As the weeks and months passed, I saw them more and more, walking miles of coastline to be among them, sleeping in their camp at night. I spent a lot of time with them, fishing or drying fish in the sun, and learning their rituals. The rest of the time I spent with Seb, weaving paths through the island’s forests.
I grew strange to myself. My clothing became tattered, faded by the salt breeze. Only one worry, persistent, like a delirium, kept me from dissolving entirely into the place. The worry was this: that the sand would forget me. No record, trace, or story of my having been.
Old habits are tenacious. The first thing I did when I met the Moken was to learn their names. We had no common language, so I placed a hand on my chest.
—Name, I said.
—Hantale.
—Hantale, I repeated. And her?
—Hantale.
—Her? I pointed to another woman across the beach.
—Hantale.
It’s a generic surname, Angus told me, his usual airiness giving way to a British schoolboyishness, irritatingly pedagogical. I wondered again about him, about where the books had come from, but couldn’t hold the sensation of curiosity.
Hantale was like a genus, I mused, binding individuals into a single family.
—It means “unafraid of the sea,” Angus said offhandedly, sensing my irritation.
—Unafraid, I repeated. Unafraid.
It sounded like unified. …
—What does? I asked, suddenly unsure.
—What?
He was tying the strings of his linen pants. He looked up at me, concerned.
—Means unafraid?
—Hantale.
—Oh.
—All of them have it.
The joints that held our conversation together were wearing thin, the limbs of our speech too far apart. What is called the “thread” of conversation was unraveling. I could not keep up the pressure that lends order to thoughts. Mine seemed to stretch to the farthest reaches of space and farther still, pushing back the horizon so that sea and sky blended in an ever-present haze.
Because of this unraveling of words and thoughts, it became more comfortable to be among the Moken. At first, I was shy and would sit away from their company, just far enough so that I could listen to their speech and stare out to sea, watching them in their boats and as they dived and emerged from the depths. Then I didn’t feel as much the growing spaces between words. It was like a loss of memory, sweet and terrifying. The women snacked on fish salted by the sun and spit out the bones. They would sometimes talk to me, though I understood nothing of what they said. Their smiles were easier to imitate, and the act of smiling planted in me a contentment I hadn’t known in many months. I was becoming other than myself, to my delight and terror.
Then Seb would return from time to time like a ritornello, bringing with him—or summoning from where they had scattered—memories and pieces of my old self.
Converting the Moken’s monsoon-season settlements, I built myself a tentlike cabin. It had been a hut in their village, thatched and set on stilts. Now there were more woven palm branches, added with the help of a few women who understood, laughingly, that I wanted to live in the place where they would come ashore with their boats.
For long stretches, the Moken would travel from the island. Before pushing out to sea, they sacrificed a large turtle. As we ate the meat, I watched the children swimming with their plastic goggles. Even the tiniest mastered the water. I wanted to learn the Moken language, so I could know their myths and the reasons for their rituals. I felt the dread of abandonment each time they left, wondering if they would come back at all.
My clothes were shredded. I could see the color of my skin getting darker, my hair growing more like straw and the sands. I grew afraid—a sudden chill in the air—of becoming nothing other than the things around me.
Seb appeared.
There is a story … I began, so that he would stay. We were watching the orange sun sink beneath the waves. He pushed me on with his eyes, the way I wanted him to.
… of a woman in the jungle, an anthropologist, timid and shy. She is very organized, recording her findings every night on a Dictaphone and in notebooks. She begins to leave in the night. No one knows where she goes. She reappears covered in dirt, with a secretive smile. Her speech changes; then she doesn’t speak at all, her research abandoned. Then she’s gone not just nights but days, too. She becomes like the land, indifferent to the rain. The villagers are frightened. When she has been gone for a week, a search party is sent. …
I looked at Seb to see if he was listening. He was picking at the sand. I went to pee behind a clump of bushes, building suspense. When I got back, he refused to look at me.
