, smiling and making compliments, telling each other little jokes, asking cute questions. There was no flirting and no courting. There were no questions. Because they already knew everything there was to know, and it made them sick inside. She knew she was going to die, and he knew he was powerless to stop it.
Once, even longer ago, the blistering London wind broke his and Ashton’s umbrellas. Cracked them in half. He and Ashton had a good laugh about it. They reminisced about living in a place where it never rained, where, with a million others, they used to sit in traffic on the Freeway or the 405 and curse their life, thinking they had it so tough, the sun always shining, them having to drive everywhere to drink with friends, tell jokes to their girls, buy books at Book Soup.
And now Julian walked with his head down and no umbrella as he battled the rain, waiting fifteen minutes for the train, the Circle Line so slow. He had a different life now, a life in which every day by Notting Hill Gate, an eight-year-old girl offered to sell him a red rose and said, for your sweetheart, sir? To make her happy?
And every day Julian bought one.
His floor was strewn with three hundred dead roses.
* * *
Ava would wave him on. “Go,” she’d say. “Go out for a walk. Go look for your golden awning. I have much to do. I’m seeding a vegetable garden in the back so next summer you can have your own tomatoes.”
“Next summer?” They stared at each other, saying nothing. What was there to say? “I don’t like tomatoes.”
“Who asked you.”
In the evenings, she stayed up with him. Late at night, Julian would sometimes become talkative, tell Ava things she could bear to hear. Mostly he told her stories of mothers and daughters. He told her about Aurora and Lady Mary in Clerkenwell, about Agatha and Miri in the rookery, about Aubrey and Mirabelle in Kent. He didn’t tell her about Mallory in the brothel. The mother Anna was dead, the girl murdering men, burning in flames, blackening her soul. Nothing about that story could be told.
And he didn’t talk to her about Shae and Agnes because it wasn’t a story yet.
It wasn’t still life yet, like a bowl of fruit.
Ava wanted to know what each girl looked like, what she sounded like. She wanted to know if she danced, sang, if she told jokes. She asked Julian to reproduce her daughter’s best moments on the stage. She bought the plays and highlighted Mia’s spoken portions and asked Julian to recite them for her, but recite them standing up, just as her daughter would have.
Ava never asked about her death. “I don’t know how you can do it,” she whispered to him one night. “How you can do it over and over.”
“That’s not why I go,” Julian said. “I go to watch her live.”
He kept missing something, Ava said. That’s why he kept failing, he wasn’t seeing an important detail, wasn’t paying attention to some essential part of Mia’s existence.
“If only you could point me to what that might be,” Julian said.
“She was such a good girl,” Ava said. “She and her dad had the best time running our place on Coney Island, Sideshows by the Seashore. That child was a born carnival clown; she tap-danced, sang, did stand-up, a juggling act; she never left his side.” Ava smiled in remembrance. “She used to do this thing at the end of every show: after the curtain fell and she would thank people for coming, she’d fling out her arms, take the deepest bow, and say Make it real, make it last, make it beautiful.” Ava wiped her face. “We had the happiest life, the three of us,” she said. “Until Jack had a heart attack and died. But for twelve years before that, we were in paradise.”
Death did that, thought Julian. It ruined fucking everything.
* * *
Ava spent hours Skyping on the computer with her friends back in Brooklyn. It allowed her to be close to Julian if he needed something, yet still be plugged into her other life. Julian usually put on his headphones so he wouldn’t hear the details of her private conversations, but one afternoon when he didn’t, he heard something garbled in her speech that didn’t sound right. He put down his book and walked out into the hall. Disjointed words were spilling out of Ava’s mouth. The cadence was normal, but nothing in their content made sense. He heard someone’s voice crying, help her, help her! Ava, what’s wrong with you?
Julian ran inside the bedroom. Ava was sitting with her back to him, tilted to one side. She had stopped speaking almost completely except for one word she kept repeating over and over. “Once,” she kept saying. “Once once once once once once once.”
“Ava, what’s the matter?” Julian said, turnin
g her chair to him and staring into her unfocused eyes. “What are you saying? Can you sit up? Just hold on to me, I’ll call the doctor.”
“Only once more,” she said, gripping his arm as she fell sideways. “Once.”
3
Once
AVA HAD A STROKE. SHE LOST HER MOBILITY, AND SHE LOST her speech. She was kept in the hospital until the doctors decided there was nothing more they could do for her. Either she was going to get better on her own, or she wasn’t. “She is close to eighty,” the on-call genius said.
So the fuck what, Julian wanted to say. He once knew a treasure hunter who scoured thousands of miles of London’s underground sewers looking for his vanished father, and he was eighty. He once knew a man who helmed a whaleship in the Antarctic ice storms, who flensed his own seals—among other things—and he was eighty.
Devi and Julian decided to move Ava to the Hampstead Heath convalescent home. It was familiar, clean, and the nurses were kind. “Plus it’s not far, and we can visit her,” Devi said.
Yes, said Julian, studying Devi. What did Ava mean by once? Was it the rantings of an unwell woman? Julian wouldn’t have given it any more thought, except it had been the only clear word out of her mouth after everything else got muddled.
* * *
“How am I going to make the trip two more times?” Julian said to Devi in a black cab, on the way home from Hampstead Heath. “I don’t mean in a whiny sense. I mean in an actual physical sense. All the bones in my body are unstable, like I’m about to fracture.”
“Why are you still boxing nonstop if you are such a fragile creature?”
Julian shrugged. “Plus I’m handicapped now.” He raised his right hand, as if Devi was confused by what Julian meant. “No matter what I want, I don’t know if my body can survive two more trips.”
“That’s good,” Devi said. “Because you can only go back once.”
Julian stopped feeling sorry for himself. “Twice, you mean.”
“Once.”
“You don’t think I can count to seven?”
“I don’t think you can, no.”
Julian stared at the back of the driver’s head, wondering if he should close the little window between them before he continued. He decided to plow on. “You said seven times. I didn’t imagine it.” Julian was almost sure the dry-witted Devi was messing with him. “I’ve gone five. 1603, 1666, 1775, 1854, 1911. That’s five. Next is six. I suppose if I fail again, then will come seven. That’s twice more. One of us can’t count.”
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