They never find her, I told him, not even her body.
The sun had gone down and shadows moved along the beach.
It will happen to you, he said coldly. No one will look for you. He didn’t laugh.
Sometimes Seb turns cruel; his eyes darken and his mouth twists into a scowl. When I sense his storm moods coming, I retreat into the forest. If he follows me there, I go among the sea gypsies, where he will not venture. I grow afraid of him when he speaks about our child. The next time he grows reproachful, I will not be able to stand it. His spits his words: You should’ve told me. But other times he’s nonchalant. I cry, and that’s all he wants to see, that I am sorry. He turns away, glances over his shoulder, and says, You might have asked me.
I sometimes see the child.
She asks me if she can write her name on my legs. I hand her my pen, and she throws it in the sea. She takes fine rocks instead, or shells sharpened by the tides, and presses her little hands to my skin. She takes the flesh of my thighs and stretches it tight, so that my skin is paper; the blood her tools coax to its surface is ink.
We don’t need to speak, she and I, for I know what she is going to write. She has Seb’s smile and nymphlike eyes. She is very beautiful, her perfect skin nut-colored from the sun. She is entirely my own. Of my making. Seb has gone into the forests, and she is with me, she with his gray eyes and hair the color of sand. I don’t need to ask her what she will write. She will write her name on my body, over and over and over, her name with its pretty accent over the a.
She writes the letters of her name across my thighs and calves until I scream and tell her to stop for today. We’ll continue tomorrow. I sit in the pools made by the tides, and the salt sets her childlike script on my skin. In time they will not scab and bleed, but scar amid the brownness of my skin so that there will be only her name in white, raised patches: siobhán siobhán siobhán siobhán siobhán siobhán siobhán siobhán siobhán siobhàn. She writes, and my skin breaks and forms again. She writes herself there, her name, into my skin. Pleasure of the salt pools when she has done, her writing fresh and the sea sealing her words into the surface of my body, the body I denied her.
Seb comes back from the forests in the heat of the day. But the three of us are never together, for that would mean we were a family, and this is not a place for families of the nuclear, explosive kind. Seb comes back from the forests and tells me I’ve killed her. I’ve angered her, and she has gone and drowned in the sea while I wasn’t watching. He has had to fish her body from the shallows and bury her on the high ground, where the tides won’t dig her out again. He is angry. His eyes are burning in a way that human eyes don’t burn. He is out of place here, dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt. He must go to teach his class at the university. He will go. I can see the Moken boats in the distance. I am afraid of him, and of myself.
When he goes, I fall to the sands and weep, then lie in the shallows and hope that the sea will take me in its arms, returning to me all that’s been lost.
FROM SIOBHÁN’S WHITE COUCH, I watch the pink and red geraniums in her window box, bald and withered, having survived last week’s heat, but barely. Ella’s green journal is on my lap. Siobhán sits on a low easy chair, professional and apprehensive, her lines of worry acc
entuated under the even light from the windows.
Opening the green journal, I run a finger along the place where its last page has been torn out. Most of the writing on the back inside cover is tiny, expanding the diminishing page—though Ella mentions a new journal, also green. Perhaps she was reluctant to let the old book go, to lose all that she’d been in its pages. Siobhán’s address, most likely copied earlier, is in large, confident script: 11, rue Perrée #15, Paris 75003 FRANCE. It’s the flat where I am now, before a tray with small chocolates and espressos on red saucers with miniature spoons.
Siobhán wants to know where I am in my draft. It’s mid-July. I should have been finished a month ago.
—I’ve written to where the journals end, I say, knowing the crucial part is still ahead of me.
Siobhán starts to say something and stops, seeing her address copied in the open journal.
—You see, she says, the journal was intended for me.
I ask her what she means.
Siobhán brings her espresso to her lips, pauses, sets it down without drinking, and stands. She goes to the antique cabinet by the window and takes out a shipping envelope, smaller than I’d imagined it, its Thai stamps faded. Sitting down, she draws from the package a sheet of paper. She looks away as she hands it to me. I recognize the paper. Its left edge is ragged.
For Siobhán, the letter begins, continuing diagonally down the page. The syntax—what I can read of it—is strange, like an ancient folktale. It leaves me with a sick and sad feeling. I hold the page to where it had been torn out years ago, as if the paper fibers might grow together again.
I imagine Siobhán receiving that package with its smell of windswept beaches. She knew as soon as she saw the Thai stamps who it was from. Her heart seized, reading the letter. Paging through the green journal, she asked herself why Ella had sent it. She kept all six journals close, their broken spines reminders of a burden she felt she deserved.
It makes sense for Siobhán to think the journals are Ella’s revenge. Feeling condemned can be more comfortable than not knowing. But if Ella had an ideal reader, it would be a semblable, someone with no investment in her at the start but searching for something all the same. I’m preparing for a final leap into Ella. It’s clear to me that Ella hadn’t planned to send the journal. The gesture was spontaneous. Coming to the end of the book, one day on the beach, she rediscovered Siobhán’s address, copied there after a painful conversation with her adoptive mother in July. (Ella bought two green journals when she was home, where it was easier to find the kind she liked.) The address gave her an idea—one she liked the more she imagined it.
A leap into Ella. More fully than before. Embody her long enough to learn the truth. And once the mystery is solved, the letters set in type, will I be able to return: Elena?
The ink is running low, she writes, and presses harder. Ella has no money for postage and must steal it from Angus. She would have been too far gone by that point to ask. She writes the letter and mails it with the book. And then?
No fixed abode. Can’t keep the old journal with me. It would disintegrate the way Seneca did. Binding weak. Can’t care for anything with a weave this close to the sea. It took forever to finish because my little daughter kept throwing my pens to the waves. I had to steal others from Angus, who acts afraid of me. We are past the point of his being afraid for me, so he doesn’t intervene. That’s all I require. A full journal is the skin of a lost self, dead and dry, like discarded toenails or the paper scales of snakes that stick in the sand before blowing away. Her address glaring up from the page told me what to do. She’ll have my husk of self, lost at last. Yes.
To find out how much money I’d need, I went to town. They don’t approve of me there, can’t fathom the creature I am. My Thai is halting from disuse, no song in it. Price of a padded envelope: two hundred baht. Postage to France is more, but the figure won’t stick in my mind. Tourists have come to the island, making it riskier to sneak back into the lodgings I left many weeks ago. Touching that Angus hasn’t rented my bungalow to someone else. He’s leaving it for last.
Inside the bungalow, I found relics from my former life. The sight of my toothbrush warmed me from my toes. Pens scattered like pick-up sticks under the bed. No money.
After three nights of surveillance, I discovered where Angus keeps the cash he earns from the bungalows. I learned other secrets, too, like that he takes one of the tourists to bed with him almost every night. He drinks, meditates, fucks, and swims alone in the dark sea. For three nights it was nearly the same. I took the money from his purple paisley sack. It was easy to take, morally I mean, since some of it had been mine. I was grateful to Angus, who gave me food before I knew how to spear fish and salt them in the sun, so I took only what I’d need.
How tidy, how neat that the civility of returning myself to the woman who made me lures me back into spaces left behind. Rooms and lives. Steps back in homage. Comforting discomfort of knowing she mourned me. It took losing a daughter—she would have been a daughter—to know. Yes, she will have the I that I was now that I’m not—unless I start a next one. Ha! A next one! Cover green like the last but fresh pages like clean white bedsheets.
Once I had the money, I sneaked back into my old bungalow and brushed my hair until I could tie it back. The sight of myself in a mirror made me laugh. I felt healthy and alive. Having a task will do that sometimes. I washed my face in the sink. The brownness collecting in the washbasin pleased me. Using the toilet was a delight. I rinsed my mouth and picked the scum from my teeth with a fingernail. I searched the backpack. Folded T-shirt at the bottom had the strangest scent, my old perfume. Memory pricked the ducts behind my eyes. I batted the feeling away like a mosquito and pulled on the T-shirt over my tattered bikini top. The cloth was heavy and hot. I’d throw it in the sea when I was done. I left on the sarong I wore among the Moken, though its edges were frayed and there was sand dust in its folds.
Then I lay on my stomach and tore out the last page of the green book. I couldn’t make the letters neat, so I put the journal underneath and that worked better. Sensations stayed locked in letters. Pen tip made a place for the inexpressible. Listening to the waves for rhythm, I began:
For Siobhán,
I write from blue calm, mangrove and beach grass. Important to investigate nature, the tastes of waters, sweet, strong, salt, and bitter. Distinctions of touch, weight, color, healthiness …
Her letter reminds me of an object my mother made during her second episode of illness. I was a teenager at the time, and I saw in it only energy. Not knowing how to fear such things, I kept it, a little mound of stone and blue glass. I don’t know where it is now. Probably destroyed with the rest.
… ink is running out, ink is unimportant, living the only record. Bodies grow into land. Ancient kin to Epimenides, I will live in a time I wasn’t born. The Moken gods are not wrathful. They live in old sea turtles and trees. Not like my gods and ghosts. Word wounds in me. I send you a spell. If you read it, I will wake up in your future. The sand and sea do not notice, take no imprint. Need as basic as hunger: eyes for these words. For you at least to know better than I what I am.
Footsteps outside. I thought someone had found me, a face to wear my impression. No. No one. Not Angus. Imagined. Not real. I began to worry about the soundness of my mind. I took this worry as proof of sanity.
My feet began to bleed on the road to town, where I hid from passing motorbikes, fearing it might be Angus, who would catch me and send me away from the island. The sea lay placid, parallel to my course for most of the way. The road hardened and made my soles bleed more. I staunched the wounds with hot sand.
At the shop that sent things to a post office on the mainland, I tried to remember what had become of my shoes. I couldn’t. I approached the counter quickly, so the woman would see only my clean T-shirt and not notice the brown bits of blood on the floor. I wrote the address with care. After slipping the journal inside with the letter, I sealed the envelope
with my dry tongue and paid. There was a little change.
Outside, I wished for the safe passage of the journal and dropped the bills and coins into a fountain in town, already buzzing with tourists, though it was still early in the season and early in the day.
38
ON THE ALABASTER COAST, two hours from Paris by train, the erosion of chalk cliffs make turquoise patches in the water. I will know that it is Normandy, of course, and not an island in the Andaman Sea, but I will feel close to her there, to what she lived, to the color of her sea.
The train is crowded. No one checks my ticket. After changing at Rouen, it is more peaceful. Fewer people. The air carries hints of grass and salt, and the roar of cities fades. Fields of wheat and green linen stretch to the sky, and finally it is quiet enough to hear her again: Ella.
I have booked four nights in a cottage by the sea, in the spare room of a woman who grows irises on her thatched roof and tends a garden teeming with roses and hydrangeas. She serves lavish breakfasts and tells me about the walking paths and tides, erratic and forceful in the region. Hot-colored roses in the morning fog remind me of the English countryside my mother loved. As a child, she spent her summers in Dover.
When the tide is out, I walk along the vast table of sands and slippery rocks. The cliffs are vertical drops of white that separate the village from the sea. Steep stone steps lead down to the beach, and, at high tide, right into the water. Down until the body is light, lifted by the waves.
But the sea in the morning is hardly there. The steps lead into a lunar landscape of tide-battered rocks and rippled sands and fields of seaweed like thick strands of hair. In the distance, men scavenge for shellfish or whatever the tide has left behind. The fog burns off slowly; then the sun filters into forest paths and lights the fields. The tide rushes in an hour later every day.
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